A Fine and Private Place (6 page)

The sergeant handed Ellery a number of photographs. They were largely close-ups, from various angles, of the same object, which was lying on what appeared to be a short-piled rug.

“What is that material the shoeprint shows up on?” Ellery asked. “Looks like ashes.”

“It is ashes,” Voytershack said.

“What kind?”

“Cigar.”

There was a great deal of it. In one picture, taken at slightly longer range, a large glass ashtray in what seemed to be an ebony holder was visible on the rug a foot or so from the ash deposit. The ashtray lay face down.

“Whose cigars?” Ellery asked. “Do you have a make on that?”

“They're from the same cigars the boys found in a humidor on the murdered guy's desk,” the sergeant said. “Prime Cuban. The finest.”

“The tray must have been piled pretty high to have dumped this much ash when it overturned.”

“They all claim Julio was a cigar chain-smoker,” Inspector Queen said. “And the maid hadn't yet cleaned up his library this morning from yesterday.”

“So presumably the tray was knocked off the desk in the struggle?”

“That's the way it figures. Joe'll show you the series of photos of the room. Chairs and lamps knocked over, a 200-year old Chinese vase smashed to bits, a rack of fire tools upset—one of them, a hefty three-foot trident-type poker, was the murder weapon—an antique taboret squashed to kindling wood where somebody must have fallen on it—as I told you back home, a donnybrook. What do you make of the shoeprint, Ellery?”

“Man's right shoe, smallish size—I'd estimate no more than an eight, could even be a seven. The sole is rippled. Might be of crepe. Certainly a sports shoe of some type. Also, diagonally down the length of the sole there's something that looks like a deep cut in the crepe. It's definitely not part of the design of the sole. The cut crosses four consecutive ripples of the crepe at an acute angle. Dad, this should have made identification a kindergarten exercise. That is, if you found the shoe.”

“Oh, it was, and we did,” the Inspector said. “The shoe—a yachting shoe, by the way, and crepe-soled, as you say—was found on the 9th floor of 99 East, in a shoe rack of the east apartment's dressing room adjoining the master bedroom. Size about 7½C. Fits the imprint in the ashes like a glove. And with a cut in the sole positioned exactly as in the ashes, crossing the same four ripples at the same angle.”

“Marco Importunato's apartment. His shoe.”

“Marco's apartment, his shoe. Right.”

“Joe, do you have the shoe here?”

Sergeant Voytershack produced it. It was a common navy blue sports oxford with the characteristic thick crepe sole. Ellery studied the crosscut.

“May I have a caliper or a tongs, Joe—something to pry the edges of the cut apart?”

Voytershack handed him a tool and a magnifying glass. The two officers watched without expression. Ellery separated the lips of the cut and peered into its vitals through the glass.

He looked up with a nod. “Can't be much doubt. The cut down the sole looks fresh—definitely not an old cut; in fact, it was made very recently. And I don't see how a slash of this length and uniform depth could have been the result of stepping on something, unless the wearer of the shoe was doing a balancing act on an ax blade. So the cut across these ripples in the crepe was made deliberately. And since this is a mass-produced sports shoe obtainable almost anywhere, making it hard to trace, the purpose of the cut can only have been for identification—to connect the distinctive print the shoe left in the cigar ashes with the specific shoe belonging to Marco Importunato. In other words—again—to frame Marco for his brother Julio's murder. Has Marco been questioned yet?”

“Very delicately,” Inspector Queen said. “Sort of in passing. In this case, we decided, haste makes headaches. We're sort of feeling our way around.”

Ellery set Marco Importunato's shoe down. Sergeant Voytershack carefully stowed it away.

“And that's the extent of the case against Marco?” Ellery asked. “The gold button? The shoeprint?”

His father said, “He's also left-handed.”

“Left-handed? Impossible. Nobody stoops to using left-handed murderers anymore.”

“In mystery stories.”

“There's a clue to left-handedness?”

“Not exactly.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The crime could have been committed by a left-handed man.”

“And I suppose all the other suspects are right-handed?”

