The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 6. Exhumation

It was on Friday the eighth of October, then, that Mr. Ellery Queen was first introduced to the actors in the Khalkis tragedy, the scene of operations and, what he considered more interesting at the moment, the ‘tightness in the air” sensed a few days before by Miss Joan Brett.

They had all congregated in the drawing-room of the Khalkis house Friday morning―a very subdued and apprehensive company; and while they waited for Assistant District Attorney Pepper and Inspector Queen to arrive, Ellery found himself engaged in conversation with a tall pink-and-white young Englishwoman of charming mould.

“You’re the, Miss Brett, I take it?”

“Sir,” she said severely, “you have the advantage of me.* There was a tiny smile behind the potential frost of her very lovely blue eyes.

Ellery grinned. “That’s not literally true, my dear. Don’t you think that if I had the advantage of you my circulatory system would know it?”

“Hmm. And a fresh “un, too.” She folded her white hands primly in her lap and glanced sideways at the door, where Woodruff and Sergeant Velie stood talking. “Are you a bobby?”

“The veriest shadow of one. Ellery Queen, scion of the illustrious Inspector Queen.”

“I can’t say you’re a very convincing shadow, Mr. Queen.”

Ellery took in her tallness and straightness and niceness with very masculine eyes. “At any rate,” he said, ‘that’s one accusation which will never be directed against you.”

“Mr. Queen!” She sat up very straight, smiling. “Are you jolly well casting aspersions on my figure?”

“Shakes of Astarte!” murmured Ellery. He examined her body critically, and she blushed. “As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even noticed it.”

They laughed together at that, and she said, “I’m a shade of a different kind, Mr. Queen. I’m really very psychic.”

And that was how Ellery learned, most unexpectedly, about the tightness in the air on the day of the funeral. There was a new tightness, too, as he excused himself and rose a moment later to greet his father and Pepper; for young Alan Cheney was glaring at him with homicidal savagery.

Hard on the heels of Pepper and the Inspector came Detective Flint, towing a tubby little old fellow who was perspiring copiously.

“Who’s this?” growled Velie, barring entrance to the drawing-room.

“Says he belongs here,” said Flint, grasping the tubby one’s fat little arm. “What’ll I do with him?”

The Inspector strode forward, hurling his coat and hat on a chair. “Who are you, sir?”

The newcomer was bewildered. He was small and portly and Dutch, with billowy white hair and almost artificially rosy cheeks. He puffed them out now, and the expression on his face became more harassed than ever. Gilbert Sloane said, from across the room, “That’s all right, Inspector. This is Mr. Jan Vreeland, our scout.” His voice was flat and curiously dry.

“Oh!” Queen eyed him shrewdly. “Mr. Vreeland, eh?”

“Yes, yes,” panted Vreeland. “That’s my name. What’s the trouble here, Sloane? Who are all these people? I thought Khalkis was . . . Where’s Mrs. Vreeland?”

“Here I am, darling,” came a floating sugary voice, and Mrs. Vreeland posed in the doorway. The little man trotted to her side, kissed her hastily on the forehead―she was compelled to stoop, and anger flashed for a moment from her bold eyes―handed his hat and coat to Weekes, and then stood stock still, looking about him with amazement.

The Inspector said, “How is it you’ve only just got back, Mr. Vreeland?”

“Returned to my hotel in Quebec last night,” said Vreeland in a series of rapid little wheezes. “Found the telegram. Didn’t know a word about Khalkis dying. Shocking. What’s the congregation for?”

“We’re disinterring Mr. Khalkis’s body this morning, Mr. Vreeland.”

“So?” The little man looked distressed. “And I missed the funeral. Tch, tch! But why a disinterment? Is―?”

“Don’t you think,” said Pepper fretfully, “we ought to get started, Inspector?”

They found Sexton Honeywell fidgeting in the graveyard, prancing up and down before a raw rectangle in the sod where the earth had been turned up during the burial of Khalkis. Honeywell indicated the boundaries, and two men spat on their hands, lifted their spades and began to dig with energy.

No one said a word. The women had been left in the house; only Sloane, Vreeland and Woodruff of the men connected with the case were present; Suiza had professed a distaste for the spectacle, Dr. Wardes had shrugged, and Alan Cheney had doggedly stayed at the trim skirts of Joan Brett. The Queens, Sergeant Velie and a newcomer with a tall lank figure, black jowls, a hideous ropy cigar clenched in his teeth and a black bag at his feet, stood nearby watching the mighty heavings of the gravediggers. Reporters lined the iron fence on Fifty-fourth Street, cameras poised. Police prevented a crowd from massing in the street. Weekes the butler peeped cautiously from behind the courtyard fence. Detectives leaned against the fence. Heads poked out of windows facing the court, necks craning.

At a depth of three feet the men’s spades clanked against iron. They scraped vigorously and, like pirate henchmen digging for buried treasure, cleaned the horizontal surface of the iron door leading to the vault beneath almost with enthusiasm. Their labours completed, they leaped from the shallow pit and leaned against their spades.

