Ellery Queen's Magicians of Mystery, page 7
“Forget it, George,” Glasco said. “He’s just the front for our campaign.”
“You can’t ever satisfy him,” Quinlan grumbled.
“We know it,” Glasco soothed.
“I’ve got to go, boys,” Quinlan said. “Sorry, but you know how it is.”
Quinlan shot out the door. Lyons turned to Glasco. “Can’t depend on George,” he said. “I told you so.”
“He’ll come around all right,” Glasco said. “It might be a good thing to play this murder up big, Ed. And you might be able to work in a little stuff about how old Bill doesn’t have any knowledge of fingerprint classification. You can mention that he depends on George for all the modern stuff. Let it creep in between the lines that Bill’s getting to be an old fogy. Then if he slips up on—”
Lyons interrupted testily, “Hell’s bells, I’m two paragraphs ahead of you. When it comes to politics don’t ever forget that the Gazette has been in business a long time. Candidates the Gazette supports get elected. Well, I’m going to rush out there and cover this story right from the start.”
Glasco watched him out of the door, then said in a low voice, “You mean you support the men who are going to get elected, you damned old buzzard.”
He heard the sound of a quick intake of breath, whirled, and saw Beryl Quinlan sitting motionless by the telephone, lips slightly parted, watching him with wide startled eyes.
Glasco hesitated for a moment, then walked past her, saying nothing, because there was nothing to say.
The little group examined the huddled figure in the light of the floodlight that Sam Beckett had rigged on the tractor. They all agreed there were no footprints. The photographer took flashlight photographs from half a dozen different positions, placing his tripod on the light trailer which Sam Beckett had put on the back of the tractor in place of the plow which had been there.
“Well, Jim,” the sheriff said to James Logan, the coroner, “guess you can move her now. Poor kid, she can’t be over nineteen or twenty.”
“Stab wound in the back,” Logan said, crisply businesslike, “and the knife isn’t there. You got a murder case on your hands, Bill.”
“Uh huh.”
The coroner was plainly puzzled, slightly impatient. “You can’t murder a girl in a freshly plowed field with soil as soft as this and not leave some sort of tracks.”
“Uh huh,” the sheriff announced, then, raising his voice said, “I want everybody here to remember that when they go out, they’re to go out on Sam Beckett’s tractor. I don’t want any footprints in this plowed ground, no footprints at all. You understand?”
No one said anything.
The sheriff turned to Quinlan and drew him to one side. “What do you make of it, George?” he asked.
“Well, it looks to me—” Quinlan cleared his throat.
“Yeh, go ahead,” the sheriff invited.
“Well, it’s a murder all right,” Quinlan said somewhat lamely. “I’m just wondering—”
“About what?”
“About Sam Beckett.”
“What about him?”
“That body couldn’t have got there the way he said.”
The sheriff fished a sack of tobacco from his vest pocket, skillfully curled a piece of rice paper around his left forefinger, shook grains of tobacco into the paper, and caught the drawstring of the tobacco sack in his teeth to pull it shut. “Go ahead, George.”
“Well, Beckett must inadvertently have stepped right in the murderer’s tracks. That’s the only thing that could have happened. And then you came along and walked in Beckett’s tracks and—well, that’s the only way it could have been. And that blots out the murderer’s tracks.”
The sheriff tilted back his sweat-stained sombrero to scratch the grizzled hair around the back of his head. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can look around a bit, come daylight.”
Quinlan moved away. The sheriff caught Sam Beckett and drew him to one side. “Sam, take everybody out of here on your tractor. Don’t let anybody walk out.” And then he added in a lower voice, “Come back in about an hour and pick me up. Don’t tell anybody I’m staying. Make a couple of trips. Take the body out in the first trip.”
Beckett nodded and Bill Eldon moved away in the darkness, the tip of his cigarette glowing now and again, then dropping to the earth and being extinguished.
Sam Beckett’s tractor moved slowly across the plowed ground to the gate, following the ruts which had now been worn in the soft soil.
