QED (4 page)

So they went upstairs, Margaret Caswell leading the way, followed by Newby and Ellery, with the others straggling behind.

The old man was lying on the floor beside his bed. He lay on his back, his eyes fixed in the disconcerting stare of death. The front of his pajama coat was clotted with the seepage from the knife wound in his chest. There had been very little bleeding. A black-handled knife trimmed in what looked like nickel protruded from the region of his heart.

“Hello, Conk,” Ellery said to the doctor, but looking at the corpse.

“Ellery,” Dr. Farnham exclaimed. “When did you get to town?”

“Last night. Just in time, as usual.” Ellery was still looking at the dead man. “How's Molly?”

“Blooming—”

“Never mind Old Home Week,” said Newby irritably. “What's your educated guess, Doctor, as to the time he got it?”

“Between four and five
A
.
M
., I'd say. A good spell after the snow stopped, if that's what you're thinking of.”

“Speaking of the snow,” said Ellery, looking up. “Who made that double set of tracks around the house I noticed on driving up?”

“Joanne and I,” said Christopher from between his teeth.

“Oh? When did you make them, Mr. Mumford?”

“This morning.”

“You and Miss Caswell walked all around the house?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice any tracks in the snow other than those you and Miss Caswell were making?” After a moment Ellery said, “Mr. Mumford?”

“No.”

“Not anywhere around the house?”

“No!”

“Thank you,” Ellery said. “I could remark that that's very helpful, but I can understand that you ladies and gentlemen may have a different point of view. It means no one entered or left the house after the snow stopped falling. It means the murder was committed by someone
in the house
—someone, moreover, who's still here.”

“That's what it means, all right,” said Chief Newby with undisguised satisfaction. He was inching carefully about the room, his bleak glance putting a touch of frost on everything.

“That was intelligent of you, Chris,” Ellen Nash said viciously. “So now we're all under suspicion. What a bloody farce!”

“You've got the wrong category, I'm afraid,” her brother said morosely. “As one of us, I suppose, is going to find out.”

There was a dreary moment. Jo's fresh face held a look of complete incredulity, as if the full meaning of the trackless snow had just now struck home. Ellen was staring over at her recumbent father, her expression saying that it was all his fault. Margaret Caswell leaned against the door, her lips moving without a sound. Christopher took out a pack of cigarets, held it awkwardly for a moment, then put it back in his pocket. Wolcott Thorp mumbled something about the absolute impossibility of it all; his tone said he wished he were back in his museum among the relics of the legitimately dead.

“The knife,” Ellery said. He was looking down again at Godfrey Mumford's torso. “The fact that the killer left it behind, Newby, undoubtedly means that it's useless as a clue. If it had any fingerprints on it, they probably were wiped off.”

“We'll dust the room and knife for prints, anyway,” said the Chief. “Don't any of you come any further than that doorway … Not that it's going to do us any good, as you say, Ellery. You people—I take it you've all been in this bedroom in the last day or so at one time or another?” He shrugged at their nods.

“By the way,” Ellery said, “I haven't seen one of these old-fashioned jackknives in years. Does anyone recognize it? Mrs. Caswell?”

“It's Godfrey's,” Mum said stiffly. “He kept it on the writing desk there. It was one of his prized possessions. He'd had it from childhood.”

“He never carried it around with him?”

“I've never seen it anywhere but on his desk. He was very sentimental about it … He used it as a letter opener.”

“I have a boyhood artifact or two myself that I'm inclined to treasure. Did everyone know this, Mrs. Caswell?”

“Everyone in the household—” She stopped with a squeak of her breath—like, Ellery thought, a screech of brakes. But he pretended not to notice. Instead, he knelt to pick something up from the floor beside the body.

“What's that?” demanded Chief Newby.

“It's a memo pad,” Dr. Farnham said unexpectedly. “It was kept on the night table at my suggestion for notations of temperature, time of medications, and so on. It apparently fell off the table when Mr. Mumford toppled from the bed; he must have jostled the table. When I got here the pad was lying on the body. I threw it aside in making my examination.”

