Egyptian Cross Mystery (19 page)

“Good grief,” muttered the Inspector. “Of all the obvious places. A stain!”

“A bloodstain,” said Ellery softly, “unless experience, like my reverend Professor here, is a poor teacher.”

It was a dried blackish stain, standing out with the crudity of a wax seal on the golden colors of the rug. Near it—no more than a few inches away—there was a square depression in the fabric of the rug, the sort of impressment made by the weight of a chair- or table-leg which has stood on one spot for a long time. The shape of the depression could not be laid to the feet of the divan, which at the base were round.

Ellery, kneeling, looked around. His eyes wavered for a moment, and then went to the secretary, which stood on the opposite wall.

“There should be—” he began, and shoved the divan toward the center of the room. He nodded at once: three feet from the first depression was its mate in the pressed nap.

“But the stain,” frowned Isham, “how the devil did it get under the divan? Stallings told me when I first questioned him that nothing had been moved in this room.”

“That doesn’t require explanation, does it?” remarked Ellery dryly as he rose to his feet. “Nothing was moved—except the rug itself, and you could scarcely expect Stallings to have noticed
that.”

His eyes gleamed as he looked about the library. He had been right about the secretary; it was the only article of furniture in the room whose legs could have made depressions the exact shape and size of the two under the divan. He crossed the room and lifted one of the secretary’s square-tipped legs. On the rug directly beneath the tip, plain enough, was a depression like the two on the other side of the room, except that it was not so deep or sharply defined.

“We might conduct an entertaining little experiment,” said Ellery, straightening up. “Let’s shift this rug about.”

“Shift it about?” asked Isham. “What for?”

“So that it will lie as it did Tuesday night, before Krosac changed its position.”

A great light broke over Inspector Vaughn’s face. “By God,” he cried, “I see it now. He didn’t want us to find the bloodstain, and he couldn’t get rid of it!”

“That’s just half the story, Inspector,” remarked Professor Yardley, “if I understand Queen’s implications.”

“You do,” said Ellery equably. “It’s just a matter of getting this table out of the way. The rest is easy.” Stephen Megara still stood in a corner, silently listening; he made no move to help the four men. Vaughn lifted the round table without effort and carried it out into the hall. In a very few moments, by placing a man at each corner of the rug, they were able to jerk it from under all the small articles of furniture and turn it about, so that the part which had been hidden beneath the divan now lay where it must have lain the night of Brad’s murder—on the opposite side of the room. The two depressions, they saw instantly, fitted with precision under the two front legs of the secretary. And the dried bloodstain …

Isham stared. “Behind the checker chair!”

“Hmm. The scene begins to materialize,” drawled Ellery. The bloodstain lay two feet behind the collapsible wall chair of the checker table which stood next to the secretary.

“Struck from behind,” mumbled Professor Yardley, “as he was experimenting with his infernal checkers. Might have known that obsession would get him into trouble some day.”

“What do you think, Mr. Megara?” asked Ellery suddenly, turning to the silent yachtsman.

Megara shrugged. “That’s your job, gentlemen.”

“I think,” said Ellery, sitting down in a club chair and lighting a cigarette, “that we’ll save time by a little rapid-fire analysis. Any objections, Inspector?”

“I still can’t see,” complained Vaughn, “why he should have swung the rug around. Whom was he trying to fool? We wouldn’t have found it at all if he hadn’t, as you pointed out, deliberately left a trail back to this room by that pipe of Mr. Megara’s.”

“Gently, Inspector. Let me have my head for a moment … It’s apparent now—there can’t be any disagreement on the point—the Krosac never intended
permanently
to conceal the fact that this room was the scene of the crime. Not only didn’t he want permanently to conceal this fact, but he even arranged matters in a deucedly clever way to lead us back to this room, at his own good time, when he knew a more careful examination of the room would disclose the bloodstain. Had he wanted permanently to conceal this fact, he would not in the first place have left the pipe trail back to the library, nor would he have left that bloodstain as it is. For observe.” Ellery pointed to the open dropleaf of the secretary. “Right at hand, almost above the bloodstain, were two bottles of ink. Suppose Krosac had left the rug in its original position, and had deliberately turned over one of these two bottles of ink by accident. The police would have found bottle and stain, would have assumed the superficial truth—that the ink had been tipped over, by Brad or some one else—and would never have thought of looking beneath the ink for a bloodstain. … Instead of adopting this perfectly simple procedure, Krosac went to the vast trouble of shifting the rug around, contriving matters so that we would miss the bloodstain on first examination, would be brought back to it by Mr. Megara’s identification of the pipe as his, and would thereby find it on second examination. The essential point being that nothing was gained by Krosac in these complex maneuvers except—
time.”

