Gramaton looked at his wife, his brow contorted.

  “Shall I tell you why, Mrs. Gramaton?” said Ellery gently. “Because obviously you are concealing your back. Because obviously something happened between the time I left you last night and breakfast this morning that forced you to conceal your back. Because obviously something happened to your back last night which you don’t want your husband to see, and which he would have to see if as usual you posed for him this morning. Am I right?”

  Mimi Gramaton’s lips moved, but she said nothing. Gramaton and the others stared at Ellery, bewildered.

  “Of course I am,” smiled Ellery. “Well, I said to myself, what could have happened to your back last night? Was there any clue? There certainly was—the portrait of the fourth Lord Gramaton!”

  “The portrait?” repeated Miss Eames, wrinkling her nose.

  “For, mark you, last night Lord Gramaton’s breast bled again. Ah, what a story! I left you in the studio, and the noble lord bled, and this morning you concealed your back.… Surely it makes sense? The bleeding picture might have been a bad joke; it might have been—forgive me—a supernatural phenomenon; but at least it was blood—human blood, Dr. Varrow has established. Well, human blood has to flow, and that means a wound. Whose wound? Lord Gramaton’s? Pshaw! Blood is blood, and canvas doesn’t wound easily. Your blood, Mrs. Gramaton, and your wound, to be sure; otherwise why were you afraid to display your back?”

  “Oh Lord,” said Gramaton. “Mimi—darling—” Mimi began to weep and Gramaton buried his ugly face in his hands.

  “It was easy to reconstruct what must have happened. It was in the studio; there are signs there of a tussle. You were attacked—with the palette knife, of course; we found it thrown away. You backed against the portrait, the wound in your back streaming blood: Lord Gramaton was set flush with the floor, and was life-size, so your back wound smeared Lord Gramaton’s breast in just the right place, happily for the ghost story. I assumed you fainted, and Jeff—he was outside when I left, so he must have been attracted by the sounds of the struggle—found you, carried you to your room, and treated your wound and kept his mouth shut like the loyal soul he is, because you begged him to.” Mimi nodded, sobbing.

  “Mimi!” Gramaton sprang to her.

  “But—Borcca,” muttered Dr. Varrow. “I don’t see—”

  Ellery flicked ashes. “It’s wonderful what the imagination is,” he grinned. “Blood—Borcca missing—plenty of motive for murder—the trail of a human body through the woods … murder! How very illogical, and how very human.”

  He puffed. “I saw, of course, that Borcca must have been the attacker: the man threatened to kill Mrs. Gramaton yesterday in my hearing, and he was plainly insane with jealousy and a deep thwarted passion. What happened to Borcca? Ah, the open window. It had been shut when I saw it the night before. Now it was open. Below, in the pansy bed, the plain sign of a fallen body, two deep trenches in the soil showing where his feet must have landed.… In short, panicky, a coward, perhaps thinking he had committed murder, hearing Jeff lumbering upstairs, Borcca jumped out of Gramaton’s window in a blind impulse to escape—and fell two stories.”

  “But how can you know he jumped?” frowned the Angers. “How do you know—Jeff, say, didn’t catch and kill him and throw his dead body out and then drag it.…”

  “No,” smiled Ellery. “The dragging marks stretched out a considerable distance through these woods. In one place, as you saw, it led under some brambles so thick that I couldn’t have gone through it except on my belly; yet the trail went right through, didn’t it? If Borcca was dead, and his body was being dragged, how did the murderer get the body through those brambles? In fact, why should he want to? Surely he wouldn’t crawl himself at that point, hauling the body after him. It would have been easier to go by an unobstructed path nearby, as we did.

  “So,” said Ellery, rising and beginning to pick his way across the rocky neck, “it was evident that Borcca had not been dragged, that Borcca had dragged himself, crawling on his stomach. Therefore he was alive, and no murder had been committed at all, you see.”

  Slowly they began to follow. Gramaton had his arm about Mimi, humbly, his big chin on his breast.

  “But why should he crawl all that distance?” demanded Dr. Varrow. “He might crawl to the woods to escape being seen, but once in the woods, at night, surely he didn’t have to.…”

  “Exactly; he didn’t have to,” said Ellery. “But he crawled nevertheless. Then he must have had to.… He had jumped two stories. He had landed feet first, and from the turning-in of the toemarks in the pansy bed his feet had twisted inward in landing. So, I said to myself, he must have broken his ankles. You see?”

