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There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]
- Автор: Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Год: 1943
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- Жанр: Классические детективы
Электронная книга - «There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]». Краткое содержание книги:
“Nicaragua. Solomons. Java. One hitch down in Oorgawy.”
“Soldiers of fortune, eh?”
The Major shrugged. “Seems to me I told you already.”
“Didn’t you two gentlemen spend most of your early days in the South Seas and Malaysia?”
“Oh, sure. We were all over. Raised plenty of hell, Steve and me. I remember once in Batavia—”
“Yes, yes,” said Ellery hurriedly. “By the way, Major, where were you the other evening? The night before the duel?”
“Bed. Sleepin’. Charley, how about a game of checkers?”
Charley muttered something discouraging.
“And Major.” Ellery lit a cigaret scrupulously. “Have you ever been married?”
The old man’s jaw dropped. “Me? Hitched? Jipers, no.”
“Any idea who might have murdered Robert Potts?”
“Same question that old albatross was askin’ me. Nope, not a notion. I’m a man minds his own business, Tuan. Live an’ let live, that’s how I figger it. Sure you won’t play a game o’ checkers, Charley?”
Charley knocked on the tower door. Louella’s bony face appeared behind the glass-protected grille and grinned at them. She unlocked her laboratory door quickly and welcomed them into her den of retorts with a frenetic eagerness that raised lumps on Ellery’s scalp. “Come in! So glad you’ve come to visit me. The most wonderful thing’s happened! See — here—” She kept chattering as she bustled them over to her workbench and exhibited a large porcelain pan heaped with some viscid stuff of a green-gray, dead color, like sea slime. It had a peculiarly pervasive and unavoidable stench.
“What is it, Miss Potts?”
“My plastic.” Louella lowered her voice, looking about. “I think I’m very near my goal. Mr. Mulqueen — I really do. Of course, I put you on your honor not to mention this to anyone — even the police. I don’t trust police, you know. They’re all in the pay of the corporations, and armed with authority as they are, they can come in here and steal my plastic and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. I know your father is that little man, the Inspector, but Charley’s assured me you have no connection with the police department, and—”
Ellery comforted her. “But, Miss Potts, I understood that you needed more funds to carry on your work. I heard your mother refuse you the other evening—”
Louella’s dry face twisted with rage. “She’ll feel sorry!” she spat. “Oh, that’s always the way — the great unselfish ones of science have to accomplish their miracles despite every hardship and obstacle! Well, Mother’s avarice won’t stop me. Some day she’ll regret it — some day when the name of Louella Potts...”
So Louella’s tortured strivings in her smelly laboratory were run by the same dark generator that moved Cornelia Potts, and Thurlow Potts, and even Horatio Potts, to glorification and defense of the Name. The Name... Mr. Queen could wish it were lovelier.
He asked Louella several offhand questions, calculated not to alarm her. No, she had been in her laboratory, working on her plastic, the night before the duel. Yes, all night. Yes, alone.
“I like to be alone, Mr. Mulqueen,” she said, her bony face glowing. And, as if her own statement had brought in its train a whole retinue of old black moods, she lost her enthusiasm, her eagerness palled, her face grew sullen, and she said: “I’ve wasted enough time. Please. If there’s nothing else — I have my Work to do.”
“Of course, Miss Potts.” Ellery moved toward the door; Charley was already there, nibbling his fingernails. “Oh, incidentally,” said Ellery lightly, turning around, “do you keep any guns up here? We’re trying to round up all the guns in the house, Miss Potts, after that terrible accident to your brother Robert—”
“I hate guns,” said Louella, shivering.
“No bullets, either?”
“Certainly not.” Her eyes wandered to the dingy mess in the porcelain pan. “Oh, guns,” she said suddenly. “Yes, they’ve been inquiring about that. That large man — Sergeant Something-or-other — he forced his way in here and turned my laboratory upside down. I had to hide my plastic under my gown...” Her voice became vague.
They fled, depressed.
Dr. Innis was just striding out of Cornelia Potts’s apartment when the two men came down from Louella’s tower.
“Oh, Doctor. How’s Mrs. Potts?”
“Not good, not good, Mr. Queen,” said Innis fretfully. “Marked cardiac deterioration. We’re doing what we can, which isn’t much. I just administered a hypo.”
“Maybe we ought to have a consultant in, Dr. Innis,” suggested Charley.
Dr. Innis stared as if Charley had struck him. “Of course,” he said icily. “If you wish it. But Mr. Thurlow Potts has every confidence in me. I suggest you discuss it with him, and—”
“Oh, come down, Doc,” said Charley irritably. “I know you’re doing what you can. I just don’t want anyone saying we haven’t gone through the motions. How about a nurse?”
Dr. Innis was slightly appeased. “You know how she is about nurses. Goes into tantrums. I really feel it would be bad to cross her in that. That old woman in the house—”
“Bridget?”
“Yes, yes. She’s adequate.” Dr. Innis shook his head. “These heart conditions, Mr. Paxton — we know so little about the heart, there’s so little we can do. She’s an old lady, and she’s driven herself hard. Now this excitement of the past few days has dangerously weakened her, and I’m very much afraid her heart won’t hold out much longer.”
“Too bad,” said Ellery thoughtfully.
Dr. Innis glanced at him in amazement, as if it had never occurred to him that anyone could rue the possible passing of Cornelia Potts. “Yes, certainly,” the physician said. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse me — I must phone the pharmacy for some more digitalis.” He hurried off with his elegant strides.
They made their way downstairs through the foyer to the French doors leading to the terrace and court. Ellery barely glanced into the study as they passed. He knew that Major Gotch was still hopping from chair to chair, playing checkers with himself.
“Horatio?” sighed Charley Paxton.
“None other.”
“You won’t get any more out of him than you got out of Louella. Ellery, we’re wasting our time.”
“I’m beginning to think so. Dad’s been all through this, anyway, and he said he’d got exactly nowhere.” They paused in the doorway, looking out across the gardens to the multi-colored cottage. “I must have been born under a very subtle curse. I live in hope always that some rationale can be applied to even the most haphazard human set-up. This time I think I’m licked... Voici Horatio.”
The burly figure of Horatio Potts appeared from behind the little house, carrying a long ladder, his red bristles a halo in the sun. He wore filthy ducks tied about his joggled paunch with a piece of frayed rope, and tattered sandals on his broad feet. Perspiration stained his blouse darkly.
“What the devil’s he doing?”
“Watch.”
Horatio padded to the nearest tree, a patriarchal sycamore, and set the ladder against the trunk. Then he began to climb, the ladder protesting clearly all the way across the garden. He disappeared among some lower branches, his fat calves struggling upward, disembodied.
The two men waited, wondering.
Suddenly the legs began to dangle; Horatio appeared again, blowing in triumph. One hand firmly clasped the crosspiece of a kite. Carefully the fat man descended from the tree; then he ran out into the open, busily tying the broken end of the kite cord to a large ball of twine from one of his bulging pockets. In a few moments he had his kite whole again, and Messrs. Queen and Paxton stood some yards away, in a doorway, enjoying the spectacle of an elephantine red-haired man racing with whoops through the gardens to let the wind catch a Mickey Mouse kite and lift it bravely into the air above Riverside Drive, New York City, the United States of America, Planet Earth.