Face to Face (3 page)

5

Ellery had not seen a New York newspaper for a long time, and if GeeGee's murder had been reported in the London
Times
, he had missed the leader in the malty haze of some pub.

As for Harry Burke, the Scot seemed both knowledgeable and appalled. He stalked over to Ellery's bar and poured himself a slug out of the handiest bottle, which happened to be bourbon, and tossed it down neat, with no more awareness of what he was doing than if he had raised his hand to scratch himself.

Ellery kept dividing his attention between the West girl and Burke.

“How dense of me,” she was saying. “Of course you don't know about the murder—you've been in Europe. Don't you have this morning's paper?”

“No,” Ellery said. “What time did she get it, Miss West, do you know?”

“Not the exact time, no. But I do know, from the news stories, that it was while Carlos was in my apartment Wednesday night. It's perfectly clear now what he was up to. When he couldn't talk me into killing his wife last summer, he started looking around for another patsy. And he must have found her—it has to be a her, Mr. Queen; he wouldn't be able to talk a
man
into giving him the time of day. So Wednesday night, while this woman did the killing—whoever she is—he made it his business to be in my place. Using me as his alibi! Dragging me into this after I thought I was rid of him and his wife and the whole nasty mess!”

She seemed on the edge of hysteria, and Ellery went to some lengths to back her away. Burke was marching like a grenadier before the bar now, evidently struggling with a problem.

“Question,” Ellery said to the girl. “Just why have you come to me?”

She was twisting the straps of her bag. “It's that—well, I'm so
alone
in this, Mr. Queen. Up to my neck in a horrible situation through no fault of my own—well, perhaps I
was
at fault to fall for Carlos's line, but how could I have known what I was getting into? Certainly I couldn't have dreamed he was scheming to commit murder … Carlos, of course, must have promptly told the police of his alibi, which meant me, because they've already been to my apartment to question me, and I naturally had to tell them the truth, which is that he was with me Wednesday night until midnight.”

“Did you tell the officers about Carlos's proposing to you last May that you murder his wife?”

“No. I guess I should have, but I just couldn't bring myself to. I kept thinking how the more I said, the more deeply I'd get involved. So all I did was answer their questions. What do I
do
, Mr. Queen? How do I get out of this?”

“I'm afraid it's too late for that. My advice to you is to tell the police everything, and the sooner the better.”

She bit her lip.

“Ellery,” said Harry Burke abruptly. “I'd like to talk to you.”

“Would you excuse us a moment, Miss West?” When they were in his study, behind the closed door, Ellery said, “You've been bursting with some kind of bombshell since that girl got here, Harry. You're involved in this case, aren't you?”

“I am now,” Burke said unhappily. “Until a moment ago I didn't know any more about the murder than you did. But the thing that brought me to New York originally—my first trip here—was tied up with Glory Guild. She'd made a request of the Yard which was outside the Yard's competence, and Vail recommended me to her, as a private agent. It was a routine inquiry—I can't see how it could have anything to do with this, although there's always the possibility.” The Scot scowled. “The fact is, Ellery, on Wednesday night I was with the Guild woman in her apartment until a bit after eleven, on the business that brought me overseas. I made my report, and from her place I went directly to the airport. My plane took off a short time later, at 1:00
A.M
. I left her alive and well.”

“Then she was murdered by someone who got to her place between a few minutes past eleven, when you left her, and midnight, when Armando left Roberta West's apartment.”

“It would seem so.” Burke seemed troubled about something, but he said nothing more.

Ellery squinted at him. “This matter that brought you to New York—you consulted my father about it?”

“Yes. It required the cooperation of the New York police.”

“Then that's why dad cabled you to come back—the hunch that it might have something to do with the killing.” Ellery paused, inviting Burke to comment. But Burke did not. “He must have gone on the murder some time after it broke. Apparently when he dashed off this telephone-message note to me he hadn't connected the West girl with the case, or still didn't know any of the facts. These things over here are always handled on the precinct level first. Well, Harry, this puts a different complexion on things. I seem to be in it, too, like it or not.”

