by Ellery Queen
“It’s as if he wanted us to get them all,” Bill said.
“We’re just too smart,” Adam sighed. “But at least there’s one consolation. We know that naugahyde nitwit, Rick, wouldn’t be able to guess even—”
He stopped abruptly. The same thought hit us all at the same instant.
Ruth gasped, “Simon’s trying to tell us something!”
“You’re right!” I shouted. “And I see what it is! Haven’t you noticed? All the questions relate to crime and murder. We’ve never done that before—that’s the clue!”
“It’s surely a hint,” cried Edna, “but would Simon leave it at that?”
Ruth grabbed Simon’s letter. “No, look! He says, ‘See if you can get all twenty-two answers.’ But he’s given us only twenty-one questions. Doesn’t that mean there’s one more answer—a big one?”
“Oh, wonderful Simon!” Adam crowed. “He knew Rick wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what he’d hidden in this quiz!”
“And Rick would surely mail this letter,” I said, “because it tells us how well Simon’s being treated.”
Edna wailed, “But he wrote it over two weeks ago! What must he think of us by now? And what if we’re too late?”
“That’s no way to talk!” snapped Bill. “We can’t be too late, we can’t!”
“We’re wasting precious time,” I growled. So with a frenzy, we attacked the list.
GAME QUESTIONS
1. The night-club musician unjustly accused of murder in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man.
2. The grieving mother of the murdered child in The Bad Seed.
3. The silent-screen master of horror (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc.).
4. An ex-wife of the man who played the murderous Monsieur Verdoux, and who later married Erich Maria Remarque.
5. Hitchcock once stranded her at sea in a mink coat, but her final role was that of a homicidal maniac in Die, Die, My Darling.
6. “Sam Spade” in The Maltese Falcon.
7. Typed for years as a cruel Prussian officer, he also played the mysterious butler-chauffeur of a mad ex-cinema queen.
8. Often a villain, but best known for his role as a Far East potentate with no dandruff problem.
9. Grace Kelly’s charming but lethal husband in Dial “M” for Murder.
10. The insurance-investigator nemesis of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.
11. The evil little sidekick of the “Fat Man” in The Maltese Falcon.
12. Current wife of the man who played the murderous Monsieur Verdoux; daughter of a noted playwright.
13. The murderess in Ladies in Retirement: off-screen wife of radio Sam Spade.
14. The “Fat Man” himself in The Maltese Falcon.
15. She tried to drive Bette Davis insane in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
16. He was “Watson” to Rathbone’s “Holmes.”
17. Typed as a spy and adventuress, this Hungarian blonde once sang with Nelson Eddy.
18. She mourned her lover, William Holden, in Sunset Boulevard.
19. She murdered her lover, William Holden, in Sunset Boulevard.
20. She immortalized Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple.”
21. The Bride of Frankenstein herself.
Now we were finished. But so what? We had a list of 21 movie celebrities, all involved in some form of celluloid murder, mayhem, or madness. But what was it supposed to tell us?
I gnawed on my pencil and stared at Oscar on the table in front of me. Then suddenly lightning struck. I clutched Simon’s letter and read the P.S. again. I knew what he wanted me to remember!
While the others gaped at me in bewilderment, I started scribbling frantically on the bottom of my list. Then I took a deep breath and showed them the result.
A creepy tingle went through all of us. For a moment nobody could say anything. I stood up and gathered together Rick’s composite, the enlargement of the Bentley, the newspaper story, and the letters from Rick and Simon.
“Come on, everybody,” I said. “We’re going to the police.”
NOTE TO THE READER
Please turn to the next page for Rod’s solution.
SOLUTION
1. Henry Fonda
2. Eileen Heckart
3. Lon Chaney
4. Paulette Goddard
5. Tallulah Bankhead
6. Humphrey Bogart
7. Erich von Stroheim
8. Yul Brynner
9. Ray Milland
10. Edward G. Robinson
11. Peter Lorre
12. Oona O’Neill
13. Ida Lupino
14. Sydney Greenstreet
15. Olivia de Havilland
16. Nigel Bruce
17. Ilona Massey
18. Nancy Olson
19. Gloria Swanson
20. Margaret Rutherford
21. Elsa Lanchester
This is what Rod remembered:
He’d won the original game by playing it with initials. Then Simon gave him a new hint: Use the first initials only.
