Queens Full (20 page)

Carroll replied clearly, “
No
.”

Looking out over the prison yard from the Warden's office, Ellery thought he had never seen a lovelier spring night sky, or a sadder one. A man should die on a stormy night, with all Nature protesting. This, he thought, is cruel and unusual punishment.

He glanced at the Warden's clock.

Carroll had fourteen minutes of life left.

The Warden's door opened and closed behind him. Ellery did not turn around. He thought he knew who it was. He had been half expecting his father for an hour.

“Ellery. I looked for you at the Death House.”

“I was down there before, Dad. Had a long talk with Carroll. I thought you'd be here long ago.”

“I wasn't intending to come at all. It isn't my business. I did my part of it. Or maybe that's why I'm here. After a lifetime of this sort of thing, I'm still not hardened to it … Ellery.

“Yes, Dad.”

“It's Helena Carroll. She's hounded and haunted me. She's waiting in an Ossining bar right now with West. I drove them up. Mrs. Carroll thinks I have some drag with you. Do I?

Ellery said from the window, “In practically everything, Dad. But not in this.”

“I don't understand you,” the Inspector said heavily. “If you have information that would save Carroll, how can you keep buttoned up now—here? All right, you saw something we didn't. Is it my job you're worried about, because I helped put Carroll on this spot? If you know something that proves his innocence, Ellery, the hell with me.”

“I'm not thinking of you.”

“Then you can only be thinking of Carroll. He's protecting somebody, he's willing to go to the Chair for it, and you're helping him do it Ellery, you can't do that.” The old man clutched his arm. “There's still a few minutes. The Warden's got an open line to the Governor's office.”

But Ellery shook his head.

Inspector Queen stared at his son's set profile for a moment Then he went over to a chair and sat down, and father and son waited.

At 11:04 the lights suddenly dimmed.

Both men stiffened.

The office brightened.

At 11:07 it happened again.

And again at 11:12.

After that, there was no change. Ellery turned away from the window, fumbling for his cigarets.

“Do you have a light, Dad?”

The old man struck a match for him. Ellery nodded and sat down beside him.

“Who's going to tell her?” his father said suddenly.

“You are,” Ellery said. “I can't.”

Inspector Queen rose. “Live and learn,” he said.

“Dad—”

The door interrupted them. Ellery got to his feet. The Warden's face was as haggard as theirs. He was wiping it with a damp handkerchief.

“I never get used to it,” he said, “never … He went very peacefully. No trouble at all.”

Ellery said, “He would.”

“He gave me a message for you, by the way.”

“Thanking him, I suppose,” Inspector Queen said bitterly.

“Why, yes, Inspector,” the Warden said. “He said to tell your son how grateful he was. What on earth did he mean?”

“Don't ask
him
,” the Inspector said. “My son's constituted himself a one-man subcommittee of the Almighty. Where you going to wait for me, Ellery?” he demanded as they left the Warden's office. “I mean while I do the dirty work?”

Ellery said stiffly, “Take Helena Carroll and Tully West back to the city first.”

“Just tell me one thing. What was Carroll ‘grateful' to you for? Who'd you help him cover up?”

But Ellery shook his head. “I'll see you at home afterward.”

“Well?” the old man said. He had got into his frayed bathrobe and slippers, and he was nursing a cup of stale coffee with his puffy hands. He looked exhausted. “And it had better be good.”

“Oh, it's good,” Ellery said. “If good is the word.” He had not undressed, had not even removed his topcoat. He sat there as he had come in from the long drive to wait for his father. He stared at the blank Queen wall. “It was a slip of the tongue. I remembered it. After a long time of not remembering. It wouldn't have made any difference if the slip had never been made, or if I'd forgotten it altogether. Any difference to Carroll, I mean. He was sunk from the start. I couldn't save him, Dad. There was nothing to save him on or for. He'd had it.”

“What slip?” the old man demanded. “Of whose tongue? Or was I deaf as well as blind?”

“I was the only one who heard it. It had to do with Felicia Hunt. Her husband dies and she goes into Spanish mourning, total and unadorned. But when she gets off by herself in that hillside cottage, back on go the gay clothes and her favorite jewelry. By herself, mind you—alone. Safe from all eyes, even her maid's.”

Ellery stared harder at the wall. “When we got back to town after finding her body, I went directly to the Tombs to tell Carroll about the murder in Westchester of the only human being who could support his alibi. Carroll was frantic. His mind went back to the alibi statement she had signed and retrieved from his briefcase, unknown to him at the time. It was all he could think of, naturally. If that piece of paper existed, if she had hidden it instead of destroying it, he might still be saved. He kept pounding at me. Maybe she'd hidden it in her luggage, her car, a secret drawer. He went on and on. And one of the places he mentioned as a possible hiding place of the statement was the locket of the ruby-and-emerald pendant Felicia Hunt was so fond of. ‘Did you look there?' he asked me. ‘
While you were searching the body
?'”

Ellery flung aside a cigaret he had never lit. “That question of his was what I finally remembered.”

“He knew she was wearing the pendant …”

“Exactly, when no one could have known except ourselves—when we found her—and whoever had murdered her there five days earlier.”

He sank deeper into his coat. “It was a blow, but there it was—John Carroll had murdered Felicia Hunt. He'd had the opportunity, of course. You and Velie agreed that the latest she could have been murdered was the preceding Sunday. That Sunday Carroll was still free on bail. It wasn't until the next morning, Monday, you'll recall, that he had to resubmit to the custody of the court for the commencement of his trial.”

“But it doesn't add up,” Inspector Queen spluttered. “The Hunt woman's testimony could get him an acquittal. Why should Carroll have knocked off the only witness who could give him his alibi?”

