Calendar of Crime

The Adventure of The Fallen Angel

That everlasting cicerone of the world forum, Marcus Tullius, somewhere tells us amicably that Fire and Water are “proverbial”; which is to say, these ancient elements of life are truly elementary. If it is further presumed that where life burns, death with his sprinkler cannot be far behind, the case of Miles Senter et alii may be considered classic. In that case there was Fire to the point of pyrotechnics, for though the New York summer was officially a mere ten days old, the sun was already baking the Senter garden to the charred crispness of an overlooked piecrust and barbecuing the stones of the garden walls in a temperature more commonly associated with the Underworld. As for Water, below the east wall flowed a whole stream of it, for the Senter house was one of those marginal Manhattan affairs clinging splendidly to the island’s shore and staring with hauteur at the untidy commercial profile of the Borough of Queens across the commonplace swells of the East River.

Nor was antique harmony restricted to geography and the season. Mythology shared in the Senter case, and art. The house had been designed in the highfalutin era, when architecture was cathedral and structural decoration full of monsters. The Senter pharmaceutical fortune had been baptized in the font of a purgative whose pink-on-black prose still illuminated the barns and jakes of rural America; and in building his mansion the progenitor of the Senter wealth—possibly in extenuation of its ephemeral source—had turned his eyes heavenward and builded for eternity. Or at least for greater permanence than was promised by cathartic pills. He had had his architect go for inspiration to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Unfortunately, for all the laxative riches at his command, the architect had neither an Ile de la Cité on which to build nor the papal resources of the twelfth century; consequently the astonished neighbors found themselves rubbing walls with a sort of gigantic architectural dwarf, an ecclesiastical Quasimodo of a building, vulgar, ugly, and unbelievably uncomfortable. Miles Senter, who had been born in it, once spent an uneasy six months on his analyst’s couch recollecting the horrid Gothic dreams which it had visited on his childhood.

The most frightening of these concerned the grotesque stone carvings which stuck out from the tower roofs like abnormal growths. These were the Senter architect’s versions of the chimères of Notre Dame cathedral. And the Chimaera, if you remember your Bulfinch and Bellerophon, breathed a particularly effective kind of fire. Thus Fire again. As for Water, unhappily the architect had confused chimaeras with gargoyles, and the monsters he had had hewn and installed on the cornices of the Senter towers, while they had the lion’s head, goat’s body, and dragon’s behind of the true Chimaera, served the traditional gargoyle purpose of providing outlets for the rain which collected on the roof. In a word, they were waterspouts. To complete the chaos, the founding Senter to his dying day persisted in calling them “angels,” and his grandson Miles, as he settled substantially into the Founder’s shoes, canonized the heresy. Not so Miles’s younger brother, David, who broke images as easily as he made them. David was a painter, with a studio on the roof of what—to his brother’s vague annoyance—he would call “the Cathedral.” David unfailingly remarked before guests, when Miles referred to the waterspout monsters as angels, that it gave an educational insight into their grandfather’s view of heaven... if not Miles’s.

But these are trifling, if pleasant, divagations. We were at a more serious business in the Senter garden on a recent broiling summer evening, with the East River lapping thirstily at the wall.

Two young ladies were perspiring under the sunlamp moon. One was Miles’s wife, the reigning Mrs. Senter; the other was Nikki Porter, who had exercised the private secretarial right of deserting her employer in his evening of direst need—it had something silly to do with a book publisher, and a deadline. But Nikki had run into Dorothy the day before, after a separation of years, and could auld acquaintance be forgot? Thus desertion, and the garden by the river. The reunion was scented for Nikki with the aromatic news that Dorothy was now Mrs. Miles Senter, which she had certainly not been when Nikki had known her last, and with a something else that defied analysis and so challenged it. There were moribund shadows under otherwise lively eyes and a kind of “To the barricades!” gaiety which had struck Nikki as out of tune with recent wedding harmonies. Indeed, dinner had had a faintly royal émigré flavor—a taste of noblesse oblige and tumbrils at the door. Even Miles Senter’s confidential secretary, a Mr. Hart, a Princeton-type man with a crew cut and the well-greased manners of an advertising agency junior executive, took the first opportunity to make a discreet—and relieved—retreat to his room. And thereafter the young matron, with a female smile, had sent her husband packing and steered Nikki into the dark garden and immediately burst into tears.

