“I won’t talk total fee, since I don’t know just what the investigation entails. I want a retainer, Mr. Bendigo, balance left open.”
“How much of a retainer?”
Ellery said, “One hundred thousand dollars.”
Behind him there was a choked paternal sound.
Abel Bendigo was looking at Ellery thoughtfully.
But King Bendigo neither choked nor took stock. He merely waved and said to his brother, “Take care of it,” and then he waved at Ellery and Inspector Queen and said impatiently, “That’s all, gentlemen.”
Ellery said: “I’m not finished, Mr. Bendigo. I want my retainer in ten certified checks of ten thousand dollars each. You are to have the payees’ lines left blank, so that I can fill in the names of ten different charities.”
He knew instantly he had taken the wrong tack. Where money was concerned, this man was invulnerable. Money was a power-tool. Anyone who failed to use it as a power-tool was beneath contempt.
King Bendigo said indifferently, “Give it to him, Abel, any way he wants it. Anything, just so they stay out of my hair.” In the identical tone, without stopping, he said, “Max’l.”
The beast in the beret shot out of the safe, grimacing horribly.
Ellery dodged. The Inspector jumped out of the way like a rabbit.
King Bendigo threw his head back and roared. The wrestler was grinning.
“All right, all right, gentlemen,” said the big man, still laughing. “Go to work.”
In the elevator, Inspector Queen broke the rather sick silence.
“I picked this up from the floor on the way out, son. It was at that far wall, all the way across the office from his desk. He must have cracked it between his fingers for exercise and then tossed it away for the help to throw in the trash.”
“What is it, Dad?” Ellery’s voice shook a little.
His father opened an unsteady hand. On it lay the fragments of the stickpin they had heard King Bendigo buy from his second visitor for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
4
The shirts were waiting for them in the lobby. Ellery found himself passing the security desk with a stiff back. But the three uniformed men paid no attention to them.
Brown Shirt said, “This way,” and Blue Shirt held the outer door open.
Outside, the son and the father breathed again. The sun was low in the west and the western sky was strawberry, copper, and mother-of-pearl. A small, powerful black car gold-initialed PRPD was at the entrance. Blue Shirt took the wheel and Brown Shirt got into the rear seat between them.
Neither Queen felt talkative. Each gazed through his window at the countryside. They might have been traveling along the Mohawk Trail in a quiet fold of the Berkshires, with a city of mills and small homes at their feet, except for the pelagic vegetation and the memory of what they had just heard and seen.
“Who,” inquired Ellery, “is at whose orders?”
“We’re taking you to the Residence, Mr. Queen,” replied Brown Shirt. “Mr. Abel has arranged everything.”
“How free are we to move about?”
“You’ve been given a temporary A-2 rating, sir.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Inspector Queen, astonished.
“You may go anywhere you want sir, except those installations marked Restricted.”
“From what we’ve seen, that sounds risky. We’re not known on the island.”
“You’re known,” Blue Shirt assured him from the front seat.
The Inspector did not look assured.
The car entered a densely wooded area. There were flashes of flying color everywhere, but these were the only evidences of wild life.
“Beauty for its own sake?” asked Ellery sceptically.
“Karla likes them,” said Brown Shirt.
“Mrs. Bendigo?” The Inspector was scrutinizing the woods closely without seeming to do so.
“King’s queen,” said Ellery.
He had seen it, too, but he and his father continued to look at opposite terrains. There were camouflaged gun emplacements in these woods. Big guns, of the coast artillery type. Probably the whole wooded area bristled with them. And how much of this jungle itself, Ellery wondered, was real?
They came upon King Bendigo’s home suddenly.
They could see only a little of it because of the trees and shrubs which choked it. The landscaping was positively untidy. Some of the trees were taller than the buildings, and there were heavy branches that actually brushed windows. Even the towers had been so treated that, while they were visible against the sky from the ground, to an airborne eye they must blend into the greenery.
Secrecy again. The original planners had probably been responsible for the camouflage, but then why, when he leased the island, hadn’t Bendigo had these trees and the encroaching underbrush cleared away? Was he afraid someone would try to take his precious mid-ocean anchorage away from him?
The Residence stood only four stories high, like the Home Office, but it covered a wider area. The section immediately before them would have been a courtyard had it not been overgrown with shrubbery planted at random. Even the paved driveway ran between two erratic files of trees whose upper branches twined overhead to form a ceiling. Embracing all of this were two projections of the building, running outward from a sort of parent body. From the angle formed by the arms, Ellery suspected others. Brown Shirt, who remained spokesman of the duo, confirmed this and explained the oddity of the architecture. The building was constructed on a plan similar to that of the Home Office, except that where the Home Office had eight arms, the Residence had five.
They were received in a great hall by flunkies in livery. Black and gold. With knee breeches and stocks. The Inspector goggled.
Here, at least, the functional temporized with fussier modes. The furniture was massively modern, but there were medieval French and Swedish tapestries on the walls and a sprinkling of old masters among new, the new chiefly abstractions. Everything in the hall was immense, the hall itself being three stories high; and it was only here and there that one saw a traditional object — such as the classic canvases — as if someone in the household insisted on at least a smattering of an older environment.
A footman conducted them through one of the five portals into a wing, and just inside this corridor Blue Shirt indicated a small elevator. They were whisked up one floor, and they got out to be marched along a soundless hall to a door. The door was open. In the doorway, dwarfed by its dimensions, stood a small man in a black suit and a wing collar. He bowed.
“This is your valet,” said Brown Shirt. “Whatever you need to supplement what you’ve brought with you, gentlemen, just inform this man and he’ll provide it at once.”
“Jeeves?” said Ellery tentatively.
“No sir,” said the valet Britannically. “Jones.”
“Your point, Jones. Does protocol demand evening clothes at dinner?”
“No, sir,” said the valet. “Except on given occasions, dining is informal. Dark suit and four-in-hand.”
“They’ll take my tan gabardine and like it,” said the Inspector.
“Yes, yes, Dad,” said Ellery soothingly. “Here, Jones, where are you off to?”
“To draw your tubs, sir,” said Jones; and he sedately vanished.
The Queens turned to find the Shirts receding shoulder to shoulder.
“Here, wait!” cried the Inspector. “When do we get to see—?”
But they were already far down the corridor.
Their sitting-room was almost a grand salon, and the two bedrooms were magnificent affairs with lofty ceilings, canopied beds, and historic-looking furnishings. Here, at least, the décor was traditional — ancien régime, as cluttered with gingerbread as any suite in the Tuileries under the Grand Monarch. Fortunately, as Ellery hastened to discover, tradition did not extend to the sanitary arrangements; but he was amused to find the telephones discreetly hidden in buhl cabinets whose surfaces were intricately inlaid with gold, tortoise-shell, and some white metal in the scrollwork, cartouches, and curlicues so dear to the times of Louis Quatorze.