“Then it doesn't mean anything,” the Chief began; but Ellery, back on his feet, staring at the top sheet of the pad, said, “I disagree. Unless … Conk, did Mr. Mumford regain any mobility since his stroke?”

“Quite a bit,” replied Dr. Farnham. “He was making a far better and faster recovery than I expected.”

“Then this pad explains why he fell out of bed in the first place, Newby—why, with that knife wound, he didn't simply die where he lay after being struck.”

“How do you figure that? You know how they'll thrash around sometimes when they're dying. What does the pad have to do with it?”

“The pad,” said Ellery, “has this to do with it: after his murderer left him, thinking he was dead, Godfrey Mumford somehow found the strength to raise himself to a sitting position, reach over to the night table, pick up the pencil and pad—you'll find the pencil under the bed, along with the top sheet of the pad containing the medical notations, where they must have fallen when he dropped them—and blockprinted a message. The dying message, Newby, on this pad.”

“What dying message?” Newby pounced. “Let me see that! Had he recovered enough from the paralysis, Doc, to be able to
write
?”

“With considerable effort, Chief, yes.”

The dead man's message consisted of one word, and Newby pronounced it again, like a contestant in a spelling bee.

“MUM,” he read. “Capital M, capital U, capital M—MUM.”

In the silence, fantasy crept. It made no sense of the normal sort at all.

MUM.

“What on earth could Godfrey have meant?” Wolcott Thorp exclaimed. “What a queer thing to write when he was dying!”

“Queer, Mr. Thorp,” Ellery said, “is the exact word.”

“I don't think so,” said the Chief with a grin. “It won't do, Ellery. I don't say I always believe what's in front of my nose, but if there's a simple explanation, why duck it? Everybody in town knows that Mrs. Caswell here is called Mum, and has been for over twenty-five years. If Godfrey meant to name his killer, then it's a cinch this thing on the pad refers to her. No embroidery, Ellery—it's open and shut.”

“What—what
rot!
” Joanne cried, jumping to her mother's side. “Mother
loved
Uncle Godfrey. You know what you are, Chief Newby? You're a—you're a nitwit! Isn't he, Mr. Queen?”

“I would like to think about it,” said Mr. Queen, staring at the pad.

January 9:
It is a fact that must be recorded, at whatever peril to his reputation, that Mr. Queen had achieved in Wrightsville the status of a professional houseguest. In more than two decades he had proved a miserably meager source of revenue to the Hollis Hotel. No sooner did he check in, it seemed, than he was checking out again. Let it be said in his defense that this was not the result of parsimony. It was simply because of his flair for entangling himself in Wrightsville's private lives and, as a consequence, being invited to Wrightsville's relevant private homes.

The invitation to move over to the Mumfords' was extended by an unhilarious Christopher at the iron plea of Joanne. Jo's motive was transparent enough; Ellery was not sufficiently vain to suppose it had anything to do with moonlight and roses. With Chief Newby breathing down her mother's neck, Jo had sensed an ally; she wanted Ellery not only on her side morally, but physically at hand.

Which explains why, on the morning of January ninth, Ellery settled his account at the checkout desk of the Hollis and, lugging his suitcases like ballast on either side, tacked briskly toward the northwest arc of the Square. Crossing Upper Dade Street, he luffed past the Wrightsville National Bank, Town Hall, and the Our Boys Memorial at the entrance to Memorial Park, and finally made the side entrance of the County Court House Building. In police headquarters he paused long enough to register his change of address with Chief Newby, who received the announcement with an unenthusiastic nod.

“Any luck with the fingerprinting, by the way?” Ellery asked.

“All kinds of it. We found
everybody's
fingerprints in the bedroom. But not a one on the jackknife. Wiped clean, all right.” Newby scowled. “Who'd have thought a nice little housekeeper like Mum Caswell would have the know-how to remove her prints or wear gloves?”

“If you're so certain she killed Mumford, why don't you make the collar?”

