The King is Dead (7 page)

They came upon King Bendigo's home suddenly.

They could see only a little of it because of the trees and shrubs which choked it. The landscaping was positively untidy. Some of the trees were taller than the buildings, and there were heavy branches that actually brushed windows. Even the towers had been so treated that, while they were visible against the sky from the ground, to an airborne eye they must blend into the greenery.

Secrecy again. The original planners had probably been responsible for the camouflage, but then why, when he leased the island, hadn't Bendigo had these trees and the encroaching underbrush cleared away? Was he afraid someone would try to take his precious mid-ocean anchorage away from him?

The Residence stood only four storeys high, like the Home Office, but it covered a wider area. The section immediately before them would have been a courtyard had it not been overgrown with shrubbery planted at random. Even the paved driveway ran between two erratic files of trees whose upper branches twined overhead to form a ceiling. Embracing all of this were two projections of the building, running outward from a sort of parent body. From the angle formed by the arms, Ellery suspected others. Brown Shirt, who remained spokesman of the duo, confirmed this and explained the oddity of the architecture. The building was constructed on a plan similar to that of the Home Office, except that where the Home Office had eight arms, the Residence had five.

They were received in a great hall by flunkies in livery. Black and gold. With knee breeches and stocks. The Inspector goggled.

Here, at least, the functional temporized with fussier modes.

The furniture was massively modern, but there were medieval French and Swedish tapestries on the walls and a sprinkling of old masters among new, the new chiefly abstractions. Everything in the hall was immense, the hall itself being three storeys high; and it was only here and there that one saw a traditional object — such as the classic canvases — as if someone in the household insisted on at least a smattering of an older environment.

A footman conducted them through one of the five portals into a wing, and just inside this corridor Blue Shirt indicated a small elevator. They were whisked up one floor, and they got out to be marched along a soundless hall to a door. The door was open. In the doorway, dwarfed by its dimensions, stood a small man in a black suit and a wing collar. He bowed.

‘This is your valet,' said Brown Shirt. ‘Whatever you need to supplement what you've brought with you, gentlemen, just inform this man and he'll provide it at once.'

‘Jeeves?' said Ellery tentatively.

‘No sir,' said the valet Britannically. ‘Jones.'

‘Your point, Jones. Does protocol demand evening clothes at dinner?'

‘No, sir,' said the valet. ‘Except on given occasions, dining is informal. Dark suit and four-in-hand.'

‘They'll take my tan gaberdine and like it,' said the Inspector.

‘Yes, yes, Dad,' said Ellery soothingly. ‘Here, Jones, where are you off to?'

‘To draw your tubs, sir,' said Jones; and he sedately vanished.

The Queens turned to find the Shirts receding shoulder to shoulder.

‘Here, wait!' cried the Inspector. ‘When do we get to see —?'

But they were already far down the corridor.

Their sitting-room was almost a grand salon, and the two bedrooms were magnificent affairs with lofty ceilings, canopied beds, and historic-looking furnishings. Here, at least, the
décor
was traditional —
ancien régime
, as cluttered with gingerbread as any suite in the Tuileries under the Grand Monarch. Fortunately, as Ellery hastened to discover, tradition did not extend to the sanitary arrangements; but he was amused to find the telephones discreetly hidden in buhl cabinets whose surfaces were intricately inlaid with gold, tortoise-shell, and some white metal in the scrollwork, cartouches, and curlicues so dear to the times of Louis Quatorze.

Inspector Queen was not amused at all. He went about from room to room antagonistically examining the grandeur into which they had been thrust; and he reserved his most hostile glare for the valet, who was patiently awaiting an opportunity to undress him. To avoid a homicide, Ellery conveyed Jones to the door.

They bathed, shaved, and dressed in fresh clothes from their suitcases, and then they waited. There was nothing else to do, for they could find no newspapers and the magnificent leather-bound books turned out to be discouraging eighteenth-century works in French and Latin. And from the windows nothing could be seen but foliage. The Inspector occupied himself for some time searching the suite for a secret transmitter, which he was positive was planted somewhere in the sitting room; but after a while he grew tired of even this diversion and began fuming.

