MR. PHINEAS MASON, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW—of the richly, almost indigestibly respectable firm of Dowling, Mason & Coolidge, 40 Park Row—was a very un-Phineaslike gentleman with a chunky nose and wrinkle-bedded eyes which had seen thirty years of harassing American litigation and looked as if they had seen a hundred. He sat stiffly in the lap of a chauffeur-driven limousine, his mouth making interesting sounds.
“And now,” he said in an angry voice, “there’s actually been murder done. I can’t imagine what the world is coming to.”
Mr. Ellery Queen, watching the world rush by in a glaring Long Island sunlight, mused that life was like a Spanish wench: full of surprises, none of them delicate and all of them stimulating. Since he was a monastic who led a riotous mental existence, he liked life that way; and since he was also a detective—an appellation he cordially detested—he got life that way. Nevertheless, he did not vocalize his reflections: Mr. Phineas Mason did not appear the sort who would appreciate fleshly metaphor.
He drawled: “The world’s all right; the trouble is the people in it. Suppose you tell me what you can about these curious Shaws. After all, you know, I shan’t be too heartily received by your local Long Island constabulary; and since I foresee difficulties, I should like to be forearmed as well.”
Mason frowned. “But McC assured me—”
“Oh, bother J. J.! He has vicarious delusions of grandeur. Let me warn you now, Mr. Mason, that I shall probably be a dismal flop. I don’t go about pulling murderers out of my hat. And with your cossacks trampling the evidence—”
“I warned them,” said Mason fretfully. “I spoke to Captain Murch myself when he telephoned this morning to inform me of the crime.” He made a sour face. “They won’t even move the body, Mr. Queen. I wield—ah—a little local influence, you see.”
“Indeed,” said Ellery, adjusting his pince-nez; and he sighed. “Very well, Mr. Mason. Proceed with the dreary details.”
“It was my partner, Coolidge,” began the attorney in a pained voice, “who originally handled Shaw’s affairs. John A. Shaw, the millionaire. Before your time, I daresay. Shaw’s first wife died in childbirth in 1895. The child—Agatha; she’s a divorcee now, with a son of eight—of course survived her mother; and there was one previous child, named after his father. John’s forty-five now….At any rate, old John Shaw remarried soon after his first wife’s death, and then shortly after his second marriage died himself. This second wife, Maria Paine Shaw, survived her husband by a little more than thirty years. She died only a month ago.”
“A plethora of mortalities,” murmured Ellery, lighting a cigaret. “So far, Mr. Mason, a prosaic tale. And what has the Shaw history to do—”
“Patience,” sighed Mason. “Now old John Shaw bequeathed his entire fortune to this second wife, Maria. The two children, John and Agatha, got nothing, not even trusts; I suppose old Shaw trusted Maria to take care of them.”
“I scent the usual story,” yawned Ellery. “She didn’t? No go between stepmother and acquired progeny?”
The lawyer wiped his brow. “It was horrible. They fought for thirty years like—like savages. I will say, in extenuation of Mrs. Shaw’s conduct, that she had provocation. John’s always been a shiftless, unreliable beggar: disrespectful, profligate, quite vicious. Nevertheless she’s treated him well in money matters. As I said, he’s forty-five now; and he hasn’t done a lick of work in his life. He’s a drunkard, too.”
“Sounds charming. And Sister Agatha, the divorcee?”
“A feminine edition of her brother. She married a fortune-hunter as worthless as herself; when he found out she was penniless he deserted her and Mrs. Shaw managed to get her a quiet divorce. She took Agatha and her boy, Peter, into her house and they’ve been living there ever since, at daggers’ points. Please forgive the—ah—brutality of the characterizations; I want you to know these people as they are.”
“We’re almost intimate already,” chuckled Ellery.
“John and Agatha,” continued Mason, biting the head of his cane, “have been living for only one event—their stepmother’s death. So that they might inherit, of course. Until a certain occurrence a few months ago Mrs. Shaw’s will provided generously for them. But when that happened—”
Mr. Ellery Queen narrowed his gray eyes. “You mean—?”
“It’s complicated,” sighed the lawyer. “Three months ago there was an attempt on the part of some one in the household to poison the old lady!”
“Ah!”
“The attempt was unsuccessful only because Dr. Arlen—Dr. Terence Arlen is the full name—had suspected such a possibility for years and had kept his eyes open. The cyanide—it was put in her tea—didn’t reach Mrs. Shaw, but killed a house-cat. None of us, of course, knew who had made the poisoning attempt. But after that Mrs. Shaw changed her will.”
“Now,” muttered Ellery, “I am enthralled. Arlen, eh? That creates a fascinating mess. Tell me about Arlen, please.”
“Rather mysterious old man with two passions: devotion to Mrs. Shaw and a hobby of painting. Quite an artist, too, though I know little about such things. He lived in the Shaw house about twenty years. Medico Mrs. Shaw picked up somewhere; I think only she knew his story, and he’s always been silent about his past. She put him on a generous salary to live in the house and act as the family physician; I suspect it was rather because she anticipated what her stepchildren might attempt. And then too it’s always seemed to me that Arlen accepted this unusual arrangement so tractably in order to pass out of—ah—circulation.”
They were silent for some time. The chauffeur swung the car off the main artery into a narrow macadam road Mason breathed heavily.
“I suppose you’re satisfied,” murmured Ellery at last through a fat smoke-ring, “that Mrs. Shaw died a month ago of natural causes?”
“Heavens, yes!” cried Mason. “Dr. Arlen wouldn’t trust his own judgment, we were so careful; he had several specialists in, before and after her death. But she died of the last of a series of heart-attacks; she was an old woman, you know. Something-thrombosis, they called it.” Mason looked gloomy. “Well, you can understand Mrs. Shaw’s natural reaction to the poisoning episode. ‘If they’re so depraved,’ she told me shortly after, ‘that they’d attempt my life, they don’t deserve any consideration at my hands.’ And she had me draw up a new will, cutting both of them off without a cent.”
