Queens Full (8 page)

“No dessert for me,” Joan said dreamily.

“Likewise,” Roger said likewise.

“You don't eat this dessert,” the chief explained, “you listen to it. Anyway,
I'm
listening.”

“Well, it goes like this,” Ellery began. “I kept urging Benedict, as he was dying, to tell me who stabbed him. When he was able to get some words out, seconds before he died, Conk Farnham and I were sure we heard him say, The heroine,' an unmistakable accusation of you, Joan. You were heroine of the play, and Benedict didn't know—or, as it turned out, didn't remember—your name.

“But then the tooth-mark test proved Joan's innocence. Dying men may accuse innocent persons falsely in mystery stories, but in life they show a deplorably simple respect for the truth. So Benedict couldn't have meant the heroine of the play. He must have meant a word that sounded like heroine but meant something else. There's only one word that sounds like heroine-with-an-e, and that's heroin-without-an-e.

“The fact was,” Ellery continued, “at the very last, Benedict wasn't answering my who-did-it question at all. His dying mind had rambled off to another element of the crime. Heroin. The narcotic.”

He emptied his coffee cup, and Chief Newby hastily refilled it.

“But no dope was found,” Joan protested. “Where could dope have come into it?”

“Just what I asked myself. To answer it called for reconstructing the situation.

“When the act ended, Benedict entered the star dressing room for the first time. He had forgotten to bring along his make-up kit and Arch Dullman had told him to use the make-up in the dressing room. In view of Benedict's dying statement, it was now clear that he must have opened one of the boxes, perhaps labeled make-up powder, and instead of finding powder in it he found heroin.”

“Benedict's finding of the dope just pointed to the killer,” Newby objected. “You claimed to be dead certain.”

“I was. I had another line to him that tied him to the killing hand and foot,” Ellery said. “Thusly:

“The killer obviously didn't get to the dressing room until Benedict was already there—if he'd been able to beat Benedict to the room no murder would have been necessary. He'd simply have taken the heroin and walked out.

“So now I had him standing outside the dressing room, with Benedict inside exploring the unfamiliar make-up materials, one box of which contained the heroin.

“Let's take a good look at this killer. He's in a panic. He has to shut Benedict's mouth about the dope before, as it were, Benedict can open it. And there's the tool chest a step or two from the door, the tape-handled knife lying temptingly in the tray.

“Killer therefore grabs knife.

“Now he has the knife clutched in one hot little hand. All he has to do is open the dressing-room door with the other—”

“Which he can't do!” Newby exclaimed.

“Exactly. The haft of the knife showed his teeth marks—he had held the knife in his mouth. A man with two normal hands who must grip a knife in one and open a door with the other has no need to put the knife in his mouth. Plainly, then, he didn't have the use of both hands. One must have been incapacitated.

“And that could mean only Mark Manson, one of whose hands was in a cast that extended to the elbow.”

Joan made a face. “Really, Roger, was it necessary to break his wrist all over again last night?”

“I didn't like where he'd aimed that kick.” Roger grinned at her and she yanked her hand away, blushing. He promptly recaptured it.

“Don't mind these two,” Newby said. “You sure make it sound easy, Queen!”

“I shouldn't have explained,” Ellery sighed. “Well, the rest followed easily, at any rate. The night before, the hospital said they would keep Manson under observation for twenty-four hours. So he must have been discharged too late on opening night to get to the theater before the play started. He must have arrived during intermission.

“With the audience in the alleys and the fire-exit doors open, all Manson had to do was drape his jacket over his injured arm to conceal the cast, mingle with the crowd in the alley, stroll into the theater, and make his way to the backstage door on the side where the star dressing room is. He simply wasn't noticed then or afterward, when he slipped out and parked in the Hollis bar—where Dullman and the
Record
reporter found him.”

“But Mark Manson and
dope
,” Joan said.

Ellery shrugged. “Manson's an old man, Joan, with no theatrical future except an actors' home and his scrapbooks. But he's still traveling in stock, hitting small towns and big-city suburbs. It's made the perfect cover for a narcotics distributor. No glory, but loot galore.”

“He did a keen Wrightsville business before he took that tumble. We've already picked up the two local pushers he supplied.” Chief Newby folded his napkin grimly. “Middlemen in the dope racket are usually too scared to talk, but I guess the pain of that wrist you broke for him all over again, Fowler, was kind of frazzling. Or maybe he figures it'll help when he comes up on the murder rap. Anyway, Manson got real chatty last night. The Feds are pulling in the big fish now.”

Ellery pushed his chair back. “And that, dear hearts, as the late Mr. Benedict might have said, is my cue to go on. On to that vacation waiting for me in the Mahoganies.”

“And for yours truly it's back to work,” Newby said, following suit.

“Wait! Please?” Joan was tugging at Roger's sleeve. “Rodge … haven't you always said—?”

“Yes?” Roger said alertly.

“I mean, who wants to be an actress?”

That was how it came about that young Roger Fowler was seen streaking across the Square that afternoon with young Joan Truslow in breathless tow, taking the short cut to the town clerk's office, while far behind puffed the chief of police and the visiting Mr. Queen, their two witnesses required by law.

E = MURDER

The title of Ellery's lecture being The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, it was inevitable that one of the talks on his tour should be crowned by the greatest misadventure of all. It came to pass just after his stint at Bethesda University, in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where misadventures of all sorts are commonplace.

Ellery had scribbled the last autograph across the last coed's Humanities I notebook when the nearly empty auditorium resounded with a shout, almost a scream.

“Mr. Queen, wait! Don't go yet!”

