A Fine and Private Place (9 page)

“All right,” Inspector Queen said. “So you dropped into Julio's apartment last night and you and Julio had a fight about his turndown of the deal?”

“Not a fight! An argument. There's a difference, you know!”

“I'm sorry, an argument. Go ahead, Mr. Importunato.”

“I thought maybe he's in a different mood tonight, maybe I can change his mind. But no, he was still dead set against it—he'd got it into his head that either somebody'd bribed our geologist to con us out of a bundle or that, even if oil was found, it would be an economic disaster trying to handle a production and pipeline setup across thousands of miles of frozen wasteland. Anyway, one word led to another, and we wound up yelling Italian curses at each other.” Marco raised his tear-swollen face. “But Julio could never stay mad very long. All of a sudden he said, ‘Look,
fratello
, what are we arguing for? The hell with it, so we'll blow 28, 29 million bucks. What's money?' and he laughed, so I laughed, and we shook hands across the desk, and I said good night and walked out. And that was it, Inspector Queen. I swear.”

He was sweating heavily now.

“You mean Julio gave his consent to the deal, Marco?” Nino Importuna demanded. “You didn't tell me.”

“I didn't get the chance.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Importuna,” the Inspector said. “You didn't come to blows, Mr. Importunato? Throw things? Break anything?”

“Julio and me? Never!”

“Mr. Importunato,” Ellery said; his father gave him a look and stepped back at once. “Did either you or your brother accidentally knock his ashtray off the desk?”

At this assault from another quarter Marco's head snapped about. He immediately drew it in, turtle-fashion. “I don't remember anything like that.”

“When you left him, where exactly was Julio? I mean where in the library.”

“I left him sitting behind his desk.”

“And the desk was in its usual position? Catercornered?”

“That's right.”

“While you were in the room, did either you or your brother move the desk?”

“Move it? Why should we move it? I don't think I even put my hand on it. And Julio never once got up from behind it.”

“And you left the library no later than 9 o'clock, you said. You seemed very sure of the time, Mr. Importunato. How come?”

Marco began to shout. “Holy Mother, don't you people take a man's word for anything? A chick was meeting me at my apartment at 9:15 to go swinging. I checked my watch as I was leaving Julio. I saw it was a couple minutes to 9. That gave me just time enough to change my clothes. Satisfied?” He thrust his lower lip forward.

“Change which clothes? What were you wearing when you visited Julio last night?”

The lips clamped down. His hands were gripping the arms of the chair and his knuckles were yellow-white.

“Your yachting jacket, Mr. Importunato?” Ellery said. “The crepe-soled shoes?”

“I'm not answering any more questions. You're through here, Mister whoever-the-hell-you-are. Get out of my apartment!”

“Oh?” Ellery said. “Why the sudden clam-up?”

“Because! I can see you've made up your minds I'm guilty. I ought to've taken Nino's advice and not opened my yap. Anything else you want to find out, you can goddam well talk to my lawyer!”

Marco Importunato got to his feet and staggered over to the bar. His brother stepped in his way, and he brushed the older man violently aside, seized the whisky bottle, threw his head back, and began to glug. Importuna and Ennis closed in on him.

Under cover of the ensuing scuffle the Inspector,
sotto
, said, “What do you think, Ellery? The button could have fallen out of his pocket without his knowing. And the ashtray could have been shoved off the desk and Marco's foot stepped on the ashes.”

“But the moving of the desk, dad. With Marco the killer it makes no sense. Suppose he's lying and he did move it. Why? Well, its effect is to make the murder appear as if it could have been committed by a left-handed man. And Marco's left-handed. So was he trying to implicate himself?” Ellery shook his head. “I feel like a yoyo. At the moment I'm inclined to believe him. Somebody else moved that desk. Unless …”

He stopped.

“Unless what, son?”

“I see,” Ellery said. “That is, I think I see.… It's certainly a possibility.”

“
What
is?”

“Dad, let's go back to Julio's library. And call for a man to meet us there on the double with a dusting kit.”

Nino Importuna and Peter Ennis rejoined the Queens in the dead man's library not long after. They had remained behind in Marco's apartment to quiet him. The Inspector was resting in an easy chair; he looked tired. Ellery stood at the desk.

