The Finishing Stroke (22 page)

The singularity of the birthmark on the living John's scalp, when in identical triplets it might have been expected that the triplet's scalp would exhibit the same mark, and a closer examination of the mark itself when the dressings were removed, inspired Dr. Samson Dark to suggest that it was no true
naevus
, but probably a forceps mark inflicted by the delivering physician during the patient's birth.

The next chapter was written by Faustino Quancchi, the many-blessed barber of Greenwich Village, whom Lieutenant Luria sought out in a burst of inspiration. Mr. Quancchi had been John I's barber since the Sebastian heir had taken up residence in the Village in 1925. Yes, Quancchi he has cut Mr. Sebastian's hair since four years,
personalmente.
Birthamark on head? Yes, Quancchi see birthamark since first time Mr. Sebastian come sit in chair. Where ona head? Justa here (illustrating with a hairy forefinger on Lieutenant Luria's skull). What it looka like? So big. Thesa shape (illustrating with stub pencil on margin of the
Graphic.)

Ergo
, the living John was John I.

Success did not go to Lieutenant Luria's head. It should not be written against his record, sorry as it is, that he erred on the side of overconfidence. Lieutenant Luria caused official inquiries to be made in the State of Idaho. The trail led to the west slope of the Continental Divide, to M.S.U. in Missoula, Montana, where John III had spent four years of his life. Campus barbers were shown John III's picture in his M.S.U. yearbook. Barber Clarence Rodney Pick, who had lost his left eye in the Argonne Forest, remembered John III well; the sonofagun almost got my younger sister Marybell in trouble. He used me to get next to my sister, always came to my chair for haircuts. Till I found out what the bastard was after and then I said to him I said the next time you come to my chair you defiler of Montana womanhood I'll slit your goddam Idaho throat. He went over to Wormser's barber shop for his haircuts after that. Birthmark on his scalp? Hell no. Least I never noticed any and I'd have noticed anything about that young bastard. Don't let my one eye fool you buddy I got forty-forty vision in it hahaha!

Ergo,
approached either positively or negatively, the dead John was John III.

Subsequent handwriting comparison tests of authenticated John I-John III specimens, when the survivor's wrist had dwindled to normal, proved beyond question that, at least in respect to his identity, the living John had told the truth.

It seemed a momentous victory for the forces of law and order at the time; but when enthusiasms cooled it was seen that sorting John I out from John III benefited no one but John I. It certainly did not benefit Lieutenant Luria or, when Lieutenant Luria was peremptorily transferred to another post, his successor or their superiors. The mystery of who had buried a dagger in old Dr. Cornelius F. Hall on Arthur Craig's library floor vied for impenetrability honours with the mystery of who had performed the same disservice for John (III) Sebastian in the bedroom upstairs ten days later. There were simply no clues. Not only was significant
res gestae
evidence lacking, even theories died of indigestion.

In due course John (I) Sebastian came into his inheritance (this, too, Ellery learned from the papers). There was no legal difficulty whatever. For he was the veritable and authentic John (I) Sebastian, the ‘My only son, John' specified in his father's will; and against the granite of this fact the life and death of his brother might have been a passing goose feather. (As Attorney Payn pointed out to Arthur Craig in a private conversation, even if John I had murdered John III, and this could be proved, John I's right to inherit would in no way be compromised. John III had never had any rights under his father's will, hence he could not be deprived of same. Indeed, insofar as his father's will
or
his father were concerned, Mr. Payn remarked with savage relish [he had long since decided, as had Mr. Freeman, that the blackmailer had been John III], John III might just as well have never been born at all.)

A sad side-effect of the catastrophe, one which Ellery followed sympathetically, was the fate of John Sebastian's romance with Yolanda (Rusty) Brown. It was climax in reverse; a nullity. Miss Brown, accompanied by her mother, went to California on ‘a new-ideas trip' of unannounced duration. Before her departure she and John Sebastian had a twelve-minute conversation behind a locked door. When she emerged, pale but proud-chinned, reporters noticed that the diamond ‘friendship ring' which had illuminated the fourth finger of Miss Brown's left hand was no longer there. Although Miss Brown refused comment (as did Mr. Sebastian), the press drew a fair bow and opined that the pair were no longer affianced; and when Miss Brown entrained for Los Angeles still Miss Brown, it was reasonably clear that no Brown-Sebastian nuptials would ever take place.

They were right.

