The Spanish Cape Mystery

Chapter Fifteen Of an Interruption

The drive back to Spanish Cape was accomplished in an electric silence. Mr. Ellery Queen sat hunched in the tonneau of the big car, nursing his lower lip and buried miles deep in thought. Judge Macklin glanced at his frowning face from time to time with curiosity; and Tiller, in the front seat, could not refrain from turning his head at periodic intervals. No one said anything, and the only sound was the rather menacing whine of a rising wind.

Ellery had been impervious to all of Inspector Moley’s frantic questions. The poor Inspector was beside himself with nervous excitement.

“Too soon,” Ellery had said. “I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I had the whole answer to this extraordinary problem. That story Pitts told about Marco’s cape... it points the way. Very definitely. I see now where I was wrong, and where the murderer’s plan went awry; and in this case that’s more than half the battle. But I haven’t thought it out, Inspector. I need time. Time to think.”

They had left Moley in a state of apoplectic frenzy, with an exhausted and bewildered prisoner on his hands. Mrs. Marco, alias Pitts, was formally booked on a charge of attempted blackmail and placed in the county jail. There had been a sad interlude when two young people, their eyes swollen with weeping, had arrived to visit the county morgue and take legal possession of the body of Laura Constable. Detectives and reporters had harried Ellery with questions. But in the midst of pandemonium he maintained unsmiling peace, and at the first opportunity they had slipped out of Poinsett.

It was only when the car swung off the main highway at Harry Stebbins’s establishment and entered the park-road leading to Spanish Cape that the silence was broken.

“Bad storm comin’ up,” remarked the police driver uneasily. “I’ve seen these winds up here before. Look at that sky.”

The trees of the park were in violent agitation, swaying to a steadily increasing gale. They emerged from the parkland and began to traverse the neck of rock from the mainland, and they saw the evening sky. It was the color of smudgy lead and was filled with huge swollen black clouds racing towards them from the heaving horizon. On the neck they took the full force of the wind and the driver wrestled with the wheel to keep the car on the road.

But no one replied, and they reached the shelter of the cliff-walls on the Cape without mishap.

Ellery leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Stop, please. Before you climb to the house.” The car braked to a halt.

“Where on earth—” began the Judge, raising his shaggy brows.

Ellery opened the door and stepped out into the road. His forehead was still wrinkled, but there was a feverish gleam in his eye. “I’ll be up soon. I think I’ve got my canines into this thing properly. On the scene itself...” He shrugged, smiled in adieu, and sauntered down the path leading toward the terrace.

The sky was rapidly darkening. A flash of lightning lit up the path; they saw Ellery reach the head of the terrace stairs and begin the descent.

Judge Macklin sighed. “We may as well go up to the house. It will rain soon, and he’ll come running back in a hurry.”

They drove on up to the house.

Mr. Ellery Queen slowly descended the terrace steps, paused on the gay flags for a moment, and then went to the round table at which John Marco had died and sat down. Buried between sheer walls of stone at a depth of more than forty feet, the terrace was a haven from the worst of the wind; and he relaxed comfortably in the chair, slumping on his spine in his favorite position for reflection, and staring out through the entrance to the Cove at the sea. Within the limits of his vision there was no craft to be seen; the storm had made them scurry for shelter. The sea boiled now in the Cove, raising a constant spume.

It faded before his eyes as he looked at more distant and immaterial things.

The terrace grew darker as he sat there; until finally, aroused by the blackness, he sighed and rose and went to the stairhead and switched on the overhead lamp. The umbrellas were swaying and fluttering. He sat down again and took up paper and pen and dipped the pen in the inkpot and began to write.

A gigantic drop, from the sound it made, plopped on one of the umbrellas. He stopped writing and twisted about. Then, with a speculative look in his eye, he rose and went to the enormous Spanish jar standing to the left of the lowest step and peered around it. After a moment he stepped behind it. Nodding, he came out and repeated the operation with the jar standing at the right of the stairs. Finally he returned to the table, sat down, and with his hair blowing about in the wind resumed his writing.

