Face to Face (17 page)

43

Inspector Queen had remarkably little trouble with Harry Burke.

“This wedding is turning out a bugger,” the Scot growled to the old man with a shake of his sandy head. “The important thing now is to marry Bertie and get the hell out of your bleeding country, Inspector. By tomorrow morning this will all be a bad dream, I keep telling myself. And Bert and I can wake up.”

“That's the boy,” the Inspector said warmly, and turned to Roberta, who kicked the rug and said, “Well, if it's all right with Harry.”

“That's the girl!”

The old man left for the delicatessen and the outside telephone still without having mentioned Armando. With the Inspector first things came first, and the hindmost could be taken care of by the usual agency.

He had almost as much trouble working his will with Lorette as being waited on by Mr. Rubin, who was puffing about the little delicatessen trying to satiate the demands of the non-Lent-observing Gentiles of his clientele, to whom Isaac Rubin's was an oasis in the Sunday desert. But finally the Inspector succeeded in placing his order, and shut himself up in the telephone booth with some dimes, and girded his lean loins for the fray.

William Maloney Wasser was no problem; the Inspector's argument was Wasser's watchdog responsibility to the famous estate in his care, as if that had anything to do with anything; the lawyer hemmed a little and hawed a little and finally said he supposed he would have to come, even though Roberta West and Harry Burke had nothing to do with anything and he would have to give up
Bonanza
and
Open End
, and what was going on, anyway? With Selma Pilter the Inspector had even less trouble. Her medieval beak sniffed something, too. “Whither Lorette goeth I go, Inspector Queen. I warn you to handle her with kid gloves, she's the hottest property in town. I won't have her so much as bruised. Who did you say are getting married?” The old man neglected to mention that he had not yet invited Lorette, or that Carlos Armando would be there hooked or crooked.

Lorette was difficult. “I
don't
understand, Inspector. Why in the world should Roberta want me at her wedding?”

“Her best friend?” the Inspector said, registering surprise. “Why not, Miss Spanier?”

“Because she's
not
my best friend, or I hers. That's all over with. Besides, if Roberta wants me, why doesn't she invite me herself?”

“Last-minute preparations. They made their plans all of a sudden—”

“Well, thank you very much, Inspector Queen, but no thank you.”

At this point the Inspector heard a mellifluous
“Cara”
from the background, and Armando's greased murmur.

“Just a moment, please,” Lorette said.

An off-telephone discussion followed. The old man grinned in the booth, waiting. Armando was advising acceptance, as of a lark. So he was still riding high, secure in his immunity. So much the better. Ellery should be pleased. And the Inspector wondered for the umpteenth time what Ellery had in mind. And tried not to think of the dirty trick he was playing on the newly-weds-to-be.

“Inspector Queen,” Lorette said.

“Yes?”

“Very well, we'll come.”

“We?” the old man repeated with cunning bleakness. Two birds with one stone. He had not envisioned Armando as an ally.

“Carlos and I. I won't come without Carlos.”

“Well, now, I don't know, Miss Spanier. In view of how Roberta feels about him, not to mention Harry Burke—”

“I'm sorry. If they really want me, they'll have to take Mr. Armando, too.”

“All right,” the Inspector said, with a not altogether contrived sigh. “I just hope he, uh, respects the solemnity of the occasion. I wouldn't have Roberta's and Harry's wedding spoiled for anything.” And hung up, feeling like Judas, a feeling he chased to cover the moment it showed its accusing head.

It's going to be one hell of a wedding, the old man guiltily thought as he left the booth, and for the umpteenth-and-first time wondered what it was all about.

44

One hell of a wedding it turned out.

Judge McCue arrived at seven, a tall old party with a white thatch, a bricklayer's complexion, a nose like a prizefighter's, and blue judge-eyes. He towered over Inspector Queen like Mt. Fujiyama. The jurist was glancing at his watch even as the Inspector let him in, and he glanced at it again during the introduction of the unhappy couple, both of whom were beginning to exhibit the classic symptoms of premarital jitters.