“There’s, an epigram,” chuckled Ellery, “worthy of a better cause.”
Mason tapped on the glass. “Faster, Burroughs.” The car jolted ahead. “In looking about for a beneficiary, Mrs. Shaw finally remembered that there was some one to whom she could leave the Shaw fortune without feeling that she was casting it to the winds. Old John Shaw had had an elder brother, Morton, a widower with two grown children. The brothers quarrelled violently and Morton moved to England. He lost most of his money there; his two children, Edith and Percy, were left to shift for themselves when he committed suicide.”
“These Shaws seem to have a penchant for violence.”
“I suppose it’s in the blood. Well, Edith and Percy both had talent of a sort, I understand, and they went on the London stage in a brother-and-sister music-hall act, managing well enough. Mrs. Shaw decided to leave her money to this Edith, her niece. I made inquiries by correspondence and discovered that Edith Shaw was now Mrs. Edythe Royce, a childless widow of many years’ standing. On Mrs. Shaw’s decease I cabled her and she crossed by the next boat. According to Mrs. Royce, Percy—her brother—was killed in an automobile accident on the Continent a few months before; so she had no ties whatever.”
“And the will—specifically?”
“It’s rather queer,” sighed Mason. “The Shaw estate was enormous at one time, but the depression whittled it down to about three hundred thousand dollars. Mrs. Shaw left her niece two hundred thousand outright. The remainder, to his astonishment,” and Mason paused and eyed his tall young companion with a curious fixity, “was put in trust for Dr. Arlen.”
“Arlen!”
“He was not to touch the principal, but was to receive the income from it for the remainder of his life. Interesting, eh?”
“That’s putting it mildly. By the way, Mr. Mason, I’m a suspicious bird. This Mrs. Royce—you’re satisfied she is a Shaw?”
The lawyer started; then he shook his head. “No, no, Queen, that’s the wrong tack. There can be absolutely no question about it. In the first place she possesses the marked facial characteristics of the Shaws; you’ll see for yourself; although I will say that she’s rather—well, rather a character, rather a character! She came armed with intimate possessions of her father, Morton Shaw; and I myself, in company with Coolidge, questioned her closely on her arrival. She convinced us utterly, from her knowledge of minutiae about her father’s life and Edith Shaw’s childhood in America—knowledge impossible for an outsider to have acquired—that she is Edith Shaw. We were more than cautious, I assure you; especially since neither John nor Agatha had seen her since childhood.”
“Just a thought.” Ellery leaned forward. “And what was to be the disposition of Arlen’s hundred-thousand-dollar trust on Arlen’s death?”
The lawyer gazed grimly at the two rows of prim poplars flanking a manicured driveway on which the limousine was now noiselessly treading. “It was to be equally divided between John and Agatha,” he said in a careful voice. The car rolled to a stop under a coldly white porte-cochère.
“I see,” said Ellery. For it was Dr. Terence Arlen who had been murdered.
A county trooper escorted them through high Colonial halls into a remote and silent wing of the ample old house, up a staircase to a dim cool corridor patrolled by a nervous man with a bull neck.
“Oh, Mr. Mason,” he said eagerly, coming forward. “We’ve been waiting for you. This is Mr. Queen?” His tone changed from unguent haste to abrasive suspicion.
“Yes, yes. Murch of the county detectives, Mr. Queen. You’ve left everything intact, Murch?”
The detective grunted and stepped aside. Ellery found himself in the study of what appeared to be a two-room suite; beyond an open door he could see the white counterpane of a bird’s-eye-maple four-poster. A hole at some remote period had been hacked through the ceiling and covered with glass, admitting sunlight and converting the room into a sky-light studio. The trivia of a painter’s paraphernalia lay in confusion about the room, overpowering the few medical implements. There were easels, paint-boxes, a small dais, carelessly draped smocks, a profusion of daubs in oils and water-colors on the walls.
A little man was kneeling beside the outstretched figure of the dead doctor—a long brittle figure frozen in death, capped with curiously lambent silver hair. The wound was frank and deep: the delicately chased haft of a stiletto protruded from the man’s heart. There was very little blood.
Murch snapped: “Well, Doc, anything else?”
The little man rose and put his instruments away. “Died instantly from the stab-wound. Frontal blow, as you see. He tried to dodge at the last instant, I should say, but wasn’t quick enough.” He nodded and reached for his hat and quietly went out.
Ellery shivered a little. The studio was silent, and the corridor was silent, and the wing was silent; the whole house was crushed under the weight of a terrific silence that was almost uncanny. There was something indescribably evil in the air….He shook his shoulders impatiently. “The stiletto, Captain Murch. Have you identified it?”
“Belonged to Arlen. Always right here on this table.”
“No possibility of suicide, I suppose.”
“Not a chance, Doc said.”
Mr. Phineas Mason made a retching sound. “If you want me, Queen—” He stumbled from the room, awakening dismal echoes.
The corpse was swathed in a paint-smudged smock above pajamas; in the stiff right hand a paint-brush, its hairs-stained jet-black, was still clutched. A color-splashed palette had fallen face down on the floor near him….Ellery did not raise his eyes from the stiletto. “Florentine, I suppose. Tell me what you’ve learned so far, Captain,” he said absently. “I mean about the crime itself.”
“Damned little,” growled the detective. “Doc says he was killed about two in the morning—about eight hours ago. His body was found at seven this a.m. by a woman named Krutch, a nurse in the house here for a couple of years. Nice wench, by God! Nobody’s got an alibi for the time of the murder, because according to their yarns they were all sleeping, and they all sleep separately. That’s about the size of it.”
