Double, Double

Monday, April 24

He could have taken the key from the chain while Dodd was asleep under sedation, Ellery reflected, but there had been Ken, big brass and bridling, and Rima, little and loyal as the sergeant of his own conscience in her enlistment on the other side. Afterward, he had had to go to the Hollis for his suitcase, and when he got back to the Dodd house Ken, an ally who kept his weapons primed, made it impossible to be alone.

Sunday night, on the pretext of “looking the house over,” Ellery had maneuvered the young doctor to the attic floor, and they had opened doors and poked into cubbies stored with historic furniture and the opulent whatnots of the last century — these had been servants’ quarters in the mansion’s heyday — until finally they had come to a narrow door with a modern lock, and this door did not open. “What’s in here?” Ellery had asked casually. “Darned if I know. The plusher Dodd family heirlooms, maybe. I don’t think Doc ever said,” and Ken had passed on. So that had been that; and later, when they looked in on Dr. Dodd, they had found him sitting up in bed like an aged frog in the stillness of some hopeless disease, a spready blotch against the lily pad of the wornout patchwork counterpane.

Their discussion with him, a tragic sonata in which the Winship and Rima variations were unsuccessfully lively, produced an unexpected coda. The doctor was grateful for Ellery’s interest and Ellery was more than welcome to stay, it seemed, but he had had time to think things out and he knew now that ordinary precautions were a waste of time. “I don’t need watching, Mr. Queen. I’m to die and it won’t be a hand that does it. Some things you can’t do a biopsy on. With all our sulfas and atomic bombs and electronic microscopes and two hundred inch telescope lenses we don’t begin to know the powers that fill the universe. Any more than the ameba in that glass of water knows what’s going on in this room. All we can do is wait and try not to be too afraid.” He had even managed a smile that was more depressing than the dreary burnside set of his jowls. And all the time he spoke his clothes lay on a chair beside his bed with that bit of watch chain peeping out, unattainable as the Little Dipper.

And when, at two in the morning, Ellery had crept down the hall in his naked feet, he had found Dr. Dodd’s door locked. In his peevishness it had struck him as an infantile defense against a Juggernaut, although effective enough against softer material. Ellery had crept back to bed cursing.

Which is how the indifferent dawn came to find him barefooted, pajamaed, and shivering, spreadeagled on the perilous pitch of the rearward Dodd roof and inching his way over to the armored eye of one of the dormers, the window of the little attic room that was locked. He had made up his mind about this after a predawn inspection — from the garden behind the house — of the mysterious dormer three floors above. The beam of his flashlight, a powerful one that occupied a permanent niche in his suitcase, had revealed a battered blind; and on this slender thread he had climbed to the top floor, entered the cubby next to the locked room, opened the cubby’s dormer window, and crawled out to the roof. Fortunately, there was a sound if ancient copper gutter along the edge of the eaves, and he was able to brace himself against this in getting over to the next dormer. Arrived at his goal, he found that the only rent in the blind of any promising size required him to hang on to the bulging eyelid of the dormer like a crooked lash, with half of him unsupported by anything more substantial than the heavy dawn air.

It was light enough by now, and the tear in the blind was sufficiently flapped away, to enable him to see most of the attic room. If he had expected dead bodies (or live ones), he was disappointed; what he could see of the room was unoccupied. It was small and meagerly furnished. There was a desklike table on the uncovered floor, a grayish mission “library table” of a previous generation, and an angular slatted armchair of the same style and period; on the interior shelf of the one end of the table which he could see stood some books; along the braceboard below the tabletop ranged an assortment of objects he could not identify; on the tabletop itself lay what appeared to be two decks of playing cards, stacked face down; and there was nothing else in the room that he could see except dust and spiderwebs.

Ellery drew back and sat down with his knees up and his bare heels in the copper gutter. He lit a cigaret from the pack he had cannily slipped into his pajama pocket and he smoked under the rising sun of Wrightsville on a crumbling roof watched by the northerly hills. He was filthy, and thoughtful. An elderly country doctor rose every morning and locked himself into a secret room in his attic and did... what?

Played solitaire? Read books? Prayed?

The sun was only a finger higher and his legs were only a little stiff. The doctor would be an early riser and this morning he would have reason to rise even earlier... The roof was shedding with age and through its thin skin Ellery heard the little door begin to beat.

He took his time getting his eye back to the peephole. Finally the dormer was embraced. About the sun at his back and his shadow on the blind he could do nothing; that was in the hands of God.

