A Choice of Murders, page 10
“No,” said Bill Updike.
“I beg pardon?”
“Suppose I’m wrong? If they were ordinary deaths. I’d have dragged someone I’ve known a hell of a long time into a mess. No, you investigate first, Mr. Queen. Find evidence of murder, and I’ll go all the way.”
“You won’t tell me his name?”
“No.”
The ghost of New Year’s Eve stirred. But then Ellery grinned, and it settled back in the grave. Nikki sighed and reached for her notebook.
“All right, Mr. Updike. Who were the three Inner Circlovians who died this year?”
“Robert Carlton Smith, J. Stanford Jones, and Ziss Brown—Peter Zissing Brown.”
“Their occupations?”
“Bob Smith was head of the Kradle Kap Baby Foods Korporation. Stan Jones was top man of Jones-Jones-Mallison-Jones, the ad agency. Ziss Brown was retired.”
“From what?”
Updike said stiffly: “Brassieres.”
“I suppose they do pall. Leave me the addresses of the executors, please, and any other data you think might be helpful.”
When the banker had gone, Ellery reached for the telephone.
“Oh, dear,” said Nikki. “You’re not calling…Club Bongo?”
“What?”
“You know? New Year’s Eve?”
“Heavens, no. My pal Eastern ’28. Cully?… The same to you. Cully, who are the four Januarians? Nikki, take this down…William Updike—yes?… Charles Mason? Oh, yes, the god who fashioned Olympus…Rodney Black, Junior—um-hm…and Edward I. Temple? Thanks, Cully. And now forget I called.”
Ellery hung up. “Black, Mason, and Temple, Nikki. The only Januarians alive outside of Updike. Consequently one of those three is Updike’s last associate in The Inner Circle.”
“And the question is which one.”
“Bright girl. But first let’s dig into the deaths of Smith, Jones, and Brown. Who knows? Maybe Updike’s got something.”
It took exactly forty-eight hours to determine that Updike had nothing at all. The deaths of Januarians-Inner Circlers Smith, Jones, and Brown were impeccable.
“Give it to him, Velie,” said Inspector Queen at Headquarters the second morning after the banker’s visit to the Queen apartment.
Sergeant Velie cleared his massive throat. “The Kradle Kap Baby Foods character—”
“Robert Carlton Smith.”
“Rheumatic heart for years. Died in an oxygen tent after the third heart attack in eighteen hours, with three fancy medics in attendance and a secretary who was there to take down his last words.”
“Which were probably ‘Free Enterprise,’” said the Inspector.
“Go on, Sergeant!”
“J. Stanford Jones, the huckster. Gassed in World War I, in recent years developed t.b. And that’s what he died of. Want the sanitarium affidavits. Maestro? I had photostats telephotoed from Arizona.”
“Thorough little man, aren’t you?” growled Ellery. “And Peter Zissing Brown, retired from brassieres?”
“Kidneys and gall-bladder. Brown died on the operatin’ table.”
“Wait till you see what I’m wearing tonight,” said Nikki. “Apricot taffeta—”
“Nikki, get Updike on the phone,” said Ellery absently. “Brokers National.”
“He’s not there, Ellery,” said Nikki, when she had put down the Inspector’s phone. “Hasn’t come into his bank this morning. It has the darlingest bouffant skirt—”
“Try his home.”
“Dike Hollow, Scarsdale, wasn’t it? With the new back, and a neckline that—Hello?” And after a while the three men heard Nikki say in a strange voice: “What?” and then: “Oh,” faintly. She thrust the phone at Ellery. “You’d better take it.”
“What’s the matter? Hello? Ellery Queen. Updike there?”
A bass voice said, “Well—no, Mr. Queen. He’s been in an accident.”
“Accident! Who’s this speaking?”
“Captain Rosewater of the Highway Police. Mr. Updike ran his car into a ravine near his home here some time last night. We just found him.”
“I hope he’s all right!”
“He’s dead.”
“Four!” Ellery was mumbling as Sergeant Velie drove the Inspector’s car up into Westchester. “Four in one year!”
