Inspector Queen’s Own Case

4 Even in the Cannon’s Mouth

“Don’t touch anything, Jessie.”

Jessie had not heard him come in. He was just inside the doorway from the kitchen, breathing in heaves, getting his breath. Perspiration was streaming down his cheeks.

“She’s dead, Richard.”

“I know.”

He had a handkerchief on his right hand again. He went into Connie Coy’s bedroom, wiped the knob of the bathroom door. He came back and went to the piano and picked up the fallen lighter and wiped it clean and put it back on the end table. He wiped the chair he had used. He glanced at the glass of water Jessie had brought the girl from the kitchen, then at Jessie’s hands.

“You’re still wearing your gloves. That’s good.” He went over to the sofa, picked up Jessie’s purse, looked around the living room. “You’ve pulled the drapes.” He did not sound angry. He said it like a man taking inventory. He came over to her and led her to the kitchen doorway. “Stay right here.” He went to the wall switch and rubbed it with the handkerchief.

Then he flipped the switch.

The room got dark again.

She heard him making his way to the window. The drapes hissed open again.

“Let’s go, Jessie.” He was back by her side.

“No,” Jessie said.

“What?” He sounded surprised, grabbed her arm.

“Just one more minute.” She began to pull away.

He held on, pulling gently the other way. “You can’t do anything for her, Jessie. Don’t you understand that we’ve got to get out of here? Come on, now.”

“I won’t leave her exposed like that,” Jessie said stubbornly. “It isn’t fair. All I want to do is close her robe, Richard. Let me go.”

But he did not. “We mustn’t touch anything.”

“All those men looking at her! A woman’s nakedness is her own. It isn’t fair.”

“She’s dead, Jessie.”

The street was just the same. No, not quite. Kripps’s car was gone. Where Richard Queen had paused to light a cigarette and talk to the retired policemen in the car there was space, signifying flight or chase.

Jessie walked stiff-legged, letting him lead her.

They walked over to Broadway, waited for the light, crossed to the east side, headed downtown.

Jessie kept moving one stiff leg after the other. Once in a while it would come to her that she was somebody named Jessie Sherwood, a registered nurse, and that behind her a blonde girl with her robe open to the navel lay under a grand piano and that none of it should be that way.

The old man did not speak to her. He was busy strolling along, her right arm tucked beneath his left, stopping for signals at corners, nudging her ahead, glancing into shop windows, pausing to light a cigarette, wipe his face, let the cigarette go out, pause to light it again. He lit a great many cigarettes.

At 72nd Street he suddenly stepped up their tempo. He hurried her across the intersection, steered her briskly into a cafeteria. The cafeteria was crowded. He picked up a tray, two spoons, two paper napkins. He made her stand on line with him behind the railing. He put two cups of coffee on the tray. He had their tickets punched, paused to look around as if for a table. Then he took her over to where a pair of elderly men were sitting over cups of coffee, too. One had a scar on his face, the other wore heavy glasses. The other two chairs at the table were unoccupied; they were tilted against the third and fourth sides as if they were reserved.

Richard Queen set the tray down, pulled out one of the tilted chairs for her, seated himself in the other.

Only then did he say, “Giffin. Kripps. What happened?”

“We lost him, Inspector.”

“You first, Giffin.”

The elderly man with the scar stirred some sugar into his coffee, talking to the coffee as if it had ears. “I ducked out onto the roof and shot a flash across the court to the other side. Nobody. I beat it down the stairs into the basement and got over to the other street through the back court. Lots of people walking, kids horsing, plenty of traffic moving in both directions. Nobody running, nobody pulling away from the kerb, nobody acting like anything had happened. And as far as I could see, not an empty parking space. I talked to the kids, but they hadn’t noticed anybody come out of the house. I knew it was a waste of time, but I checked the stairs, elevators, basement, and roof over there. The roof is absolutely clean. The way I figure it, he cut across the roofs of several buildings and came out near the corner of West End — maybe had a getaway parked there. Anyway, it was a bust.”

“You, Johnny?” Inspector Queen said.

The other elderly man looked like a teacher or a librarian, Jessie thought, with his black-rimmed glasses and distinguished white hair. “I drove around to 89th when you ran outside with the news, Inspector. By the time I got there it was either too early or too late, I didn’t know which. I hung around for a few minutes with nothing to latch onto. Then a car pulled away from the kerb fast, and I tailed it. It turned out to be some college kid late for a date.”

“It’s the legs,” Giffin said gloomily to his coffee. “Let’s face it, we’re not as spry as we used to be.”

“We needed more men is all.” Johnny Kripps breathed on his glasses. “Hell, I’m not even packing a gun.”

“Who was it?” Jessie thought. To her surprise, the thought was audible.

The men glanced at her curiously.

“Take it easy, Jessie,” the old man said. “As a matter of fact, boys, I’m not getting you in any deeper.” He sipped some coffee and looked at them. “I want you to go home and forget it.”

They laughed. Giffin said, “We haven’t met the lady, Inspector.”

“I beg your pardon. Miss Sherwood, John Kripps, Hugh Giffin.”

“How do you do,” Jessie said. “He shot her between the eyes as if she were something in a shooting gallery. Then he fired two more shots. It couldn’t have been at her, she was flat on the floor. He shot at us, Richard.”

“I know, Jessie,” he said gently. His hand came to her under the table. “I want you boys to go home, and one of you phone Pete Angelo and Al Murphy and tell them to forget it, too.”

“How about a little something to go with that coffee, Miss Sherwood?” Hugh Giffin asked.

“Maybe a nice cheese Danish?” Johnny Kripps said. “They’re tops in here.”

“About this deal,” the Inspector said insistently. “I appreciate your attitude, boys. But this is murder. I can’t let you endanger your pensions, maybe wind up in jail. Jessie and I,” his hand tightened, “we’re in so far now we couldn’t get out if we wanted to. But you—”

“You’re wasting your breath,” Kripps said. “I’m talking for Pete and Murph, too. Who takes care of the call-in?”

“I will!” the old man said.

“The hell you will,” Giffin said hotly. “Your voice is too well known, Inspector. Johnny or I’ll do it.”

“Call-in?” Jessie said.

“Notifying the police, Miss Sherwood,” the ex-homicide man explained. He did, look like a scholar. “We can’t let her lie on that floor till the super’s nose brings him up there.”

“An anonymous call?” Jessie said.

The three men flushed and picked up their cups.

Jessie picked up her cup, too. She remembered now that she hadn’t touched it.

He took the key from her cold fingers. He unlocked the apartment door and shoved it open and reached for the switch and ducked all in one movement. Then he stood there looking. After a moment he went into Jessie’s bedroom.

He came back.

“All right.”

He shut the apartment door and latched it.

“Why am I so cold?” Jessie shivered. “Did the temperature drop?”

He felt her forehead, her hand.

“It’s the nervous reaction,” Richard Queen said. “I used to break out in a sweat afterward, even in the dead of winter. You’re going to bed, young woman.”

“I’m not a young woman,” Jessie said, standing there trying to keep her teeth from clacking. “I’m an old woman and I’m scared.”

“I could kick myself for letting you in for this.” He took her purse and gloves, clumsily removed her hat. “I’d send you back to Connecticut tomorrow—”

“I won’t go.”

“—only I want you where I can keep an eye on you. For all he knows, she told us his name.”

“He shot at us,” Jessie said. “A bullet hit something behind me and broke it. He doesn’t take chances, does he?”

