“Yes,” said Ellery, “Dakin is devoted to the great god Fact.”

  “But now I’m convinced the two incidents are tied up. The jewelry is valuable. It was pawned. Money again.” Diedrich smiled. “And I’d always considered myself a pretty freehanded bird. Shows how easy it is to kid yourself, Mr. Queen. Well, I’m going to bed. I have a big day tomorrow.”

  And so have I, thought Ellery, so have I.

  “Good night, Mr. Queen.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  “If you should find out anything—”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t tell…the one that’s involved. Come to me.”

  “I understand. Oh, Mr. Van Horn.”

  “Yes, Mr. Queen.”

  “If you should hear a prowler down here, don’t be alarmed. It’ll only be your house guest, raiding the icebox.”

  Diedrich grinned and went out, waving in a wide and friendly gesture.

  Ellery felt very sorry for him indeed.

  And for himself.

  Laura had left him a feast. Under other circumstances, and in view of the fact that he hadn’t eaten since early afternoon, Ellery would have blessed her with each mouthful. As it was, he had little appetite. He tormented the roast beef and the salad just long enough to give Van Horn time to fall asleep. Then, with a coffee cup in his hand, he returned quietly to the study.

  He seated himself in the chair behind his host’s desk and swiveled about so that his back was to the door. Then he took the fat manila envelope from his pocket and quickly flipped through its contents. He saw at once that the bills were in numerical sequence; they had come from the United States Mint by a direct route. He returned the bills to the envelope and the envelope to his pocket. Then he dug out the slip of paper Diedrich had given him.

  The bills in his pocket were the bills which had been taken from Van Horn’s safe the night before.

  There had been no doubt of this in Ellery’s mind from the moment his host had broached the burglary. The fact had merely called for certification.

  Now there was that other matter to attend to.

  “You may come in now, Howard,” Ellery said.

  Howard came in, blinking.

  “Shut the door, will you?” He obeyed in silence. He was in pajamas and dressing gown, and he wore moccasinlike slippers over bare feet. “You know, you’re really not very good at this sort of thing, Howard. How much did you hear?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “And you waited for me to come back to the study, to see what I would do.”

  Howard sat down on the edge of his father’s leather armchair, his big hands clenched on his knees. “Ellery—”

  “Spare me the explanations, Howard. You stole that money from your father’s safe last night, and it’s in my pocket right now. Howard,” said Ellery, leaning forward, “I wonder if you quite realize the position you’ve forced me into.”

  “Ellery, I was frantic.” Ellery could scarcely hear him. “I don’t have that kind of money. And the money had to be got somewhere.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d taken it from your father’s safe?”

  “I didn’t want Sally to know.”

  “Oh, Sally doesn’t know.”

  “No. I couldn’t tell you up at the lake, or on the drive back. She was with us.”

  “You could have told me this afternoon or evening, when I was alone in the cottage.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your work.” Howard suddenly looked up. “No, that’s not the reason. I was scared to.”

  “Afraid I’d renege on tomorrow?”

  “It’s not just that…Ellery, it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever done anything like this. And to have to do it to the old man…” Howard rose, heavily. “The money’s got to be paid. I don’t expect you to believe me, but it really isn’t for my sake. Or even for Sally’s. I’m not as much of a coward as you think. I could tell father tonight—right now—man to man. I could tell him and say I wanted him to divorce Sally and that I’d marry her, and if he hit me I could pick myself up from the floor and say it again.”

  I believe you could, Howard. And even get a sort of pleasure from it.

  “But it’s father who needs the protection in this. He mustn’t get those letters. They’d kill him. He can stand the loss of twenty-five thousand measly dollars—he has millions—but the letters would kill him, Ellery. If I could have invented a reason, a phony reason that would stand up, for needing that much cash I’d have asked father for it right out. But I knew I’d have to back it up—he doesn’t fool easily—and I couldn’t back it up. So I took it from the safe.”

  “And suppose he finds out that you’re the thief?”

  “I’ll have to cross that one when I come to it. But there’s no reason why he should find out.”

  “He knows now it’s you or Sally.”