He wrote for a long time. The drops increased in size, ferocity, and frequency. One spattered on the sheet before him, blotting a word. He wrote more rapidly.

He finished with the first gust of solid rain. Stuffing the sheets in his pocket he jumped up, turned out the light, and hurried up the path toward the stone steps ascending to the plateau on which the house stood. By the time he had reached the shelter of the patio his shoulders were sopping.

The portly butler met him in the main corridor. “Dinner has been kept hot for you, sir. Mrs. Godfrey has ordered—”

“Thank you,” Ellery replied absently, and waved his hand. He hurried toward the alcove where the switchboard stood, dialed a number, and waited with a serene expression.

“Inspector Moley... Ah, Inspector, I thought I’d catch you in... Yes. Quite. In fact, if you’ll come down to Spanish Cape at once I think we can settle this sad business to your satisfaction tonight!”

The insular interior of the living-room glowed with isolated lights. Outside in the patio, on the roofs, rain hissed and roared. A furious wind battered the windows. Even above the splash of the rain they could hear the trumpeting surf as it lashed at the cliffs of the Cape. It was a good night to be indoors and they all glanced gratefully at the blaze in the fireplace.

“We’re all here,” said Ellery in a soft voice, “but Tiller. I especially want Tiller. If you don’t mind, Mr. Godfrey? He’s been the one bright spot in this case and he deserves a reward.”

Walter Godfrey shrugged; he was for the first time dressed in something like a decent costume, as if with the recovery of his wife he had also recovered his sense of social responsibility. He tugged a bell-rope, said something curtly to the butler, and sank back beside Stella Godfrey.

They were all there — the three Godfreys, the two Munns, and Earle Cort. Judge Macklin and Inspector Moley, curiously subdued, sat a little away from the others; and it was significant that, although nothing of the sort had been discussed, Moley’s chair was nearest the door. Of the nine the only one who looked happy was young Cort. There was an almost fatuous expression of contentment on his face as he squatted at the knees of Rosa Godfrey; and from the dreamy look in Rosa’s blue eyes it was evident that the shadow of John Marco had lifted from both of them. Munn was smoking a long brown cigar, tearing it with his teeth; and Mrs. Munn was deathly quiet. Stella Godfrey, calm but taut, twisted her handkerchief in her hands; and the little millionaire was watchful. The atmosphere was distinctly oppressive.

“You called for me, sir?” asked Tiller politely, from the door.

“Come in, come in, Tiller,” said Ellery. “Sit down; this is no time to stand on ceremony.” Tiller rather timidly sat down on the very edge of a chair, to the rear, glancing at Godfrey’s face; but the millionaire was gazing at Ellery with a cautious alertness.

Ellery stepped to the fireplace and set his back against it so that his face was in shadow and his figure a black unrelieved mass against the flames. The light fell eerily on their faces. He took the sheaf of papers from his pocket and placed them to one side on a taboret, where he could glance at them. Then he applied a match to a cigaret and began.

“In many ways,” he murmured, “this has been a very sad affair. On more than one occasion this evening I have been prompted to shut my mind to the facts and go away. John Marco was a scoundrel of the deepest dye. Apparently in his case there was no middle ground between mala mens and malus animus. Unquestionably he possessed the criminal mind — unembarrassed by the slightest restraint of conscience. To our circumscribed knowledge alone he endangered the happiness of one woman, planned the ruin of another, blasted the life of a third, and caused the death of a fourth. Undoubtedly his ledger, if we only had entree to it, shows many similar cases. In a word, a villain who richly deserved extermination. As you said the other day, Mr. Godfrey, whoever killed him was a benefactor of mankind.” He paused, puffing thoughtfully.

