The Oxford Book of American Det (99 page)

“We intend to split the $65,000 payment to Miss DiCampo,” said Harbidger, “and take joint ownership of the two pieces.”

“An arrangement,” growled old Tungsten, “I’m against on principle, in practice, and by plain horse sense.”

“So am I,” sighed the Lincoln collector, “but what else can we do?”

“Well,” and the Poe man regarded Bianca DiCampo with the icy intimacy of the cat that long ago marked the bird as its prey, “Miss DiCampo, who now owns the two pieces, is quite free to renegotiate a sale on her own terms.”

“Miss DiCampo,” said Miss DiCampo, giving Tungston stare for stare, “considers herself bound by her father’s wishes. His terms stand.”

“In all likelihood then,” said the other millionaire, “one of us will retain the book, the other the document, and we’ll exchange them every year, or some such thing.” Harbidger sounded unhappy.

“Only practical arrangement under the circumstances,” grunted Tungston, and he sounded unhappy. “But all this is academic, Queen, unless and until the book and document are found.”

Ellery nodded. “The problem, then, is to fathom DiCampo’s interpretation of that 30d in the document. 30d... I notice, Miss DiCampo—or, may I? Bianca?—that your father’s typewritten copy of the Lincoln holograph text runs the 3 and 0 and d together—no spacing in between. Is that the way it occurs in the longhand?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Still... 30d... Could d stand for
days
... or the British
pence
... or
died,
as used in obituaries? Does any of these make sense to you, Bianca?”

“No.”

“Did your father have any special interest in, say, pharmacology? chemistry? physics?

algebra? electricity? Small d is an abbreviation used in all those.” But Bianca shook her splendid head. “Banking? Small d for
dollars, dividends?”

“Hardly,” the girl said with a sad smile.

“How about theatricals? Was your father ever involved in a play production? Small d stands for
door
in playscript stage directions.”

“Mr. Queen, I’ve gone through every darned abbreviation my dictionary lists, and I haven’t found one that has a point of contact with any interest of my father’s.” Ellery scowled. “At that—I assume the typewritten copy is accurate—the manuscript shows no period after the d, making an abbreviation unlikely. 30d... let us concentrate on the number. Does the number 30 have any significance for you?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Bianca, making all three men sit up. But then they sank back. “In a few years it will represent my age, and that has enormous significance. But only for me, I’m afraid.”

“You’ll be drawing wolf whistles at twice thirty,” quoth Ellery warmly. “However!

Could the number have cross-referred to anything in your father’s life or habits?”

“None that I can think of, Mr. Queen. And,” Bianca said, having grown roses in her cheeks, “thank you.”

“I think,” said old Tungsten testily, “we had better stick to the subject.”

“Just the same, Bianca, let me run over some ‘thirty’ associations as they come to mind. Stop me if one of them hits a nerve. The Thirty Tyrants—was your father interested in classical Athens? Thirty Years War—in Seventeenth Century European history? Thirty all—did he play or follow tennis? Or... did he ever live at an address that included the number 30?”

Ellery went on and on, but to each suggestion Bianca DiCampo could only shake her head.

“The lack of spacing, come to think of it, doesn’t necessarily mean that Mr. DiCampo chose to view the clue that way,” said Ellery thoughtfully. “He might have interpreted it arbitrarily as 3-space-0-d.”

“Three 0d?” echoed old Tungston. “What the devil could that mean?”

“0d? 0d is the hypothetical force or power claimed by Baron von Reichenbach—in 1850, wasn’t it?—to pervade the whole of nature. Manifests itself in magnets, crystals, and such, which according to the excited Baron explained animal magnetism and mesmerism. Was your father by any chance interested in hypnosis, Bianca? Or the occult?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Mr. Queen,” exclaimed Harbidger, “are you serious about all this—this semantic sludge?”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Ellery. “I never know till I stumble over something. Od...

the word was used with prefixes, too—
biod,
the force of animal life;
elod,
the force of electricity; and so forth.
Three
od... or
triod,
the triune force—it’s all right, Mr.

Harbidger, it’s not ignorance on your part, I just coined the word. But it does rather suggest the Trinity, doesn’t it? Bianca, did your father tie up to the Church in a personal, scholarly, or any other way? No? That’s too bad, really, because Od—

capitalised—has been a minced form of the word God since the Sixteenth Century.

Or... you wouldn’t happen to have three Bibles on the premises, would you?

