The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 33. Eye-Opener

It was during this period that a rift of serious width opened between father and son. The Inspector’s psychology is understandable: freighted down to the gunwales with worry, emotionally awash, the primitive emerged and threatened for several hours to bare its teeth at the slightest quiver of Ellery’s for the most part silent figure. The old man, sensing something wrong, unable to put his precise little finger on anything material, reacted characteristically: he stormed and ranted and made the lives of his subordinates unbearable, while all the time his wrath was directed obliquely against the bowed head of his son.

Several times that day he made as if to leave the office. It was only at such moments that Ellery lived again; and scenes of increasing irritableness were enacted between the two.

“You mustn’t leave. You must stay here. Please.”

Once the Inspector rebelled, and went away; and Ellery who had been sitting hunched over the telephone, tense as a setter on the point, was overcome with nervousness and bit his lip until blood came. But the Inspector’s resolution was weak; and back he came, red-faced and growling, to keep the incomprehensible vigil with his son. Ellery’s face lightened at once; and he sat himself down at the telephone again, no less strained than before, but now content to devote all his faculties to the apparently herculean task of waiting, waiting . . . .

Telephone calls came in with monotonous regularity. From whom they were, what they signified, the Inspector did not know; but each time the buzzer sounded Ellery snatched at the instrument as if he were a man condemned to death and this the instrument of his reprieve. Each time he was disappointed; listening soberly, nodding, saying a few noncommittal words, and hanging up again.

At one time the Inspector called for Sergeant Velie; and discovered that the usually reliable sergeant had not reported to Headquarters since the previous evening; that no one knew where he was; that not even his wife could account for his absence. This was serious, and the old man’s nose lengthened and his jaw snapped in a manner that boded ill for the sergeant. But he had learned his lesson and said nothing; and Ellery, who perhaps nursed a tiny spark of resentment against his father for having doubted him, did not enlighten him. In the course of the afternoon the Inspector found it necessary to call upon various members of his staff on matters connected with the Grimshaw case; and to his deepening astonishment he discovered that several of these, too, among whom were numbered his most trusted men―Hagstrom, Piggott, Johnson―were also unaccountably missing.

Ellery said quietly: “Velie and the others are out on an important mission. My orders.” He could no longer bear the old man’s agony.

“Your orders!” The Inspector barely did not utter the words loud. His mind was shrouded in a fog of red rage. “You’re trailing somebody,” he said with an effort.

Ellery nodded; his eyes were on the telephone.

Hourly, half-hourly, cryptic telephoned reports came in to Ellery. The Inspector grasped his surging temper at last with firm hand―the danger of open revolt was now past―and waded ferociously into a sea of routine matters. The day lengthened; Ellery ordered luncheon to be sent up; they ate in silence. Ellery’s hand never far from the telephone.

* * *

At dinner they ate again in the Inspector’s office―without appetite, mechanically, in a frightened gloom. Neither man had thought to touch the fight-switch; the shadows clustered thickly and the Inspector let his work go in disgust. They just sat there.

And then, behind locked doors, Ellery found his old affection, and something sparked between them, and Ellery began to speak. He spoke swiftly, certainly, as if what he said had crystallized in his mind after many hours of cold experimental thought. And as he spoke, the last vestige of the Inspector’s pique vanished, and an expression of such amazement as rarely visited that case-hardened old countenance broke through his deep face-lines. He kept muttering: “I can’t believe it. It’s impossible. How can it be?”

And, at the conclusion of Ellery’s recital, for an instant apology crept out of the Inspector’s eyes. No more than an instant; the eyes glittered, and from that moment too he watched the telephone as if it were a sentient thing.

At the normal closing-hour, the Inspector summoned his secretary and issued mysterious instructions. The secretary went away.

Within fifteen minutes the report was casually circulated through the corridors of Police Headquarters that Inspector Queen had left for the day―had gone home, in fact, to muster his strength for the battle that was imminent with James J. Knox’s lawyers.

But Inspector Queen still sat in his darkened office, waiting with Ellery at the telephone, which was now connected to the central police operator on a private line.

Outside, at the curb, a police car with two men in it had been stationed all afternoon, motor running.

Waiting, it seemed, with the same iron patience that was enforced upon the two men high in the grey stone building behind locked doors and in darkness.

It was past midnight when the call finally came.

The Queens leaped into action with muscles coiled for the kill. The telephone rang shrilly. Ellery snatched the receiver, shouted into the transmitter: “Well?”

A man’s rumbling rejoinder.

“On our way!” yelled Ellery, dropping the telephone. The Knox house, dad!”

They dashed out of the Inspector’s office, struggling into their coats as they ran. Downstairs to the waiting automobile, Ellery’s strong voice shouting instructions, and the car, too, leaped into action . . . turning its black nose north and shooting uptown with its siren screaming.

But Ellery’s instructions brought them not to James Knox’s mansion on Riverside Drive. For it turned into Fifty-fourth Street―the street of the church and the Khalkis house. The siren had been choked several blocks away. The car stole on its rubber feet into the dark street, slid without noise to the curb, and Ellery and the Inspector jumped out quickly. Without hesitation they made for the shadows surrounding the basement entrance of the empty Knox house next door to Khalkis’s . . . .

They moved like ghosts, making no sound. Sergeant Velie’s gigantic shoulders pushed up out of a black patch beneath the crumbly steps. A flashlight touched the Queens briefly, snapped off on the instant, and the sergeant whispered: “Inside. Got to work fast. Boys all around the place. Can’t get away. Quick, Chief!”