  He stopped. They stopped. Ellery had led them to the end of the path on the eastward part of the island. They could see the abandoned shack through the trees.

  “A man with two broken feet—both were broken, because the trail showed two parallel shoe marks dragging, indicating that he could not use even one leg for pushing—cannot swim, without foot leverage he can hardly be conceived as rowing, and there is neither a motor-boat nor a bridge on this island. I felt sure,” he said in a low voice, “that he was therefore still on the island.”

  Gramaton growled deep in his throat, like a bloodhound.

  “And in view of Jeff’s inability to find our Mr. Borcca this morning, it also seemed probable that he had taken refuge in that shack.” Ellery looked into Gramaton’s gray eyes. “For more than twelve hours the creature has been cowering in there, in intense pain, thinking himself a murderer, waiting to be routed out for the capital punishment he believes he’s earned. I imagine he’s been punished enough, don’t you, Gramaton?”

  The big man’s eyes blinked. Then, without a word, he said: “Mimi?” in a low voice, and she looked up at him and took his arm and he turned her carefully around and began to walk her back to the western end of the island.

  Offshore, resting on his oars like a watchful Buddha, sat Jeff.

  “You may as well go back, too,” said Ellery gently to the two women. He waved his arm at Jeff. “Dr. Varrow and I have a nasty job to—finish.”

  Man Bites Dog

  Anyone observing the tigerish pacings, the gnawings of lip, the contortions of brow, and the fierce melancholy which characterized the conduct of Mr. Ellery Queen, the noted sleuth, during those early October days in Hollywood, would have said reverently that the great man’s intellect was once more locked in titanic struggle with the forces of evil.

  “Paula,” Mr. Queen said to Paula Paris, “I’m going mad.”

  “I hope,” said Miss Paris tenderly, “it’s love.”

  Mr. Queen paced, swathed in yards of thought. Queenly Miss Paris observed him with melting eyes. When he had first encountered her, during his investigation of the double murder of Blythe Stuart and Jack Royle, the famous motion-picture stars,* Miss Paris had been in the grip of a morbid psychology. She had been in a deathly terror of crowds. “Crowd phobia” the doctors called it. Mr. Queen, stirred by a nameless emotion, determined to cure the lady of her psychological affliction. The therapy, he conceived, must be both shocking and compensatory; and so he made love to her.

  And lo! although Miss Paris recovered, to his horror Mr. Queen found that the cure may sometimes present a worse problem than the affliction. For the patient promptly fell in love with her healer; and the healer did not himself escape certain excruciating emotional consequences.

  “Is it?” asked Miss Paris, her heart in her eyes.

  “Eh?” said Mr. Queen. “What? Oh, no. I mean—it’s the World Series.” He looked savage. “Don’t you realize what’s happening? The New York Giants and the New York Yankees are waging mortal combat to determine the baseball championship of the world, and I’m three thousand miles away!”

  “Oh,” said Miss Paris. Then she said cleverly: “You poor darling.”

  “Never missed a New York series before,” wailed Mr. Queen. “Driving me cuckoo. And what a battle! Greatest series ever played. Moore and DiMaggio have done miracles in the outfield. Giants have pulled a triple play. Goofy Gomez struck out fourteen men to win the first game. Hubbell’s pitched a one-hit shutout. And today Dickey came up in the ninth inning with the bases loaded, two out, and the Yanks three runs behind, and slammed a homer over the right-field stands!”

  “Is that good?” asked Miss Paris.

  “Good!” howled Mr. Queen. “It merely sent the series into a seventh game.”

  “Poor darling,” said Miss Paris again, and she picked up her telephone. When she set it down she said: “Weather’s threatening in the East. Tomorrow the New York Weather Bureau expects heavy rains.”

  Mr. Queen stared wildly. “You mean—”

  “I mean that you’re taking tonight’s plane for the East. And you’ll see your beloved seventh game day after tomorrow.”

  “Paula, you’re a genius!” Then Mr. Queen’s face fell. “But the studio, tickets … Bigre! I’ll tell the studio I’m down with elephantiasis, and I’ll wire Dad to snare a box. With his pull at City Hall, he ought to—Paula, I don’t know what I’d do.…”

  “You might,” suggested Miss Paris, “kiss me … goodbye.”

