Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Fletcher Flora Mrs. Dearly’s Special Day

Mrs. Dearly got a special joy out of living — everything contributed to her heightened sense of excitement and exhilaration and sheer sensuous delight.

After what had been done last night, it was mostly a day of waiting for something to happen. Waiting, however, can be a great excitement If one possesses the quality of character to sustain composure, the excitement all inside and growing, waiting can be the most exhilarating experience imaginable.

The day began consciously for Mrs. Dearly at exactly nine o’clock, when she wakened. She had left her windows open and the drapes drawn back before going to bed, and her room was now, at nine o’clock in the morning, full of warm and golden light. It was clearly going to be one of those andante days expiring through minutes and hours to slumberous summer sounds.

Mrs. Dearly loved that kind of day, so softly sensuous and replete with drowsy dreams, and she was aware of this one instantly in her flesh and bones. She yawned and stretched, lifting golden arms into the golden light. Looking down the length of her body, its senses astir in a sheer mist of blue nylon, she felt a kind of innocent narcissistic delight. Holding herself in child-like affection, quite uncorrupted by vanity, she was truly grateful for being what she was — so perfectly made for love and lovely things; but her gratitude was unformed and undirected, and she hadn’t the faintest notion to whom it was owed, or how it might be acknowledged.

She lay in bed for perhaps another half hour, absorbing and transforming all the subtle manifestations of the day, and then she stretched again and got up and shed the blue mist on the way to the bathroom. It lay on the floor like something conjured out of her dreams, a giant handful of the bubble bath foam in which she soaked until ten. Returning then to the bedroom, she began to remove the bright enamel from her fingernails, and when this was accomplished she began, with equally meticulous attention, to put on another coat of enamel.

Inasmuch as the new coat was the same color and shade as the old, the effect, when she was finished, was identical with the one it replaced; but in the meanwhile she had measured the heightening of her anticipation and excitement by the precise performance of a small task that occupied her pleasantly and brought her so much closer to where the day was taking her.

It was almost noon when she was finally dressed in a tan sleeveless dress, tan stockings and shoes, and a tiny hat of deeper shade. She inspected herself in her full-length mirror with the same child-like innocence and delight with which she had looked at herself earlier in the blue mist, turning slowly now for the effect from all sides; and then, carrying her purse and a pair of white gloves, she went downstairs prepared to leave the house, going out the back way to a terrace where she expected her husband to be — and there he was, sure enough, reclining in a blue and yellow sling chair.

Mrs. Dearly crossed the terrace and kissed him lightly over one eye, patting his head at the same time with a display of that kind of affection one generally bestows on small boys and dogs.

“Good morning, dear,” she said.

“Morning? In case you don’t realize it, it’s noon.”

The words alone, unqualified by inflection, had a carping connotation; but his voice was, in fact, amused and indulgent — as if it were understood and agreed that she should be immune to the imposition and demands of time, and that it would, really, be rather absurd if she were otherwise.

“Oh, I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Honestly I have.”

“You’re dressed for the street,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“I have some shopping to do downtown. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least. But don’t you want some lunch before you go? I suppose it’s too late for breakfast.”

“I hardly ever eat breakfast, as you know, and I’ll have lunch downtown. What will you do?”

“There’s plenty to do in the flower beds, and I’m going to mow the grass.”

“I knew it. I was looking out at the lawn last evening, and I said to myself that the grass was getting high. Cal will mow the grass tomorrow, I said.”

“You were right. That’s exactly what Cal is going to do.”

“You shouldn’t work so hard at it, dear. Why don’t you hire a gardener to do such things?”

“Because I wouldn’t get any pleasure out of having a gardener do it. I enjoy doing the yard work — you know that perfectly well. All week I look forward to the weekend when I can get my green thumb into the ground. Things grow for me, and the grass somehow looks better when I mow it. I’m a frustrated horticulturist, I guess.”

This was true. He had made several millions in real estate speculations, but he took more pride in his grass, his roses, his flowering and evergreen shrubs. He even had the rough look of a man who lived close to the earth. Now, on the wide terrace behind his costly house, he was wearing a coarse blue shirt tucked into worn jeans, and his shoes were the shoes of a working man, not of a dilettante gardener — thick-soled, hard-toed shoes laced up around his ankles.