  Howard looked baffled. He said angrily: “My own stupidity. I’ll just have to figure out something.”

  Poor Howard.

  “Ellery, I’ve dragged you into a nasty mess and I’m damned sorry. Give me the money and I’ll go to the Hollis myself tomorrow. And you can stay here, or leave—whichever you think best—and I won’t drag you into this any more.”

  He came up to the desk and held out his hand.

  But Ellery said: “What else don’t I know, Howard?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing else.”

  “What about the burglary in June, Howard?”

  “I didn’t do that!”

  Ellery looked up at him for a long time.

  Howard glared back.

  “Who did, Howard?”

  “How should I know? Some crook or other. Father’s wrong about that, Ellery. It was an outside thief. The whole thing came about accidentally. The thief lifted some jewelry and found the box had value, too. Ellery, give me the damned envelope and clear out of this!”

  Ellery sighed. “Go to bed, Howard. I’ll see it through.”

  Ellery walked back to the cottage with dragging feet. He was tired, and the envelope in his pocket weighed a great deal.

  He crossed the north terrace, felt his way around the pool.

  I can’t even afford to fall in and drown, he thought. They’d find the money on me.

  And then he bumped into the stone garden seat.

  A pain shot through him, not entirely from his kneecap.

  The stone seat!

  The old woman he had seen sitting here last night.

  He had completely forgotten about the old woman.

  The Fourth Day

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS WRIGHTSVILLE takes on a mercantile air. The goose of commerce hangs high. High Village shops are full, cash registers jump and cry out hour after hour, the Square and Lower Main are jammed, the Bijou Theater’s queue stretches from the box office almost to the doors of Logan’s Market at the corner of Slocum and Washington, the parking lot in Jezreel Lane raises its fee to thirty-five cents, and all over town—on Lower Main, on Upper Whistling, on State, in the Square, on Slocum, on Washington—one sees faces usually absent during the week: walnut-skinned farmers in stiff store pants from the back country, kids with stiff shoes on, stout ladies in stiff gingham, wearing hats. Model T’s rub fenders with jeeps everywhere; and the public parking area on the rim of the Square, surrounding the statue of Founder Wright, forms a cordon of Detroit steel through which pedestrians find it impossible to squeeze. It is all quite different from Thursday evening, which is Band Concert Night and centers about Memorial Park on State Street, near Town Hall. Band Concert Night brings out principally the Low Village contingent and the youth of all sectors. Staring boys in their big brothers’ khaki blouses fine the edge of the walks and nervous girls parade before them in pairs, trios, and quartets, while the American Legion Band in silver helmets plays Sousa marches sternly in the concentrated headlights of the cars parked in military formation across the street. Thursday is more a field night for popcorn paladins and hotdog hidalgos than for the merchants dispensing their wares under a leasehold.

  But Saturday is solid.

  It is on Saturday afternoons that the haut monde descend into High Village for those quintessential gatherings at which the cultural, civic, and political health of the community is kept under unflagging observation. (Organizationally speaking, this is not industry’s day. Business pursues its less selfish affairs on Mondays, which is logical, Saturday retail business being brisk and Monday retail business being sluggish. That is why you will find the Wrightsville Retail Merchants Ass. meeting for pork chops, julienne potatoes, and the Sales Tax at the Hollis Hotel each Monday at noon. The Chamber of Commerce congregates at the Kelton for baked ham, candied sweets, and the American Way on Thursdays; and Rotary assembles at Upham House for Ma Upham’s fried chicken, hot biscuits, boysenberry jam, and the Menace of Communism on Wednesdays.) Each Saturday afternoon the ladies of Hill Drive and Skytop Road and Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches fill the ballrooms of the Hollis and the Kelton with their grim twitterings—that is to say, those ladies who must attend the luncheon meetings of the Civic Forum Committee, the Wrightsville Robert Browning Society, the Wrightsville Ladies’ Aid, the Wrightsville Civic Betterment Club, the Wrightsville Interracial Tolerance League and such because they cannot crash the more select gatherings of the D.A.R., the New England Genealogical Society, the Wrightsville Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Wrightsville Republican Women’s Club in the Paul Revere Room and the other Early American banquet halls of Upham House. Not all these functions are held simultaneously, of course; the ladies have worked out an efficient stagger plan which permits the spryer among them to attend two, and even three, luncheons on the same day, which explains why the ballroom menus on Saturdays at all three hostelries are so leafy and the desserts so fruity. Nevertheless, husbands have been known to complain of their Spartan Sunday dinners; and at least two enterprising young lady dieticians have moved to Wrightsville, one from Bangor and the other from Worcester, and made a very good thing out of it.

