“Apparently some of these good folk can’t, either. Do you know any of them?”
“Nary a soul,” shrugged the old gentleman. “I’m afraid, judging from Godfrey’s sour expression — if that disreputable little rascal is Godfrey — we’re not too welcome.”
Rosa got out of her wicker chair rather wearily. “I’m so sorry, Judge. I’m afraid I... I’m a little upset. Mother, father, this is Judge Macklin. He’s offered to help. And this is Mr. Ellery Queen, a — a detective. I— Where is he?” she cried suddenly in a stricken voice, and she began to weep. Whether she meant David Kummer or John Marco no one knew.
The brown young man winced. He sprang forward and seized her hand. “Rosa—”
“Detective,” said Walter Godfrey, hitching his dirty slacks. “Seems to me we have plenty of those. Rosa, stop sniffling! It’s unmannerly of you. The scoundrel got what he deserved, I daresay, and I hope the benefactor of mankind who polished him off goes scot-free. If you listened to your father more often instead of to—”
“Pleasant chap,” muttered Ellery, turning away with the Judge as Stella Godfrey flashed an angry look at her husband and hurried to her daughter. “Observe our young hero. The world’s most ubiquitous swain, with an obvious weakness for tears. Can’t say I blame him in this case. And wouldn’t you say that that human barge over there is the ‘frenetic’ Mrs. Constable Rosa mentioned?”
Laura Constable, attired in an aching red morning dress, sat in a trance nearby. She did not see the two men, nor Stella Godfrey escorting Rosa into the house, nor Earle Cort biting his lip, nor Walter Godfrey staring malevolently at the detectives hovering over the patio. The woman was indecently stout even in the armor she wore beneath her gown; and her bosom was frightening.
But the size of her body was insignificant beside the magnitude of her terror. It was more than fear on the fat, lumpy, insipid, enameled face; it was pure panic. It could not be explained by the presence of the numerous police, nor even by the proximity of a dead man. Ellery studied her intently. There was an artery jumping in the skin of her fat throat, and a spasmodic nerve in her left eyelid, over bloodshot eyes. She breathed in slow, heavy, labored, almost asthmatic breaths.
“There’s a spectacle of raw nature,” said the Judge grimly. “I wonder what’s bothering her?”
“An inadequate verb... And there, I suppose, sit the Munns.”
“Towers,” murmured Judge Macklin, “of silence. An interesting collection of animals, my son.”
The woman was easily identified. Her beautiful face had been pictured in a thousand newspapers and periodicals. Emanating from the grubby soil of a mid-Western hamlet, she had flashed to a doubtful fame before she was twenty as the winner of numerous beauty contests. For a time she had modeled — there was a hard blonde loveliness in her face and figure that photographed superbly. Then she had disappeared, to turn up in Paris as the wife of a dissolute American millionaire. Two months later she had secured a lucrative divorce and a motion picture contract in Hollywood.
This episode in her career was as cursory as it was eventful. Possessing no special talent, embroiled in three successive scandals, she had quit Hollywood and returned to New York — almost at once securing another contract, this one to appear in a featured role of a Broadway revue. And here, apparently, Cecilia Ball struck her true metier; for she hurtled from one revue to another uninterruptedly and with that skyrocketing velocity of success possible only to Broadway and Balkan politics. Then she met Joseph A. Munn.
Munn was something of a character. A far-Westerner who had punched cattle in his teens for thirty dollars a month, he had joined Pershing’s punitive army in the Villista war, found himself caught up in the maelstrom of the European conflict, achieved a sergeantcy and two medals in France, and returned to the United States a penniless hero with three scraps of shrapnel in his body. That his wounds did not impair a herculean vigor was proved by his subsequent history. Almost at once he quit New York and disappeared by way of a shabby tramp-liner. For many years he remained invisible. Then suddenly he turned up in New York, a man of forty-odd, black as a mestizo, his hair as strong and curly as ever, with an air of quiet authority and a fortune of several million dollars. How he had made it no one but his banker knew; but the preponderant rumor placed the source of his wealth in revolution, cattle, and mines. He seemed intimately familiar with the South American continent.
Joe Munn came to New York with an idea that amounted to an obsession: to make up as quickly as possible for his years of hard riding, hard campaigning, and hard association with halfbreed women. It was inevitable that he should stumble over Cecilia Ball. It was in a gaudy night-club, the party was hilarious and liquorish, the music inciting; Munn got roaring drunk and flung his money about with the incredible carelessness of a maharajah. He was so big and masterful, so different from the pale men she was accustomed to, and moreover had so much more money — as was self-evident — that to Cecilia he became instantly irresistible. At noon the next day Munn awoke in a Connecticut hotel-room to find Cecilia smiling coyly by his side; there was a marriage license on the bureau.
Another man might have stormed and threatened, or consulted a lawyer, according to his nature. Joe Munn laughed and said: “All right, kid, you hooked me; but it was my own fault and I guess you’re not so hard to take. Only remember; from now on you’re Joe Munn’s wife.”
“How could I forget it, handsome?” she cooed, snuggling close.
“Oh, I’ve seen it happen,” said Munn with a grim chuckle. “This is going to be one of those closed corporations, see? I don’t give a whoop in hell what you were or who you played around with; my own past isn’t any too sweet-smelling. I’ve got scads of dough; more than any one you’ll meet can give you. And I think I can take care of myself in a clinch. You see our clinches are private, that’s all.” And he promptly proceeded to prove his point.
Cecilia Munn shivered a little, however, whenever she had cause to remember the look in his hard black eyes.
That had been some months before.
Now the Munns, husband and wife, sat side by side in the patio of Walter Godfrey’s hacienda — saying nothing, doing nothing, scarcely breathing. It was not difficult to gauge the condition of Cecilia Munn’s emotions: she was deathly pale beneath her make-up, her hands were rolled into a hard knot in her lap, and her enormous gray-green eyes were swimming with fear. Her breasts rose and fell in minute, repressed surges. She was frankly scared; as scared in her own way as Laura Constable.
Munn towered by her side, a bull of a man, his black eyes almost closed and roving under the brown lids like restless little rats, missing nothing. His big muscular hands were half-hidden in the pockets of his sport coat. His face was absolutely blank, the face of a gambler in a professional moment.
Ellery gathered the impression from some secret place in his mind that the brown Westerner’s muscles under his loose stylish clothes were gathered for lightning action. He seemed aware of — and ready for — everything.
“What in tunket are they all afraid of?” murmured Ellery to the Judge as Inspector Moley’s powerful figure emerged from a door at the far corner of the patio. “I’ve never seen a crew in greater funk.”
The old gentleman did not reply for a moment. Then he said slowly: “I’m most curious about this man who’s been murdered. I should like a look at his face. Was he afraid, too?”
Ellery’s glance flickered over the immobile figure of Joe Munn. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said softly.