The Four of Hearts (18 page)

CHAPTER 17

‘DANSE AMOUREUSE'

Mr. Queen sat in Ty's cool room and cogitated. He sat and cogitated for a considerable time. In many ways things were satisfactory; yes, quite satisfactory. In one important way, however, they were unquestionably not satisfactory. The most important way.

‘Same old story,' reflected Mr. Queen. ‘Find the nut and there's nothing to crack it with. Is it possible there's nothing to do but wait? Think, man, think!'

Mr. Queen thought. An hour passed; another. Mr. Queen kept on thinking. But it was no use.

He got to his feet, stretching to iron the kinks out of his muscles. It all gelled; the case lay smooth and shiny and whole before his critical appetite. The problem, which he found himself unable to solve, was how to wrap his fingers around it without causing it to disintegrate into a sticky, ruined, quivering mess.

Hoping fervently for an inspiration, Mr. Queen left the bungalow and the studio and took a taxi back to his hotel. In his apartment he called the desk clerk and instructed him to have his coupé brought round from the garage. While he was gathering the various letters in his collection and placing them under the lid of John Royle's portable typewriter, the telephone rang.

‘Queen?' bellowed Inspector Glücke. ‘You come down to my office right away! Right away, d'ye hear?'

‘Do I hear? I can't very well help myself, Glücke.'

‘I'm not saying anything now. You just get down here as fast as those smart legs of yours can carry you!'

‘Mmm,' said Ellery. ‘Shall I take a toothbrush and pyjamas?'

‘You ought to be in clink, damn you. Step on it!'

‘As a matter of fact, I was on my way, Glücke –'

‘You'd double-cross your own father,' roared the Inspector. ‘I give you a half-hour. Not a minute more!' He hung up.

Ellery frowned, sighed, snapped down the lid of the typewriter, went downstairs, got into his coupé, and headed for downtown Los Angeles.

‘Well?' said Mr. Queen, precisely a half-hour later.

Inspector Glücke sat behind his desk blowing out his hard cheeks and contriving to look both vexed and wounded at once. Also, he breathed hard and angrily.

‘What's that you've got there?' he growled, pointing to the typewriter.

‘I asked first,' said Ellery coyly.

‘Sit down and don't be so damned funny. Did you see Paula Paris's paper today?'

‘No.'

‘Can't you read English, or aren't our newspapers classy enough for you? After all, you
are
a literary man.'

‘Ha, ha,' said Ellery. ‘That, I take it, was meant to positively gore me. You see how much I love you, darling? I even split an infinitive with you! Come on, spill.' Glücke hurled a newspaper at Ellery. Ellery caught it, raising his brows, and began to read a passage marked in red pencil in Paula Paris's column.

‘What you got to say for yourself?'

‘I say she's wonderful,' said Ellery dreamily. ‘My lady Paula! A woman with brains. Glücke, tell me truthfully: Have you ever met a woman who combined intellect, beauty, and charm so perfectly?'

The Inspector smote his desk with the flat of his hand, making things jump and tremble. ‘You think you're damned cute – you and that pest of a newspaperwoman! Queen, I don't mind telling you I'm raving mad. Raving! When I read that piece I had a good mind to issue a warrant for your arrest. I mean it!'

‘Looking for a goat, eh?' said Ellery sympathetically.

‘Collecting all those letters! Holding out on me all week! Posing as a Headquarters dick!'

‘You've worked fast,' said Ellery with admiration. ‘All she says here, after all, is that Blythe Stuart was receiving anonymous letters and that they were mailed through the agency of a mailing service. Good work, Glücke.'

‘Don't salve me! There's only one mailing service in town, and I had this guy Lucey on the carpet just a while ago. He told me all about you – recognized you from his description. And you left your name and hotel phone number with him. The cheek of it! That proved his story. I suppose the other two were Ty Royle and Lew Bascom, from Lucey's description.'

‘Wonderful.'

‘I've been having the Stuart house searched – no letters so I know you have ‘em.' The Inspector looked as if he were about to cry. ‘To think you'd pull a lousy trick like that on
me.'
He jumped up and shouted: ‘Fork over!'

Ellery frowned. ‘Nevertheless, the inevitability of secrets finally coming to rest in Paula's column is beginning to give me the willies. Where the devil does she get her information?'