“He’s taking all kinds of chances,” the old man said gently. “But we’ll talk about it tomorrow. You go in there and get undressed. Do you have any phenobarb?”

“What are you going to do, Richard?” Now her teeth were clacking.

“Stay over.”

She knew she should protest, send him home, or at least make up the daybed for him in the living room. But the connection between her larynx and her will seemed broken. On the edge of things lay the body of Connie Coy with the spattery hole in her forehead and the greenish roots of her gold hair slowly dyeing red. But the core of herself felt a great warmth. As long as he was here nothing like that hole and that bloody dye could happen to her. All she had to do was drift... let go... Goodness, Jessie thought dreamily, I’m getting to be a female woman.

“Can you make it by yourself all right?” he asked anxiously.

“Why do you ask?” Jessie giggled at the consternation that flooded his face. He was so easy to tease...

Later, when she was in bed, he knocked and she said, “Come in,” and he came in with a cup of warm milk and a sleeping tablet.

“Take this.”

“Yes, sir,” Jessie said obediently.

It was hard lifting her head from the pillow. He hesitated, then slipped his arm around her shoulders and sat her up. The coverlet dropped away and Jessie thought, Now, Jessie! But she really didn’t have the strength to pull it back up... And me in my most décolleté nightgown. How shameless can you get? He’ll think I purposely...

Jessie drank the milk very slowly.

“It’s hot.”

“I’m sorry. Take your time.” His voice sounded funny.

When she sank back he removed his arm as if it hurt.

“Thank you, Richard.” Is this really me? Jessie thought.

“Feeling better?” He was addressing the badly reproduced Van Gogh still-life over Gloria Sardella’s bed.

“Worlds.”

But it’s so nice... Jessie slipped under the covers, giggling again.

He went over to the window and looked out. The fire escape seemed to disturb him. He pulled the window down and locked it, lowered the Venetian blind, closed the vanes. Then he went into the bathroom.

One second, her forehead was smooth and white, the next it had a hole in it, a real hole, black and then red...

“I’ve opened the bathroom window, Jessie. I’ll leave the door to the living room open for circulation. Unless light bothers you?”

“Just don’t go away.” She began to shiver again.

“I won’t. Remember, I’ll be in the next room. At anything — for any reason — sing out.”

“Yes... The linen’s in that closet next to the kitchenette. Richard, she’s dead.”

“Go to sleep now, Jessie.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I don’t seem to have any strength at all.”

“It’s been a rough night. If you’re not better in the morning I’ll call a doctor.”

“Oh, no...”

“Oh, yes.”

The light snapped off, but she could not hear him move.

“Good night,” Jessie said drowsily.

“Sleep well, Jessie.”

He went out then, in a sort of stumble.

He didn’t look at me as if I were just any woman. He looked at me as if...

The last thing Jessie heard as she fell asleep was the scream of police sirens heading uptown.

The voice of Abe Pearl at the other end of the wire was so loud the old man glanced over at the bedroom doorway.

“Stop bellowing, Abe,” he grumbled. “I’m not deaf yet.”

“Where in the name of God have you been?” Chief Pearl demanded angrily. “I’ve been trying to reach you all night. Where you calling from?”

“Jessie Sherwood’s place in New York.”

“Look, Dick, if you want to shack up, shack up, but the least you can do is leave me her phone number so I can contact you. I didn’t start this, you did!”

“You cut that out, Abe,” Richard Queen growled. “I’m not shacked up with anybody—”

“Okay, so she’s playing hard to get — Becky, will you shut up!... Can you give me five minutes?”

“Go ahead,” he said shortly.

“I got a call tonight from New Haven, from this Dr. Duane. He’s been phoning all over creation trying to reach Humffrey again. He finally contacted me out of desperation, wanted me to run over to Nair Island and see if maybe Humffrey hadn’t gone back there — he’d tried to reach Stallings, but there was no answer. I’ve found out that Stallings had gone to a movie; anyway, he hadn’t seen or heard from Humffrey. The point is, Mrs. Humffrey is bad again, and it sounded to me like Duane’s got hold of a hot knish and would like to let go. You don’t know where Humffrey is, Dick, do you? I thought I’d check with you before calling Duane back.”

“I haven’t seen Humffrey, no,” Richard Queen said slowly. “Abe.”

“Yes?”

“What time did Humffrey leave his Park Avenue apartment today? Did Duane talk to Mrs. Lenihan?”

“She told him he’d left early this morning and didn’t say where he was going. At the time Duane called me, which was about nine tonight, Humffrey still hadn’t got back.”

“Did Cullum chauffeur him? Or did Humffrey leave alone?”

“I don’t know.” Abe Pearl paused. “Dick, what’s happened? Something happened tonight.”

“Connie Coy’s been knocked off.”

“The mother?”

When Abe Pearl heard the story, he said, “One minute, Dick. Just hang on.” The silence was prolonged. “I’m trying to piece this together—”

“It’s complicated,” Richard Queen said dryly.

“Dick. Why did you ask me what time Humffrey left his New York apartment today?” He said, “Dick? You there?”

“I’m here.” The old man said rapidly, “Abe, doesn’t it strike you as queer that the day Finner is murdered Humffrey’s movements can’t be accounted for, and the night Connie Coy gets it — ditto?”

Abe Pearl said, “What?”

“You heard me.”

His friend was silent.

Then he said, “You’re crazy! There might be a dozen explanations—”

“Sure.”

“It’s just a coincidence—”

“I can’t prove it isn’t.”

“The whole idea is ridiculous. Why...” Abe Pearl paused. “You’re not serious.”

The old man said, “Oh, yes, I am.”

Silence again.

“How long has this bee been buzzing around in your bonnet?” the Taugus chief finally demanded.

Inspector Queen did not answer.

“Don’t you see you’ve got nothing to back it up? So Humffrey couldn’t be located around the time of either murder. So what? Maybe now that his wife is tucked away in New Haven, he’s picked himself up some tasty blonde—”

“Now?” The old man sounded grim. “That could have happened a year ago.”

“Dick, you’re off your trolley. Alton Humffrey? You have to be human to start chick-chasing. Even if Humffrey had the yen, he wouldn’t put himself in such a position. He thinks too damn much of himself and his precious name.”

“Be consistent, Abe. One minute you’re saying Humffrey might be having an affair with some woman to account for his absences, but when I suggest the woman was Connie Coy and he had the affair with her last year you start telling me he isn’t the type. Sure he’s the type. Under given circumstances, any man’s the type. And especially the Humffreys of this world.”

“Humffrey...” He could almost see Abe Pearl shaking his head.

“I admit it’s mostly hunch. But there isn’t much else to go by, Abe. Up to now it’s been one stymie after another. First the nephew, Frost, comes up with an airtight alibi for the baby’s murder. Then the killer lifts the Humffrey folder from Finner’s files and chokes off the obvious lead to the child’s mother. When we finally get to the Coy woman by a roundabout route and she’s about to come through with the baby’s father’s name, she stops a bullet between the eyes. I can’t wait for the next stymie, Abe. I’ve got to take the initiative.”

“You’re heading for big trouble,” Chief Pearl said in a mutter. “You can’t go after a man like Humffrey with a popgun.”

“I don’t intend to. I won’t move in till I have some man-sized ammunition. And I think I know where I can get some.”

“Where?”

“I’ll let you know when I get it. Give my love to Becky, will you?”