Because—“

Ellery stopped with the smashing abruptness of an ordinary force meeting an absolutely immovable object. The girl and the two collectors gawped. Bianca had idly picked up the typewritten copy of the Lincoln document. She was not reading it, she was simply holding it on her knees, but Ellery, sitting opposite her, had shot forward in a crouch, rather like a pointer, and he was regarding the paper in her lap with a glare of pure discovery.

“That’s it!” he cried.

“What’s it, Mr. Queen?” the girl asked, bewildered.

“Please—the transcript!” He plucked the paper from her. “Of course. Hear this: ‘On the other hand, let us regard Mr. Poe’s ‘notion’ turn-about.’ Turn-about. Look at the 30d ‘turn-about’—as I just saw it!”

He turned the Lincoln message upside down for their inspection. In that position the 30d became:

P0£

“Poe!” exploded Tungsten.

“Yes, crude but recognisable,” Ellery said swiftly. “So now we read the Lincoln clue as: The hiding-place of the book is in Poe’!”

There was a silence.

“In Poe,” said Harbidger blankly.

“In Poe?” muttered Tungsten. “There are only a couple of trade editions of Poe in DiCampo’s library, Harbidger, and we went through those. We looked in every book here.”

“He might have meant among the Poe books in the public library. Miss DiCampo—“

“Wait.” Bianca sped away. But when she came back she was drooping. “It isn’t. We have two public libraries in Eulalia, and I know the head librarian in both. I just called them. Father didn’t visit either library.”

Ellery gnawed a fingernail. “Is there a bust of Poe in the house, Bianca? Or any other Poe-associated object, aside from books?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Queer,” he mumbled. “Yet I’m positive your father interpreted ‘the hiding-place of the book’ as being ‘in Poe.’ So he’d have hidden it ‘in Poe’...” Ellery’s mumbling dribbled away into a tormented sort of silence: his eyebrows worked up and down, Groucho Marx-fashion; he pinched the tip of his nose until it was scarlet; he yanked at his unoffending ears; he munched on his lip... until, all at once, his face cleared; and he sprang to his feet. “Bianca, may I use your phone?” The girl could only nod, and Ellery dashed. They heard him telephoning in the entrance hall, although they could not make out the words. He was back in two minutes.

“One thing more,” he said briskly, “and we’re out of the woods. I suppose your father had a key ring or a key case, Bianca? May I have it, please?” She fetched a key case. To the two millionaires it seemed the sorriest of objects, a scuffed and dirty tan leatherette case. But Ellery received it from the girl as if it were an artefact of historic importance from a newly discovered IV Dynasty tomb. He unsnapped it with concentrated love; he fingered its contents like a scientist. Finally he decided on a certain key.

“Wait here!” Thus Mr. Queen; and exit, running.

“I can’t decide,” old Tungsten said after a while, “whether that fellow is a genius or an escaped lunatic.”

Neither Harbidger nor Bianca replied. Apparently they could not decide, either.

They waited through twenty elongated minutes; at the twenty-first they heard his car, champing. All three were in the front doorway as Ellery strode up the walk.

He was carrying a book with a red cover, and smiling. It was a compassionate smile, but none of them noticed.

“You—“ said Bianca, “—found—“ said Tungsten, “—the book!” shouted Harbidger.

“Is the Lincoln holograph in it?”

“It is,” said Ellery. “Shall we all go into the house, where we may mourn in decent privacy?”

“Because,” Ellery said to Bianca and the two quivering collectors as they sat across a refectory table from him, “I have foul news. Mr. Tungsten, I believe you have never actually seen Mr. DiCampo’s book. Will you now look at the Poe signature on the flyleaf?”

The panther claws leaped. There, toward the top of the flyleaf, in faded inkscript, was the signature Edgar Allan Poe.

The claws curled, and old Tungsten looked up sharply. “DiCampo never mentioned that it’s a full autograph—he kept referring to it as ‘the Poe signature.’ Edgar Allan Poe... Why, I don’t know of a single instance after his West Point days when Poe wrote out his middle name in an autograph! And the earliest he could have signed this 1845 edition is obviously when it was published, which was around the fall of 1844. In 1844 he’d surely have abbreviated the ‘Allan,’ signing ‘Edgar A. Poe,’ the way he signed everything! This is a forgery.”