The sheriff sat squatting on his heels, cowboy fashion, watching the activity at the gate as parked automobiles roared into noise, headlights splashed on, and tail-lights glowed in sinister bloodred, meteorlike trails.
Slowly the calm of silence descended, broken here and there by little night noises. The field became dark and silent as it had lain for many months while the heirs of old Marvin Higbee squabbled among themselves.
Somewhere behind the sheriff a horse snorted.
Bill Eldon straightened. He turned toward the vague patch of blackness which marked the trees around the old Higbee homestead and walked slowly, the green springy grass muffling his steps. His legs moved with that peculiar high-kneed motion which characterizes the best hunters when they are stalking game. He carefully refrained from using his flashlight.
A few minutes later when the big gloomy house loomed just ahead of the sheriff, the officer loosened his gun in a holster worn shiny with age. He catfooted along the shadow of the trees, found an advantageous place, and once more squatted on his heels, waiting.
An owl boomed suddenly, puncturing the silence with its weird cry. A faint rustling sounded in the dead leaves on the ground over to his right. The sheriff cocked his head slightly to one side, the better to listen to that rustling. Then as the sound became the unmistakable scurrying of some small animal, he turned back toward the house. For some twenty minutes he sat motionless, until the noises made by small nocturnal animals reassured him. Then he straightened to his feet and went forward.
The doors of the big house were closed. The windows had been boarded up. A No Trespassing sign had been nailed to the front of the house.
The sheriff cautiously switched on his flashlight as he inspected the front door and then moved around to the back door. Both doors were closed and locked.
A side door on the east caught the sheriff’s eye. There were spider webs on the side of that door which had been freshly broken.
The sheriff turned the knob.
The door creaked open, rusty hinges squawking at his intrusion.
Stale, musty air assailed Bill Eldon’s nostrils. His flashlight illuminated a small hallway thick with dust and hung with spider webs.
The sheriff pushed across the hallway and entered what had at one time been the living room. A rat, caught in the beam of his flashlight, gave a frightened squeak and scurried for shelter.
Old Marvin Higbee had died over a year ago. Since then the heirs had been engaged in such bitter quarreling that none of them had ever lived in the house or tried to keep it up. Now the living room presented a weird sight. Rats were nesting in the upholstery of the davenport, while spiders were entrenched in webs spun from chandeliers. The floors were thick with dust, and the pictures on the walls hung at crazy angles.
During his lifetime Higbee had been chairman of the board of one of the local banks and had amassed a comfortable fortune as a highly successful contractor. The Higbee place had been the scene of much hospitality. A widower, Marvin Higbee had no children. But he left a sister, Carlotta, and two brothers, Oscar and Robert, when he died after a brief illness. His will bequeathed $10,000 to Oscar, $10,000 to Robert, and the balance of the estate to his sister, Carlotta Higbee Lane. When the will was offered for probate, however, Mrs. Kidder, who had been Higbee’s housekeeper, calmly advanced the claim that she was, in reality, Mrs. Marvin Higbee. There had been a common-law marriage, she said. Because she had not been provided for in the will, she maintained that she was entitled to the rights of a wife.
There had followed a period during which dirty linen had been aired in public. The two brothers, Oscar and Robert, contended not only that Mrs. Kidder was an adventuress and a liar, but also that Carlotta had exerted undue influence on Marvin at the time he made his will. The result had been a legal Donnybrook Fair in which the big country home had become a forgotten side issue.
The sheriff stooped to hold his flashlight near the floor. As he did so, the oblique illumination disclosed prints which had theretofore been invisible.
The officer studied the dust-covered carpet carefully. He could make out the prints of a woman’s shoes and those of at least one man. They had walked back and forth, intersecting each other’s paths. They had made a veritable crazy quilt of tracks, seemingly as purposeless as the tracks left by kangaroo rats dancing wildly about in the moonlight.