“Precious little, to be sure,” murmured Ellery. “By the way, Captain, was it Dr. Arlen’s custom to paint in the wee hours?”
“Seems so. I thought of that, too. But he was a queer old cuss and when he was hot on something he’d work for twenty-four hours at a clip.”
“Do the others sleep in this wing?”
“Nope. Not even the servants. Seems Arlen liked privacy, and whatever he liked the old dame—Mrs. Shaw, who kicked off a month ago—said ‘jake’ to.” Murch went to the doorway and snapped: “Miss Krutch.”
She came slowly out of Dr. Arlen’s bedroom—a tall fair young woman who had been weeping. She was in nurse’s uniform and there was nothing in common between her name and her appearance. In fact, as Ellery observed with appreciation, she was a distinctly attractive young woman with curves in precisely the right places. Miss Krutch, despite her tears, was the first ray of sunshine he had encountered in the big old house.
“Tell Mr. Queen what you told me,” directed Murch curtly.
“But there’s so little,” she quavered. “I was up before seven, as usual. My room’s in the main wing, but there’s a storeroom here for linen and things….As I passed I—I saw Dr. Arlen lying on the floor, with the knife sticking up—The door was open and the light was on. I screamed. No one heard me. This is so far away….I screamed and screamed and then Mr. Shaw came running, and Miss Shaw. Th-that’s all.”
“Did any of you touch the body, Miss Krutch?”
“Oh, no, sir!” She shivered.
“I see,” said Ellery, and raised his eyes from the dead man to the easel above, casually, and looked away. And then instantly he looked back, his nerves tingling. Murch watched him with a sneer.
“How,” jeered Murch, “d’ye like that, Mr. Queen?”
Ellery sprang forward. A smaller easel near the large one supported a picture. It was a cheap “processed” oil painting, a commercial copy of Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait group, The Artist and His Wife. Rembrandt himself sat in the foreground, and his wife stood in the background. The canvas on the large easel was a half-finished replica of this painting. Both figures had been completely sketched in by Dr. Arlen and brush work begun: the lusty smiling mustached artist in his gayly plumed hat, his left arm about the waist of his Dutch-garbed wife. And on the woman’s chin there was painted a beard.
Ellery gaped from the processed picture to Dr. Aden’s copy. But the one showed a woman’s smooth chin, and the other—the doctor’s—a squarish, expertly stroked black beard. And yet it had been daubed in hastily, as if the old painter had been working against time.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Ellery, glaring. “That’s insane!”
“Think so?, said Murch blandly. “Me, I don’t know. I’ve got a notion about it.” He growled at Miss Krutch: “Beat it,” and she fled from the studio, her long legs twinkling.
Ellery shook his head dazedly and sank into a chair, fumbling for a cigaret. “That’s a new wrinkle to me, Captain. First time I’ve ever encountered in a homicide an example of the beard-and-mustache school of art—you’ve seen the pencilled hair on the faces of men and women in billboard advertisements? It’s—” And then his eyes narrowed as something leaped into them and he said abruptly: “Is Miss Agatha Shaw’s boy—that Peter—in the house?”
Murch, smiling secretly as if he were enjoying a huge jest, went to the hallway door and roared something. Ellery got out of the chair and ran across the room and returned with one of the smocks, which he flung over the dead man’s body.
A small boy with frightened yet inquisitive eyes came slowly into the room, followed by one of the most remarkable creatures Ellery had ever seen. This apparition was a large stout woman of perhaps sixty, with lined rugged features—so heavy they were almost wattled—painted, bedaubed, and varnished with an astounding cosmetic technique. Her lips, gross as they were, were shaped by rouge into a perfect and obscene Cupid’s-bow; her eyebrows had been tweezed to incredible thinness; round rosy spots punctuated her sagging cheeks; and the whole rough heavy skin was floury with white powder.
But her costume was even more amazing than her face. For she was rigged out in Victorian style—a tight-waisted garment, almost bustle-hipped, full wide skirts that reached to her thick ankles, a deep and shiny bosom, and an elaborate boned lace choker-collar….And then Ellery remembered that, since this must be Edythe Shaw Royce, there was at least a partial explanation for her eccentric appearance: she was an old woman, she came from England, and she was no doubt still basking in the vanished glow of her girlhood theatrical days.
“Mrs. Royce,” said Murch mockingly, “and Peter.”
“How d’ye do,” muttered Ellery, tearing his eyes away. “Uh—Peter.”
The boy, a sharp-featured and skinny little creature, sucked his dirty forefinger and stared.
“Peter!” said Mrs. Royce severely. Her voice was quite in tune with her appearance: deep and husky and slightly cracked. Even her hair, Ellery noted with a wince, was nostalgic—a precise deep brown, frankly dyed. Here was one female, at least, who did not mean to yield to old age without a determined struggle, he thought. “‘He’s frightened. Peter!”
“Ma’am,” mumbled Peter, still staring.
“Peter,” said Ellery, “look at that picture.” Peter did so, reluctantly. “Did you put that beard on the face of the lady in the picture, Peter?”
Peter shrank against Mrs. Royce’s voluminous skirts. “N-no!”
“Curious, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Royce cheerfully. “I was remarking about that to Captain Burch—Murch only this morning. I’m sure Peter wouldn’t have drawn the beard on that one. He’d learned his lesson, hadn’t you, Peter?” Ellery remarked with alarm that the extraordinary woman kept screwing her right eyebrow up and drawing it deeply down, as if there were something in her eye that bothered her.
“Ah,” said Ellery. “Lesson?”
