The King is Dead (8 page)

‘It's no different from any highly industrialized area in the States. Factories, homes, schools, roads, trucks, planes, people …' The Inspector pointed at the papers vigorously.

Ellery nodded. ‘What kind of factories?'

‘Munitions mostly, I guess. Hell, I don't know. A lot of places had
Restricted
signs on 'em with armed guards and electrified fences and the rest of the claptrap. Couldn't get near 'em.'

There was one series of sketches of rather queer-looking plants, a scale-frame indicating enormous size.

‘Meet anybody interesting?' Ellery pointed to the peculiar sketches and looked inquiring.

‘Just Colonel Spring's lads. The working people seem an unfriendly lot. Or they're shy of strangers. Wouldn't give me the time of day.' The Inspector's reply to the silent part of their conversation was a shrug and a shake of the head. Ellery studied the sketches with a frown.

‘Well, son, I guess I'll take me a bath in that marble lake they gave me to splash around in.' The Inspector rose and took his notes back.

‘I could use one myself.'

His father tucked the papers away in his clothes, and Ellery knew that unless a body search were made, the sketches would not leave their hiding place this side of Washington, D.C.

That night they passed through the gold curtain.

The feat was accomplished by means of a piece of paper. At six o'clock a footman with over-developed calves delivered a velvety purplish envelope, regally square, and backed out with the kind of bow the Inspector had never seen outside a British period movie. The bow indicated that it was hardly necessary to open the envelope. But they did, and they found inside a sheet of richly engraved and monogrammed stationery of the same colour and texture covered with gold ink writing in a firm feminine hand. Inspector Richard Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen were requested to appear in the private apartments of the Bendigo family at 7 p.m. for cocktails and dinner. Dress was informal. The signature was
Karla Bendigo
. There was a postscript: She had heard so much of the Queens from her brother-in-law Abel that she was looking forward with delight to meeting them, and she concluded by apologizing — with what seemed to Ellery significant vagueness — for having been ‘unable to do so until now'.

They had hardly finished reading the invitation before their valet appeared with a dark blue double-breasted man's suit, dully gleaming black shoes, a pair of new black silk socks, and a conservative blue silk necktie. Ellery relieved the man of them and nudged him out before the snarl formed in the Inspector's nose.

‘Try them on, Dad. Chances are they won't fit, and you'll have an excuse for not wearing them.'

They fitted perfectly, even the shoes.

‘All right, wise guy,' growled the Inspector. ‘But the school I was brought up in, if your guests want to show up in their underwear the host strips, too. Who the devil do these people think they are?'

So at five minutes of seven, Ellery in his best oxford grey and the Inspector uneasily elegant in Jones's finery, the Queens left their suite and went upstairs.

Different guards were on duty in the foyer on the top floor. They were under the command of a younger officer, who scrutinized Karla Bendigo's invitation microscopically. Then he stepped back, saluting, and the Queens were passed through the portals, feeling a little as if they ought to remove their shoes and crawl in on their stomachs.

‘That head will roll,' murmured Ellery.

‘Huh?' said his father nervously.

‘If we snitch on him. He didn't fingerprint us.'

They were in a towering reception room full of black iron, hamadryads in marble, giant crystal chandeliers, and overwhelming furniture in the Italian baroque style. Across the room two great doors stood open, flanked by footmen in
rigor mortis
. An especially splendid flunkey wearing white gloves received them with a bow and preceded them to the double door.

‘Inspector Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen.'

‘Just a little snack with the Bendigos,' mumbled the Inspector; then they both stopped short.

Coming to them swiftly across a terrazzo floor was a woman as improbably beautiful as the heroine of a film. But Technicolor could never adequately have reproduced the snowiness of her skin and teeth, the sunset red of her hair, of the tropical green of her eyes. Even allowing for the art, there was a fundamental colour magic that startled, and it enlivened a person that was disquieting in form. A great deal of the person was on display, for she was wearing a strapless dinner gown of very frank décolletage. The gown, of pastel green velvet, sheathed her to the knees; from the knees it flared, like a vase. Despite her colouring, she was not of Northern blood, Ellery decided, because she made him think of Venezia, San Marco, the Adriatic, and the women of the doges. Studying her as she approached, he saw earth in her figure, breeding in her face, and no nonsense in her step. A Titian woman. Fit for a king.