“I don't like to hurry matters,” Judge McCue said in his Chaliapin voice, “but the fact is I had to tell Mrs. McCue a white lie about where I was going, and she's expecting me back home practically at once. My wife doesn't hold with Lenten weddings.”

“I'm beginning to agree with her,” Harry Burke said with ungroomlike asperity. “It seems we have to wait, Judge McCue. Inspector Queen's invited some guests to our wedding.” The Scot's stress on the pronoun was positively prosecutional.

“It'll be over soon, darling,” Roberta said nervously. “Judge, I wonder … could you possibly perform the ceremony with the Episcopal service instead of just a civil service? I mean, I'd really feel more married if …”

“I don't see why not, Miss West.” Judge McCue said. “Except that I don't carry a Book of Common Prayer around with me.”

“Ellery's got one in his reference library.” Burke said with an anything-to-get-this-over-with air.

“I'll get it.” Ellery said unexpectedly. He sounded almost grateful. He emerged from his study with a battered little red-covered book, carrying it as if it put a strain on his arm muscles. “Page 300, I think.”

“Don't you feel well, Ellery?” asked Judge McCue.

“I'm fine,” Ellery said bravely, and handed the book to the Judge and went over to the windows, between which the enormous basket-spray of shaggy ‘mums Burke had ordered had been set up by Roberta for appropriate background, and gloomed down at the street. He kept pulling at his lower lip and pinching his nose, and he looked about as festive as Walter Cronkite announcing an abort at Cape Kennedy.

Burke sniffed the cinnamony air in Ellery's direction, and muttered something.

“Here comes Wasser,” Ellery said suddenly. “And Mrs. Pilter.”

“Anyone else coming?” Judge McCue referred to his wrist-watch again.

“And there's another cab with Lorette,” Ellery announced, still looking out, and paused. “And Carlos Armando,” he said.

“What?” Harry Burke shouted in 100-proof stupefaction.

“Now look, Harry boy,” the Inspector said hurriedly. “Lorette Spanier wouldn't come without him. I couldn't help myself. If you wanted Lorette—”

“I didn't want Lorette! I didn't want any of them!” the Scot howled. “Whose wedding is this? What's coming off here? By God, for a plugged pig's bladder I'd call the bloody thing off!”

“Harry,” moaned Roberta.

“I don't care a tweak, Bertie! These people have taken over the most sacred thing in our lives and they're turning it into a bloody peep show! I won't be used! I won't have you being used!”

“What is this all about?” Judge McCue asked feebly. Nobody answered him.

The door buzzed.

Roberta, half hysterical, raced to the Inspector's bathroom.

The next few minutes were avant-garde and Nouvelle Vague, with a dash of Fellini. The unwilling guests inched in together, to be met by Harry Burke's glare, Ellery's simper, the Inspector's frantic heartiness, and Judge McCue's bewilderment. The only one who seemed to enjoy the experience was Carlos Armando, whose dark face and black eyes glistened with malice. Everyone milled about in the smallish living room, passing and repassing like a deck of cards being shuffled by a clumsy dealer, to the accompaniment of confused introductions, mumbled politenesses, unresponsive grunts, hostile handshakes, enthusiastic references to the dismal spring, sudden silences, overhearty congratulations to Lorette, and—like a Wagnerian leitmotiv—queries about the whereabouts of the missing bride, chiefly by Armando, in an innocent tone of voice.

She was in the bathroom “fixing herself up” for the happy event, Inspector Queen found himself saying for the dozenth time.