“Coincidence,” said Nikki desperately, thinking of the festivities on the agenda for that evening.
“All I know is that forty-eight hours after Updike asks me to find out if his three cronies of The Inner Circle who died this year hadn’t been murdered, he himself is found lying in a gully with four thousand pounds of used car on top of him.”
“Accidents,” began Sergeant Velie, “will hap—”
“I want to see that ‘accident’!”
A State trooper flagged them on the parkway near a cutoff and sent them down the side road. This road, it appeared, was a shortcut to Dike Hollow which Updike habitually used in driving home from the City; his house lay some two miles from the Parkway. They found the evidence of his last drive about midway. The narrow blacktop road twisted sharply to the left at this point, but Bill Updike had failed to twist with it. He had driven straight ahead and through a matchstick guardrail into the ravine. As it plunged over, the car had struck the bole of a big old oak. The shock catapulted the banker through his windshield and he had landed at the bottom of the ravine just before his vehicle.
“We’re still trying to figure out a way of lifting that junk off him,” said Captain Rosewater when they joined him forty feet below the road.
The ravine narrowed in a V here and the car lay upside down in its crotch. Men were swarming around it with crowbars, chains, and acetylene torches. “We’ve uncovered enough to show us he’s mashed flat.”
“His face, too. Captain?” asked Ellery suddenly.
“No, his face wasn’t touched. We’re trying to get the rest of him presentable enough so we can let his widow identify him.” The trooper nodded toward a flat rock twenty yards down the ravine on which sat a small woman in a mink coat. She wore no hat and her smart gray hair was whipping in the Christmas wind. A woman in a cloth coat, wearing a nurse’s cap, stood over her.
Ellery said, “Excuse me,” and strode away. When Nikki caught up with him, he was already talking to Mrs. Updike. She was drawn up on the rock like a caterpillar.
“He had a directors’ meeting at the bank last night. I phoned one of his associates about 2 a.m. He said the meeting had broken up at eleven and Bill had left to drive home.” Her glance strayed up the ravine. “At four-thirty this morning I phoned the police.”
“Did you know your husband had come to see me, Mrs. Updike—two mornings ago?”
“Who are you?”
“Ellery Queen.”
“No.” She did not seem surprised, or frightened, or anything.
“Did you know Robert Carlton Smith, J. Stanford Jones, Peter Zissing Brown?”
“Bill’s classmates? They passed away. This year,” she added suddenly. “This year,” she repeated. And then she laughed. “I thought the gods were immortal.”
“Did you know that your husband. Smith, Jones, and Brown were an ‘inner circle’ in The Januarians?”
“Inner Circle.” She frowned. “Oh, yes. Bill mentioned it occasionally. No, I didn’t know they were in it.”
Ellery leaned forward in the wind.
“Was Edward I. Temple in it, Mrs. Updike? Rodney Black, Junior? Charlie Mason?”
“I don’t know. Why are you questioning me? Why—?” Her voice was rising now, and Ellery murmured something placative as Captain Rosewater hurried up.
“Mrs. Updike. If you’d be good enough…”
She jumped off the rock. “Now?”
“Please.”
The trooper captain took one arm, the nurse the other, and between them they half-carried William Updike’s widow up the ravine toward the overturned car.
Nikki found it necessary to spend some moments with her handkerchief.
When she looked up, Ellery had disappeared.
She found him with his father and Sergeant Velie on the road above the ravine. They were standing before a large maple looking at a road sign. Studded lettering on the yellow sign spelled out Sharp Curve Ahead, and there was an elbow-like illustration.
“No lights on this road,” the Inspector was saying as Nikki hurried up, “so he must have had his brights on—”
“And they’d sure enough light up this reflector sign. I don’t get it. Inspector,” complained Sergeant Velie. “Unless his lights just weren’t workin’.”
“More likely fell asleep over the wheel, Velie.”
“No,” said Ellery.
“What, Ellery?”
“Updike’s lights were all right, and he didn’t doze off.”
“I don’t impress when I’m c-cold,” Nikki said, shivering. “But just the same, how do you know, Ellery?”
Ellery pointed to two neat holes in the maple bark, very close to the edge of the sign.
