Apparently Judah Bendigo scorned his brother’s vineyards. Unless the Segonzac label was another possession of the all-powerful King... It was a point Ellery never did clear up.
The discovery in the music salon led Ellery to poke and pry. An alcoholic who hides bottles in one place will hide them in another. He was not disappointed.
He found bottles of Segonzac V.S.O.P. hidden everywhere he looked. Seven turned up in the gymnasium, four around the hundred-foot indoor swimming pool. Ellery found them in the billiard room and the bowling alley. He found them in the card-room. And on one of the terraces, where he lunched in solitude, Ellery felt the flagstone under his left foot give and, on investigating, stared down at another of the bell-shaped bottles nestling in a scooped-out hole beneath the flag.
In the afternoon he toured the vicinity of the Residence. Wherever he went he turned up the dark green evidence of Judah Bendigo’s ingenuity. The outdoor swimming pool, cleverly constructed to resemble a natural pond, was good for eight bottles, and Ellery could not be sure he had found them all. He did not bother with the stables — there were too many grooms about — but he took an Arab mare out on the bridle path and he made it a point to probe tree hollows and investigate overhead tree crotches, with rewarding results. Another artificial stream, this one stocked with game fish, was a disappointment; but Ellery suspected that if he had worn hip-boots he could have waded in any direction through the broken water and found a bottle wedged between the nearest rocks.
“And I didn’t begin to find them all,” he told his father that evening, in their sitting-room. “Judah must carry a map around with him, X marking the spots. There’s a man who likes his brandy.”
“You might have lifted a couple of bottles,” grumbled the Inspector. “I’ve had a miserable day.”
“Well?”
“Oh, I putt-putted around the island. Isn’t that what a tourist is supposed to do?” And while he said this, in a tone of lifelessness, the Inspector rather remarkably took a roll of papers from an inner pocket and waved them at his son.
“I will admit,” said his son, eying the papers, “this enforced vacation is beginning to bore me, too.” He leaned forward and took the papers. “When do you suppose our investigation begins?”
“Never, from the look of things.”
“What’s the island like, Dad?” Ellery unrolled several of the papers noiselessly. Each showed a hasty sketch of an industrial plant. Others were rough detail maps.
“It’s no different from any highly industrialized area in the States. Factories, homes, schools, roads, trucks, planes, people...” The Inspector pointed at the papers vigorously.
Ellery nodded. “What kind of factories?”
“Munitions mostly, I guess. Hell, I don’t know. A lot of places had Restricted signs on ’em with armed guards and electrified fences and the rest of the claptrap. Couldn’t get near ’em.”
There was one series of sketches of rather queer-looking plants, a scale-frame indicating enormous size.
“Meet anybody interesting?” Ellery pointed to the peculiar sketches and looked inquiring.
“Just Colonel Spring’s lads. The working people seem an unfriendly lot. Or they’re shy of strangers. Wouldn’t give me the time of day.” The Inspector’s reply to the silent part of their conversation was a shrug and a shake of the head. Ellery studied the sketches with a frown.
“Well, son, I guess I’ll take me a bath in that marble lake they gave me to splash around in.” The Inspector rose and took his notes back.
“I could use one myself.”
His father tucked the papers away in his clothes, and Ellery knew that unless a body search were made, the sketches would not leave their hiding place this side of Washington, D.C.
That night they passed through the gold curtain.
The feat was accomplished by means of a piece of paper. At six o’clock a footman with over-developed calves delivered a velvety purplish envelope, regally square, and backed out with the kind of bow the Inspector had never seen outside a British period movie.
The bow indicated that it was hardly necessary to open the envelope. But they did, and they found inside a sheet of richly engraved and monogrammed stationery of the same color and texture covered with gold ink writing in a firm feminine hand. Inspector Richard Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen were requested to appear in the private apartments of the Bendigo family at 7 p.m. for cocktails and dinner. Dress was informal. The signature was Karla Bendigo. There was a postscript: She had heard so much of the Queens from her brother-in-law Abel that she was looking forward with delight to meeting them, and she concluded by apologizing — with what seemed to Ellery significant vagueness — for having been “unable to do so until now”.
They had hardly finished reading the invitation before their valet appeared with a dark blue double-breasted man’s suit, dully gleaming black shoes, a pair of new black silk socks, and a conservative blue silk necktie. Ellery relieved the man of them and nudged him out before the snarl formed in the Inspector’s nose.
“Try them on, Dad. Chances are they won’t fit, and you’ll have an excuse for not wearing them.”
They fitted perfectly, even the shoes.
“All right, wise guy,” growled the Inspector. “But the school I was brought up in, if your guests want to show up in their underwear the host strips, too. Who the devil do these people think they are?”
So at five minutes of seven, Ellery in his best oxford gray and the Inspector uneasily elegant in Jones’s finery, the Queens left their suite and went upstairs.
Different guards were on duty in the foyer on the top floor. They were under the command of a younger officer, who scrutinized Karla Bendigo’s invitation microscopically. Then he stepped back, saluting, and the Queens were passed through the portals, feeling a little as if they ought to remove their shoes and crawl in on their stomachs.
“That head will roll,” murmured Ellery.
“Huh?” said his father nervously.
“If we snitch on him. He didn’t fingerprint us.”
They were in a towering reception room full of black iron, hamadryads in marble, giant crystal chandeliers, and overwhelming furniture in the Italian baroque style. Across the room two great doors stood open, flanked by footmen in rigor mortis. An especially splendid flunky wearing white gloves received them with a bow and preceded them to the double door.
“Inspector Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen.”
“Just a little snack with the Bendigos,” mumbled the Inspector; then they both stopped short.
Coming to them swiftly across a terrazzo floor was a woman as improbably beautiful as the heroine of a film. But Technicolor could never adequately have reproduced the snowiness of her skin and teeth, the sunset red of her hair, of the tropical green of her eyes. Even allowing for the art, there was a fundamental color magic that startled, and it enlivened a person that was disquieting in form. A great deal of the person was on display, for she was wearing a strapless dinner gown of very frank décolletage. The gown, of pastel green velvet, sheathed her to the knees; from the knees it flared, like a vase. Despite her coloring, she was not of Northern blood, Ellery decided, because she made him think of Venezia, San Marco, the Adriatic, and the women of the doges. Studying her as she approached, he saw earth in her figure, breeding in her face, and no nonsense in her step. A Titian woman. Fit for a king.