And this is Rod’s final note:
First initials in the order of Simon’s list:
HELPTHEYREPOISONINGME
HELP THEYRE POISONING ME
H.R.F. Keating
Mrs. Craggs’ Sixth Sense
It was a good thing that Mrs. Craggs had had her twinges. If she had not, and had not acted on them, the nasty little something-or-other that had developed just under the skin on her right elbow could not have been dealt with so easily; and more important, poor old Professor Partheman would have been in much worse trouble than he was. But twinges she did have, and the doctor she went to recommended a minor operation. With the consequence that Mrs. Craggs “did for” Professor Partheman that particular week on Wednesday and not on Thursday.
And so she set eyes on Ralph.
He was doing no more than mow the lawn in front of the professor’s ground-floor flat and from time to time taking a boxful of clippings round to the compost heap behind the shrubbery. But that was enough for Mrs. Craggs.
“Excuse me for mentioning it, sir,” she said to the professor as she tucked her wages into her purse, “but I would just like to say a word about that chap.”
“What chap, Mrs. Craggs? I was not aware that we had discussed any chap.”
The old professor was a bit spiky sometimes, but Mrs. Craggs liked working for him because, despite his great age, there he was always beavering away at his writing and papers, doing his job and no messing about. So she ignored the objection and went on with what she had to say.
“That feller what you’ve got in to mow your old bit of a lawn, sir.”
“Ralph, Mrs. Craggs,” said the professor. “A young man employed as domestic help over at Royal Galloway College and making a little extra on his day off. Now, what do you want to say about him?”
The professor glared, as if he already knew without realizing it that Mrs. Craggs had an adverse comment to make.
She took a good long breath.
“I don’t think you ought to have him around, sir,” she said. “I don’t like the looks of him, and that’s a fact.”
“Mrs. Craggs,” said the professor in the voice he had used to put down any number of uppish undergraduates, “that you do not ‘like the looks’ of Ralph may be a fact, but anything else you have said or implied about him most certainly is not. Now, do you know any facts to the young man’s detriment?”
“Facts, I don’t know, sir. But feelings I have. He’ll do you now good and of that I’m certain sure.”
“My dear good lady, are you really suggesting I should cease to offer the fellow employment just because of some mysterious feeling you have? What is it about his looks that you don’t like, for heaves’s sake?”
Mrs. Craggs thought. She had not up to that moment attempted to analyze her feeling. She had just had it. But overwhelmingly.
After a little she managed to pin something down.
“I
think it’s the way he prowls, sir,” she said. “Whenever he goes anywhere he prowls. Like an animal, sir. Like a—”
She searched her mind.
“A jaguar, sir. He prowls like one o’ them jaguars. That’s it.”
“My dear Mrs. Craggs. You cannot really be telling me that all you have against the chap is the way he walks. It’s too ridiculous.”
But Mrs. Craggs was not so easily discouraged. She thought about the young gardener at intervals right up to the following Monday when she was next due at the professor’s. She even was thinking about him during the minor operation which had been such a striking success. And when on the Monday she had been given her money she broached the subject again.
“That Ralph, sir. I hope as ’ow you’ve had second thoughts there.”
“Second thoughts.” The aged professor’s parchment-white face was suffused with pinkness. “Let me tell you, my dear lady, I had no need for more than the swiftest of first thoughts. I have spent a lifetime dealing in facts, Mrs. Craggs, hard facts, and I’m scarcely likely to abandon them now. Not one word more, if you please.”
Mrs. Craggs sighed. “As you like, sir.”
But, though she said no more then, she made up her mind to do all that she could to protect the old professor from the jaguar she had seen prowling across his lawn carefully avoiding ever appearing to look in at the windows of the flat.
