The Murderer is a Fox (2 page)

"I got my orders,"
said Detective Howie in a screeky voice. And his fat lips snapped
shut. That was that.

It began to look difficult.

"Howie's a great one
for orders," explained Chief Dakin dryly. "I guess that's
how Phil Hendrix come to send him on this job, Mr. Queen. It's also
one of the reasons I drove up. I didn't want you thinkin'
everybody
in Wrightsville had 'orders.'"

"Thanks," Ellery
grinned. Then he said to Detective Howie: "And just what are
your orders, Mr. Howie?"

"No funny business."
The mouth snapped shut again.

"Right," said
Ellery cheerfully. "Now we understand each other. . . .
One
of the reasons you drove up, Dakin?"

Dakin chuckled. "Ain't
much bamboozles you, is there? The other reason is I'm sworn to
preserve the peace of Wrightsville."

"Oh," said Ellery.

"Expecting trouble,
Chief?" asked the Warden anxiously.

"Maybe, Warden."

"But why?" Ellery
asked.

"I guess it's because
Wrightsville was once pretty riled about Bayard Fox, Mr. Queen. Came
close to actin' mighty foolish, the town did. We had quite a time of
it."

Ellery nodded soberly.

"I figured," Dakin
went on, his light eyes on Ellery, "we'd sort of smuggle him
into town by auto through the servants' entrance. They'll be watchin'
the trains."

"After twelve years?"

"I'm not savin'
anything's
goin
' to happen, Mr. Queen."

"Dakin, do you think
Bayard Fox poisoned his wife?"

The Chief seemed startled.
"Why, sure. It was absolutely open and shut. Not a loophole a
louse could wriggle through, Mr. Queen. I'm mighty glad to see you,
but you're was tin' your time."

Ellery glanced at the fat
man in the comer. "And you, Howie? Do you think Fox was guilty?"

Detective Howie spat
accurately halfway across the room into the Warden's spittoon. "Arc
you kiddin'?" he said.

Ellery thought of Linda
Fox's tormented face, the shaking hands of Captain Davy Fox.

"All right, Warden "
he said with a smile. "We're ready any time your prisoner is."

The man who came into the
Warden's office so very correctly was stooped-over and
squeezed-looking, as if Time had had him in its vise for more than
his span. A brown and freckled scalp glistened through his thin white
hair; apparently he did much outdoors work at the prison. He was
dressed respectably in a blue serge suit and black shoes, and he wore
a white shirt and a neat pinstripe blue tie.

Ellery noticed a smile of
satisfaction on the Warden's lips, such as mothers smile when they
have dressed their young especially well.

"They fixed you up fine
for clothes, I see," said the Warden.

"Yes, Warden."
Bayard Fox folded his hands before him, looking down at the floor.
But Ellery detected a glitter in his eyes, quickly concealed.

'Thank you. Warden."

"Hullo, Mr. Fox,"
boomed Chief Dakin.

Ellery could not decide
whether it was the familiar voice or Dakin's use of the word "Mister"
that caused the lowered face to come up so swiftly, and the glow to
stain the weathered checks.

"Chief!" Bayard
Fox took a half-step forward. But then he halted and looked down
again. "I hardly recognized you, Mr. Dakin."

"How are you?"

"Fine, thank you, Mr.
Dakin."

"You're lookin' fit."

"The Warden is kind to
me." There was no self-pity in those mumbly accents; merely
gratitude. A broken man, thought Ellery, the spirit all but
shattered. Or-and he caught himself up—or so Fox seemed.

"And this is Mr. Ellery
Queen, Fox," said the Warden. "He's the one responsible for
this trip back to Wrightsville."

"How do you do, sir?"
Eyes down, but the glitter again.

"You'll technically be
in custody of Detective Howie here, of Prosecutor Hendrix's office."

"Yes, Warden."

Detective Howie rose from
his mooring.

But Ellery said in the
quietest of voices: "Mr. Fox," and waited.

Bayard Fox's glance came up
not so much against his will, it seemed to Ellery, as in the absence
of it. And when Ellery looked into those encaverned eyes—Davy's
eyes, but old, old, embalmed—he felt a pang of pity and knew
why the Warden, a sensitive man, had spoken of remoteness. On the
surface it appeared that even now, with hope held out to him—such
as it was—Bayard Fox had no hope. And yet . . . that glitter. A
little shutter-flash. A flash of something that was more life than
death.

