The Siamese Twin Mystery (23 page)

It was twelve-thirty. He put the watch away, sighing.

Almost precisely at one—he consulted his watch again the instant after it occurred—his nerves were tingling again. But this time not from real or fancied sounds outside. This sound came from the bed a few feet away. It emanated from the dying man.

Jamming his watch back, the Inspector jumped up and bounded across the rug to the bed. Xavier’s left arm was stirring, and the sound was the thick burble he had heard hours before downstairs. There was even a movement of the head. The burble rose in volume, ending in a raucous cough. The Inspector thought the whole house must be aroused, it ripped out so harshly and loudly. He bent over Xavier, whose face was turned away from the light, and gently tugged until he worked his right arm under the man’s neck. With his left arm he managed to turn Xavier over without permitting the wounded back to touch the bed; so that finally, when he straightened, the recumbent figure lay on its left side, face to the light. The eyes were still closed, although the sounds continued.

Xavier was slowly regaining consciousness.

The Inspector hesitated. Should he wait, make the man talk? Then he remembered Dr. Holmes’s admonition, and the thought that delay might well deal the wounded man his death blow made him hurry to the chair, snatch up the revolver, and run to the door. He could not leave Xavier alone even for an instant, he thought quickly. No one was going to take advantage of him while he slipped out to summon the doctor. He would open the door, stick out his head, and yell for Holmes. If the others wakened, the hell with them.

He grasped the knob, turned it noisily, and pulled the door open. He thrust out his head and opened his mouth.

To Ellery it seemed that he was struggling upward along the black glassy side of an animate abyss, striving to keep from slipping back to the caldron of fire raging below. He battered his hands and bruised his fingers on the hard smooth jeering walls, and in his head was an inferno that matched the blaze in intensity. His head began to puff, to swell, to burst. He was sliding, sliding. … He awoke with a start, bathed in cold perspiration.

The room was dark and he fumbled on the night table for his wrist watch. By its luminous dial he saw that it was five minutes past two. He crept groaning out of bed, his body an aching mess of damp flesh and protesting muscles, and groped for his clothes.

The house was very still as he slipped out of his room and made his way up the corridor. The landing bulb was burning and to his blinking eyes everything seemed normal. All doors were shut.

He reached the end of the corridor and paused outside Xavier’s room. He had made no noise walking, the door was shut, and there was no reason to suppose that anyone, including his father, had heard him. The thought filled him with a sudden surge of alarm. Lord, what applied to him might very well have applied to someone else! Suppose the old gentleman …

But the old gentleman, as he knew from varied and pleasant experience, was quite capable of taking care of himself. And then there was the revolver, which already had—

Shaking aside his fears as childish, he opened the door and said softly: “El, dad. Don’t be alarmed.” There was no response. He pushed the door farther and then froze to the spot, his heart stopping.

The Inspector lay on the floor near the door, face down, the revolver a few inches from his motionless hand.

Dazedly he shifted his gaze to the bed. The drawer of the night table before it was open. Mark Xavier’s right hand dangled to the floor, clutching something. His body lay half out of the bed, head hanging horribly. What Ellery could see of the face sickened him—twisted features back in a grin to expose the teeth and oddly bluish gums.

The man was dead.

But he had not died of the festering bullet in his lung. Ellery divined that even before he glimpsed the evidence. The tortured face, as if Xavier had died in exquisite agony; significant. And significant, too, the empty vial that lay on the rug some feet from the bed, dropped there by a defiant hand.

Mark Xavier had been murdered.

“I felt as if I was going crazy. Just plain crazy. I sat there and they stood over me and nobody said anything and all the while that damned bloody shirt lay there with the light on it and I could see his face even though he was a stiff in the Morgue. So I came through. I couldn’t stand it. I felt as if I was going crazy. I confessed.”

—A. F.’s Statement to the Press While Awaiting Execution at Sing Sing Prison, November 21, 19—

H
OW LONG ELLERY STOOD
there he never knew. His brain was racing madly, but his muscles refused to respond and his heart had turned to granite in his breast.

