The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (18 page)

“Well,” said Cooper with a sneer, “I suppose that mess of statistics means something to you.”

“This mess of statistics,” said Ellery gravely, pocketing the receipt, “means everything to me. Pity if it had been lost. It's like the Rosetta Stone—it's the key to an otherwise mystifying set of facts.” He looked pleased with himself, and at the same time his gray eyes were watchful. “The old adage was wrong. It isn't safety that you find in numbers, but enlightenment.”

Gallant threw up his hands. “You're talking gibberish, Queen.”

“I'm talking sense.” Ellery stopped smiling. “You gentlemen are excused. By all means the Chief of Police must be called—but it's I who'll call him and, by your leave … alone.”

“I was not to be cheated of my tidbit of
bizarrerie
,” announced Mr. Ellery Queen that evening, “after all.” He was serene and self-contained. He was perched on the edge of the study desk, and his hand played with the belly of the obsidian image.

Cooper, Miss Merrivel, the two Gallants stared at him. They were all in the last stages of nervousness. The house was rocking again, and the dragon quivered in all his coils in the wind coming through the open window; and the Samurai had magically taken watchful life unto himself once more. The sky through the window was dark and dappled with blacker clouds; the moon had not yet slipped from under the hem of the sea.

Ellery had departed from the Kagiwa mansion after his telephonic conversation with the Chief of Police, to be seen no more by interested mortal eyes until evening. When he had returned, there were men with him. These men, quiet and solid creatures, had not come into the house. No one had approached the Gallants, the secretary, the nurse, the servants. Instead the deputation had disappeared, swallowed up by the darkness. Now strange clankings and swishings were audible from the sea outside the study window, but no one dared rise and look.

And Ellery said: “‘What a world were this, how unendurable its weight, if they whom Death had sundered did not meet again.' A moving thought. And very apt on this occasion. We shall meet Death tonight, my friends; and even more strangely, the weight shall be lifted. As Southey predicted.”

They gaped, utterly bewildered. From the night outside the clankings and swishings continued, and occasionally there was the far shout of a man.

Ellery lit a cigarette. “I find,” he said, inhaling deeply, “that once more I have been in error. I demonstrated to you this morning that the most likely reason for the theft of the doorstop was that it was stolen for its contents. I was wrong. It was not stolen for its contents. It was never intended that the belly of the dragon should be ravished.”

“But the fifty thousand dollars—” began Miss Merrivel weakly.

“Mr. Queen,” cried Bill Gallant, “what's going on here? What are those policemen doing outside? What are those noises? You owe us—”

“Logic,” murmured Ellery, “has a way of being slippery. Quite like soapstone, Mr. Gallant. It eluded my fingers today. I pointed out that the doorstop could
not
have been stolen for itself. I was wrong again. It could have been stolen for itself in one remote contingency. There was one value possible to the doorstop beyond its worth in dollars and cents, or in a sentiment attached to it, or in its significance as a symbol. And that was—
its utility
.”

“Utility?” gasped Cooper. “You mean somebody stole it to use as a doorstop?”

“That's absurd, of course. But there is still another possible utility, Mr. Cooper. What are the characteristics of this piece of carved stone which might be made use of? Well, what are its chief points physically? Its substance and weight. It is stone, and it weighs forty-four pounds.”

Gallant made a queer brushing-aside gesture with one hand and rose as if under compulsion and went to the window. The others wavered, and then they too rose and went to the window, pressing eagerly toward the last, their pent-up fears and curiosity urging them on. Ellery watched them quietly.

The moon was rising now. The scene below was blue-black and sharp, a miniature etching in motion. A large rowboat was anchored a few yards from the rear of the Kagiwa house. There were men in it, and apparatus. Someone was leaning overside, gazing intently into the water. The surface suddenly quickened into concentric life, becoming violently agitated. A man's dripping head appeared, open mouth sucking in air. And then, half-nude, he climbed into the boat and said something, and the apparatus creaked, and a rope emerged from the blue-black water and began to wind about a small winch.