“Woodpeckers?” said Nikki. But the air was gray and sharp as steel, and it was hard to forget Mrs. Updike’s look.
“This bird, I’m afraid,” drawled Ellery, “had no feathers. Velie, borrow something we can pry this sign off with.”
When Velie returned with some tools, he was mopping his face. “She just identified him,” he said. “Gettin’ warmer, ain’t it?”
“What d’ye expect to find, Ellery?” demanded the Inspector.
“Two full sets of rivet-holes.”
Sergeant Velie said: “Bong,” as the road-sign came away from the tree.
“I’ll be damned,” said Inspector Queen softly. “Somebody removed these rivets last night, and after Updike crashed into the ravine—”
“Riveted the warning sign back on,” cried Nikki, “only he got careless and didn’t use the same holes!”
“Murder,” said Ellery. “Smith, Jones, and Brown died of natural causes. But three of the five co-owners of that fund dying in a single year—”
“Gave Number 5 an idea!”
“If Updike died, too, the $200,000 in securities would…Ellery!” roared his father. “Where are you running to?”
“There’s a poetic beauty about this case,” Ellery was saying restlessly to Nikki as they waited in the underground vaults of The Brokers National Bank. “Janus was the god of entrances. Keys were among his trappings of office. In fact, he was sometimes known as Patulcius—‘opener.’ Opener! I knew at once we were too late.”
“You knew, you knew,” said Nikki peevishly. “And New Year’s Eve only hours away! You can be wrong.”
“Not this time. Why else was Updike murdered last night in such a way as to make it appear an accident? Our mysterious Januarians hotfooted it down here first thing this morning and cleaned out that safety deposit box belonging to The Inner Circle. The securities are gone, Nikki.”
Within an hour, Ellery’s prophecy was historical fact.
The box was opened with Bill Updike’s key. It was empty.
And of Patulcius, no trace. It quite upset the Inspector. For it appeared that The Inner Circle had contrived a remarkable arrangement for access to their safety deposit box. It was gained, not by the customary signature on an admission slip, but through the presentation of a talisman. The talisman was quite unlike the lapel button of The Januarians. It was a golden key, and on the key was incised the two-faced god, within concentric circles. The outer circle was of Januarian garnets, the inner of diamonds. A control had been deposited in the files of the vault company. Anyone presenting a replica of it was to be admitted to The Inner Circle’s repository by order of no less a personage, the vault manager informed them, than the late President Updike himself— who, Inspector Queen remarked with bitterness, had been more suited by temperament to preside over the Delancey Street Junior Spies.
“Anyone remember admitting a man this morning who flashed one of these doojiggers?”
An employee was found who duly remembered, but when he described the vault visitor as great-coated and mufflered to the eyes, wearing dark glasses, walking with a great limp, and speaking in a laryngitic whisper, Ellery said wearily: “Tomorrow’s the annual meeting of The Januarians, Dad, and Patulcius won’t dare not show up. We’d better try to clean it up there.”
These, then, were the curious events preceding the final meeting of The Januarians in the thirteenth-floor sanctuary of The Eastern Alumni Club, beyond the door bearing the stainless-steel medallion of the god Janus.
We have no apocryphal writings to reveal what self-adoring mysteries were performed in that room on other New Year’s Days; but on January the first of this year. The Januarians held a most unorthodox service, in that two lay figures—the Queens, pater et filius—moved in and administered some rather heretical sacraments; so there is a full record of the last rites.
It began with Sergeant Velie knocking thrice upon the steel faces of Janus at five minutes past two o’clock on the afternoon of the first of January, and a thoroughly startled voice from within the holy of holies calling: “Who’s there?”
The Sergeant muttered an Ave and put his shoulder to the door. Three amazed, elderly male faces appeared. The heretics entered, and the service began.
It is a temptation to describe in loving detail, for the satisfaction of the curious, the interior of the tabernacle—its stern steel furniture seizing the New Year’s Day sun and tossing it back in the form of imperious light, the four-legged altar, the sacred vessels in the shape of beakers, the esoteric brown waters, and so on—but there has been enough of profanation, and besides the service is more to our point.
