13. Neptune’s Secret
Stephen Megara’s yacht Helene made a record run from Jamaica north through the peppered islands of the Bahamas, but near New Providence Island she developed serious engine trouble and her master, Captain Swift, was constrained to put her into the port of Nassau for repairs. It was several days before she was able to stand out to sea again.
So it was not until the first of July, eight days after Inspector Vaughn’s receipt of Megara’s radiogram, that the Helene hove into sight of the Long Island coast. Arrangements had been made with the Port authorities to expedite Megara’s clearing through New York Harbor, and the Helene after a brief delay steamed into Long Island Sound, accompanied by a police boat and a flock of small craft hired by enterprising newspapermen who were kept off the Helene’s holystoned decks only with the greatest difficulty.
Eight days... Eight days of singularly halcyon uneventfulness. With the exception of the funeral. And even that was a quiet affair. Brad had been interred in a Long Island cemetery without pomp or untoward circumstance; and Mrs. Brad, it was observed by the gentlemen of the press, bore the ordeal with remarkable fortitude. Even her daughter, no blood-relation of the deceased, was more affected by the interment than the widow.
The search for Velja Krosac had assumed the proportions of a national manhunt. His description had been sent to police headquarters and Sheriffs’ offices throughout the United States and to all port officers; he was being watched for by the police of the forty-eight States, Canada, and Mexico. Despite the widening of the seine, however, no Montenegrin fish was caught; the man had disappeared as effectually as if he had flown off the Earth into space. Of Kling, too, not a trace.
The chauffeur, Fox, was still under guard in his hut; not formally arrested, to be sure, but as effectively a prisoner as if he had been behind the bars of Sing Sing. Quietly the inquiry spread about him; but by the time of Megara’s arrival no identification of his fingerprints had been made in any of the Eastern rogues’ galleries. The Inspector, doggedly, sent copies of the fingerprints farther west. Fox himself maintained his iron silence. He did not complain at his unofficial confinement, but there was a desperate glint in his eye, and the Inspector grimly doubled the guard. It was part of Vaughn’s genius to ignore the man completely, except for the silent guards; Fox was not questioned or bullied; he was left strictly alone. Despite this strain on his nerves, however, the man did not break. He sat quietly in his hut, day after day, barely touching the food relayed to him from the kitchen of Mrs. Baxter, barely moving, barely breathing.
Everything was ready on Friday, the first of July, when the Helene pushed her way up Long Island Sound and through the western narrows of Ketcham’s Cove, anchoring in the deep waters between Oyster Island and the mainland. Bradwood’s landing dock was black with people — detectives, police, troopers. They watched the slow maneuvers of the yacht. It was a gleaming white, low-slung and rakish craft. In the magnifying morning air the neat glitter of her brasswork and the tiny moving figures on her deck were clearly visible. Little boats swayed around her narrow belly.
Inspector Vaughn, District Attorney Isham, Ellery Queen, and Professor Yardley stood on the dock, silently waiting. A launch put out overside, smacked into the waters of the Cove. Several figures could be seen descending the iron staircase and stepping into the launch. Immediately a police boat got under way and the launch followed submissively. They made for the landing. The crowd stirred...
Stephen Megara was a tall, sun-blackened man of powerful physique, with a black mustache and a nose which, from its appearance, had been irremediably battered in a brawl. He was altogether a vital and somehow sinister figure. His leap from the launch to the dock was quick, sure, lithe; all his movements were decisive. Here, Ellery felt as he studied him with keen interest, was the man of action; a richly different person from the paunchy, overfed and prematurely old man that must have been Thomas Brad.
“I’m Stephen Megara,” he said abruptly in English, touched by an Etonian accent. “Quite a reception committee. Helene!” He singled her out of the crowd — the chief actors, standing timidly in the background — Helene, her mother, Jonah, Dr. Temple... Megara took Helene’s hands, ignoring the others, and looked with fierce tenderness into her eyes. She flushed and withdrew her hands slowly. Megara smiled a brief, mustache-raising smile, murmured something into Mrs. Brad’s frozen ear, nodded curtly to Dr. Temple, and turned back. “So Tom’s been murdered? I’m at the service of any one who cares to introduce himself.”