“But why,” came Ellery's voice from behind them, “should an object be stolen because it is stone and weighs forty-four pounds? Regarded in this light, the view became brilliantly clear. A man was mysteriously and inexplicably missing—a sick, defenseless, wealthy old man. A heavy stone was missing. And there was the sea at his back door. Put one, two, and three together and you have—”

Someone shouted hoarsely from the boat. In the full moon a dripping mass emerged from the water at the end of the rope. As it was pulled into the boat the silver light revealed it as a mass made up of three parts. One was a suitcase. Another was a small rectangular chunk of stone with carving on it. And the third was the stiff naked body of a little old man with yellow skin and slanted eyes.

“And you have,” continued Ellery sharply, slipping from the edge of the desk and poking the muzzle of an automatic into the small of Bill Gallant's rigid back, “the murderer of Jito Kagiwa!”

The shouts of the triumphant fishers made meaningless sound in the old Japanese's study, and Bill Gallant without turning or moving a muscle said in a dead voice: “You damned devil. How did you know?”

Miss Letitia's bitter mouth opened and closed without achieving the dignity of speech.

“I knew,” said Ellery, holding the automatic quite still, “because I knew that the doorstop had no hollow at all, that it was a piece of solid stone.”

“You couldn't have known that. You never saw it. You were guessing. Besides, you said—”

“That's the second time you have accused me of guessing,” said Ellery in an aggrieved tone. “I assure you, my dear Mr. Gallant, that I did nothing of the sort. But knowing that the doorstop was solid, I knew that you had lied when you maintained that you had seen with your own eyes Kagiwa's withdrawal of the dragon ‘plug,' that you had seen the ‘cavity' and the ‘money' in it. And so I asked myself why such an obviously distressed and charming gentleman had lied. And I saw that it could only have been because you had something to conceal and were sure the doorstop would never be found to give you the lie.”

The waters were stilling under the moon.

“But to be sure that the doorstop would never be found, you had to know where the doorstop was. To know where it was, you had to be the person who had disposed of it after striking Miss Merrivel over the head and stealing it from this room, unconsciously making that slithery, dragonish sound in the process which was merely the scuffing of your shoes in the thick pile of this rug. But the person who disposed of the doorstop was the person who disposed of the carcass of gentle little Jito Kagiwa; which is to say, the murderer. No, no, my dear Gallant; be fair. It wasn't precisely guesswork.”

Miss Merrivel said in a ghastly voice: “Mr. Gallant. I can't—But why did you do this awful—awful …”

“I think I can tell you that,” sighed Ellery. “It was apparent to me, when I saw that his story of the cache in the doorstop was a lie, that he had probably planned to tell that ingenious story from the beginning. Why? One reason might have been to cover up the real motive for the theft of the carved piece; divert the trail from its use as a mere weight for a dead body to a fabricated use as the receptacle of a fortune, and its theft for that reason. But why the lie about the fifty thousand dollars? Why so detailed, so specific, so careful? Was it because you had embezzled fifty thousand dollars from your stepfather's business, Mr. Gallant, knew that the discovery of this shortage was imminent, and therefore created a figmentary thief who last night stole the money which you had stolen and dissipated possibly months ago?”

Bill Gallant was silent.

“And so you built up a series of events,” murmured Ellery. “You arranged the old gentleman's bedclothes during the night to form a human figure, as if he had done it himself. You threw some clothes of his in one of his suitcases, as if he had planned to flee. In fact, you arranged the whole thing to give the impression that Mr. Kagiwa, whose business I have no doubt is shaky—largely due to your peculations—had cut loose from his Occidental surroundings once and for all time and vanished into the mysterious Orient from which he had come … with the remnants of his fortune. In this way there would be no body to look for, no murder, indeed, to suspect; and you yourself would escape the consequences of your original crime of grand larceny. For you knew that, like all honorable and gentle men, your stepfather, who had given you everything, would forgive everything except your crime against honor. Had Mr. Kagiwa discovered your larceny, all would have been lost.”

But Bill Gallant said nothing to these inexorable words; he was still staring out the window where nothing more was to be seen except the quieting water. The rowboat, the stone, the suitcase, the dead body, the men had vanished.

And Ellery nodded at that paralyzed back with something like sad satisfaction.