“We finally got him into bed.” Ennis was evidently ruffled; he was brushing his clothes with unnecessarily powerful strokes. “I sincerely hope he stays there! Marco's a bit of a handful when he's loaded.”

“Tebaldo will take care of him,” the multimillionaire said brusquely. “Mr. Queen, is there an end to this day? I'm beginning to feel persecuted. What is it now?”

“This business of the desk, Mr. Importuna.” Ellery was staring at it; it was as they had left it, in the catercornered position. “With the desk catercornered, and on the assumption that Julio was sitting up in the swivel chair behind it facing his assailant, it wouldn't have been possible for whoever killed him, as I pointed out earlier, to have delivered a left-hand blow to the side of Julio's head where the wound is. Unless the killer struck a backhand blow, which is theoretically possible, I suppose, but I strongly question whether anyone outside a Mr. America contest could have used that poker backhandedly with sufficient force and certainly with such deadly aim as to have left that very deep and fatal wound—especially in view of the fact that the attack consisted of a single blow. No, we have to conclude that if Marco, say, had been at the striking end of the poker the wound would have been found on the opposite side of Julio's head from where it actually landed. Unless”—and Ellery swung about suddenly—“
unless our assumption is wrong and Julio was
not
facing his assailant at the instant of impact
.”

“I don't see—” Importuna began.

“Hold it!” the Inspector yawped. “How exactly do you figure that, son?”

“Suppose Julio—while facing the other man in the natural vis-à-vis position—anticipated the blow. A split second before the poker came down, suppose he tried to dodge and succeeded only in swiveling his chair 180°.
So that when the blow landed he was turned completely about, facing the corner, with the
back
of his head presented to the descending poker, instead of the front, as we've been assuming
. Then the poker
would
have struck the opposite side of his head!” Ellery was striding irritably about. “Where the devil is that fingerprint man?”

“I'll be damned,” his father breathed; and he repeated it. Then he shook his head. “And none of us saw it! But Ellery, why a fingerprint man?”

“To test a theory that grows out of the point I just made. As the chair swiveled around with Julio trying to escape the poker, isn't it likely that he'd have thrown his arms forward instinctively to keep from toppling from the chair? And, if that happened, I don't see how Julio's hands could have avoided making contact with those walls that meet in the corner.” Ellery squeezed behind the desk. “Just about here, I'd estimate—Ah, here he is! Over here, please—Maglie, isn't it?”

“But we dusted everything, Mr. Queen.” The tech man was tieless, unshaven, and he was wearing a badly creased and grimy white shirt. His long face said he had been summoned from before his TV set and a bottle of beer. “What's the problem, Inspector Queen?”

The old man waved a dragging hand. “In that corner, Maglie. On the walls. Ellery 'll show you.”

And several minutes later they were staring at two large, smudged palm prints, shoulder high to a seated man, each print about a foot from where the two walls met, and each tilted at the finger ends toward the other.

Nobody said a word until the fingerprint man packed up and left.

“Good as a photo,” the Inspector said; he had perked up considerably, and he was trying, not altogether successfully, to keep a chortle out of his voice. “That's what happened, all right! With Julio's back to the killer, the head wound is just where it would be if the strike had come from the killer's left side. No ifs about it, Julio
was
killed by a left-handed man—not just possibly anymore, but positively. That, Mr. Importuna, I'm sorry to say, along with the gold button and the shoeprint, points to your brother Marco again, only this time a lot stronger than before.”

“Wait, wait,” Nino Importuna said thickly. “You don't answer important questions. Why wasn't Julio left that way—I mean the way he died, facing the corner? Why was his body turned around so that his face fell forward on the desk?”

“If you weren't so upset, Mr. Importuna,” Ellery said, “you'd be able to answer that yourself. We're hypothesizing now that, by the weight of the evidence, your brother Marco was Julio's murderer. Marco's just struck the lethal blow and he's looking down at Julio's unexpectedly reversed head, crushed in on the side that unmistakably betrays a left-hand blow. And he, Marco, is left-handed. Murderers don't want to be caught, Mr. Importuno, at least not consciously. So Marco turns Julio's body around to face him. In the face-to-face position, as indeed we've been assuming until now, a left-hand blow appears impossible. Isn't that reason enough for Marco not to have left Julio to be found in the about-face position?”