  Mr. Queen did so, absently. The he started. “Not at all! You’re coming with me!”

  “That’s what I had in mind,” said Miss Paris contentedly.

  And so Wednesday found Miss Paris and Mr. Queen at the Polo Grounds, ensconced in a field box behind the Yankees’ dugout.

  Mr. Queen glowed, he reveled, he was radiant. While Inspector Queen, with the suspiciousness of all fathers, engaged Paula in exploratory conversation, Ellery filled his lap and Paula’s with peanut hulls, consumed frankfurters and soda pop immoderately, made hypercritical comments on the appearance of the various athletes, derided the Yankees, extolled the Giants, evolved complicated fifty-cent bets with Detective-Sergeant Velie, of the Inspector’s staff, and leaped to his feet screaming with fifty thousand other maniacs as the news came that Carl Hubbell, the beloved Meal Ticket of the Giants, would oppose Señor El Goofy Gomez, the ace of the Yankee staff, on the mound.

  “Will the Yanks murder that apple today!” predicted the Sergeant, who was an incurable Yankee worshiper. “And will Goofy mow ’em down!”

  “Four bits,” said Mr. Queen coldly, “say the Yanks don’t score three earned runs off Carl.”

  “It’s a pleasure!”

  “I’ll take a piece of that, Sergeant,” chuckled a handsome man to the front of them, in a rail seat. “Hi, Inspector. Swell day for it, eh?”

  “Jimmy Connor!” exclaimed Inspector Queen. “The old Song-and-Dance Man in person. Say, Jimmy, you never met my son, Ellery, did you? Excuse me. Miss Paris, this is the famous Jimmy Connor, God’s gift to Broadway.”

  “Glad to meet you, Miss Paris,” smiled the Song-and-Dance Man, sniffing at his orchidaceous lapel. “Read your Seeing Stars column, every day. Meet Judy Starr.”

  Miss Paris smiled, and the woman beside Jimmy Connor smiled back, and just then three Yankee players strolled over to the box and began to jeer at Connor for having had to take seats behind that hated Yankee dugout.

  Judy Starr was sitting oddly still. She was the famous Judy Starr who had been discovered by Florenz Ziegfeld—a second Marilyn Miller, the critics called her; dainty and pretty, with a perky profile and great honey-colored eyes, who had sung and danced her way into the heart of New York. Her day of fame was almost over now. Perhaps, thought Paula, staring at Judy’s profile, that explained the pinch of her little mouth, the fine lines about her tragic eyes, the singing tension of her figure.

  Perhaps. But Paula was not sure. There was immediacy, a defense against a palpable and present danger, in Judy Starr’s tautness. Paula looked about. And at once her eyes narrowed.

  Across the rail of the box, in the box at their left, sat a very tall, leather-skinned, silent and intent man. The man, too, was staring out at the field, in an attitude curiously like that of Judy Starr, whom he could have touched by extending his big, ropy, muscular hand across the rail. And on the man’s other side there sat a woman whom Paula recognized instantly. Lotus Verne, the motion-picture actress!

  Lotus Verne was a gorgeous, full-blown redhead with deep mercury-colored eyes who had come out of Northern Italy Ludovica Vernicchi, changed her name, and flashed across the Hollywood skies in a picture called Woman of Bali, a color film in which loving care had been lavished on the display possibilities of her dark, full, dangerous body. With fame, she had developed a passion for press agentry, borzois in pairs, and tall brown men with muscles. She was arrayed in sun yellow and she stood out among the women in the field boxes like a butterfly in a mass of grubs. By contrast little Judy Starr, in her flame-colored outfit, looked almost old and dowdy.

  Paula nudged Ellery, who was critically watching the Yankees at batting practice. “Ellery,” she said softly, “who is that big, brown, attractive man in the next box?”

  Lotus Verne said something to the brown man, and suddenly Judy Starr said something to the Song-and-Dance Man; and then the two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when there is no knife handy.

  Ellery said absently: “Who? Oh! That’s Big Bill Tree.”

  “Tree!” repeated Paula. “Big Bill Tree?”

  “Greatest left-handed pitcher major-league baseball ever saw,” said Mr. Queen, staring reverently at the brown man. “Six feet three inches of bull whip and muscle, with a temper as sudden as the hook on his curve ball and a change of pace that fooled the greatest sluggers of baseball for fifteen years. What a man!”