Mrs. Dearly, although willing to concede something to his more numerous years — which were twenty more than her own-still felt that the addiction of a rich man to rough pursuits, like digging in the ground and mowing grass, should adhere to more fashionable lines. There was no reason, for example, why Cal couldn’t work just as well in a colorful sports shirt and in presentable trousers and shoes as in the crude outfit he was now wearing. Moreover, to put it candidly, he stank. When she had bent over to kiss him and pat his head, the odor of perspiration had been strong. She could not see that it was made less offensive by being the result of earthy labor.

“Well, you must be careful of the heat,” she said. “You may have a stroke or something if you’re not careful.”

“I’ll be careful, thank you. An old fellow like me has to be, you know.”

“Nonsense. You’re a perennial boy. Will you look after yourself properly while I’m gone? Have a good lunch, I mean, and don’t stay too long in the sun without resting.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m strong as a bull.”

Bending to kiss him again, she thought that he not only was as strong as one, he also smelled like one.

“Goodbye, dear,” she said. “I may be just a little late.”

“Shall I back your car out for you?”

“Don’t bother, thanks. I don’t in the least mind doing it myself.”

As a matter of fact, she preferred it. His handling of her beautiful little Jaguar was, she felt, a kind of physical violation only a little less disturbing than that imposed infrequently on herself. Having now evaded the former — as she did, whenever possible, the latter — she drove the ten or twelve miles downtown in a considerably shorter time than obedience to the speed limits would have permitted.

She loved driving fast, could not resist the sense and excitement of high speeds, and it was fortunate that she also drove expertly, with a casual mastery to which the Jaguar submitted as if it were somehow an extension of its driver. Sometimes she really felt this, especially on the highway, that she and the powerful little car were organically joined, and that it experienced in its tempered-steel body the same thrill she experienced in her soft and yielding body. This was nonsense, of course, a private fantasy, but it amused her...

Downtown, she parked in the Municipal Garage two levels underground and walked through a brightly lighted tunnel to an elevator that carried her up into the lobby of a hotel across the street. She was hungry by then, so she had lunch by herself in the hotel, and after eating like a bird she went to several department stores in the area where she bought a great many things, mostly personal and wearable, all of which she left in the stores for delivery. This took quite a while, lunch and shopping requiring about three hours; but the time passed agreeably and almost before she knew it, it was 3:30 — which was the time she was supposed to meet Douglas.

She returned to the hotel where she had lunched, going this time to the cocktail lounge instead of the restaurant, and it was cool and seductive there, in an artificial dusk suspended mistily between light and darkness. She paused just inside the door while her eyes adjusted to the shadows, listening to the soft serenade of recorded strings and feeling her happiness and quiet excitement stir and swell inside her with an effect of almost painful pleasure; and all the while she was looking around for Douglas, and there he was, as she had hoped and expected, at a small table in a corner.

There was such a sudden sharp intensification of her pleasurable pain that she almost whimpered, and she thought at the same time, with incongruous detachment, that it was odd that he should have the capacity to make her feel that way, for he was not an exceptional young man at all. He was, in fact, rather dull at times, and incited her at once to exasperation and tenderness.

Seeing her approach, he started to rise, but she slipped so quickly into the chair across from him that he was no more than half up when she was entirely down. He resumed his seat after remaining a moment half risen, as if he were fighting an impulse to leave at once, and she took one of his hands and held it lightly on the table.

“Darling,” she said, “have you been waiting long?”

“No. Just a few minutes.”

“Have you had a drink?”

“Not yet. I was waiting for you.”

“That was nice of you. You are always so nice. What shall we have? Martinis?”

“I suppose so. We always do, don’t we?”