“I don't know about all the suspects—‘all' covers a lot of ground, and we haven't even scratched the surface of the potentials. For what it's worth, Marco's brothers, Julio who was the victim and Nino who heads the whole shebang, were … are … whatever the devil it is!—both right-handed.”

“Why do you say the crime could have been committed by a southpaw? Where's the clue to that?”

Inspector Queen's chin jerked at the sergeant. In silence Voytershack handed Ellery a portfolio of photographs.

The Inspector tapped the uppermost photo. “You tell me.”

It showed a corner of a room.

The picture was not a sample of the lensman's art by any criterion of esthetics. There was a long desk, heavy-looking, with an oak grain in a feudal finish, extensively carved. A man, or what had been a man, was seated in what appeared to be a swivel chair, midway behind the desk. The view was from across the desk, facing the dead man. The upper torso and head lay fallen forward on the desk top, and one side of the head was caved in.

The large desk blotter and some papers scattered on the desk—fortuitously, one of them on the squashed side was a newspaper—had sopped up most of the blood and brain matter. That entire side—of the head, the shoulder, the desk—was a continuous ruin.

“From the wound,” Ellery said, making a face, “a single blow, a crusher; had to have been full arm. A home run in any park.” He snapped a fingertip at the color print. “Question: If there was a battle royal between Julio and his killer of sufficient violence to shatter vases and break furniture, how come Julio was found seated more or less peaceably behind the desk?”

“We have to figure he lost the fight,” the Inspector said with a shrug. “Killer then forced him to sit down behind the desk, or conned him into it, on what excuse or threat or sweet talk is anybody's guess. Maybe to talk over their differences, whatever they were … I mean why they fought in the first place. However the killer managed it, it led to his crowning Julio with the poker. It's the only theory that makes sense to us. If any of this makes sense.”

“Any fix on the time of the murder? Did Prouty's man say?”

“Prouty's man? Are you kidding? This one was important enough to bring the eminent Dr. Prouty trotting out in the flesh. Last night around 10
P
.
M
. is Doc's preliminary estimate.”

“Didn't anyone hear the fight?”

“The servants' quarters are way to hell and gone at the other end of Julio's apartment, which goes on forever. And as far as overhearing is concerned, you could stage a kid gang rumble in one of those rooms and nobody'd know it. They built walls that were walls in the days when 99 East was put up, not the cardboard partitions they use today. No, nobody heard the fight.”

Ellery set the photograph down. Sergeant Voytershack reached for it. But Ellery had already picked it up again. “And Prouty couldn't be more exact about the time?”

“Restless, my son?” his father asked. “Doesn't this case come up to your usual standard? No, Doc couldn't—not today, anyway. He says he'll give us, quote, ‘a more accurate stab in the dark,' unquote, as soon as he can. If he can.”

“You don't seem to have much confidence in anything about the case.”

“And you,” Inspector Queen retorted, “don't seem in much of a hurry to hold forth on the left-handedness business.”

Ellery scowled and squinted at the photograph. One of the short ends of the desk met the side wall. The desk's long dimension was therefore parallel with the rear wall, the one behind the dead man's chair.

“No mystery about it,” Ellery said. “Certainly not from this photo. From the position and angle of the line of impact made on this side of the skull by the weapon, assuming that when Julio was struck he was sitting up normally in the chair, the blow could certainly have been delivered by a left-handed man.”

The Inspector and Sergeant Voytershack nodded without enthusiasm.

“That's it?” Inspector Queen asked.

“Not to me it isn't,” Ellery said. “Not yet. It's consistent with Marco's left-handedness, all right, but that may be the trouble. If Marco's being framed, if the button and shoeprint were plants, this left-handedness possibility may be a plant, too. I'd like to see Julio's library close up, dad. And can you arrange to have the confidential secretary—what's his name? Peter Ennis?—join us there?”

It was 9:35
P
.
M
. when the Queens rode the small private elevator to the top floor of 99 East and stepped out into the modest vestibule that served both the east and west 9th-floor apartments. They had had to struggle through the wasps' nest of reporters and photographers downstairs, and both men were ruffled.

