The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 20. Reckoning

Madison Avenue in the vicinity of the Khalkis Galleries was a dark and quiet region when Inspector Queen, Ellery Queen, Sergeant Velie and a number of detectives descended upon it from several directions later that evening. They worked without clamour. The shop itself, as they could see through the wide front pane, was dark; and the entrance to the shop was barred, protected by familiar electrically wired lattice-work. A separate entrance, however, to one side of the shop door held their attention; and the Inspector and Velis whispered together for a moment. Then the sergeant pressed his big thumb on a button above which appeared the words: Night Bell, and they waited in silence. There was no response, and Velie rang again. Five minutes passing without a sound or a light from within, Velie grunted, waved several of his men to join him, and together they broke down the door. It gave with a grinding and screaming of wood and steel hinges, and they tumbled in a heap in the blackness of the hall beyond.

They swarmed up a flight of steps, came to another door which they found in the rays of their flashlights to be protected by another burglar-alarm device, attacked this door with callous vehemence and no apparent fear of the alarm they were setting off in the central bureau of the protective agency, and crashed through.

They found themselves in a long black gallery, extending the entire length of the floor. Their torches revealed in flitting glimpses the unmoved features of numerous painted faces on the walls, the gleam of floor-cases containing objets d”art, and many pieces of pale statuary. Everything seemed quite in order, and no one appeared to challenge their coming.

Almost at the end of the gallery, to their left, a stream of light gashed across the floor, emanating from an open doorway. The Inspector cried: “Sloane! Mr. Sloane!” but there was no answer. They hurried in a body to the source of the illumination and found themselves in a doorway, steel door gaping open and on it lettered the legend:

Mr. Gilbert Sloane, Private But their eyes were not long occupied with such fleeting details. For, as one man, they sucked in their breaths, thronging the doorway, now still as death . . . still, in fact, as the figure of death that was sprawled at a desk in the room, the light of a desk-lamp pitilessly revealing the stark body of Gilbert Sloane.

There was little material for speculation. They stood about the room―someone had snapped on the electric switch―and gazed down at the shattered, bloody head of what had been Gilbert Sloane.

The desk at which he sat, head lying on its left side on a green desk blotter, was in the centre of the private office. One end of the desk was squarely facing the doorway, so that the view of Sloane’s body from the gallery outside was a sideways view. He sat slumped forward in a leather chair, his left arm extended along the top of the blotter, his right arm dangling to the floor along the side of his chair. And a revolver lay on the floor directly under his right hand, a few inches below the tips of his dead fingers, as if it had slipped from his hand. The Inspector leaned over and, without touching the body, examined the dead man’s right temple, which lay exposed to the glare of the office lights. There was a deep, torn, crimson hole in the temple, spattered with blackish powder marks―unquestionably the point of the bullet’s entry. The old man knelt and, very carefully, broke open the revolver. It was fully loaded except for one chamber. He sniffed the muzzle and nodded.

“If this isn’t suicide,” he announced, getting to his feet, T’m a monkey’s uncle.”

Ellery looked about the room. It was a small, neat office; everything in it seemed precisely in its accustomed place. There was no slightest sign of a scuffle anywhere.

Meanwhile, the Inspector had sent a detective off with the revolver, wrapped in tissue, to determine its ownership. He turned back to Ellery as the man went out. “Well, isn’t this enough for you? Still think it’s a frame-up?”

Ellery’s eyes sought some far-off place beyond the confines of the room. He murmured: “No, it looks genuine enough. But what I cannot grasp is the pressing necessity for suicide. After all, there was nothing in our talk with Sloane earlier this evening which might have made him suspect you had a case against him. Nothing was said about the will at that time, the key had not been found, Mrs. Vreeland had not yet told her story. I began to suspect . . . “

They stared at each other. “Mrs. Sloane!” they cried together, and Ellery jumped for the telephone on Sloane’s desk. He became very busy interrogating the operator, was switched to a central office . . . .

The Inspector’s attention was diverted. The wail of a siren reached his ears faintly from Madison Avenue; brakes screeched in the street, and he heard the pounding of heavy feet on the stairs. The Inspector peered into the gallery. Sergeant Velie’s ruthless destruction of the electrical alarm had borne fruit. A squad of grim men dashed in, automatics levelled. It took the Inspector several minutes to convince them that he was in truth the well-known Inspector Queen of the Detective Bureau, and that the men scattered about were detectives, not thieves, and that nothing had apparently been stolen from the Khalkis Galleries. By the time he had placated them, sent them packing, and returned to the office, he found Ellery smoking in a chair and looking more disturbed than ever.

“Find out anything?”

“It’s incredible . . . . It’s taken me some time, but I finally managed to get the information. There was one incoming call on this instrument to-night,” said Ellery morosely. “Within the hour. We traced the incoming call. It emanated from the Khalkis house.”

“As I thought. So that’s how he knew the jig was up! Somebody overheard us talking the case over in the library, and tipped Sloane off by phone from the house.”