Burke merely nodded.

They returned to the living room. “All right, Miss West, I'll stick with you,” Ellery told the girl. She was staring at them in a frightened way. “At least until we see how it shapes up. The first thing you're going to do is tell the police the whole story. Carlos's alibi notwithstanding, it may well be that he's as guilty of his wife's murder as if he committed it himself. At this point I'd say that it's likelier than not.”

“I'll do whatever you say, Mr. Queen.” She seemed relieved.

“This Armando character is obviously devious. Whoever the woman is he's snake-charmed into doing his dirty work for him, he's probably been seeing her in secret—as he saw you, I take it?”

He could barely hear her “Yes.”

“And now he'll be careful not to see her at all, or one of these days he'll pretend he's meeting her for the first time. He's got to wait for the heat to let up. Well, we'll see. She may be his weakness, too. At any rate, she has to be found, and I have the feeling it won't be easy.”

Just then the phone rang in Ellery's study.

“Son?” It was his father's nasal rasp. “So your plane finally landed, did it? What did it do, play skipping stones all the way from London? Ellery, I'm on one beaut of a case—”

“I know,” said Ellery. “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.”

“So the West girl did get to you. She was questioned by some precinct men, and I didn't put two and two together till after I got the early reports. Is she there now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come on over and join the party, and bring her with you. By the way, you didn't happen to run into a man named Harry Burke on the plane coming over, did you?”

“I did. And he's with me. House guest.”

“I'll be damned,” said the Inspector. “Another of your magic acts. I've been waiting to hear from Burke—I suppose he's told you I cabled him. Bring him along, too.”

“Where are you, dad?”

“At GeeGee's Park Avenue apartment. Do you know the address?”

“No, but Burke and Miss West do.”

“That's a fact, isn't it?” The old man cursed and hung up.

6

The doorman at the cooperative had a wild look in his eye. There was a patrolman conspicuously on duty in the lobby, and another in the foyer of the Guild-Armando apartment. Several detectives, including Sergeant Velie, were working their way through the penthouse duplex. Ellery left Roberta West in a small drawing room off the foyer, and at Velie's direction he and Harry Burke went up the wrought-iron stairway to the master bedroom, where they found Inspector Queen going through a clothes closet.

“Oh, hello, son,” the old man said, barely looking up. “Damn it, where
is
it? Sorry to bring you all the way back across an ocean, Burke, but I had no choice. It's got to be here
somewhere.”

“Before we get down to cases, daddy-o,” Ellery said in a pained tone, “may I point out that you haven't seen me for almost two months? I didn't expect the fatted calf, but could you spare a handshake?”

“Oh …
booshwa
,” said the Inspector crossly, falling back on the slang of his youth. “Help me find it, you two, will you?”

“Find what, Inspector?” asked Burke. “What are you looking for?”

“Her diaries. I'm mad for cases where they keep diaries. Her secretary, Jeanne Temple, tells me Glory-Glory kept one ever since her retirement—wrote up the events of the day every night before going to bed. By now it's volumes. A few months ago she started working on a publishing project, an autobiography or book of memoirs or something, with the help of that gigolo husband of hers and Miss Temple, and she's been using the diaries as reference material, where she couldn't trust her memory or had to look up details. And that's great, only where are they? Or it? I'm anxious to see the latest one especially, the current diary—what she wrote in it Wednesday night. If she did, that is. We've been searching for two days.”

“They're all missing?” asked Ellery.

“Including the manuscript of the autobiography.”

“Inspector,” said Harry Burke. “I saw her Wednesday night.”

“The hell you did. I was hoping for a break like that! It's one of the reasons I cabled you. What time was it you left her?”

“A few minutes after eleven.”

“That's good, that's good,” the Inspector said in an absent way. “She wasn't excited or nervous or anything?”

“Not as far as I could tell. Of course I didn't know her very well—just the few conversations we'd had about the matter I was on for her.”

“Well, those diaries are tied into this case some way, I'll bet a cookie, or the whole kit and caboodle wouldn't be missing. They've been lifted. The question is, why?”