“You see,” went on Mrs. Royce, continuing her ocular gymnastics with unconscious vigor, “it was only yesterday that Peter’s mother caught him drawing a beard with chalk on one of Dr. Arlen’s paintings in Peter’s bedroom. Dr. Arlen gave him a round hiding, I’m afraid, and himself removed the chalk-marks. Dear Agatha was so angry with poor Dr. Arlen. So you didn’t do it, did you, Peter?”
“Naw,” said Peter, who had become fascinated by the bulging smock on the floor.
“Dr. Arlen, eh?” muttered Ellery. “Thank you,” and he began to pace up and down as Mrs. Royce took Peter by the arm and firmly removed him from the studio. A formidable lady, he thought, with her vigorous room-shaking tread. And he recalled that she wore flat-heeled shoes and had, from the ugly swelling of the leather, great bunions.
“Come on,” said Murch suddenly, going to the door.
“Where?”
“Downstairs.” The detective signalled a trooper to guard the studio and led the way. “I want to show you,” he said as they made for the main part of the house, “the reason for the beard on that dame-in-the-picture’s jaw.”
“Indeed?” murmured Ellery, and said nothing more. Murch paused in the doorway of a pale Colonial living-room and jerked his head.
Ellery looked in. A hollow-chested, cadaverous man in baggy tweeds sat slumped in a Cogswell chair staring at an empty glass in his hand, which was shaking. His eyes were yellow-balled and shot with blood, and his loose skin was a web of red veins.
“That,” said Murch contemptuously and yet with a certain triumph, “is Mr. John Shaw.”
Ellery noted that Shaw possessed the same heavy features, the same fat lips and rock-hewn nose, as the wonderful Mrs. Royce, his cousin; and for that matter, as the dour and annoyed-looking old pirate in the portrait over the fireplace who was presumably his father.
And Ellery also noted that on Mr. John Shaw’s unsteady chin there was a bedraggled, pointed beard.
Mr. Mason, a bit greenish about the jowels, was waiting for them in a sombre reception-room. “Well?” he asked in a whisper, like a supplicant before the Cumæan Sibyl.
“Captain Murch,” murmured Ellery, “has a theory.”
The detective scowled. “Plain as day. It’s John Shaw. It’s my hunch Dr. Arlen painted that beard as a clue to his killer. The only one around here with a beard is Shaw. It ain’t evidence, I admit, but it’s something to work on. And believe you me,” he said with a snap of his brown teeth, “I’m going to work on it!”
“John,” said Mason slowly. “He certainly had motive. And yet I find it difficult to…” His shrewd eyes flickered. “Beard? What beard?”
“There’s a beard painted on the chin of a female face upstairs,” drawled Ellery, “the face being on a Rembrandt Arlen was copying at the time he was murdered. That the good doctor painted the beard himself is quite evident. It’s expertly stroked, done in black oils, and in his death hand there’s still the brush tipped with black oils. There isn’t any one else in the house who paints, is there?”
“No,” said Mason uncomfortably.
“Voilà.”
“But even if Arlen did such a—a mad thing,” objected the lawyer, “how do you know it was just before he was attacked?”
“Aw,” growled Murch, “when the hell else would it be?”
“Now, now, Captain,” murmured Ellery, “let’s be scientific. There’s a perfectly good answer to your question, Mr. Mason. First, we all agree that Dr. Arlen couldn’t have painted the beard after he was attacked; he died instantly. Therefore he must have painted it before he was attacked. The question is: How long before? Well, why did Arlen paint the beard at all?”
“Murch says as a clue to his murderer,” muttered Mason. “But such a—a fantastic legacy to the police! It looks deucedly odd.”
“What’s odd about it?”
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” exploded Mason, “if he wanted to leave a clue to his murderer, why didn’t he write the murderer’s name on the canvas? He had the brush in his hand…”
“Precisely,” murmured Ellery. “A very good question, Mr. Mason. Well, why didn’t he? If he was alone—that is, if he was anticipating his murder—he certainly would have left us a written record of his concrete suspicions. The fact that he left no such record shows that he didn’t anticipate his murder before the appearance of his murderer. Therefore he painted the beard while his murderer was present. But now we find an explanation for the painted beard as a clue. With his murderer present, he couldn’t paint the name; the murderer would have noticed it and destroyed it. Arlen was forced, then, to adopt a subtle means: leave a clue that would escape his killer’s attention. Since he was painting at the time, he used a painter’s means. Even if his murderer noticed it, he probably ascribed it to Arlen’s nervousness; although the chances are he didn’t notice it.”
Murch stirred. “Say, listen—”
“But a beard on a woman’s face,” groaned the lawyer. “I tell you—”
“Oh,” said Ellery dreamily, “Dr. Arlen had a precedent.”
“Precedent?”
“Yes; we’ve found, Captain Murch and I, that young Peter in his divine innocence had chalked a beard and mustache on one of Dr. Arlen’s daubs which hangs in Peter’s bedroom. This was only yesterday. Dr. Arlen whaled the tar out of him for this horrible crime vers l’art, no doubt justifiably. But Peter’s beard-scrawl must have stuck in the doctor’s mind; threshing about wildly in his mind while his murderer talked to him, or threatened him, the beard business popped out at him. Apparently he felt that it told a story, because he used it. And there, of course, is the rub.”
“I still say it’s all perfectly asinine,” grunted Mason.
“Not asinine,” said Ellery. “Interesting. He painted a beard on the chin of Rembrandt’s wife. Why Rembrandt’s wife, in the name of all that’s wonderful?—a woman dead more than two centuries! These Shaws aren’t remote descendants…”
“Nuts,” said Murch distinctly.
“Nuts,” said Ellery, “is a satisfactory word under the circumstances, Captain. Then a grim jest? Hardly. But if it wasn’t Dr. Arlen’s grisly notion of a joke, what under heaven was it? What did Arlen mean to convey?”