“My God,” murmured Bianca, clearly intending no impiety; she was as pale as Poe’s Lenore. “Is that true, Mr. Queen?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Ellery said sadly. “I was suspicious the moment you told me the Poe signature on the flyleaf contained the ‘Allan.’ And if the Poe signature is a forgery, the book itself can hardly be considered Poe’s own copy.” Harbidger was moaning. “And the Lincoln signature underneath the “Poe, Mr. Queen!

DiCampo never told me it reads Abraham Lincoln—the full Christian name. Except on official documents, Lincoln practically always signed his name ‘A. Lincoln.’ Don’t tell me this Lincoln autograph is a forgery, too?”

Ellery forbore to look at poor Bianca. “I was struck by the ‘Abraham’ as well, Mr.

Harbidger, when Miss DiCampo mentioned it to me, and I came equipped to test it. I have here—“ and Ellery tapped the pile of documents he had taken from his briefcase

“—facsimiles of Lincoln signatures from the most frequently reproduced of the historic documents he signed. Now I’m going to make a precise tracing of the Lincoln signature on the flyleaf of the book—“ he proceeded to do so “—and I shall superimpose the tracing on the various signatures of the authentic Lincoln documents.

So.”

He worked rapidly. On his third superimposition Ellery looked up. “Yes. See here. The tracing of the purported Lincoln signature from the flyleaf fits in minutest detail over the authentic Lincoln signature on this facsimile of the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s a fact of life that’s tripped many a forger that nobody ever writes his name exactly the same way twice. There are always variations. If two signatures are identical, then, one must be a tracing of the other. So the ‘Abraham Lincoln’ signed on this flyleaf can be dismissed without further consideration as a forgery also. It’s a tracing of the Emancipation Proclamation signature.

“Not only was this book not Poe’s own copy; it was never signed—and therefore probably never owned—by Lincoln. However your father came into possession of the book, Bianca, he was swindled.”

It was the measure of Bianca DiCampo’s quality that she said quietly, “Poor, poor father,” nothing more.

Harbidger was poring over the worn old envelope on whose inside appeared the dearly beloved handscript of the Martyr President. “At least,” he muttered, “we have this.”

“Do we?” asked Ellery. “Turn it over, Mr. Harbidger.” Harbidger looked up, scowling. “No! You’re not going to deprive me of this, too!”

“Turn it over,” Ellery repeated in the same gentle way. The Lincoln collector obeyed reluctantly. “What do you see?”

“An authentic envelope of the period! With two authentic Lincoln stamps!”

“Exactly. And the United States has never issued postage stamps depicting living Americans; you have to be dead to qualify. The earliest U.S. stamp showing a portrait of Lincoln went on sale April 15, 1866—a year to the day after his death. Then a living Lincoln could scarcely have used this envelope, with these stamps on it, as writing paper. The document is spurious, too. I am so very sorry, Bianca.” Incredibly, Lorenzo DiCampo’s daughter managed a smile with her “Non importa, signer.” He could have wept for her. As for the two collectors, Harbidger was in shock; but old Tungston managed to croak, “Where the devil did DiCampo hide the book, Queen? And how did you know?”

“Oh, that,” said Ellery, wishing the two old men would go away so that he might comfort this admirable creature. “I was convinced that DiCampo interpreted what we now know was the forger’s, not Lincoln’s, clue, as 30d read upside down; or, crudely, Poe. But ‘the hiding-place of the book is in Poe’ led nowhere.

“So I reconsidered. P, o, e. If those three letters of the alphabet didn’t mean Poe, what could they mean? Then I remembered something about the letter you wrote me, Bianca. You’d used one of your father’s envelopes, on the flap of which appeared his address: Post Office Box 69, Southern District, Eulalia, N.Y. If there was a Southern District in Eulalia, it seemed reasonable to conclude that there were post offices for other points of the compass, too. As, for instance, an Eastern District. Post Office Eastern, P.O. East. P.O.E.”

“Poe!” cried Bianca.

“To answer your question, Mr. Tungston: I phoned the main post office, confirmed the existence of a Post Office East, got directions as to how to get there, looked for a postal box key in Mr. DiCampo’s key case, found the right one, located the box DiCampo had rented especially for the occasion, unlocked it—and there was the book.” He added, hopefully, “And that is that.”

“And that is that,” Bianca said when she returned from seeing the two collectors off.

“I’m not going to cry over an empty milk bottle, Mr. Queen. I’ll straighten out father’s affairs somehow. Right now all I can think of is how glad I am he didn’t live to see the signatures and documents declared forgeries publicly, as they would surely have been when they were expertised.”