Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 38, Fall/Winter 1979

Ellery Queen Uncle from Australia

All of us would like to have a rich uncle from Australia — but a rich uncle from Australia can turn out to be an altogether mixed blessing... a classic situation — with a difference...

“How did you happen to call me, Mr. Hall?” asked Ellery. He had been annoyed at first, because it was half-past ten and he was about to bed down with his favorite book, the dictionary, when his phone rang.

“The security hofficer at the ’otel ’ere gave it to me,” said the man on the line. His salty cockney accent savored of London, but the man said he was from Australia.

“What’s your problem?”

It turned out that Herbert Peachtree Hall was not merely from Australia, he was somebody’s uncle from Australia. Uncles from Australia were graybeard standards of the mystery story, and here was one, if not exactly in the flesh, at least in the voice. So Ellery’s ears began to itch.

It appeared that Mr. Hall was all of three somebodies’ uncle from Australia, a niece and two nephews. A migrant from England of thirty years’ exile, Hall said he had made his pile on the nether continent, liquidated it, and was now prepared — ah, that classic tradition! — to give it all away in a will. The young niece and the two young nephews being his only kin (if he had any kith, they were apparently undeserving of his largess), and all three being New York residents, Hall had journeyed to the United States to make their acquaintance and decide which of them deserved to be his heir. Their names were Millicent, Preston, and James, and they were all Halls, being the children of his only brother, deceased.

Ever the voice of caution, Ellery asked, “Why don’t you simply divide your estate among the three?”

“Because I don’t want to,” said Hall, which seemed a reasonable reason. He had a horror, it seemed, of cutting up capital into bits and pieces.

He had spent two months getting to know Millicent, Preston, and James; and this evening he had invited them to dinner to announce the great decision.

“I told ’em, ‘Old ’erbert,’ I says, ’old ’erbert ’as taken a fancy to one of you. No ’ard feelings, you hunderstand, boys, but it’s Millie gets my money. I’ve signed a will naming ’er my heir.” Preston and James had taken his pronouncement with what Hall said he considered ruddy good sportsmanship, and they had even toasted their sister Millie’s good fortune in champagne.

But after the departure of the trio, back in his hotel room, the uncle from Australia had afterthoughts.

“I never ’ad trouble making money, Mr. Queen, but maybe by giving it away I’m asking for some. I’m sixty, you know, but the doctors tell me I’m fit as one of your dollars — can live another fifteen years. Suppose Millie decides she won’t wait that long?”

“Then make another will,” said Ellery, “restoring the status quo ante.”

“Mightn’t be fair to the girl,” protested Hall. “I ’aven’t real grounds for suspicion, Mr. Queen. That’s why I want the services of a hinvestigator, to muck through Millie’s life, find out if she’s the sort to bash in ’er poor rich uncle’s ’ead. Can you come ’ere right now, so I can tell you what I know about ’er?”

“Tonight? That seems hardly necessary! Won’t tomorrow morning do, Mr. Hall?”

“Tomorrow morning,” said Herbert Peachtree Hall stubbornly, “could be too late.”

So for some reason obscure to him — although his ears were itching like mad — Ellery decided to humor the Australian. The hour of 11 p.m. plus six minutes found him outside Hall’s suite in the midtown hotel, knocking. His knock went unanswered. Whereupon Ellery tried the door, found it opened to his hand, and walked in.

And there was a bone-thin little man with a white thatch and a bush tan stretched out on the carpet, face down, with a brassy-looking Oriental paperknife in his back.

Ellery leaped for the phone, told the hotel operator to send up the house doctor and call the police, and got down on one knee beside the prone figure. He had seen an eyelid flicker.

“Mr. Hall!” he said urgently. “Who did it? Which one?”

The already cyanosed lips trembled. At first nothing came out, but then Ellery heard, quite distinctly, one word.

“Hall,” the dying man whispered.

