Greek Coffin Mystery (28 page)

The old man sucked at his old teeth. “Go on,” he said. “Get it off your chest. There’s an answer for everything.”

“Oh, and is there?” retorted Ellery. “Very well—let me expatiate. Sloane himself didn’t send that letter, obviously—would he give the police an item of damning information against himself if he were guilty? Naturally not. Who then did write the letter? Remember that Sloane said no one in the world except himself—not even Grimshaw, mind you, his own brother—knew that Gilbert Sloane,
as Gilbert Sloane,
was the brother of the murdered man. So I ask again: who wrote the letter? For whoever wrote it did know, and yet it seems that no one except the single individual who
wouldn’t
write the letter
did
write it. Doesn’t follow.”

“Ah, my son, if all questions were as easy to answer as that,” grinned the Inspector. “Of course Sloane didn’t write the letter! And I don’t care a hoot who did. It isn’t important. Because—” he brandished his thin forefinger affectionately—“because we have only Sloane’s word for it that no one but he knew. You see? Certainly, if Sloane had told the truth the question would be a poser, but with Sloane himself the criminal, anything he said is open to doubt, especially if he said it—as he did—at a time when he thought he was safe and when lies might tangle up the trail for the police. So—it’s quite likely that some one else
did
know that Sloane as Sloane was Grimshaw’s brother. Sloane himself must have spilled it to some one. The best possibility is Mrs. Sloane, although it’s true that there doesn’t seem to be any reason why she should inform against her own husband—”

“An acute parenthesis,” drawled Ellery. “Because, according to your own case against Sloane, you postulated Mrs. Sloane as the person who warned Sloane by telephone. Certainly that isn’t consistent with the indigenous malice of the anonymous letter-writer.”

“All right,” said the Inspector instantly, “look at it this way. Did Sloane have an enemy? Darned right he did—the one who told against him in another instance: Mrs. Vreeland! So maybe she’s the one who wrote the letter. How she came to know of the brothership, of course, is a matter of guesswork, but I’ll bet—”

“And you’d lose your money. There’s something so rotten in Denmark that it makes my head ache—a flaw, a flaw! I’m hanged if …” He did not finish; his face grew longer, if that were possible, and he flung a match-stick into the dying fire with viciousness.

The shrill br-r-ring of the telephone startled them. “Who on earth could that be at this hour?” exclaimed the old man. “Hello! … Oh. Good
-morning. …
Quite all right. What did you find? … I see. That’s fine. Now run along to bed—late hours are mighty bad for a nice young girl’s complexion. Ha, ha! … Very well. Good night, my dear.” He hung up, smiling. Ellery asked a question with his eyebrows. “Una Lambert. Says there’s no question about the authenticity of the written name on that burnt scrap of will. It’s Khalkis’ fist, without a doubt. And she says that everything else tends to show that the fragment is part of the original document.”

“Indeed.” The information depressed Ellery for no reason imaginable to the Inspector.

The old man’s good humor was swallowed in a little storm of temper. “By heaven, it seems to me you don’t
want
this blasted case to end!”

Ellery shook his head gently. “Don’t scold, dad. I can think of no consummation more devoutly to be wished. But it must be a consummation which is satisfactory to me.”

“Well, it’s satisfactory to
me.
The case against Sloane is perfect. And with Sloane dead, Grimshaw’s partner is wiped off the map and everything is cleaned up. Because, as you said, Grimshaw’s partner was the only outsider who knew that Knox had that Leonardo thing-amajig, and now that he’s a stiff—although the painting business might still have been one of the contributing motives in Sloane’s original plot—the whole thing remains a police secret. That means,” continued the Inspector with a little smack of his lips, “that we can go to work on Mr. James J. Knox. We’ve got to get that painting back, if it’s really the one that was stolen by Grimshaw from the Victoria Museum.”

“Have you had a reply to your cablegram?”

“Nary a word.” The Inspector frowned. “Can’t understand why the Museum doesn’t answer. Anyway, if that British crowd try to get the painting back from Knox, there’ll be a cat-fight. Knox with his money and pull will keep himself in the clear. I think Sampson and I had better work this problem out slowly—don’t want to scare our rich bird into getting his hackles up.”