“If it wasn’t so ridiculous,” muttered the lawyer, “I’d say he was pointing to—Peter.”
“Nuts and double-nuts,” said Murch, “begging your pardon, Mr. Mason. The kid’s the only one, I guess, that’s got a real alibi. It seems his mother’s nervous about him and she always keeps his door locked from the outside. I found it that way myself this morning. And he couldn’t have got out through the window.”
“Well, well,” sighed Mason, “I’m sure I’m all at sea. John, eh….What do you think, Mr. Queen?”
“Much as I loathe argument,” said Ellery, “I can’t agree with Brother Murch.”
“Oh, yeah?” jeered Murch. “I suppose you’ve got reasons?”
“I suppose,” said Ellery, “I have; not the least impressive of which is the dissimilar shapes of the real and painted beards.”
The detective glowered. “Well, if he didn’t mean John Shaw by it, what the hell did he mean?”
Ellery shrugged. “If we knew that, my dear Captain, we should know everything.”
“Well,” snarled Murch, “I think it’s spinach, and I’m going to haul Mr. John Shaw down to county headquarters and pump the old bastard till I find it’s spinach.”
“I shouldn’t do that, Murch,” said Ellery quickly. “If only for—”
“I know my duty,” said the detective with a black look, and he stamped out of the reception-room.
John Shaw, who was quietly drunk, did not even protest when Murch shoved him into the squad car. Followed by the county morgue-truck bearing Dr. Arlen’s body, Murch vanished with his prey.
Ellery took a hungry turn about the room, frowning. The lawyer sat in a crouch, gnawing his fingernails. And again the room, and the house, and the very air were charged with silence, an ominous silence.
“Look here,” said Ellery sharply, “there’s something in this business you haven’t told me yet, Mr. Mason.”
The lawyer jumped, and then sank back biting his lips. “He’s such a worrisome creature,” said a cheerful voice from the doorway and they both turned, startled, to find Mrs. Royce beaming in at them. She came in with the stride of a grenadier, her bosom joggling. And she sat down by Mason’s side and with daintiness lifted her capacious skirts with both hands a bit above each fat knee. “I know what’s troubling you, Mr. Mason!” The lawyer cleared his throat hastily. “I assure you—”
“Nonsense! I’ve excellent eyes. Mason, you haven’t introduced this nice young man.” Mason mumbled something placative. “Queen, is it? Charmed, Mr. Queen. First sample of reasonably attractive American I’ve seen since my arrival. I can appreciate a handsome man; I was on the London stage for many years. And really,” she thundered in her formidable baritone, “I wasn’t so ill-looking myself!”
“I’m sure of that,” murmured Ellery. “But what—”
“Mason’s afraid for me,” said Mrs. Royce with a girlish simper. “A most conscientious barrister! He’s simply petrified with fear that whoever did for poor Dr. Arlen will select me as his next victim. And I tell him now, as I told him a few moments ago when you were upstairs with that dreadful Murch person, that for one thing I shan’t be such an easy victim—” Ellery could well believe that—“and for another I don’t believe either John or Agatha, which is what’s in Mason’s mind—don’t deny it, Mason!—was responsible for Dr. Arlen’s death.”
“I never—” began the lawyer feebly.
“Hmm,” said Ellery. “What’s your theory, Mrs. Royce?”
“Some one out of Arlen’s past,” boomed the lady with a click of her jaws as a punctuation mark. “I understand he came here twenty years ago under most mysterious circumstances. He may have murdered somebody, and that somebody’s brother or some one has returned to avenge—”
“Ingenious,” grinned Ellery. “As tenable as Murch’s, Mr. Mason.”
The lady sniffed. “He’ll release Cousin John soon enough,” she said complacently. “John’s stupid enough under ordinary circumstances, you know, but when he’s drunk—! There’s no evidence, is there? A cigaret, if you please, Mr. Queen.”
Ellery hastened to offer his case. Mrs. Royce selected a cigaret with a vast paw, smiled roguishly as Ellery held a match, and then withdrew the cigaret and blew smoke, crossing her legs as she did so. She smoked almost in the Russian fashion, cupping her hand about the cigaret instead of holding it between two fingers. A remarkable woman! “Why are you so afraid for Mrs. Royce?” he drawled.
“Well—” Mason hesitated, torn between discretion and desire. “There may have been a double motive for killing Dr. Arlen, you see. That is,” he added hurriedly, “if Agatha or John had anything to do—”
“Double motive?”
“One, of course, is the conversion of the hundred thousand to Mrs. Shaw’s stepchildren, as I told you. The other…Well, there is a proviso in connection with the bequest to Dr. Arlen. In return for offering him a home and income for the rest of his life, he was to continue to attend to the medical needs of the family, you see, with special attention to Mrs. Royce.”
“Poor Aunt Maria,” said Mrs. Royce with a tidal sigh. “She must have been a dear, dear person.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow, Mr. Mason.”
“I’ve a copy of the will in my pocket.” The lawyer fished for a crackling document. “Here it is. ‘And in particular to conduct monthly medical examinations of my niece, Edith Shaw—or more frequently if Dr. Arlen should deem it necessary—to insure her continued good health; a provision, (mark this, Queen!) ‘a provision I am sure my stepchildren will appreciate.’ ”
“A cynical addendum,” nodded Ellery, blinking a little. “Mrs. Shaw placed on her trusted leech the responsibility for keeping you healthy, Mrs. Royce, suspecting that her dearly beloved stepchildren might be tempted to—er—tamper with your life. But why should they?”
For the first time something like terror invaded Mrs. Royce’s massive face. She set her jaw and said, a trifle tremulously: “N-nonsense. I can’t believe—Do you think it’s possible they’ve already tr—”
“You don’t feel ill, Mrs. Royce?” cried Mason, alarmed.