“On what evidence? That MUM message?” The Chief threw up his hands. “Imagine the corned-beef hash a defense lawyer would make of
that
in court. Ellery, find something for me in that house, will you?”

“I'll do my best,” said Ellery. “Although it may not turn out to be for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm concerned with the truth, Anse. You're merely concerned with the facts,” said Ellery.

And he left before Newby could reply.

Ellery commandeered a taxicab driven, to his surprise, by someone he did not recognize, and was trundled off (after circling the Square) back up broad-bottomed State Street to the oldest part of town, where the houses were black-shuttered pre-Revolutionaries set well back on rolling lawns in the shade of centuries-old trees. And soon he was ringing the chimes-doorbell of the Mumford mansion.

It was the day after Mumford's funeral, and the big house was still haunted. The old man's presence seemed to linger in the sight and scent of his precious chrysanthemums, which in lesser greenhouses bore their blooms from late August to December.

Joanne let him in with a glad little cry.

She established him in a tall-ceilinged bedroom upstairs with a tester bed and a beautiful Duncan Phyfe highboy that he instantaneously coveted. But he was made melancholy by the vase of two-headed mums that Jo had set on the night table, and he soon descended in search of fleshlier company.

He found Jo, Ellen, and Christopher in the library, and it became clear at once that the exercise of his peculiar gifts, at least as far as Ellen Nash was concerned, was her charge for his lodging.

“I'm not going to dignify for one moment the absurd conclusion that one of us murdered father,” Ellen said. “He was done in by some maniac, or tramp, or something—”

“The snow,” her brother said damply.

“To hell with the snow! What I'm interested in is that father left a million dollars' worth of pendant in his wall safe, and I want that safe opened.”

“Pendant?” said Ellery. “What pendant?”

So Christopher told him all about the New Year's Eve party, and what Godfrey Mumford had told them, and how he had exhibited the Imperial Pendant to them and then returned it to the safe.

“And he also told us,” Christopher concluded, “that he was the only one who knew the safe combination. He said he was going to make a note of the combination for us. But we haven't looked for it yet.”

“I have,” said Ellen, “and I can't find it. So that your stay here won't be a complete waste of time, Mr. Queen, why not show us how Superman detects? A little thing like finding a safe combination should barely test your reputation.”

“Do we have to worry about the pendant
now?
” asked Jo.

“It shouldn't take too long, Miss Caswell,” said Ellery. To himself he was saying: Maybe a million dollars' worth of jewelry has something to do with where Godfrey's boyhood knife had finally rested.

Searches were Ellery's forte, but this one defeated him. Trailed by relatives of the deceased, he squandered the rest of the morning looking in obvious places. But unlike Poe's purloined letter, the combination of the safe was nowhere to be found.

They took time out for lunch and an inventory of the unlikelier places, and the afternoon passed in exhausting this inventory. Then time out again, and over dinner a round-table discussion of other possibilities, however remote. Mr. Queen's fame as a sleuth clearly underwent reappraisal by at least one conferee present. And Mr. Queen himself grew audibly more quiet.

After dinner Ellen returned to the search of the files she had already ransacked once. Ellery, reminding himself bravely in the face of his failure that there was, after all, more than one way to flay a kitty, took Christopher aside.

“I'm prompted,” Ellery announced, “to go directly to the source of the problem—namely, to the safe itself. Can you show me where the blamed thing is?”

“What do you have in mind?” asked Christopher. “Nitro?”

“Nothing so common. A bit of fiddling with the dial, à la Jimmy Valentine.”

“Who's he?”

Ellery said sadly, “Never mind.”

Christopher led him to the drawing room and, turning on the lights, went to the chrysanthemum painting on the wall and pushed it aside. Ellery began to flex his fingers like a violin virtuoso before a recital.

He studied the thing. The safe door was about ten inches square and in the middle was a rotating dial about six inches in diameter. Etched into the circumference of the dial were twenty-six evenly spaced notches numbered in sequence 1 to 26. Around the dial Ellery saw a narrow immovable ring or collar in the top of which was set a single unnumbered notch—the notch used for aligning the numbers of the combination when opening the safe.