Calamity Town

The Second Sunday in May

“A drop too much to drink,” said Mr. Queen quickly to Gus Olesen. ”May we use your back room, Gus?”

“Sure, sure,” said Gus. ”Say, I’m sorry about this, Mr. Bradford. That’s good rum I used in those drinks. And she only had one¯Andy took her second one. Lemme give you a hand¯”

“We can manage her all right, thank you,” said Mr. Queen, “although 1 do think a couple of fingers of bourbon might help.”

“But if she’s sick¯” began Gus, puzzled. ”Okay!”

The Old Soak stared blindly as Carter and Ellery helped Pat, whose eyes were glassy chips of agony, into Gus Olesen’s back room. They set her down on Gus’s old horsehair black leather couch; and when Gus hurried in with a glass of whisky, Carter Bradford forced her to drink. Pat choked, her eyes streaming; then she pushed the glass aside and threw herself back on the tufted leather, her face to the wall.

“She feels fine already,” said Mr. Queen reassuringly. ”Thanks, Gus. We’ll take care of Miss Wright.”

Gus went away, shaking his head and muttering that that was good rum¯he didn’t serve rat poison like that chiseling grease-ball Vic Carlatti over at the Hot Spot.

Pat lay still. Carter stood over her awkwardly. Then he sat down and took her hand. Ellery saw her tanned fingers go white with pressure. He turned away and strolled over to the other side of the room to examine the traditional Bock Beer poster. There was no sound at all, anywhere.

Until he heard Pat murmur: “Ellery.”

He turned around. She was sitting up on the couch again, both her hands in Carter Bradford’s; he was holding on to them for dear life, almost as if it were he who needed comforting, not she. Ellery guessed that in those few seconds of silence a great battle had been fought, and won.

He drew a chair over to the couch and sat down facing them.

“Tell me the rest,” said Pat steadily, her eyes in his. ”Go on, Ellery. Tell me the rest.”

“It doesn’t make any difference, Patty darling,” mumbled Cart. ”Oh, you know that. You know it.”

“I know it, Cart.”

“Whatever it was, darling¯she was sick. I guess she was always a neurotic, always pretty close to the borderline.”

“Yes, Cart. Tell me the rest, Ellery.”

“Pat, do you remember telling me about dropping in to Nora’s a few days after Rosemary arrived, in early November, and finding Nora ‘trapped’ in the serving pantry?”

“You mean when Nora overheard Jim and Rosemary having an argument?”

“Yes. You said you came in at the tail end and didn’t hear anything of consequence. And that Nora wouldn’t tell you what she’d overheard. You said Nora had the same kind of look on her face as that day when those three letters tumbled out of the toxicology book.”

“Yes . . . ” said Pat.

“That must have been the turning point, Pat. That must have been the time when Nora learned the whole truth¯by pure accident, she learned from the lips of Jim and Rosemary themselves that Rosemary wasn’t his sister but his wife, that she herself was not legally married . . . the whole sordid story.”

Ellery examined his hands. ”It . . . unbalanced Nora. In a twinkling her whole world came tumbling down, and her moral sense and mental health with it. She faced a humiliation too sickening to be faced. And Nora was emotionally weakened by the unnatural life she’d been leading for the years between Jim’s sudden desertion and her marriage to him . . . Nora slipped over the line.”

“Over the line,” whispered Pat. Her lips were white.

“She planned to take revenge on the two people who, as her disturbed mind now saw it, had shamed her and ruined her life. She planned to kill Jim’s first wife, the hated woman who called herself Rosemary. She planned to have Jim pay for the crime by using the very tools he’d manufactured for a similar purpose years before and which were now, as if by an act of Providence, thrust into her hand. She must have worked it out slowly. But work it out she did. She had those three puzzling letters that were puzzling no longer. She had Jim’s own conduct to help her create the illusion of his guilt. And she found in herself a great strength and a great cunning; a talent, almost a genius, for deceiving the world as to her true emotions.”

Pat closed her eyes, and Carter kissed her hand.

“Knowing that we knew about the letters¯you and I, Pat¯Nora deliberately carried out the pattern of the three letters. She deliberately swallowed a small dose of arsenic on Thanksgiving Day so that it would seem to us Jim was following his schedule. And recall what she did immediately after showing symptoms of arsenic poisoning at the dinner table? She ran upstairs and gulped great quantities of milk of magnesia which, as I told you later that night in my room, Pat, is an emergency antidote for arsenic poisoning. Not a well-known fact, Patty. Nora had looked it up. That doesn’t prove she poisoned herself, but it’s significant when you tack it onto the other things she did.

“Patty, must I go on? Let Carter take you home¯”

“I want the whole thing,” said Pat. ”This moment, Ellery. Finish.”

“That’s my baby,” said Carter Bradford huskily.