The old mansion could tell many a tale, the sheriff meditated. Higbee had been a deep one—with women, in politics, and in business. For a while Farnham, the crusader, had been after Higbee’s scalp, claiming collusion on the big school-construction job. Glasco had been trying to get the Gazette to demand an inquiry, but suddenly the whole thing had been dropped. Higbee’s charm, fascinating to women, had seemed to be as effective with his political enemies. And Higbee, big, vital, breezy, had gone on his way until death had intervened. No amount of backslapping, the sheriff reflected, could make death change its mind.
Moving cautiously, the sheriff entered other rooms of the house. Everywhere, when he dropped his flashlight to a lower angle, he found the same pattern of zigzagging, intersecting footprints in the dust.
Dust had been carefully cleaned from a table in the kitchen. On that table the sheriff found waxed paper, bread crumbs, a lipstick, and a hammered silver cigarette case. At one end of the table there was a charred streak some two inches long and bordered with gray ash, whish had apparently been made by a burning cigarette.
The sheriff examined the linoleum floor. One burnt match was lying underneath the table, and also on the floor were two cigarette stubs, both of which had been pinched out. One held the telltale red of lipstick.
Eldon picked up the cigarette case and turned it over. He saw that a heart had been engraved on the side, an arrow intersecting the heart. There were two initials on the arrow, R at the feathered end and B over the point of the arrow.
After studying the cigarette case thoughtfully, the sheriff placed it back on the table just as he had found it. Then he turned around and to the accompaniment of squeaking boards and scurrying rodents he left the house as he had entered it. He took care to close the creaking side door behind him.
It was nearly eleven when the Quinlan telephone rang stridently, insistently.
Beryl threw a robe around her shoulders and ran from her bedroom. “I’ll get it, Mother,” she called as she passed her mother’s door.
“Thank you, dear.”
Beryl fairly flew down the stairs. She raised the receiver and said breathlessly, “Yes, yes, hello. This is Beryl Quinlan.”
The drawling voice of the sheriff came over the wire. “Your father there, Beryl?”
“Why, no. Isn’t he with you? He hasn’t come back yet.”
“Hasn’t got back yet?” the sheriff asked.
“Why, no, he went out to investigate that murder.”
“I see.”
“Can I take a message?”
The sheriff said, “If you will, please. When he comes in tell him I want to get in touch with him right away. Someone left a silver cigarette case out here at the Higbee place and I want him to look it over for fingerprints.”
“I’ll tell him, sheriff.”
“Tell him to bring that fingerprint outfit of his and to be sure to bring his camera. It’s a silver cigarette case with a heart engraved on it and an arrow through the heart. There’s an R on one end of the arrow and a B on the other. You tell him, will you, Beryl?”
“I’ll tell him—Goodbye.” The words came haltingly. And the hand that slowly lowered the receiver back into place seemed to have turned to ice.
The cigarette case she had given to Roy for Christmas!
And then another thought, which for some time had been uneasily asking for attention, suddenly popped out to the front of her consciousness. The long-distance operator had told Roy to deposit twenty-five cents. If he had been at Fort Bixling the rate would have been eighty-five cents.
“Beryl,” her mother called from the head of the stairs, “what is it? Nothing’s happened to your father, has it? Your voice sounded—”
Beryl’s laugh was harsh. “Good Heavens, no, Mumsie! Go back to bed. I’ve—I’ve got to go find Father.”
“Find Father? Why, Beryl, what’s the matter? What’s happened? Tell me. Don’t try to keep it from me.”
“Don’t be a goose, Mumsie. It was the sheriff. He wanted Dad, that’s all, wants him to take some fingerprints right away.”
“But your father’s with the sheriff.”
“No, he left.”
“Well, the only thing you can do then is wait for him to come in and—”
“Oh, I think I can find him,” Beryl said casually, dashing upstairs. “He’ll probably be at the Gazette office.”
“Then why don’t you telephone?”
Beryl’s cold fingers were frantically divesting herself of her pajamas, picking up lingerie. “He might not be there, Mumsie. He might be some other place where I could just run onto him. I’ll drive up and down the main drag, and see if the car’s parked somewhere. Remember, he took his own car. I can spot it as far as I can see it.”
