The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 22. Bottom

Ellery Queen discovered with a growing sense of futility that one of his innumerable ancient sources for wisdom, Pittacus of Mitylene, had not made provision for the human margin of frailty. Time, Ellery found, was not be seized by the forelock. The days went by, and it was not in his power to stay them. A week passed, and he had succeeded in wringing from its fleeing hours only a few drops of bitterness, and not any mental sap at all―an empty beaker, all things considered, into whose arid bottom he stared with increasing unhappiness.

For others, however, the week had been full to the brim. Sloane’s suicide and funeral had undammed a flood. The newspapers wallowed in copious details. They splashed about in the backwaters of Gilbert Sloane’s personal history. They sluiced the dead man with streams of subtle vituperation, managed without singular effort to soak and soften the outer shell of his life, so that it warped and split and curled off, a spoiled and loggy reputation. Those who survived him were caught up in the backwash, and of these Delphina Sloane became of inexorable necessity the most prominent. Waves of words lapped at the shores of her grief. The Khalkis house had been converted into an impregnable lighthouse toward whose beacon the not-to-be-daunted representatives of the press directed their barques.

One miniature newspaper which might well have been named The Enterprise―but was not―offered the widow a rajah’s ransom in return for her permission to sanction a series of articles, to be printed below a line-cut of her signature, and to be titled with editorial restraint: Delphina Sloane’s Own Story of Life With a Murderer. And although the magnanimous offer was spurned with outraged silence, this glowing model of journalistic impudence succeeded in excavating some precious personal items from Mrs. Sloane’s first marriage and exhibited them to their readers with the zest and pride of victorious archaeology. Young Alan Cheney punched a reporter attached to the tabloid, sending him back to his City Editor with a bruised eye and a scarlet nose; and it took a grand pulling of wires to keep the paper from having Alan arrested on a charge of assault.

During this buzzing interim in which the scavengers croaked above their carrion, Police Headquarters remained singularly peaceful. The Inspector returned to the less perplexing problems of routine, content merely with clearing up an odd point here and there in order to satisfy the official records of the Khalkis-Grimshaw-Sloane Case, as the newspapers virtuously called it. Dr. Prouty’s autopsy on the body of Gilbert Sloane, performed in a manner thorough although perfunctory, elicited not the barest indication of foul play: there was no poison, no tell-tale marks of violence; the bullet-wound was just such a bullet-wound as a man inflicts when he commits suicide by shooting himself in the temple; and Sloane’s cadaver, as has been signified, was released by the Medical Examiner’s office for consignment to a flowery grave in a suburban cemetery.

The sole morsel of information which seemed to Ellery Queen to possess even a modicum of digestibility was this: that Gilbert Sloane had died instantly. But how this fact was to assist him Ellery confessed to himself, in the thickening fog, he could not see.

The fog, although he did not in this period of darkness realize it, was to be dispelled very shortly; and the fact of Gilbert Sloane’s instantaneous death was to become a brightly visible signpost indeed.