“All very well,” said the Professor in a nettled tone, “but I’ll be drawn and quartered if I see why he wanted us to find it at all.”

“Professor darling,” said Ellery, “don’t anticipate. This is my recitation. You’re swell on ancient history, but my forte is logic and I yield the palm to no man in my own province. Ha, ha! Well, let it go.”

He dropped his grin. “Krosac wanted not permanent concealment of the scene of the crime, but delay of its discovery. Why? Three possible reasons. Follow closely—Mr. Megara especially; you may be able to help us here.”

Megara nodded and dropped on the divan, which had been restored to its proper position before the wall.

“One: There was something in this room dangerous to Krosac which he wanted to take away later, since for some peculiar reason he could not take it away on the night of the murder. … Two: There was something Krosac wanted to add or bring back to this room later, which he could not add or bring back on the night of the murder—”

“Hold your horses a minute,” said the District Attorney, who for a moment had been fiercely frowning. “Both of those sound reasonable, for in either case making the summerhouse seem the scene of the crime would draw attention away from the library, perhaps leaving it during that period accessible to the murderer.”

“Contradiction in order. Wrong, Mr. Isham,” drawled Ellery. “Krosac had to expect, even if the stain were missed in the first search—as he planned—and the summerhouse accepted as the scene of the crime … Krosac had to expect, I repeat, that the house would be guarded and that he would be prevented by purely precautionary police measures from taking something away later or bringing something back later. But there’s an even more important objection to the first two possibilities, gentlemen.

“If Krosac wanted to come back here and therefore deliberately made the summerhouse appear the scene of the crime, it would certainly be to his advantage to make the summerhouse appear the scene of the crime permanently. This would give him unlimited time and opportunity in which to gain access to the library. But he didn’t—he deliberately left a trail back to this room which, if the surmise I’ve just mentioned were correct, would be about the last thing he’d do. So I say, neither of the first two theories is tenable.”

“Over my head,” said Vaughn disgustedly. “Too fancy for me.

“Shut up like a good fellow,” snapped Isham. “This isn’t slap-me-down police methods, Vaughn. I’ll admit it’s an unorthodox way to go about solving a crime, but it sounds like the real stuff. Go on, Mr. Queen. We’re all ears.”

“Inspector, consider yourself publicly reprimanded,” said Ellery severely. “Third possibility: That there is something now in the library which was also there the night of the murder, which—a plethora of whiches—is not dangerous to the criminal, which he didn’t plan to take away later, which he wanted the police to discover, but which he did not want discovered by the police until Mr. Megara’s return.”

“Phew,” said Vaughn, throwing up his hands. “Let me out of here.”

“Don’t mind him, Mr. Queen,” said Isham.

Megara squinted steadily at Ellery. “Go ahead, Mr. Queen.”

“Since we are obliging souls,” continued Ellery, “obviously we must look for and find what Krosac planned us to find only when you, Mr. Megara, were on the scene. … You know,” he added contemplatively, “I’ve always found—and I think you’ll bear me out, inspector—that the more involved a murderer becomes the more errors he’s apt to make. Suppose we get friend Stallings in here for a moment.”

The detective at the door yelled “Stallings!” and the butler appeared in dignified haste.

“Stallings,” said Ellery abruptly, “you know this room pretty well, don’t you?”

Stallings coughed. “If I do say so, sir, as well as Mr. Brad himself knew it.”

“I’m ravished to hear it. Take a look about.” Stallings dutifully took a look about. “Is everything in order? Has anything been added? Is there anything here which shouldn’t be here?”