Under the heavy coating of powder her coarse skin was muddily pale. “No, I—Dr. Arlen was supposed to examine me for the first time tomorrow. Oh, if it’s…The food—”
“Poison was tried three months ago,” quavered the lawyer. “On Mrs. Shaw, Queen, as I told you. Good God. Mrs. Royce, you’ll have to be careful!”
“Come, come,” snapped Ellery. “What’s the point? Why should the Shaws want to poison Mrs. Royce, Mason?”
“Because,” said Mason in a trembling voice, “in the event of Mrs. Royce’s demise her estate is to revert to the original estate; which would automatically mean to John and Agatha.” He mopped his brow.
Ellery heaved himself out of the chair and took another hungry turn about the sombre room. Mrs. Royce’s right eyebrow suddenly began to go up and down with nervousness.
“This needs thinking over,” he said abruptly; and there was something queer in his eyes that made both of them stare at him with uneasiness. “I’ll stay the night, Mr. Mason, if Mrs. Royce has no objection.”
“Do,” whispered Mrs. Royce in a tremble; and this time she was afraid, very plainly afraid. And over the room settled an impalpable dust, like a distant sign of approaching villainy. “Do you think they’ll actually try…?”
“It is entirely,” said Ellery dryly, “within the realm of possibility.”
The day passed in a timeless haze. Unaccountably, no one came; the telephone was silent; and there was no word from Murch, so that John Shaw’s fate remained obscure. Mason sat in a miserable heap on the front porch, a cigar cold in his mouth, rocking himself like a weazened old doll. Mrs. Royce retired, subdued, to her quarters. Peter was off somewhere in the gardens tormenting a dog; occasionally Miss Krutch’s tearful voice reprimanded him ineffectually.
To Mr. Ellery Queen it was a painful, puzzling, and irritatingly evil time. He prowled the rambling mansion, a lost soul, smoking tasteless cigarets and thinking….That a blanket of menace hung over this house his nerves convinced him. It took all his willpower to keep his body from springing about at unheard sounds; moreover, his mind was distracted and he could not think clearly. A murderer was abroad; and this was a house of violent people.
He shivered and darted a look over his shoulder and shrugged and bent his mind fiercely to the problem at hand….And after hours his thoughts grew calmer and began to range themselves in orderly rows, until it was evident that there was a beginning and an end. He grew quiet.
He smiled a little as he stopped a tiptoeing maid and inquired the location of Miss Agatha Shaw’s room. Miss Shaw had wrapped herself thus far in a mantle of invisibility. It was most curious. A sense of rising drama excited him a little….
A tinny female voice responded to his knock, and he opened the door to find a feminine Shaw as bony and unlovely as the masculine edition curled in a hard knot on a chaise-longue, staring balefully out the window. Her négligé was adorned with boa feathers and there were varicose veins on her swollen naked legs.
“Well,” she said acidly, without turning. “What do you want?”
“My name,” murmured Ellery, “is Queen, and Mr. Mason has called me in to help settle your—ah—difficulties.”
She twisted her skinny neck slowly. “I’ve heard all about you, What do you want me to do, kiss you? I suppose it was you who instigated John’s arrest. You’re fools, the pack of you!”
“To the contrary, it was your worthy Captain Murch’s exclusive idea to take your brother in custody, Miss Shaw. He’s not formally arrested, you know. Even so, I advised strongly against it.”
She sniffed, but she uncoiled the knot and drew her shapeless legs beneath her wrapper in a sudden consciousness of femininity. “Then sit down, Mr. Queen. I’ll help all lean.”
“On the other hand,” smiled Ellery, seating himself in a gilt and Gallic atrocity, “don’t blame Murch overly, Miss Shaw. There’s a powerful case against your brother, you know.”
“And me!”
“And,” said Ellery regretfully, “you.”
She raised her thin arms and cried: “Oh, how I hate this damned, damned house, that damned woman! She’s the cause of all our trouble. Some day she’s likely to get—”
“I suppose you’re referring to Mrs. Royce. But aren’t you being unfair? From Mason’s story it’s quite evident that there was no ghost of coercion when your stepmother willed your father’s fortune to Mrs. Royce. They had never met, never corresponded, and your cousin was three thousand miles away. It’s awkward for you, no doubt, but scarcely Mrs. Royce’s fault.”
“Fair! Who cares about fairness? She’s taken our money away from us. And now we’ve got to stay here and—and be fed by her. It’s intolerable, I tell you! She’ll be here at least two years—trust her for that, the painted old hussy!—and all that time…”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. Two years?”
“That woman’s will,” snarled Miss Shaw, “provided that this precious cousin of ours come to live here and preside as mistress for a minimum of two years. That was her revenge, the despicable old witch! Whatever father saw in her…To ‘provide a home for John and Agatha,’ she said in the will, ‘until they find a permanent solution of their problems.’ How d’ye like that? I’ll never forget those words. Our ‘problems’! Oh, every time I think—” She bit her lip, eyeing him sidewise with a sudden caution.
Ellery sighed and went to the door. “Indeed? And if something should—er—drive, Mrs. Royce from the house before the expiration of the required period?”
“We’d get the money, of course,” she flashed with bitter triumph; her thin dark skin was greenish. “If something should happen—”
“I trust,” said Ellery dryly, “that nothing will.” He closed the door and stood for a moment gnawing his fingers, and then he smiled rather grimly and went downstairs to a telephone.
John Shaw returned with his escort at ten that night. His chest was hollower, his fingers shakier, his eyes bloodier; and he was sober. Murch looked like a thundercloud. The cadaverous man went into the living-room and made for a full decanter. He drank alone, with steady mechanical determination. No one disturbed him.
“Nothing,” growled Murch to Ellery and Mason.
At twelve the house was asleep.