‘I don't care,' yelled Glücke. ‘I didn't even call her this morning on it – what the hell good would it do? Listen, Queen, are you going to give me those letters or do I have to slap you in the can?'

‘Oh, the letters.' Ellery kicked the typewriter between his legs. ‘You'll find them in here, with the cards and the machine the scoundrel used to type his code sheet, and his letter to International Mailers.'

‘Cards? Code sheet?' gasped Glücke. ‘Machine? Whose machine?'

‘Jack Royle's.'

The Inspector sank back, feeling his brow. ‘All right,' he choked. ‘Let's have the story. I'm just in charge of the Homicide Detail. Just give me a break, a handout.' He bellowed: ‘Damn it, man,
GIVE
!'

Ellery gave, chuckling. He launched into a long exposition, beginning at the beginning – the very beginning, which was his acquisition of the first two cards from Blythe Stuart herself in Jack Royle's house – and concluding with the story of the new series of letters sent to Bonnie.

The Inspector sat glowering at the typewriter, the yellow sheets, the cards, the envelopes.

‘And when I found that the two letters to Bonnie were typed on Ty's machine,' shrugged Ellery, ‘that was the end of it. Honestly, Glücke, I was on my way to give you all this stuff when you phoned me.'

The Inspector rose, grunting, and took a turn about the room. Then he summoned his secretary. ‘Take all this stuff down to Bronson and have him check it, along with the fingerprint detail.' When the man left, he resumed his pacing.

Finally, he sat down. ‘To tell you the truth,' he confessed, ‘it doesn't mean an awful lot to me. That letter signed Smith is a phony, of course; just a neat way of wiping out the trail to himself. The only thing I get out of the whole set-up is that the original plan was to bump Blythe off, and that something happened to make this Smith give Jack the works, too.'

‘The essential point,' murmured Ellery.

‘But why
was
Jack knocked off? Why were the warnings sent at all?' The Inspector waved his arms. ‘And what's the idea of starting on Bonnie Stuart now? Say!' His eyes narrowed. ‘So that's why you had me put a day-and-night tail on her!'

‘If you'll recall, I asked you to have her watched before the first warning was sent to her.'

‘Then why –'

‘Call it a hunch. The cards to Bonnie later confirmed it.'

‘So now she's elected,' muttered Glücke. ‘No savvy.'

‘Have you seen her today?'

‘I tried to locate her when I found out about the anonymous letters, but she's not home, and my men haven't reported. Matter of fact, Royle isn't around either.'

A chilly finger pressed on Ellery's spine. ‘You haven't been able to locate Ty?'

‘Nope.' The Inspector looked startled. ‘Say, you don't think
he's
behind these letters? That he's the one –!' He jumped up again. ‘Sure! You say yourself these last messages to Bonnie were typed on his machine!' He grabbed his phone. ‘Miller! Hop down to the Magna Studios on the double and bring back the typewriter in Ty Royle's dressing-room. Careful with it – prints.' He hung up, rubbing his hands. ‘We'll have to go easy, of course. Proving he sent the cards doesn't prove he pulled the double murder. But just the same it's a start. Motive galore –'

‘You mean he killed his father, too?'

Glücke looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I said we'd go easy. There's a lot of questions to clear up. Keep this under your hat, Queen, while I start the ball rolling.'

‘Oh, I will,' said Ellery drily.

The Inspector grinned and hurried out. Ellery mused over a cigarette. When the Inspector came back he was beaming.

‘We'll locate him in short order, of course. Then a day-and-night tail without his knowledge. I'm having his house fine-combed. Maybe we'll turn up something on that morphine and sodium allurate, too – check over his movements for a couple of weeks, drug purchases, and so on. It's a start; it's a start.'

‘Of course, you know Ty physically couldn't have been that masked pilot,' Ellery pointed out.

‘Sure not, but he could have hired someone as a blind. Swell blind, too, having himself held up with a gun and tied like a rooster. With the girl as witness, too.'

Ellery sighed. ‘I hesitate to dampen your enthusiasm, Glücke, but you're all wrong.'

‘Hey? Wrong? How's that?' Glücke looked startled.

‘Ty never wrote those letters – no, any more than Jack wrote the ones that came to Blythe.'

