by Ellery Queen
For Dr. John Smith is perhaps the ideal criminologist: he has a scalpel-sharp mind, a depth of psychiatric knowledge of the human heart and its motivations, an expert interrogating technique, and an intensely probing curiosity that penetrates far below the meanings of physical clues.
The short novels about Dr. Smith are not “action” stories—not if you interpret action as gunplay, fisticuffs, or exciting chases. The action is in the mind, in the battle of wits, in the play and counterplay of human forces—the ancient, never-ending struggle between good and evil. Dr. Smith believes that “the most exciting mysteries lie in digging into the subconscious portions of the human mind.”
Here is the absorbing story of a man haunted and tortured by three successive impulses to murder the person he loves best. We promise you a fascinating investigation of a diabolical murder plot, and central to that investigation, a study-in-depth of character and environment. . .a memorable short novel.
The small gray man knelt beside the body. The others stood in a circle focusing the lights of their electric torches on him. It was a brief examination. He stood up, and instinctively the others lifted their torches to light his expressionless face.
“He’s quite dead,” he said. “I doubt if there’s a single bone left unbroken in his body.”
There was the sound of a muffled sob that came from a woman somewhere outside the circle of light.
“There’s no doubt about it, Dr. Smith?” The questioner was a State Trooper.
“None, Captain Walsh,” the doctor said. He raised his eyes to the darkness which seemed to be pressing down on them. “How far up are the ledges?”
“A good two hundred feet,” Walsh said.
The doctor shrugged. “That accounts for it.”
“Dangerous place to be at night.”
A toneless voice spoke from deep in the shadows. “Especially if you’re with a murderer.”
The torches turned to light the face of the man who’d spoken. He was tall and dark. He looked shriveled inside his tweed jacket. The torches accentuated lines and shadows, but this man’s eyes seemed to be sunk into his head.
He was standing next to a girl with red-gold hair. His arm was around her shoulder and his hand looked large and white against the black cloth of her coat.
“Stephen! Stephen, darling!” the girl said in a protesting tone.
The man looked down at her and a nerve quivered in his cheek. Then he lifted his weary, dark eyes to the line of torches.
“I think I murdered him,” he said.
“Take it easy, Mr. Drake,” Walsh said. “Everybody knows Dr. Bristow was one of your closest friends. You can’t blame yourself for an accident.”
“I don’t think it was an accident,” Stephen Drake said. “I think I murdered him.”
A young man came out of the crowd to stand beside Dr. Smith and Captain Walsh. His face in profile was sharply, handsomely modeled. He had on riding clothes. “Look, Captain Walsh,” he said, in a voice lowered so that it would not carry beyond the doctor and the State Trooper. “Stephen’s been very sick. He’s overwrought. We ought to get him back home.” He turned to the doctor. “I understand you’re vacationing here in town, sir?”
“That’s right,” Dr. Smith said.
“I’m Ted Hunter, Stephen’s brother-in-law. Stephen’s been under Bristow’s care for several weeks.” Hunter glanced down at the body, then quickly lifted his eyes. “Could you come back to the house with us? I’m afraid he’s already gone to pieces from the shock of this.”
Dr. John Smith nodded. “Yes. I’ll come,” he said. But he didn’t move for a moment. “Your brother-in-law has a strange way of expressing himself, Mr. Hunter. Most men know if they’ve committed a murder.”
Dr. Smith rode back to town in the police car with Captain Walsh. They rode in silence for most of the way. The State Trooper glanced from time to time at the doctor whose face was illuminated by the glow from the dash and wondered at his peculiar, anonymous quality. It was Walsh’s business to notice people, but he had only learned tonight, when a doctor was needed, that Smith was in town and had been for more than a month.
“Who is Stephen Drake?” the doctor asked, breaking the silence. His voice was colorless, flat.
“Local boy who made good,” Walsh said. “President of Drake Aircraft. The plant’s about twenty miles down Route 9. You may have seen it.” The doctor didn’t indicate whether he’d seen it or not. “He employs about half the people in Woodfield.”
“And the dead man?”
Walsh frowned, his eyes on the road ahead. “Dr. Bristow was one swell guy,” he said. “Local boy, too. I guess he and Stephen Drake are the two people the folks here in Woodfield are proudest of. Bob Bristow had a brilliant career as a surgeon ahead of him. He chose to come back here and take care of his own. People loved him for that. He’s a great loss to us, Dr. Smith.”
“I could wish for such an epitaph,” the doctor said. He stared at the instrument panel of the car as if it fascinated him. “What were they doing on that mountain trail at night if it’s so dangerous?”