‘Damn it, what kind of runaround is this? What are we supposed to do, rot here? I'm going downstairs, Ellery!'

‘Let's wait, Dad. All this has a purpose.'

‘To starve us out!'

But Ellery was frowning over a cigarette. ‘I wonder why we've been brought to the island.'

The Inspector stared.

‘Abel hires us to investigate a couple of threatening letters received, he says, through the mail. The mail undoubtedly is flown here daily from the mainland by Bendigo's planes. If those letters came through the mail, then, they emanated from the mainland. Why, then, does Abel ask us to investigate
on the island
?'

‘Because he thinks the letters came from the island!'

‘Exactly. Someone's slipping them into the pouches or into the already sorted Residence or Home Office mail.' Ellery ground out his cigarette in a Royal Sèvres dish which was probably worth more than he had in the bank. ‘Which somebody? A clerk? Secretary? Footman? Guard? Factory hand? Lab worker? For anyone like that, the Prime Minister doesn't have to make a special trip to New York, with a side visit to Washington, to engage the services of a couple of outsiders. That kind of job could be polished off by Colonel Spring's department in about two hours flat.'

‘So it gets down to … what?' Ellery looked up. ‘To somebody big, Dad.'

But the Inspector was shaking his head. ‘The bigger the game, the less likelihood that Bendigo would call in an outsider.'

‘That's right.'

‘That's right? But you just said —'

‘That's right, and that's wrong, too. So none of it sets on the stomach. In fact,' and Ellery fumbled for another cigarette, ‘I'm positively bilious.'

That was when the telephone tinkled and Ellery leaped to answer it, almost knocking his father down. Abel Bendigo's calm twang said he was terribly sorry but his brother King was being a bit difficult this evening and in Abel's considered judgement it would be a lot smarter not to press matters at the moment. If the Queens didn't mind dining alone …?

‘Of course not, Mr. Bendigo, but we're anxious to get going on the investigation.'

‘Tomorrow will be better,' said the Yankee voice in the tones of a physician soothing a fretful patient.

‘Are we to wait in these rooms for your call?'

‘Oh, no, Mr. Queen. Do anything you like, go anywhere you please. I'll find you when I want you.' Perhaps to get by the ironical implications of this statement, the Prime Minister said hurriedly, ‘Good night,' and hung up.

Dinner was served in their suite from warming ovens and other portable paraphernalia by a butler and three serving-men under the cadaver's eye of a perfect official who introduced himself as the Chief Steward of the Residence and thereafter uttered not a single word.

It was like dining in a tomb, and the Queens did not enliven the occasion. They ate in silence, exactly what they could not afterward recall except that it was rich, saucy, and French, in keeping with the
décor
.

Then, in the same nervous silence, and because there was nothing else to do, they went to bed.

There was no note from Abel Bendigo on their plates the next morning, and the telephone failed to ring. So after breakfast Ellery proposed a tour of the Residence.

The Inspector, however, had developed a pugnacious jaw. ‘I'm going to see how far they'll let me go. Where do you suppose the royal garage is?'

‘Garage?'

‘I'm borrowing a car.'

He went out, his jaw preceding him, and Ellery did not see him until late afternoon.

Ellery prowled about the five-armed building alone. It took him all morning to make its acquaintance. Certainly he made the acquaintance of nothing more animate, for he saw none of the Bendigo family during his tour and the servants in livery and minor officials of the household whom he ran across ignored him with suspicious unanimity.

He was stopped only once, and that was on the top floor of the central building. Here there were armed guards in uniform, and their captain was politely inflexible.

‘These are the private apartments of the family, sir. No one is allowed to enter except by special permission.'

‘Well, of course I shouldn't want to blunder into anyone's bathroom, but I was given to understand by Mr. Abel Bendigo that I could go anywhere.'

‘I have received no orders to admit you to this floor, Mr. Queen.'

So Ellery meekly went back to the lowlier regions.