  “Yes, isn’t he?” smiled Miss Paris.

  “Now what does that mean?” demanded Mr. Queen.

  “It takes greatness to escort a lady like Lotus Verne to a ball game,” said Paula, “to find your wife sitting within spitting distance in the next box, and to carry it off as well as your muscular friend Mr. Tree is doing.”

  “That’s right,” said Queen softly. “Judy Starr is Mrs. Bill Tree.”

  He groaned as Joe DiMaggio hit a ball to the clubhouse clock.

  “Funny,” said Miss Paris, her clever eyes inspecting in turn the four people before her: Lotus Verne, the Hollywood siren; Big Bill Tree, the ex-baseball pitcher; Judy Starr, Tree’s wife; and Jimmy Connor, the Song-and-Dance Man, Mrs. Tree’s escort. Two couples, two boxes … and no sign of recognition. “Funny,” murmured Miss Paris. “From the way Tree courted Judy you’d have thought the marriage would outlast eternity. He snatched her from under Jimmy Connor’s nose one night at the Winter Garden, drove her up to Greenwich at eighty miles an hour, and married her before she could catch her breath.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Queen politely. “Come on, you Giants!” he yelled, as the Giants trotted out for batting practice.

  “And then something happened,” continued Miss Paris reflectively. “Tree went to Hollywood to make a baseball picture, met Lotus Verne, and the wench took the overgrown country boy the way the overgrown country boy had taken Judy Starr. What a fall was there, my baseball-minded friend.”

  “What a wallop!” cried Mr. Queen enthusiastically, as Mel Ott hit one that bounced off the right-field fence.

  “And Big Bill yammered for a divorce, and Judy refused to give it to him because she loved him, I suppose,” said Paula softly. “And now this. How interesting.”

  Big Bill Tree twisted in his seat a little; and Judy Starr was still and pale, staring out of her tragic, honey-colored eyes at the Yankee bat boy and giving him unwarranted delusions of grandeur. Jimmy Connor continued to exchange sarcastic greetings with Yankee players, but his eyes kept shifting back to Judy’s face. And beautiful Lotus Verne’s arm crept about Tree’s shoulders.

  “I don’t like it,” murmured Miss Paris a little later.

  “You don’t like it?” said Mr. Queen. “Why, the game hasn’t even started.”

  “I don’t mean your game, silly. I mean the quadrangular situation in front of us.”

  “Look, darling,” said Mr. Queen. “I flew three thousand miles to see a ball game. There’s only one angle that interests me—the view from this box of the greatest li’l ol’ baseball tussle within the memory of gaffers. I yearn, I strain, I hunger to see it. Play with your quadrangle, but leave me to my baseball.”

  “I’ve always been psychic,” said Miss Paris, paying no attention. “This is—bad. Something’s going to happen.”

  Mr. Queen grinned. “I know what. The deluge. See what’s coming.”

  Someone in the grandstand had recognized the celebrities, and a sea of people was rushing down on the two boxes. They thronged the aisle behind the boxes, waving pencils and papers, and pleading. Big Bill Tree and Lotus Verne ignored their pleas for autographs; but Judy Starr with a curious eagerness signed paper after paper with the yellow pencils thrust at her by people leaning over the rail. Good-naturedly Jimmy Connor scrawled his signature, too.

  “Little Judy,” sighed Miss Paris, setting her natural straw straight as an autograph-hunter knocked it over her eyes, “is flustered and unhappy. Moistening the tip of your pencil with your tongue is scarcely a mark of poise. Seated next to her Lotus-bound husband, she hardly knows what she’s doing, poor thing.”

  “Neither do I,” growled Mr. Queen, fending off an octopus which turned out to be eight pleading arms offering scorecards.

  Big Bill sneezed, groped for a handkerchief, and held it to his nose, which was red and swollen. “Hey, Mac,” he called irritably to a red-coated usher. “Do somethin’ about this mob, huh?” He sneezed again. “Damn this hay fever!”

  “The touch of earth,” said Miss Paris. “But definitely attractive.”

  “Should ’a’ seen Big Bill the day he pitched that World Series final against the Tigers,” chuckled Sergeant Velie. “He was sure attractive that day. Pitched a no-hit shutout!”