At the triple knock Richard Queen moved over to the door and said in a low voice, “Yes?”

“It’s Wes, Inspector.”

He unlatched the door.

“Did I time it right?” Polonsky asked.

“Keep your voice down. Miss Sherwood’s asleep. Yes, Wes, perfect. Did Johnny also tell you what happened tonight?”

“Uh-huh.” Polonsky rubbed his mashed nose with the back of his old man’s hand. “Looks like you started something, Inspector. Any leads?”

“I’ve got an idea or two.” The Inspector took a key from his pocket. “Would you do something for me?”

The white-haired man looked offended.

“This is the key to my apartment. Go up to 87th Street and if there’s no stake-out, let yourself in. My bedroom is off the living-room to the right. In the bottom drawer of the bureau you’ll find my old shoulder-holster and gun. There ought to be some ammo in the drawer, too. Bring them to me here.”

Polonsky said softly, “That being the case, Inspector, maybe I better stop off at my place and pick up my gun, too.”

“No. I can’t let you boys in for this.”

“Johnny said he and Hugh Giffin were going to start packing theirs. What am I, an orphan?”

The old man grinned. But after he let Polonsky out and relatched the door, he sank into a chair, scowling.

A few minutes later he reached for the Manhattan classified directory and began hunting for an address under Detective Service.

The gray-skinned man got off the elevator and walked erratically up the hall reading page three of the Daily News. He seemed fascinated and slightly sick. He was a big man of about forty in a slim-drape lounge suit and a hat with a Tyrolean feather. The gray skin was drawn angularly over his face bones in flat planes and straight lines. He looked like a cartoon.

He stopped before a pebbled glass door and fumbled in his pants pocket for a keycase without taking his eyes from the newspaper. The door said:

He unlocked the door and stepped into the anteroom, still reading. The typewriter on the receptionist’s desk was in a shroud. There was no window in the room.

His left hand groped near the door, located the light switch, snapped it on. Absorbed in his morning paper, he walked on through, into the inner office, over to the window. He pulled up the blind, sank into the chair behind the desk. As he continued to read he tilted back, nibbling his lip.

“Interesting story?”

The gray-faced man looked up quickly.

Richard Queen was seated in a chair behind the partition wall of the anteroom.

“I said that’s an interesting story about that girl’s murder last night,” he said. “From the way you’re reading it, Weirhauser, you agree with me.”

The private detective put the newspaper down on his desk carefully.

“Am I supposed to know you, pop?” He had a rough, nasty voice. “Or is this a stickup?”

“Come, come, George, cut the clowning,” the old man said mildly. “I thought we could talk before your girl got here, and I didn’t feel like waiting in the hall.” He rose, put his hat on the chair, and walked over to the desk. “I want some information from you. Who hired you to tail me?”

The investigator looked blank. “Am I supposed to be tailing you?”

“You were pulled off the job Sunday, whether temporarily or permanently I don’t know.” The Inspector’s tone was patient. “I asked you a question.”

“See that word Private?” Weirhauser said. “Get going.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, Weirhauser. Still doing a take-off on George Raft.” The Inspector laughed.

Weirhauser got up. “You going to get out, or do I have to heave you out?”

The old man stared at him. “Don’t you realize what you’ve stepped into? Or are you even stupider than you act?”

The gray was taking on a brick color. Weirhauser set his knuckles on the desk. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

Inspector Queen glanced at his watch. “I don’t have any time to waste, Weirhauser. Let’s have it.”

“You talk like you’re somebody.” The man’s tone was jeering, but there was an uncertain note in it.

“You know who I am.”

“I know who you were. The trouble with you has-beens is you don’t know enough to lay down and roll over. You’re not Inspector Queen any more, remember?”

“Hand me that phone.”

Weirhauser’s color changed back to its normal gray. “What are you going to do?”

“Call Headquarters and show you whether I’m a has-been or not.”

“Wait.”

“Well?”

The investigator said, “You know I can’t give out that kind of information, Inspector.” He was trying to sound rueful and put-upon. “Agency work is confidential—”

“You should have stuck to chasing dirty divorce evidence.” The old man looked amused. “How do you like being mixed up in a murder? You didn’t bargain for that, did you?”

Weirhauser said quickly, “Who’s mixed up in a murder? I took a tailing job. I was told to tail you and the woman and to report your movements to my client and I did and that’s all.”

“You tailed me from hospital to hospital, you tailed me to an apartment house on 88th near West End, you found out I was asking for a girl named Connie Coy and that she was expected back from out of town shortly, and you reported that to your client Sunday evening. This morning, Tuesday, you open your paper and find that a girl named Connie Coy got back from Chicago last night and within the hour was shot to death through her window from a nearby roof. And you say you’re not mixed up in it, Weirhauser? You walked in here this morning trying to remember your prayers.”

“Look, Inspector,” Weirhauser began.

“Suppose we go downtown and tell one of the brass that you, George Weirhauser, holding a license to conduct private investigations, fingered Connie Coy for a client you refuse to name? How long do you think you’d hold your license? In fact, how long do you think it would be before you began yelping for a bail bondsman?”

“Look,” Weirhauser said again, licking his lips. “You’re way off base on this thing, Inspector. My client couldn’t have had anything to do with this—”

“How do you know he couldn’t?”

“Well, he’s...”

“He’s what? All right, maybe he didn’t have anything to do with it. Do you know where he was all day yesterday, Weirhauser? Can you alibi him for the time of the girl’s murder?”

The private detective shouted, “I didn’t go near the guy yesterday! Didn’t even talk to him on the phone. He told me Sunday night when I spoke to him that he’d changed his mind, the information I had for him wasn’t what he was after at all, he was calling the whole thing off. That’s all I know.”

The Inspector shook his head. “Try again, Weirhauser.”

“What d’ye mean? I tell you that’s all I know!”

“You’ve left one thing out.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of your client.”

Weirhauser got up and went to the window, fingering his lip. When he came back and sat down again his sharp eyes were sly.

“What side of the street you working in this deal... Inspector?”

“That,” the old man snapped, “is none of your business.”

“It just occurred to me.” The investigator grinned. “You might be in this up to your eyeballs yourself — you and this dame.”

“I am.”

“You are?” The man looked surprised.

“Sure,” the old man said. “I’m after your client, and I’m going to get him. And the less you know about it, Weirhauser, the longer you’ll sleep in your own bed. I’ve thrown away enough time on you. Who is he?”

“Okay, okay, but give me a break, will you? Honest to God, if I’d known this was going to wind up in a homicide, I’d have spit on his retainer and run like hell.”

“Who is he?” the old man repeated. His eyes were glitttering.

“It’s understood you’ll keep me out of this?”

“Personally, I don’t give a damn about you. As far as I’m concerned you’re out of it right now. Who is he, Weirhauser?”

Weirhauser got up again and shut the door to the anteroom.

“Well, he’s a rich muckamuck, lives on Park Avenue—” Even now the gray-faced man sounded grudging, as if he were being forced to sell a gilt-edged security far below its market value.

“His name!”

Weirhauser cursed. “Alton K. Humffrey.”

“Are you all right, Jessie?”

Jessie said, “I’m fine.”

They were in the tall-ceilinged foyer outside the Humffrey apartment on Park Avenue. The wall opposite the elevator was an austere greenish ivory, with plaster panel-work of cupids and wreaths. The elevator had just left them, noiselessly.