  In all this ferment of commerce, culture, civics, and pure yeasty mass, offenses against man seem as distant as Port Said. In fact, the last thing you would think of on a Saturday afternoon in Wrightsville is that peculiarly nasty aberration of individual behavior known as blackmail; which is undoubtedly why the blackmailer, Ellery glumly reflected, selected today for his rendezvous with twenty-five thousand of Diedrich Van Horn’s dollars.

  Ellery parked Howard’s proletarian roadster halfway down the winding hill approach to High Village which is Upper Dade Street. He got out, touched his breast pocket, and then strolled down the hill toward the Square. He had purposely selected Upper Dade, for on Saturday afternoons Upper Dade plays host to the traffic overflow from the center of town and a man bent on anonymity can lose himself there without trying. Still, Ellery was surprised at what he found. Upper Dade Street was almost unrecognizable. A gigantic housing development in leprous brick had appeared since his last visit to Wrightsville, on the very site where gray frame, ivy-grown houses had stood for seventy-five years and longer. It was flanked by brisk and glittering new stores. There was a great used-car lot where the coal yard had sprawled, filled with rank after rank of gleaming cars which, if they had been truly used, had been driven by spirits of air over ethereal roads for exactly the wink of a hummingbird’s wing.

  Ah, Wrightsville!

  Ellery grew glummer. Strolling along under the metal banners of Upper Dade’s invading tradesmen, his face lighted variously by orange, white, blue, gold, and green neon rays—must they pit their garish little scene against God Himself in the person of His sun?—Ellery reflected that this was far from the Wrightsville of his tenderest memories.

  Small wonder, blackmail.

  But when he rounded the curve at the bottom of the hill, his step quickened. He was home again.

  Here was the honest old Square, which was round, with the hub of Founder Jezreel Wright’s bronze dripping bird droppings from his crusty nose into the verdigrised horse trough at his feet; there the spokes of State Street, Lower Main, Washington, Lincoln, and Upper Dade, each with its altered Wrightsville character, perhaps, but nonetheless in some mysterious way beckoning the prodigal home from the sinful cities. Up State Street, that broadest of spokes, might be seen Town Hall, and beyond Town Hall Memorial Park; the Carnegie Library (was Dolores Aikin still there, presiding over the stuffed owl and the fierce eviscerated eagle?); and the “new” County Court House, which was already old. Lower Main: the Bijou, the post office, the Record office, the shops. Washington: Logan’s, Upham House, the Professional Bldg., Andy Birobatyan’s. Lincoln and the feed stores and stables and the Volunteer Fire Department. But it was the square itself which gave them life, as the mother the chicks.

  Here was John F.’s bank, no longer John F.’s but Diedrich Van H.’s; but the building was the same, and there is steadfastness in buildings. And here was the very old Bluefield store, and J. P. Simpson’s pawnshop (Loan Office), and Sol Gowdy’s Men’s Shop, and the Bon Ton Department Store, and Dune MacLean—Fine Liquors; and the sad land change, alas, of the High Village Pharmacy, now but a link in a chain drug store, and of William Ketcham—Insurance, now the Atomic War Surplus Outlet Store.

  And, dominant, the marquee of the Hollis Hotel.

  Ellery glanced at his wrist watch: 1:58.

  He entered the Hollis lobby unhurriedly.

  Civic fervor was in full cry. From the Grand Ballroom came a mighty music of culture and cutlery. The lobby seethed. Bellboys raced. The desk bell clanged. The house phones leaped. At the newsstand and cigar counter Mark Doodle’s son, Grover, a portly Grover now, dispensed news and tobacco with furious geniality.

