The Oxford Book of American Det (98 page)

“$56,000,” said Tungston.

“$57,000,” said Harbidger.

“$58,000,” said Tungston.

“$59,000,” said Harbidger.

Tungston showed his fangs. “$60,000,” he said.

Harbidger fell silent, and DiCampo waited. He did not expect miracles. To these men, five times $60,000 was of less moment than the undistinguished wine they were smacking their lips over; but they were veterans of many a hard auction-room campaign, and a collector’s victory tasted very nearly as sweet for the price as for the prize.

So the impoverished prince was not surprised when the Lincoln collector suddenly said, “Would you be good enough to allow Mr. Tungston and me to talk privately for a moment?”

DiCampo rose and strolled out of the room, to gaze sombrely through a cracked window at the jungle growth that had once been his Italian formal gardens.

It was the Poe collector who summoned him back. “Harbidger has convinced me that for the two of us to try to outbid each other would simply run the price up out of all reason. We’re going to make you a sporting proposition.”

“I’ve proposed to Mr. Tungsten, and he has agreed,” nodded Harbidger, “that our bid for the book and document be $65,000. Each of us is prepared to pay that sum, and not a penny more.”

“So that is how the screws are turned,” said DiCampo, smiling. “But I do not understand. If each of you makes the identical bid, which of you gets the book and document?”

“Ah,” grinned the Poe man, “that’s where the sporting proposition comes in.”

“You see, Mr. DiCampo,” said the Lincoln man, “we are going to leave that decision to you.”

Even the old prince, who had seen more than his share of the astonishing, was astonished. He looked at the two rich men really for the first time. “I must confess,” he murmured, “that your compact is an amusement. Permit me?” He sank into thought while the two collectors sat expectantly. When the old man looked up he was smiling like a fox. “The very thing, gentlemen! From the typewritten copies of the document I sent you, you both know that Lincoln himself left a clue to a theoretical hiding place for the book which he never explained. Some time ago I arrived at a possible solution to the President’s little mystery. I propose to hide the book and document in accordance with it.”

“You mean whichever of us figures out your interpretation of the Lincoln clue and finds the book and document where you will hide them, Mr. DiCampo, gets both for the agreed price?”

“That is it exactly.”

The Lincoln collector looked dubious. “I don’t know...”

“Oh, come, Harbidger,” said Tungsten, eyes glittering. “A deal is a deal. We accept, DiCampo! Now what?”

“You gentlemen will of course have to give me a little time. Shall we say three days?” Ellery let himself into the Queen apartment, tossed his suitcase aside, and set about opening windows. He had been out of town for a week on a case, and Inspector Queen was in Atlantic City attending a police convention.

Breathable air having been restored, Ellery sat down to the week’s accumulation of mail. One envelope made him pause. It had come by airmail special delivery, it was postmarked four days earlier, and in the lower left corner, in red, flamed the word URGENT. The printed return address on the flap said: L.S.M.B-R DiCampo, Post Office Box 69, Southern District, Eulalia, N.Y. The initials of the name had been crossed out and “Bianca” written above them.

The enclosure, in a large agitated female hand on inexpensive note-paper, said: Dear Mr. Queen,

The most important detective book in the world has

disappeared. Will you please find it for me?

Phone me on arrival at the Eulalia RR station or airport and I will pick you up.

BIANCA DiCAMPO

A yellow envelope then caught his eye. It was a telegram, dated the previous day:
WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD FROM YOU STOP AM IN

DESPERATE NEED YOUR SERVICES

BIANCA DICAMPO

He had no sooner finished reading the telegram than the telephone on his desk trilled.

It was a long-distance call.

“Mr. Queen?” throbbed a contralto voice. “Thank heaven I’ve finally got through to you! I’ve been calling all day—“

“I’ve been away,” said Ellery, “and you would be Miss Bianca Di-Campo of Eulalia. In two words, Miss DiCampo: Why me?”

“In two words, Mr. Queen: Abraham Lincoln.”

Ellery was startled. “You plead a persuasive case,” he chuckled. “It’s true, I’m an incurable Lincoln addict. How did you find out? Well, never mind. Your letter refers to a book, Miss DiCampo. Which book?”