“You’ll have ample opportunity to settle the affair. It’s doubtful if the Museum would want the story publicized that the painting which their experts had pronounced a genuine Leonardo and which was exhibited publicly as such is an almost valueless copy. That is, always provided it
is
a copy. We have only Knox’s word for that, you know.”

The Inspector spat thoughtfully into the fire. “Gets more and more complicated. Anyway, to come back to the Sloane case. Thomas got his report on the list of people registered at the Hotel Benedict on the Thursday and Friday of Grimshaw’s stay. Well, there’s no name on the list which corresponds or is connected with any one in the case. I suppose that was to be expected. Sloane said he thought the fellow was a hotel acquaintance of Grimshaw’s—he must have lied, and this mysterious baby must be some one else, maybe not in the case at all, who came after Sloane. …”

The Inspector chattered on, carried away by a soothing virtuous contentment. Ellery said nothing in reply to these calm verbal wanderings; he extended his long arm and picked up the Sloane diary, flipping its pages, studying it again with gloomy mien.

“Look here, dad,” he said at last, without raising his eyes, “it is true that on the surface everything matches glossily with the hypothesis of Sloane as the
deus ex machina
of these events. But that’s just the trouble with it; it’s all occurred much too fortuitously to lull my restless sensibilities. Don’t forget, please, that once before we—I—have been tricked into accepting a solution … a solution which might have been accepted and publicized and forgotten by this time had it not been pricked by the sheerest accident. This one seems, so to speak, unprickable. …” He shook his head. “I can’t put my finger on it. But I feel there’s something wrong.”

“But it won’t do you any good to bat your head against a stone wall, son.”

Ellery grinned feebly. “Such a procedure might knock an inspiration into being,” he said, and bit his lip. “Follow me for a moment.” He held up the diary, and the Inspector flapped over in his carpet-slippers to look at it. Ellery had opened the book at the point of its last written entry—a wordy report in neat, small script under the printed date:
Sunday Oct. 10.
The opposite page was headed by:
Monday Oct. 11.
That page was blank.

“Now, you see,” said Ellery with a sigh, “I have been poring over this personalized and therefore interesting yearbook, and I could not escape noting that Sloane made no entry to-night—the night of his, as you say, suicide. Allow me for a moment to epitomize the spirit-content of this diary. We brush aside at once, of course, the fact that nowhere in these pages is mention made of the incidents surrounding Grimshaw’s strangling; and the fact that merely conventional reference is made to Khalkis’ death: for naturally, were Sloane a murderer, he would avoid committing to paper anything which might incriminate him On the other hand, certain observations are self-evident: for one thing, Sloane wrote in this diary religiously each night of the week at the same approximate hour, setting down before his day’s notation the time of writing; as you can see, it has been for months the hour of eleven
P.M.
or thereabout. For another thing, this diary reveals Sloane to have been a gentleman of overweening ego, a man of enormous preoccupation with himself; a reading elicits lurid details, for example—painfully lurid—of a sexual affair with some woman, cautiously unnamed.”

Ellery slammed the book shut, flung it on the table, leaped to his feet and began to pace the rug before the hearth, his forehead creased in scores of tiny lines. The old man peered up at him unhappily. “Now I ask you, in the name of all the knowledge of modern psychology,” cried Ellery, “would such a man as this—a man who dramatized everything about himself, as this diary copiously illustrates, a man who found in the expression of his ego the obviously morbid satisfaction that is so characteristic of his type—would such a man pass up the unexampled, the unique, the cosmic opportunity of writing dramatically about the greatest event of his life: his coming death?”

“Thoughts of that very death may have pushed everything else from his mind,” suggested the Inspector.

“I doubt it,” said Ellery bitterly. “Sloane, if he had been informed by the tenuous telephone call of police suspicion, realizing that he could no longer evade punishment for his crime, having besides even a brief interval during which he might work unmolested, would have been impelled by every crying fiber of his personality to make that last heroic entry in his diary … an argument supported, moreover, by the circumstance that all this occurred around the general period—eleven o’clock—when he was accustomed to confiding in his little yearbook. And yet,” he cried, “no entry at all was made for this night, of all nights!”

His eyes were fevered, and the Inspector rose and placed his small thin hand on Ellery’s arm, shaking him with almost womanish sympathy. “Come, don’t take on so. It sounds good, but it doesn’t prove anything, son. … Come to bed.”