The Inspector sucked his finger. ‘How come?' He looked disappointed.

‘You might examine,' drawled Ellery, ‘the faces of the h and r keys on this machine.'

Glücke did so, frowning. The frown disappeared magically, to be replaced by a scowl. ‘Filed!'

‘Exactly. And, when you examine Ty's typewriter, you'll find that the b and d and t are similarly filed. There could be only one purpose in a deliberate mutilation of typewriter keys – identification of the machine from a sample of its writing. Well, who would want Jack Royle's machine to be easily identified as the machine which typed the code sheet behind the anonymous letters? Jack Royle? Hardly, if he was sending them. And the same goes for Ty and his machine.'

‘I know, I know,' said Glücke irritably. ‘Framed, by God.'

‘So we can be sure of several things. First, that Jack Royle did
not
send those card messages to Blythe. Second, that Ty Royle did
not
send those card messages to Bonnie. And third – this follows a pattern of probability – from the fact that the same method of mutilation was used on both machines, filing of keys, a conclusion that
the same person
mutilated both, and consequently the same person sent both series of messages.'

‘But a frame of
two
men!'

‘See what we have. Originally a plan to murder Blythe, and in doing so to frame Jack for the murder by the device of sending those otherwise infantile messages, leaving a trail to them through Jack's typewriter.'

‘But Jack was killed, too.'

‘Yes, but we also know the murderer had to change his original plans. Somehow that change necessitated the killing of Jack and the abandonment of the frame-up against him by virtue of the very fact that he had to be murdered.'

‘But the cards kept coming.'

‘Because the murderer had set up the machinery for having them mailed and didn't want to risk stopping it. Think now, Glücke. We have a change of plan. Jack's murder. Then the cards start coming to Bonnie. Had the original plans been followed through, it's reasonable to assume that Jack would continue to be framed. But with Jack dead, someone else must be framed for the threats against Bonnie. Who? Well, we know it's Ty being framed for those threats. It all adds up to one thing.'

‘Keep talking,' said the Inspector intently.

‘Someone is using the Royle-Stuart feud as a motive background for his crime. He's throwing you a ready-made motive. So the feud can't be the motive at all.'

‘The pilot!'

Ellery looked thoughtful. ‘Any trace of the pilot yet?'

‘Damned shadow simply vanished. We're still plugging along on it. I've sort of become discouraged myself.' He eyed Ellery. ‘Did you know I've cleared Alessandro?'

‘Cleared?' Ellery elevated his brows.

‘That hundred and ten grand Jack owed him was really paid. No doubt about it.'

‘Was there ever any?'

The Inspector looked suspicious. ‘You knew it!'

‘As a matter of fact, I did. How did you find out?'

‘Checked over bank accounts. Found that Jack had cashed a cheque for a hundred and ten thousand dollars in the bank on the morning of Thursday, the fourteenth.'

‘Not his bank, surely; they wouldn't honour a cheque of that size for him so quickly. Tolland Stuart's bank?'

‘How'd you know that?' exploded Glücke.

‘Guessed. I do know the cheque was signed by old man Stuart and was dated the thirteenth. I know because I asked the terrible-tempered old coot just yesterday.'

‘How come Stuart forked over all that dough to Jack? Jack didn't mean anything to him. Or did he?'

‘I think not. It was Blythe's work. She took Jack with her that Wednesday to see her father, pleaded for the money for Jack's sake, not for her own. He says he gave it to her to get rid of both of them.'

‘Sounds screwy enough to be true. Even if it wasn't the reason, the signature's genuine; we know the old gent did make out a cheque for that amount.'

‘Anything else turn up?'

‘Nope. Our leads on Jack's lady-friends petered out; every one of ‘em had an alibi. And the poison – not a trace.' Ellery drummed on the arm of his chair. Glücke scowled. ‘But this frame-up, now. If Ty's being framed, this last card was an awful dumb one to send the girl! What kind of cluck are we dealing with, anyway?'

‘A cluck who puts morphine into people's cocktails and sends ‘em dumb messages. Perplexing, isn't it?'

‘Maybe,' muttered the Inspector hopefully, ‘maybe there's a lead in this fortune-telling stuff after all. I do know Blythe was a little cracked on the subject, like most of the wacky dames out here.'