Nikki let Dorothy cry, wondering if it might not be the house. The house was frightful—musty and catlike, with great clanging rooms, bedrooms uniformly exposed to the noise and damp of the river, and a colossal dinginess; it had not seen decorators for a generation. It was evident that Miles Senter, though kindly and agreeable, was a man of uncompromising conservatism and no imagination. In fact, Nikki had been rather shocked by him. He claimed forty-five, looked sixty, and was probably in mid-fifties. And Dorothy was twenty-six years old. Of course it could be that, although Dorothy had always been a practical girl, with no nonsense about her and a wonderful respect for accomplishment; it was quite like her to fall in love with a rich man twice her age. Or was it David? Nikki had heard a great deal about David Senter at dinner, although the artist had not joined them — “Has a watercolor on his mind,” Miles Senter had said. “David’s always up to something in his studio.” Nikki had gathered that David was a lovable scamp, with all the absurd ideas of extreme youth — “the Greenwich Village type,” his brother had said fondly. “Practically a Red.” So she was surprised to learn—from Dorothy—that David was thirty-five years old. To Miles, he would evidently always be a teenager, to be indulged or spanked by the hand that held the pursestrings. There was a self-portrait of David in oils in the living room — “the Nave, David calls it,” Dorothy had laughed as Miles frowned—and he certainly looked Byronic enough to explain Dorothy’s tears in the garden. He was a dark handsome fellow with the devil in his eye, or at least he had painted the devil there. Yes, it might well be David.

And apparently it was. For when Dorothy began to explain her tears, the first thing she did was to praise her husband. Miles was the finest, tenderest, most considerate, most generous husband in the world. And she, Dorothy, was the most ungrateful, confused, irresponsible little bitch who had ever lured a good man into marriage. Oh, she’d thought she was in love with him, and Miles had been so... solid. And persistent, of course... She really hadn’t lured him, he’d sort of lured himself; but then it was equally true that she hadn’t been trueblue honest with herself, she’d only thought she was being... “Oh, Nikki, don’t think horrible things of me. I’ve fallen in love with Somebody Else.”

So there it was.

Nikki sipped her Bombay Cooler, which she had had the providence to take into the garden with her. “Well, suppose you have,” she said, as brightly and illusively as the long reflections on the river. “Those things happen, Dorothy.”

“But Nikki, what shall I do? I don’t want to hurt Miles. He’s a little limited, of course, but salt of the earth, really a darling, and I’m afraid if I ran out on him now... so soon... I mean, I’m afraid—”

“You’re afraid what?”

Dorothy began to cry again.

“See here, Dotty,” said Nikki. “You’ve eaten your cake and now you want it back. That’s bound to be messy.”

“What a horrid way to put it,” said Dorothy, wiping her eyes a little peevishly.

“It’s the man I work for,” said Nikki, taking another sip. “Spells out every spade, and it’s catching. Dotty dear, we’re a couple of the girls, and no men around. How much do you want this character S.E.?”

“S.E.?”

“Somebody Else.”

“Nikki, I love him! I do!”

“And what is Somebody Else’s view of the situation?”

“He says—”

“Wait.” Nikki put her hand on her friend’s bare arm. She said suddenly, “Smile, Dotty. Someone’s coming.”

Miles Senter’s broad figure appeared from around the northeast corner of the house. The lights from the front of the building silhouetted him as he paused in the path, dabbing his half-bald head with a handkerchief, peering into the gloom of the garden.

“Dorothy?” he called uncertainly. “You out there with Miss Porter?”

“Yes, Miles!” said Dorothy.

“Oh,” said her husband, and he was silent. Then he cleared his throat. “So stifling indoors... radio says there’s no relief in sight... I thought maybe you and Miss Porter might like to play some Canasta...” Senter took a slight step toward them, handkerchief in hand.

Nikki found herself thinking aqueously that the poor fish was out of his natural element, and it occurred to her that Miles Senter might be not entirely insensitive after all. And because she felt sorry for him, Nikki looked away as he stepped forward, and that was how she happened to glimpse the descent of the angel—one of the gargoyle-throated chimaeras which had thrust its unlovely form from the tower roof over the garden for three-quarters of a century. The glimmering mass was falling straight for where Miles Senter’s head would be in another step. And Nikki cried out, and the mass fell, and Senter fell, and Dorothy began to shriek with an automatic vitality, as if she were possessed. The burden of her dark litany was death and disenchantment, and the response from the Senter physician, old Dr. Grand, who lived next door and had been dozing in his garden, was more in the nature of a retort. Devil or angel, Dr. Grand remarked as he stooped over the fallen man, it had missed its mark; and he instructed Miles Senter to get off his backside and onto his knees, in a more fitting attitude to thank his Maker.

At this Dorothy’s husband scrambled to his feet, paler than the stone monster in the path, and turned his eyes to the heavens. But it was not out of gratitude for his deliverance. A black head projected from the roof, another gargoyle against the moon, and its owner was demanding in a curious voice what the devil all the noise was about. When neither Miles nor his wife replied, Dr. Grand explained in his crickety way, and there was a silence from the roof, and then David Senter’s dark head vanished. To Nikki the air seemed suddenly chill, and she took no pleasure in it. And when David bounded around the corner to help his brother into the house, Nikki found him even more Byronic-looking than his portrait. And this gave her no pleasure, either.

The next day Ellery patiently pointed out that he made his livelihood inventing far cleverer crimes than Nikki was ever likely to encounter among her acquaintances, and would she please stick to his typing, for her social life was interfering with his contractual obligations—not to mention his publisher’s advance, which was not payable until delivery of the finished manuscript.

“But Ellery, it wasn’t an accident,” said Nikki, using the typewriter as an elbow-rest.

