QED (21 page)

By 1939 the depression and natural causes had lopped the membership to a butler's dozen. But the club treasury took on a hideous life of its own, for the survivors—privy to the financial secrets of their multimillionaire employers—invested in common stocks for $5 and less a share, and by 1963 the club owned the brownstone and $3,000,000 worth of blue-chip securities besides.

Today a mere two members, long since retired from butling, survived. Both were in their 80s—William Jarvis (who had, it appeared, a repulsive grandson named Benzell Jarvis), and Peter Burroughs, Edie's grandfather, both of whom lived at the club.

“Ben Jarvis and I lead lives of our own elsewhere and,” Miss Burroughs added grimly, “apart, thank goodness. But under the bylaws the members must live at the club or forfeit their rights of survivorship.”

“Rights of
survivorship?
” Mr. Q was sniffing like an enchanted hound dog. “Do you mean to say this association of majordomos created a tontine? That wonderful old stupidity in which everything goes to the last beneficiary left alive?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen.”

“I'm amazed. Butlers are supposed to be the most conservative group on earth.”

“You evidently don't know much about butlers,” chimed Miss Burroughs. “They're all born gamblers. Anyway, by now those two old ninnies have only one thought—to outlive the other and so fall heir to the club treasury. It's all pretty silly, and it would be amusing if not for the fact …” She hesitated.

“If not for what fact?”

“Well, that's really why I'm here, Mr. Queen. Last evening I dropped by for my weekly visit to grandfather …”

The Night Before
, 7
P
.
M
.: Edie found the pair of octogenarians in the oak-and-leather “silence room,” engaged in making a great deal of what, in any but butlers, would have been unseemly noise.

“And you, Jarvis,” Edie heard her grandfather shout in an undertone, “have a narsty mind!” Peter Burroughs was a long withered root of a man, all crooked with age, and he was vibrating as in a high wind.

“Really, Burroughs?” chortled William Jarvis. Jarvis was little and bald and livid, and the chortle sounded remarkably evil. “Can you deny trying to put me out of the way in order to be able to leave the club fortune to your granddaughter?”

“I can, Jarvis, and I do!”

“
Mr
. Jarvis, really,” said Edie, shocked. “Nobody's trying to put you out of the way.”

“No, indeed, you doddering scullion,” said old Burroughs to old Jarvis in a refined shriek. “The boot is quite on the other foot! It is
you
who are planning to kill
me
for the tontine, to pass it over to that playboy grandson of yours!”

And the two old men tottered toward each other's throats, claws at the ready.

At that moment, fortunately, Benzell Jarvis arrived on
his
weekly visit, which always seemed to coincide with Edie's, and stepped between the bristling gaffers. For once Edie was glad to see him (young Jarvis, who was an exemplary Dr. Jekyll in company, became an instant Mr. Hyde when he could catch Edie alone).

“Here, Edie,” said Ben Jarvis, who was as little and bald as his grandfather, “you take your old fool, and I'll take my old fool, and we'll put 'em away—I wish there were locks on their bedroom doors—and then … you and me …?”

“… but I'm worried half to death, Mr. Queen,” Edie concluded, not mentioning the judo chop she had had to resort to in escaping from young Mr. Jarvis. “Each thinks the other is out to murder him, and they might do each other real harm in imagined self-defense. It seems ridiculous to go to the police, and yet—what shall I do?”

“Don't they employ anyone to take care of them?”

“The houseman and the cook work afternoons only; they sleep out. Nobody's there at night if one of them should get a senile notion.”

“Then what is required in this emergency,” said Ellery with gravity, “is an unofficial show of authority. My father is a police inspector, Miss Burroughs, and this is just the kind of crime-prevention work he dotes on. Excuse me while I telephone him.”

Later
: For a man who doted on crime prevention, Inspector Queen seemed extraordinarily unenamored of this particular opportunity. The Inspector glared at his son as they waited with Edie Burroughs on the sidewalk in front of The Butlers Club for Ben Jarvis (the Inspector had insisted on phoning him to join them); he glowered at Jarvis as that young man, clearly suffering from hangover, crawled out of a cab; and as they all mounted the brown-stone steps he muttered to Ellery, “What in the so-and-so is the goldang idea?”