“And the inheritance,” muttered Cooper. “Of course, he was the heir. Clever, clever.”

“Stupid,” said Ellery gently, “stupid. All crime is stupid.”

Gallant said in the same dead voice: “I still think you were guessing about the doorstop being solid,” as if he were engaged in a polite difference of opinion. Ellery was not fooled. His grip tightened on the automatic. The window was open and the water might look inviting to a desperate man, for whom even death would be an escape.

“No, no,” said Ellery, almost protesting. “Please give the devil his due. It was all obscure to me, you know, until on my way out I thought of the fact that the doorstop was made of soapstone. I knew soapstone to be fairly heavy. I knew the piece was almost perfectly regular in shape, and therefore admissible to elementary calculation. It was conceivable that I could test the accuracy of your statement that the doorstop was hollow. And so I came back and asked to consult an almanac. Once I had run across in such a reference book a list of the weights of common minerals. I looked up soapstone. And there it was.”

“There what was?” asked Gallant almost with curiosity.

“The almanac said that 1 cubic foot of soapstone weighs between 162 and 175 pounds. The doorstop was of soap-stone; what were its dimensions? Six by six by twelve inches, or 432 cubic inches. In other words, one-quarter of a cubic foot. Or, by computing from the almanac's figures and allowing for the small additional weight of the shallow bas-relief dragons, the doorstop should weigh one-quarter of the cubic-foot poundage, which is forty-four pounds.”

“But that's what the receipt said,” muttered Cooper.

“Quite so. But what do these forty-four pounds represent? They represent forty-four pounds of
solid
soap-stone! Mr. Gallant had said the doorstop was
not
solid, had a hollow inside large enough to hold fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. That's five hundred bills. Any space large enough to contain five hundred bills, no matter how tightly rolled or compressed, would make the total weight of the doorstop considerably
less
than forty-four pounds. And so I knew that the doorstop was solid and that Mr. Gallant had lied.”

Heavy feet tramped outside. Suddenly the room was full of men. The corpse of Jito Kagiwa was deposited on a divan, naked and yellow as old marble, where it dripped quietly, almost apologetically. Bill Gallant was turned about, still frozen, and they saw that his eyes, too, were dead as they regarded the corpse … as if for the first time the enormity of what he had done had struck home.

Ellery took the heavy doorstop, glistening from the sea, from the hand of a policeman and turned it over in his fingers. And he looked up at the wall and smiled in friendly fashion at the dragon, which was now obviously a pretty thing of silk and golden threads and nothing more.

The Adventure of the House of Darkness

“And this,” proclaimed Monsieur Dieudonné Duval with a deprecatory twirl of his mustache, “is of an ingenuity incomparable, my friend. It is not that I should say so, perhaps. But examine it. Is it not the—how do you say—the pip?”

Mr. Ellery Queen wiped his neck and sat down on a bench facing the little street of amusements. “It is indeed,” he sighed, “the pip, my dear Duval. I quite share your creative enthusiasm.… Djuna, for the love of mercy! Sit still.” The afternoon sun was tropical and his whites had long since begun to cling.

“Let's go on it,” suggested Djuna hopefully.

“Let's not and say we did,” groaned Mr. Queen, stretching his weary legs. He had promised Djuna this lark all summer, but he had failed to reckon with the Law of Diminishing Returns. He had already—under the solicitous wing of Monsieur Duval, that tireless demon of the scenic-designing art; one of the variegated hundreds of his amazing acquaintanceship—partaken of the hectic allurements of Joyland Amusement Park for two limb-rending hours, and they had taken severe toll of his energy. Djuna, of course, what with excitement, sheer pleasure, and indefatigable youth, was a law unto himself; he was still as fresh as the breeze blowing in from the sea.

“You will find it of the most amusing,” said Monsieur Duval eagerly, showing his white teeth. “It is my
chef-d'oeuvre
in Joyland.” Joyland was something new to the county, a model amusement park meticulously landscaped and offering a variety of ingenious entertainments and mechanical divertissements—planned chiefly by Duval—not to be duplicated anywhere along the Atlantic. “A house of darkness … That, my friend, was an inspiration!”