Ultimately Roberta made her appearance, pale but head high, like the heroine in a Victorian play. The hush that fell over the living room did not improve the climate. Armando's charm poisoned the air; Ellery had to grab hold of Harry Burke's arm at one point to prevent that oak-muscled member from an extremity. In the end it was—surprisingly—Lorette who saved the day. She put her arms about Roberta, kissed her, and took her off to the kitchen to disinter the wedding bouquet from the refrigerator; and when they emerged Roberta announced that Lorette was to be her maid of honor; and the Inspector hastily swiped some ‘mums from the basket and improvised a maid of honor's corsage, using a length of white satin ribbon out of the supply he hoarded from past Christmases.

Finally everything was settled. The Judge took up a position between the windows, his back to the floral spray, with Burke facing him on the right hand and Roberta on the left, as prescribed in the liturgy, Lorette standing behind Roberta, Ellery behind Burke, and the others behind them. Judge McCue opened the Book of Common Prayer to page 300, and clamped tortoise shells on his mashed nose, and began in his
basso profundo
to read the Solemnization of Matrimony as ratified by the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America in convention assembled on the sixteenth day of October in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty nine:

“Dearly beloved
,” the Judge said, and cleared his throat.

Inspector Queen, from his premeditated vantage point to one side, kept watching Ellery. That child of his youth was a stricken man. The Inspector had never seen him so iron-stiff, so bloodless with indecision. Obviously, a worm was nibbling away at the fruit of the Inspector's loins; and, while the Judge read on, the old man kept probing for it, trying to catch and classify. But fruitlessly.

“…we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony …”

The room was filled with the odor of the unknown given off by all wedding ceremonies, an odor that is almost a threat. Roberta was unconsciously clutching to her white lace wedding frock the pink velvet muff Burke had ordered, bruising the gardenias with which it was covered; the stocky groom himself seemed inches taller, as if he had suddenly been assigned to sentry duty at Buckingham Palace—the Inspector could almost see Burke wearing a shako and shouldering a musket. Lorette Spanier looked far away and lost. Selma Pilter was secretive with the hidden envy of an old woman to whom weddings were celebrations of regret; and the Inspector was fascinated to behold William Maloney Wasser's belly doing a portly jiggle in rhythm with Judge McCue's cadences, as at some overseen fertility rite. Only Armando was his mocking, hateful self, his enjoyment of the scene evidently deepened by his own multiple experience of such obscenities.

“…
which is an honourable estate, instituted of God
…” The Judge boomed on of the mystical union and the holy estate and the first miracle wrought in Cana of Galilee, and Inspector Queen returned to his only begotten son, stiff as mortality.

And the old man began to wonder with great uneasiness if he had not committed a wrong in taking matters into his own hands. Something wrong, something very wrong, was in the air.

“…
and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.”

Why? Why?

“Into this holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined.”

What's he wrestling with? the old man thought. Whatever the opponent, the struggle was fierce. A muscle in Ellery's jaw was doing a throttled dance of its own; the hands clasped before him were gray in the knuckles; he stood as rigidly at attention as the nervous groom before him. But Burke has cause, the Inspector thought. What's with my son?

“If any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together
,” the bass voice continued,
“let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.”

Something has to give, the old man's thoughts ran. This can't go on; he'll burst … Ellery opened his mouth. And clamped it shut again.

“I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess
—”

Ellery said, “I have a point.”

The words sounded involuntary, as if a thought had found its own vehicle of expression, independent of its thinker. And, indeed, Ellery looked as shocked by what he had said as Judge McCue, Roberta West, and Harry Burke. The Judge's severe blue eyes accused him over Burke's head; the nuptial pair half turned in Ellery's direction in protest; and all the other eyes went to him, even Carlos Armando's, as if he had given vent to a natural indiscretion during silent prayer in church.

“I have a point,” Ellery said again. “I have a point, and I can't keep it to myself any longer. Judge, you will simply have to stop this wedding.”

“You're daft,” Burke said. “Daft.”

“No, Harry,” Ellery said. “Sane. Only too sane.”

45

“I owe you an apology, Roberta.” Ellery went on. “This may not seem the time or place, but in another sense it's the only time and place. In either event, I have no choice.” He said again, as if to reassure himself, “I have no choice.”