“On the other hand,” said Ellery wearily, ‘there was no way of discovering who put the call through to this office or what the conversation was. You’ll have to be satisfied with the bare facts.”

“They’re plenty sufficient, believe me. Thomas!” Velie appeared in the doorway. “Scoot back to the Khalkis house and question everybody there. Find out who was in the house this evening during the time we searched Sloane’s room, questioned Sloane and Mrs. Vreeland, and talked over the Sloane business in the library downstairs. Find out if you can who used one of the phones in the house to-night―and be mighty sure you put Mrs. Sloane on the pan. Understand?”

“Spill the news to the Khalkis bunch?” growled Velie.

“You bet. Take some of the boys with you. Nobody is to put a foot out of the place until I say so.”

Velie left. The telephone rang; the Inspector answered. It was a call from the detective whom he had dispatched with the revolver. He had succeeded in tracing the weapon; it was registered under an official permit which had been issued to Gilbert Sloane. The old man, chuckling, telephoned headquarters for Dr. Samuel Prouty, the Assistant Medical Examiner.

He turned away from the telephone to find Ellery exploring a small safe set in the wall behind Sloane’s desk, its round steel door wide open.

“Anything there?”

“I don’t know yet . . . . Hullo!” Ellery adjusted his pince-nez more firmly on his nose and bent over. Beneath several documents strewn on the floor of the little safe there was a metallic object. The Inspector took it away from him at once.

It was a heavy, old-fashioned gold watch, worn with age. There was no tick of life within it.

The old man turned it over. “If this isn’t the darnedest―!” He waved the watch aloft, and executed a little impromptu war-dance. “Ellery,” he cried, ‘this clinches it! By the Lord Harry, the whole messy business is finished!”

Ellery sharply examined the watch. There, on the reverse side of the open face, etched in tiny script on the gold case-back, appeared the almost obliterated letters of the name: Albert Grimshaw. The engraving was genuinely aged.

Ellery looked more dissatisfied than ever. His misery increased when the Inspector, tucking the watch into one of his vest pockets, said: “No question about it. This is corroboration. Sloane evidently took Grimshaw’s watch from the body at the same time he swiped the promissory note. This coupled with Sloane’s suicide is as much proof of Sloane’s guilt as any man could want.”

“There,” said Ellery dolefully, “I thoroughly agree with you.”

* * *

Miles Woodruff and Assistant District Attorney Pepper put in an appearance on the scene of the suicide some time later. They looked soberly down at the remains of Gilbert Sloane.

“So it was Sloane all the time,” said Woodruff. His normally ruddy face was ridged with pallid muscle. “I knew he must have been the one who stole the will in the first place . . . . Well, Inspector, it’s finished, eh?”

“Thank goodness, yes.”

“Darned rotten way for a man to go out,” said Pepper. “Coward’s way. But then from what I hear Sloane was almost a pansy . . . . Woodruff and I were going back to the Khalkis house when we bumped into Sergeant Velie. Told us what had happened, and we hurried over here. Woodruff, suppose you tell “em about the will.”

Woodruff sat down heavily on a modernistic divan in a corner, wiping his face. “Not much to tell. That scrap is genuine. I think Pepper will confirm this; it exactly matches the corresponding portion of my office copy―exactly. And the handwriting―the written name of Grimshaw―that’s Khalkis’s fist, all right, all right.”

“Fine. But we might as well be sure. Did you bring the scrap and copy back with you?”

“Certainly.” Woodruff handed the Inspector a large manila envelope. “I’ve put in some other samples of Khalkis’s writing, you’ll find.”

The old man looked into the envelope, nodded, and beckoned one of the men standing about. “Johnson, you go down and locate Una Lambert, the handwriting expert. You’ll find her home address at Headquarters. Tell her to examine all samples of handwriting in this envelope. Also the typewriting of the burnt scrap. Want an immediate check-up.”

Johnson went away just as the tall, lank figure of Dr. Prouty, the inevitable cigar in his mouth, slouched into the room.

“Come in, Doc!” said the Inspector genially. “Got another stiff for you. Looks like the last.”

“In this case,” said Dr. Prouty cheerfully. He set down his black bag and looked at the dead man’s shattered head. “Hmph! So it’s you, hey? Never thought I’d meet you again under these circumstances, Mr. Sloane.” And he dropped his hat and coat and became busy.

Five minutes later he rose from his knees. “Plain case of suicide, and that’s my verdict unless somebody here knows different,” he growled. “Where’s the gat?”

“Sent it off with a man,” said the Inspector. “The gun checks.”

“A .38, I suppose?”

“Right.”

“Reason I say that,” continued the Assistant Medical Examiner, chewing away on his cigar, “is that the bullet isn’t here.”

“What do you mean?1 asked Ellery swiftly.