“Hall? Which Hall? Millie? One of your nephews? Mr. Hall, you have to tell me—”

But Mr. Hall was not telling anything more to anybody. The man from down under was down, down under, and Ellery knew he was not going to come up again, ever.

The following day Ellery was an inquisitive audience of one in his father’s office at police headquarters. The director was, of course, Inspector Queen; the cast were the three Halls — Millicent, Preston, and James. The banty Inspector put them through their paces peevishly.

“All your uncle was able to get out before he died,” snapped the Inspector, “was the name Hall, which tells us it was one of you, but not which one.

“This is an off-beat case, God help me,” the old man went on. “Murders have three ingredients — motive, means, opportunity. You three match up to them pretty remarkably. Motive? Only one of you benefits from Herbert P. Hall’s death — and that’s you, Miss Hall.”

Millicent Hall had a large bottom, and a large face with a large nose in the middle of it. She was plain enough, Ellery concluded, to have grasped at the nettle murder in order to achieve that luscious legacy.

“I didn’t kill him,” the girl protested.

“So say they all, Miss Hall. Means? Well, there are no prints on the knife that did the job — because of the chasework on the handle and blade — but it’s an unusual piece, and establishing its ownership has been a cinch. Mr. Preston Hall, the knife that killed your uncle belongs to you.”

“Belonged to me,” coughed Preston Hall, a long lean shipping clerk with the fangs of a famished ocelot. “I presented it to Uncle Herbert just last week. Father left it to me, and I thought Uncle Herbert might like to have a memento of his only brother. He actually cried when I gave it to him.”

“I’m touched,” snarled the Inspector. “Opportunity? One of you was actually seen and identified loitering about the hotel last night after the dinner party broke up — and that was you, James Hall.”

James Hall was a bibulous fellow, full of spirits of both sorts; he worked, when one of the spirits moved him, in the sports department of a tabloid.

“Sure it was me,” James Hall laughed. “Hell, I stayed around to have a few belts, that’s all, before tootling on home. Does that mean I am the big bad slayer?”

“This is like coming down the stretch in a three-horse race,” complained Inspector Queen. “Millicent Hall is leading on motive — though I’d like to point out that you, Preston, or you, James, could have knocked the old boy over to teach him a lesson for not leaving his money to you. Preston’s leading on means; I have only your uncorroborated word that you gave the letter knife to Herbert Hall; what I do know is that it’s yours. Though, again, even if you did give Hall the knife, you, Millie, or you, James, could have used it in that hotel room. And James, you’re leading on opportunity — though your brother or sister could have easily sneaked up to your uncle’s room without being seen. Ellery, what are you sitting there like a dummy for?”

“I’m thinking,” said Ellery, looking thoughtful.

“And have you thought out,” asked his father acidly, “which one of the Halls their uncle meant when he said ‘Hall’ killed him? Do you see a glimmer?”

“Oh, more than a glimmer, dad,” Ellery said. “I see it all.”

“Old ’erbert was right, dad,” Ellery said. “Millie, drooling over the prospect of all those Australian goodies, couldn’t wait for her uncle to die naturally. But she hadn’t the nerve to murder him by herself — did you, Miss Hall? So you held out the bait of a three-way split to your brothers, and they willingly joined you in the plot. Safety in numbers, and all that. Right?”

The three Halls had grown very still indeed.

“It’s always disastrous,” Ellery said sadly, “trying to be clever in a murder. The plan was to confuse the issue and baffle the police — one of you being tied to motive, another to the weapon, the third to opportunity. It was all calculated to water down suspicion — spread it around.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the drinking Hall, quite soberly; and his brother and sister nodded at once.

The Inspector was troubled. “But how do you know, Ellery?”

“Because Herbert Hall was a Cockney. He dropped his aitches; in certain key words beginning with a vowel, he also added the cockney aitch. Well, what did he say when I asked him which one of the three had stabbed him? He said, ‘Hall.’ I didn’t realize till just now that he wasn’t saying ‘Hall’ — he was adding an aitch. What he really said was ‘all’ — all three of them murdered him!”