It was chiefly catechistical, proceeding in this wise:
Inspector: Gentlemen, my name is Inspector Queen. I’m from Police Headquarters, this is my son Ellery, and the big mugg on the door is Sergeant Velie of my staff.
Black: Police? Ed, do you know anything about—?
Temple: Not me, Rodney. Maybe Charlie, ha-ha…?
Mason: What is it. Inspector? This is a private clubroom—
Inspector. Which one are you?
Mason: Charles Mason—Mason’s Theater Chain, Inc. But—
Inspector: The long drink of water—what’s your name?
Temple: Me? Edward I. Temple. Attorney. What’s the meaning—?
Inspector: I guess. Tubby, that makes you Rodney Black, Junior of Wall Street.
Black: Sir—I
Ellery: Which one of you gentlemen belonged to The Inner Circle of The Januarians?
Mason: Inner what, what?
Black: Circle, I think he said, Charlie.
Temple: Inner Circle? What’s that?
Sergeant: One of ’em’s a John Barrymore, Maestro.
Black: See here, we’re three-fourths of what’s left of the Class of Eastern ’13…
Ellery: Ah, then you gentlemen don’t know that Bill Updike is dead?
All: Dead! Bill?
Inspector: Tell ’em the whole story, Ellery.
And so, patiently, Ellery recounted the story of The Inner Circle, William Updike’s murder, and the vanished $200,000 in negotiable securities. And as he told this story, the old gentleman from Center Street and his sergeant studied the three elderly faces; and the theater magnate, the lawyer, and the broker gave stare for stare; and when Ellery had finished, they turned to one another and gave stare for stare once more.
And finally Charlie Mason said: “My hands are clean, Ed. How about yours?”
“What do you take me for, Charlie?” said Temple in a flat and chilling voice.
And they both looked at Black, who squeaked: “Don’t try to make me out the one, you traitors!”
Whereupon, as if there were nothing more to be said, the three divinities turned and gazed bleakly upon the iconoclasts.
And the catechism resumed:
Ellery: Mr. Temple, where were you night before last between 11 p.m. and midnight?
Temple: Let me see. Night before last… That was the night before New Year’s Eve. I went to bed at 10 o’clock.
Ellery: You’re a bachelor, I believe. Do you employ a domestic?
Temple: My man.
Ellery: Was he—?
Temple: He sleeps out.
Sergeant: No alibi!
Inspector: How about you, Mr. Black?
Black: Well, the fact is…I’d gone to see a musical in town…and between 11 and 12 I was driving home…to White Plains…
Sergeant: Ha! White Plains!
Ellery: Alone, Mr. Black?
Black: Well…yes. The family’s all away over the holidays…
Inspector: No alibi. Mr. Mason?
Mason: Go to hell. (There is a knock on the door.)
Sergeant: Now who would that be?
Temple: The ghost of Bill?
Black: You’re not funny, Ed!
Ellery: Come in. (The door opens. Enter Nikki Porter.)
Nikki: I’m sorry to interrupt, but she came looking for you, Ellery. She was terribly insistent. Said she’d just recalled something about The Inner Circle, and—
Ellery: She?
Nikki: Come in, Mrs. Updike.
“They’re here,” said Mrs. Updike. “I’m glad. I wanted to look at their faces.”
“I’ve told Mrs. Updike the whole thing,” said Nikki defiantly.
And Inspector Queen said in a soft tone: “Velie, shut the door.”
But this case was not to be solved by a guilty look. Black, Mason, and Temple said quick ineffectual things, surrounding the widow and spending their nervousness in little gestures and rustlings until finally silence fell and she said helplessly. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” and dropped into a chair to weep.
And Black stared out the window, and Mason looked green, and Temple compressed his lips.
Then Ellery went to the widow and put his hand on her shoulder. “You recall something about The Inner Circle, Mrs. Updike?”
She stopped weeping and folded her hands, resting them in her lap and looking straight ahead.
“Was it the names of the five?”
“No. Bill never told me their names. But I remember Bill’s saying to me once: ‘Mary, I’ll give you a hint.’”