“Open up,” Inspector Queen snapped to the officer on guard at the east door. The man rapped three times, and the door was unlocked from inside by another officer.

“Bad down there, Inspector?” he asked.

“It's as much as your life is worth. It's all right, Mulvey, we'll find it. I have hound-dog blood in me.”

Ellery followed his father, taking in the high ceilings and rococo ornamentation of the apartment. The furniture was ponderous and for the most part Italian, but the décor was haphazardly bright, expressing no particular scheme or period but rather the whims of the decorator, undoubtedly Julio Importunato himself. The murdered man, Ellery reflected, must have been a lighthearted, chromatic
amante
of life. The life-sized oil portrait in the living room through which they passed confirmed his guess. It was of a large, doughy man with a lusty mustache and eyes that reminded him of a Hals he had seen in the Louvre,
The Gypsy
, brimming over with amiable mischief. The portraitist's symbolism was as hearty as the subject himself. On the table at which the artist had painted the youngest brother lay an overturned leather dicebox with the dice spilled out beside an empty bottle of
vino;
a slopping wineglass was clutched in the fist resting on the table. And, reflected in a background mirror (the curlicued frame was festooned with gold cupids), on an opulent bed, lay a smiling woman of noble dimensions with one rosy leg drawn up and no clothes on.

“Pity,” Ellery said.

“What?”

“I was having a platitudinous thought about death. An epitaph for Julio. How many rooms are there in this labyrinth, anyway?”

They finally penetrated to the scene of the murder. The library, Inspector Queen said, was in the same condition as when Peter Ennis had found the dead man, except for what had necessarily been disturbed in the police workover. Chairs were overturned, lamps lay broken on the floor, the rack of fire tools at the fireplace sprawled on the hearthstone; even the débris of the antique taboret lay where it had collapsed. And while Julio Importunato's body was no longer there, its surrogate remained—the ghostly outline of his torso and head chalked on the bloodied desk.

“That's where the shoeprint was?” Ellery pointed with his toe to an erratic hole some two feet in diameter in the cobalt blue Indian rug. The piece had been cut out of the rug near one of the front corners of the desk.

Inspector Queen nodded. “For the D.A.'s office.” He added, “Hopefully.”

“That's the name of this game. Is Ennis here?”

The Inspector nodded to the patrolman on duty and the patrolman opened a door at the far end of the library. Two men came in. The man who appeared first could not have been Ennis in any event; he strolled, in no hurry, the captain of a ship, unquestioned master of his decks. Peter Ennis followed with quick small steps, in a sort of choreography, the very model of the subordinate; the small steps shrank his natural advantage of height over his employer to their real proportions.

“This is Mr. Importuna,” the younger man announced. “Mr. Nino Importuna.” He possessed a surprising high tenor voice, incongruous in a man of his size and virile blond appearance.

No one acknowledged the fanfare; Ennis took one step back, flushing.

Importuna stopped before his murdered brother's desk, surveying the dried blood, the bits of tissue, the chalked outline. Whatever he felt, he did not allow it to show.

“This is the first time I've seen”—his right hand with its four fingers described a vague oval—“this. They wouldn't let me in before.”

“You shouldn't be here now, Mr. Importuna,” Inspector Queen said. “I'd rather have spared you this.”

“Kind but not necessary,” the multimillionaire said. His voice sounded deep and dry, with a faint echo of remorse, like an abandoned well. “Italian
contadini
are used to the sight of blood.… So this is how the murder of a brother looks.
Omicidio a sangue freddo
.”

“Why do you say ‘in cold blood,' Mr. Importuna?” Ellery asked.

The adversary eyes turned Ellery's way. They took his measure. “Who are you? You're not a policeman.”

“My son Ellery,” the Inspector said, quickly. “He has a professional interest in homicide, Mr. Importuna, though his profession isn't police work. He writes about it.”

“Oh? My brother Julio becomes your raw material, Mr. Queen?”

“Not for profit,” Ellery said. “We have the feeling this is a difficult case, Mr. Importuna. I'm helping out. But you haven't answered my question.”