“Don’t be afraid,” Richard Queen said. “This is the one place where he won’t try anything. I wouldn’t have asked you along if I thought there was any danger.”

“I’m not afraid.” Jessie smiled faintly. “I’m numb.”

“Would you rather sit this out?”

“I’m fine,” Jessie said again.

“We’ve got to move in on him, Jessie. See just how tough a nut he’s going to be. So far he’s had it all his own way. You see that, don’t you?”

“I suppose the trouble is I don’t really believe it.” Jessie set her lips to keep them from quivering. “I want to look at his face — really look at it. Murder must leave a mark of some kind.”

The Inspector blotted the perspiration from his neck and pressed the apartment bell. He had given their names to the flunkey in the lobby with a confidence Jessie could only admire. There had been no unpleasantness. Mr. Humffrey had said on the house phone yes, he would see them. In a few minutes. He would call down when they might be sent up.

It was Friday evening, the second of September, a sizzling forerunner of the Labor Day weekend. The city had been emptying all day, leaving a sort of tautness in the vacuum.

Like me, Jessie thought.

It had been a curious three days since Richard Queen came back from George Weirhauser’s office. He had summoned his aging assistants that evening to a council of war. It was surely the strangest conference, Jessie thought, in the unlikeliest place... a gathering of old men on a bench in a secluded spot in Central Park. The handsome ex-lieutenant of Homicide, Johnny Kripps, had been there; the scar-faced Hugh Giffin; ex-Sergeant Al Murphy of the 16th, chunky, brick-skinned, with all his red hair, the youngest of the group; big Wes Polonsky, of the shaking hands; and Polonsky’s old partner, Pete Angelo, a slim tough dark man whose face was a crisscross of wrinkles, like a detail map of his seventy years.

They had listened in happy silence as Richard Queen spoke, lonely men being handed straws and grasping them thankfully. And when they had walked off into the night, one by one, each with his assignment, Jessie had remarked, “I feel sorry for him in a way.”

“For whom, Jessie?”

“Alton Humffrey.”

“Don’t waste your sympathy,” the old man had muttered. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

“Good evening,” the millionaire said.

He had opened the door himself. He stood there sharp and shoulderless in a satin-faced smoking jacket, at disciplined ease, the chill Brahmin with nothing on his wedge of face but remoteness — like a high Army officer in mufti or a Back Bay man of distinction — framed in a rectangle of rich wines and hunt-club greens and leather browns; and Jessie thought, No, it isn’t possible.

“You’re looking well, Miss Sherwood.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Queen, I can say the same about you.”

“Could we come in?” Richard Queen said.

“Sorry! Suppose we use the study. Anything less than twenty people in the drawing-room strains the vocal cords. I apologize for not having the servants here to greet you. Unfortunately, I gave them the evening off.”

“Within the last fifteen minutes?”

Alton Humffrey shook his head, smiling. “You’re an extremely suspicious man.”

“Yes,” the old man said grimly, “I suppose you could say that.”

The apartment was like a strange land, all mysterious woods and coruscating chandeliers high overhead, antiques, crystal, oil paintings, old tapestries, glowing rugs... rooms twice as large as any Jessie had ever set foot in, with no cushion crushed, no rug scuffed, no receptacle with a trace of ashes. She realized now that the Nair Island house had represented the Alton K. Humffreys en déshabille, an annual adventure in roughing it, as remote from their real life as the average family’s summer camping trip was from its suburban fireside.

What kind of people could be happy living in this dustless, stylized, dwarfing museum? Maybe, Jessie thought, that’s why Sarah Humffrey is locked in a sanatorium room in New Haven.

The study was like the drawing-room, indigestibly rich, with monumental Tudorish furnishings and impossibly tall walls of books that looked as if they were going to topple over.

“Be seated, Miss Sherwood,” Humffrey said. “May I give you some sherry?”

“No, thanks.” The thought was nauseating. “How is Mrs. Humffrey?”

“Not too well, I’m sorry to say. Mr. Queen, whisky?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to sit down?”

“No.”

“That has a forbidding sound,” Humffrey said with a slight smile. “Like an inspector of police.”

Richard Queen did not change expression. “May I begin?”

“By all means.” Humffrey seated himself in the baronial oak chair behind his desk, a massive handcarved piece. “Oh, one thing.” His bulbous eyes turned on Jessie, and she saw now that they were cushioned by welts she had not noticed on Nair Island. “I take it, Miss Sherwood, from your being here tonight with Mr. Queen, that you’re still pursuing your delusion about poor Michael’s death?”

“I still believe he was murdered, yes.” Jessie’s voice sounded too loud to her ears.

“Well, at least let me thank you for being so discreet. You’ll recall I asked you not to involve Mrs. Humffrey and me in further painful publicity.”

“My recollection, Mr. Humffrey, is that you threatened me.”

“Threatened?” His sparsely tufted brows went up. “I’m sorry you construed my remarks that way. But if what I said encouraged you to keep my name out of the newspapers, perhaps I should be grateful.”

“Are you through?” the old man asked.

“Forgive me, Mr. Queen.” The millionaire leaned back attentively. “You were about to say?”

“I was about to say,” the Inspector said with a note of irony, “that what I’m going to tell you will hardly come as news to you, Mr. Humffrey. You’ve read, I suppose, about the murder of a shyster lawyer named Finner in his Manhattan office on the 20th of last month? ”

“I believe I have. Nasty business. Apparently has the police baffled.”

“Yes, Finner, of course, was the man who turned the baby over to you back in June.”

“He was?”

“Come, Mr. Humffrey, you’re hardly in a position to deny it. Jessie Sherwood went along with you and Mrs. Humffrey to take charge of the child. She saw Finner at that time. So did your chauffeur, Cullum.”

“I did not deny it, Mr. Queen,” Humffrey smiled. “I was merely making some appropriate sounds.”

“On Thursday the 18th, possibly the next day, Finner got in touch with you, told you I was putting pressure on him, and asked you to be present at a meeting in his office with me and Miss Sherwood on Saturday the 20th, at 4 p.m. You agreed to come.”

“Now you’ve moved from the terra firma of fact,” Humffrey said, “into the cuckooland of speculation. Of course I can’t permit unfounded allegations to pass unchallenged. Pardon me for interrupting, Mr. Queen.”

“You deny those allegations?”

“I will not dignify them by a denial. In view of your failure to mention the slightest corroboration, none is necessary. Go on.”

“You agreed to be there,” Richard Queen continued, unmoved. “But you had a little surprise up your sleeve for Finner, Mr. Humffrey. And, I might add, for us. You went to Finner’s office that Saturday afternoon, all right, but not at four o’clock. You got there about an hour and a half early — from the contents of Finner’s stomach, according to accounts of the autopsy findings, it must have been right after Finner came up from his lunch. You picked up Finner’s letter-knife from his desk and buried it in his heart. Then you rifled his files for the folder marked ‘Humffrey’ that contained the papers and proofs of the baby’s parentage, and out you walked with it. By this time, of course, you’ve destroyed it.”

Jessie was watching Alton Humffrey’s face, fascinated. There was no twitch or flicker to indicate that the millionaire was indignant, alarmed, or even more than mildly interested.

“I can only ascribe this extraordinary fantasy to a senile imagination,” Humffrey said. “Are you accusing me — in all seriousness — of murdering this man Finner?”

“Yes.”

