He hung up softly and said: “Complicated situation. Knox was named executor in a non-producible will, and if that will isn’t found and we can’t establish identity of the new beneficiary for the Galleries, there won’t be any executor. Khalkis will be considered to have died intestate . . . . Well, he seems keen about it. We’ll have to see that he’s appointed administrator if the will isn’t found in the coffin to-morrow. Knox is busy right now conferring with Woodruff at the house. Preliminary survey of the estate.
Says hell be there all day. Damned nice of him at that, to take all this interest.”
“Will he attend the disinterment?” asked Ellery. “I’ve always wanted to meet a multi-millionaire.”
“He says not. He’s got to go out of town again early tomorrow morning.”
“Another childhood ambition shattered,” said Ellery sadly.
Chapter 6. Exhumation
It was on Friday the eighth of October, then, that Mr. Ellery Queen was first introduced to the actors in the Khalkis tragedy, the scene of operations and, what he considered more interesting at the moment, the ‘tightness in the air” sensed a few days before by Miss Joan Brett.
They had all congregated in the drawing-room of the Khalkis house Friday morning―a very subdued and apprehensive company; and while they waited for Assistant District Attorney Pepper and Inspector Queen to arrive, Ellery found himself engaged in conversation with a tall pink-and-white young Englishwoman of charming mould.
“You’re the, Miss Brett, I take it?”
“Sir,” she said severely, “you have the advantage of me.* There was a tiny smile behind the potential frost of her very lovely blue eyes.
Ellery grinned. “That’s not literally true, my dear. Don’t you think that if I had the advantage of you my circulatory system would know it?”
“Hmm. And a fresh “un, too.” She folded her white hands primly in her lap and glanced sideways at the door, where Woodruff and Sergeant Velie stood talking. “Are you a bobby?”
“The veriest shadow of one. Ellery Queen, scion of the illustrious Inspector Queen.”
“I can’t say you’re a very convincing shadow, Mr. Queen.”
Ellery took in her tallness and straightness and niceness with very masculine eyes. “At any rate,” he said, ‘that’s one accusation which will never be directed against you.”
“Mr. Queen!” She sat up very straight, smiling. “Are you jolly well casting aspersions on my figure?”
“Shakes of Astarte!” murmured Ellery. He examined her body critically, and she blushed. “As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even noticed it.”
They laughed together at that, and she said, “I’m a shade of a different kind, Mr. Queen. I’m really very psychic.”
And that was how Ellery learned, most unexpectedly, about the tightness in the air on the day of the funeral. There was a new tightness, too, as he excused himself and rose a moment later to greet his father and Pepper; for young Alan Cheney was glaring at him with homicidal savagery.
Hard on the heels of Pepper and the Inspector came Detective Flint, towing a tubby little old fellow who was perspiring copiously.
“Who’s this?” growled Velie, barring entrance to the drawing-room.
“Says he belongs here,” said Flint, grasping the tubby one’s fat little arm. “What’ll I do with him?”
The Inspector strode forward, hurling his coat and hat on a chair. “Who are you, sir?”
The newcomer was bewildered. He was small and portly and Dutch, with billowy white hair and almost artificially rosy cheeks. He puffed them out now, and the expression on his face became more harassed than ever. Gilbert Sloane said, from across the room, “That’s all right, Inspector. This is Mr. Jan Vreeland, our scout.” His voice was flat and curiously dry.
“Oh!” Queen eyed him shrewdly. “Mr. Vreeland, eh?”
“Yes, yes,” panted Vreeland. “That’s my name. What’s the trouble here, Sloane? Who are all these people? I thought Khalkis was . . . Where’s Mrs. Vreeland?”
“Here I am, darling,” came a floating sugary voice, and Mrs. Vreeland posed in the doorway. The little man trotted to her side, kissed her hastily on the forehead―she was compelled to stoop, and anger flashed for a moment from her bold eyes―handed his hat and coat to Weekes, and then stood stock still, looking about him with amazement.
The Inspector said, “How is it you’ve only just got back, Mr. Vreeland?”
“Returned to my hotel in Quebec last night,” said Vreeland in a series of rapid little wheezes. “Found the telegram. Didn’t know a word about Khalkis dying. Shocking. What’s the congregation for?”
“We’re disinterring Mr. Khalkis’s body this morning, Mr. Vreeland.”
“So?” The little man looked distressed. “And I missed the funeral. Tch, tch! But why a disinterment? Is―?”
“Don’t you think,” said Pepper fretfully, “we ought to get started, Inspector?”
They found Sexton Honeywell fidgeting in the graveyard, prancing up and down before a raw rectangle in the sod where the earth had been turned up during the burial of Khalkis. Honeywell indicated the boundaries, and two men spat on their hands, lifted their spades and began to dig with energy.
No one said a word. The women had been left in the house; only Sloane, Vreeland and Woodruff of the men connected with the case were present; Suiza had professed a distaste for the spectacle, Dr. Wardes had shrugged, and Alan Cheney had doggedly stayed at the trim skirts of Joan Brett. The Queens, Sergeant Velie and a newcomer with a tall lank figure, black jowls, a hideous ropy cigar clenched in his teeth and a black bag at his feet, stood nearby watching the mighty heavings of the gravediggers. Reporters lined the iron fence on Fifty-fourth Street, cameras poised. Police prevented a crowd from massing in the street. Weekes the butler peeped cautiously from behind the courtyard fence. Detectives leaned against the fence. Heads poked out of windows facing the court, necks craning.
At a depth of three feet the men’s spades clanked against iron. They scraped vigorously and, like pirate henchmen digging for buried treasure, cleaned the horizontal surface of the iron door leading to the vault beneath almost with enthusiasm. Their labours completed, they leaped from the shallow pit and leaned against their spades.
The iron door was hauled open. Almost at once the large nostrils of the tall lank cigar-chewing man oscillated rapidly, and he muttered something cryptic beneath his breath. He stepped forward, under the puzzled glances of his audience, fell to his knees and leaned far over, sniffing. He raised his hand, scrambled to his feet and snapped at the Inspector: “Something fishy here!”
“What’s the matter?”
Now the tall lank cigar-chewing man was not given to alarums and excursions, as Inspector Queen knew from previous experience. He was Dr. Samuel Prouty, assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of New York County, and he was a very canny gentleman. Ellery found his pulse quickening, and Honeywell looked positively petrified. Dr. Prouty did not reply; he merely said to the gravediggers: “Get in there and pull out that new coffin, so we can hoist it up here.”