Ellery frowned: "You
know why we're going back to Wrightsville?"

"The Warden told me,
sir."

"Please call me
anything but 'sir.' And I'll call you Bayard, if I may. We must be
friends, or we can't work at this at all. I know your son—"

"Davy?"

That something leaped out of
the caverns again—"Quick as a fox,"

Ellery thought absurdly—and
was gone as quickly.

"Am I going to see Davy
again, Mr. Queen?"

"Oh, yes."

"My boy's one of the
big heroes of the War, Warden," said Bayard Fox with a slightly
animated smile. "I've been reading about—" He
stopped. Then he said stolidly: "I don't want to spoil my son's
life, Mr. Queen. This can't do any good."

"You mean you don't
want your case reopened?"

"Mr. Queen, this can't
do any good."

Sincerity or cunning?

Detective Howie spat into
the spittoon.

Ellery said abruptly:
"Bayard, I don't know whether it will do any good or not. I
don't know, from my own knowledge, whether you're guilty or innocent.
But I'll tell you this: Your son's happiness—perhaps a great
deal more—hangs on this investigation."

The eyes blinked.

"I must have your
unquestioning co-operation. Will you trust me—and do exactly as
I ask you to?"

That sunken glance went to
the Warden, as if—but only as if—for guidance. The
Warden, limpid soul, nodded with a sore and sympathetic pleasure.

"Whatever you say, Mr.
Queen."

The shoulders sagged.

Almost deliberately.

Despite Chief of Police
Dakin's precautions, they were spotted driving through Slocum, and by
the time they drew up before Talbot Fox's house in Wrightsville a
considerable throng had gathered before the big iron gate.

It was neither a menacing
crowd nor a compassionate one; simply Wrightsville gaping. But the
moment held its terrors.

Detective Howie hustled
Bayard Fox up the walk, covering the frail figure with his Himalayan
bulk. A faint flush at sight of the rubbernecks on the sidewalk
colored Bayard's cheeks; but only for a moment. Then his gaze fixed
upon the ivy-disheveled, shuttered house next door, and clung. He
actually stumbled on the bottom riser at the Talbot Fox porch steps;
Howie had to steady him with a secretly cruel paw.

Ellery had been hopeful of
the meeting between Bayard Fox and his family. He sought a hint, the
least smear of a clue, from which to direct his researches. But the
incident told him less than nothing.

The family was assembled in
the parlor in photographic postures. Talbot stood at one of the front
windows peering through Emily's faille curtains out at the crowd on
the sidewalk. As the four men entered, Talbot turned from the window,
a little pale, and hurried forward with a forced smile.

"Hello, Bay."

Bayard Fox regarded his
elder brother for an instant without recognition. Then he mumbled:
"Tal," and looked away—searching. The vague glance
rested on his sister-in-law, and awareness flickered again. Emily
crept forward to cling to her husband's arm. "Bayard, I'm so
glad—" She stopped in a sort of terror, and his glance
wavered on—and then the glitter Ellery had noticed in the
Warden's office sprang into the sunken eyes as they found Davy in a
corner, his arm tightly about Linda.

"Son!"

Davy managed a grin. "Hello,
Dad. Meet your daughter-in-law. Remember little Linny?"

Linda ran to the
white-haired prisoner and threw her arms about him. From the way he
stiffened, she realized she had made a serious mistake. Linda
recoiled, smiling to conceal her confusion.

"So you're Linny,"
said Bayard. "So grown-up." And his eyes dismissed her.
"Davy."

"Dad."

They glanced at each other,
and then away.

That was all.

A very bad scene, Ellery
thought with irritation. It lacks color, drama, and above all
significance. A man comes back from the dead and everyone is
embarrassed, including the corpse, although he less than anyone.