“You hadn’t heard about the Conroy kid, Doctor?”
“What about him?”
“Frankie Conroy. He’s seven. His father runs the local meat market. He’s been lost all day. The whole town’s been looking for him. The Drake family and Dr. Bristow were looking for him on the mountain.”
“You mean the boy may still be up there?”
“No. He was found several hours ago.” Walsh shook his head. “That’s the ironic part of it. He was found quite a while before Doc Bristow fell. He got locked in a root cellar at his own house.”
“Why were the people looking for him on the mountain?”
“Somebody thought they’d seen a kid headed that way.”
They rode in silence for a while. Then Dr. Smith said, “Why would Stephen Drake murder Bristow?”
Walsh laughed. “He wouldn’t. Ted’s right. Stephen’s been sick and the accident’s shocked him out of making sense. He probably thinks he could have saved the doc somehow. He and Bristow were the closest of friends.”
Dr. Smith turned to look at Walsh. His eyes were gray and thoughtful. “Crime is your business. Captain Walsh, not mine. But I should think the instances of a man murdering a total stranger were rather rare. I would hardly classify friendship as an alibi.”
Walsh laughed. “Don’t go dreaming things up, Doctor.”
They slowed and turned through a pair of iron gates. Ahead of them, up a graveled driveway, the doctor saw a big stone house. It seemed to be lighted from top to bottom. There were several cars pulled up in front of it.
“Drake place,” Walsh said. “They’ll be needing you for Stephen.”
They got out of the car and walked to the front door. Walsh went in as if he were an old friend. They were in a large entrance hall. A wide stairway with a polished mahogany rail curved upward to the second floor. There was a fireplace at one end of the hall.
The whole place looked like a picture gallery. There were more than a dozen large oil paintings hung about the walls: landscapes, portraits, and two rather extraordinary abstractions. It wasn’t necessary to be a connoisseur to recognize that they were all the work of one artist, a man with extraordinary vitality and color sense.
The doctor stood looking around at the paintings. He seemed so interested in them that it was an effort for him to turn his attention to the girl who came out of the room to the right of the front door. It was the same girl he had seen a little while before, clinging to Stephen Drake. The clear light here showed how delicate and sensitive her beauty was. She’d been crying but the evidence of it didn’t leave an impression of weakness.
“Thank you, Captain, for bringing the doctor,” she said. She held out her hand to Dr. Smith. “I’m Marcia Drake. I tried to persuade Stephen to go to bed, but he’s refused. He’s in the study. He insists on talking to Captain Walsh, but he’s not up to it. Really he’s not. If you could only make hi
m see, Doctor—”
“See what, Mrs. Drake?”
“That’s he’s torturing himself with something quite unreal.”
“Most of us do,” the doctor said. “Will you take me in?”
“This way.”
“I want to talk to Ted about what happened,” Walsh said. “Where is he?”
“In the living room, Captain. Maybe you’ll need a drink as much as the rest of them do.”
Dr. Smith followed Marcia Drake into the study. It was a dark, book-lined room. French windows opened onto a terrace beyond. The July night sent a warm breeze stirring through the room. It played tricks with the spiral of smoke from the cigarette in the ashtray on the desk.
Stephen Drake sat behind the desk, elbows resting on it, face in his hands. As Marcia and the doctor came in he looked up. His eyes looked haunted.
“This is Dr. Smith, Stephen.”
“Hullo, Doctor,” Stephen said. His voice was so weary it seemed impossible he could say anything else, but he did. “I’m past needing pills or sedatives, Doctor. I just need to tell my story to Walsh and get it over with.”
“Please tell him he hasn’t the strength for this, Dr. Smith,” Marcia said. “He mustn’t talk now.”
“Perhaps he must,” the doctor said. He moved out of the range of the cone of light thrown down on the desk by the student lamp. “I understand you’ve been sick, Mr. Drake.”
“I—I had a crack-up,” Stephen said. “Usual thing from overwork I guess. Low blood pressure, rapid pulse, overexcited reflexes, no sleep. We’ve been building planes, Dr. Smith—thousands of plane’s. I’ve been at it, fifteen—twenty hours a day. I didn’t have what it took. I must say I didn’t expect to fall apart at thirty-four.”
“The treatment?” Dr. Smith asked.
“Rest, more rest. Sleeping pills. High protein diet. Injections of iron and liver. All unimportant. All very, very unimportant.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Doctor. You see, what happened tonight has been coming for days and days. I’ve been on the verge of committing murder three times before tonight. I guess I’ve known all along that sooner or later I couldn’t resist it. Something’s snapped inside me, Doctor. I just want to tell my story and be taken some place where I can’t do any harm.”