“Yes, but then why would Marco move the desk?” Importuna argued. “If he had left it catercornered, but turned Julio around to the face-to-face position so that the blow would seem to have come from the opposite side, you'd have had to say: The killer was right-handed, not left-handed. If Marco killed Julio, he had every reason
not
to move the desk. So again I ask: Why did he move it and defeat his own purpose, Mr. Queen? You can't have it both ways!”

“You know, Ellery,” the Inspector said, looking tired again, “he has a point there.”

Ellery was back at his nose-pulling exercise, and he was muttering, something he rarely did. “Yes … that's so, isn't it? If Marco was clear-headed enough to turn the body, he should have been clear-headed enough not to shift the desk. This
is
the queerest case.… We'd better talk to Marco again. Maybe he can clear the point up.”

But they were not to talk to Marco Importunato again on that night, or indeed on any night short of the resurrection. They found him in the tall-ceilinged gymnasium hanging halfway down the climbing rope. He had fashioned a loop in the thick hemp, thrust his head into it, evidently shinnied with it to the ceiling, and then launched himself head first toward the floor. At the end of the dive the contention of gravity with the rope claimed his neck.

That sometime imperfect gentleman's gentleman, Tebaldo, was stretched out on the trampoline like a martyr of the Inquisition, snoring with vigor and nuzzling a three-quarter-empty bottle of Italian barley brandy. Much later, on being resuscitated and approximately sobered, Tebaldo stated that his
cugino
Marco—he said he was a fifth cousin Marco had brought over from the old country at great expense in the spirit of
famiglia
, a virtue rarely to be found, alas, in this otherwise great America—had suddenly crawled forth from the bed and challenged him, Tebaldo, to a drinking competition, during which Tebaldo had attempted manfully to keep up, and about the outcome of which he, Tebaldo, remembered nothing but Cousin Marco's inflamed eyes, which he insisted—crossing himself several times—had resembled nothing so much as two of the fires of hell.

“Son, son,” Inspector Queen was saying as they watched Marco's body being taken down—the lab men were confiscating most of the climbing rope, including the noose, for later examination—“anybody can get fouled up in a case like this. Don't feel so bad. I'm as responsible as you are when you get down to it. I couldn't believe all that evidence pointing straight to Marco, either. Yet it was pretty much open and shut from the start. Everything says it was Marco—the button dropped out of his pocket, the shoeprint in the ashes, that left-handed business, and now he commits suicide. Hanging himself is as good as a signed confession.… What's the matter, Ellery? Why the long puss again? You still aren't satisfied?”

“Since you're putting the direct question, I'll have to answer you in kind,” Ellery said. “No.”

“No? Why not? What's eating you now?”

“A number of things. For one, why Marco didn't leave the desk catercornered. For another, the fact that his committing suicide doesn't necessarily add up to a confession of murder, tempting as it is to think it does. Hanging himself might well have been the result of pouring that appalling quantity of alcohol into his system—and we saw how jittery and upset he was to start with—so much, in fact, that he may have gone temporarily psycho. In which condition a rope around his neck could seem the logical answer to his grief and guilt feelings about having quarreled with Julio. Not to mention—if he was innocent—panic over being framed.

“Also,” Ellery went on, “lest we forget, dad,
cui bono
? as a canny old gent named Cicero put it some time ago. For whose benefit? Who profits by the Importunato brothers' deaths?”

“You know what I think?” the Inspector exploded. “I think you're looking for any excuse not to get back to that book of yours! All right, we'll go ask Importuna.”

“Let me do the talking, dad.”

The old man shrugged.

He had sent Importuna and Ennis into Marco's bedroom while the technicians worked. They found the secretary drooping in a chair, but Importuna was standing lik statuary at the foot of his brother's bed, a yard away from it; Ellery received the ludicrous impression that he might be perched on one leg, like a stork or a Far East religious fanatic. Otherwise, if the multimillionaire felt anything at the violent loss of his second brother in 24 hours, Ellery was unable to detect a sign of it. Those heavy features were modeled, beyond alteration, in bronze.