Face to Face (4 page)

7

“Face,” Ellery said, as if he were tasting it.

“Face?” Burke said.

“Face,” retorted Inspector Queen. “And that's it, gentlemen. Short, sweet, and ridiculous. It's another reason we're looking for those diaries and the manuscript of the autobiography. They might throw some light on whose face.”

“Or it could be somebody's name,” ventured the Scotsman. “Although I've never run across a name like Face.”

“You ought to spend more time at our ball parks,” Ellery said. “However, Harry, you're wrong on a different count. That ƒ is definitely lowercase. No, it's got to be ‘face,' as in ‘face the music'—”

“Which is just what I'm going to be doing,” said the Inspector, “unless we crack this thing. I've already heard rumblings from upstairs. Can't you make anything out of it, either, son?”

“No.” Ellery's own face was squeezed up in a lemonlike scowl.

“Another thing.” The Inspector matched the scowl; both scowling, there was a remarkable resemblance. “We still have no answer to how the killer got into the apartment. There are only two keys, it seems, Glory's and her husband's. And this Armando has a real alibi, according to the West girl; also, he produced his key. Glory's apparently hasn't been touched. What's more, the apartment door seems to have been locked—there's all kinds of evidence that Glory was scared to death of burglars. So another question is, how did her killer get in?”

“Perhaps she knew who it was,” suggested Burke, “and let him in—or her—herself.” Then he shook his head. “No, that doesn't follow. If she'd known her assailant, she'd have written his name before she died.”

Ellery was worrying it, shaking his head at Burke's last statement. He kept scowling.

“That West girl,” sighed the Inspector. “I'd better talk to her personally.” He called down to Sergeant Velie to fetch Roberta West. Harry Burke joined the old man at the door; the two began to whisper.

Ellery glanced at them. “Is that conference top secret,” he asked in an annoyed voice, “or can you declassify it?” They paid no attention to him.

The sorrel-haired girl came up the stairs visibly bracing herself. Inspector Queen broke off his palaver with Burke to glare at her. His glare made Burke glare at
him.
The Scot touched the girl's elbow reassuringly. She gave him a pale smile.

“I'm Inspector Queen, in charge of this case, Miss West,” the old man said crustily. “I've read the reports of the detectives who questioned you, and I want to know if you have anything to add to your statement. Do you?”

She glanced at Ellery, and he nodded. So she gulped and told the Inspector what she had told Ellery and Harry Burke about Carlos Armando's incredible proposal to her over seven months before.

“He wanted you to kill his wife for him,” said the Inspector, perversely pleased. “That's very helpful, Miss West. Would you be willing to testify to it?”

“In court?”

“That's where people usually testify.”

“I don't know …”

“Now, look, if you're afraid of him—”

“Wouldn't any girl be, Inspector? And then there's the publicity. I'm just getting started on my career, and the wrong kind of publicity—”

“Well, you've got time to think about it,” the old man said with sudden kindliness. “I won't press you now. Velie, see that Miss West gets safely home.” The girl rose, made an attempt to smile, and left with the mountainous sergeant. Harry Burke watched her slender figure twinkle down the stairs. He watched until she was lost behind the closing front door.

The old man was rubbing his hands. “That's a real development! This Armando is behind it, all right. And whoever this woman is he conned into doing the killing for him, that's the way she got in. Armando had a duplicate of his house key made and provided her with it. And since she's a woman he's undoubtedly been two-timing his wife with, Glory never saw her before. That's why she couldn't leave us a direct clue. She didn't know the woman's name.”

“She obviously meant something by that word ‘face,' ” argued Ellery. “So there must be something about the woman that Glory knew, or spotted—”

“Something about her face?” exclaimed Burke.

“No, no, Harry,” Ellery said. “It's not anything like that, or she'd have specified. Face …”

“Have you anything on the time she was shot, Inspector?” Burke asked.

“As it happens, we can place it to the minute. There was a small electric clock on her desk there, a leather job her left arm must have knocked off the desk as she slumped forward, because we found it on the floor, to her left, with the plug pulled out. That stopped the clock at 11:50. No, the clock isn't here now, Ellery; it's at the lab, though it won't tell them any more than it's told already. Ten minutes to twelve was the time she stopped those two bullets. Incidentally, Doc Prouty's finding as to the time of death jibes roughly with the clock.”

“In connection with that,” Burke said, “I just remembered that as I was leaving here Wednesday night, Mrs. Armando remarked to me that she was expecting her husband home a little past midnight.”

“That means,” said Ellery slowly, “at the time she was shot, Glory knew Armando would be walking into the apartment in a matter of minutes.”

“He found her,” nodded the Inspector, “between fifteen and twenty minutes past twelve. If he left the West girl's apartment at midnight, by the way, that would just about check out.”