But Dr. Dodd was blind to changes in light. He was dressed in his working suit of blue serge. The key dangled from its chain, touching his thigh. He stood at the table staring down; and, yes, perhaps his lips were moving. Behind him the little door barred everyone.

Suddenly the doctor sat down, his big hand closing shakily about one of the decks of cards.

He sat there, arm resting on the edge of the library table, hand about the deck.

It came away in a spasm, severing the deck like an executioner. For a moment he was motionless, part of the deck on the table, part of the deck in his hand. Then he exposed the card he had cut to.

The ace of spades.

Dr. Dodd slammed the cards back and heaved to his feet. He ran to the door clawing for the key at his thigh. His thick blue back looked armored, as if he expected a blow from behind. He could not get the key into the lock; Ellery saw him seize his right hand with his left to steady it.

But then his hands dropped and he stood still again. Offering his back as a target? But Ellery was wrong. This was not surrender. Dr. Dodd turned — slowly, but he turned — and went heavily back to his altar.

And conducted a second service.

This was done very slowly indeed. The man who goes twice to question his god knows there can be no third appeal.

Dr. Dodd put his hand on the second deck of cards. It came away with part of the deck concealed in it. After an infinity of meditation he looked.

And this was the strangest thing of all, that he no longer quaked or leaned upon the table but simply stood in the hardening seizure of a kind of death, strong and sure of itself and not to be struggled against.

Stood looking at another ace of spades.

After a long time Dr. Dodd dropped the cards on the other deck and with remarkable steadiness marched to the door, unlocked it, and went out, leaving the little room only a shade altered.

Ellery found himself some time later squatting on the curled shingles contemplating the garden below his navel, a meager and perplexed Buddha. There was an earthstained spade beside a tulip bed by the wall of the garage, but it was not nearly so mordant as the memory of those other spades, of ink and pasteboard, in the hand of Dr. Dodd. The nine of diamonds had served the butcher duke of Cumberland in another age to put the curse of death on the Jacobites of Scotland. That card, fresh from Culloden Moor, had had writing on it; was there a sentence on Dr. Dodd’s two aces of spades?

And who was the butcher duke of Wrightsville?

Dr. Dodd would have said the noble Fiend, that teller of black fortunes. Telling death twice, as if he would not be misunderstood.

Ellery sat on Dr. Dodd’s roof thoroughly confused.

At last he crept over to the other dormer and prepared to re-enter the house. He had just scrambled through and was shutting the window when he spied a slotlike face at another window, a window below him and the garden’s width away, in the upper story of the garage.

Harry Toyfell.

Immediately the curtain fell straight.

Ellery let himself into the attic hall. The house was churchly; nor was there sign or sound of Dr. Dodd. As he tried the door of Dodd’s dusty chapel and found it locked again, Ellery fretted over more than the doctor’s secretiveness.

How long had the slabjawed gardener been peering from behind the curtain of his room above the garage? Had Toyfell witnessed the acrobatics on the roof? Would he drop a philosophical word to his new employer?

It was a nuisance; and Ellery went down to his bedroom, showered, washed out his grimy pajamas, and dressed, all in an unsettled haste.

In the hall again, he took stock. Rima’s door was shut, Ken Winship’s door was shut; Dr. Dodd’s door was open, as were the doors of Mrs. Fowler and Essie.

Ellery went downstairs.

Dr. Dodd was not in his office, not in his study.

Coffee warmed the kitchen. “No, just coffee, Mrs. Fowler. Thought I heard Dr. Dodd stirring. Is he up?”

“Doctor’s always up with the birds,” Mrs. Fowler shouted cheerfully. “Never saw such a man for early risin’. Though he’d have prescribed staying in bed for a body looked as peaked as he did this mornin’. No breakfast, thank you, and he takes his hat and marches out. I declare, all men are infants, and doctors are the worst of all!”

“Where did he go, Mrs. Fowler? Oh, thanks. Hospital?”

“He didn’t say, though I expect that’s where he is. Just said to say he’d meet you, Miss Anderson, and Dr. Winship at the inquest this afternoon. Oh, that awful Jacquard!”

Ellery put down his cup and went back to his bedroom, walking softly as he passed the closed doors. Of course I might ask Dodd, he thought. But a man who keeps locking a door with a key doesn’t usually open it with a word. In any language. And afterward he’d be hysterically on his guard.

Ellery opened his suitcase, which had an uncandid side to it. From the false bottom, where he regretfully carried certain tools of his trade, he took this and that; and he went out and past the sleeping doors to the attic stairs.

A little later he balanced himself on the edge of Chief Dakin’s desk and he said, “Dakin, I’m going to ask you to help me commit an illegal act.”