The chancellors of great universities do not ordinarily charge down center aisles with blooded cheeks, uttering whoops; and Ellery felt the prickle of one of his infamous premonitions.

“Something wrong, Dr. Dunwoody?”

“Yes! I mean probably! I mean I don't know!” the head of Bethesda U. panted. “The President … Pentagon … General Carter … Dr. Agon doesn't—Oh, hell, Mr. Queen, come with me!”

Hurrying across the campus in the mild Maryland evening by Dr. Dunwoody's heaving side, Ellery managed to untangle the chancellorial verbiage. General Amos Carter, an old friend of Ellery's, had enlisted the services of Dr. Herbert Agon of Bethesda University, one of the world's leading physicists, in a top-secret experimental project for the Pentagon. The President of the United States himself received nightly reports from Dr. Agon by direct wire between the White House and the physicist's working quarters at the top of The Tower, Bethesda U.'s science citadel.

Tonight, at the routine hour, Dr. Agon had failed to telephone the President. The President had then called Agon, and Agon's phone had rung unanswered. A call to the Agon residence had elicited the information from the physicist's wife that, as far as she knew, her husband was working as usual in his laboratory in The Tower.

“That's when the President phoned General Carter,” Dr. Dunwoody wailed. “It happens that the General was closeted with me in my office—a, well, a personal matter—and that's where the President reached him. When General Carter heard that you were on campus, Mr. Queen, he asked me to fetch you. He's gone on ahead to The Tower.”

Ellery accelerated. If Dr. Agon's experiments involved the President of the United States and General Amos Carter, any threat to the safety of the physicist would, like the shot fired by the rude bridge that arched the flood, echo round the world.

He found the entrance to the ten-story aluminum-and-glass Tower defended by a phalanx of campus police. But the lobby was occupied by three people: General Amos Carter; a harassed-looking stalwart in uniform, the special guard on Tower night duty; and a young woman of exceptional architecture whose pretty face was waxen and lifeless.

“But my husband,” the young woman was saying, like a machine—a machine with a Continental accent. “You have no right, General. I must see my husband.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Agon,” General Carter said. “Oh, Ellery—”

“What's happened to Dr. Agon, General?”

“I found him dead. Murdered.”

“
Murdered?
” The crimson in Chancellor Dunwoody's cheeks turned to ashes. “Pola. Pola, how dreadful.”

General Carter stood like a wall. “It's dreadful in more ways than one, Doctor. All Agon's notes on his experiments have been stolen. Ellery, for the next few minutes I can use your advice.”

“Of course, General. First, though, if I may … Mrs. Agon, I understand from Dr. Dunwoody that you're a scientist in your own right, a laboratory technician in Bethesda's physics department. Were you assisting your husband in his experiments?”

“I know nothing of them,” Pola Agon's mechanical voice said. “I was a refugee, and although I am now a naturalized citizen and have security clearance, it is not for such high-priority work as Herbert was doing.”

Dr. Dunwoody patted the young widow's hand and she promptly burst into unscientific tears. The chancellor's arm sneaked about her. Ellery's brows went aloft. Then, abruptly, he turned to General Carter and the guard.

The top floor of The Tower, he learned, consisted of two rooms: the laboratory and the private office that housed Dr. Agon's secret project for the Pentagon. It was accessible by only one route, a self-service, nonstop elevator from the lobby.

“I suppose no one may use this elevator without identification and permission, Guard?”

“That's right, sir. My orders are to sign all visitors bound for the top floor in and out of this visitors' book. There's another book, just like it, in Dr. Agon's office, as a further check.” The guard's voice lowered. “There was only one visitor tonight, sir. Take a look.”

Ellery took the ledger. He counted twenty-three entries for the week. The last name—the only one dated and timed as of that evening—was James G. Dunwoody.

“You saw Dr. Agon tonight, Doctor?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen.” The chancellor was perspiring. “It had nothing to do with his work, I assure you. I was with him only a few minutes. I left him alive—”

The General snapped, “Guard?” and the guard at once stepped over to block the lobby exit, feeling for his holster. “You go on up to Agon's office, Ellery, and see what it tells you—it's all right, I've locked the laboratory door.” The General turned his grim glance on the head of Bethesda University and the murdered man's widow. “I'll be up in a minute.”

General Carter stepped out of the elevator and said, “Well, Ellery?”

Ellery straightened up from the physicist's office desk. He had found Agon's body seated at the desk and slumped forward, a steel letter-knife sticking out of his back. The office was a shambles.

“Look at this, General.”

“Where'd you find
that?
”

“In Agon's right fist, crumpled into a ball.”

Ellery had smoothed it out. It was a small square memorandum slip, in the center of which something had been written in pencil. It looked like a script letter of the alphabet:

“E,” General Carter said. “What the devil's that supposed to mean?”

Ellery's glance lifted. “Then it isn't a symbol connected with the project, General—code letter, anything like that?”

“No. You mean to tell me Agon wrote this before he died?”

“Apparently the stab wasn't immediately fatal, although Agon's killer might have thought it was. Agon must have revived, or played dead, until his killer left, and then, calling on his remaining strength, penciled this symbol. If it has no special meaning for you, General, then we're confronted with a dying message in the classic tradition—Agon's left a clue to his murderer's identity.”

The General grunted at such outlandish notions. “Why couldn't he have just written the name?”

“The classic objection. The classic reply to which is that he was afraid his killer might come back, notice it, and destroy it,” Ellery said unhappily, “which I'll admit has never really satisfied me.” He was scowling at the symbol in great puzzlement.