It was so much like the nightmare, he thought, a continuation of the horrid dream he had been having. Perhaps he was still dreaming. … After the first lightning scrutiny of the man on the bed his head had wrenched about and he had fastened his gaze upon the supine figure of his father. Dead. … His father was dead. His brain reeled before the enormity of the fact. His father was dead. The shrewd gray eyes would never twinkle again. Those thin nostrils would never more flare in anger. That old throat would never mutter and growl at petty annoyances, nor chuckle with sly humor. Those tireless little legs … His father was dead.

Then he experienced a vast impersonal surprise. Something wet was trickling down his cheeks. He was crying! Anger at himself made him shake his head violently, and suddenly he felt life and hope and strength flood warmly back into his blood. His muscles relaxed. But this time only to tense again for a spring forward.

He flung himself on his knees beside the Inspector and tore at the old man’s collar. There was a waxy paleness on his father’s face and he was breathing stertorously. Breathing! Then he was alive!

He shook the thin, small body with glad insistent hands, crying: “Dad, wake up! Dad, it’s El!” and smiling and panting and weeping like a demented man. But the Inspector’s gray, birdlike little head only wabbled a little and his eyes remained closed.

Panic-stricken again, Ellery slapped the old man’s cheeks, pinched his arm, pounded and pummeled him. … And then he stopped, sniffing and raising his head. The shock had dulled his physical faculties. He realized acutely now what subconsciously he had known from his first step into the room. There was a cloying odor in the place. Yes, now that he bent closer to his father’s lips, it was stronger. … The Inspector had been chloroformed.

Chloroformed! Then he had been taken off his guard, a murderer had beaten down his defenses and—committed murder again.

With the thought came calmness and a dogged resolve. He saw with bitter clarity where he had gone wrong, how essentially blind he had been. Led blandly along by his own self-assurance, he now realized that the trail, far from ending, had merely come to a bend, with a long misty prospect beyond. But this time, he told himself with gritted teeth, it would be different. The murderer’s hand had been forced. This had been not a crime of will or whim but of necessity. It had drawn the criminal against his will into the open. The corpse on the bed, what he had quickly seen in that first second’s flash …

He stooped, lifted the light figure of his father in his arms, and carried him to the armchair. Depositing him gently there, Ellery opened the old man’s shirt and shifted his body into a comfortable position. He felt beneath the shirt and nodded at the steady pound of the old man’s heart against his palm. The Inspector would be all right—just a matter of sleeping it off.

Ellery rose and went to the bed, eyes narrowed. What was to be seen he meant to see at once, before anyone else should come upon the scene.

The dead man was an unsavory sight. His chin and breast were covered with a thick greenish-brown semi-liquid, evil smelling and nauseating. Ellery’s eyes strayed to the vial on the floor and he went over and picked it up carefully. A few drops of a whitish liquid remained at the bottom. He sniffed the mouth of the vial and then with desperate decision tipped it so that a drop fell on his finger. Instantly he wiped this off and touched his tongue to the spot where the drop had fallen. He was rewarded with a quick fire on his tongue and a disagreeable sour taste. His finger tingled. A little sick, he spat into his handkerchief. The stuff was poison, undoubtedly.

He placed the vial on the night table and dropped to his knees beside the hanging head of the dead man. A swift glance into the open drawers of the table and the floor about the dead man’s right hand had told him the incredible story. The drawer was cluttered with much the same assortment of games that occupied Ellery’s own night table drawer, but the customary deck of cards was gone. They now lay scattered on the floor beside the bed.

And the object that Mark Xavier’s dead hand clutched so tightly was one of them.

Ellery removed it from the rigid fingers with difficulty. He shook his head at what he saw. He had been wrong. It was not a card; it was
half
a card. His glance went to the floor and he soon picked out the other half lying on top of the rest of the strewn pasteboards.

That Mark Xavier should have torn a card in two was not remarkable, he reflected quickly, considering the fact that his dead brother had shortly before set the precedent. Nor was it remarkable that the card Xavier tore was not a six of spades; for
that
bubble, he thought, had been forever pricked.

What did pique him was that the card was a knave of diamonds.

Now why, he said fretfully to himself, a knave of diamonds? Of all the fifty-two cards in the deck?