“Sure,” said Dakin, rising with alacrity. “But we’ll have to work fast if we’re to make that inquest this afternoon. What crime do I commit?”

“You arrange the technical details. Is there a locksmith in town?”

“Millard Peague. Got a little shop down on Crosstown and Foaming.”

“How good is he?”

“He’s done a job or two for the county in his time, and once in a while he gets a call from as far away as Connhaven. What do you want Millard to do?”

“Make a key from a wax impression I just happen to have on me.” And Ellery placed a little carefully wrapped bundle on Dakin’s desk.

Dakin sat down again. “Whose?”

“That,” said Ellery, “is surely irrelevant and immaterial?”

“I could hold you up, Mr. Queen.”

“And I,” smiled Ellery, “could let you down.”

“Suppose we make a dicker—”

“On my terms, Dakin. You get this little job done for me without questions or publicity and I’ll tell you what door the key fits when I think you ought to know.”

“Tell me this,” said the chief of police. “You going to take anything?”

“No.”

“You going to put anything?”

“Cold, Dakin, cold.”

“Then what do you want to get in for?”

“Let’s say murder, shall we, and let it go at that?”

“You’re a hard man,” said Chief Dakin, rising and reaching for his cap, “and I’m just wax in your hands. If you’ll give me that thing I’ll go see what Millard Peague can do.”

The inquest into Nicole Jacquard’s death went off like an operation under the surgical hands of Coroner Grupp, presiding in Judge Eli Martin’s old courtroom in the County Court House. Grupp cut deftly through issues and skillfully tied off arterial impediments like the flowing Widow Jacquard and her distressed priest, Father Crétien of Low Village; and he handled the jury as if they were his masters, which they were not. It was all over in a wonderfully short time. Dr. Ken Winship, to his and Rima’s piteous relief, was exonerated by his peers, and the widow — though not in her hearing — was congratulated by the jury, for she had not only been cut free from the deadweight of her humorless husband but it was rumored that Dr. Sebastian Dodd was settling a far more substantial weekly sum on her and Nicole’s progeny than the corpse had provided in the most successful days of his pilferage. The verdict of the coroner’s jury was “It’s a good thing all around,” although expressed in more formal terms; and the atmosphere in the courtroom when the inquest broke up was such as to make Prosecutor Chalanski wish, humorously aloud to Mr. Queen, that he could hurry the date of the Congressional primaries.

Ellery’s interest in the proceedings was narrow. He had eyes chiefly for Sebastian Dodd. They had found Dr. Dodd seated heavily in the courtroom; he seemed to have signed a temporary truce with events. He said nothing of where he had been all morning. And afterward, Dodd had gone straight to the house on Algonquin and Wright and locked himself in his bedroom. He thought he would take it easy for the rest of the day, he said; his office hours had been canceled by Rima in the morning and Kenneth could take his evening house calls. He was happy, he said, very happy that the inquest had turned out so well, and would Mrs. Fowler leave a tray outside his door? This had been a sop to Mrs. Fowler, whose remedy for any sort of distress was invariably hot food in quantity. Ellery, passing Dodd’s door later that evening, found the tray cold, as Mrs. Fowler had not left it; he resisted an impulse with difficulty to kick it and blow up the charged silence of the house.

They were all affected by Dr. Dodd’s peculiar suppressions, even Essie, who just before dinner suddenly burst into tears and fled to her room; even Harry Toyfell, whose elongated jaws ground away in the kitchen to the exclusion of all possibility of communication. Mrs. Fowler served, and it was a question which was worse, her loquacity or the silence at the supper table. Ken did not even pretend to be hungry; he kept glancing upward. Rima watched him anxiously, a little island of helplessness. And Ellery nibbled, feeling the cold burn on his thigh of the key Chief Dakin had slipped into his hand as they were leaving the courtroom.

Finally Ken tossed his napkin down. “I’ve got to get out on those calls.”

“Ken. Don’t you think you ought to do something about Dr. Dodd?” At last it was out.

“What, darling? Take his blood pressure?” Dr. Winship sounded savage. He kissed Rima, excused himself, and they heard him drive away in a rush.

“Rima,” began Ellery.

But Rima said steadily, “No, I won’t listen to anything. I don’t understand and I have Ken’s and Dr. Dodd’s bills to make out and if you don’t mind, Ellery, I’d like to get to it.”

Nobody seemed to want to talk but Mrs. Fowler; and it was Mrs. Fowler’s conversation that eventually drove Ellery upstairs.