“It wasn’t. I suppose,” said Ellery, falling back helplessly on irony, “that’s a demonstrable conclusion, like most of your conclusions?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. I examined that tower roof last night, where the thing fell from—”

“With Lens and Calipers Among the Lotus-Eaters. And you found?”

“I told you. Weren’t you listening?”

“You found that the cement holding the doodad to the whatsis was worn as friable as Roquefort. Astounding! And the waterspout weighed—how much, did you say?”

“About a hundred pounds, Mr. Senter said.”

“I refer you to Sir Isaac and the law of gravity. Shall we get back to mere fiction?”

“Be logical, but I still say it was no accident,” declared Miss Porter, unmoved. “And that’s why I suggested to Miles Senter last night—”

The doorbell trilled, and Nikki stopped.

A terrible suspicion darkened her employer’s countenance. “Nikki,” he said in a Basil Rathbone voice, “you suggested what to Miles Senter last night?”

Nikki glanced mutely toward the foyer, which was in full cry.

Ellery groaned.

“You angel, I knew you wouldn’t mind!” and Nikki flew. A moment later Ellery heard her assuring someone that Mr. Queen could hardly wait.

To his astonishment, Ellery found himself immediately feeling sorry for the fellow. The president of Senter Pharmaceuticals all but crawled into view. It was a sort of nervous slither, and it went perfectly with his windy eyes and graying stubble; in fact, Miles Senter gave a creditable impersonation of a dope peddler about to consummate a sale. He offered a trembling hand, refused a drink — “on principle, Mr. Queen” — accepted a cigaret, failed to puff on it, and through it all he was grateful, abjectly grateful that Mr. Queen was bothering to see him at all. The fact was... it was damned awkward... Miss Porter’s being Dorothy’s friend and so on... if Nikki hadn’t saved his life the night before...

“Mr. Senter,” said Ellery, “what are you trying to say?”

Senter studied the dead cigaret in his hand, then he crumpled and crushed it between his fingers. “Queen, I think my wife and my brother are in love with each other.” There was an ashtray at his elbow, but rather remarkably he placed the remains in his pocket. “In love with each other,” he repeated, and he stopped as if he expected Ellery to say something devastating.

But Ellery said nothing at all. And Nikki was finding one of her fingernails interesting.

“Nothing I’ve been able really to get hold of,” Senter mumbled on. “It’s just that Dorothy’s been acting... well, I can’t quite name it, but something’s come between us lately. She’s too darned polite to me!” he blurted. “And David’s a handsome young artist and a devil with the women. Suppose I oughtn’t to have expected much else—what do they say about old fools? — but why didn’t they come to me? Instead of... Well, Mr. Queen,” cried Miles Senter, “what would you think?”

“Using your major premise? Let’s see. Your brother and your wife are in love, and last night a heavy waterspout parted from the roof where your brother has his studio and missed braining you by a hair. It would seem, Mr. Senter, that your brother tried to murder you.”

“Then you agree with me.” He sagged against the chair.

“Oh, no,” said Ellery, smiling. “I’ve drawn a possible conclusion from a pair of facts, one of which is not a fact but an opinion.”

“Well, there’s a third fact I failed to mention,” said Senter, and now his voice was hard, “and this one would satisfy a bank examiner. My father left the Senter enterprises to me during my lifetime. But when I die, David gets them.”

Ellery sighed. “People will do odd things, won’t they?” He rose. “While I can’t share your certainty, Mr. Senter, I certainly appreciate your fears. How and when can I examine the roof without your brother David’s knowledge? The sooner, I should say, the better.”

Miles Senter promised to notify Ellery when the condition could be met, and later that day he telephoned naming that very night for the investigation. “I’ll have my secretary meet you at the side gate at midnight,” he said, and he hung up before Ellery could raise his brows.

Ellery left his car on First Avenue and he and Nikki walked toward the river, slowly, for they were a few minutes early and the night steamed. There was a simmering lambency over the world that made straight lines fluid, so that when they came to the Senter house the whole incredible mass seemed in motion, as if it were about to change into something else. Ellery felt his arm clutched and he murmured something soothing about heat waves and optical illusions, but Nikki’s hold did not relax until a man stepped from the wrought-iron gateway and she recognized Miles Senter’s secretary.

“I’m certainly glad it’s you, Mr. Hart, and not some priest of the Black Mass!”

Mr. Hart looked baffled. But then he shook hands footballishly with Ellery, made a hearty remark about the heat, and ushered them across the front lawn. Ellery walked rubbernecking. But at the skyline the mansion was still doing tricks.

Nikki clung.

“I take it you know why I’m here tonight, Mr. Hart?”

“Mr. Senter’s just told me.” The secretary sounded secretarial.

“What’s your opinion?”