Ellery was looking over the Hollywood bed, with its bold satin spread and silken bolsters and gold damask draped canopy. The bed had not been slept in.

His father caught the glance and nodded. “She never did get to bed Wednesday night.”

“I take it, dad, she wasn't killed in this room.”

“No.” The Inspector led the way past a vast master bath with a sunken marble tub and gold-plated fixtures, into an untidy den—if it had been human, Ellery would have called it disheveled. “She was shot in here.”

Except for the clutter, the room was surprisingly Spartan. One scatter rug on the parquet floor, a kneehole desk and a leather swivel chair behind it, facing the doorway; a far-out armchair of some black wood, covered with what Ellery could have sworn was elephant hide; one work of art on a pedestal, a carving in ebony of a Watusi warrior, of native African craftsmanship, and not very good, he thought. There was not a painting on the wall, and the lamp beside the armchair had a mica shade that was flaking. High above the Watusi warrior, inset in the wall near the ceiling, was a wood-framed grille of some coarse, potato-sack like material, with a volume regulator, which Ellery took to conceal a speaker that piped music in from the elaborate player he had noticed in the living room downstairs; he had seen a similar speaker in one of the bedroom walls, and one in the bathroom. And that was all except for the bookcases, which ran around three walls to a height of some eight feet. The shelves were mobbed with books—lying down, leaning both ways, protruding (chiefly detective stories, Ellery noted with interest—he spotted Poe, Gaboriau, Anna Katharine Green, Wilkie Collins, Doyle, Freeman, Christie, Sayers, Van Dine among many others, including a number of his own early books); scrapbooks of all sizes and colors, tricks, puzzles, whatnots … the accumulation of what must have been many years. Ellery strolled over to one shelf and plucked a Double-Crostics book at random from a small army of them. He riffled through it; all the puzzles had been completed, in ink. In his experience, there was nothing quite so useless as a filled-in Double-Crostics book, especially one filled in ink, the mark of the thirty-third degree. Glory Guild Armando had evidently been unable to part with anything relating to her hobbies, even the things that had served their purpose.

The top of the kneehole desk was a mess. The desk blotter, centered before the swivel chair, was considerably stained with dry, oxidized blood.

“Chest wound?” Burke said, studying the bloodstains.

“Two of them,” Inspector Queen said. “One bullet through the right lung, the other in the heart. The way we put it together, she'd come in here—some time after you left, Burke—maybe intending to write in her diary, more likely to make some notes for her book of memoirs. Miss Temple says she'd been doing that before she went to bed practically every night for the last few months, and then she'd dictate the notes to Miss Temple the next day, to be typed up. Probably Glory'd just sat down at the desk when her killer showed up and shot her, most likely from the doorway there, Doc Prouty says. The angles of entry of the two bullets fired into her confirm this. The blood got on the blotter when she fell forward on being shot, as you guessed, Burke. It's a cinch she saw who shot her.”

“Did she die instantly?” Ellery asked.

“No, she lived a few minutes, Doc says.” The Inspector's tone was peculiar.

“Ah me and oh my,” Ellery mourned. “Wouldn't it be tidy if she'd left a dying message? But that's too much to expect.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” rasped his father in the same nasally mysterious way. “And may it do you a lot more good than it does us. As far as I'm concerned it could be ancient Martian.”

“Don't tell me—”

“That's just what I'm doing. She lived long enough, and had enough strength—though where she got it Doc says he can't imagine, with that heart wound—to pick up a pen, or maybe she already had it in her hand, and write something on the nearest piece of paper.”

Ellery was aquiver.

“Come over here. You, too, Burke.”

They joined the old man behind Glory's desk. One of the objects on the bloodstained blotter was a police photostat of what had clearly been a sheet of ordinary lined pad-paper (“Yellow?” Ellery muttered, as if the color mattered; and his father nodded with a straight face) and roughly on one of the lines, toward the bottom of the otherwise unmarked sheet, a single word had been written.

The writing was tortured and difficult, a scrawl executed under extreme stress. The word was:

face.