Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (58 page)

Mr. Q(entering on the run).
Yes? Nikki, what is it? What’s happened?

Miss P.
A
man dressed as Santa Claus just handed me this envelope. It’s addressed to you.

Mr. Q.
Note?
(He
snatches it, withdraws a miserable
slice of paper from it on which is block-lettered in pencil a message which he
reads aloud with considerable expression.)
“Dear Ellery, Don’t
you trust me? I said I’d steal the Dauphin in Nash’s emporium today and that’s
exactly where I’m going to do it. Yours—” Signed...

Miss P(craning).
“Comus.”
That Santa?

Mr. Q. (Sets his manly lips. An icy wind blows.)

* * *

Even the master had to
acknowledge that their defenses against Comus were ingenious.

From the Display
Department of Nash’s they had requisitioned four miter-jointed counters of
uniform length. These they had fitted together, and in the center of the hollow
square thus formed they had erected a platform six feet high. On the counters,
in plastic tiers, stretched the long lines of Miss Ypson’s babies. Atop the
platform, dominant, stood a great chair of handcarved oak, filched from the
Swedish Modern section of the Fine Furniture Department; and on this
Valhalla-like throne, a huge and rosy rotundity, sat Sergeant Thomas Velie of
Police Headquarters, morosely grateful for the anonymity endowed by the scarlet
suit and the jolly mask and whiskers of his appointed role.

Nor was this all. At a
distance of six feet outside the counters shimmered a surrounding rampart of
plate glass, borrowed in its various elements from
The
Glass Home of the Future
display on the sixth floor rear,
and assembled to shape an eight foot wall quoined with chrome, its glistening
surfaces flawless except at one point, where a thick glass door had been
installed. But the edges fitted intimately and there was a formidable lock in
the door, the key to which lay buried in Mr. Queen’s right trouser pocket.

It was 8:54
A.M.
The Queens, Nikki Porter, and Attorney Bondling stood among store officials and
an army of plainclothesmen on Nash’s main floor surveying the product of their
labors.

“I think that about does
it,” muttered Inspector Queen at last. “Men! Positions around the glass
partition.”

Twenty-four assorted
gendarmes in mufti jostled one another. They took marked places about the wall,
facing it and grinning up at Sergeant Velie. Sergeant Velie, from his throne,
glared back.

“Hagstrom and Piggott—the
door.”

Two detectives detached
themselves from a group of reserves. As they marched to the glass door, Mr.
Bondling plucked at the Inspector’s overcoat sleeve. “Can all these men be
trusted, Inspector Queen?” he whispered. “I mean, this fellow Comus—”

“Mr. Bondling,” replied
the old gentleman coldly, “you do your job and let me do mine.”

“But—”

“Picked men, Mr.
Bondling! I picked ’em myself.”

“Yes, yes, Inspector. I
merely thought I’d—”

“Lieutenant Farber.”

A little man with watery
eyes stepped forward.

“Mr. Bondling, this is
Lieutenant Geronimo Farber, Headquarters jewelry expert. Ellery?”

Ellery took the Dauphin’s
Doll from his greatcoat pocket, but he said, “If you don’t mind, Dad, I’ll keep
holding on to it.”

Somebody said, “Wow,” and
then there was silence.

“Lieutenant, this doll in
my son’s hand is the famous Dauphin’s Doll with the diamond crown that—”

“Don’t touch it,
Lieutenant, please,” said Ellery. “I’d rather nobody touched it.”

“The doll,” continued the
Inspector, “has just been brought here from a bank vault which it ought never
to have left, and Mr. Bondling, who’s handling the Ypson estate, claims it’s
the genuine article. Lieutenant, examine the diamond and give us your opinion.”

Lieutenant Farber
produced a
loupe.
Ellery held the dauphin securely, and Farber did not touch it.

Finally, the expert said:
“I can’t pass an opinion about the doll itself, of course, but the diamond’s a
beauty. Easily worth a hundred thousand dollars at the present state of the
market—maybe more. Looks like a very strong setting, by the way.”

“Thanks Lieutenant. Okay,
son,” said the Inspector. “Go into your waltz.”

Clutching the dauphin,
Ellery strode over to the glass gate and unlocked it.

“This fellow Farber,” whispered
Attorney Bondling in the Inspector’s hairy ear. “Inspector, are you absolutely
sure he’s—?”

“He’s really Lieutenant
Farber?” The Inspector controlled himself. “Mr. Bondling, I’ve known Gerry
Farber for eighteen years. Calm yourself.”

Ellery was crawling
perilously over the nearest counter. Then, bearing the dauphin aloft, he
hurried across the floor of the enclosure to the platform.

Sergeant Velie whined, “Maestro,
how in hell am I going to sit here all day without washin’ my hands?”

But Mr. Queen merely
stooped and lifted from the floor a heavy little structure faced with black
velvet consisting of a floor and a backdrop, with a two-armed chromium support.
This object he placed on the platform directly between Sergeant Velie’s massive
legs.

Carefully, he stood the
Dauphin’s Doll in the velvet niche. Then he clambered back across the counter,
went through the glass door, locked it with the key, and turned to examine his
handiwork.

Proudly the prince’s
plaything stood, the jewel in his little golden crown darting “on pale electric
streams” under the concentrated tide of a dozen of the most powerful
floodlights in the possession of the great store.

“Velie,” said Inspector
Queen, “you’re not to touch that doll. Don’t lay a finger on it.”

The Sergeant said, “Gaaaaa.”