He had stepped out of the tableau, while its actors remained frozen where they stood. But now he said, “You had better all sit down, this will take time,” as if the concept of time obsessed him; and he moved about, pushing a chair here, settling Roberta with special care, another there, for Mrs. Pilter, and still another for Lorette Spanier. None of the men complied. Already the atmosphere was thickening up to something curiously like a lynching mood. Only, who were the posse and who was the victim?

Ellery braced himself.

“A moment ago I mentioned time and place,” Ellery said. “The place may be fortuitous, but what of time? We're face to face with it. Time is of the essence in this case.

“Case … Because, of course, the case is what this is all about. The murder case. The murder of Glory Guild.

“I have to take you back to Glory's will, her copy of it,” Ellery said, “and what she wrote in disappearing ink between those typewritten lines. What she wrote was an earwitness report of the events of that evening when she overheard her own murder being planned—by you, Armando, when you thought your wife was safely in Connecticut at her cottage, and you got Roberta West up to your wife's apartment and tried to talk this girl into killing her for you.”

“You will not take me in by cheap trickery,” Armando said, showing his brilliant teeth. “This has all been ably stage-managed, Mr. Queen, but I do not blurt out indiscretions under a surprise. A report in GeeGee's copy of her will? In disappearing ink? You are romancing, no doubt for my benefit. You will have to do better than that.”

“The question,” Ellery said, turning his back on the swarthy man, “the question is the
time
the incident of the plotting took place. It's the nicest sort of question—”

But he was interrupted. “I can't imagine your doing anything more to me than you're doing at this moment,” Harry Burke snarled. “Something's gone wrong with you, Queen. Your brain's begun rattling about in your bean. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“The time,” Ellery repeated. He took the blue-backed document from his pocket. “This is Glory's copy of her will, with her message on it. You, Harry, and Roberta and Mr. Wasser were present when my father read it aloud in Mr. Wasser's office, so you're acquainted with its contents. The Judge, Lorette, Mrs. Pilter, and Armando—especially Armando—are not. So bear with me while I read it to them.”

“You probably wrote it yourself,” Armando said, smiling; but there was wariness in his smile. “But read it, by all means.”

Ellery ignored him. “ ‘I am writing this for reasons that will become clear soon enough,' ” he read. “ ‘I had wanted for some time to get away from things, and I had planned to go up to Newtown, to the cottage …' ” He read on in a neutral, almost schoolmaster's voice, as if it were a lesson to be taught: how Armando's wife had driven up to Newtown and found that her secretary had forgotten her instructions to notify the Connecticut Light & Power Company to turn the electricity on, how the house had been “very damp and cold,” and how, rather than risk a cold, she had returned to the city. How she had let herself into the apartment and overheard her husband's conversation with a girl unknown to her; her description of Roberta; Armando's reference to herself as “a cow to be milked”; his proposal to Roberta that she kill his wife while he established an alibi, after which he would inherit “all my money” and marry Roberta. And how, unable to “take any more,” Glory Guild had fled from the apartment, walked the streets most of the night, and then driven back to the Connecticut cottage where she had stayed for “two whole days,” thinking over her plight; and so on, to the dismal end.

The silence was puzzled, except for Armando's.

“I deny it all, of course,” Armando said. “This is a forgery—”

“You be quiet.” Ellery tucked the will away in his pocket. “I return to the question. And I ask you: Did you hear a single word in the account I just read you that specifies the
time
when this unlovely scene took place?” And he shook his head. “The fact remains, Glory's message does not date Armando's session with Roberta.”

“But Roberta told us the time!” Harry Burke growled. “The night this scum proposed the murder to her—when she ran out of the Guild apartment frightened and disgusted—was a night in May, Roberta said. So what's all this nonsense about time?”

Harry, Harry, Ellery thought.