“Fellow in my spot has no opinions. Right, Miss Porter?… David? Oh, David has a shack in Westport where he gets away from it all when we poor goofs bore him or he wants to paint Connecticut barns. He was to leave tonight for over the holiday, but Mr. Senter didn’t know what train he was making, so he set midnight as... I’m sure he must have. I haven’t seen him—just got in from a party—but it’s so late... This way, please. Mr. Senter’s waiting upstairs for you. His own rooms. He’s given the servants the night off, so you’ll have a clear field. Mrs. Senter? I really couldn’t say. I’d assume Mr. Senter’s seen to, er, that arrangement personally.” Mr. Hart, it appeared, was urbanely determined to be the most confidential—and uninvolved—of secretaries.

There were three doors, as in Paris, little early Gothic imitations surmounted by twenty-eight reduced kings of Israel and Judah, a skimpy rose window, and other shrunken wonders. Having passed through the central door, they entered a sort of medieval never-never land which was mercifully in darkness, or at least in that curious negation of light passing for illumination by which material objects are guessed at rather than seen. No one was about, and the great hall was as deeply hushed as a Hollywood sound-stage; in fact, Ellery would not have been surprised had someone suddenly appeared in puttees and in a loud voice ordered the set to be struck. For all its age, blackened oak, and inky iron, it looked as insubstantial as a backdrop.

They were halfway up the grand staircase and Ellery was just remarking respectfully, “Is that a bona fide suit of Norman armor, Mr. Hart, or are we in the Metropolitan Museum?” when from somewhere above, slightly damped, came a short explosive kwap! like a little clap of thunder.

It brought them to a military halt, and for a moment they listened. But the angry sound was not repeated, and they looked at one another.

“What,” asked Nikki in the strangest voice, “was that?”

“It couldn’t be,” said Miles Senter’s secretary, with an uneasy laugh, “what it sounded like.”

“Why not?” snapped Ellery; and he was away.

They found him a moment later in a sitting room upstairs, kneeling beside an outstretched man who seemed to have run head on into a copious quantity of tomato purée.

“Oh, no,” said Hart idiotically.

“Oh, yes,” said Nikki. “I was right. He was right. Murdered.”

“Not quite.” Ellery glanced quickly about. “Head wounds are often a bloody mess. No sign of the gun... I don’t think it’s fatal. Nikki, poke your head out the window and yell.”

“Yell?”

“For that doctor! Next door, didn’t you say? Hart, you come with me.” Ellery was already in the hall.

“But Mr. Senter,” began the secretary.

“Don’t touch him!” Hart blundered into the hall. “Whoever shot Senter can’t have got far. Hart, where’s the other way down?”

“Other way down?”

“Damn it, Hart! We came up the front stairs and didn’t see anyone, so Senter’s assailant must have escaped another way! Isn’t there a second stairway?”

“Oh! Yes, Mr. Queen. Backstairs. Up the hall there—”

Ellery ran, and Hart trotted dismally after. Behind them Nikki’s demoniac voice shrieked for Dr. Grand.

The backstairs went gloomily down to an iron-clasped oak door which opened on the rear of the great hall.

“Hart, you search the front—lawn, shrubbery, street. I’ll take the rear.” He gave the man a shove.

The kitchens were dark. Ellery blundered through several coppery caverns, bumping into things and cursing. Finally he sighted a star, set a straight course, and in a moment was plunging through a doorway. He found himself in a stingy strip of back garden, and the first thing he spied was a spidery figure not ten feet away, clinging to the top of the wall separating the Senter property from its neighbor.

Ellery jumped, clutching. His hands closed triumphantly about a bony ankle.

“Oh, thank you,” said a testy voice. “I’m not as spry getting over this wall as I used to be when Elmo Senter imagined himself dying, which was regularly once a week. Catch me, please,” and Ellery received in his arms first a medical bag and then a panting old gentleman who was chiefly bones. “Well, well? What’s happened now? Speak up, man! That woman yelled bloody murder. And who, by the way, are you?”

“Miles Senter first, Doctor—his upstairs sitting room. Gunshot scalp wound. You’d better hurry.”

Dr. Grand looked incredulous. Snatching his bag, he scurried into the house.

Ellery followed the Senter-Grand wall toward the river. When he met the river wall he turned north and toed his way among the Senter flowerbeds. Two upper windows glared out of the dark mass on the other side of the garden; Ellery saw Nikki swoop across one of them like an agitated fly. Then his hand encountered the splintery side of a wooden structure, which interrupted the river wall apparently for some distance. Exploring it cautiously, he discovered that it was a long low shed, with its back to the garden and a flight of wooden steps along its north side that went down to the river. A boathouse... It struck him that a guilty man might find it irresistible.

Taking a grip on his slippery flashlight, and wishing wistfully that he were Dan’l Boone, Ellery began to edge down the steps. But the steps squeaked and groaned abominably, as he had known they would, so he jumped the rest of the way, scrambled around the corner of the boathouse, found a doorway, and went in sidewise to sweep the interior with his light and catch in its beam the frightened face of a young woman. There was no one else in the building, and it was stifling, so Ellery sat down on a coil of nylon rope and he asked, “Has anyone come this way in the last few minutes? Besides yourself, I mean?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I take it you’re Mrs. Miles Senter and, if you are,” said Ellery regretfully, “it’s my melancholy job to inform you that your husband has just stopped a bullet upstairs. And now would you mind answering my question, Mrs. Senter?”