“You realize, of course, that without proof of any sort — an eyewitness, let us say, a fingerprint, something drearily unfantastic like that — you’re exposing yourself to a suit for criminal slander, defamation of character, and probably half a dozen other charges my attorneys will think of?”

“I’m relying on your well-known dislike for publicity to restrain them, Mr. Humffrey,” the old man said dryly. “May I proceed?”

“My dear man! Is there more?”

“Lots more.”

Humffrey waved his long white hand with its curling fingers as if he were bestowing a benediction.

“On the following Monday morning,” Richard Queen went on, “you walked into a Times Square detective agency run by a fellow named Weirhauser and hired him to shadow Miss Sherwood and me. Weirhauser reported to you that we were visiting the maternity sections of one metropolitan hospital after another, trying to match up a set of infant footprints with the hospital birth records. This went on for about a week.”

“I see,” Humffrey said.

“Last Sunday evening, Weirhauser reported to you that we had presumably found what we’d been looking for. Our hospital find had taken us to an apartment house on West 88th Street, where we asked a lot of questions about a tenant named Connie Coy. Connie Coy, Mr. Humffrey.”

“You pause significantly. Is the name supposed to mean something to me?” the millionaire asked.

“Weirhauser told you that Connie Coy was out of town filling a singing engagement in a Chicago nightclub, but that she was expected back soon. You then gave Weirhauser a clumsy story about being on the wrong tack and called him off the job.”

The room turned stifling suddenly. Jessie sat very still.

“And for this allegation, Mr. Queen, you’re also drawing on your imagination?”

“No,” the old man said, smiling for the first time. “For this one, Mr. Humffrey, I have an affidavit sworn to and signed by George Weirhauser. Would you care to see it? I have it right here in my pocket.”

“I’m tempted to say no,” Humffrey murmured. “But as a man who has played poker with Harvard undergraduates in his day — yes, I think I would care to see it.”

Inspector Queen promptly took a folded paper out of his pocket and laid it on the desk.

Jessie almost protested aloud. She fully expected the millionaire to pounce on the paper and tear it to pieces. But he merely reached for it, unfolded it, read it through, folded it again, and politely handed it back.

“Of course, I don’t know this man Weirhauser’s signature from yours, Mr. Queen,” he said, clasping his bony hands behind his head. “However, since you seem to have got to him, it doesn’t really matter. By the way, even if this is a legitimate affidavit its contents aren’t necessarily unchallengeable. I fancy Weirhauser hasn’t too sweet a reputation, and if it became a matter of his word against mine...”

“Then you’re denying this, too?”

“For legal purposes — if it should ever come to that, which considering your extra-legal activities, Mr. Queen, I strongly doubt — for legal purposes, as I say, I should obviously prefer to let my attorneys answer your question. But as among the three of us here,” and he smiled coldly, “I see no harm in admitting that yes, I engaged a detective to follow you and Miss Sherwood last week, simply to see what mischief you two were up to. I’d gathered from what Miss Sherwood let drop, that night she left my home on Nair Island, that you and she were bent on following up her hysterical belief that the baby was murdered; and I felt — in my wife’s protection, if not in mine — that I was justified in keeping myself informed. When my man’s report indicated that you were chasing some will-o’-the-wisp involving a woman I had never heard of, I of course lost interest. My only regret is that in hiring Weirhauser I seem to have made a mistake. I detest mistakes, Mr. Queen, particularly my own.” He turned his thin smile on Jessie; and in spite of herself, she stiffened. “My worst mistake, Miss Sherwood, apparently was in hiring you. Why couldn’t you have let the whole distressing affair drop?”

“Because I loved that baby,” Jessie cried, “and he was murdered, Mr. Humffrey.”

Humffrey shook his head. “There’s no reasoning with a woman, is there, Mr. Queen? But go on.”

The old man had been waiting patiently. “I believe you just said you lost interest when you found out we were on the trail of a woman you’d never heard of, Mr. Humffrey. Is that your position? That you never knew Connie Coy, the nightclub singer?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen,” the millionaire said gently, “that is my position.”

“Then I can’t understand your activities the day after you fired Weirhauser. Last Sunday night Weirhauser told you we were asking questions about the Coy girl and that she was expected back soon from Chicago. The next day — this past Monday, Mr. Humffrey — you spent the entire day and a good deal of the evening at Grand Central Terminal watching the arrival of trains from Chicago. Why would you have done that if you didn’t know Connie Coy and had no interest in her?”

Humffrey was silent. For the first time a slight frown drew his brows toward each other. Then he said, “I think I’m beginning to be bored with this conversation, Mr. Queen. Of course I was not in Grand Central Terminal that day, to watch the Chicago trains or for any other absurd purpose.”

“That’s funny,” the old man retorted. “A redcap and a clerk at one of the newsstands have identified a Stamford, Connecticut news photo of you as that of a man they saw hanging around the Chicago incoming train gates at Grand Central all day.”

The millionaire stared at him.

Richard Queen stared back.

“Now you annoy me, Mr. Queen,” Humffrey said icily. “Your so-called identifications don’t impress me at all. You must know, from your days as a competent police officer, how unsatisfactory such identifications are. I must really ask you to excuse me.”

He rose.

“Just when I was getting to the most interesting part, Mr. Humffrey?”

The old man’s grin apparently changed Humffrey’s mind. He sat down again.

“Very well,” he said. “What else have you dreamed up?”

“The Coy girl got in at Grand Central that evening. She took a taxi uptown, and you followed her to 88th Street.”

“And you have a witness to that?”

“No.”

“My dear Queen.”

“At least not yet, Mr. Humffrey.”

Humffrey settled back. “I suppose I should hear this fairy tale out.”

“You followed Connie Coy home, you took up a position on a roof overlooking her top-floor apartment, and when you saw me pumping her you aimed at a point midway between her eyes with a gun you were carrying, and you shot her dead.

“Don’t interrupt me now,” the old man said softly. “Finner was killed because he had the file on the case and knew who the baby’s parents were. Connie Coy was killed because, as the mother of the baby, she certainly knew the identity of its father. The only one who benefits by destroying those papers and shutting Finner’s and the real mother’s mouth, Mr. Humffrey, is the baby’s real father.

“You’ve committed two cold-blooded murders to keep your wife, her relatives, your blue-nosed friends, me, Jessie Sherwood, from finding out that you’d adopted, not a stranger’s child, but a child you yourself fathered in a cheap affair with a nightclub entertainer.”

Humffrey opened a side drawer of his desk.

Jessie’s heart gave a wicked jump.

As for the old man, his hand flashed up to hover over the middle button of his jacket.

But when the millionaire leaned back, Jessie saw that he had merely reached for a box of cigars.

“Do you mind, Miss Sherwood? I rarely smoke — only, in fact, when I’m in danger of losing my temper.” He lit a cigar with a platinum desk lighter and looked at Richard Queen with a mineral brightness. “This has gone beyond simple senility, Mr. Queen. You’re a dangerous lunatic. You claim that I not only committed two atrocious murders, but that I did so in order to conceal from the world that I was the blood-father of the unfortunate little boy I adopted. I can’t imagine your laying any other heinous crimes at my door, but from the beginning you and Miss Sherwood have insisted Michael was murdered. How does your diseased mind reconcile his alleged murder with my subsequent crimes? Did I murder my own child, too?”

