Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  She stopped short, right in the middle of the number, detached his arm from her waist, and stepped back from its half embrace. “Wait here, Tom. I just remembered. I have to make a phone call.”

  “I no sooner get you than I lose you again.”

  But she’d already turned and was moving away from him, looking back over her shoulder now.

  He tried to follow her. She laughed and held him back. A momentary flattening of her hands against his shirtfront was enough to do that. “No, you can’t come with me. Oh, don’t look so dubious. It’s just to Martha, back at our house. Something I forgot to tell her when we left. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “But we’ll lose this dance.”

  “I’ll give you—I’ll give you one later, to make up for it,” she promised. “I’ll foreclose on somebody else’s.” She gave him a smile, and even a little wink, and that held him. “Now, be a good boy and stay in here.”

  She made sure that he was standing still first. It was like leaving a lifesize toy propped up—you wait a second to make sure it won’t fall over. Then she turned and went out into the foyer.

  She looked back at him from there, once more. He was standing obediently stock-still in the middle of the dance floor like an ownerless pup, everyone else circling around him. She raised a cautioning index finger, shook it at him. Then she whisked from sight.

  She went over to the checkroom cubbyhole.

  “Will you let me have that now, Marie.”

  “Leaving already, Miss Brainard?” The girl raised a small overnight case from the floor—it hadn’t been placed on the shelves, where it might have been seen and recognized—and passed it to her.

  Sunny handed her something. “You haven’t seen me go, though.”

  “I understand, Miss Brainard,” the girl said.

  She hurried out of the club with it. She went over to where the cars were parked, found a small coffee-colored roadster, and put the case on the front seat.

  Then she got in after it and drove off.

  The clubhouse lights receded in the indigo February darkness.

  The music got fainter, and then you couldn’t hear it any more. It stayed on in her mind, though: still playing, like an echo.

  “The object of my affection

  Can change my complexion

  From white to rosy-red—”

  The car purred along the road. She looked very lovely, and a little wild, her uncovered hair streaming backward in the wind. The stars up above seemed to be winking at her, as though she and they shared the same conspiracy.

  After a while she took one hand from the wheel and fumbled in the glittering little drawstring bag dangling from her wrist.

  She took out a very crumpled note, its envelope gone. The note looked as though it had been hastily crushed and thrust away to protect if from discovery immediately after first being received.

  She smoothed it out now as best she could and reread it carefully by the dashboard light. A part of it, anyway.

  “—There’s a short cut that’ll bring you to me even quicker, darling. No one knows of it but me, and now I’m sharing it with you. It will keep you from taking the long way around, on the main road, and risk being seen by anyone. Just before you come to that lighted filling station at the intersection, turn off, sharp left. Even though there doesn’t seem to be anything there, keep going, don’t be frightened. You’ll pick up a back lane, and that’ll bring you safely to me. I’ll be counting the minutes—”

  She pressed it to her lips, the crumpled paper, and kissed it fervently. Love is a master alchemist: it can turn base things to gold.

  She put it back in her bag. The stars were still with her, winking. The music was still with her, playing for her alone.

  “Every time he holds my hand

  And tells me that he’s mine.”

  Just before she came to that lighted filling station at the intersection, she swung the wheel and turned off sharp left into gritty nothingness that rocked and swayed the car.

  Her headlights picked up a screen of trees and she went around to the back of them. She found a disused dirt lane there—as love had promised her she would—and clung to it over rises and hollows, and through shrubbery that hissed at her.

  And then at last a little rustic lodge. A hidden secret place. Cheerful amber light streaming out to welcome her. Another car already there, offside in the darkness—his.

  She braked in front of it. She took out her mirror, and by the dashboard light she smoothed her hair and touched a golden tube of lipstick lightly to her mouth. Very lightly, for there would be kisses that would take it away again soon.

  She tapped the horn, just once.

  Then she waited for him to come out to her.

  The stars kept winking up above the pointed fir trees. Their humor was a little crueler now, as though someone were the butt of it. And in the lake that glistened like dark-blue patent leather down the other way, their winking still went on, upside down in the water.

  She tapped her horn again, more heavily this time, twice in quick succession.

  He didn’t come out. The yellow thread outlining the lodge-door remained as it was; it grew no wider.

  An owl hooted somewhere in the trees, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d only just learned what love was; how should she have had time to learn what fear was?

  She opened the car door abruptly and got out. Her footfalls crunched on the sandy ground that sloped down from here all the way to the lake. Silly, fragile sandals meant for the dance floor, their spike heels pecking into the crusty frosty ground.

  She went up onto the plank porch, and there they sounded hollow. She knocked on the door, and that sounded hollow too. Like when you knock on an empty shell of something.

  The door moved at last, but it was her own knock that had done it; it was unfastened. The yellow thread widened.

  She pushed it back, and warmth and brightness gushed out, the night was driven to a distance.

  “Hoo-hoo,” she called softly. “You have a caller. There’s a young lady at your door, to see you.”