The husky voice told him, and certain other provocative things as well. “So you will come, Mr. Queen?”

“Tonight if I could! Suppose I drive up first thing in the morning. I ought to make Eulalia by noon. Harbidger and Tungston are still around, I take it?”

“Oh, yes. They’re staying at a motel downtown.”

“Would you ask them to be there?”

The moment he hung up Ellery leaped to his bookshelves. He snatched out his volume of
Murder for Pleasure,
the historical work on detective stories by his good friend Howard Haycraft, and found what he was looking for on page 26: And... young William Dean Howells thought it

significant praise to assert of a nominee for President of the United States:

The bent of his mind is mathematical and

metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased with the

absolute and logical method of Poe’s tales and

sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author.

Abraham Lincoln subsequently confirmed this

statement, which appeared in his little known

‘campaign biography’ by Howells in 1860... The

instance is chiefly notable, of course, for its revelation of a little suspected affinity between two great

Americans...

Very early the next morning Ellery gathered some papers from his files, stuffed them into his briefcase, scribbled a note for his father, and ran for his car, Eulalia-bound...

He was enchanted by the DiCampo house, which looked like something out of Poe by Charles Addams; and, for other reasons, by Bianca, who turned out to be a genetic product supreme of northern Italy, with titian hair and Mediterranean blue eyes and a figure that needed only some solid steaks to qualify her for Miss Universe competition.

Also, she was in deep mourning; so her conquest of the Queen heart was immediate and complete.

“He died of a cerebral haemorrhage, Mr. Queen,” Bianca said, dabbing at her absurd little nose. “In the middle of the second night after his session with Mr. Harbidger and Mr. Tungston.”

So Lorenzo San Marco Borghese-Ruffo DiCampo was unexpectedly dead, bequeathing the lovely Bianca near-destitution and a mystery.

“The only things of value father really left me are that book and the Lincoln document.

The $65,000 they now represent would pay off father’s debts and give me a fresh start.

But I can’t find them, Mr. Queen, and neither can Mr. Harbidger and Mr. Tungston—

who’ll be here soon, by the way. Father hid the two things, as he told them he would; but where? We’ve ransacked the place.”

“Tell me about the book, Miss DiCampo.”

“As I said over the phone, it’s called
The Gift: 1845.
The Christmas annual that contained the earliest appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Purloined Letter.”

“Published in Philadelphia by Carey & Hart? Bound in red?” At Bianca’s nod Ellery said, “You understand that an ordinary copy of
The Gift: 1845
isn’t worth more than $50. What makes your father’s copy unique is that double autograph you mentioned.”

“That’s what he said, Mr. Queen. I wish I had the book here to show you—that beautifully handwritten Edgar Allan Poe on the flyleaf, and under Poe’s signature the signature Abraham Lincoln.”

“Poe’s own copy, once owned, signed, and read by Lincoln,” Ellery said slowly. “Yes, that would be a collector’s item for the ages. By the way, Miss DiCampo, what’s the story behind the other piece—the Lincoln document?” Bianca told him what her father had told her.

One morning in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln opened the rosewood door of his bedroom in the southwest corner of the second floor of the White House and stepped out into the red-carpeted hall at the unusually late hour—for him—of 7:00 A.M.; he was more accustomed to beginning his work day at six.

But (as Lorenzo DiCampo had reconstructed events) Mr. Lincoln that morning had lingered in his bedchamber. He had awakened at his usual hour but, instead of leaving immediately on dressing for his office, he had pulled one of the cane chairs over to the round table, with its gas-fed reading lamp, and sat down to reread Foe’s
The Purloined
Letter
in his copy of the 1845 annual; it was a dreary morning, and the natural light was poor. The President was alone; the folding doors to Mrs. Lincoln’s bedroom remained closed.

Impressed as always with Poe’s tale, Mr. Lincoln on this occasion was struck by a whimsical thought; and, apparently finding no paper handy, he took an envelope from his pocket, discarded its enclosure, slit the two short edges so that the envelope opened out into a single sheet, and began to write on the blank side.

“Describe it to me, please.”

“It’s a long envelope, one that must have contained a bulky letter. It is addressed to the White House, but there is no return address, and father was never able to identify the sender from the handwriting. We do know that the letter came through the regular mails, because there are two Lincoln stamps on it, lightly but unmistakably cancelled.”

