The Egyptian Cross Mystery
- Автор: Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Серия: Ellery Queen #5
- Год: 1932
- Язык: английский
- Год: Frederick A. Stokes Company
- Жанр: Классические детективы
Электронная книга - «The Egyptian Cross Mystery». Краткое содержание книги:
Ellery visualized the scene as well as if he could see. The young man, he was sure, had stiffened. “Is that so?” said Jonah bitterly. “Very well, that’s all I wanted to know. Interfering, hey? Just an outsider. No right. Very well, Helene. I shan’t interfere any more. I’m going—”
“Jonah!” There was panic in her voice now. “What do you mean? I didn’t—”
“I mean what I said,” growled Jonah. “For years I’ve been just a good fellow, slaving like a dog for one man who spends all his time at sea and another who stayed home playing checkers. Well, that’s out! The damned salary isn’t worth it. I’m going to leave with Hester, by God, and I’ve told your precious Megara so! Told him this afternoon on the yacht. Let him run his own business for a change; I’m sick and tired of doing it for him.”
There was a taut little interval during which neither antagonist said a word. Ellery, behind the security of his tree, sighed. He could imagine what was coming.
He heard the soft escape of Helene’s breath, and sensed Jonah’s defensive rigidity. “After all, Joe,” she whispered, “it isn’t as if — as if you didn’t owe Father’s memory something. He — he did a lot for you, now, didn’t he?” No remark from Mr. Lincoln. “And as for Stephen... oh, you haven’t said it this time, but I’ve told you so often before that there’s nothing between us. Why should you be so — so poisonous about him?”
“I’m not being poisonous,” said Jonah with dignity.
“You are! Oh, Jonah...” Another silence, during which Ellery visualized the young lady either moving her chair closer or leaning, like Calypso, toward her victim. “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told you before!”
“Eh?” Jonah was startled. Then he said hastily: “You needn’t, Helene. I’m not at all interested — if it’s about Megara, I mean.”
“Don’t be silly, Joe. Why do you think Stephen stayed away a whole year on this last trip of his?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Probably found a hula-hula girl in Hawaii whose style he liked.”
“Jonah! That’s unkind. Stephen isn’t that sort, and you know it... I’ll tell you. It’s because he asked me to marry him. There! That’s why.” She paused triumphantly.
“Oh, yes? Well,” growled Jonah, “that’s one heck of a way to treat your intended bride. Go away for a year! I wish both of you lots of luck.”
“But I... I refused him!”
Ellery sighed again and crept back toward the path. The night was still bleak, as far as he was concerned. As for Mr. Lincoln and Miss Brad... Silence. Ellery rather fancied he knew what was happening.
22. Foreign Correspondence
“All the signs,” said Ellery to Professor Yardley two days later, on Wednesday, “tell me that justice is wagging her tail and scuttling for home.”
“Which means?”
“There are certain universal indications among balked policemen. I’ve lived with one, you know, all my life... Inspector Vaughn is, in the modest word of the press, baffled. He can’t put his finger on anything concrete. So he becomes the aggressive defender of law, chases people, whips his men into a frenzy of useless activity, barks at his friends, ignores his colleagues, and generally acts like little Rollo in a pet.”
The Professor chuckled. “If I were you, I’d forget this case entirely. Relax and read the Iliad. Or something as nicely literary and heroic. You’re paddling the same canoe as Vaughn. Except that you’re more graceful about the fact that it’s sinking.”
Ellery grunted and flipped his cigarette butt into the grass.
He was chagrined; more than that, he was worried. That the case offered no logical solution to his mind did not disturb him half so much as that it seemed to have expired of inertia. Where was Krosac? For what was he waiting?
Mrs. Brad wept over her sins in the privacy of her boudoir. Jonah Lincoln, despite his threats, had returned to the offices of Brad & Megara and was continuing to distribute rugs to a rug-conscious America. Helene Brad floated about in a glow, barely touching the earth. Hester Lincoln, after a stormy session with Dr. Temple, had departed bag and baggage for New York. Dr. Temple thereafter prowled about Bradwood, pipe in mouth, his black face blacker than ever. From Oyster Island there was silence; occasionally old man Ketcham appeared, but he tended his own business as he rowed his dinghy back and forth with supplies and mail. Fox quietly continued to massage the lawns and drive the Brad cars.
Andrew Van skulked in the West Virginia hills. Stephen Megara kept to his yacht; the crew, with the exception of Captain Swift, had been paid off and sent away with Inspector Vaughn’s permission. Megara’s personal bodyguard of two detectives, who had lolled on the Helene’s deck — drinking, smoking, playing casino — Megara insisted on dismissing; he was perfectly capable, he said curtly, of taking care of himself. The water police, however, continued to patrol the Sound.
A cable from Scotland Yard had barely ruffled the monotony. It ran:
FURTHER INVESTIGATION PERCY AND ELIZABETH LYNN IN ENGLAND UNSUCCESSFUL SUGGEST CHECK WITH CONTINENTAL POLICE
So Inspector Vaughn acted, as Ellery said, like little Rollo in a pet, and District Attorney Isham shrewdly eased himself out of the case by the simple expedient of remaining in his office, and Ellery cooled himself in Professor Yardley’s pool, read Professor Yardley’s excellent books, and thanked his multifarious gods for a vacation — both of the body and the mind. At the same time, he kept one worried eye cocked on the big house across the road.
On Thursday morning Ellery strolled over to Bradwood and found Inspector Vaughn sitting on the porch, a handkerchief between his sunburned neck and his wilted collar, fanning himself and cursing the heat, the police force, Bradwood, the case, and himself in the same breath.
“Nothing, Inspector?”
“Not a damned thing!”
Helene Brad came out of the house, cool as a spring cloud in her white organdie dress. She murmured a good morning and, descending the steps, turned into the westerly path.
“I’ve just been giving the old oil to the newspapermen,” growled Vaughn. “Progress. Improvement. This case’ll die of improvements, Mr. Queen. Where the hell is Krosac?”
“A rhetorical question.” Ellery frowned over his cigarette. “Frankly, I’m puzzled. Has he given up? It doesn’t seem possible. A madman never gives up. Then why is he marking time? Waiting for us to retreat, to give up the case as a bad job?”
“You tell me.” Vaughn muttered to himself, and then added, “I’ll stay here, by God, till Doomsday.”
They lapsed into silence. In the garden circled by the driveway moved the tall figure of Fox, clad in corduroys, accompanied by the rattle of a lawn mower.
The Inspector sat up suddenly and Ellery, smoking with his eyes half-shut, started. The rattle had stopped. Fox was standing as still as a scouting brave, head cocked toward the west. Then he dropped the mower and broke into a run, vaulting a bed of flowers. He ran toward the west.
They jumped up, and the Inspector shouted: “Fox! What’s the matter?”
The man did not halt his leaping strides. He gestured toward the trees and yelled something which they could not make out.
Then they heard it. A faint scream. It came from somewhere on the Lynn estate.
“Helene Brad!” cried Vaughn. “Come on.”
When they burst into the clearing before the Lynn house they found Fox before them, kneeling on the grass and holding on his knee the head of a recumbent man. Helene, her face as white as her frock, stood over them clutching her breast.