The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 21. Yearbook

The cheerless mood persisted until far―very far―into the bleak hours of the early morning. In vain the Inspector endeavoured, by every paternal artifice known to him, to persuade his gloomy scion to abandon thought and seek solace in the depths of bed. Ellery, clad in dressing-gown and slippers, crouched in an armchair before a weak fire in the living-room, intent on every word of the leather-bound yearbook he had filched from Sloane’s desk, did not deign even to reply to the old man’s blandishments.

Finally in despair the Inspector shuffled into the kitchen, brewed a pot of coffee―young Djuna was fast asleep in his cubicle―and in silence drank a lonely toast. The aroma titillated Ellery’s olfactory just as he concluded his study of the diary; he rubbed his eyes sleepily, went into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee and the two drank together, still in a silence that offended the eardrums.

The old man set his mug down with a bang. “Tell papa. What the devil’s eating you, son?”

“Well,” said Ellery, ‘may you ask. I’ve been awaiting that question with the impatience of Lady Macbeth. You postulate Gilbert Sloane as the murderer of his brother, Albert Grimshaw―the result of admittedly confessional circumstances and what seems to you a sharp, clear case. Now I ask you: who sent the anonymous letter which disclosed Sloane as Grimshaw’s brother?”

The old man sucked at his old teeth. “Go on,” he said. “Get it off your chest. There’s an answer for everything.”

“Oh, and is there?” retorted Ellery. “Very well―let me expatiate. Sloane himself didn’t send that letter, obviously―would he give the police an item of damning information against himself if he were guilty? Naturally not. Who then did write the letter? Remember that Sloane said no one in the world except himself―not even Grimshaw, mind you, his own brother―knew that Gilbert Sloane, as Gilbert Sloane, was the brother of the murdered man. So I ask again: who wrote the letter? For whoever wrote it did know, and yet it seems that no one except the single individual who wouldn’t write the letter did write it. Doesn’t follow.”

“Ah, my son, if all questions were as easy to answer as that,” grinned the Inspector. “Of course Sloane didn’t write the letter! And I don’t care a hoot who did. It isn’t important. Because―” he brandished his thin forefinger affectionately―”because we have only Sloane’s word for it that no one but he knew. You see? Certainly, if Sloane had told the truth the question would be a poser, but with Sloane himself the criminal, anything he said is open to doubt, especially if he said it―as he did―at a time when he thought he was safe and when lies might tangle up the trail for the police. So―it’s quite likely that someone else did know that Sloane as Sloane was Grimshaw’s brother. Sloane himself must have spilled it to someone. The best possibility is Mrs. Sloane, although it’s true that there doesn’t seem to be any reason why she should inform against her own husband―”

“An acute parenthesis,” drawled Ellery. “Because, according to your own case against Sloane, you postulated Mrs. Sloane as the person who warned Sloane by telephone. Certainly that isn’t consistent with the indigenous malice of the anonymous letter-writer.”

“All right,” said the Inspector instantly, “look at it this way. Did Sloane have an enemy? Darned right he did―the one who told against him in another instance: Mrs. Vreeland! So maybe she’s the one who wrote the letter. How she came to know of the brothership, of course, is a matter of guesswork, but I’ll bet―”

“And you’d lose your money. There’s something so rotten in Denmark that it makes my head ache―a flaw, a flaw! I’m hanged if . . . “ He did not finish; his face grew longer, if that were possible, and he flung a matchstick into the dying fire with viciousness.

The shrill br-r-ring of the telephone startled them. “Who on earth could that be at this hour?” exclaimed the old man. “Hello! . . . Oh. Good morning . . . . Quite all right. What did you find? . . . I see. That’s fine. Now run along to bed―late hours are mighty bad for a nice young girl’s complexion. Ha, ha! . . . Very well. Good night, my dear.” He hung up, smiling. Ellery asked a question with his eyebrows. “Una Lambert. Says there’s no question about the authenticity of the written name on that burnt scrap of will. It’s Khalkis’s fist, without a doubt. And she says that everything else tends to show that the fragment is part of the original document.”

“Indeed.” The information depressed Ellery for no reason imaginable to the Inspector.

The old man’s good humour was swallowed in a little storm of temper. “By heaven, it seems to me you don’t want this blasted case to end!”

Ellery shook his head gently. “Don’t scold, dad. I can think of no consummation more devoutly to be wished. But it must be a consummation which is satisfactory to me.”

“Well, it’s satisfactory to me. The case against Sloane is perfect. And with Sloane dead, Grimshaw’s partner is wiped off the map and everything is cleaned up. Because, as you said, Grimshaw’s partner was the only outsider who knew that Knox had that Leonardo thingamajig, and now that he’s a stiff―although the painting business might still have been one of the contributing motives in Sloane’s original plot―the whole thing remains a police secret. That means,” continued the Inspector with a little smack of his lips, ‘that we can go to work on Mr. James J. Knox. We’ve got to get that painting back, if it’s really the one that was stolen by Grimshaw from the Victoria Museum.”

“Have you had a reply to your cablegram?”

“Nary a word.” The Inspector frowned. “Can’t understand why the Museum doesn’t answer. Anyway, if that British crowd try to get the painting back from Knox, there’ll be a cat-fight. Knox with his money and pull will keep himself in the clear. I think Sampson and I had better work this problem out slowly―don’t want to scare our rich bird into getting his hackles up.”

“You’ll have ample opportunity to settle the affair. It’s doubtful if the Museum would want the story publicized that the painting which their experts had pronounced a genuine Leonardo and which was exhibited publicly as such is an almost valueless copy. That is, always provided it is a copy. We have only Knox’s word for that, you know.”