“May I see your father’s transcript of what Lincoln wrote out that morning on the inside of the envelope?”

Bianca handed him a typewritten copy and, in spite of himself, Ellery felt goose-flesh rise as he read:

Apr. 14, 1865

Mr. Poe’s
The Purloined Letter
is a work of singular originality. Its simplicity is a master-stroke of cunning, which never fails to arouse my wonder.

Reading the tale over this morning has given me a

‘notion.’ Suppose I wished to hide a book, this very book, perhaps? Where best to do so? Well, as Mr.

Poe in his tale hid a letter among letters, might not a book be hidden among books? Why, if this very copy

of the tale were to be deposited in a library and on purpose not recorded—would not the Library of

Congress make a prime depository!—well might it

repose there, undiscovered, for a generation.

On the other hand, let us regard Mr. Poe’s ‘notion’

turn-about: suppose the book were to be placed, not amongst other books, but where no book would

reasonably be expected? (I may follow the example

of Mr. Poe, and, myself, compose a tale of

‘ratiocination’!)

The ‘notion’ beguiles me, it is nearly seven o’clock.

Later today, if the vultures and my appointments

leave me a few moments of leisure, I may write

further of my imagined hiding-place.

In self-reminder: the hiding-place of the book is in 30d, which

Ellery looked up. “The document ends there?”

“Father said that Mr. Lincoln must have glanced again at his watch, and shamefacedly jumped up to go to his office, leaving the sentence unfinished. Evidently he never found the time to get back to it.”

Ellery brooded. Evidently indeed. From the moment when Abraham Lincoln stepped out of his bedroom that Good Friday morning, fingering his thick gold watch on its vest chain, to bid the still-unrelieved night guard his customary courteous “Good morning” and make for his office at the other end of the hall, his day was spoken for.

The usual patient push through the clutching crowd of favour-seekers, many of whom had bedded down all night on the hall carpet; sanctuary in his sprawling office, where he read official correspondence; by 8:00 A.M. having breakfast with his family—Mrs.

Lincoln chattering away about plans for the evening, 12-year-old Tad of the cleft palate lisping a complaint that “nobody asked me to go,” and young Robert Lincoln, just returned from duty, bubbling with stories about his hero Ulysses Grant and the last days of the war; then back to the presidential office to look over the morning newspapers (which Lincoln had once remarked he “never” read, but these were happy days, with good news everywhere), sign two documents, and signal the soldier at the door to admit the morning’s first caller, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax (who was angling for a Cabinet post and had to be tactfully handled); and so on throughout the day—the historic Cabinet meeting at 11:00 A.M., attended by General Grant himself, that stretched well into the afternoon; a hurried lunch at almost half-past two with Mrs. Lincoln (had this 45-pounds-underweight man eaten his usual midday meal of a biscuit, a glass of milk, and an apple?); more visitors to see in his office (including the unscheduled Mrs. Nancy Bushrod, escaped slave and wife of an escaped slave and mother of three small children, weeping that Tom, a soldier in the Army of the Potomac, was no longer getting his pay: “You are entitled to your husband’s pay.

Come this time tomorrow,” and the tall President escorted her to the door, bowing her out “like I was a natural-born lady”); the late afternoon drive in the barouche to the Navy Yard and back with Mrs. Lincoln; more work, more visitors, into the evening...

until finally, at five minutes past 8:00 P.M., Abraham Lincoln stepped into the White House formal coach after his wife, waved, and sank back to be driven off to see a play he did not much want to see,
Our American Cousin,
at Ford’s Theatre...

Ellery mused over that black day in silence. And, like a relative hanging on the specialist’s yet undelivered diagnosis, Bianca DiCampo sat watching him with anxiety.

Harbidger and Tungsten arrived in a taxi to greet Ellery with the fervour of castaways grasping at a smudge of smoke on the horizon.

“As I understand it, gentlemen,” Ellery said when he had calmed them down, “neither of you has been able to solve Mr. DiCampo’s interpretation of the Lincoln clue. If I succeed in finding the book and paper where DiCampo hid them, which of you gets them?”