The iron door was hauled open. Almost at once the large nostrils of the tall lank cigar-chewing man oscillated rapidly, and he muttered something cryptic beneath his breath. He stepped forward, under the puzzled glances of his audience, fell to his knees and leaned far over, sniffing. He raised his hand, scrambled to his feet and snapped at the Inspector: “Something fishy here!”

“What’s the matter?”

Now the tall lank cigar-chewing man was not given to alarums and excursions, as Inspector Queen knew from previous experience. He was Dr. Samuel Prouty, assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of New York County, and he was a very canny gentleman. Ellery found his pulse quickening, and Honeywell looked positively petrified. Dr. Prouty did not reply; he merely said to the gravediggers: “Get in there and pull out that new coffin, so we can hoist it up here.”

The men lowered themselves cautiously into the black pit, and for a few moments the confused sounds of their hoarse voices and scraping feet could be heard. Then something large and shiny and black crawled into view, and apparatus was hastily adjusted, instructions given . . . .

Finally, the coffin lay on the surface of the graveyard, a little to one side of the gaping crypt.

“He reminds me of Herr Frankenstein,” murmured Ellery to Pepper, looking at Dr. Prouty. But neither of them smiled.

Dr. Prouty was sniffing like a bloodhound. But now they all detected a foul, sickening smell; it grew more malodorous with every passing second. Sloane’s face had turned grey; he fumbled for his handkerchief and sneezed violently.

“Was this damned body embalmed?” demanded Dr. Prouty, crouching over the coffin. No one replied. The two gravediggers began to unscrew the lid. On Fifth Avenue, at precisely the dramatic moment, a vast number of automobiles began a cacophony of raucous horn-tooting―an unearthly accompaniment singularly appropriate to the noisome character of the scene. Then the lid came off . . . .

One thing was immediately, horribly, unbelievably evident. And that was the source of the grave-smell.

For, crammed on top of the stiff, dead, embalmed body of Georg Khalkis, its members askew and―where their rotting flesh was naked to the sky―all blue and blotched . . . was the putrescent body of a man. A second corpse!

* * *

It is at such moments that life becomes an ugly thing, pushed aside by the dreadful urgency of death, and time itself stands still.

For the space of a heart-beat they were puppets in a tableau―unmoving, moveless, stricken dumb, pure terror gleaming in their distended eyes.

Then Sloane made a retching sound, his knees quivering, and he clutched childishly at Woodruff’s meaty shoulder for support. Neither Woodruff nor Jan Vreeland so much as sighed―they just glared at the noxious interloper in Khalkis’s coffin.

Dr. Prouty and Inspector Queen looked at each other in stupefaction. Then the old man strangled a shout and leaped forward, a handkerchief at his offended nostrils, peering wildly into the coffin.

Dr. Prouty’s fingers curved into talons; he grew busy.

Ellery Queen threw back his shoulders and looked at the sky.

“Murdered. Strangled.”

Dr. Prouty’s brief examination revealed so much. He had managed, with Sergeant Velie’s assistance, to turn the body over. The victim had been found lying face down, head cradled against Khalkis’s lifeless shoulder. Now they could see the face itself―eyes sunken deeply in the head, open eyes revealing eyeballs incredibly dry and brownish. But the face itself was not so distorted as to be inhuman. Under the irregular livid patch was a dark skin. The nose, a little flaccid now, must nevertheless have been sharp and pointed in life. The lines and creases of the face, softened and puffed by putrefaction, must still have been harsh before decay set in.

Inspector Queen said, in muffled tones, “By heaven, that mug looks familiar!”

Pepper was leaning over his shoulder, staring intently. He muttered: “To me, too, Inspector. I wonder if―”

“Are the will and the steel box in there?” asked Ellery in a dry, cracked voice.

Velie and Dr. Prouty prodded, pulled, felt . . . . “No,” said Velie disgustedly. He looked at his hands, and made a surreptitious brushing movement along his thighs.

“Who cares about that now!” snarled the Inspector. He rose, his small body quivering. “Oh, that was a marvellous deduction of yours, Ellery!” he cried. “Marvellous! Open the coffin and you’ll find the will . . . . Faugh!” He wrinkled his nose. “Thomas!”

Velie lumbered to his side. The Inspector rapped words at him; Velie nodded and plodded away, making for the courtyard gate. The Inspector said sharply, “Sloane, Vreeland, Woodruff. Get back in the house. At once. Not a word to any one. Ritter!” A burly detective lounging at the fence scrambled across the yard. “Stave off the newspaper men. We don’t want them nosing about now. Hurry!” Ritter plunged toward the Fifty-fourth Street gate of the graveyard. “You―Sexton What’s-Your-Name. You men there. Put the lid back on and let’s get this damned―this thing into the house. Come along, Doc. There’s work to do.”