‘Good evening,' she exclaimed, taking their hands. Her voice had the same colouring; it was a vivid contralto, with the merest trace of Southern Europe. She was not so young, Ellery saw, as he had first thought. Early thirties? ‘I am so happy to receive you both. Can you forgive me for having neglected you?'

‘After seeing you, madam,' said Inspector Queen with earnestness, ‘I can forgive you anything.'

‘And to be repaid with gallantry!' She smiled, the slightest smile. ‘And you, Mr. Queen?'

‘Speechless,' said Ellery. Now he saw something else — a sort of grotto deep beneath the sunny seas of her eyes, a place of cold sad shade.

‘I have always adored the flattery of American men. It is so uncomplicated.' Laughing, she took them across the room.

King Bendigo stood at an Italian marble fireplace taller than himself, listening in silence to the conversation of his brother Abel and three other men. The lord of Bendigo Island looked fresh and keen, although Ellery knew he must have had a long day at his desk. The jester, Max'l, was at a table nearby helping himself to canapés with both murderous hands. Occasionally, while his great jaws ground away, he looked around at his master like a dog.

In an easy chair opposite King sprawled a slight dark man in rumpled clothing. On his sallow face, with its intelligent features, he wore a slight dark moustache; it gave him a gloomy, almost sinister, look. It was an odd face, with a broad high forehead, a nose sharply and crookedly hooked, and a chin that came to a premature point. A bell-shaped dark green bottle stood at his elbow and he was rolling a brandy snifter between his palms as his head lolled on the back of the chair. From the slits of his deeply sunken eyes he was studying Ellery, however, with remarkable alertness.

King greeted them graciously enough, but in a moment he had turned aside with Abel, and it was Karla Bendigo who introduced the other men. The slight dark man in the easy chair was Judah Bendigo, the middle brother; he did not rise or offer his hand. He merely squinted up at them, rolling the snifter between his palms. Either he was already drunk, or rudeness was a hereditary Bendigo trait. Ellery was glad when they had to turn to the group at the fireplace.

One of the three was small, stout, and bald, with the unemotional stare of a man to whom nothing has value but the immediate moment. Their hostess introduced him as Dr. Storm, Surgeon-General of Bendigo Island and her husband's personal physician, who lived on the premises. It did not surprise Ellery to learn that the second man, a tall lean swarthy individual with a catty smile, was also a permanent resident; his name was Immanuel Peabody, and he was King Bendigo's chief legal adviser. The third man of the group looked like a football player convalescing from a serious illness. He was young, blond, broad-shouldered, and pale, and his face was rutted with fatigue.

‘Dr. Akst,' Karla Bendigo said. ‘We seldom see this young man; it is a rare pleasure. He buries himself in his laboratory at the other side of the island, fiddling with his dangerous little atoms.'

‘With his what?' said Inspector Queen.

‘Mrs. Bendigo insists on making Dr. Akst out to be some sort of twentieth-century alchemist,' said the lawyer, Peabody, smiling. ‘A physicist can't very well avoid the little atom, but it's hardly dangerous, Dr. Akst, is it?'

‘Say it is dangerous, Doctor,' said Karla playfully. But she flashed a glance at the lawyer. It seemed to Ellery the glance was resentful.

‘Only in the sense that an experimenter,' protested Peabody, ‘is always monkeying with the unknown.'

‘Can we talk about something else?' asked Dr. Akst. He spoke with a strong Scandinavian accent, and he sounded younger than he looked.

‘Mrs. Bendigo's eyes,' suggested Ellery. ‘Now there's a subject that's really dangerous.'

Everyone laughed, and then Ellery and the Inspector had cocktails in their hands and Immanuel Peabody began to tell the story of an old criminal trial in England, in which testimony about the colour of a woman's eyes delivered the defendant to Jack Ketch. But all the while Ellery was wondering if his father knew that the tired young man with the humourless Scandinavian voice was one of the world's most famous nuclear physicists. And he thought, too, that in trying to gloss over the nature of Dr. Akst's work on Bendigo Island Immanuel Peabody had only succeeded in calling attention to it. For the rest of the evening Akst made a point of effacing himself and, playing the game, Ellery ignored him.