But he pressed the bell. And again. And again, and again. “Are they deaf as well as mush-headed?” the Inspector growled.

“It's a very loud bell,” said Edie Burroughs nervously. “Oh, do you suppose—?”

“Allow me,” said Ellery, whipping out his trusty picklock gun. He unlocked the door and they stepped through a time machine into a living past of dark woods, altitudinous ceilings, vast stained-glass chandeliers, brassy firedogs, and many many oil paintings of—incredibly—butlers.

And, oddly, a continuous trilling sound.

“That's grandfather's alarm clock,” Edie exclaimed, “in his bedroom. Why doesn't he turn it off?”

She bounded like Artemis toward the rear of the main floor, explaining on the fly that her grandfather could no longer climb stairs. And as she burst into the old butler's bedroom the girl wailed, and stopped, and turned away; and just as the Queens sprang to the big brass bed to stoop over Peter Burroughs, the old-fashioned single-alarm clock on the nightstand uttered a last peevish screek and went as dead as its owner.

Old Burroughs, fully dressed, was sprawled across the bed. There were several ugly scratches on his barklike cheeks, but no other signs of violence.

“From the condition of the body, he's been dead since last night,” said Inspector Queen after a while. “Did he have those face scratches when you two left here?”

“No,” said Ben Jarvis, absently embracing Edie. “Tough luck, sugar. My condolences.”

“Thank you, Ben,” said Edie, “but no hands? Please?”

“I think, Jarvis,” said Ellery, eying Ben coldly, “we had better look in on your grandfather, too. Where is his bedroom? Upstairs? No, Miss Burroughs, you'd better wait for us down here.”

So they found little old William Jarvis crumpled on his bedroom floor, fully clothed also; and
his
cheeks were badly scratched; and he was just as dead as his fellow butler below.

“When,” asked young Jarvis wildly, “did
he
die?”

And the Inspector rose and said, “Last night, too.”

“At 7:46,” Ellery nodded, pointing to the bedside electric clock. In falling, the old man's body had jerked the cord out of the wall socket, stopping the clock. “What time did you and Miss Burroughs leave here last night, Jarvis?”

“Not quite 7:30.”

They found Edie in the big clubroom downstairs, weeping quietly. She looked up and said, “Dear God, what happened?”

“I'd say they waited until you two left,” Inspector Queen said, “and then headed for each other again. The only damage they were able to do was scratch each other's faces, but the exertion and excitement must have been too much for both of them. They managed to get back to their bedrooms, collapsed, and died. I'm betting the postmortems show simple heart failure in both cases.”

“There, there,” Ellery was crooning to the flooded blue eyes. “They were very old, Edie.”

“Thus endeth The Butlers Club, and high time, too,” said Benzell Jarvis. “All I want to know is, which one died first? Or rather, second?”

“No autopsy can determine the exact moment of death,” the Inspector said, regarding him as if he were a strange bug, “although I'm positive they died around the same time. You know, Ellery, it makes an interesting problem at that.”

“What, dad?” said Ellery. “Oh! Yes. It does, indeed.”

“You're damned right it does!” snarled Jarvis. “If old Burroughs died first, my grandfather inherited the tontine and I get the jackpot. If it was the other way around, Edie gets it. There's got to be some way of telling which survived the other, even if it was only for ten seconds!”

“Oh,” said Ellery, “there is, Jarvis, there is.”

As Ellery explained it: “We know what time William Jarvis fell dead last night. The electric clock he stopped in falling says it was 7:46.

“The question, then, is how to determine what time Peter Burroughs died. His alarm clock provides the answer.

“If you want an alarm clock to ring at, say, 8 o'clock in the morning, you must set the alarm
after
8 o'clock the night before. Because if you set the alarm before 8, it will obviously ring at 8 the same night, not at 8 the next morning.

“It was a few minutes past 8
A
.
M
. when Edie Burroughs came to me for help this morning. I had to call you, dad; you called Ben Jarvis; we all had to meet on 60th Street—it was therefore long past 8
A
.
M
. when we entered The Butlers Club. And what did we hear when we entered? The ringing of Peter Burroughs's alarm clock, which ran down just as we got into his bedroom.

