It was all very sad and discouraging; and Ellery was grumbling away in his sleep before Inspector Queen got back from his movie.
It came off on schedule, almost as if Ellery had planned it.
He groped for the light-chain at the eruption of the telephone, found it, dragged it, blinked at his watch and noted the time as 3:03 A.M., fumbled about for the phone and found that — all before he was really awake. But the gasp and heave in his ear were like a wash of seawater.
“Who is this?”
“J-J-J...”
“Johnny? Is this Johnny?”
“Yes.” He was hauling the breath from his lungs as if it had weights attached. “El...?”
“Yes, yes, what’s wrong?”
“Dying.”
“You? Wait! I mean, I’ll be right over.”
“No... time.”
“Hang on—”
“M-m-m...” He stopped. There was a gurgly sob. Then Benedict said, “Murder,” in a quite ordinary way.
Ellery said swiftly, “Who, Johnny? Tell me. Who did it?”
This time the dragged-out breath, interminable.
And Johnny Benedict said distinctly, “Home,” and stopped again.
Ellery found himself irritated. Why does he want me to know where he is? I know where he is. Or must be. At the main house. Using the extension. It made no sense. He was making no sense. If he could call me, he could be lucid. He had no right to be out of his head — to go this far only to tell me he was calling from home.
“I mean, who attacked you?”
He heard some meaningless sounds. It was exasperating.
“Hold on, Johnny, hold on! Who did it?” It was like trying to coax a recalcitrant child. “Try to tell me.” He almost said “daddy” instead of the pronoun.
Johnny tried, according to his lights. He was on the “home” kick again. He said it three times, each time less distinctly, less assertively, with more of a stammer. Finally he stopped trying and there was nothing but a defeated thunk! at the other end, the phone hitting something, as if Johnny-B had flung it away or, what was less pleasantly probable, had dropped it.
“What is it, son?”
Ellery hung up. To his surprise, he found himself yawning. It was his father, in the doorway. The Inspector did not sleep well any more. The least interruption in the rhythm of his environment disturbed him.
“Ellery?”
He told the Inspector what Johnny had said.
“Then what are you standing here for?” the old man yelled, and dived for his bedroom.
There’s no hurry, Ellery thought as he hurriedly pulled on his pants. Johnny’s gone with the wind he sowed.
Wrightsville strikes again.
The Cougar covered the quarter mile in nothing flat. The main house was dark except for two windows upstairs which they took to be in Benedict’s room, the master bedroom. Ellery jumped out, and the Inspector cried, “Did you remember to bring that key Benedict gave you?” to which Ellery replied, “Hell, no, I forgot it. Who ever used a key in Wrightsville?” and was immediately vindicated, because the front door, while it was closed, was not locked.
They ran upstairs. The master bedroom door stood open.
Benedict was in puce-colored silk pajamas, a milk-chocolate-striped silk kimono, and Japanese slippers. He lay in a heap on the floor beside the bed and he looked like a cake just out of the oven, decorated, and set aside to cool. The cradle of the telephone was on the nightstand; the receiver dangled to the floor. There was amazingly little blood, considering the wounds in Benedict’s head.
The weapon lay on the floor six feet from the body, between the bed and the doorway. It was an oversized, heavy-looking Three Monkeys sculpture in a modern elongated style, cast in iron. Both the material and the stylistic distortion gave its familiar “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” homily an irony terribly grotesque. Neither man touched it.
“He’s dead, of course,” Ellery said.
“What do you think?”
“For the record.” Ellery’s lips were tight. “We’d better verify.”
The Inspector squatted and felt Benedict’s carotid.
“He’s dead. What I can’t understand is where he found the strength to pick up a phone.”
“He obviously found it,” Ellery said coldly. “The point is: having found it, what did he do with it? Not a damned thing!”
And in an aggrieved way he wrapped a handkerchief around his right hand, picked up the receiver, punched the button on the cradle for an outside line, and from too, too solid memory dialed the number of Wrightsville police headquarters.
“It’s going to be some time before Newby gets here,” Ellery remarked to his father, replacing the phone. “Which is probably just as well. By the way, these guests of Johnny’s sleep like the dead. Maybe we’d better check their carotids, too.”
“Let ’em be,” the Inspector growled. “Their time is coming. What do you mean ‘just as well’?”
“The night desk man, a fellow named Peague — I’m betting he’s related to Millard Peague, who used to have the locksmith shop on Crosstown and Foaming — says the chief went to a Red Man blast tonight and just got into the sack, so he won’t appreciate having to get up and come out here. The three radio cars on the graveyard tour are all over at Fyfield Gunnery School — some students got high on speed or something and they’re wrecking the administration building. It’s developed into a full-scale engagement — state police, patrol cars from Slocum as well as Wrightsville — the locals won’t be able to get here for hours, Peague says. While we’re waiting for Newby we may as well make ourselves useful.”
The Inspector looked doubtful. “I hate cutting in on another cop’s turf.”
“Newby won’t mind. The Lord of battles knows we’ve charged shoulder to shoulder often enough. Let’s see if we can find any writing materials.”
“What for?”
“Superman or not, Johnny’d have written something in preference to phoning — if he could. My hunch is we’ll find nothing.”
They found nothing. It gave Ellery a small satisfaction.
One mystery was solved. On the opposite side of the room from the windows, helter-skelter on the floor as if thrown there, they found the three articles of clothing Benedict’s ex-wives had reported missing: Audrey Weston’s black sequined gown, Marcia Kemp’s green wig, and Alice Tierney’s white evening gloves.
Ellery examined them eagerly. The evening gown was long enough to trail on the floor; the wig was not only absurdly green but distended — it looked like an excited hedgehog; the gloves were of high-quality kid. None of the three showed even a pinpoint of bloodstain.
“So they weren’t being used at the time of the assault,” the Inspector mused. “A plant?”
“Three plants,” Ellery said, squinting. “Otherwise why leave all three? If Johnny’s assailant had wanted to implicate Marcia, he’d have left just the wig. Or Audrey, just the gown. Or Alice, just the gloves. By leaving all three he implicates all three.”
“But why?”
“That is the question.”
“But I don’t get it, Ellery.”
“I wish I could enlighten you. I don’t, either.”
“Something tells me we should have stood in Manhattan,” the Inspector said gloomily.
The bed had been slept in; the spread had been neatly folded at the foot, the bottom sheet was wrinkled, and the pillow still showed the depression made by Benedict’s head.
“He certainly didn’t go to bed with his robe on,” Ellery said. “That means something woke him up, and he jumped out of bed and slipped into his robe and slippers. So the next question is: what disturbed him?”