He gave the order to a girl who was waiting for it, and after the Martinis had been mixed and brought, Mrs. Dearly looked at him fondly — and wondered why she was here looking at him at all. His face in repose, boyishly handsome beneath a falling lock of dark hair that seemed contrived, was like a cheap air-brush portrait by an inferior artist in which all other features were subordinated to a sulky mouth. Douglas was, in fact, an inferior artist himself, an instructor in an art school, and she had met him almost six months ago when she had gone to the school to learn to paint in water colors, for which, as she quickly learned, she had no talent whatever. This knowledge — and Douglas — were all she had acquired from the effort.

Sipping her Martini and speaking over the thin edge of glass, she said, “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Nothing much. Nothing of consequence.”

“Are you working on something remarkable?”

“I’m not working on anything at all. It’s impossible.”

“Darling, are you still feeling guilty about Cal? If only you could understand what a waste your guilty conscience is. You have done him no harm, and neither have I, and we have done each other a great deal of good.”

“I doubt that Cal would think so.”

“Oh, nonsense. Cal doesn’t think about it one way or another. While you are sitting here making yourself miserable, he is at home this instant as happy as can be, digging in the flower gardens and mowing the grass.”

“You make everything sound so simple and acceptable.”

“Because it is. You must learn to accept things as they are and without complicating them in your mind.”

“Well, it’s not so easy to accept your going on indefinitely as Cal’s wife.”

“You must be patient, darling. Something will work out for us eventually — perhaps sooner than you think. In the meanwhile, let’s have another Martini before I go.”

“Why must you go so soon?”

“Something to do at home — but it’s really too tiresome to talk about.”

Her second Martini, which was consumed slowly to the sound of strings, proved a considerable challenge to her resolution to go home; but she went, nevertheless, about 4:30. The traffic was heavy on the streets, crippling the Jaguar, which could not get free to run until the last few miles — so that it was five when she pulled into the driveway behind a car which sat there, blocking the way to the garage.

Mrs. Dearly, mildly annoyed by the trespasser, got out of the Jaguar and walked around the house to the rear; but there was no sign of Cal or anyone else. She went into the house through the kitchen, and there in the hall which ran forward from the kitchen to the front entrance was a short man in a dark blue suit, a stranger with an odd little potbelly like a melon held in position by his belt; and this man had obviously come out of the living room to meet her, as if he had become, by some strange trickery in her absence, the master of the house and she the stranger.

“Mrs. Dearly?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”

“My name is Dickson. Police.”

“Police? What on earth are you doing here? Where is my husband?”

“You had better talk with Lieutenant Hardy about that. He’s waiting for you in the living room.”

He half turned and gestured toward a doorway, still with that curious implication of inviting her to be his guest. She walked past him into the living room, where another man was standing in the middle of the room with his back to a bank of windows bright with the late afternoon sun. He was even shorter than the man who had called himself Dickson — a thin, consumptive-looking man of indeterminate age in a wilted seersucker suit.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Dearly,” he said. His voice was as wilted as his suit, and perfectly supplemented by a languid, hesitant gesture of his right hand, its middle and index fingers stained by the smoke of countless cigarettes. “I’m Lieutenant Hardy. Sorry to intrude.”

The apology was hollow, a mere concession to form. For a moment Mrs. Dearly had a terrifying feeling of helplessness, of being swept into a play of forces she could not control, and at whatever cost she was compelled to assert herself in a way that would restore her position and assurance.

“Your car is blocking the drive,” she said. “Please be good enough to move it.”

“Certainly.” His right hand moved again, seeming to gather in Dickson. “Go move the car, Dickson, and drive Mrs. Dearly’s back to the garage.”

“The key is in the ignition,” Mrs. Dearly said. “Have you ever driven a Jaguar?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Dickson said.

He went out, and Mrs. Dearly turned back to Hardy.

“Perhaps now, Lieutenant, you’ll explain why you are here. And I would like to see my husband, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. He isn’t here.”

“Where is he? Has something happened to him? Tell me at once.”

“I had hoped to break it to you a little more gently, but I see that I can’t. The fact is, your husband is dead.”

“Dead? Did you say — dead?”

She moved to a chair and sat down with an effect of excessive care, as if moving and sitting had become all of a sudden a precarious business. She sat erect in the chair, her back unsupported, her eyes staring past Hardy through a bright pane of glass behind him into the side yard beyond the drive.