“I think you got the idea when your nephew made that drunken, senseless attempt to break into the baby’s nursery the night of July 4th,” the Inspector said quietly. “What you couldn’t have known, of course, was that Frost would suffer an appendix attack and have to have an emergency operation — an ironbound alibi — for the very night you picked. I think you murdered Michael, Mr. Humffrey, yes. I think you selected a night when you knew Miss Sherwood would be off. I think that after your wife fell asleep you deliberately suffocated the baby, and that in the confusion after Miss Sherwood’s arrival to find the baby dead you noticed the pillowslip in the crib with its telltale handprint that indicated murder, and disposed of it. And from that moment on, of course, you kept insisting that Jessie Sherwood had been seeing things and that the baby’s death was an unfortunate nursery accident. Yes, Mr. Humffrey, that’s exactly what I think.”

“Making me out a monster with few precedents.” Humffrey’s nasal tones crackled. “Because only a monster murders his own flesh and blood — eh, Mr. Queen?”

“If he does it believing it is his own flesh and blood.”

“I beg your pardon?” The millionaire sounded amazed.

“When you found out that Connie Coy was pregnant and arranged through Finner to adopt the baby without her knowledge when it was born, Mr. Humffrey, you did it because you wanted possession of your own child. But suppose after you arranged for the secret purchase of your baby, with a forged birth certificate, with Finner paid off, with Connie Coy not knowing you had the baby and your wife not knowing the baby was yours — suppose after all this, Mr. Humffrey, you suddenly began to suspect you’d been made a fool of? That you’d gone to all that trouble and skulduggery to pass your name on to a baby that wasn’t yours at all!”

Humffrey was quite still.

“A woman who’d had an affair with one man might have had affairs with a dozen, you told yourself. Suppose you even checked back and found that the Coy girl had been sleeping around with other men at the same time you were her lover? You being what you are — a proud, arrogant man with an exaggerated sense of family and social position — your love for the child you’d thought was yours might well have turned to hate. And so one night you murdered him.”

The cigar had gone out. Humffrey was very pale.

“Get out,” he said thickly. “No, wait. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to spell out for me just what further incredible flights of your fancy, Mr. Queen, I must protect myself against. According to you, I fathered that child in a sordid affair, I murdered the child, I murdered Finner, I murdered the child’s mother. Against these insanities you have adduced just two alleged pieces of evidence — that I hired a private detective to follow you two for a week, which I have explained, and that I was seen in Grand Central Terminal last Monday watching for Chicago trains, which I deny. What else have you?”

“You were in the Nair Island house on the night of the baby’s murder.”

“I was in the Nair Island house on the night of the baby’s accidental death,” the millionaire said coolly. “A coroner’s jury supports my version of the slight difference in our phraseology. What else?”

“You had the strongest motive of anyone in the world to remove the folder marked ‘Humffrey’ from Finner’s filing cabinet and destroy it.”

“I cannot grant even the existence of such a folder,” Humffrey smiled. “Can you prove it? What else?”

“You have no alibi for the afternoon of Finner’s murder.”

“You state an assumption as a fact. But even if your assumption were a fact — neither have ten thousand other men. What else, Mr. Queen?”

“You have no alibi for the evening of Connie Coy’s murder.”

“I can only repeat my previous comment. Anything else?”

“Well, we’re working on you,” the old man drawled. “A whole group of us.”

“A whole group?” Humffrey pushed his chair back.

“Oh, yes. I’ve recruited a force of men like myself, Mr. Humffrey, retired police officers who’ve become very interested in this case. So, you see, it wouldn’t do you the least good to kill Miss Sherwood and me, as you tried to do Monday night. Those men know the whole story... and you don’t know who they are. Come, Jessie.”

All Jessie could think of was that her back was to him; she could almost hear the blast of doom exploding behind her as she went to the door. But nothing happened. Alton Humffrey simply sat in the baronial chair at his desk, thinking.

“One moment.” The millionaire came slowly around the desk toward them.

Richard Queen moved over to block the doorway. Humffrey stopped a few feet away, so close Jessie could smell the after-shave lotion on his gaunt cheeks.

“After reflection, Mr. Queen,” he said good-humoredly, “I must conclude that you and your aging cronies have exactly nothing.”

“Then you’ve got exactly nothing to worry about, Mr. Humffrey.”

“We’re in a sort of stalemate, aren’t we? I won’t go to the police to make you stop annoying me, because I prefer being annoyed in private rather than in public. You won’t go to the police with your fantastic story, because your activities could land you in jail. It looks as if you and I are going to have to grin and bear each other. By the way, that is a gun you’re carrying under your left armpit, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the old man said, showing his denture for a moment. “And I imagine you have a permit for the gun you decided not to take out of that drawer a few minutes ago.”

“Now your imagination is back within bounds, Mr. Queen,” the millionaire smiled.

“He pointed a gun at me once, Richard,” Jessie said in a piping voice. “The night I came back from New York to find the baby dead. Even after I identified myself he kept pointing it at me. For a minute I thought he was going to shoot me.”

“Perhaps I should have.” With those eyes turned on her, Jessie felt absurdly like running. Something womanish insinuated itself into Humffrey’s voice, taunting and cruel. “I’ve given you considerable thought, Miss Sherwood. But now I’ve solved you. You’re that most dismal of people, her brother’s keeper. Good night.”

Late that night Richard Queen snapped to the five silent old men, “It’s going to be rough. He’s an ice-cold customer, and smart. He’s not going to be stampeded into anything stupid. As I said the other night, our best bet is to go backwards. We’ve got to tie him in with the Coy girl. They must have had a love nest somewhere before he dropped her and she moved to 88th Street. Maybe there’s a record of his having paid her rent or hospital bills. We’ve got to find witnesses who saw them together — in restaurants, nightclubs, hideaways, rooming houses, motels...”

He talked until two in the morning to the attentive men. Jessie fell asleep on his shoulder. He did not disturb her.

New York came back from its holiday weekend. Autumn set in suddenly. Children prepared to return to school. Department stores were jammed. Another hurricane threat petered out. A sensational bank robbery in Queens seized the headlines, elbowing out the dwindling followup stories on the Finner and Coy cases.

Alton Humffrey was followed wherever he went. But his comings and goings were exemplary. The homes of friends, the ballet, his attorneys’ offices, Wall Street, the Harvard Club. He did no entertaining.

They discussed a wire tap. Johnny Kripps was for it.

“We’re in so far, Inspector, we may as well go the whole way.”

But Inspector Queen vetoed it.

“He’s too smart to say anything incriminating over a phone, Johnny. Besides, whom would he say it to? He’s cleaned his slate. There’s no business pending on his agenda except keeping an eye on us... I wonder why he hasn’t gone up to New Haven.”

“He’s probably keeping in touch with Dr. Duane by phone,” Jessie said.

The old man looked troubled.

The reports from Angelo, Murphy, and Giffin were discouraging. If Humffrey had set up a love nest for Connie Coy, they could find no trace of it. Before moving to the West Side apartment the Coy girl had lived in a theatrical hotel in the 40s. The ex-detectives, armed with photographs of Humffrey snapped by Kripps with a concealed candid camera, could turn up no one at the hotel who recognized the millionaire. The trace-back of the girl’s New York club dates around August and September of the previous year, when conception must have taken place, was without result.

“She played a lot of dates out of town around that time,” Pete Angelo reported. “One of them was a week’s engagement in Boston. The Humffreys closed up the Nair Island place right after Labor Day last year and went back to Massachusetts. I better run up to Boston, Inspector.”

“All right, Pete. But watch your step. He’s a lot better known there than he is here.”