Godfrey said in a harsh tone: “Then why don’t you let well enough alone? Apparently you’ve arrived at a conclusion. The man needed killing; the world’s a better place without him. Instead of—”

“Because,” sighed Ellery, “my work is done with symbols, Mr. Godfrey, not with human beings. And I owe a duty to Inspector Moley, who has been kind enough to let me run wild in his bailiwick. I believe, when all the facts are known, that the murderer of Marco stands an excellent chance of gaining the sympathy of a jury. This was a deliberate crime, but it was a crime which — in a sense, as you imply — had to be done. I choose to close my mind to the human elements and treat it as a problem in mathematics. The fate of the murderer I leave to those who decide such things.”

A pall of hushed tension fell as he picked up the top sheet from the taboret, scanned it briefly in the flickering firelight, and set it down again. “I can’t tell you how confused and baffled I was until this very evening. There was something in the way of a lucid interpretation of the facts. I felt it, I knew it, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then, too, I had made one very glaring error in my previous calculations. Until the woman Pitts — who you now know is Mrs. Marco — revealed a certain fact, I was literally in a fog. But when she told me that the cape which Marco wore when he was found had been brought down to the terrace by her after Marco’s death — in other words, that the cape had not been on the scene of the crime at all during the murder — I saw daylight very clearly indeed, and the rest was merely a matter of time, application, and correlation.”

“What the devil can the cape have to do with it?” muttered Inspector Moley.

“Everything, Inspector, as you shall see. But now that we know Marco was not in possession of his cape at the time he was murdered, let us start from our knowledge of what he actually did possess. He was wearing a complete suit of clothes, with all the fixings. Now, we know that the murderer undressed Marco and took away the complete outfit — or almost complete: that is, coat, trousers, shoes, socks, underclothes, shirt, necktie, and whatever may have been in the pockets. The first problem that must be solved, then, is: Why did the murderer undress the dead man and take away his clothes? That there was a sane, an overwhelmingly sane, reason for this act of apparent insanity I knew; and that the whole solution depended upon its answer I felt instinctively.

“I turned the problem over in my mind until I wore it down to its component fibers. And finally I concluded that there were only five possible theories which would account for the theft of the garments of a murder-victim — any murder-victim, in the most general sense.

“The first,” continued Ellery, after a glance at his notes, “was the possible explanation that the murderer had done it for the contents of the clothes. This was especially important in the light of the existence of certain papers threatening the peace of mind of a number of persons connected with Marco. And, for all we knew, these papers might have been on Marco’s person. But if it were the papers the murderer was after, and they were in the clothes, why hadn’t he taken the papers and left the clothes, intact, behind? For that matter, if it were anything in the clothes, the murderer could have emptied the pockets or torn open linings and secured what he was after without taking the clothes from the body. So that was wrong, obviously.

“The second was an inevitable thought. Inspector Moley will tell you that very often a body is fished out of a river or is found in the woods with the clothes either damaged or missing altogether. In a large percentage of these cases the reason is simple: to conceal the identity of the victim, the destruction or theft of the clothing preventing identification. But this was quite plainly wrong in the case of Marco; he was Marco, no one ever questioned his identity as Marco, and surely his clothing could not have indicated that he was any one else. There never was and cannot be any question of the identity of the corpse in this case, with or without clothes.

“Conversely, there was always the third possibility that in some way the theft of Marco’s clothes tended to conceal the identity of Marco’s murderer. I see blank looks. By that I mean simply that Marco may have been wearing something — or everything — belonging to his murderer, the discovery of which the murderer felt would be fatal to his own safety. But this, too, was clearly wide of the mark, for our invaluable Tiller—” Tiller folded his hands and looked down modestly, although his tiny ears were cocked like a terrier’s — “testified that the specific garments he laid out for Marco just before Marco redressed Saturday night were Marco’s own. Besides, these were the only garments missing from Marco’s wardrobe. Therefore Marco wore them that night and they could not have belonged to the criminal.”

They were so quiet that the crackling of the resinous logs sounded like pistol-shots in the room, and the noise of the rain outside had the overwhelming quality of a cataract’s thunder.