As for the dual murder case (it was assumed that the murder of Dr. Hall and the murder of John III were connected, although in the pathless jungle of this case no one would have been astonished had it proved otherwise), no solution was ever officially offered, no one was ever arrested for either or both, and it – or they – remained in the ‘Open' file until the file mouldered.

It is officially unsolved to this day.

To Mr. Ellery Queen – young Mr. Queen – the aftermath of the Sebastian case constituted one of the blackest periods of his life.

Into this darkness not even the fatherly light of the Inspector's love was able to penetrate. Ellery paced night and day, or stared at walls. He dallied with his food, grew emaciated and forlorn. His friends knew him not.

The light of Inspector Queen's professional experience made no impression, either. Son and father discussed the case interminably – the frame-up, the possible framer, the ways in which he might be arrived at. But they arrived nowhere.

Eventually the darkness lifted – from young Mr. Queen's spirit, at least – and other cases came along to engage his interest and talent for seeing twos and putting them together. He solved them. He wrote his books. He even became famous. But he never forgot how he had failed in his second – really his first – murder case. Long after the details faded from his memory, the fact of that failure remained – like a ringworm routed but not destroyed – itching – under his skin.

Book Three

CHALLENGE TO THE READER

IN WHICH THE READER'S ATTENTION IS
RESPECTFULLY REQUESTED

The current vogue in detective literature is all for the practice of placing the reader in the position of chief sleuth … At this point … the interpolation of a challenge to the reader … [is pertinent] … The alert student of mystery tales, now being in possession of all the … facts, should at this stage of the story have reached definite conclusions … The solution – or enough of it to point unerringly to the guilty character – may be reached by a series of logical deductions and psychological observations …

–
The Roman Hat Mystery

17 27 Years Later:
Summer 1957

In Which Mr. Queen Is Seized with a Serious Attack of Nostalgia and Suffers Himself to Be Fatally Tempted to Resuscitate the Past

By Manhattan standards it was a perfect midsummer day, with the temperature at 72 degrees midmorning, a humidity of 33 per cent, and the barometer at 30.05 and steady – warm and dry and breezy-fresh, with pigeons fluttering about the front windows and boys playing stickball on West 87th Street to the frosty tinkle of a Good Humour man, the Park beckoning a few blocks east, the rivers calling east and west, the beaches murmuring lecherously north and south … just the sort of day, Ellery thought, whipped up by a malicious Mother Nature to plague the whole race of spread-seated, typewriter-shackled, apartment-bound idiots who insisted on being writers.

He had been toiling for almost two hours now at his beautiful electric typewriter, and all he had to show was a sheet of yellow paper dirtied with five and a half lines of less than deathless prose containing 53 words, 21 of which he had gone back and Xed out.

No energy, Ellery thought, drooping. I'm vitamin-poor, a man with a built-in tranquilizer. Give me a harp and I'm happy. Thirty novels under my belt – what do I want with thirty-one? Weren't nine symphonies enough for Beethoven?

With some alarm he realized that he was getting old. This was such an overwhelming thought that he immediately typed two and a half lines more, disdaining to X out so much as a typographic error. But then the futility of it all hit him again, he drooped again, and he found himself wishing it were noon so that he might decently make himself a Bloody Mary.

At this point the telephone rang. He leaped on it.

‘Ellery Queen speaking!'

The voice was male, bass and vibrato with emotion. ‘Mr. Queen, I bet you'll never guess who this is.'

Ellery sighed. This was the one telephonic approach that was calculated to depress him in times of high receptivity. ‘I never bet, friend, let alone guess. Who is this?'

‘Stanley Devoe,' the voice said. Then it said into the silence, hopefully, ‘Devoe? Remember?'

‘Devoe, Devoe. No,' Ellery said, ‘I can't say I do. Where do I know you from?'

‘From away back. Maybe you'd remember Sergeant Devoe?'

‘Sergeant De …
Sergeant
Devoe!' Ellery shouted. ‘Hello, Sergeant! How could I ever forget you? Grown any?'

‘Backwards about an inch.'

‘Sergeant Devoe. I'll be double-dyed-in-Danbury. How are you?'

‘Getting on, getting on. And you?'

‘Ditto, ditto,' Ellery said glumly. ‘How in the world did you happen to call me up, Sergeant?'

‘I'm not a sergeant any more, Mr. Queen.'

‘Lieutenant? Captain?'

‘Chief.'

‘Chief! Well. Chief of what?'

‘I retired from the troopers a few years back and there was this opening for a chief of police job up here –'

‘Where is up here?'

‘Alderwood.'