“I wish you’d telephone, dear.”
“No, I’ll jump in my little whoopee and have Dad located in no time. You be a good girl, Mumsie, and don’t worry. And if Dad should come home, tell him I have a message for him.”
“Can’t you tell me what the message is, and I—”
“I’ll tell him,” Beryl said. “Tell him to wait for me,” and she went streaking down the stairs.
It was nearly midnight when the sheriff drifted in to the coroner’s office.
“George here?” he asked.
“Yeah, he’s in back with the doctor.”
“What did the doctor find?”
“Stab wound in the back—left side. Think it went straight in.”
The sheriff said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of him. I—here he comes now.”
George Quinlan stepped out of the back room. “There isn’t a drop of blood on the skirt, Bill,” he said. “It was a stab wound. Missed the heart, but severed one of the big blood vessels. Death was almost instantaneous. She might have lived for a matter of seconds. It’s hard to tell.”
The sheriff nodded. Then he beckoned the deputy to one side. “Been lookin’ for you, George. Did you see your daughter?”
“She got me on the phone a few seconds ago, said she’d been driving around looking for me. Said you had some fingerprints. I was just starting for the office to pick up the fingerprint outfit.”
“I told her to try and get in touch with you,” the sheriff said. “There’s been a couple of people in the old Higbee house, walking back and forth across the floors, sort of zigzagging, and out in the kitchen I found where some sandwiches had been eaten, and there’s a girl’s lipstick and a cigarette case. I thought there might be some prints and—”
“You didn’t touch those things?” Quinlan asked.
“Well, just sort of picked them up and looked them over,” the sheriff admitted.
“Let’s hope you didn’t smudge any fingerprints. Gosh, Bill, I’ve told you a dozen times that you’ve got to be careful handling things that—”
“I know, I know,” the sheriff said, “but I thought it was pretty important to see the other side of that case. Had to turn it over to do that.”
“How about the lipstick?”
“I didn’t touch that.”
Quinlan said, “Let’s go. I’ll stop by the office and get my fingerprint outfit.”
“You got your car here?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ll meet you out there,” the sheriff said.
“You want to take a look at the body?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Not right now. Get prints of her fingers?”
“Yes.”
“What do you make of her?”
“Natural blonde, blue eyes, smooth skin, a beautiful girl, somewhere between nineteen and twenty.”
“Too bad,” the sheriff said, and then added after a moment, “I’ll be seeing you out there.”
There was little traffic on Main Street at this hour, so the sheriff swung out close to the center of the street. He opened up the County car, but didn’t use the siren. This time it took him nearly fifteen minutes to get to the Higbee gate.
The sheriff got out of the car and opened the gate. Then he paused as his headlights disclosed tire tracks superimposed on the tracks left by the tractor.
Quinlan drove up to find the sheriff down on hands and knees studying these tracks with the aid of his spotlight.
“What’s the idea?” the deputy asked, jumping out. “You found something?”
“A car’s been in here,” the sheriff said.
“You mean since the tractor came out?”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t get stuck?”
“No. The tractor had packed down the earth hard enough so a car could drive in all right.”
“Well, now, that’s something,” Quinlan said. “Wonder who it could have been. Probably some of the newspaper people snooping around. It wouldn’t have done any harm to have put a lock on that gate.”
“Or left somebody here,” the sheriff said.
Quinlan’s silence showed that he felt very definitely someone should have been left in charge but that it had been a matter for the sheriff to arrange.
“Tell anything by the tracks?” Quinlan asked.
“Not much. Tires worn pretty smooth and only occasionally you can get a bit of the pattern. And if you’ll look over here on the left you can see where the front wheels swung just a little bit out of the ruts. Now, that must have been when the car was going out, because they’re the last tracks that were made. So this’ll be the right front wheel on the car. And you notice that little nick out of the tire, on the side? Better remember that, George. We may run into a car like that again if we keep our eyes open.”