“No one.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Is Miles dead?”

“I couldn’t wait for the returns. So you’ve seen no one, Mrs. Senter. In that case, may I ask—?”

“You needn’t,” said Dorothy Senter. “I shot him.”

When Inspector Queen arrived, there was blood in his sleepy eyes. “You can take this homicidal high life,” he snorted to his son, “but I’m old enough to be your father. Couldn’t you have let the local men handle this?”

Ellery said thoughtfully, “I thought it was a case that called for more elevated skull-work,” and the Inspector immediately looked wakeful. Ellery followed him about, remaining thoughtful.

In proper course Dorothy Senter and Nikki Porter had hysterics and got over them, Inspector Queen had settled what facts there were to his peculiar satisfaction, men came and went, telephones rang and were silent, and at last they waited upon the pleasure of old Dr. Grand. At a few minutes before 2 A.M. Dr. Grand opened the door of Miles Senter’s bedroom, drying his hands on a monogrammed towel. “Nothing to it,” he chirruped. “It’s going to give him an interesting part in what hair he’s got left, and that’s about all, gentlemen. Wonderful constitutions, these Senters. Takes a lot to kill ’em.” Then he saw Dorothy Senter’s face, and his own changed. “Short as you can make it, Inspector Queen.” He stepped aside.

There was an odd illusion of headlessness in the man who lay on the great testered bed, but when they came near they saw that it was only the effect of bandages against the pillows and a face from which all color had been washed.

Miles Senter looked at his wife with a sort of feeble eagerness, but after a moment the eagerness died and he shut his eyes.

“Mr. Senter,” said Inspector Queen, “can you tell us what happened?”

“I don’t know. I had been talking to my secretary, Mr. Hart, and I sent him downstairs to wait for Mr. Queen. I was alone. The door opened. I was about to turn around when something exploded and everything went black.”

“Then you didn’t see who fired at you?”

“No.” The man on the bed sounded remote.

“Well, then, Mrs. Senter,” said the Inspector, “suppose you tell your husband what you told me.”

Miles Senter opened his eyes quickly.

Dorothy Senter said in a high singsong, “I left the house after dinner saying I was going to visit some friends. I walked over to Central Park and sat down on a bench. After a while I got up and walked some more. Then I walked back to the house. It was almost midnight. I went up to my room, passing Miles’s sitting room. He was in there talking to Harry Hart; they didn’t hear me. I waited till Harry went downstairs. Then I got a gun from my room that I have had for a long time and I went to Miles’s room and I shot him.” The man on the bed made a slight movement, then he was still again. “I ran down the backstairs to the garden. I saw the boathouse. I threw the gun as far as I could out into the water and I ran to the boathouse and stayed in there. I don’t know why.”

Miles Senter was squinting, as if the light hurt him.

“And now about the gun, Mrs. Senter,” said the Inspector, swabbing his face. “A .22 revolver, didn’t you tell me?”

“Yes.”

“The kind that has a cylinder that turns—that holds the bullets? That’s the kind it was, Mrs. Senter?”

“Yes. But I threw it into the river.”

“And a .22, you said,” said the Inspector, reaming his collar. “That’s really interesting, Mrs. Senter. Because when my son found your husband on the floor, he also found the shell of the cartridge. Mrs. Senter, revolvers don’t eject shells on being fired; the shell stays in the chamber. It’s automatics that eject shells, Mrs. Senter. And another interesting thing... this shell didn’t come from a .22, it came from a .38. So I regret to say you’ve been lying your head off, Mrs. Senter, and now what I would like to know is: Whom are you covering up?”

Dorothy gripped the footrail of her husband’s bed.

“I’ll tell you whom she’s covering up,” said her husband, staring at the canopy of his tester. “She’s covering up my brother David. Instead of going to Westport, David hid somewhere and then shot me. And Dorothy saw him do it. And because she’s crazy in love with him—”

“Harry, no!” screamed Dorothy.

But Miles Senter’s secretary was shaking his head. “It’s no use, Dotty. I can’t let this go on. Senter, David isn’t the man. I am.”

Miles Senter involuntarily raised himself. He stared at Harry Hart as if for the first time he was aware of more than a suit of clothes. In that stare he seemed to see everything at once, like a camera. When the wounded man sank back he turned his face away.

Hart was pale to the roots of his crew cut. “We tried our best to avoid it. But how can you stop a thing like that? It happened, and there it was. I wanted to tell you—”

“But there was always the salary,” said the man on the bed. “Eh, Harry?”

Hart went on with an effort. “Dorothy thinks I tried to kill you tonight because of it. That’s why she said she did it herself.”

“Noble.”

The other man was silent.

“So this has all been for love, Harry?”

“All for love,” said Hart steadily.