“Keep your shirt on, Queen. Come over here.” Ellery and the others crowded about the desk as Dr. Prouty leaned over the dead man, gripped the thin disordered hair and raised the head. On the left side of the head, which had been lying against the green blotter, there was a welter of stiff blood and a distinguishable hole; the blotter where the head had been resting was stained with blood. “Bullet went clean through his dome. Must be about here somewhere.”

He pulled the body to a sitting position in the chair, as calmly as if he were handling a sack of wet wash. He jerked the head straight, holding it by the slippery hair, and squinted in the direction the bullet must have taken if Sloane had shot himself as he sat in his chair.

“Right out through the open door,” said the Inspector. “Easy to tell from the general direction and the body’s position. DOor was open when we found him, so the bullet must be out in the gallery there.”

The Inspector trotted through the doorway into the now brilliantly lighted gallery. He gauged the probable trajectory of the bullet with his eye, nodded, and proceeded directly to the wall opposite the doorway. A thick antique Persian rug hung there. A moment’s careful scrutiny, a moment’s prodding with the point of his pen-knife, and the old man returned triumphantly carrying a slightly smashed and flattened bullet.

Dr. Prouty grunted in approval, and restored the dead man to his original position. The Inspector turned the deadly pellet over in his fingers. “Nothing to it. He shot himself, the bullet went clean through his head and out through the left side of the skull, flew through the doorway, most of its force spent, and landed in that rug on the wall opposite, outside. Not in very deep, either. Checks all around.”

Ellery examined the bullet, then returned it to his father with an exasperated shrug that was eloquent of a queer and tenacious puzzlement. He retired to a corner to sit beside Woodruff and Pepper while the Inspector and Dr. Prouty superintended the removal of the body for autopsy purposes―a precaution the old man insisted upon.

While the corpse was being carted through the long gallery, Sergeant Velie toiled up the stairs, strode by the stretcher with no more than a passing glance, and marched into the office like a grenadier on parade. Disdaining to remove his great felt hat, which was jammed like a busby on his head, he growled to the Inspector: “No luck.”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter. Just what did you find?”

“Nobody telephoned to-night―at least, that’s what they say.”

“Naturally, whoever phoned won’t admit it. Point probably never will be cleared up,” remarked the Inspector, feeling for his snuff-box. “Dollars to doughnuts it was Mrs. Sloane who tipped Sloane off. Probably eavesdropped when we were gabbing in the library, waited until she could ditch Mrs. Vreeland, and then called Sloane in a hurry. Either she was an accomplice of Sloane’s, or she was innocent and realized, when she heard us talking, where the guilt lay and called to dig the truth out of her hubby . . . . Hard to tell. What Sloane said, or what she said, is a question, but at least the call served to show Sloane that he was through. So he committed suicide as the only way out.”

I’d say,” rumbled Velie, “That she’s not guilty. When she heard the news, she fainted clear away―and believe me, Chief, that wasn’t a phoney. That was a faint.”

Ellery had risen restlessly, barely listening, and was again prowling about. He went through the safe again―nothing there seemed to interest him and he sauntered over to the desk, which was littered with papers, studiously avoiding with the eyes the dark splotch on the blotter where Sloane’s blood had oozed from his head. He began to rummage among the papers. A book-like object caught his fancy; it was a Morocco-bound diary, as he saw by the gilt letters: Diary, 192―, stamped on the cover. It was half-hidden beneath some papers, and he plucked it from the desk with avidity. The Inspector went to his side and inquisitively peeped over his son’s shoulder. Ellery flipped through the yearbook―there was page after page of neat, precise, voluminous writing. He picked up several sheets of paper from the desk on which were samples of Sloane’s handwriting, and compared them with the handwriting in the diary; they all matched exactly. He read snatches in the yearbook, shook his head angrily, shut the book and―slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket.

“Anything there?” asked the Inspector.

“If there is,” said Ellery, “It wouldn’t interest you, dad. I thought you said the case was closed?”

The old man grinned and turned away. Men’s hoarse voices were echoing through the main gallery outside. Sergeant Velie appeared in the midst of a yelling group of reporters. Somehow cameramen managed to slip in, and before long the room was filled with flashes and smoke. The Inspector began an indulgent recital of the facts; men were busy scribbling, and Sergeant Velie was cornered for his story, and Assistant District Attorney Pepper became the centre of a cynically admiring group; and Miles Woodruff expanded his chest and began to talk, rapidly and personally, the gist of his remarks being that he, Attorney Woodruff, had known all along where the guilt lay, but the―well, you know, boys, how these official investigations creep along; the police and the Detective Bureau . . . .

In the midst of the turmoil, Ellery Queen managed to slip out of the office unobserved. He picked his way past the statuary in the gallery, beneath the rich paintings on the walls; trod lightly down the stairs and past the shattered front door, and emerged with a vast sigh of relief into the dark cold air of Madison Avenue.

The Inspector found him there, fifteen minutes later, leaning against a shadowy shop-window, communing with whatever of darkling thoughts swirled about each other in his aching head.