  A fire was blazing in the natural-stone fireplace, gilding the walls and coppering the ceiling with its restless tides of reflection. There was a table, all set and readied for two. The feast of love. Yellow candles were twinkling on it; their flames had flattened for a moment, now they straightened again as she came in and closed the door behind her.

  Flowers were on it in profusion, and sparkling, spindly-stemmed glasses. And under it there was a gilt ice pail, with a pair of gold-capped bottles protruding from it at different angles.

  And on the wooden peg projecting from the wall, his hat and coat were hanging. With that scarf she knew so well dangling carelessly from one of the pockets.

  She laughed a little, mischievously.

  As she passed the table, on her way deeper into the long room, she helped herself to a salted almond, crunched it between her teeth. She laughed again, like a little girl about to tease somebody. Then she picked up a handful of almonds and began throwing them one by one against the closed bedroom-door, the way you throw gravel against a windowpane to attract someone’s attention behind it.

  Each one went tick! and fell to the floor.

  At last, when she’d used up all the almonds, she gave vent to a deep breath of exasperation, that was really only pretended exasperation, and stepped directly up to it and knocked briskly.

  “Are you asleep in there, or what?” she demanded. “Is this any way to receive your intended? After I come all the way up here—”

  Silence.

  A log in the fire cracked sharply. One of the gilt-topped bottles slumped lower in the pail, the ice supporting it crumbling.

  “I’m coming in there, ready or not.”

  She flung the door open.

  He was asleep. But in a distorted way, as she’d never yet seen anyone sleep. On the floor alongside the bed, with his face turned upward to the ceiling, and one arm flung over his eyes protectively.
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  Then she saw the blood. Stilled, no longer flowing. Not very old, but not new either.

  She ran to him, for a second only, tried to raise him, tried to rouse him. And all she got was soddenness. Then after that, she couldn’t touch him any more, couldn’t go near him again. It wasn’t him any more. He’d gone, and left this—this thing—behind him. This awful thing that didn’t even talk to you, take you in its arms, hold you to it.

  She didn’t scream. Death was too new to her. She barely knew what it was. She hadn’t lived long enough.

  She began to cry. Not because he was dead, but because she’d been cheated, she had no one to take her in his arms now. First heartbreak. First love. Those tears that never come more than once.

  She was still kneeling there, near him.

  Then she saw the gun lying there. Dark, ugly, dangerous-looking. His, but too far across the room for him to have used it himself. Even she, dimly, realized that. How could it get all the way over there, with him all the way over here?

  She began crawling toward it on hands and knees.

  Her hand went out toward it, hesitated, finally closed on it, picked it up. She knelt there, holding it between both hands, staring at it in fascinated horror—

  “Drop that! Put it down!”

  The voice was like a whip across her face, stinging in its suddenness, its lashing sharpness. Then leaving her quivering all over, as an aftermath.

  Tom Reed was standing in the doorway like a tuxedoed phantom.

  Bare-headed, coatless, just as he’d left the dance floor and run out after her into the cold of the February night.

  “You fool,” he breathed with soft, suppressed intensity. “You fool, oh you little fool!”

  A single frightened whimper, like the mewing of a helpless kitten left out in the rain, sounded from her.

  He went over to her, for she was crouched there incapable of movement; he raised her in his arms, caught her swiftly to him, turned her away with a gesture that was both rough and tender at the same time. The toe of his shoe edged deftly forward and the gun slithered out of her sight somewhere along the floor.

  “I didn’t do it!” she protested, terrified. “I didn’t! Oh, Tom, I swear—”

  “I know you didn’t,” he said almost impatiently. “I was right behind you coming up here. I would have heard the shot and I didn’t.”

  All she could say to that was, “Oh, Tom,” with a shudder.

  “Yes, ‘oh, Tom,’ after the damage is done. Why wasn’t it ‘oh, Tom’ before that?” His words were a rebuke, his gestures a consolation that belied them. “I saw you leave and came right after you. Who did you think you were fooling, with your phone-call home? You blind little thing. I was too tame for you. You had to have excitement. Well, now you’ve got it.” And all the while his hand stroked the sobbing golden-haired head against his shoulder. “You wanted to know life. You couldn’t wait. Well, now you do. How do you like it?”

  “Is this—?” she choked.

  “This is what it can be like if you don’t watch where you’re going.”

  “I’ll never—I’ll never—oh, Tom, I’ll never—”

  “I know,” he said. “They all say that. All the little, helpless purring things. After it’s too late.”

  Her head came up suddenly, in renewed terror. “Oh, Tom, is it too late?”

  “Not if I can get you back to that dance unnoticed—you’ve only been away about half an hour—” He drew his head back, still holding her in his arms, and looked at her intently. “Who was he?”

  “I met him last summer when I was away. All of a sudden he showed up here. I never expected him to. He’s only been here a few days. I lost my head, I guess—”

  “How is it nobody ever saw him around here, even the few days you say he’s been here? Why did he make himself so inconspicuous?”

  “He wanted it that way, and I don’t know—I guess to me it seemed more romantic.”

  He murmured something under his breath that sounded like, “Sure, at eighteen it would.” Then aloud, and quite bitterly, he said, “What was he hiding from? Who was he hiding from?”