She was oddly sensitive in that moment to the details of sight and sound, and she noticed that the yard had been partly mowed, the power mower standing at rest on the clean line dividing the clipped and shaggy grass. She heard the rich roar, quickly reduced, of the Jaguar in the drive.

“Are you all right?” Hardy said.

“Yes, thank you. I’m quite all right.”

“Would you like me to tell you about it?”

“I think you had better.”

“Well, there isn’t much to tell, when you come right down to it Our only witness is your neighbor on the west, Mr. Winslow, and he didn’t really see anything much. He was upstairs in a room on the second floor of his house this afternoon about two or two thirty, he couldn’t be exact, and he looked out the window and saw your husband reclining in one of those canvas sling chairs on your rear terrace. He said your husband had been mowing the grass, and Winslow assumed, naturally, that he had merely taken a break to rest and cool off, which was probably true. It’s been a pretty hot day, as you know.

“Anyhow, Winslow happened to look out the window again about twenty minutes later, and your husband was no longer in the sling chair. He was lying on his face on the terrace. Apparently he had stood up, taken a step or two, and collapsed. Winslow was alarmed, as you might expect, and he hurried over. To put it bluntly, if you will excuse me, your husband was dead. Before dying, he had been very ill. To his stomach, I mean.”

Hardy stopped, watching Mrs. Dearly, and Mrs. Dearly continued to stare through the bright glass into the bright yard. Her face in profile was beautiful and composed. It was almost, Hardy thought, serene. Being basically an old-fashioned man, he found an old-fashioned simile in his head: she has a face like a cameo, he thought.

“I’ve warned him and warned him about it,” she said at last.

“About what, Mrs. Dearly?”

“Working so hard in the hot sun. He loved working in the yard, you know, and he insisted on spending practically every week-end at it Sometimes, whenever he could, week days also. He was getting too old for such work, especially in the hot sun. He had a stroke, I guess. A heat stroke or something. Doesn’t someone with a heat stroke become violently ill to his stomach?”

“I think so. I’m not sure about it.”

“Where is my husband now? His body, I mean. And why are the police involved? Is it normal for the police to be involved in such a matter?”

“We were called by the doctor who was summoned by Mr. Winslow.”

“Why should the doctor call the police?”

“He thought it wise, considering the circumstances of the death. He was not prepared to certify the cause without an autopsy.”

“An autopsy? Is that where Cal is? Have you taken him away somewhere for an autopsy?”

“Yes. Sorry. We tried to locate you, but we couldn’t.”

“Can you perform an autopsy on my husband without my permission?”

“If you want to make an issue of it, we can get an order. But it would be much better if you would simply agree. I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“Since you will obviously do it in any event, I might just as well agree. You are right, anyway. There is no reason why I shouldn’t.”

“Thank you. The body will be returned to you as soon as possible.” He paused for a moment, apparently trying to put in order the words to express properly what needed to be said. “I must say that I admire the way you are taking this. I was afraid it might be an ordeal.”

She turned her face toward him then, lighted by the sun on one side and softened by shadows on the other. Her lips assumed the shape of the merest smile.

“I’m not the hysterical type, Lieutenant. I suppose I’m a bit numb, really. I can hardly believe that Cal is dead. It’s often that way when someone dies suddenly, isn’t it? Later it will strike me fully and all at once.”

“Will you be all right here alone? It’s a large house, but apparently there are no servants around.”

“We have a cook and a housekeeper, but they were given the week-end off. Cal and I were on our own for two days.”

“Too bad. If someone had been around, something might have been done in time to save him.”

“Yes. Poor Cal. Dying alone like that. I think, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind, that I would like to go upstairs. Is there anything more you want of me?”

“No. I’m finished here. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we had to intrude this way.”

“Not at all. Under the circumstances, as you said, there was nothing else you could do.”

“You’re gracious to say so. Goodbye, Mrs. Dearly.”