“Touching. But I’m a business man, Harry. I have the commercial mind. The way I see it, you knew I’d willed my estate to Dorothy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of idle luxury—that’s what I think you were after, Harry, and all that stood in the way was a simple-minded husband who’s losing his hair. One shot, and the problem was solved—”

“If it only were,” said a voice; and, startled, they looked around, even Senter. But it was Ellery, looking thoughtful still. “Harry Hart is unquestionably a talented fellow, Mr. Senter, but to have shot you tonight he’d have to have been a wizard. Hart was coming up the stairs down there between Nikki Porter and me when we heard the report of the gun over our heads. So maybe it’s true love, after all... Human interest in quantity, Dad, but homicidally a famine. Could we have been right in the first place?”

“Looks like it,” said Inspector Queen grouchily. “Well, Mr. Senter, I think you’ve had enough of us for one night, and Dr. Grand’s looking fidgety. We shan’t disturb you again unless we get a line on your brother.”

“My brother?” repeated Miles Senter painfully.

“On your death, I understand, Senter Pharmaceuticals goes to David Senter by the will of your father. And from what I’ve heard of Senter Pharmaceuticals, that’s a goal worth shooting for... so to speak. I’m afraid, Mr. Senter, we’re going to have to start looking for your brother.”

That was an unmarked night, and when Nikki drifted into the garden she had no idea how much time had passed, if time had passed at all, except that the darkness was grayer, a boiling grayness that reduced everything to a glutenous mass, tasteless and unrecognizable. She groped for one of the bamboo chairs and a human hand clamped on her wrist.

Nikki squealed.

“It’s only me,” said a voice; and after a moment Nikki made out the long lines of Ellery, lying on the bamboo chaise on one elbow. “Nikki—”

“You fool,” said Nikki angrily. “Does failure bring out the card in you?”

“I wanted action,” said Ellery. “Nikki, look at those stars...”

“I’ve had all the action I want for one night,” said Nikki, dropping into the bamboo chair. “Yes, and romance, too. I finally got Dorothy to sleep with a pill Dr. Grand gave me, and I didn’t neglect to tell Mr. Hart a thing or two, either. I know his type. Plays golf like a professional—and women—and the stock market like a yokel. Do you suppose New York will ever stop cooking?”

“It looks,” said Ellery intently, “as if it’s only just begun.” He pointed. “The stars, Nikki, the stars.”

“What stars?” Nikki sighted along his ghostly arm. “Oh, I’m in no condition for games!”

“Nor I.” Ellery was still squinting obliquely skyward. “But this game has its points. I was lying here simmering away, waiting for you and wondering how a man who was merely going to Westport could disappear as thoroughly as David Senter seems to have done, when I began to realize there was something new under the moon. Nikki, look at the roof... Over there. Above the... the apse, I suppose you’d call it. That penthouse thing.”

“That’s David Senter’s studio,” said Nikki. “What’s come over you?”

“See his chimney?”

“Of course I see his chimney.”

“What’s hovering over it?”

“A... sort of haze, it looks like.”

“It’s smoke.”

“Well, of all things,” sniffed Nikki. “What should come out of a chimney?”

“Not smoke, Nikki. Definitely not smoke, when we’re a week and a half into what can be described with perfect decorum as a hell of a summer, the hour is almost 3 A.M., and the thermometer sticks at ninety-one. Or are you sitting there gasping like a television wrestler because you find my proximity overpowering?” Ellery rose from the bamboo chaise, still craning. “Nikki, someone’s been playing with fire up there and I’m feeling just deep-fried enough to want to know why. Coming along?”

“Yes,” said Nikki. “Maybe it’s cooler on the roof.”

A few minutes later Ellery was on his hands and knees on David Senter’s hearth, inspecting the smoldering remains of a fireplace fire with the jerky fixity of an aroused hound. The studio, which was in Byronic disorder, was otherwise dedicated to thermal science and Gabriel Fahrenheit; but Ellery’s perspiration hissed onto the grate unnoticed in the profounder concerns absorbing him. Nikki, hung up in the doorway, thought she could see him dwindling by the inch. The roof was not cooler, Nikki had learned; it was merely less infernal than the studio, whose door and windows they had found shut.

“Who the devil would start a fire in this heat?” moaned Nikki. “Or rather, who but the devil?”

“Exactly,” said Ellery, turning his nose this way and that. “Therefore heat wasn’t the desideratum. Leaving combustion. Leaving ashes. And the ashes tell me this curious conflagration,” said Ellery, “was set in motion around three hours ago. It was green wood and slow-burning. Also, the damper is partially closed—”

“What,” said Nikki wearily, “no Trichinopoly cigars?”

“No,” said Ellery, his tone glinting like his skin, “but there’s this,” and he held up what Nikki thought for a horrified instant was a severed, charred human hand. But it was only a thick white cotton glove, one of those sexless mitts which are purchasable at the gardening counter of any emporium. It was singed, soot-streaked, and spattered with mysterious-looking black specks, and immediately upon relieving Nikki it depressed her. For it sustained the crime story of the long night and made the unspeakable fire not merely devilish but, what was possibly worse, irrelevant. And when Ellery tasted several of the black specks, savored them like a gourmet, and pronounced them grains of gunpowder, Nikki nodded gloomily.