“You men on duty. Don’t
worry about the crowds. Your job is to keep watching that doll. You’re not to
take your eyes off it all day. Mr. Bondling, are you satisfied?” Mr. Bondling
seemed about to say something, but then he hastily nodded. “Ellery?”

The great man smiled. “The
only way he can get that bawbie,” he said, “is by well-directed mortar fire or
spells and incantations. Raise the portcullis!”

* * *

Then began the
interminable day,
dies irae,
the last shopping day before Christmas. This is traditionally the day of the
inert, the procrastinating, the undecided, and the forgetful, sucked at last
into the mercantile machine by the perpetual pump of Time. If there is peace
upon earth, it descends only afterward; and at no time, on the part of anyone
embroiled, is there good will toward men. As Miss Porter expresses it, a cat
fight in a bird cage would be more Christian.

But on this December
twenty-fourth, in Nash’s, the normal bedlam was augmented by the vast shrilling
of thousands of children. It may be, as the Psalmist insists, that happy is the
man that hath his quiver full of them; but no bowmen surrounded Miss Ypson’s
darlings this day, only detectives carrying revolvers, not a few of whom forbore
to use same only by the most heroic self-discipline. In the black floods of
humanity overflowing the main floor little folks darted about like electrically
charged minnows, pursued by exasperated maternal shrieks and the imprecations
of those whose shins and rumps and toes were at the mercy of hot, happy little
limbs; indeed, nothing was sacred, and Attorney Bondling was seen to quail and
wrap his greatcoat defensively about him against the savage innocence of
childhood. But the guardians of the law, having been ordered to simulate store
employees, possessed no such armor; and many a man earned his citation that day
for unique cause. They stood in the millrace of the tide; it churned about
them, shouting, “Dollies!
Dollies!
”
until the very word lost its familiar meaning and became the insensate scream
of a thousand Loreleis beckoning strong men to destruction below the eye-level
of their diamond Light.

But they stood fast.

And Comus was thwarted.
Oh, he tried. At 11: 18
A.M.
a tottering old man
holding to the hand of a small boy tried to wheedle Detective Hagstrom into
unlocking the glass door “so my grandson here—he’s terrible nearsighted—can get
a closer look at the pretty dollies.” Detective Hagstrom roared, “Rube!” and
the old gentleman dropped the little boy’s hand violently and with remarkable
agility lost himself in the crowd. A spot investigation revealed that, coming
upon the boy, who had been crying for his mommy, the old gentleman had promised
to find her. The little boy, whose name—he said—was Lance Morganstern, was
removed to the Lost and Found Department; and everyone was satisfied that the
great thief had finally launched his attack. Everyone, that is, but Ellery
Queen. He seemed puzzled. When Nikki asked him why, he merely said: “Stupidity,
Nikki. It’s not in character.

At 1:46
P.M.,
Sergeant Velie sent up a distress signal. He had, it seemed, to wash his hands.
Inspector Queen signaled back: “O.K. Fifteen minutes.” Sergeant Santa C. Velie
scrambled off his perch, clawed his way over the counter, and pounded urgently
on the inner side of the glass door. Ellery let him out, relocking the door
immediately, and the Sergeant’s red-clad figure disappeared on the double in
the general direction of the main-floor gentlemen’s relief station, leaving the
dauphin in solitary possession of the dais.

During the Sergeant’s
recess, Inspector Queen circulated among his men repeating the order of the
day.

The episode of Velie’s
response to the summons of Nature caused a temporary crisis. For at the end of the
specified fifteen minutes he had not returned. Nor was there a sign of him at
the end of a half hour. An aide dispatched to the relief station reported back
that the Sergeant was not there. Fears of foul play were voiced at an emergency
staff conference held then and there and counter-measures were being planned
even as, at 2:35
P.M.,
the familiar Santa-clad bulk of the
Sergeant was observed battling through the lines, pawing at his mask.

“Velie,” snarled
Inspector Queen, “where have you been?”

“Eating my lunch,” growled
the Sergeant’s voice, defensively. “I been taking my punishment like a good
soldier all this damn day, Inspector, but I draw the line at starvin’ to death
even in the line of duty.”

“Velie—!” choked the
Inspector; but then he waved his hand feebly and said, “Ellery, let him back in
there.”

And that was very nearly
all. The only other incident of note occurred at 4:22
P.M.
A
well-upholstered woman with a red face yelled, “Stop! Thief! He grabbed my
pocketbook! Police!” about fifty feet from the Ypson exhibit. Ellery instantly
shouted,
“It’s a trick! Men, don’t take your
eyes off that doll!”

“It’s Comus disguised as
a woman,” exclaimed Attorney Bondling, as Inspector Queen and Detective Hesse
wrestled the female figure through the mob. She was now a wonderful shade of
magenta.

“What are you
doing?”
she screamed. “Don’t arrest
me!
—catch
that crook who stole my pocketbook!”

 “No dice, Comus,” said
the Inspector. “Wipe off that makeup.”

“McComas?” said the woman
loudly. “My name is Rafferty, and all these folks saw it. He was a fat man with
a mustache.”

“Inspector,” said Nikki
Porter, making a surreptitious scientific test. “This is a female. Believe me.”
And so, indeed it proved. All agreed that the mustachioed fat man had been
Comus, creating a diversion in the desperate hope that the resulting confusion
would give him an opportunity to steal the little dauphin.

“Stupid, stupid,” muttered
Ellery, gnawing his fingernails.

“Sure,” grinned the
Inspector. “We’ve got him nibbling his tail, Ellery. This was his do-or-die
pitch. He’s through.”