“Goodbye, Lieutenant. Please find your own way out.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He looked thin and worn, almost ravaged, in his wilted seersucker. His right hand moved again in that hesitant gesture as he turned and went out of the room.

Standing quite still, listening, Mrs. Dearly heard his steps receding in the hall, then the front door closing behind him. She continued to stand there, listening intently. She had heard the movements of the police car and the Jaguar in the drive, and now, after several minutes, she heard the police car in the street, its engine starting and the swiftly diminishing sound of it as it sped away.

The silence of the house gathered around her, and she turned in silence and went through the hall into the kitchen and downstairs from the kitchen into the basement. She walked directly to the wall to her left, the wall toward the side yard where the power mower stood at rest between the clipped and shaggy grass; and she was just reaching overhead for the circular handle of a valve when someone spoke behind her.

“I don’t believe I’d do that if I were you, Mrs. Dearly,” the voice said.

How strange it was! she thought afterward. Following the first moment of terror, when her breath stopped and her heart withered, she was immediately calm and lucid and without any fear whatever. She thought clearly before turning around that Douglas must surely be kept a secret now, however difficult it might be, for he would be considered a motive at the very least, if not a conspirator — and the funny thing about it was that Douglas was not a motive at all, but only a kind of fringe benefit.

“I thought you had gone, Lieutenant,” she said.

“Dickson went,” he said. “As for me, I must confess to intruding again. I came in through the basement window there.”

He walked over and stood beside her, looking up at the valve she had intended to turn. To the right of the valve, slanting down toward the basement floor, were about six feet of pipe that made a right turn, by means of an elbow joint, and passed through the concrete foundation.

The Lieutenant began again. “While I was waiting for you to come home this afternoon from wherever you were, I got to wondering how your husband might have been poisoned — if he was poisoned, which was at least a possibility. In a container of something to drink, perhaps? In something he ate, perhaps? But that would have been dangerous, and foolishly so. The container to be analyzed. The remains of the food, ditto. Then I walked along the side of the house, and I noticed that the ground under the outside faucet was damp — and it came to me. What does the kind of man who loves working in the yard, as your husband did, almost invariably do when he gets hot and thirsty? He takes a drink from the outside faucet. Usually from his cupped hands. That’s what your husband did, Mrs. Dearly, and that’s what you knew he would do.”

The Lieutenant paused, still staring up at the valve with an expression of admiration, almost of wonder. Perhaps he was waiting for Mrs. Dearly to speak, but at the moment Mrs. Dearly did not feel like speaking.

“It was clever,” he went on. “You’re a clever woman, Mrs. Dearly. Between that inside valve and the outside faucet there are six feet of one-inch pipe. It was almost perfect for your purpose, wasn’t it? A perfect container. First, you closed the inside valve and drained the six feet of pipe. This you did merely by opening the outside faucet, letting the water in the pipe flow out, then closing the faucet afterward. Then, with a wrench, you disconnected the six feet of pipe below the valve and put into the pipe, your perfect container, whatever you used to kill your husband. This done, you reconnected the pipe to the valve, opening the valve to let water run through and fill the pipe. By closing the valve after the pipe was filled, you had a deadly liquid ready to run from the outside faucet whenever it was opened.

“It wouldn’t run long or as freely as it would have run with the valve open, of course, for six feet of one-inch pipe will hold by my arithmetic only about one quart of water. But that was enough. It was sufficient to give your husband a long, fatal drink. And now you have come down here to open the valve again and to flush from the pipe what may be left of the poison. What kind of poison did you use, Mrs. Dearly? Well, never mind. I don’t expect you to tell me. Something nearly tasteless, of course, and soluble in water. We’ll find out.”

Mrs. Dearly sighed and dusted her hands by brushing them softly together. She was feeling positively exhilarated.

“It is not I who is clever, Lieutenant,” she said “It’s you. What you have said is logical and rather convincing, I’m sure, but it is only a theory, and it will be quite exciting to see if you can prove it or not.”

But Mrs. Dearly’s exhilaration was only that of excitement, no more. The Lieutenant had no difficulty proving his theory — there was enough poison left in the pipe, and it wasn’t long before they found Douglas...