“It also clears up one aspect of the clue Glory left,” mused Ellery. “Knowing she was dying, knowing her husband would almost certainly be the first to discover her body, she realized that he would also be the first to see any dying message she could leave. If she wrote down something that accused or described his accomplice, or involved him, he would simply destroy it before notifying the police. So—”

“So she had to leave a clue that would trick Armando into thinking it had no bearing on her murder?” Burke had taken out his pipe and was loading it absently from a Scotch-grain pouch.

“That's right, Harry. Something obscure enough to fool Armando into ignoring it—perhaps as the start of one of the word-game puzzles she was eternally doing; after all, why should he figure it was a clue?—and still provocative enough to make the police follow it up.”

“I don't know,” Burke said, shaking his head.

“It's too damned bad she didn't leave something good and plain,” grumbled the Inspector. “Because all her fancy last-minute figuring turned out to be unnecessary. When she did die she fell forward among the papers on the desk, and the word she'd written on the top paper was hidden by her head. Armando probably didn't notice it at all—he'd sure as shooting keep his hands off that body! According to the story he tells, he never even set foot in the den—just stood in the doorway, saw the blood and his wife lying over the desk, and went right to the bedroom phone to call the police. And, you know, I believe him.”

“All of which,” said Ellery, pulling on his nose, “gets us back to where we started: Just what did she mean by ‘face'?”

“That's not where we started,” his father retorted. “We started with those missing diaries, and where they are; and while, strictly speaking, it's none of your business, I'm softheaded enough to ask both of you: Where are they?” He poked his head out the study doorway and bellowed down, “Velie! Anything on those diaries yet?” And when the sergeant's glum negative was bellowed back, the old man pulled his head back in and almost pleaded, “Any suggestions?”

The two younger men were silent.

Finally Harry Burke said, “The killer—or Armando before he phoned the police—could have taken them from the apartment.”

“Not Armando—he didn't have time enough. The woman, maybe.” Then the old man shook his head. “It wouldn't have made sense, though.
All
the diaries?
All
the biographical material? And don't forget, mere possession would be as dangerous as a fingerprint. Incidentally, talking of fingerprints, there aren't any except Armando's, Glory's, the maid's, and the secretary's, Jeanne Temple's; and the maid and the secretary sleep out.”

“Then they're here somewhere.” Burke sucked on his pipe quietly, the very figure of a proper British police officer. “Those bookshelves, Inspector. Have the books on them been individually inspected? It occurs to me that the diaries may have false and misleading covers—”

“You mean disguised as a set of my son's books, for instance?” Ellery winced at his father's tone. “Well, they're not. That's the first thing I thought of.”

“Has anything been removed from this room?” Ellery asked abruptly.

“Lots of things,” said his father. “The body, the clock—”

“That's two. What else?”

“The piece of paper she wrote on.”

“And that's three. Go on.”

“Go on? Go on where? That's all, Ellery.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm not sure! Velie!” the Inspector shrieked. The sergeant came thundering upstairs. “What's been taken from the study here?”

“The body,” began Sergeant Velie, “the clock—”

“No, no, Sergeant,” Ellery said. “Something not apparently connected with the crime.”

The sergeant scratched his head. “Like what, for instance?”

“Like a three-step ladder,” said Ellery. “As I recall her, Glory Guild wasn't more than five foot six. These bookshelves are eight feet tall. She'd need a little ladder to reach the top shelves; I can't see her dragging a very expensive monstrosity like that elephant-hide chair over to the shelves every time she wanted to reach a book over her head, or risking her neck standing on the swivel chair. So, Sergeant, where's the ladder?”

Burke was staring at him. The Inspector's mustache had lifted in a puzzled smile. Velie's mouth hung open.

“Shut the flytrap, Velie, and go get it,” said the Inspector mildly; and as the sergeant left, shaking his big head, the old man said, “I forgot about the ladder. There was one in here, all right, but a detective borrowed it yesterday to look over the Dutch shelving in the dining room downstairs and didn't bring it back. Why do you want it, Ellery? We've examined everything on the top shelves.”

But all Ellery said was, “We'll see.”

Sergeant Velie lumbered back with a library-type ladder of ivory-decorated blackwood, with plastic-covered risers that had been scratched and scored by heavy official shoes. Ellery said, “Sergeant, would you get that pedestal out of the way?” and when Velie had moved the Watusi warrior to one side, Ellery set the ladder down where the pedestal had been standing and mounted to the top step. His hair nearly brushed the ceiling. “The loudspeaker,” he explained. “I noticed that the inset of the speaker in the bedroom was screwed into the frame, whereas this one has hinges and a winged nut to hold it closed. Didn't your crew look up here, dad?”