Ellery allowed himself to be led into their bedroom. “Yes,” he said, “it proves nothing.”

And a half-hour later in the darkness, addressed to his father’s soft snores, “But it is just such a psychological indication as this that makes me question whether Gilbert Sloane committed suicide after all!”

The chill darkness of the bedroom providing little comfort and no response, Ellery proved himself a philosopher and went to sleep. He dreamed all night of animated diaries astride curiously human coffins brandishing revolvers and shooting at the man in the moon—a lunar countenance whose features were unmistakably those of Albert Grimshaw.

“Most of the epic discoveries of modern science have been made possible fundamentally by their discoverers’ persistence in applying cold logic to a set of actions and reactions.
…

“Lavoisier’s simple explanation
—
it seems simple to us now
—
of what happens to pure lead when it is ‘burned’—an explanation which exposed the centuries-old fallacy of that horrific creation of the medieval mind,
phlogiston—
was the result of what seems to us in our atmosphere of modern scientific thoroughness an absurdly basic principle, as indeed it is; that if a substance weighs one ounce before burning in the air, and weighs one ounce point o seven after burning in the air, then some substance from the air has been
added
to the original ore to account for the extra weight. … It took some sixteen centuries for man to realize this, and to name the new product lead oxide!

“No phenomenon in a crime is impossible of explanation. Persistence and simple logic are the cardiac requisites of the detective. What to the unthinking is a mystery, to the calculating is self-evident truth. … The detection of crime is no longer a matter of medieval mutterings over a crystal; it is one of the most exact of modern sciences. And at its root lies logic.”

—from
“Byways of Modern Science”
(pp. 147-8)

by
DR. GEORGE HINCHCLIFFE

E
LLERY QUEEN DISCOVERED WITH
a growing sense of futility that one of his innumerable ancient sources for wisdom, Pittacus of Mitylene, had not made provision for the human margin of frailty. Time, Ellery found, was not to be seized by the forelock. The days went by, and it was not in his power to stay them. A week passed, and he had succeeded in wringing from its fleeing hours only a few drops of bitterness, and not any mental sap at all—an empty beaker, all things considered, into whose arid bottom he stared with increasing unhappiness.

For others, however, the week had been full to the brim. Sloane’s suicide and funeral had undammed a flood. The newspapers wallowed in copious details. They splashed about in the backwaters of Gilbert Sloane’s personal history. They sluiced the dead man with streams of subtle vituperation, managed without singular effort to soak and soften the outer shell of his life, so that it warped and split and curled off, a spoiled and loggy reputation. Those who survived him were caught up in the backwash, and of these Delphina Sloane became of inexorable necessity the most prominent. Waves of words lapped at the shores of her grief. The Khalkis house had been converted into an impregnable lighthouse toward whose beacon the not-to-be-daunted representatives of the press directed their barques.

One miniature newspaper which might well have been named
The Enterprise
—but was not—offered the widow a rajah’s ransom in return for her permission to sanction a series of articles, to be printed below a line-cut of her signature, and to be titled with editorial restraint:
Delphina Sloane’s Own Story of Life With a Murderer.
And although the magnanimous offer was spurned with outraged silence, this glowing model of journalistic impudence succeeded in excavating some precious personal items from Mrs. Sloane’s first marriage and exhibited them to their readers with the zest and pride of victorious archeology. Young Alan Cheney punched a reporter attached to the tabloid, sending him back to his City Editor with a bruised eye and a scarlet nose; and it took a grand pulling of wires to keep the paper from having Alan arrested on a charge of assault.

During this buzzing interim in which the scavengers croaked above their carrion, Police Headquarters remained singularly peaceful. The Inspector returned to the less perplexing problems of routine, content merely with clearing up an odd point here and there in order to satisfy the official records of the Khalkis-Grimshaw-Sloane Case, as the newspapers virtuously called it. Dr. Prouty’s autopsy on the body of Gilbert Sloane, performed in a manner thorough although perfunctory, elicited not the barest indication of foul play: there was no poison, no tell-tale marks of violence; the bullet-wound was just such a bullet-wound as a man inflicts when he commits suicide by shooting himself in the temple; and Sloane’s cadaver, as has been signified, was released by the Medical Examiner’s office for consignment to a flowery grave in a suburban cemetery.