“Then that’s the glove he wore when he shot his brother. Had a fire laid, ran up here, tossed the glove on it, and a match, and got away while we were finding Miles. Trust an artist to be inefficient. The least he could have done was make sure it burned up.”

“He was in a hurry.” Ellery replaced the burned glove meticulously. “He was also unlucky. Look there, Nikki.”

Nikki looked. But all she could see were some tiny red scraps of paper or cardboard, clinging like confetti to one of the side walls of the fireplace.

“What are they?”

“Unholy relics, Nikki. A rather perverted miracle. Stay here a minute, will you? I’ll send Dad up. Some fur’s going to fly around here. The roof’s supposed to have been searched.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be in the garden,” said Ellery, and he went out so quickly Nikki had no time to assure him that she wasn’t going to stay upon the roof alone and he could put that in David Senter’s fireplace and smoke it. As it was, she had to stay until the Inspector appeared, roaring, and then she left quickly, too, with her hands over her ears.

She found Ellery at the northeast corner of the mansion, prodding the path and nearby shrubbery with the beam of his flashlight, like a man who has lost something.

“Where is it, Nikki?” Ellery demanded without looking around.

“Where is what?”

“The waterspout. That gargoyle that almost conked Miles Senter.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” said Nikki crossly. “How should I know?”

“Wasn’t it here that it fell?”

Nikki recognized a certain urgency in the casual Queen manner. It certainly wasn’t there. “It was right here on the path last time I saw it. Night before last. See? Where the flags are chipped?”

“I see where the flags are chipped,” said Ellery, suddenly austere, and he went back into the house.

The next hour bubbled. Ellery went about demanding the waterspout, waking people up, whipping them to feats of memory and muscle, and generally making himself unpopular. Why he was so bent on locating an object which, after all, had failed to be lethal he chose not to explain, and the victims of his inquisition went about muttering while they searched. Harry Hart was roused, Dorothy Senter was slapped awake, Dr. Grand was routed from his aged bed next door; not even Miles Senter was spared, although his questioning was executed with tactful dispatch. In the end, the waterspout was not found, although the house was gone over from cellar to roof and the grounds inch by inch. Nor could anyone remember having seen it since late afternoon of the day before, when the butler had stumbled over it on the spot in the path where it had crashed the night previous and, being the butler and not the gardener, had merely cursed and gone about his business. The gardener, a hickory-necked Irishman with the succinct philosophy of his profession, merely said, “Nobody told me to take the dom thing away,” and went back to bed.

So there it was, or rather wasn’t, as Inspector Queen said, and what difference its presence or absence made—

“Except that it’s absent,” said Ellery absently.

“All right, Ellery. So whoever tried to knock Senter’s brains out took the dom, the damn thing away because somehow it left a clue to his identity—”

“His fingerprints,” said Nikki with a flicker of life.

“On stone, Nikki? And anyway, if that was it, why didn’t he just wipe it off? And anyway, if he used a glove once he’d use it twice, and that reminds me of something a lot more important than missing angels, which is missing brothers who try to burn up evidence in fireplaces. Velie!” shouted the Inspector.

Sergeant Velie came wearily, drying his vast face with a crib-sized handkerchief.

“What did you find out?”

“From the Westport police nothin’ except a couple of new cuss words. They swear there’s no evidence he’s been to his shack in a month. Anyway, he ain’t in Westport. The N.Y.N.H. and H. trains stopping at Westport that left New York beginning last night can’t remember anyone of his description. The New Haven ticket sellers at Grand Central can’t remember ditto. Our taxi investigation—”

“You satisfied now?” demanded Inspector Queen, turning around. “Now where the devil did he go?”

“Miles Senter’s study,” said Nikki.

At this moment the study door opened and Ellery appeared.

“Senter’s definitely missing. You satisfied now?”

“That he’s definitely missing? Definitely.”

“Velie, general alarm for David Senter. Put it through and then let’s all go home and take a shower. I’m not coming back till he’s found, and that’s that.”

“Make it...” Ellery glanced at his wristwatch. “Make it seven or eight hours, Dad. Take some time at this hour to get the equipment here that I phoned for in your name... oh, say, noon.”

“Equipment? Noon?”

“You want David Senter, don’t you?”

“Certainly I want David Senter!”

“Noon.”

“Here?”

Ellery sat down on a settee, his knees apart and his palms supporting him, like an old lady who had been climbing stairs. “It’s the old arithmetic,” he said. “Two and two, no trick to it... A solid stone object weighing one hundred pounds is missing. A man is missing. And beside the house runs a river. Missing man, missing weight, deep water. David Senter was murdered and his body sunk in the East River, and as soon as the harbor police can get their diver and dragging apparatus here... Does anyone mind if I catch my forty?”

They fished David Senter out with twenty-five minutes to spare; and Inspector Queen, who had not gone home after all, stamped in to announce with bleary wrath that Miles Senter’s artist-brother had an artistic bullet-hole through his head and had had same, from all the superficial signs, for at least twelve hours.