And, she thought, she had one way of perhaps obtaining some “facts.” It so happened at that time that her friend of long standing, Mrs. Milhorne, was employed as a daily cleaner at Royal Galloway College. At the first opportunity she paid her a visit at her home, though that was not unfortunately till the following Tuesday evening.
“Oh, yes, Ralph,” said Mrs. Milhorne. “I always knew in my bones about him. Handsome he may have been, and sort of romantic, if you take my meaning, but I never tried to make up to ’im, no matter what they say.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, dear,” said Mrs. Craggs, who knew her friend’s susceptible nature. “But why do you go on about him as if he ain’t there no more?”
“Because that’s what he aidn’t,” said Mrs. Milhorne.
And then the whole story came out. Ralph had been dismissed about a fortnight before, suspected of having brutally attacked a young Spanish maid at the college. The girl, Rosita by name, although battered about terribly and still actually off work, had refused to say who had caused her injuries. But, as Ralph had notoriously been attracted to her, no one really had had any doubt.
“’Spect he’s back home now, wherever that is,” said Mrs. Milhorne, and she sighed.
“No, he’s not,” Mrs. Craggs said. “I told you, dear. He’s coming every Wednesday to mow old Professor Partheman’s lawn, and the professor’s got picture frames full of old coins, gold an’ all. He’s what’s called one o’ them new miserists. An’ if that Ralph’s just half o’ what I think he is, he’ll be planning to help himself there, ’specially now he’s out of a job.”
A red flush of excitement came up on Mrs. Milhorne’s pallid face.
“We’ll have to go to the rescue,” she said. “Just like on telly. The United States Cavalry.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Craggs. “Only when old Professor Partheman sees you a-galloping up, an’ me come to that, you know what he’ll do? He’ll tell us to turn right roun’ and gallop away again. Or he will unless we come waving some facts on our little blue flags.”
She stood considering.
“Rosita,” she said at last. “She’s got to be made to talk.”
But since Rosita knew hardly a word of English and since she had obstinately persevered with her silence, Mrs. Craggs’s plan seemed to run up against insuperable difficulties.
Only it was Mrs. Craggs’s plan.
Introduced next morning to the room in which Rosita was resting, her fact still blotched with heavy bruises, Mrs. Craggs first gave her a heartwarming smile and then joined her in a nice cuppa, selecting from a plate of biscuits the sweetest and stickiest and pressing them on the Spanish girl with such hearty insistence that if the interview was to do nothing else it would at least add some ounces to Rosita’s already deliriously buxom figure. But Mrs. Craggs had only just begun.
“’Ere,” she said, when she judged the moment ripe. “You know I works for an old professor?”
Rosita would hardly have understood this abruptly proffered piece of information had not Mrs. Craggs at the same time jumped to her feet and first mimed to a T the old professor, frail as a branch of dried twigs, and then had imitated herself brushing and dusting and polishing fit to bust.
“Si, si,” said the Spanish girl, eyes alight and dancing. “Work, si, si. Ol’ man, si, si.”
“Ah, you’re right, dear,” Mrs. Craggs said. “But I ain’t the only one what works fer ’im.”
Another bout of miming.
“Ah, si. Si. Jardinero.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Craggs. “A gardener. Ralph.”
And the vigor she put into saying the name sent at once a wave of pallor across the Spanish girl’s plump and pretty face.
“Ah, si, Ralph.”
“Yes, dear. You got it nicely. But, listen. That old prof, he’s got a lot o’ valu’ble coins in his study. His study, see.”
In place of Mrs. Craggs there came a picture of an ancient scholar bent over his books, scribbling rapidly on sheet after sheet of paper and from time to time taking a rare and precious old coin and scrutinizing it with extraordinary care.
“Ah, si. He have antigo dinero, si.” And then suddenly a new expression swept over her face. “Dios,” she said. “Ralph!”