The Inspector, very calm and steady now, nodded: and Velie gently pushed the door to the basement open. He paused a moment in the basement vestibule, and from nowhere another man popped up. Silently the Queens accepted flashlights from his hand, and at a word from the Inspector, Velie and Ellery muffled them with handkerchiefs, and then the three men crept into the deserted basement. The sergeant, evidently familiar as a cat with the terrain, led the way. The small cloudy light from their torches barely lightened the darkness. Like marauding Indians they glided across the floor, past the ghostly furnace, and up the basement staircase. At the top of the steps Velie paused again; a few whispered words with another man stationed there, and then the sergeant beckoned silently and led the way from the stairs into the blackness of the lower-floor hall.

As they tiptoed into the corridor, they all halted with noiseless abruptness. Somewhere ahead there were cracks of feeble light at the top and bottom of what was evidently a door.

Ellery touched Sergeant Velie’s arm lightly. Velie turned his big head. Ellery breathed a few words. And although it was not visible, Velie grinned a deprecating grin in the darkness, his hand went to his coat pocket, and out it came grasping a revolver.

He permitted his torch to flash for the merest space―and instantly other dark shadows converged on the spot, moving with caution. A hushed colloquy between Velie and another man, who from his voice was Detective Piggott. All exits, it appeared, were covered . . . . The party, at a signal from the sergeant, crept forward to the source of the tiny light. They stood still. Velie drew a deep breath, motioned Piggott and another detective―Johnson, it was, from his slight figure―to his side, roared: “Now!” and the three men, Velie’s iron shoulders in the centre, crashed against the door, splintered it like matchwood, and lunged into the room beyond. Ellery and the Inspector plunged through precipitately; they spread out, uncovered now brilliant flashlights which swept the room, catching something, all trapping in that infinitesimal moment the frozen figure―their quarry―in the centre of the dusty unfurnished room―a figure who had been studying in the rays of a small torch two identical canvases spread out on the floor . . . .

For that same moment there was silence; and then, so suddenly that it might never have existed, the spell shivered. From the chest of the muffled figure came a snarl, a whimper, a choked cry that was animal; it twisted about like a panther, a white hand flashed toward a coat-pocket, and there appeared out of nowhere a bluish automatic. And a very private sort of hell broke loose.

It broke loose as the dark figure fixed a feline glare on the tall form of Ellery Queen, singling him out with a magical directness from among the clustered bodies in the doorway. Very quickly a finger tightened upon the trigger of the automatic and squeezed; and in the same breath there came the coughing roar of many police revolvers. And Sergeant Velie, his face a furious mask in its steely whiteness, hurled himself forward with the speed of an express train on the dark figure . . . . It crumpled to the floor, grotesquely like a form composed of papier-mache.

Ellery Queen, with a soft groan of surprise, opened his eye wide and toppled to his father’s frozen feet.

* * *

Ten minutes later the torches illuminated a scene as still as its predecessor had been frenzied. The solid figure of Dr. Duncan Frost was crouched over a recumbent Ellery, who was lying on a litter of detectives’ overcoats on the dirty floor. Inspector Queen, as white as a drifting cloud, as cold and hard and brittle as porcelain, stood over the physician with eyes fixed immovably on Ellery’s bloodless face. No one said a word, not even the men who surrounded the crazily shapeless figure of Ellery’s assailant on the floor in the centre of the room.

Dr. Frost twitched his head. “Poor shot. He’ll be quite all right. A slight flesh-wound in the shoulder. There, he’s coming to now.”

The Inspector sighed windily. Ellery’s eyes fluttered open, a spasm of pain contracted them, and his hand groped for his left shoulder. It met a bandage. The Inspector squatted beside him. “Ellery, old son―you’re all right, you feel all right?”

Ellery contrived a smile. He shook himself and struggled to his feet, assisted by gentle hands. “Phew!” he said, wincing. “Hello, Doctor. When did you arrive?”

He looked about, and his gaze coagulated on the thick cluster of silent detectives. He lurched toward them, and Sergeant Velie moved aside with a childish, muttering apology. Ellery clutched Velie’s shoulder with his right hand, leaned heavily, stared down at the body on the floor. There was no triumph in his eyes, but a vast moodiness which blended well with the flashlights, the dust, the grim men, and the grey-black shadows.

“Dead?” he asked, wetting his lips.

“Four slugs through his guts,” grunted Velie. “Dead as he’ll ever be.”

Ellery nodded; his eyes shifted and focused on the two stretches of painted canvas, lying very humbly in the dust where someone had tossed them. “Well,” he said with a wry humourless grin, “at least we’ve got them/ and looked down at the dead man again. “A bad break, a very bad break for you, Mister. Like Napoleon, you won every fight but the last.”

He studied the dead open eyes for a moment, shivered a little, and turned to find the Inspector at his side; a little old man who watched him with haggard eyes.

Ellery smiled feebly. “Well, dad, we can let poor old Knox go now. He’s been the willing victim, and he’s served his purpose . . . . Here’s your case lying harmlessly in the dust of Knox’s floor. The lone wolf of the whole affair―blackmailer, thief, murderer . . . .”

They stared down together at the dead man. The dead man on the floor looking back at them quite as if he could see―indeed there was the indelible imprint of a daring and malicious grin on those snarling features―was Assistant District Attorney Pepper.