“If you were innocent,” said Moley sternly, “didn’t you realize that by running away you were making it look bad for yourself?”
“I had to get away,” she said desperately. “I was afraid they’d find out. I went right away because if Jorum saw he was dead he’d have raised an alarm and I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the grounds. And then there were those papers.”
Moley scratched his ear, frowning. There was the unmistakable ring of truth in the woman’s voice and story. True, he had an excellent circumstantial case against her, the stenographic report of her story safely made, but... He glanced at Ellery’s face as that lean young man turned away for an instant, and he was startled.
Ellery whirled about, sprang to the woman’s side, grasped her arm. She cried out, shrinking back. “You’ve got to be more explicit!” he said fiercely. “You say that when you first saw Marco on the terrace he was stark naked?”
“Yes,” she quavered.
“Where was his hat?”
“Why, on the table. His cane, too.”
“And the cloak?”
“Cloak?” The woman’s eyes widened with genuine surprise. “I didn’t say his cape was on the table. Or did I? I’m so mixed up—”
Ellery slowly released her arm. There was an agony of hope in his gray eyes. “Oh, it wasn’t on the table,” he said in a strangled voice. “Where was it — on the flagstones of the terrace? But of course. That’s where it must have been when the murderer threw it down to undress him.” His eyes were glassy now, glaring in their concentration on her lips.
She was bewildered. “No. It wasn’t on the terrace at all. I mean — what’s all the fuss about? Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it! I didn’t mean anything! I see you think—” Her voice had risen to a scream again.
“Never mind what I think,” panted Ellery, gripping her arm again. He shook her so violently that she gasped and her head flopped back. “Tell me! Where was it? How did it get there?”
“When I read the note upstairs, in his room,” she muttered, her face grayer than before, “I didn’t want to take the chance of going down to the terrace empty-handed. I wanted an excuse for being there if somebody caught me. I saw his cape lying on the bed; he’d forgotten to take it with him, I guess.” Something hotly fierce flared into Ellery’s face. “I picked it up and took it down with me, to say that he had sent me for it — if somebody should stop me. Nobody did. When I saw he was naked I was — was glad I had it to put over him...”
But Ellery had flung her arm from him and stepped back, drawing a breath from his toes. Moley, the Judge, the stenographer looked at him with puzzled, almost frightened, eyes. He seemed to be swelling, to have filled out suddenly.
He stood very still, gazing over the woman’s head at the blank wall of Moley’s office. Then, very slowly, his fingers dipped into his pocket and came out with a cigaret.
“The cape,” he said, so low they barely heard the words. “Yes, the cape... The missing piece.” He crushed the cigaret in his hand and spun about, eyes shining madly. “By God, gentlemen, I’ve got it!”
Challenge to the Reader
“In the mountains of truth” quoth Nietzsche, “you never climb in vain.”
No one outside the realm of fairy tales ever scaled a mountain by standing at its foot and wishing himself over its crest. This is a hard world, and in it achievement requires effort. It has always been my feeling that to garner the fullest enjoyment from detective fiction the reader must to some degree endeavor to retrace the detective’s steps. The more painstakingly the trail back is scrutinized, the closer the reader comes to the ultimate truth, and the deeper his enjoyment is apt to be.
For years now I have been challenging my readers to solve my cases by the exercise of close observation, the application of logic to the winnowed facts, and a final correlation of the individual conclusions. I have been encouraged to persist in this practice by the warm testimonials of many correspondents. To those of you who have never tried it, I earnestly recommend that you do. You may run afoul of a snag somewhere along the line, or you may indeed after much thinking get nowhere at all; but it has been the experience of thousands that, successful or not, the effort is amply repaid by the heightened pleasure.
Technically there are no snags. The facts are all here at this point in the story of John Marco’s death. Can you put them together and logically place your finger on the one and only possible murderer?
Ellery Queen.
Chapter Fifteen
Of an Interruption
The drive back to Spanish Cape was accomplished in an electric silence. Mr. Ellery Queen sat hunched in the tonneau of the big car, nursing his lower lip and buried miles deep in thought. Judge Macklin glanced at his frowning face from time to time with curiosity; and Tiller, in the front seat, could not refrain from turning his head at periodic intervals. No one said anything, and the only sound was the rather menacing whine of a rising wind.
Ellery had been impervious to all of Inspector Moley’s frantic questions. The poor Inspector was beside himself with nervous excitement.
“Too soon,” Ellery had said. “I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I had the whole answer to this extraordinary problem. That story Pitts told about Marco’s cape... it points the way. Very definitely. I see now where I was wrong, and where the murderer’s plan went awry; and in this case that’s more than half the battle. But I haven’t thought it out, Inspector. I need time. Time to think.”
They had left Moley in a state of apoplectic frenzy, with an exhausted and bewildered prisoner on his hands. Mrs. Marco, alias Pitts, was formally booked on a charge of attempted blackmail and placed in the county jail. There had been a sad interlude when two young people, their eyes swollen with weeping, had arrived to visit the county morgue and take legal possession of the body of Laura Constable. Detectives and reporters had harried Ellery with questions. But in the midst of pandemonium he maintained unsmiling peace, and at the first opportunity they had slipped out of Poinsett.
It was only when the car swung off the main highway at Harry Stebbins’s establishment and entered the park-road leading to Spanish Cape that the silence was broken.
“Bad storm comin’ up,” remarked the police driver uneasily. “I’ve seen these winds up here before. Look at that sky.”
The trees of the park were in violent agitation, swaying to a steadily increasing gale. They emerged from the parkland and began to traverse the neck of rock from the mainland, and they saw the evening sky. It was the color of smudgy lead and was filled with huge swollen black clouds racing towards them from the heaving horizon. On the neck they took the full force of the wind and the driver wrestled with the wheel to keep the car on the road.
But no one replied, and they reached the shelter of the cliff-walls on the Cape without mishap.
Ellery leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Stop, please. Before you climb to the house.” The car braked to a halt.
“Where on earth—” began the Judge, raising his shaggy brows.
Ellery opened the door and stepped out into the road. His forehead was still wrinkled, but there was a feverish gleam in his eye. “I’ll be up soon. I think I’ve got my canines into this thing properly. On the scene itself...” He shrugged, smiled in adieu, and sauntered down the path leading toward the terrace.