“Handsome devil,” sighed Ellery, raising his eyes to the dead man’s face.
It was a faintly Latin face, with rather full lips and the merest suggestion of aquilinity in the nose — a well-shaven, scrubbed and dangerous face, languid and strong and mocking even in death. Of the fear Judge Macklin had speculated upon there was not a trace. “This is the way he was found?”
“Just the way you see him, Mr. Queen,” said Moley, “except that the cloak wasn’t draped around and over his shoulders as it is now. It fell straight down, covering his body pretty well. We turned the flaps back ourselves and got the shock of our lives... Nuts, isn’t it? We haven’t moved him, though, an inch. Something out of a book, or a lunatic asylum... Here comes our county coroner. Hi, Blackie, shake a leg, will you?”
“Curious,” muttered Judge Macklin, shifting his lean old body aside as a thin and bony man with a tired face trudged down the terrace steps. “This gentleman, Inspector: was he in the habit of strolling about in what I confess is a very fetching nude, or was last night a special occasion? By the way, it was last night, I take it?”
“Looks like it, from the little I’ve been able to dig out so far, Judge. As for his habits, your guess is as good as mine,” said Moley sourly. “If he was, he must have given the gals around here a great big thrill. ‘Lo, Blackie. How’s this for a godly chore of a Sunday morning?”
The coroner’s jaw sagged. “Why, the fellow’s naked! Is this the way you found him?” His black bag thudded on the flags as he bent over the corpse, peering incredulously.
“For the tenth time,” said the Inspector in a weary voice, “the answer is yes. Get going, Blackie, for the love of Mike. This is a funny business all around and I want as much as you can give me on the spot, pronto.”
The three men stepped back and watched the coroner go to work. For a moment none of them said anything.
Then Ellery drawled: “You haven’t found his clothes, Inspector?”
His eyes ranged over the terrace. It was not spacious, but what it lacked in size it made up for in color and atmosphere. It invited leisure — an intimate little temple of lazy pleasure. Its open-beamed white roof permitted the rays of the sun to fall on the gay flags underfoot in a striped pattern of light and shadow that was of the very essence of summer.
A clever hand and eye had supervised the decorations; one received the dual impression of sea and Spain. There were beach umbrellas over saucy round tables in a prevailing motif of Spanish reds and yellows; sea-shell ashtrays lay about, and small brass-and-leather-bound chests of cigarets and cigars, and various sets of table games. At the head of the terrace steps, one on each side of the walk, were two huge Spanish oil jars, implanted with flowers; at the bottom, resting on the flagstones, two others. They were magnificently gigantic, something out of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment; almost as tall as a man, and voluptuously fat-bellied. Against the left-hand rock wall, nestling in the shadow of the high cliff, stood a miniature Spanish galleon on a stand (which Ellery discovered later split in two by some alchemy of ingenuity and became a very practical bar). Several pieces of superb colored statuary in marble occupied niches hewn out of the rock walls, and upon the walls themselves a capable hand had molded bas-relief sculptures of Spanish historical figures, chiefly maritime, in terra cotta and stucco. Two large searchlights, the sun glittering on their brasswork and prisms, stood sentinel on two of the opposite beams of the openwork roof. They faced straight ahead, piercing the opening between the cliff walls forming the Cove.
Upon the round table at which the naked dead man sat were writing implements — an oddly shaped inkpot, an ornate and delightful quill in a box of fine sand, and a rather elaborate repository for stationery.
“Clothes?” scowled Inspector Moley. “Not yet. That’s what makes it so screwy, Mr. Queen. You could say that a guy might come trotting down to this little pocket-sized beach at night, take off his things, and splash around in the ocean for a while to cool off, or something; but what the devil happened to his clothes? And his towel; can’t dry off at night without a towel. Don’t tell me somebody swiped his clothes while he was taking a swim, like the kids do! Anyway, that’s the way I was thinking — in dizzy circles — till I found out something.”
“He couldn’t swim, I suppose,” murmured Ellery.
“Right, right!” Vast disgust was on the red honest face. “Anyway, that swim stuff would be out. He’s wearing a cloak and holding a cane. Hell, he was even writing a letter when he was killed!”
“Now that,” said Ellery dryly, “sounds like something.” They were standing behind the still seated figure now. Marco’s dead body faced the little beach squarely, the broad cloaked back to the terrace stairs. He seemed to be brooding out over the coruscating sand, and the tiny curve of blue sea filling the mouth of the Cove. The tide was out, although even as Ellery watched there was an almost imperceptible inward creep of the water. The thirty feet or so of uncovered sand were perfectly smooth, unmarked by the slightest alien impression.
“What d’ye mean — something?” snorted Moley. “Sure it’s something. Take a look for yourself.”
Ellery poked his head over the dead man’s shoulder; the coroner, working from the side, grunted something and he stepped back again. But he had seen clearly enough the evidence of Moley’s assertion. Marco’s left hand hung straight down, near the table; directly below on the flags, the stiff fingers grotesquely pointing to it, lay a brightly colored quill pen like the one sticking in the sand-box. The nib was discolored with dried black ink. A sheet of stationery on which several lines of script appeared — a creamy sheet with a coronal crest embossed in red and gold at the top, the name Godfrey in antique lettering on the little streamer below the crest — lay on the table only a few inches away from the dead man’s body. Apparently Marco had been assaulted in the midst of writing, for the last word of his message — obviously an incomplete letter — broke off abruptly, and a thick black ink-line trailed off down the sheet, across the intervening stretch of table-top to the very edge. There was a smudge of black ink on the side of the middle finger of the dead man’s left hand, as Ellery ascertained by stooping and squinting.
“Looks genuine enough,” he remarked, straightening. “But doesn’t it strike you as odd, to say the least, that he was writing with only one hand?”
The Inspector stared, and Judge Macklin frowned. “Well, for God’s sake,” exploded Moley, “how many hands does a man need to write a letter with?”
“I think I know what Mr. Queen means,” said the Judge slowly, his fine eyes lighting up. “We don’t usually think of a man’s needing two hands to write with, but actually it’s so. One to write with, and the other to hold the sheet of paper steady.”
“Yet Marco,” drawled Ellery, nodding his approval at the old gentleman’s quick understanding, “was holding his ebony stick with his right hand, to judge from what we see here, at the same time that he wrote with his left. I say it’s... er... spinach.” He added hastily: “On the surface, on the surface only. There may be an explanation.”
The Inspector permitted himself a fleeting grin. “You don’t let anything get by, do you, Mr. Queen? Can’t say you’re wrong, though I didn’t think of it myself. But there could be an explanation. He might have had his stick lyin’ on the table next to him while he wrote. He heard a sound behind him — maybe he was tense, anyway — his left hand trailed off the page as he grabbed the stick up in his right with some quick idea of defending himself. Before he could do more than grab it he was bopped. And there you are.”