“Just what I asked myself. And the only answer that made sense was: Carroll must have had reason to believe that when Felicia took the stand in court, she was going to tell the truth.”

“Truth? About what?”

“About Carroll's alibi being false.”

“
False?
”

“Yes. And from his standpoint, of course, that would compel him to shut her mouth. To protect the alibi.”

“But without her he had no alibi, true
or
false!”

“Correct,” Ellery said softly, “
But when Carroll drove up to Westchester he didn't know that; at that time he thought he had her signed statement locked in his office safe
. He didn't learn until days after he had killed her—when West and I opened the safe and found the envelope empty—that he no longer had possession of the alibi statement, hadn't had possession for months, in fact—that, as I pointed out to him, Felicia Hunt must have lifted it from his briefcase while he was downstairs showing the notary out. No wonder he almost collapsed.”

“I'll be damned,” the Inspector said. “I'll be double-damned!”

Ellery shrugged. “If Carroll's alibi for Meredith Hunt's murder was a phony, then the whole case against him stood as charged. The alibi was the only thing that gave him the appearance of innocence. If in fact he had no alibi, everything pointed to his guilt of Hunt's murder, as the jury rightfully decided.

“Carroll filled in the details for me earlier tonight in the Death House.” Ellery's glance went back to the wall. “He said that when he left his house that rainy night after Hunt's ultimatum, to walk off his anger, the fog gave him a slight lease on hope. Maybe Hunt's plane was grounded and Hunt was still within reach. He phoned La Guardia and found that all flights had been delayed for a few hours. On the chance that Hunt was hanging around the airport, Carroll stopped in at his office and got his target pistol. He had some vague idea, he said, of threatening Hunt into a change of heart.

“He took a cab to La Guardia, found Hunt waiting for the fog to clear, and persuaded him to get his car from the parking lot so that they could talk in privacy. Eventually Hunt meandered back to Manhattan and parked on East 58th Street. The talk in the car became a violent quarrel. Carroll's hair-trigger temper went off, and he shot Hunt. He left Hunt in the Thunderbird and stumbled back home in the rain.

“The next morning, when we called on Mrs. Hunt to announce her husband's killing and found Carroll and West there, and you mentioned that the killer had left his gun in Hunt's car, Carroll was sick. Remember he ran into the bathroom to gag? He wasn't acting that time. For the first time he realized that, in his fury and panic, he'd completely forgotten about the gun.

“As a lawyer,” Ellery droned on, “he knew what a powerful circumstantial case loomed against him, and that the only thing that could save him was an equally powerful alibi. He saw only one possible way to get it. He had never destroyed the love letters Felicia Hunt had written him during her infatuation. And he knew her dread of scandal. So he fabricated a statement out of the whole cloth about having spent the murder period in her bedroom ‘pleading' with her to intercede with her husband, and he took the statement to her. He didn't have to spell out his threat. Felicia understood clearly enough the implication of his proposal … that if she didn't give him the phony alibi he needed, he would publish her hot letters and ruin her with her strait-laced Latin-American family and compatriots. She signed.”

“But why didn't Carroll produce the alibi right away, Ellery? What was his point in holding it back?”

“The legal mind again. If he produced it during the investigation, even if it served to clear him, the case would still be open on the books and he might find himself back in it up to his ears at any time. But if he stood trial for Hunt's murder and
then
produced the fake alibi and was acquitted—he was safe from the law forever by the rule of double jeopardy. He couldn't be tried again for Hunt's killing after that even if the alibi should at some future date be exposed as a fake.

“He knew from the beginning,” Ellery went on, “that Felicia Hunt was the weak spot in his plan. She was neurotic and female and he was afraid she might blow under pressure when he needed her most. As the trial approached, Carroll told me, he got more and more nervous about her. So the day before it was scheduled to start, he decided to talk to her again. Learning that she'd gone into retreat up in Westchester, he found an excuse to get away from his family and drove up to the cottage. His worst fears were realized. She told him that she had changed her mind. Scandal or no scandal, she wasn't going to testify falsely under oath and lay herself open to perjury. What she didn't tell him—it might possibly have saved her life if she had—was that she'd stolen and destroyed the alibi statement he had forced her to sign months before.

“Carroll grabbed the nearest heavy object and hit her over the head with it. Now at least, he consoled himself, she wouldn't be able to repudiate her signed statement, which he thought was in his office safe.”

“And you've kept all this to yourself,” his father muttered. “Why, Ellery? You certainly didn't owe Carroll anything.”

Ellery turned from the wall. He looked desperately tired.

“No, I didn't owe Carroll anything … a man with a completely cockeyed moral sense … too proud to live on his wife's money, yet capable of stealing twenty thousand dollars … a faithful husband who nevertheless kept the love letters of a woman he despised for their possible future value to him … a man with a strange streak of honesty who was also capable of playing a scene like an actor … a loving father who permitted himself to murder two people.

“No, I didn't owe him anything,” Ellery said, “but he wasn't the only one involved. And no one knew that better than Carroll. The afternoon that the answer came to me, while we were waiting for the jury to come in, I told Mrs. Carroll I couldn't save her husband, that it was too late. Carroll was the only one present who knew what I meant. He knew I meant it was too late for
him
, that I couldn't save him because I knew he was guilty. And when I put it up to him, he made me understand that I wasn't to give him away. It wasn't for his own sake—he knew the verdict the jury was going to bring in. He knew he was already a dead man.

“And so I respected his last request. I couldn't save him, but I could save his family's memories of him. This way Helena Carroll and little Breck and Louanne will always think John Carroll died the victim of a miscarriage of justice.” Ellery shucked his topcoat and headed for his bedroom. “How could I deny them that comfort?”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1965 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee