The adventures of ellery.., p.29
The Adventures of Ellery Queen,
p.29
No one replied.
Ellery went swiftly to the mirror, stood on tiptoe, touched something, and something happened to the whole glass. It moved forward as if on hinges. He hooked his fingers in the crack and pulled. The mirror, like a door, swung out and away, revealing a shallow closet-like cavity.
The women with one breath screamed and covered their eyes.
The stiff figure of the Mad Hatter, with Richard Owen’s unmistakable features, glared out at them—a dead, horrible, baleful glare.
Paul Gardner stumbled to his feet, choking and jerking at his collar. His eyes bugged out of his head. “O-O-Owen,” he gasped. “Owen. He can’t be here. I b-b-buried him myself under the big rock behind the house in the woods. Oh, my God.” And he smiled a dreadful smile and his eyes turned over and he collapsed in a faint on the floor.
Ellery sighed. “It’s all right now, De Vere,” and the Mad Hatter moved and his features ceased to resemble Richard Owen’s magically. “You may come out now. Admirable bit of statuary histrionics. And it turned the trick, as I thought it would. There’s your man, Mr. Naughton. And if you’ll question Mrs. Gardner, I believe you’ll find that she’s been Owen’s mistress for some time. Gardner obviously found it out and killed him. Look out—there she goes, too!”
“What I can’t understand,” murmured Emmy Willowes after a long silence late that night, as she and Mr. Ellery Queen sat side by side in the local bound for Jamaica and the express for Pennsylvania Station, “is—” She stopped helplessly. “I can’t understand so many things, Mr. Queen.”
“It was simple enough,” said Ellery wearily, staring out the window at the rushing dark countryside.
“But who is that man—that De Vere?”
“Oh, he! A Thespian acquaintance of mine temporarily ‘at liberty.’ He’s an actor—does character bits. You wouldn’t know him, I suppose. You see, when my deductions had led me to the looking glass and I examined it and finally discovered its secret and opened it, I found Owen’s body lying there in the Hatter costume—”
She shuddered. “Much too realistic drama to my taste. Why didn’t you announce your discovery at once?”
“And gain what? There wasn’t a shred of evidence against the murderer. I wanted time to think out a plan to make the murderer give himself away. I left the body there—”
You mean to sit there and say you knew Gardner did it all the time?” she demanded, frankly skeptical.
He shrugged. “Of course. The Owens had lived in that house barely a month. The spring on that compartment is remarkably well concealed; it probably would never be discovered unless you knew it existed and were looking for it. But I recalled that Owen himself remarked Friday night that Gardner had designed ‘this development.’ I had it then, naturally. Who more likely than the architect to know the secret of such a hidden closet? Why he designed and had built a secret panel I don’t know; I suppose it fitted into some architectural whim of his. So it had to be Gardner, you see.” He gazed thoughtfully at the dusty ceiling of the car. “I reconstructed the crime easily enough. After we retired Friday night Gardner came down to have it out with Owen about Mrs. Gardner—a lusty wench, if I ever saw one. They had words; Gardner killed him. It must have been an unpremeditated crime. His first impulse was to hide the body. He couldn’t take it out Friday night in that awful rain without leaving traces on his night-clothes. Then he remembered the panel behind the mirror. The body would be safe enough there, he felt, until he could remove it when the rain stopped and the ground dried to a permanent hiding-place; dig a grave, or whatnot….He was stowing the body away in the closet when I opened the door of the den; that was why I didn’t see the reflection of the clock. Then, while I was in the library, he closed the mirror-door and dodged upstairs. I came out quickly, though, and he decided to brazen it out; even pretended he thought I might be ‘Owen’ coming up.
“At any rate, Saturday night he drugged us all, took the body out, buried it, and came back and dosed himself with the drug to make his part as natural as possible. He didn’t know I had found the body behind the mirror Saturday afternoon. When, Sunday morning, I found the body gone, I knew of course the reason for the drugging. Gardner by burying the body in a place unknown to anyone—without leaving, as far as he knew, even a clue to the fact that murder had been committed at all—was naturally doing away with the primary piece of evidence in any murder-case…the corpus delicti….Well, I found the opportunity to telephone De Vere and instruct him in what he had to do. He dug up the Hatter’s costume somewhere, managed to get a photo of Owen from a theatrical office, came down here….We put him in the closet while Naughton’s man was detaining you people in the library. You see, I had to build up suspense, make Gardner give himself away, break down his moral resistance. He had to be forced to disclose where he had buried the body; and he was the only one who could tell us. It worked.”
The actress regarded him sidewise out of her clever eyes. Ellery sighed moodily, glancing away from her slim legs outstretched to the opposite seat. “But the most puzzling thing of all,” she said with a pretty frown. “Those perfectly fiendish and fantastic packages. Who sent them, for heaven’s sake?”
Ellery did not reply for a long time. Then he said drowsily, barely audible above the clatter of the train: “You did, really.”
“I?” She was so startled that her mouth flew open.
“Only in a manner of speaking,” murmured Ellery, closing his eyes. “Your idea about running a mad tea-party out of Alice for Master Jonathan’s delectation—the whole pervading spirit of the Reverend Dodgson—started a chain of fantasy in my own brain, you see. Just opening the closet and saying that Owen’s body had been there, or even getting De Vere to act as Owen, wasn’t enough. I had to prepare Gardner’s mind psychologically, fill him with puzzlement first, get him to realize after a while where the gifts with their implications were leading….Had to torture him, I suppose. It’s a weakness of mine. At any rate, it was an easy matter to telephone my father, the Inspector; and he sent Sergeant Velie down and I managed to smuggle all those things I’d filched from the house out into the woods behind and hand good Velie what I had….He did the rest, packaging and all.”
She sat up and measured him with a severe glance. “Mr. Queen! Is that cricket in the best detective circles?”
He grinned sleepily. “I had to do it, you see. Drama, Miss Willowes. You ought to be able to understand that. Surround a murderer with things he doesn’t understand, bewilder him, get him mentally punch-drunk, and then spring the knock-out blow, the crusher….Oh, it was devilish clever of me, I admit.”
She regarded him for so long and in such silence and with such supple twisting of her boyish figure that he stirred uncomfortably, feeling an unwilling flush come to his cheeks. “And what, if I may ask,” he said lightly, “brings that positively lewd expression to your Peter Pannish face, my dear? Feel all right? Anything wrong? By George, how do you feel?”
“As Alice would say,” she said softly, leaning a little toward him, “curiouser and curiouser.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE AUTHOR WISHES TO express his gratitude to Red Book, Mystery, Great Detective and Mystery League for permission to include certain stories which appeared in their publications.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, 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 © 1934, 1935 by Ellery Queen
Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen
Cover design by Jim Tierney
978-1-4532-8966-2
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Queen, Ellery, The Adventures of Ellery Queen