“In the hot spots?” Angelo’s wrinkles writhed. “If you ask me, this is a case of a guy slipping on his one and only banana peel. They won’t know who he is unless they’ve seen him in their joint. Don’t worry, Inspector.”

Angelo came back three days later.

“Nothing definite,” he reported. “The maitre-dee thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. He remembered Coy singing there, but he says she kept pretty much to herself. I had to shy off, because he began to get nosy. Said ‘another New York detective’ had been around asking questions about Coy.”

“Routine,” the Inspector muttered. “Out of desperation, sounds like. Did the New York cop show this fellow a man’s photo, Pete?”

“Nothing but Coy’s, and no mention of any particular man. They’re still chasing their tails. While I was there,” Angelo added, “I checked on the hotel she’d stayed at, and some likely hideaway eateries and motels. But no dice. I get the feeling Boston or around Boston was where they met, but it was a year ago, and it looks pretty hopeless to me.”

“He must have seen her in New York early last winter, when she got back to town,” ex-Sergeant Murphy said. “But he sure was cagey.”

“Cagey,” Richard Queen said glumly, “is his middle name.”

Kripps and Polonsky shared the shadowing assignment. They kept reporting nothing but tired feet.

On the 14th of the month Jessie announced that she had to go up to Rowayton. Her summer tenants’ lease was expiring the next day and she was a little anxious about the condition of her house.

“It isn’t much,” Jessie said, “but I do have a few nice things and I don’t cherish the thought of finding them smashed or made love to.”

“I think I’ll go with you,” the Inspector said suddenly.

“That isn’t necessary, Richard. Nothing can happen to me while he’s being followed day and night.”

“It isn’t that, Jessie. I can’t understand Humffrey’s staying away from the sanitarium so long. You’d think with his wife so ill he’d go up to see her at least once a week. I’m going to tackle Dr. Duane.”

“I’ll drive you to New Haven.”

“I’d rather not risk your being seen there. Not just yet, anyway. Are your tenants vacating tomorrow?”

“In the morning. I’ve called them.”

“Well, we’ll drive up to Connecticut around noon, and if you don’t mind my borrowing the Dodge, I’ll drop you off at your place and go on to New Haven. I shouldn’t be gone more than a few hours.”

He gave Johnny Kripps, who had the day trick, special instructions. The next morning Kripps called to say that Humffrey had a luncheon appointment in town with an investment banker, and another with some friends for late afternoon at one of his clubs.

Richard Queen found the Duane Sanitarium without difficulty. It was a colossal white Colonial building, with sky-reaching pillars, on a rise of hill overlooking acres of barbered gardens and lawns. But it was entirely surrounded by a high iron-spiked brick wall, and there was a guardhouse at the iron entrance.

The guard was grim-faced. “Sorry, sir, no one gets in without an appointment or pass. You’ll have to write or phone.”

He flashed his gold shield. “You tell your Dr. Duane that a police inspector from New York wants to see him — and not next week, but right now.”

Ten minutes later an attendant was ushering him through a vast flower-spotted reception room and up a flight of marble stairs to the director’s private office.

Dr. Duane was waiting for him beside his secretary’s desk. He was a tall impressive man with a carnation in his lapel.

“Come in, come in,” he said testily, indicating the open door of his office. “Miss Roberts, I’m not to be disturbed.” He followed the old man in and shut the door. “And you are Inspector—?”

“Queen.” He looked around. The office was like an M-G-M set, with massive blond furniture, potted plants, and tropical fish tanks inset in the walls. “I know you’re a busy man, so I’ll get right to the point. I want to see Mrs. Sarah Humffrey.”

Dr. Duane frowned. He seated himself at his immaculate desk and straightened a pile of medical charts.

“Impossible, I’m afraid.”

The old man’s brows went up. “How come, Doctor?”

“She’s in no condition to see anyone. Besides, Mr. Humffrey’s instructions were specific.”

“Not to allow his wife to speak to a police officer?” Inspector Queen asked dryly.

“I didn’t say that, Inspector. The circumstances under which Mrs. Humffrey came to us, as I take it you know, make Mr. Humffrey’s wishes quite understandable. She has seen no one since being admitted here except our staff and her husband.”

“How is she?”

“Better. The prognosis now is considerably more optimistic. However, any emotional upset...”

The man was nervous. He kept fidgeting with his bow tie, the papers, the telephone cord.

“Incidentally, just what’s wrong with her?”

“Now, Inspector Queen, you can’t expect me to tell you that. If Mr. Humffrey wishes to discuss his wife’s illness, that’s his affair. As her physician, I can’t.”

He took out a small black notebook and leafed through it. Duane watched him alertly.

“Now, Doctor, there’s that business of your phone call on the afternoon of Saturday, August 20th, to the New York office of a lawyer named Finner—”

Dr. Duane stiffened as if his chair were wired. “My call?” he cried. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you made it.”

“You people are hounding me! I told those detectives long ago I knew nothing about a phone call to such a person.”

“Oh, some of the boys were up here on that?” the Inspector murmured. “When was this, Dr. Duane?”

“The last week in August. It seems that in investigating the murder of this man — Finner, was it? — the New York police claimed to have found a telephone company record of a toll call from this New Haven number to the man’s office... Didn’t you know they’d been here?” he asked, breaking off suspiciously.

“Of course. I also know, Doctor, that you did make that call.”

“Prove it,” Dr. Duane snapped. “You people prove it! I told your men at the time that it was a mistake. We have never had a patient named Finner here, or a patient directly connected with a person of that name. I showed them our records to prove that. It’s always possible some member of my staff put in such a call, but they have all denied it, and the only explanation I can offer is the one I gave — that someone here did call a New York number but got this fellow Finner’s number by mistake...”

“In a way it’s a break,” Richard Queen said thoughtfully to Jessie when he got back to her cottage in Rowayton. “His lie about the phone call to Finner’s office the afternoon of the murder stopped New York cold. Their one lead to Humffrey in this case was choked off at the source.”

“You haven’t said one word about whether you like my house,” Jessie said. She was surrounded by mops and pails, and she was furious.

“It’s pretty as a picture, Jessie. But about Duane’s lying. Privacy means money to Duane. His whole high-toned establishment is based on it. He can’t afford to have his name kicked around in a murder case. He’s not protecting Humffrey, he’s protecting himself.” He scowled into his coffee cup.

“Those people!”

“What people?”

“My tenants! The condition they left my beautiful little matchbox in! Pigs, that’s what they must be. Look at this filth, Richard!”

“I think I’ll run over and see Abe Pearl while I’m in the neighborhood,” he said philosophically.

“Would you? That will give me a chance to clean at least some of this mess.”

He grinned. “Never knew a woman who could look at a dirty house and think of anything else. All right, Jessie, I’ll get out of here.”

Abe Pearl almost tore his arm out of the socket.

“What’s happening, for God’s sake?” When the old man brought him up to date, he shook his head. “That Humffrey dame might just as well be rotting in solitary somewhere. Do you suppose she’s gone clean off her rocker, Dick, and that’s why they won’t let anyone see her?”

“No,” Richard Queen said slowly. “No, Abe, I don’t think so. What happened up there today only confirms a suspicion I’ve had.”

“What’s that?”

“I think Humffrey’s main reason for putting his wife out of circulation in a place where he can be sure she can’t be got at — and himself staying away, now that he’s being tailed day and night — is to keep us from her.”