As Chief Dakin pushed a
chair forward, Bayard smiled his vacant smile ind sat down in it to
fold his hands and rest them in his lap and look around with a
certain pleasure of recognition—yes, there's the grand piano
with the same Spanish shawl all fringed with silk Emily used to
have—I remember that—there's the daguerreotype of
Great-grandmother Finggren who went out to Illinois as a "Latter-day
pioneer," as Grandmother Harrison used to say—Talbot's
Harvard Classics on the mantelpiece, and the Danish meerschaum that
came over from the old country with somebody's great-uncle—they've
changed things around a bit, but it's pretty much the same. . . .
Ellery thought how perfectly calculated this bit of nostalgic byplay
was to arouse the sympathy of an audience—the brittle, frail
figure in the too big tapestried chair, smiling sadly at familiar
things all but forgotten.

If it
was
calculated.

They were all talking now,
all but Bayard, talking with great liveliness, about the dry spell
since the bad storm, about Chief Dakin's daughter Elvy who had just
married a Slocum boy, about the triplets old Doc Willoughby had
delivered over at Farmer Hunker's—about everything but what was
on their minds.

"May I suggest,"
said Ellery, "that we call the meeting to order?" He smiled
at Bayard, who started nervously. "Bayard, your sister-in-law
has offered her home here as our headquarters. Very generously.
However, if you have any objection—you see, Mrs. Fox, I'm being
brutally frank—we'll take rooms at the Hollis or Upham House
and operate from there. Which would you rather do, Bayard?"

"Which would ...
I
rather do?" The question seemed to confuse him. He paused
helplessly, then he said: "This is very kind of you, Emily."
He repeated, "Very kind of you."

"Oh, Bayard!"
Emily burst into tears.

"Now Emily-"
thundered Talbot.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Emily swabbed her eyes with a handkerchief that was already sodden.

Detective Howie looked
about, as if for a spittoon.

"Before we begin,
Bayard," said Ellery. "Have you anything to tell us?"

"Tell you?" Bayard
blinked.

"Well," said
Ellery, "you might tell us whether you poisoned your wife twelve
years ago."

Linda sucked in her breath;
it was the only sound in the room.

"I guess you all think
I want to be freed," Bayard began slowly. "But I don't
know. Once I did, but maybe now I'd rather stay where I am. It's
gotten to be sort of like home." He sighed. "Davy, Mr.
Queen told me on the drive over from the prison all about what's
happened to you . . . what you almost did to your. . . wife, and why.
Mr. Queen says this

investigation means—well,
Davy, I guess if it means all that to you and Linda, I'll do
anything." And now that tantalizing glitter was in his eyes
again. "All I ask is that everybody tell the truth. That's all I
ask. The truth."

"But Dad." Davy
was shaking. "You haven't answered Mr. Queen's question."

Bayard regarded his son with
the unconcealed tenderness of a woman. “I did not kill your
mother, son,"

It sounded like a man
stating a truth. There was no slightest timbre of falsity. A simple
and direct and—yes—hopeless statement of fact. Or was it
the quintessence of cleverness? The man, thought Ellery, is either
the victim of the foulest circumstances, or an astounding actor.

"All right," said
Ellery; his voice told nothing of his thoughts. Then here's my
program. I'm going to spend a few days examining the court records of
the trial. Then we'll all get together in the house next door and
retrace every step of the events of a dozen years ago. Every action,
every statement, every remembered thought as far as possible. I
propose to

pull time back. Maybe in
making history repeat itself we can get it to shout something now
that it only whispered then, or was silent about altogether.

"There are certain
dangerous implications in what I'm trying to do here. The people
involved are very few in number. And tied to one another by blood or
marriage. If Bayard Fox is innocent, as he claims to be, then we may
be faced with a most unpleasant situation."

It was unnecessary' to
belabor the point. Their eyes mirrored the possibilities.

"One thing more."
Ellery smiled at Davy and Linda. These two young people have a
tremendous stake in this investigation. They were virtually babies
when Jessica Fox died. It isn't fair or right that they should be
made to suffer as adults for someone's duplicity when they were
children. I'm not saying there was duplicity; I just don't know. But
if there was, I warn you now—I'll follow this through till I
comer the truth. No matter

where it leads. No matter
whom it hurts.

"Is that clear? To
everyone?"

No one replied; no one had
to.

"Thank you," said
Ellery, with a smile. "And now I've got to get busy with those
trial records."

PART TWO

chapter 8

Fox-Love

The next morning, having a
half hour before his appointment with Prosecutor Hendrix, Ellery
renewed his acquaintance with Wrightsville.