The first alarm was sounded by Miss Krutch. It was almost one when she ran down the upper corridor screaming at the top of her voice: “Fire! Fire! Fire!” Thick smoke was curling about her slender ankles and the moonlight shining through the corridor-window behind her silhouetted her long plump trembling shanks through the thin nightgown.
The corridor erupted, boiled over. Doors crashed open, dishevelled heads protruded, questions were shrieked, dry throats choked over the bitter smoke. Mr. Phineas Mason, looking a thousand years old without his teeth, fled in a cotton nightshirt toward the staircase. Murch came pounding up the stairs, followed by a bleary, bewildered John Shaw. Scrawny Agatha in silk pajamas staggered down the hall with Peter, howling at the top of his lusty voice, in her arms. Two servants scuttled downstairs like frantic rats.
But Mr. Ellery Queen stood still outside the door of his room and looked quietly about, as if searching for some one.
“Murch,” he said in a calm, penetrating voice. The detective ran up. “The fire!” he cried wildly. “Where the hell’s the fire?”
“Have you seen Mrs. Royce?”
“Mrs. Royce? Hell, no!” He ran back up the hall, and Ellery followed on his heels, thoughtfully. Murch tried the knob of a door; the door was locked. “God, she may be asleep, or overcome by—”
“Well, then,” said Ellery through his teeth as he stepped back, “stop yowling and help me break this door down. We don’t want her frying in her own lard, you know.”
In the darkness, in the evil smoke, they hurled themselves at the door….At the fourth assault it splintered off its hinges and Ellery sprang through. An electric torch in his hand flung its powerful beam about the room, wavered….Something struck it from Ellery’s hand, and it splintered on the floor. The next moment Ellery was fighting for his life.
His adversary was a brawny, panting demon with muscular fingers that sought his throat. He wriggled about, coolly, seeking an armhold. Behind him Murch was yelling: “Mrs. Royce! It’s only us!”
Something sharp and cold flicked over Ellery’s cheek and left a burning line. Ellery found a naked arm. He twisted, hard, and there was a clatter as steel fell to the floor. Then Murch came to his senses and jumped in. A county trooper blundered in, fumbling with his electric torch….Ellery’s fist drove in, hard, to a fat stomach. Fingers relaxed from his throat. The trooper found the electric switch….
Mrs. Royce, trembling violently, lay on the floor beneath the two men. On a chair nearby lay, in a mountain of Victorian clothing, a very odd and solid-looking contraption that might have been a rubber brassière. And something was wrong with her hair; she seemed to have been partially scalped.
Ellery cursed softly and yanked. Her scalp came away in a piece, revealing a pink gray-fringed skull.
“She’s a man!” screamed Murch.
“Thus,” said Ellery grimly, holding Mrs. Royce’s throat firmly with one hand and with the other dabbing at his bloody cheek, “vindicating the powers of thought.”
“I still don’t understand,” complained Mason the next morning, as the chauffeur drove him and Ellery back to the city, “how you guessed, Queen.”
Ellery raised his eyebrows. “Guessed? My dear Mason, that’s considered an insult at the Queen Hearth. There was no guesswork whatever involved. Matter of pure reasoning. And a neat job, too,” he added reflectively, touching the thin scar on his cheek.
“Come, come, Queen,” smiled the lawyer, “I’ve never really believed McC.’s panegyrics on what he calls your uncanny ability to put two and two together; and though I’m not unintelligent and my legal training gives me a mental advantage over the layman and I’ve just been treated presumably to a demonstration of your—er—powers, I’ll be blessed if I yet believe.”
“A skeptic, eh?” said Ellery, wincing at the pain in his cheek. “Well, then, let’s start where I started—with the beard Dr. Arlen painted on the face of Rembrandt’s wife just before he was attacked. We’ve agreed that he deliberately painted in the beard to leave a clue to his murderer. What could he have meant? He was not pointing to a specific woman, using the beard just as an attention-getter; for the woman in the painting was the wife of Rembrandt, a historical figure and as far as our personæ went an utter unknown. Nor could Arlen have meant to point to a woman with a beard literally; for this would have meant a freak, and there were no freaks involved. Nor was he pointing to a bearded man, for there was a man’s face on the painting which he left untouched; had he meant to point to a bearded man as his murderer that is, to John Shaw—he would have painted the beard on Rembrandt’s beardless face. Besides, Shaw’s is a vandyke, a pointed beard; and the beard Arlen painted was squarish in shape….You see how exhaustive it is possible to be, Mason.”
“Go on,” said the lawyer intently.
“The only possible conclusion, then, all others having been eliminated, was that Arlen meant the beard merely to indicate masculinity, since facial hair is one of the few exclusively masculine characteristics left to our sex by dear, dear Woman. In other words, by painting a beard on a woman’s face—any woman’s face, mark—Dr. Arlen was virtually saying: ‘My murderer is a person who seems to be a woman but is really a man.’ ”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” gasped Mason.
“No doubt,” nodded Ellery. “Now, ‘a person who seems to be a woman but is really a man’ suggests, surely, impersonation. The only actual stranger at the house was Mrs. Royce. Neither John nor Agatha could be impersonators, since they were both well-known to Dr. Arlen as well as to you; Arlen had examined them periodically, in fact, for years as the personal physician of the household. As for Miss Krutch, aside from her unquestionable femininity—a ravishing young woman, my dear Mason—she could not possibly have had motive to be an impersonator.
“Now, since Mrs. Royce seemed the likeliest possibility, I thought over the infinitesimal phenomena I had observed connected with her person—that is, appearance and movements. I was amazed to find a vast number of remarkable confirmations!”
“Confirmations?” echoed Mason, frowning.
“Ah, Mason, that’s the trouble with skeptics: they’re so easily confounded. Of course! lips constitute a strong difference between the sexes: Mrs. Royce’s were shaped meticulously into a perfect Cupid’s-bow with lipstick. Suspicious in an old woman. The general overuse of cosmetics, particularly the heavy application of face powder: very suspicious, when you consider that overpowdering is not common among genteel old ladies and also that a man’s skin, no matter how closely and frequently shaved, is undisguisably coarser.
“Clothes? Really potent confirmation. Why on earth that outlandish Victorian get-up? Here was presumably a woman who had been on the stage, presumably a woman of the world, a sophisticate. And yet she wore those horrible doodads of the ’90s. Why? Obviously, to swathe and disguise a padded figure—impossible with woman’s thin, scanty, and clinging modern garments. And the collar—ah, the collar! That was his inspiration. A choker, you’ll recall, concealing the entire neck? But since a prominent Adam’s-apple is an inescapable heritage of the male, a choker-collar becomes virtually a necessity in a female impersonation. Then the baritone voice, the vigorous movements, the mannish stride, the flat shoes….The shoes were especially illuminating. Not only were they flat, but they showed signs of great bunions—and a man wearing woman’s shoes, no matter how large, might well be expected to grow those painful excrescences.”
“Even if I grant all that,” objected Mason, “still they’re generalities at best, might even be coincidences when you’re arguing from a conclusion. Is that all?” He seemed disappointed.
“By no means,” drawled Ellery. “These were, as you say, the generalities. But your cunning Mrs. Royce was addicted to three habits which are exclusively masculine, without argument. For one thing, when she sat down on my second sight of her she elevated her skirts at the knees with both hands; that is, one to each knee. Now that’s precisely what a man does when he sits down: raises his trousers; to prevent, I suppose, their bagging at the knees.”
“But—”
“Wait. Did you notice the way she screwed up her right eyebrow constantly, raising it far up and then drawing it far down? What could this have been motivated by except the lifelong use of a monocle? And a monocle is masculine….And finally, her peculiar habit, in removing a cigaret from her lips, of cupping her hand about it rather than withdrawing it between the forefinger and middle finger, as most cigaret-smokers do. But the cupping gesture is precisely the result of pipe-smoking, for a man cups his hands about the bowl of a pipe in taking it out of his mouth. Man again. When I balanced these three specific factors on the same side of the scale as those generalities, I felt certain Mrs. Royce was a male.
“What male? Well that was simplest of all. You had told me, for one thing, that when you and your partner Collidge quizzed her she had shown a minute knowledge of Shaw history and specifically of Edith Shaw’s history. On top of that, it took histrionic ability to carry off this female impersonation. Then there was the monocle deduction—England, surely? And the strong family resemblance. So I knew that ‘Mrs. Royce,’ being a Shaw undoubtedly, and an English Shaw to boot, was the other Shaw of the Morton side of the family—that is, Edith Shaw’s brother Percy!”
“But she—he, I mean,” cried Mason, “had told me Percy Shaw died a few months ago in Europe in an automobile accident!”
“Dear, dear,” said Ellery sadly, “and a lawyer, too. She lied, that’s all!—I mean ‘he,’ confound it. Your legal letter was addressed to Edith Shaw, and Percy received it, since they probably shared the same establishment. If he received it, it was rather obvious, wasn’t it, that it was Edith Shaw who must have died shortly before; and that Percy had seized the opportunity to gain a fortune for himself by impersonating her?”
“But why,” demanded Mason, puzzled, “did he kill Dr. Arlen? He had nothing to gain—Arlen’s money was destined for Shaw’s cousins, not for Percy Shaw. Do you mean there was some past connection—”
“Not at all,” murmured Ellery. “Why look for past connections when the motive’s slick and shiny at hand? If Mrs. Royce was a man, the motive was at once apparent. Under the terms of Mrs. Shaw’s will Arlen was periodically to examine the family, with particular attention to Mrs. Royce. And Agatha Shaw told me yesterday that Mrs. Royce was constrained by will to remain in the house for two years. Obviously, then, the only way Percy Shaw could avert the cataclysm of being examined by Dr. Arlen and his disguise penetrated—for a doctor would have seen the truth instantly on examination, of course—was to kill Arlen. Simple, nein?”
“But the beard Arlen drew—that meant he had seen through it?”
“Not unaided. What probably happened was that the impostor, knowing the first physical examination impended, went to Dr. Arlen the other night to strike a bargain, revealing himself as a man. Arlen, an honest man, refused to be bribed. He must have been painting at the time and, thinking fast, unable to rouse the house because he was so far away from the others, unable to paint his assailant’s name because ‘Mrs. Royce’ would see it and destroy it, thought of Peter’s beard, made the lightning connection, and calmly painted it while ‘Mrs. Royce’ talked to him. Then he was stabbed.”
“And the previous poisoning attempt on Mrs. Shaw?”
“That,” said Ellery, “undoubtedly lies between John and Agatha.”
Mason was silent, and for some time they rode in peace. Then the lawyer stirred, and sighed, and said: “Well, all things considered, I suppose you should thank Providence. Without concrete evidence—your reasoning was unsupported by legal evidence, you realize that, of course, Queen—you could scarcely have accused Mrs. Royce of being a man, could you? Had you been wrong, what a beautiful suit she could have brought against you! That fire last night was an act of God.”
“I am,” said Ellery calmly, “above all, my dear Mason, a man of free will. I appreciate acts of God when they occur, but I don’t sit around waiting for them. Consequently…”
“You mean—” gasped Mason, opening his mouth wide.
“A telephone call, a hurried trip by Sergeant Velie, and smoke-bombs were the materia for breaking into Mrs. Royce’s room in the dead of night,” said Ellery comfortably. “By the way, you don’t by any chance know the permanent address of—ah—Miss Krutch?”