For once the Inspector had nothing to say, although he glanced at Sergeant Velie, who paled.

“I say!” Harry Burke said. “You have a pair of eyes, Ellery. I missed it completely.”

Ellery spun the nut parallel to the frame and began to pry at the inset of the loudspeaker. He got a purchase, and the inset swung out on its almost invisible hinges. “Well,” Ellery said, pleased. His arm disappeared in the opening. “Just the sort of gimmicky hiding place a puzzle addict like GeeGee would think of.” His arm reappeared; he flourished a metal box of the safe-deposit type. “Here you are, dad. I'll be very much surprised if what you're looking for isn't in these boxes.”

8

There were six identical metal boxes in the hiding place, none of them locked; each was crammed with diaries, manuscripts, and other papers. In one of the boxes lay a kraft paper envelope sealed with wax, with the typed inscription: “My Will. To Be Opened by My Attorney, William Maloney Wasser.” This envelope the Queens set aside, hunting through the boxes for the current diary.

Ellery found it, and opened it at once to the December entries. The last entry was under the date of Tuesday, December 29, “11:15
P.M
.,” the night before Glory Guild Armando's murder. The Inspector pronounced a salty word. She had evidently not got round to penning an entry for the day of the night she was shot; this was confirmed, as Ellery pointed out, by their having found the diary in her loudspeaker cache rather than on her desk.

All the entries were written with a fine-line pen in a tiny, precise script. A peculiarity of the dead woman's chirography was that the script looked more like italic letter-printing than ordinary writing. The individual letters were not only slanted but unjoined, as in the word
f a c e
of her dying message, which Ellery also pointed out. There was very little spacing between lines, so that with the separation of the letters of individual words on the one hand, and the closeness of the lines on the other, the whole effect was at once scattered and crowded-looking. It made for difficult reading.

They skimmed through the diary from the earliest entries, page after page, and found an omission. Except for the pages date-printed
December 30
—the day of her death—and
December 31
, the only page not written on at all was the page for
December 1.

“December first blank,” muttered Ellery. “Now why didn't she write an entry for that day?”

“Why? Why?” the Inspector said, annoyed.

“Did anything unusual happen on December first?” asked Burke. “I mean generally?”

“Not that I recall,” the Inspector said. “Anyway, why would that have stopped her? Unless she was sick or something.”

“Inveterate diary writers don't let sickness stand in their way,” Ellery said. “They almost always go back afterward and fill in. Besides, as far as I can tell”—he riffled the pages of several of the other diaries—“she kept a daily account faithfully for years. No, there's a reason for this blank page, and it hasn't anything to do with illness or oversight.” He stopped suddenly. “Of course!” And he fished in his pocket and landed his cigaret lighter.

“What are you going to do, Ellery?” demanded Inspector Queen, alarmed. “Watch that flame!”

Ellery had doubled the diary back on its spine, leaving the blank page dangling, and he was carefully passing the flame of the lighter under the page.

“Invisible ink?” said Burke. “Oh, come, Ellery.”

“Considering her tricky mind,” Ellery said dryly, “I beg to differ.”

Still, even to Ellery's astonishment, something began to appear on the blank page. The entry seemed to consist of a single word; try as he would with the flame, no other writing showed up.

Then they were staring at it:

f a c e

handprinted in the same spidery italic fashion, with spacing between individual letters, as in the case of the dying message, except that this
f a c e
was more surely written.

“Again.” Ellery glared at it. “She wrote that same word on December first! In her
diary.
Now why would she have done that—four weeks before she was murdered?”

“Unless she had a premonition of her death,” Burke suggested.

“She must have had a lot more than a premonition,” Inspector Queen said irritably, “to have written it in invisible ink.” Then he threw up his hands. “Why am I always stuck with the nut cases? Magic ink! The next thing, it'll be rabbits out of a hat!”

“Very possible,” Ellery said. “It seems to be that kind of rabbity business.”

“Isn't it common in the States, talking about show business,” murmured Burke, “to nickname theatrical personalities? Bing Crosby, The Voice. Betty Grable, The Legs. And wasn't there a star—what was her name? Marie McDonald—you people called The Body? Has there ever been one called The Face?”

“If there has been, I missed it,” Ellery said. “Anyway, Harry, I point out again that in both cases—the dying message and this invisible-ink diary entry—the word is spelled with a lowercase ƒ. No, it's nothing like that. Face …” Then he said, “Dad.”

“What?”

“Was there anything unusual about Glory's face?”

The old man shrugged. “Just a face. They all look the same dead.”

“I think I'd like to see this one.”

“Be my guest.” And they left Inspector Queen seated gloomily behind GeeGee Guild's desk, beginning to leaf through the diaries.