“I said ‘the other things she did,’ “ said Ellery in a low tone. ”Recall them! If Nora was as concerned over Jim’s safety as she pretended, would she have left those three incriminating letters to be found in her hatbox? Wouldn’t any wife who felt as she claimed to feel about Jim have burned those letters instantly? But no¯Nora saved them . . . Of course. She knew they would turn out to be the most damning evidence against Jim when he was arrested, and she made sure they survived to be used against him. As a matter of cold fact, how did Dakin eventually find them?”

“Nora . . . Nora called our attention to them,” said Cart feebly. ”When she had hysterics and mentioned the letters, which we didn’t even know about¯”

“Mentioned?” cried Ellery. ”Hysterics? My dear Bradford, that was the most superb kind of acting! She pretended to be hysterical; she pretended that I had already told you about the letters! In saying so, she established the existence of the letters for your benefit. A terrible point, that one. But until I knew that Nora was the culprit, it had no meaning for me.” He stopped and fumbled for a cigarette.

“What else, Ellery?” demanded Pat in a shaky voice.

“Just one thing. Pat, you’re sure¯You look ill.”

“What else?”

“Jim. He was the only one who knew the truth, although Roberta Roberts may have guessed it. Jim knew he hadn’t poisoned the cocktail, so he must have known only Nora could have.

“Yet Jim kept quiet. Do you see why I said before that Jim had a more sublime reason for martyrizing himself? It was his penance, his self-imposed punishment. For Jim felt himself to have been completely responsible for the tragedy in Nora’s life¯indeed, for driving Nora into murder. So he was willing to take his licking silently and without complaint, as if that would right the wrong! But agonized minds think badly. Only . . . Jim couldn’t look at her. Remember in the courtroom? Not once. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t see her, or talk to her, before, during, or after. That would have been too much. For after all, she had¯” Ellery rose. ”I believe that’s all I’m going to say.”

Pat sank back on the couch to rest her head against the wall.

Cart winced at the expression on her face. So he said, as if somehow it softened the blow and alleviated the pain: “But Queen, isn’t it possible that Nora and Jim together,as accomplices¯?”

Ellery said rapidly: “If they’d been accomplices, working together to rid themselves of Rosemary, would they have deliberately planned the crime in such a way that Jim, one of the accomplices, would turn out to be the only possible criminal? No. Had they combined to destroy a common enemy, they would have planned it so that neither of them would be involved.”

And then there was another period of quiet, behind which tumbled the waters of Mr. Anderson’s voice in the taproom. His words all ran together, like rivulets joining a stream. It was pleasant against the malty odor of beer.

And Pat turned to look at Cart; and, oddly, she was smiling. But it was the wispiest, lightest ghost of a smile.

“No,” said Cart. ”Don’t say it. I won’t hear it.”

“But Cart, you don’t know what I was going to say¯”

“I do! And it’s a damned insult!”

“Here¯” began Mr. Queen.

“If you think,” snarled Cart, “that I’m the kind of heel who would drag a story like this out for the edification of the Emmy DuPres of Wrightsville, merely to satisfy my sense of ‘duty,’ then you’re not the kind of woman I want to marry, Pat!”

“I couldn’t marry you, Cart,” said Pat in a stifled voice. ”Not with Nora¯not with my own sister¯a . . . a . . . ”

“She wasn’t responsible! She was sick! Look here, Queen, drive some sense into¯Pat, if you’re going to take that stupid attitude, I’m through¯I’ll be damned if I’m not!” Cart pulled her off the sofa and held her to him tightly. ”Oh, darling, it isn’t Nora, it isn’t Jim, it isn’t your father or mother or Lola or even you I’m really thinking of . . . Don’t think I haven’t visited the hospital. I¯I have. I saw her just after they took her out of the incubator. She glubbed at me, and then she started to bawl, and¯Damn it, Pat, we’re going to be married as soon as it’s decent, and we’re going to carry this damn secret to the grave with us, and we’re going to adopt little Nora and make the whole damn thing sound like some impossible business out of a damn book¯that’s what we’re going to do! Understand?”

“Yes, Cart,” whispered Pat. And she closed her eyes and laid her cheek against his shoulder.

When Mr. Ellery Queen strolled out of the back room, he was smiling, although a little sadly.

He slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar before Gus Olesen and said: “See what the folks in the back room will have, and don’t neglect Mr. Anderson. Also, keep the change. Goodbye, Gus. I’ve got to catch the train for New York.”

Gus stared at the bill. ”I ain’t dreaming, am I? You ain’t Santa Claus?”

“Not exactly, although I just presented two people with the gift of several pounds of baby, complete down to the last pearly toenail.”

“What is this?” demanded Gus. ”Some kind of celebration?”

Mr. Queen winked at Mr. Anderson, who gawped back. ”Of course! Hadn’t you heard, Gus? Today is Mother’s Day!”

The End