  Ellery crossed the lobby at a pace calculated to attract no eye, however idle. He adjusted himself to the tempo of the crowd, moving with it, neither faster nor slower. His manner and expression, a blend of abstracted positiveness and pleasant curiosity, suggested to Wrightsvillians that he was a Wrightsvillian and to strangers that he was a stranger. And he waited for the second of the three elevators, so that he might be pushed in with a large group. Inside, he refrained from calling out a floor number; he simply waited, half-turned from the operator. At the sixth floor he remembered: the operator was Wally Planetsky, whom he had last seen on duty at the admission desk of the County Jail, on the top floor of the County Court House. Planetsky had been elderly then, and graying; now he was old, white-haired, and with his thick shoulders heavily stooped. O tempus! Grover Doodles grow pots and policemen retire to run hotel elevators. Just the same, Ellery was careful to get out at the tenth floor crab-fashion, back to Wally Planetsky.

  A gentleman carrying a salesman’s briefcase, who looked like J. Edgar Hoover, got out with him.

  The gentleman turned left, so Ellery turned right.

  He searched among the wrong room numbers long enough for the gentleman to unlock a door and disappear. Then Ellery went quickly back, past the elevators, noting that his tenth-floor fellow traveler had entered 1031, and hurried on. The Turkey red carpet muffled his footsteps.

  He saw 1010 coming up and he looked back briefly without checking his stride. But the corridor behind him was empty and no guilty head popped back into a room. At 1010 he stopped, looking around again.

  Nothing.

  He tried the door then.

  It was not locked.

  So it wasn’t a bluff.

  Ellery pushed the door in suddenly. He waited.

  When nothing happened, he went in, immediately shutting the door.

  No one was there. No one seemed to have been there for weeks.

  It was a single, without bath. In one corner stood a white sink with its plumbing showing; there was a wooden towel bar above the sink. A walk-in closet lay beyond the sink.

  The room contained the irreducible minimum prescribed by Boniface’s profession. It featured a narrow bed covered by a tan bedspread with purple candlewicking, a night table, an overstuffed chair, a standing lamp, a writing table, and a bureau with a starched cotton runner. Above the bureau hung a mirror, and on the wall opposite, above the bed, there was a dust-peppered print labeled Sunrise Over the Mt. The single window was covered with a slick and sleazy curtain in grim écru, whose edge came the traditional two inches above a large, flaking radiator. The floor was carpeted wall to wall in a green Axminster, thoroughly faded. On the night table stood a telephone, and on the writing table were grouped a water pitcher, a thick glass, and a square glass tray with fluted edges. A menu inscribed Hunting Room, The Hollis Hotel, “Fine Food for Discriminating Diners,” stood on the bureau, leaning against the mirror.

  Ellery looked into the closet.

  It was empty except for a new paper laundry bag on the hat shelf and a curious piece of crockery on the floor which it took him a moment to identify. He made the identification with pleasure. It was what an older generation had forthrightly termed a “thunder jar.” He returned it to its place gently. This was Wrightsville at its best.

  Ellery shut the closet door, looking around.

  It was clear that the blackmailer had not engaged the room in the customary way: the towel bar was empty, the window was fastened. Yet Sally’s anonymous caller had known as early as yesterday morning that Room 1010 would be available for the rendezvous. It would be essential for him to insure the room’s accessibility. He had, then, reserved it, paying cash in advance. But he had not taken open, formal possession. To unlock the door, the blackmailer had therefore used an ordinary hardware store skeleton key; the Hollis’s rooms had not yet progressed to the stage of cylinder locks.

  It all added up, mused Mr. Queen, seating himself comfortably in the overstuffed chair, to a cautious scoundrel. He would not put in a personal appearance. But there must be contact. Therefore there would be a message.

  Ellery wondered how long he would have to wait and how the message would come.

  He sat in the chair, relaxed, not smoking.

  At the end of ten minutes he rose and began to prowl. He glanced into the closet again. He got down on his knees and looked under the bed. He opened the bureau drawers.