The fact that the torn half was in Xavier’s right hand had no helpful significance. It was where it should have been. Left-handed, the poisoned lawyer in his last moments of consciousness had reached out to the table, pulled open the drawer, fumbled until he found the deck, opened it, picked out the knave of diamonds, dropped the rest of the deck on the floor, held the card in both hands, torn it with the left, thrown away one half with the left, and died with the other half clutched in his right hand.

Ellery rooted about among the fallen pasteboards. The six of spades was there, an innocent member of the ensemble.

He rose, frowning, and picked up the vial again. Holding it close to his mouth by the lip, he breathed hard upon the glass, turning the vial around as he did so to cover the surface with his condensed breath. No marks of fingerprints appeared. The murderer, as before, had been careful.

He set the vial down on the table and went out of the room.

The corridor was empty as before, and all the doors shut.

Ellery strode down the length of the hall to the last door on his right, listened for a moment with his ear close to the panels, heard nothing, and went in. The room was dark. He heard now a man’s soft breathing across the room.

He groped for the bed, found it, felt about, and then shook the sleeper’s arm gently. The arm stiffened and he felt the man’s body jerk with alarm.

“It’s all right, Dr Holmes,” said Ellery softly. “It’s Queen.”

“Oh!” the young physician yawned with relief. “Gave me something of a turn.” He switched on the lamp on the table beside his bed. Then, when he caught sight of Ellery’s expression, his jaw dropped. “Wh-what’s the matter?” he gasped. “What’s happened? Has Xavier—?”

“Please come at once, Doctor. There’s work for you.”

“But—who—?” began the Englishman vaguely, his blue eyes liquid with alarm. Then he jumped out of bed, draped a dressing gown about his shoulders, slipped his feet into carpet slippers, and followed Ellery without another word.

Ellery reached the door of Xavier’s bedroom and stood back. He motioned Holmes to precede him. Holmes stopped short on the threshold, staring.

“Oh, good God,” he said.

“Not so very good to Xavier,” murmured Ellery. “Our cunning little playfellow with the homicidal tendencies has been at work again, you see. I wonder how dad—Let’s get inside, Doctor, before anyone hears us. I most particularly want your opinion in private.”

Dr. Holmes stumbled across the sill and Ellery followed, shutting the door quietly behind him.

“Tell me what he died of, and when.”

For the first time Dr. Holmes saw the still figure of the Inspector outstretched on the chair. His eyes widened with horror. “But, great heavens, man, your father! Did he—was he—?”

“Chloroform,” said Ellery briefly. “I want you to bring him around as soon as you can.”

“Well, then, what are you standing there for?” shouted the young man, his eyes blazing. “Get busy, can’t you? To hell with Xavier! Open those windows wide—wide as you can get them!”

Ellery blinked and then sprang to obey. Dr. Holmes bent over the Inspector, listened to his heart, pulled up his eyelids, nodded, and bounded off to the adjoining lavatory. He returned in a moment with several towels soaked in cold water.

“Get him as close to the windows as you can,” he said more calmly. “Fresh air is imperative—fresh as you can get it in this ghoulish place,” he muttered aside. “Quickly, man!” They picked the chair up between them and carried it close to the open windows. The physician bared the Inspector’s chest and slapped the sopping towels on the smooth flesh. Another he applied to the relaxed face, like a barber’s hot towel—curled all about the face but leaving the nostrils exposed.

“He seemed all right,” said Ellery anxiously. “Don’t tell me—”

“No, no, there’s nothing wrong with him. How old is he?”

“Not quite sixty.”

“Good health?”

“Hard as nails.”

“Then this won’t hurt him. If we’re to get him out of it we’ve got to adopt heroic measures. Get a couple of those pillows from the bed.”

Ellery brought the pillows, filched from the dead man, and stood waiting rather helplessly. “What now?”

Dr. Holmes glanced briefly at the bed. “Can’t put him there. … Get hold of his legs. We’ll stretch him across the arms of the chair. Head lower than the rest of the body.”

They raised the old man’s body easily and turned him around. Dr. Holmes stuffed the big pillows under the Inspector’s back. The old man’s head hung over one arm.