After that it was the work of only half a minute for Mrs. Craggs to be seated at the driving wheel of some vehicle capable of the most amazing speed, and then to reincarnate her picture of Professor Partheman and put onto his lips a stream of sound that could not have meant anything to anybody, but made it perfectly clear that the old man was a fluent speaker of Spanish. Rosita seized a coat and scarf and showed herself ready for instant departure.
“But, hurry,” said Mrs. Craggs. “We ain’t got much time to lose. That Ralph gets there by two o’clock.”
They had not much time, but in theory they had enough. Buses from outside the college ran at twenty-minute intervals; the journey to the professor’s took only half an hour or a little more, and it was only just 12:45.
But.
But bus services everywhere suffer from shortage of staff, and when they do they are apt simply to miss one particular run. The run missed that day was the one due to pass Royal Galloway College at 1:00 P.M. exactly. That need not have mattered. The 1:20 would bring them to within a couple of hundred yards of the professor’s by 1:55 at the latest. And it arrived at the college on the dot. And in the words of its conductor it “suffered a mechanical breakdown” just five minutes later.
Mrs. Craggs posted herself plank in the middle of the road. In less than a minute a car pulled to a halt. An irate lady motorist poked her head out. Mrs. Craggs marched up to her.
“Life an’ death,” she said. “It may be a matter o’ life an’ death. We gotter get to Halliman’s Corner before two o’clock.”
The lady motorist, without a word, opened the car’s doors. Mrs. Craggs, Mrs. Milhorne, and Rosita piled in. Once on the go, Mrs. Craggs explained in more detail. The lady motorist grew excited. But she was a lady who relied more on the feel of the countryside than on signposts or maps. And a quarter of an hour later all four had to admit they had no idea where they were.
“The telephone,” suggested the lady motorist. “We shall have to go to a house and telephone your professor.”
“No good,” said Mrs. Craggs. “He don’t never answer it when he’s working. Rare old miracle he is like that. Ring, ring, ring, an’ never a blind bit o’ notice.”
“I’d die out o’ curiosity,” put in Mrs. Milhorne.
“So would I, dear,” said Mrs. Craggs. “But that ain’t getting the United States Cavalry to the
wagon train.”
They resumed their progress then, eyes strained to catch the least sign of anything helpful. And it was Mrs. Craggs who spotted something.
“That old plastic sack on top o’ that gatepost,” she said. “I remembers it from the bus coming out. It’s that way. That way.”
The lady motorist, recognizing an infallible sign when she heard one, turned at once.
“We’ll be there in five minutes,” she shouted.
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Craggs. “An’ it’s two minutes to two now.”
There was a little argument about whose watch was right, but all agreed that two o’clock was bound to come before they reached their destination. And it did.
“Quick,” said Mrs. Craggs, as at last they got to the familiar corner. “Up that way. We may not be too late. He may not’ve doen it yet.”
But she could not see in her mind’s eye that prowling jaguar carefully mowing the old professor’s lawn before he struck. And she could see, all too clearly, the thornlike obstinate old man defending his property to the last. And she could see frail thorns, spiky though they might be, all too easily being crushed to splinters.
The car pulled up with a screech of brakes. Mrs. Craggs was out of it before it had stopped. She hurled open the gate. The garden was empty. Ominously empty. Mrs. Craggs tore across the unmown lawn like an avenging amazon. She burst into the professor’s study.
The professor was sitting holding up an ancient coin, scrutinizing it with extraordinary care.
“Ralph!” Mrs. Craggs burst out. “Where’s Ralph?”
Professor Partheman turned to her.
“Ah, yes, Ralph,” he said. “Well, Mrs. Craggs, I happened to read in The Times this morning a most interesting article about research at Johns Hopkins University in America proving that women do have a particular skill in what is called nonverbal communication. Or, to put it in popular terms, their instinct is to be trusted. So with that fact at my disposal I decided to give credence to your—ahem—feeling and left a note on the gate telling Ralph I no longer required him. Yes, you can trust a woman’s intuition, Mrs. Craggs. You can trust it for a fact.”