“Fourth,” said Ellery, “because the clothes were bloodstained and in some way the stains were dangerous to the criminal or his plan.” A startled look crept over Moley’s heavy face. “No, no, Inspector, it’s not as elementary as that. If the ‘blood’ was Marco’s, the theory is wrong on two counts: All the clothes of Marco’s which the criminal took away couldn’t have been bloodstained — socks, underwear, shoes? — and even more important, there was no blood as far as the victim of this crime is concerned. Marco was struck over the head and stunned, shedding no blood in the process; and then he was strangled, another bloodless operation.

“But suppose — I anticipate your question, Judge — it was the murderer’s blood involved? That is, improbable as it seems from the position of the body, that Marco had engaged his killer in a struggle, in the course of which the killer had been wounded, inadvertently staining Marco’s clothes with the killer’s blood? Here again there are two objections. The first — again that all of Marco’s clothes couldn’t have been stained, so why were all taken? The second — on the theory that the only reason the killer could want to conceal the fact that he had bled being that he didn’t want to have the police look for a wounded person — is simply that no one involved in this case has been injured. Except Rosa, and she has a perfectly sound explanation which does not necessitate such an elaborate deception. So the bloodstain theory is out.

"There was really,” resumed Ellery quietly after a pause, “only one last possibility.”

The rain hissed and the fire cracked. There were knitted brows and puzzled eyes. It was almost certain that none of them — not even Judge Macklin — envisioned the answer. Ellery flipped his cigaret into the fire.

He turned back and opened his mouth...

The door burst open, bringing Moley to his feet instantly and jerking their heads around in alarm. Roush, the detective, stood there gasping for breath; he was soaked to the skin. He gulped three times before he was able to utter a comprehensible word.

“Chief! Just — been something... Run all the way from the terrace... They’ve cornered this Captain Kidd!”

For a moment they were too stunned to do more than gape.

“Huh?” said Moley in a croaking voice.

“Caught out in the storm!” cried Roush, waving his dripping arms excitedly. “Coast Guard just sighted Waring’s cruiser. For some reason the big ape’s headin’ in for shore — he’s makin’ for the Cape! Looks like he’s in trouble...”

“Captain Kidd,” muttered Ellery. “I don’t—”

“Come on,” yelled Moley, bounding through the doorway. “Roush, get—” His voice died away as he pounded off. The people in the room hesitated, and then with a concerted rush followed him.

Judge Macklin was left staring at Ellery. “What’s the matter, El?”

“I don’t know. This is the strangest development— No,” And with these cryptic words he sprang after the others.

They made for the terrace, a mad boiling crowd, careless of the downpour — women and men, soaked in a moment, their faces oddly alive and glowing with hope and excitement. Moley was in the van, his shoes squishing on the morass underfoot. Only Judge Macklin was sensible enough to think of protection against the storm; he came last, more slowly, his tall figure draped in a sou’wester he had picked up somewhere in the house.

A group of detectives, their coats gushing rain, were balanced precariously on the white beams of the open terrace roof, struggling with the swivel-joints of the two large brass searchlights. Jorum was there to one side looking on with an indifferent, almost majestic, air. The men’s garments whipped madly in the wind.

Moley jumped, shouting orders, onto the terrace. It was a wonder, in all the turmoil raging above his head, that some one did not slip from a wet beam and break his neck on the flags below. But finally the switches were found, and simultaneously two blinding white beams a foot wide leaped into being in the darkness, stabbing at the sky. The flood was gray hell in the path of the beams.

“Straighten ’em out, you clucks!” roared the Inspector, dancing and waving his arms. “Focus ’em through that opening ahead of you!”

Erratically the beams jerked into position. Then they were horizontal to the terrace, and they fused and crossed each other fifteen feet above the water boiling outside the entrance to the Cove.

They strained and craned, faces streaming, following the rigid paths of the beacons. At first they could make out nothing but the translucent wall of the deluge impinging on the black waters below. But then, as one of the searchlights moved a little, they saw a wildly plunging speck far out to sea. At the same moment a third beam of light swept into view, from the seaside. It was dancing about the speck.