“Humor me, Harry,” Ellery said, “and let's pursue this nonsense. Glory was murdered on the night of December thirtieth last year. You, I, my father went through her diaries and memoirs, with particular attention to last year, and we found every page—in last year's diary, up to the day of her death, every page but one—jammed with day-to-day jottings. Yet not one of those entries—which means throughout May as well as in any other month last year—not one mentioned what took place in the Guild apartment the night Armando made his charming proposal to Roberta. Not one, or certainly one or all of us—trying to solve the murder—would have pounced on it and shouted it to the rooftops of Centre Street. Nowhere in last year's diary did Glory note down a word about having overheard her husband's plot. That is, directly.”

“What do you mean?” Inspector Queen said, frowning. “She didn't mention it at all. You just said so.”

“I said ‘directly.' But didn't she mention it—as it were—somewhere in the diary indirectly?”

After a moment his father said quickly, “The blank page.”

“The blank page. Which was dated what?”

“December first.”

Ellery nodded.

“So, in view of its absence everywhere else in the diary, it must have been on the night of December first that Glory overheard Armando plotting her death. And there's a confirmation of this—that blank December first page contained the letters
f-a-c-e
in disappearing ink, which was Glory's read-between-the-lines clue to her copy of the will. Which, duly read, in turn revealed her firsthand account of the events of that night. December first was the date of that session, beyond a doubt.

“December first,” Ellery said, addressing himself for the first time in the supercharged silence to Roberta, “not a night in May, Roberta. What's more, there can be no question of its having been a slip of the tongue. You misdated the talk as taking place in May not once but at least twice that I can remember. The first time was on the morning of New Year's Day, when Harry and I had just got off the plane from England—less than thirty-six hours after the murder—and I found my father's note to call you, and I did, and you insisted on coming right over, and you told us about your affair with Armando terminating in his proposal that you kill his wife. He made that proposal to you, you told us, on a night ‘a little more than seven months ago.' Since you were telling us this story on January first, ‘a little more than seven months ago' placed the conversation some time back in late May.

“One misdating might have been an innocent error, although an error of over half a year takes great faith in innocence to swallow. But you misdated it a second time, the other day, when I finally interpreted Glory's clue
f-a-c-e
, brought out the hidden message in her will, and my father read her accusation aloud in your presence. You immediately placed the time of the scene in the Guild apartment as ‘that night in May,' as Harry just reminded us. That was quick of you, Roberta. Before any of us, you spotted Glory's failure to date the scene in her account, and you made on-the-spot use of it to strengthen your original story to us.

“For in that original story, on New Year's morning, you told Harry and me that you had not laid eyes on Carlos Armando between ‘that night in May' and the night of December thirtieth, when you said Armando showed up suddenly at your apartment and established his alibi for the murder of his wife, which was taking place presumably while he was with you.

“We know now that you did see the lover you professed to have come to loathe in May—saw him as recently as the night of December first, in his wife's apartment, the night that his proposal to you to murder her really took place, not six months earlier. Far from having dropped him in May, it's a reasonable assumption that you kept seeing him all through the summer and fall—until, in fact, that night of December first.

“And if you lied to us about that, Roberta, then your whole story becomes suspect. And if your whole story becomes suspect, we can no longer take your word for anything you told us. For example, for the alibi you gave Armando for the night of his wife's murder. And if the alibi you gave Armando for his wife's murder is suspect, then it follows that
you yourself have no alibi
for the night of the murder. Because an alibi works two ways, one of them neatly hidden. It accounts for the person being alibied, and
ipso facto
accounts for the person providing the alibi. That was the really clever part of the plan. It cleared you at the same time that it cleared Armando. It enabled you to come to me soon after the murder and, by alibiing your lover, clear yourself of any suspicion that might arise in the investigation.

“Innocent people don't concoct intricate ways to clear themselves of suspicion.