  “He was going to—we were going to be married,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have been married,” he told her with quiet scorn.

  She looked at him aghast.

  “Oh, there would have been a ceremony, I suppose. For how long? A week or two, a month. And then you’d come creeping back alone. The kind that does his courting under cover doesn’t stick to you for long.”

  “How do you know?” she said, crushed.

  “Ask your sister Jane sometime. They say she found that out once, long ago. And look at her now. Embittered for all the rest of her life. Eaten up with hate—”

  He changed the subject abruptly. He tipped up her chin and looked searchingly at her. “Are you all right now? Will you do just as I tell you? Will you be able to—go through with this, carry it off?”

  She nodded. Her lips formed the words, barely audible, “If you stay with me.”

  “I’m with you. I was never so with you before.”

  With an arm about her waist, he led her over toward the door. As they reached and passed it, her head stirred slightly on his shoulder. He guessed its intent, quickly forestalled it with a quieting touch of his hand.

  “Don’t look at him. Don’t look back. He isn’t there. You were never here either. Those are the two things you have to keep saying to yourself. We’ve all had bad dreams at times, and this was yours. Now wait here outside the door a minute. I’ve got things to do. Don’t watch me.”

  He left her and went back into the room again.

  After a moment or two she couldn’t resist: the horrid fascination was too strong, it was almost like a hypnotic compulsion. She crept back to the threshold, peered around the edge of the door-frame into the room beyond, and watched with bated breath what he was doing.

  He went after the gun first. Got it back from where he’d kicked it. Picked it up and looked it over with painstaking care. He interrupted himself once to glance down at the form lying on the floor, and by some strange telepathy she knew that something about the gun had told him it belonged to the dead man, that it hadn’t been brought in from outside. Perhaps something about its type or size that she would not have understood; she didn’t know anything about guns.

  Then she saw him break it open and do something to it with deft fingers, twist or spin something. A cartridge fell out into the palm of his hand. He stood that aside for a minute, upright on the edge of the dresser. Then he closed up the gun again. He took out his own handkerchief and rubbed the gun thoroughly all over with it.

  Each time she thought he was through, he’d blow his breath on it and steam it up, and then rub it some more. He even pulled the whole length of the handkerchief through the little guard where the trigger was, and made that click emptily a couple of times.

  He worked fast but he worked calmly, without undue excitement, keeping his presence of mind.

  Finally he wrapped the handkerchief in its entirety around the butt so that his own bare hand didn’t touch it. Holding it in that way, he knelt down by the man. He took the hand, took it by the very ends, by the fingers, and closed them around the gun, first subtracting the handkerchief. He pressed the fingers down on it, pressed them hard and repeatedly, the way you do when you want to take an impression of something.

  Then he fitted them carefully around it in a grasping position; even pushed one, the index-finger, through that same trigger guard. He watched a minute to see if the gun would hold that way on its own, without his supporting hand around the outside of the other. It did; it dipped a little, but it stayed fast. Then very carefully he eased it, and the hand now holding it, back to the floor, left them there together.

  Then he got up and went back to the cartridge. He saw her mystified little face peering in at him around the edge of the door.

  “Don’t watch, I told you,” he rebuked her.

  But she kept righ
t on, and he went ahead without paying any further attention to her.

  He took out a pocketknife and prodded away at the cartridge with it until he had it separated into two parts. Then he went back to the dead man and knelt down by him. What she saw him do next was sheer horror.

  But she had only herself to blame; he’d warned her not to look.

  He turned the head slightly, very carefully, until he’d revealed the small, dark, almost neat little hole, where the blood had originally come from.

  He took one half of the dissected cartridge, tilted it right over it, and shook it gently back and forth. As though—as though he were salting the wound from a small shaker. Her hands flew to her mouth to stifle the gasp this tore from her.

  He thrust the pieces of cartridge into his pocket, both of them. Then he struck a match. He held it for a moment to let the flame steady itself and shrink a little. Then he gave it a quick dab at the gunpowdered wound and then back again.

  There was a tiny flash from the wound. For an instant it seemed to ignite. Then it went right out again. A slightly increased blackness remained around the wound now; he’d charred it. This time a sick moan escaped through her suppressing hands. She turned away at last.

  When he came out he found her at the far end of the outside room with her back to him. She was twitching slightly, as though she’d just recovered from a nervous chill.

  She couldn’t bring herself to ask the question, but he could read it in her eyes when she turned to stare at him.

  “The gun was his own, or the user wouldn’t have left it behind. I had to do that other thing. A gun suicide’s always a contact wound. They press it hard against themselves. And with a contact wound there are always powder burns.”

  Then he said with strange certainty, “A woman did it.”

  “How do you—?”

  “I found this in there with him. There must have been tears at first, and then later she dropped it when she picked up the gun.”

  He handed it to her. There wasn’t anything distinctive about it—just a gauzy handkerchief. No monogram, no design. It could have been anyone’s, anyone in a million. A faint fragrance reached her, invisible as a finespun wire but just as tenuous and for a moment she wondered at the scent.