“Therefore Peter Burroughs must have set his alarm long past 8 o'clock last night. To have been able to do that, he had to have been alive long past 8
P
.
M
.

“But your grandfather, Jarvis, died at 7:46
P
.
M
.

“Miss Burroughs, may I shake the hand of the loveliest multimillionaire of my acquaintance?”

Crime Syndicate Dept.: Payoff

“Combine?” Ellery asked, sitting up.

“No,” sighed Inspector Queen, “these operators are about as close to the Combine type as the stratosphere to a groundhog. And as hard to reach. It's a real high-class nastiness.”

“Tell me more, dad.”

“Well, we were up against a stone wall till evidence turned up that this plush-lined mob has a Board of Directors composed of four men. When I tell you who they are you'll send for the loony wagon.”

“It can't be as bad as all that.”

“Can't it?” The Inspector raised his corded hands and began to tick the quartet off. “One: Ever hear of DeWitt Hughes?”

“Certainly I've heard of DeWitt Hughes. Wall Street and banking in the megamillions. You're not seriously suggesting …?”

“I am.”

“But DeWitt Hughes? Directing a crime syndicate?”

“As one of four,” said his father, shaking his head. “Of whom the second is John T. Ewing.”

Ellery gawped. “The oil and mining tycoon?”

“You heard me. And Number Three: Filippo Falcone.”

“The construction and trucking king? Dad, is this a rib?”

“I wish I could joke about it,” the Inspector said. “And last—you ready, son? Reilly Burke.”

“You've got to be kidding,” Ellery exclaimed. “Burke, the Great Mouthpiece of our time! Why would a lawyer of Burke's standing and big businessmen like Falcone, Ewing, and Hughes dirty themselves in the rackets?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe it's so easy for such operators to make big money legit these days that the only kicks left is to turn crooked.”

“I'd like to help straighten them out,” Ellery said grimly. “I take it I fit into your plans some way?”

“Before we move a step I want to know which of those four cuties is top banana, Ellery. Not only would that enable us to move in faster and so cut down on the chances of a tipoff, but my information is that the head man has possession of the main syndicate records. So I'm hoping you can pinpoint him for us.”

“Do you have a lead?”

“In a way.” Inspector Queen flipped his intercom. “Velie, send in Mrs. Prince.”

The ravaged woman Sergeant Velie admitted to the Inspector's office must once have been pretty in a petite, even chic, way. But only wreckage was left. She was so nervous that Ellery had to help her into the chair; her arm thrummed like a piano wire.

“Mrs. Prince's husband is an accountant who's serving five to ten for an embezzlement,” Inspector Queen said.

“He didn't do it.” She had a broken-down voice, too. “He confessed to a crime he didn't commit because it was part of a deal.”

“Tell my son what Mr. Prince told you when he was sent up.”

“John said that when he got out we'd be set for life,” the woman told Ellery. “Meanwhile, every month for over three years now I've received through the mail an unmarked envelope containing $750 in small bills. That's what the children and I have been living on.”

“You don't know where the money is coming from?”

“No, and John won't discuss it when I visit him. But he knows, all right! It's part of the deal he made, I'm positive, to make sure he keeps his mouth shut.”

“He's being released from Sing Sing on parole tomorrow, Ellery.”

“My husband told me not to meet him in Ossining—to wait for him at home,” the woman whispered. “Mr. Queen, I'm scared.”

“Why?”

“Because of the deal he made, whatever it was. Of the blood money, wherever it comes from, that he's going to be paid off with. I don't want it!” Mrs. Prince cried. “All I want is for us to get away from here, change our name, start all over again somewhere. But John won't listen to me …”

“Or to anyone else,” said Inspector Queen. “It's a long shot, Ellery, but maybe he'll listen to you. Mrs. Prince says he's always been a fan of yours.”

“If you'd only make John see that we can't build a life on that kind of money, Mr. Queen!”

“Nobody, including you, is going to talk Prince out of
that
,” the Inspector remarked to his son, when the woman had left, “in spite of what I just said. Not when he's earned the money by sacrificing his good name and over three years of his life.”