Ellery stared at him. This from his own father! The prosaic little Inspector, who had handled more corpses and wallowed in more illicitly spilled human blood than any other man in the New York Police Department!
“It... it looked,” went on the Inspector with a feeble grin that held no mirth whatever, “it looked just like — a crab.”
“A crab!”
Ellery gaped at his father. Then his flat cheeks ballooned out and he put his hand over his mouth, doubled over in a spasm of the heartiest laughter. He rocked to and fro, eyes streaming.
“A crab!” he gasped. “Ho, ho, ho! A crab!” and he went off into another gale.
“Oh, stop it!” said the old gentleman irritably. “You sound like Lawrence Tibbett singing that flea song. Stop it!”
“A crab,” gasped Ellery again, wiping his eyes.
The old man shrugged. “Mind you, I’m not saying it was a... a crab. Might have been a couple of crazy acrobats or wrestlers or something doing a little homework on the hall floor. But it looked like a crab — a giant crab. Big as a man — bigger than a man, El.” He rose nervously and grasped Ellery’s arm. “Come on, be nice. I look all right, don’t I? I haven’t got de — delusions, or something, have I?”
“Blessed if I know what you have,” chuckled Ellery, flinging himself on the bed. “Seeing crabs! If I didn’t know you so well I’d lump the crab with a particularly violent purple elephant and say you’d had a wee drappie too much. Crab!” He shook his head. “Now look here; let’s examine this thing like rational human beings, not kids in a haunted house. I was talking to you, facing you. You were looking straight ahead, down the corridor. Exactly where did you see this — this fantastic beast of yours, Inspector dear?”
The Inspector took snuff with shaking fingers. “Second door down the hall from ours,” he muttered, and sneezed. “Of course, it was just my imagination, El... It was on our side of the hall. It was pretty dark at that spot—”
“Pity,” drawled Ellery. “With a little more light I’m sure you’d have seen at least a tyrannosaurus. Just what was your friend the crab doing when you spotted him and got the shivers?”
“Don’t rub it in,” said the Inspector miserably. “I just got a glimpse of — of the thing. Scuttled—”
“Scuttled!”
“That’s the only word for it,” said the old gentleman in a dogged voice. “Scuttled through the doorway, and then you heard the click yourself. Must have.”
“This,” said Ellery, “calls for investigation.” He jumped from the bed and strode to the door.
“El! For God’s sake be careful!” wailed the Inspector. “You simply can’t go snooping about a man’s house at night—”
“I can go to the bathroom, can’t I?” said Ellery with dignity; and he pulled open the door and vanished.
Inspector Queen sat still, gnawing at his fingers and shaking his head. Then he rose, pulled off his coat and shirt, his suspenders sagging below his seat, and stretching his arms yawned prodigiously. He was very tired. Tired and sleepy and — afraid. Yes, he admitted to himself in the privacy of that doorless chamber of the mind to which no outsider can gain admittance, old Queen of Centre Street was afraid. It was a queer thing. He had felt fear often before; it was silly to set oneself up as a Jack Dalton; but this was a new kind of fear. A fear of the unknown. It did queer things to his skin and made him want to whirl about at purely imaginary sounds behind him.
Consequently he yawned and stretched and busied himself with the score of slow little unimportant things a man does when he is undressing for bed. And all the while, despite the very genuine laughter of Ellery echoing in his brain, fear lurked there and would not be banished. He even began — sneering bitterly to himself in the same instant — to whistle.
He slipped out of his trousers and folded his clothes neatly on the Morris chair. Then he bent over one of the suitcases at the foot of the bed. As he did so something rattled at one of the windows and he looked up, prickling and alert. But it was only a half-drawn window shade.
Moved by an unconquerable impulse he trotted quickly across the room — a gray mouse of a man in his underwear — and pulled the blind. He caught a glimpse of the outdoors as the blind came down: a vast black abyss, it seemed to him; and indeed it was, for he was to find later that the house was perched on the edge of a precipice, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the next valley. His small, sharp eyes flicked sidewise. In the same instant he sprang back from the window, releasing the shade so that it flew up with a crash, and darting across the room flicked the light switch, plunging the room in darkness.
Ellery opened the door of their bedroom, stopped short in astonishment, and then slipped into the room like a wraith, shutting the door quickly and softly behind him.
“Dad!” he whispered. “Are you in bed? Why’s the light off?”
“Shut up!” he heard his father say fiercely. “Don’t make any more noise than you have to. There’s something damned fishy going on around here, and I think I know now what it is.”
Ellery was silent for a moment. As his pupils contracted under influence of the dark, he began to make out shadowy details. A faint starlight shone through the rear windows. His father, bare legged and in shorts, was crouched almost on his knees across the room. There was a third window on the right-hand wall; and it was at this window that the Inspector crouched.
Ellery ran to his father’s side and looked out. The side window overlooked a court formed by the recession of the rear wall of the house in the middle. The court was narrow. Propped against the outside of the rear wall in the court at the first-floor level there was a balcony which led, apparently, from the bedroom adjoining the Queens’. Ellery reached the window just in time to see a flowing shadowy figure slip from the balcony through a French door and vanish. A white feminine hand shone in the starlight as it reached out of the room and drew the double door shut.
The Inspector rose with a groan, pulled all the blinds, pattered back to the door, and turned on the light switch. He was perspiring profusely.
“Well?” murmured Ellery, standing still at the foot of the bed.
The Inspector dropped onto the bed, hunched over like a little half-naked kobold, and tugged fretfully at one end of his gray mustache. “I went over there to pull the blind,” he muttered, “and just then I saw a woman through the side window. She was standing on the balcony staring off into space, seemed like. I ran back and turned off the light and then watched her. She didn’t move. Just stared up at the stars. Moony, sort of. I heard her sniffle. Cried like a baby. All by herself. Then you came in and she went back to that room next door.”
“Indeed?” said Ellery. He slipped over to the wall on the right and pressed his ear against it. “Can’t hear a thing through these walls, damn the luck! Well, and what’s fishy about that? Who was it — Mrs. Xavier, or that very frightened young woman, Miss Forrest?”
“That,” said the Inspector grimly, “is what makes it so fishy.”
Ellery stared at his father. “Riddles, eh?” He began to strip off his jacket. “Come on, out with it. Somebody we haven’t seen tonight, I’ll wager. And not the crab.”
“You’ve guessed it,” said the old gentleman glumly. “It wasn’t either of ’em. It was... Marie Carreau!” He uttered the name as if it were an incantation.