“Coast Guard,” shrieked Mrs. Godfrey. “Oh, catch him, catch him!” Her fists were fiercely clenched, her hair hanging in limp strands down her face.

The sharp prow of the Coast Guard boat edged into sight, bearing down on Hollis Waring’s cruiser.

The cruiser was in evident distress. It pitched sickeningly, and it seemed dangerously low in the stern. As it came nearer they could discern the pigmy figure of a man staggering about its deck. The figure was too minute for recognition, but that he was in a state of desperation was apparent from his actions. And then, so suddenly that they froze and stopped breathing, the ship’s bow upended, it shivered under the impact of a tremendous sea, which momentarily obscured it... When the sea tumbled the cruiser was gone.

They groaned in chorus. The beams darted to and fro, searching frantically.

“There he is!” screamed Rosa. “He’s swimming!”

One of the beams had touched a dark bobbing head in the water. Arms flashed in and out of the sea. The man was swimming strongly, but he was being buffeted about by the raging seas and he made painful progress toward the Cove. The Coast Guard ship loomed larger, but it kept off, afraid of running the swimmer down. A lifeline snaked and glittered over the water and fell short. But now they were so close to the cliffs that it was perilous for the ship to come nearer.

“He’s making it!” shouted Moley. “Get blankets, somebody! Keep ’em dry!”

In ever-slowing lunges the swimmer inched toward the Cove. He was weakening. Nothing could be seen but the top of his head.

Helpless, they could only watch. And after an age it was over, like the climax of a nightmare. Nearing the entrance to the Cove, he was sucked in suddenly like a sardine. All they could see was a tangle of arms and legs as he hurtled dangerously near the cliff-wall to their right and shot with the resiliency of a cork into the comparative shelter of the Cove.

The detectives could not get the searchlights to focus steadily on the thrashing, half-drowned figure. Three of them dropped to the terrace and bounded across the strip of beach behind Inspector Moley to the water, lunging for the feebly kicking man. Then Moley had the back of the man’s neck, and he pulled powerfully, getting the swimmer out of the clutches of the rollers, dragging him backward with the assistance of his men against the suck of the sea.

Standing aloof beside Judge Macklin, Ellery could see nothing of the rescued man. But they could see the faces of the crowding people in front of them, and what they saw on those faces caused Judge Macklin, at least, to narrow his eyes. It was sheer amazement, as if they had all received a stunning shock.

Some one jostled them aside, carrying oilskin-wrapped blankets, and disappeared as he dropped to his knees beside the rescued man. Then Mrs. Godfrey screamed and flung herself forward. They pressed nearer, striving to see.

They heard the man’s deep, exhausted voice. “Thank... God... I... he — kept me — prisoner — somewhere along — coast. I—” The voice stopped. He was panting in huge, terrible, chest-shaking gulps. “Got loose — tonight — fought — boat out of control — I killed — him with a... Body overside — boat stove in — by storm...”

Ellery shouldered Munn and Walter Godfrey aside. The detective was wrapping the blanket about the recumbent man. He was a tall fellow. His eyes were pink with blood and there was a long dirty stubble on his cheeks and a gaunt look about him, as if he had suffered horribly. His clothes — what remained of a once-white linen suit — were sopping rags.

Rosa and her mother were on their knees beside him, clinging to him, weeping.

Ellery’s features wore a pinched look. He stooped and tilted the man’s exhausted face upward. It was a good face, strong and resolute for all its gauntness and fatigue.

“You’re David Kummer?” he asked in a strangled voice, as if he had difficulty in speaking.

Kummer gasped: “Yes... yes. Who are—”

Ellery straightened and jammed his wet hands into his drenched pockets. “I’m frightfully sorry,” he said in the same reluctant croak. “It was a good plan and a good fight, David Kummer. But I am compelled to charge you with the murder of John Marco.”