Karla Bendigo did not refer to him again.

Dinner was sumptuous and interminable. They dined in the adjoining room, a place of suffocating grandeur, and they were served by an army corps of servants. The courses and wines came in a steady parade, many of the delicacies blue-flamed in chafing dishes, so that the whole incredible feast was like a torchlight procession in a medieval festival.

Immanuel Peabody kept pace, with fat and deadly little Dr. Storm not far behind, Peabody telling with the utmost cheerfulness gruesome stories of criminal lore, with Dr. Storm's surgically bawdy. To these last, Max'l was the most appreciative listener; he winked, leered, and guffawed between gulletfuls, missing nothing. Max'l wore his napkin frankly under his chin and he ate with both elbows guarding his plate; he removed one of them only to batter Ellery's ribs at a particularly gusty witticism of Dr. Storm's.

To the Queens' disappointment, neither had been placed beside King or Karla Bendigo. The Inspector was trapped between the loquacious lawyer and the wicked little Surgeon-General, while Ellery sat diagonally across the table between the taciturn physicist, Akst, and Max'l — the father being talked to death, the son given Coventry on one side and a beating on the other. The arrangement was deliberate; nothing here, Ellery knew, happened by chance.

Since most of the lawyer's and the physician's conversation was directed toward the Queens, they found little opportunity to talk to the Bendigos. Karla murmured to Abel at her end of the field-long table, occasionally sending a word or a crooked little smile their way, as if in apology. At the other end sat King, listening. Once, turning suddenly, Ellery found their host's black eyes fixed on him with amusement. He tried after that to cultivate at least an appearance of patience.

It was a queer banquet, full of tense and mysterious undercurrents, and not the least of them swirled about Judah Bendigo. The slender little man slumped to the left of his brother King, ignoring Max'l's feeding antics — Max'l sat between Judah and Ellery — ignoring Storm's sallies and Peabody's forensic yarns, ignoring his food … giving all his attention to the bottle of Segonzac cognac beside his plate. No servant touched that bottle, Ellery observed; Judah refilled his own glass. He drank steadily but slowly throughout the evening, for the most part looking across the table at a point in space above Immanuel Peabody's head. His only recognition of the menu was to drink two cups of black coffee toward the end, and even then he laced them with brandy. The first cup emptied his bottle, and a servant quickly uncorked a fresh bottle and set it beside him.

The dinner took three hours; and when at exactly 10.45 p.m. King Bendigo made an almost unnoticeable gesture and Peabody brought his story to an end within ten seconds, Ellery could have collapsed in gratitude. Across the table his father sat perspiring and pale, as if he had exhausted himself in a desperate struggle.

The rich voice said to the Queens, ‘Gentlemen, I must ask you to excuse Abel and me. We have work to do tonight. I regret the necessity, as I'd looked forward to hearing some stories of your adventures.' Then why the devil, thought Ellery, did you order Peabody and Storm to monopolize the conversation? ‘However, Mrs. Bendigo will entertain you.'

He did not wait for Karla's murmured, ‘I will be so happy to, darling,' but pushed his chair back and rose. Abel, Dr. Storm, Peabody, and Dr. Akst immediately rose, too. Abel followed his tall brother through one door, and the doctor, the lawyer, and the physicist trooped out through another. The Queens watched them leave, fascinated. It was exactly as if the long dinner had been a scene in a play, with everyone an actor and the curtain coming down to disperse them in their private identities, each registering relief in his own fashion.

As Ellery drew Karla Bendigo's chair back, his eyes met his father's over her satiny red hair.

In three hours, with all the principals present, not one word had been said about the reason for the Queens' presence on Bendigo Island.

‘Shall we go, gentlemen?'

King's wife took their arms.

At the door, Ellery looked back.

Side by side at the littered table sat Max'l and Judah Bendigo. The ex-wrestler was still stuffing himself, and the silent Bendigo brother was pouring another glassful of cognac with an air of concentration and a hand that remained steady.

5

Karla's apartment was on another planet, a gentle world of birds and flowers, with casements overlooking the gardens and a small fireplace burning aromatic logs. Water-colours splashed the walls, glass winked in the firelight, and everything was bright and warm and friendly.