He looked in on the state dining-room, the grand ballroom, salons, reception rooms, trophy rooms, galleries, kitchens, wine cellars, servants' quarters, storerooms, even closets. There was an oak-and-leather library of twenty thousand volumes, uniformly bound in black Levant morocco and stamped with the twin-globes-and-crown, which more and more took on the colour of a coat-of-arms. The standardization of the books themselves, many of them rare editions raped of their original bindings, made Ellery cringe. None that he sampled showed the least sign of use.

Shortly before noon Ellery found himself in a music salon, dominated by a platform at one end large enough to accommodate a symphony orchestra. In the centre of this stage glittered a concert grand piano sheathed in gold. Wondering if this splendid instrument was in tune, Ellery climbed to the platform, opened the piano, and struck middle C. An unmusical clank answered him. He struck a chord in the middle register. This time the horrid jangle that resulted impressed him as far too extreme to be accounted for by mere neglect, and he raised the top of the piano.

Six sealed bottles, identical in every respect, lay in a neat row on the strings.

He took one out with curiosity. It was bell-shaped, with a slender neck, and of very dark green glass, so dark as to be opaque. The antiqued label identified the contents as
Segonzac V.S.O.P. Cognac
. The heavy seal was unbroken, as were the seals of its five brothers, at which Ellery sighed. He had never had the good fortune to savour Segonzac Very Special Old Pale Cognac, for the excellent reason that Segonzac Very Special Old Pale Cognac was priced — where it could be found at all — at almost fifty dollars the bottle. He replaced the heavy glass bell on its harmonious bed and lowered the top of the grand piano with reverence.

A man who cached six bottles of cognac in a grand piano was an alcoholic. The middle Bendigo brother, Judah, had been reported by the Inspector's military
tête-à-tête
as an alcoholic. It seemed a reasonable conclusion that this was Judah Bendigo's cache. The incident also told something of the musicality of the Bendigo household, but since this was of a piece with the evidence of the library, Ellery was not surprised.

Apparently Judah Bendigo scorned his brother's vineyards. Unless the Segonzac label was another possession of the all-powerful King … It was a point Ellery never did clear up.

The discovery in the music salon led Ellery to poke and pry. An alcoholic who hides bottles in one place will hide them in another. He was not disappointed.

He found bottles of Segonzac V.S.O.P. hidden everywhere he looked. Seven turned up in the gymnasium, four around the hundred-foot indoor swimming pool. Ellery found them in the billiard room and the bowling alley. He found them in the card-room. And on one of the terraces, where he lunched in solitude, Ellery felt the flagstone under his left foot give and, on investigating, stared down at another of the bell-shaped bottles nestling in a scooped-out hole beneath the flag.

In the afternoon he toured the vicinity of the Residence. Wherever he went he turned up the dark green evidence of Judah Bendigo's ingenuity. The outdoor swimming pool, cleverly constructed to resemble a natural pond, was good for eight bottles, and Ellery could not be sure he had found them all. He did not bother with the stables — there were too many grooms about — but he took an Arab mare out on the bridle path and he made it a point to probe tree hollows and investigate overhead tree crotches, with rewarding results. Another artificial stream, this one stocked with game fish, was a disappointment; but Ellery suspected that if he had worn hip-boots he could have waded in any direction through the broken water and found a bottle wedged between the nearest rocks.

‘And I didn't begin to find them all,' he told his father that evening, in their sitting-room. ‘Judah must carry a map around with him, X marking the spots. There's a man who likes his brandy.'

‘You might have lifted a couple of bottles,' grumbled the Inspector. ‘I've had a miserable day.'

‘Well?'

‘Oh, I putt-putted around the island. Isn't that what a tourist is supposed to do?' And while he said this, in a tone of lifelessness, the Inspector rather remarkably took a roll of papers from an inner pocket and waved them at his son.

‘I will admit,' said his son, eyeing the papers, ‘this enforced vacation is beginning to bore me, too.' He leaned forward and took the papers. ‘When do you suppose our investigation begins?'

‘Never, from the look of things.'

‘What's the island like, Dad?' Ellery unrolled several of the papers noiselessly. Each showed a hasty sketch of an industrial plant. Others were rough detail maps.