“I don’t get it,” Chief Pearl said.

“He’s put her where nobody can talk to her. He’d like us to forget she ever existed. Abe, Humffrey is scared to death of something his wife might tell us.”

“About him?” The big man was puzzled.

“About him and the baby’s death. It’s got to be about little Mike’s murder — she probably hasn’t even been told about the other two. And if it’s something Alton Humffrey doesn’t want us to know, then it’s something we’ve got to find out. The problem is, how to get to Sarah Humffrey...”

Jessie wanted to stay over, claiming that it would take a week to clean her house properly. But he hurried her back to the city.

They found Hugh Giffin picking disconsolately at his scar, and Al Murphy staring at the backs of his red-furred hands.

“Hospital,” Giffin said. “Nothing, Inspector. The trail goes back to Finner, and Finner only. Even Finner didn’t pay the bills directly. Connie Coy paid them with the cash Finner provided. Humffrey kept a million miles away from it.”

“Murph,” the Inspector said. “Any luck with the cabs?”

“Nope,” the ex-sergeant said gloomily. “I must have tackled every hackie stationed around Grand Central. Just didn’t hit it, that’s all. Either this Humffrey hopped a cruising cab when he followed the girl home that night, or else he used a private car.”

The old man shook his head. “He’d have felt safer taking a public carrier, Murph. Actually, all he had to do when he saw her climb into a cab with her luggage at Grand Central was take another cab, maybe on Madison or Lexington, and be driven to the general neighborhood of the apartment, then walk over. After the shooting he probably just walked away — another pedestrian out for some air.”

Murphy looked unhappy.

“It’s all right,” Inspector Queen shrugged. “We’ll just have to keep digging.”

He clapped the two men on the shoulder and sent them home.

The following night, when Johnny Kripps came up with his day’s report on Humffrey, the old man said, “I’m calling you off the tail, Johnny. Pete Angelo can take over.”

“You firing me, Inspector?” the bespectacled ex-Homicide man asked, not altogether humorously.

“At the salary you’re getting?” He grinned, not humorously either. “Johnny, have you been spotted by any of the working details?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll have to start cutting corners. We’re getting nowhere. Here’s what I want you to do — I’d do it myself, but you’re the logical man for the job. Drop in at Homicide and see some of the boys. A friendly visit to your old pals, you understand.”

“Steer the talk around to the Coy and Finner cases?”

“Especially the Coy case. Find out what they’ve got. Don’t overdo it, Johnny — I don’t want to have to bail you out of 125 White Street!”

Kripps reported the next afternoon. “They’ve drawn a skunk egg, Inspector. All they had on the Finner case was that New Haven toll call, and Duane’s pooped them on that. The fact that he’s an M.D. running a private sanitarium gave them the bright idea at first that he was mixed up with Finner in the baby racket, but the more they’ve investigated Duane the cleaner he washes. Finner’s case files they’ve exhausted without a lead.”

“And Coy?” Richard Queen asked grimly.

“Believe it or not, they haven’t been able to come up with a single witness who saw a damn thing the night she got it. By the way, they think too that the killer hopped three or four roofs before he hit for ground level. Just walked down, and out, and away, probably on West End Avenue.”

The Inspector tormented his mustache.

“All they’ve got in the Coy case is the bullet they’ve taken from her head and the ones from the plaster.” Kripps shrugged. “Three slugs from the same gun. 38 Special ammo.”

“Pete dug out the gun permit information on Humffrey today,” the old man muttered. “One of the revolvers he owns is — or was — a Colt Cobra, which would fit with the ammo. But the gun is gone, Johnny. That we can be sure of. He probably dropped it in the Hudson the same night he shot Connie.”

“Quite a guy,” Kripps said unadmiringly.

“How do you know?” Jessie said.

“That he’s quite a guy, Miss Sherwood?”

“That he’s disposed of the gun?”

They looked at her.

“But Jessie,” Richard Queen protested, “possession of the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Connie Coy would be enough by itself to warrant a murder indictment. Humffrey wouldn’t be so foolish as to hold on to it. A ballistics comparison test, if we or the police got our hands on it, would mean curtains for him.”

“Clever people are often so clever they’re stupid,” Jessie said. “He might be holding on to the gun out of plain cussedness, just because he figures you think he wouldn’t. He strikes me as that type of man.”

Ex-Inspector Queen and ex-Lieutenant Kripps examined each other.

“What do you think, Johnny?”

“What have we got to lose?”

“Plenty if we get caught at it.”

“Let’s not be.”

“It might throw a scare in him, too,” the old man chuckled. “Maybe even turn up something. I should have thought of it myself! Let’s talk to Murph and Giffin and the others and see how they feel about it.”

“Feel about what?” Jessie asked. “What are you talking about, Richard?”

He grinned at her. “There’s only one way to take the bull, Jessie, and that’s by the horns. We’re going to raid Humffrey’s apartment.”

The opportunity came two nights later. Cullum drove Alton Humffrey out to Oyster Bay to visit friends. The women on the staff had been given the night off.

The raiding party gained entrance to the Park Avenue building by way of an adjoining roof and a boarded-up penthouse. They got into the Humffrey apartment through the service door.

“No ripping, tearing or smashing,” Richard Queen ordered. “But give it a real going-over.”

They found nothing — no gun, no love letters, no receipted bills that tied in with Connie Coy, no correspondence with Finner... not a scrap of evidence to link Alton Humffrey with the murdered girl, or the murdered lawyer, or for that matter with the murdered baby.

The phone rang at three in the morning.

“Mr. Queen?” said a familiar nasal voice.

“Yes.” He was wide-awake instantly.

“I’m disappointed in you.”

“Are you, now.”

“Did you really think you’d find anything in my apartment that could possibly nourish your fantasies?”

“For the record, Mr. Humffrey,” Richard Queen said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes. Well.” Humffrey sounded nasty but amused. “When you get over your attack of amnesia, you might take stock. Having me followed, ransacking my apartment, investigating my past — none of it will get you anywhere. You’re in a pitiful condition, Mr. Queen. Have you considered consulting a palmist?”

His phone clicked gently in the old man’s ear.

There was nothing in the next day’s newspapers about a robbery attempt on Park Avenue.

The Inspector called another conference.

“Humffrey’s right,” he said grimly. “I’m calling you all off.”

“What?” Jessie cried.

“The tail, too?” Wes Polonsky said.

“The tail, too, Wes.”

The five old men stared at the sixth incredulously.

“We’ll get nowhere attacking Humffrey’s strength,” he went on without excitement. “All we’ve done is waste time, money, and shoe leather. He’s covered his tracks from way back where Finner and Coy were concerned, and he has nothing to do now but sit tight. What we’ve got to do is attack his weakness.”

“Does he have one?” Jessie asked bitterly.

“Yes. It’s mixed up with what happened on the night of August 4th on Nair Island. It doesn’t matter which murder we pin on Humffrey, remember. He can only take the long sleep once.”

“Sarah Humffrey? You keep coming back to her, Richard.”

He nodded. “I should have stuck to her from the beginning. I’m convinced Mrs. Humffrey knows something about the baby’s murder that Humffrey is dead scared she’ll spill.” He looked down at Jessie. “We’ve got to worm that information out of her. And that means an inside job.”

“In other words,” Jessie said, “me.”

He took her hand clumsily. “I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I could see a better way, Jessie. Do you think you could get into the Duane Sanitarium as a nurse?”