‘Alderwood!' Memories were popping up from long-buried brain cells like corn from a hot grid. ‘What ever happened to Chief Brickell?'

‘Brickell?' Chief Devoe chuckled. ‘Doesn't time mean anything to you writer guys? Alderwood's had two police chiefs since Brickell. Old Brick died back in ‘Thirty-seven.'

‘Old Brick dead for twenty years.' Ellery had known Old Brick for just about five hours, but he felt terrible. ‘Well, well. Sergeant Devoe.' And now he couldn't think of anything to say.

Devoe was quiet, too. But then he said, ‘Tell you why I called. You remember that cockeyed case, Mr. Queen – those two murders over in the old Craig place?'

‘Yes?' Ellery's nostrils began to quiver.

‘You know, it was never solved.'

‘I know.'

‘Well, the last week or so I've been having one of the storerooms in the basement here at police headquarters cleaned out of a mess of old junk –'

‘Police headquarters. That used to be one cubbyhole in the city hall.'

‘We've got our own building now. Well, this stuff is not only the accumulated junk of the twenty-two years since the building was put up, but also some that was transferred from the old city hall. Anyway, this morning we ran across a crate, and what do you think it was marked? Sebastian Case.'

‘Crate?'

‘The whole damn file on the case.'

‘Well.' Something was stirring deep inside, something distinctly not pleasant. ‘What's it doing in Alderwood? That was a county investigation.'

‘I know. Nobody seems to know how it got here. But it's here, and I was going to have it burned with the rest of the trash when all of a sudden I said to myself, Hey, I'll bet Ellery Queen would like to have this. Would you?'

Ellery was silent.

‘Mr. Queen?'

‘I think I would,' Ellery said slowly. ‘It's
all
there? Those Christmas boxes, the cards …?'

“The whole kit and caboodle of the screwball stuff. Say, I'm glad I thought of it.' Chief Devoe sounded pleased with himself. ‘Okay, Mr. Queen, I'll ship it to you Railway Express.'

‘No, no, don't go to that trouble,' Ellery said, quickly this time. ‘I might take a drive and pick it up myself. Yes, I think I'll do that – today, in fact. Would today be all right for you, Chief?'

‘Are you kidding? My whole department's a-rockin' and a-rollin' just knowing I'm on the phone with you.'

‘All four of 'em, eh?' Ellery chuckled.

‘Four? I've got thirty-two men working out of this building, besides the office staff.'

‘Oh,' Ellery said humbly.

‘I guess you'll find a whole lot changed. Including me. Don't expect to see that skinny kid trooper you used to know.' Stanley Devoe guffawed. ‘I've kind of put on a little weight since back in ‘Thirty.'

Chief Devoe weighed 300 pounds. It took Ellery's total powers of imagination to see through the layers of lard to the beautiful Figure of the Sergeant Devoe he had known. The face was all but unrecognizable.

‘Changed some, huh, Mr. Queen?' Devoe said wistfully.

‘Haven't we all?'

‘I'd know you any place. You've kept in condition.'

Not where it counts, Ellery thought … Everything was changed everywhere. He had driven his '57 convertible into a strange city up to an ageing marble building of W P A vintage, with parking meters, 30-minute time limits, and business buildings towering in every direction. None of it had any more relation to the Alderwood he had visited in 1929 than a TV colour set had to Mrs. Janssen's old crystal radio.

It was an uncomfortable experience. Chief Devoe felt it, too. They chatted in his fine big office for a while – about his career, the growth of Alderwood, juvenile delinquency, radioactive fallout, the hopeless task of civil defence, the Thruway, the Earth Satellite – even about Lieutenant Luria who, according to Devoe, had resigned from the state trooper organization a few years after the Sebastian fiasco and had gone into the insurance business somewhere in the Midwest. But it was a nervous sort of conversation, with no roots anywhere, and after the third awkward silence Devoe got ponderously to his feet and suggested that they visit the basement. Ellery could have hugged him.

‘You know, I'm getting a real bang out of this,' the huge man said, leading the way down a flight of concrete steps. ‘You're a pretty famous guy, Mr. Queen. I'll bet there's not one of your books I haven't read.'

‘I'll bet, even though I never do.'

‘What? You name it, I've got it home.'

‘The Twelfth Night Mystery.'

‘Twelfth –? Oh! Say, I never did at that. You did one on the Sebastian case?'

‘You never read it,' Ellery said grimly, ‘because I never wrote it.'

‘Couldn't Figure out the solution, hey?' Devoe laughed. When he laughed his whole mountainous body quaked. Ellery felt a little sick.