The Inspector spat thoughtfully into the fire. “Gets more and more complicated. Anyway, to come back to the Sloane case. Thomas got his report on the fist of people registered at the Hotel Benedict on the Thursday and Friday of Grimshaw’s stay. Well, there’s no name on the list which corresponds or is connected with anyone in the case. I suppose that was to be expected. Sloane said he thought the fellow was a hotel acquaintance of Grimshaw’s―he must have lied, and this mysterious baby must be someone else, maybe not in the case at all, who came after Sloane . . . .”

The Inspector chattered on, carried away by a soothing virtuous contentment. Ellery said nothing in reply to these calm verbal wanderings; he extended his long arm and picked up the Sloane diary, flipping its pages, studying it again with gloomy mien.

“Look here, dad,” he said at last, without raising his eyes, “it is true that on the surface everything matches glossily with the hypothesis of Sloane as the deus ex ma-china of these events. But that’s just the trouble with it; it’s all occurred much too fortuitously to lull my restless sensibilities. Don’t forget, please, that once before we―I―have been tricked into accepting a solution . . . a solution which might have been accepted and publicized and forgotten by this time had it not been pricked by the sheerest accident. This one seems, so to speak, unprickable . . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t put my finger on it. But I feel there’s something wrong.”

“But it won’t do you any good to bat your head against a stone wall, son.”

Ellery grinned feebly. “Such a procedure might knock an inspiration into being,” he said, and bit his hp. “Follow me for a moment.” He held up the diary, and the Inspector flapped over in his carpet-slippers to look at it. Ellery had opened the book at the point of its last written entry―a wordy report in neat, small script under the printed date: Sunday Oct. 10. The opposite page was headed by: Monday Oct. 11. That page was blank.

“Now, you see,” said Ellery with a sigh, “I have been poring over this personalized and therefore interesting yearbook, and I could not escape noting that Sloane made no entry to-night―the night of his, as you say, suicide. Allow me for a moment to epitomize the spirit-content of this diary. We brush aside at once, of course, the fact that nowhere in these pages is mention made of the incidents surrounding Grimshaw’s strangling; and the fact that merely conventional reference is made to Khalkis’s death: for naturally, were Sloane a murderer, he would avoid committing to paper anything which might incriminate him. On the other hand, certain observations are self-evident: for one thing, Sloane wrote in this diary religiously each night of the week at the same approximate hour, setting down before his day’s notation the time of writing; as you can see, it has been for months the hour of eleven p.m. or thereabout. For another thing, this diary reveals Sloane to have been a gentleman of overwhelming ego, a man of enormous preoccupation with himself; a reading elicits lurid details, for example―painfully lurid―of a sexual affair with some woman, cautiously unnamed.”

Ellery slammed the book shut, flung it on the table, leaped to his feet and began to pace the rug before the hearth, his forehead creased in scores of tiny lines. The old man peered up at him unhappily. “Now I ask you, in the name of all the knowledge of modern psychology,” cried Ellery, “would such a man as this―a man who dramatized everything about himself, as this diary copiously illustrates, a man who found in the expression of his ego the obviously morbid satisfaction that is so characteristic of his type―would such a man pass up the unexampled, the unique, the cosmic opportunity of writing dramatically about the greatest event of his life: his coming death?”

“Thoughts of that very death may have pushed everything else from his mind,” suggested the Inspector.

“I doubt it,” said Ellery bitterly. “Sloane, if he had been informed by the tenuous telephone call of police suspicion, realizing that he could no longer evade punishment for his crime, having besides even a brief interval during which he might work unmolested, would have been impelled by every crying fibre of his personality to make that last heroic entry in his diary . . . an argument supported, moreover, by the circumstance that all this occurred around the general period―eleven o’clock―when he was accustomed to confiding in his little yearbook. And yet,” he cried, “no entry at all was made for this night, of all nights!”

His eyes were fevered, and the Inspector rose and placed his small thin hand on Ellery’s arm, shaking him with almost womanish sympathy. “Come, don’t take on so. It sounds good, but it doesn’t prove anything, son . . . • Come to bed.”

Ellery allowed himself to be led into their bedroom. “Yes,” he said, “it proves nothing.”

And a half-hour later in the darkness, addressed to his father’s soft snores, “But it is just such a psychological indication as this that makes me question whether Gilbert Sloane committed suicide after all!”

The chill darkness of the bedroom providing little comfort and no response, Ellery proved himself a philosopher and went to sleep. He dreamed all night of animated diaries astride curiously human coffins brandishing revolvers and shooting at the man in the moon―a lunar countenance whose features were unmistakably those of Albert Grimshaw.

“Most of the epic discoveries of modern science have been made possible fundamentally by their discoverers’ persistence in applying cold logic to a set of actions and reactions . . . .

“Lavoisier’s simple explanation―it seems simple to us now―of what happens to pure lead when it is “burned”―an explanation which exposed the centuries-old fallacy of that horrific creation of the medieval mind, phlogiston―was the result of what seems to us in our atmosphere of modern scientific thoroughness an absurdly basic principle, as indeed it is; that if a substance weighs one ounce before burning in the air, and weighs one ounce point o seven after burning in the air, then some substance from the air has been added to the original ore to account for the extra weight . . . . It took some sixteen centuries for man to realize this, and to name the new product lead oxide!

“No phenomenon in a crime is impossible of explanation. Persistence and simple logic are the cardiac requisites of the detective. What to the unthinking is a mystery, to the calculating is self-evident truth . . . . The detection of crime is no longer a matter of medieval mutterings over a crystal; it is one of the most exact of modern sciences. And at its root lies logic.”

―from “Byways of Modern Science”

(pp. 147-8) by Dr. George Hinchcliffe