From his room he could hear the sputter of Rima’s typewriter, the offended bang of Mrs. Fowler’s dishes; punctuations to the silence. Ellery hurled himself about the bedroom under the spur of the duplicate key in his pocket. His was a corner bedroom, in a small ell, and from his window he could see the windows of Dr. Dodd’s room. Dodd’s light was on; it had been on all evening. Occasionally Ellery could see his bulk drift past like a paramecium on a slide.

It was impossible to investigate the locked attic room while Dodd was awake. It was almost directly above Dodd’s bedroom and the floors, dryboned with age, squealed and tattled with every step.

At 9:30 Ellery heard Mrs. Fowler’s heavy step come up the hall. He heard her knock on Essie Pingarn’s door and Essie’s sniveling reply. A moment later Mrs. Fowler’s light came on and a moment after that there was a muffled swoosh of water. Ellery groaned. Mrs. Fowler’s bedtime tub the night before had taken exactly one hour and ten minutes.

He left his room and went down the hall. There was the taunting moat of light under Dodd’s door. The tray was gone; Mrs. Fowler must have taken it away.

He knocked.

He knocked again.

“Yes? Who’s that?”

“Queen.”

“Oh.” He sounded hoarse, as if he had been addressing audiences. “Yes?”

“I saw your light on, Doctor. May I come in and visit?”

“Well, the fact is I was just going to sleep—” The moat blacked out. Ellery heard the clash of springs.

“Feeling all right, Doctor?”

“Fine. Had a wonderful rest this evening. You comfortable, Mr. Queen? Have your dinner? Everything you want?”

“Yes, thanks. Good night. Sleep well.”

“Thanks...”

Ellery continued loudly down the hall. At the head of the stairs he stopped.

He waited one hour by his watch. Then he went back; it took him ten minutes to retrace the fifteen feet to Dr. Dodd’s door. He braced himself with both hands and put his ear to the panel.

The breathing was deep and slow, with a slight snore in it occasionally. And once a whimper.

Ellery straightened. Rima’s typewriter was still going downstairs; Ken had still not returned. Toward the other end of the hall the transom above Mrs. Fowler’s door was dark.

Carefully Ellery went back to the stairs and started for the attic.

He used a pencil-sized flash this time.

The key had a film of oil on it and he eased it into the lock of Dr. Dodd’s sanctuary with no sound.

Then he put the flashlight between his jaws, like a cigar, grasped the knob firmly with his left hand, and with his right he twisted.

The key would not turn.

Ellery could have sat down on the attic floor and cried.

Then he was angry. It was the most ridiculous case he had ever stuck his nose into. It was made of froth and dancing flecks and the look in a man’s eyes, with not enough substance to keep a dwarf going.

He made his way back to the second floor, and he rummaged in his suitcase again, and then he returned to the attic and with gritted teeth made another wax impression of the lock.

As he finished, he heard a car in the driveway, and by the time he got downstairs with his hat Rima was sitting on Ken’s lap in the waiting room, her arms about his neck.

“Don’t get up,” said Ellery, smiling. “I’m just passing through. You look beat, Ken.”

“He’s going right to bed. Which is where I thought you were, Ellery,” said Rima.

“Itchy. By the way, Dr. Dodd’s asleep.”

“I was just going up to see him,” said Ken guiltily. “But if he’s sleeping— Where you going?”

“I thought I might walk this flea mood off. Talking of sleep, Ken, this female you’ve captivated has been working on your damned bills all evening.”

“I know it, and I’ve been giving her hell. Darling, I told you...”

Ellery let himself out. There was a raw edge to the night and he shivered as he hurried around the corner to Wright Street. The alcoholic heat of Jack’s Palace Bar and Grill was almost pleasant. Ellery went to the bar and ordered a beer. He sipped it long enough to outwait the interest his entrance had stirred up, and then he slipped into the telephone booth.

“Dakin? Don’t you ever go home?”

“Well, since my wife died there’s not much to go home for. But I was on my way. What’s up?”

“The key Peague made doesn’t work. I’ve got another impression.”

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be right over.”

Dakin was waiting for him on the steps between the green lights. “No point to popping Gobbin’s popeyes,” Dakin said mildly. “He’s got a direct pipeline to Malvina Prentiss’s office. Where is it?”

Ellery gave it to him and Chief Dakin put it carefully into a Boston bag he was carrying. They began to walk east on State Street, past the Court House.

“Too late to do anything on this tonight, Mr. Queen.”

“When will you get it to Peague?”

“First thing in the morning. You’ll have it by noon tomorrow. Any news for me?”

“No. Any news for me?”

“No.”

They parted at State and Upper Whistling in silence.