‘Something like that.'

Devoe gave him a queerly sharp look. ‘Well, here it is.'

The wooden lid had been wrenched off. Devoe switched on an overhead bulb, and Ellery peered.

There it was again, the fossil remains of his youthful failure, in a perfect state of preservation. As if the last twenty-seven years had never been. The little sandalwood ox … the toy house … the jewelled dagger … And there was the stack of white cards. A shred of desiccated rubber band was stuck to the top one; someone had tied a piece of string around them to hold them together … And the little black book.

Black book?

The diary
!

He had completely forgotten about his diary.

Ellery snatched it from the crate. It was plastered with dust. He opened it eagerly. A youthful script sprang out at him … His own handwriting, over a quarter of a century old. Lieutenant Luria had confiscated the diary and it had never been returned to him.

And here it was.

Ellery replaced the dusty little relic in the crate with tenderness.

‘Could one of your people put this in the trunk of my car, Chief?'

‘Right away.'

‘I can't begin to tell you what this means to me.'

‘Sure, Mr. Queen. I understand.' And for a moment Ellery had the warmest feeling that the big man really did, and for the only time that afternoon he felt close to Devoe.

On impulse he drove through the unfamiliar streets toward the old Craig property. He passed it twice without recognizing it. The third time he checked with a street sign to make sure he was in the right location. He was. The Craig house was gone. The woods beyond were gone, too. So were the lordly lawns. On the site stretched dozens and dozens of identical little houses disguised with yellow or red or purple trim, like jukeboxes, each with a tiny garage in the rear, each with a postage stamp of lawn and a small play-yard fore and aft, a TV antenna above, and one miserable tree to a lot.

Ellery backed around and drove agedly back to New York.

Inspector Queen surfaced out of a drowning sleep, wondering what had awakened him. Blearily he peered at the radial hands of his watch. Twenty past four. Somebody had said something …

Somebody was still saying something.

There it was again, a loud clear tenor, intense, full of self-loathing, and triumphant.

‘I'll be damned. I'll be
damned
.'

A light shone somewhere in the apartment.

The old man crawled out of bed. He wore no pyjama top. Yawning and rubbing his damp, skinny torso, he padded across the invisible living room to Ellery's study, the source of the light.

‘You out of your mind, son?' The Inspector yawned again. ‘Haven't you been to bed yet?'

Ellery was in his stockinged feet, still wearing his trousers and shirt. He was seated Indian-fashion on top of his desk staring down at the floor, on which he had laid out in a satisfying circle the contents of the Alderwood crate. The black diary lay open on the desk beside him.

‘Dad, I've got it.'

‘Aren't you a bit on in years to be playing house?' His father sat down on the leather couch and reached for a cigarette. The couch felt cool and he leaned back. ‘Got what?'

‘The answer to the Sebastian riddle.'

‘Sebastian?' The old man puffed, frowning. ‘Sebastian. It doesn't click. Who's Sebastian?'

‘It was a long time ago, Dad.' Ellery had a refreshed aura about him, as if he had just come from a dip in a mountain lake. At the same time there was a sadness in him, a sad wisdom the Inspector found puzzling.

The old man stared.

‘You remember,' Ellery said softly. ‘Alderwood. That poetry-writing kid who lived in Greenwich Village. This was back in ‘Twenty-nine. You and Velie dug some background out for me –'

The Inspector slapped his ropy shank. ‘Sure! Are these –?' He looked at the circle of objects intently. ‘But that's ancient history, Ellery. Where did you dig these up?'

Ellery told him, and picked up the black book. ‘I've spent most of the night re-reading my diary. You know, I was pretty young.'

‘That's bad?'

‘That's good, but it had its disadvantages. I must have been insufferable. So cocky and know-it-all. Did I get into your hair much?'

‘I was a lot younger then myself,' Inspector Queen grinned. He tamped out the cigarette and said, ‘You've cracked the case? After all these years?'

‘Yes.' Ellery locked his arms about his knees and rocked. ‘I was the Brain. My powers were absolute, and when they collided with the facts it was the facts that suffered. That's why I never saw the truth in the Sebastian case. Dad, I had it right in my hands. I turned it over, sniffed it, examined it inside and out. And I never really saw it.'

‘Want to tell me about it?' his father said.

‘No, Dad, you go on back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you.'

‘Want to tell me about it?' the old man repeated.

So Ellery told him.

This time it was the Inspector who said, over and over, ‘I'm damned. I'll be
damned
.'