“All this logical figuration, Roberta,” Ellery said to the sorrel-haired girl, “leads to only one conclusion: You could have been the woman Carlos Armando used as his tool. You could have been his accomplice. You could have been the woman we've been hunting—the woman who shot Glory Guild to death.”

She was standing pale as a cast; the gardenia-covered symbol of her wedding was pressed hard against her lacy frock, rupturing the flowers. The Scot at her side looked like a companion piece; Burke seemed to be retreating deeper within himself, as if the plaster were hardening; only his transparent eyes showed a tormented kind of life. As for Armando, he wet his pretty lips in the burned and pitted skin and half parted them, as if about to admonish Roberta West against speaking; but then they clamped shut, evidently preferring silence to the risk of admission implicit in a warning.

Ellery half turned from Roberta and Harry Burke, and it was clear that they had become intolerable to him. But then he turned back. “You could have been,” he said to Roberta. “The question is: Were you?

“You were.

“I say this baldly because there are three confirmations of your guilt arising from the facts.

“One: In the account Glory left us between the lines of her will, she described you unmistakably, Roberta, down to the butterfly birthmark on your cheek, as the woman with whom her husband was plotting her death. Since we can no longer accept your word that you rejected Armando's proposal, the fact remains that you were the woman Glory accused. ‘This girl is Carlos's accomplice,' she concluded her account. ‘She is the one who, if I am murdered, will have done the murder for him.' I submit that Glory would hardly have left such an unequivocal accusation, Roberta, had she not had sufficient reason to believe, from what she overheard that night of December first, that you had given clear evidence of falling in with Armando's plan. Had you remained ‘stunned' and ‘horrified,' as you told us, ‘unable to get a word out,' Glory could not have accused you so without qualification. It follows that you must have said something that night, given some positive indication to Armando, that convinced Glory of your acquiescence in the murder plot.

“And incidentally, let's get one thing straight about the cryptic clue that culminated in the secret account on the will. When Glory sat at her desk on the night of December thirtieth, mortally shot, and managed to pick up a pen and write
f-a-c-e
on a piece of paper before she fell forward on it, it was not an inspiration that came to her from on high a mere few seconds away from death. Now we know that she had prepared that very clue almost a full month earlier, when she wrote the same four letters of the alphabet in disappearing ink on the blank December first page of her diary.

“Also incidentally, Glory's passion for puzzles was not the reason for her use of the
f-a-c-e
clue and the disappearing ink. They were only the
modus operandi
of her motivation. Had she left open instructions and an open account of what she had overheard on December first, she was afraid either Armando or Jeanne Temple, her secretary, who had access to her effects, would find and destroy them—Armando for obvious reasons, Jeanne Temple because she was having an affair with Armando and was presumably under his thumb.

“Which brings us to confirmation number two.” Ellery unexpectedly turned to Carlos Armando, who took an involuntary half step backward. “When you planned the murder of your wife, Armando, you believed your premarital agreement with her—that five years' probation business—was no longer in existence; as you said heatedly at the will reading, Glory tore it up before your eyes at the expiration of the five years. Only it turned out that she hadn't done anything of the sort; she had torn up a dummy. So, when Mr. Wasser read the will to the heirs after your wife's funeral, you learned for the first time that she had duped you; that the premarital agreement was still in effect; that all the trouble you had gone to, up to and including masterminding a murder, had netted you a mere $5,000.

“To most murderers this would have been checkmate. A lesser mortal would have given up, collected his $5,000 and turned to other games. But you were made of more heroic stuff. You didn't give up—not you. You thought you saw a way to recoup your defeat in spite of Glory's defensive play. It's common knowledge that a murderer can't legally profit from his crime. If Lorette Spanier, who inherited the bulk of Glory's estate, could somehow be tagged for her aunt's murder,
the estate would have to revert to you
in spite of that premarital agreement. The reason is, of course, that with Lorette legally out of the picture you would be
the only one
left to inherit. Glory Guild had no other living heirs.