“They’re still looking for the gun,” said the Inspector, glaring about Miles Senter’s bedroom, where everyone was congregated. “But we’ll get it, we’ll get it, and when we do—”

“I don’t think,” said Ellery, “we’ll have to wait that long. Mrs. Senter, wouldn’t you prefer a chair? The evidence of who murdered David and almost murdered you, Mr. Senter—the logical evidence—is all in; we merely have to assemble it. And by the way, Mr. Senter, are you sure you’re feeling well enough to go through this? It consists of four elements: the grains of gunpowder peppering the cotton glove which failed to be consumed in David’s fireplace; the little scraps of red cardboard clinging to the fireplace wall; the shot that was fired in the upper part of the house while we were coming up the stairs; and, of course, the date.”

“The date,” said Inspector Queen.

“The date?” said Nikki.

“That’s very nearly the best part of it,” Ellery said enthusiastically. “Summer became official as usual on June twenty-first, a week and a half ago, so the holiday David Senter meant to spend reproducing a Westport barn was obviously the Fourth of July, as it’s hardly necessary to point out. And putting an incipient Fourth of July holiday together with gunpowder grains, pieces of red cardboard, and a loud noise, you can scarcely avoid getting... a firecracker.

“Now it was midnight when we got here, Nikki,” said Ellery, “and I told you at 3 A.M. that the fire in the roof studio was about three hours old. So that noise we heard coming up the stairs on our arrival, Nikki, which we took to be a revolver shot, must have been a firecracker exploding in David Senter’s studio fireplace. And since there was only one explosion that we heard, you couldn’t have been shot at that time, Mr. Senter. You must have been shot a few minutes earlier.”

“Then why didn’t we hear the real shot?” Nikki demanded. She knew she looked like the wrath, her clothes felt leprous, and her friend Dorothy insisted on reminding her of something repulsive at Madame Tussaud’s. So there was a snap in her voice. “Everything was so quiet we’d certainly have heard it, even from the street.”

“The answer to that, I think,” said Inspector Queen grimly, “is coming this way right now. The gun, Velie? Wrapped up in a pillow.” And now he said, an amiable old gentleman: “All right, Sergeant. Wrap it up, and shut the door behind you.”

And there was nothing to be heard in that room but Sergeant Velie’s weighty tread and the life-cutting switch of the closing door. And the Inspector patted himself under the left arm, looking around.

“An explosion that was planned to be heard,” said Ellery pleasantly, “and a prior explosion that was planned not to be heard. What was achieved? A miracle. The firecracker going off was taken to be the revolver shot. A simple illusion designed to make us think you were being shot while we were coming up the stairs, Mr. Senter, when actually you’d been shot a few minutes before. A falsification of the time of the shooting which could have had only one purpose: to seem to give the shooter an alibi, an alibi for the false time, when the firecracker went off.

“And who had an alibi when the firecracker went off?” Ellery went on, smiling. “You, Dorothy Senter? No, you were alone in the boathouse. You, Mr. Senter—to be absurd? No, you were alone in your sitting room with a well-creased scalp. You, Dr. Grand—to be fantastic? No, even you were alone, dozing in your garden. And David Senter was also alone—alone at the bottom of the East River.

“So I’m afraid,” said Ellery, and now he was not smiling, “I’m afraid that leaves you, Hart, and by a curious coincidence you did have an alibi for the time when the firecracker went off. A very strong alibi, Hart; in fact, the strongest possible. You were walking up the stairs between Nikki Porter and me. An excellently planned bit of stagecraft.

“But as a technician I find you wanting. You had two tries at Miles Senter and you flubbed both. First you loosened the gargoyle waterspout and pushed it off the roof while Miles Senter was passing along the path below. You chose that method because his brother David’s studio was on the roof, and David, with his money motive, would be the natural suspect. When that didn’t work, you rather extended yourself. Yesterday you hid the waterspout and last night you shot David to death, weighted his body with the waterspout, and sank it in the river, thinking he would make the perfect scapegoat, since he would presumably never be found. Then you went to Miles Senter’s sitting room, had your chat, walked out, and immediately walked back in and shot him in the head through a muffling pillow—and did you witness that, Mrs. Senter? I think you did—and you left your heroine’s husband for dead, Hart, which was criminally careless of you. The rest was timing. You hurled the gun into the river from one of the windows, dashed up to the studio where you had a firecracker ready on a fuse, dropped the glove with which you’d handled everything into the fireplace, tossed a match on the prearranged fire which was to destroy all the evidence—and didn’t—and you hurried downstairs to meet me and Nikki at the gate and copper-rivet your alibi when the firecracker went off. Clever, Harry, clever; but a little on the intricate side, don’t you agree... post mortem? The hard ones are the simple ones.”

Thus Fire, and Water, in a case which aficionados say will become proverbial. Should time bear them out Ellery will be pleased, for he has always considered Marcus Tullius Cicero one of the soundest old earbenders in the business.