Stallings smiled briefly and began a stately stalk about the library. He poked in corners, opened drawers, investigated the interior of the secretary. … It took him ten minutes, but when he concluded his tour of inspection and said: “This room is exactly as I saw it last, sir—I mean before Mr. Brad was killed … except, sir, that the table is gone,” they all felt that there was nothing more to ask.

But Ellery was persistent. “Nothing else has been disturbed or taken away?”

The butler shook his head emphatically. “No, sir. The only thing that’s really different is that stain, sir,” he said, pointing to the rug. “It wasn’t there Tuesday evening when I left the house. And the checker table …”

“What about the checker table?” asked Ellery sharply.

Stallings shrugged with decorum. “The pieces. Of course, their position is different. Mr. Brad naturally played on after I left.”

“Oh,” said Ellery with relief. “That’s excellent, Stallings. You have within you the delicate makings of a Sherlock, the camera eye. … That’s all.”

Stallings cast a reproachful look at Stephen Megara, who was staring moodily at the wall and puffing at a West Indian cheroot, and left the room.

“Now,” said Ellery briskly, “let’s scatter.”

“But what the hell do we look for?” grumbled Vaughn.

“Heavens, Inspector, if I knew a search wouldn’t be necessary!”

The scene that ensued would have been ludicrous to any observer except Stephen Megara; that man, it seemed, was minus the faculty of laughter. The spectacle of four grown men crawling about a room on hands and knees, doing their best to climb up the walls and tap plaster and wood, going through the stuffing of the divan’s pillows, wrenching experimentally at the legs and arms of chairs, divan, secretary, checker-table … an Alice-in-Wonderland situation. After fifteen minutes of fruitless search Ellery, rumpled, hot, and much annoyed rose and sat down by Megara’s side, to sink instantly into a reverie. The daydream was, from the expression on his face, more in the nature of a nightmare. The Professor, nothing daunted, toiled on; he was enjoying himself hugely as he crawled, his ungainly length doubled up, over the rug. Once he straightened and looked up at the old-fashioned chandelier.

“Now that would be an unusual hiding place,” he muttered, and forthwith proceeded to stand on a chair and tinker with the crystal ornaments of the chandelier. There was a defective or exposed wire somewhere, for he suddenly yelped and crashed to the floor. Vaughn grunted and held another piece of paper up to the light; the Inspector working on the theory, apparently, that a message had been written in invisible ink. Isham was shaking out the draperies; he had already unwound the window shades and searched for hollow interiors in the lamps. It was all pleasant and unreal and useless.

All of them, at one time or another, had cast speculative glances at the books bristling in their built-in cases, but no one had made a move toward examining them. The enormity of the task of going through those myriad volumes one by one seemed to discourage even a beginning.

Ellery leaned back suddenly and drawled: “What a pack of prime fools we are! Chasing our tails like pups … Krosac wanted us to come back and search this room for something. Then he wanted us to find it. He wouldn’t put it in a place which would take the combined ingenuity of a Houdini and a bloodhound to discover. On the other hand, he would secrete it in a place not so obvious as to be found in a superficial search, yet not in so obscure a place as never to be found, even in a thorough search. As for you, Professor, please remember when you attempt to explore chandeliers again that Krosac probably isn’t so well acquainted with this room that he knew where there would be hollows in furniture legs, or in lamps. … No, it’s in a clever, but accessible, hiding place.”

“Swell talk,” said Vaughn sarcastically, “but where?” He was tired and dripping. “Know of any hiding places here, Mr. Megara?”

Professor Yardley’s chin-brush jutted out like the false beard of an Egyptian Pharaoh as Megara shook his head.

Ellery said: “Reminds me of a remarkably similar search my father, Assistant D.A. Cronin, and I made not long ago when we were investigating the murder of that crooked lawyer, Monte Field who was poisoned—you recall?—in the Roman Theater during a performance of
Gunplay.
*
We found it in—”

The Professor’s eyes glistened, and he hurried across the room to the alcove in which the grand piano was ensconced. Isham had gone through the alcove some minutes before. But Yardley did not bother with the body of the instrument, or the piano chair, or the music cabinet. He merely sat down in the chair and, with all the gravity Ellery remembered from the Professor’s lectures at the university, began at the first bass note on the keyboard and wended his digital way up toward the treble, one note at a time, depressing each key slowly.