“Stephen!” Marcia cried. “You mustn’t talk that way.”
The doctor’s voice was unmoved. “So you resisted three impulses to kill Dr. Bristow and then finally gave in to a fourth one?”
Stephen shook his head. “That’s the mad part, the insane part, Doctor. Bob Bristow was my only hope, my only refuge. The other three times when it came so close it wasn’t Bob I wanted to kill.”
He took a deep breath and seemed to drag his voice up from a well of horror. He looked at his wife. “It was you, darling. It was you I nearly murdered.”
For a moment Marcia Drake stared at her husband, her eyes wide and frightened, the back of her right hand pressed against her mouth. Then the tension broke. “Stephen, that’s a joke—a horrible, bad joke!”
Stephen didn’t answer. He had covered his face once more. A breath of wind sent a sheet of paper drifting slowly down from the desk. The doctor watched it as if he were vitally interested in just where it might land on the rug.
“Perhaps it’s not a joke,” he said. He might have been talking to himself.
Captain Walsh found three people in the living room. He knew them all well. Ted Hunter was mixing drinks at a small portable bar. Harriet Moore, Ted’s maiden aunt, sat in a big wing chair by the fireplace. She was a dark, wiry woman in her early fifties. The tweed skirt, the high-collared, white shirtwaist, the short, military-cut jacket with padded shoulders gave an impression of smart severity. Steel knitting needles clicked in her fingers, an automatic process which apparently required no concentration. She glanced up at Walsh, who had taken a notebook from his pocket as he came into the room.
“Must you act like a policeman?” she asked.
“Sorry,” Walsh said. “I have to make a report, you know.”
“Give the man a drink,” Harriet said.
The third person in the room was Michael Cleghorn, a huge, shaggy, St. Bernard-like man, who was the Drakes’ nearest neighbor. He was an artist. His hands looked big and clumsy, but they could work magic with a paintbrush.
He, too, had been brought up in Woodfield. He, Bob Bristow, Ted, Stephen, and Marcia had been a cliquish gang of kids together. Walsh, who has been a town boy and moved in another social sphere, had thought them all rather snobbish in those days. But he had secretly admired them, and today he liked them.
“This is a hell of a thing to have happened,” Walsh said.
Cleghorn was sprawled in a leather chair, his legs draped over one side, a rugged curve-stemmed pipe between his teeth; “I wish it could have been me,” he said. “Bob was some use in this world.”
Ted came over from the bar with a drink for Walsh. “Cleg is always so noble,” he said. Walsh was used to the mocking note in his voice. “Nobody ever really wishes it was them. But it’s a nice sentiment.”
“I’ve got to know what happened,” Walsh said.
Ted picked up a cigarette from an ashtray on the bar. “There’s nothing very clear about it, Jim. It was dark. We were all in a group together. I think Bob stepped aside to let Marcia or Harriet pass him on the path. He didn’t realize how close to the edge he was and lost his footing.”
“God, I’ll never forget the sound of his voice as he fell,” Cleghorn said. “He sounded like a child, screaming.”
“There’s no point in reliving it over and over, Mike,” Harriet said.
“Damn it, Harriet, I loved that guy!” Cleghorn said.
“We all loved him,” Harriet said. “But having loved him isn’t going to help things.”
“Will you tell me how you happened to go up the mountain—the whole thing from the beginning?” Walsh asked.
“That’s simple enough,” Ted said. He had perched himself on the edge of a table, his riding boots swinging rhythmically back and forth. “I’d been out on an all-day ride with Joe Davis. When I got back here I found Marcia, Stephen, Harriet, Cleg, and Bob out on the terrace. They were all talking about the Conroy kid being lost.”
“Marcia had been to a meeting in the village and heard the story there,” Harriet said.
“Well, Joe and I had passed the foot of Lookout Trail on the way home. I saw a small kid fooling around the foot of the path. I didn’t know about the Conroy boy then, so I didn’t think anything of it. When I heard about him I wondered if it could have been him I saw. Of course it turns out it wasn’t, but at the time I thought it might have been.”
“You don’t know who the boy was you saw?”
“I haven’t any idea. At the time I didn’t pay much attention. We passed maybe fifty or sixty yards from him. He was just a little boy. When I mentioned it, Stephen got steamed up about it. He thought we ought to go look for him.”
“We used to play around the trail when we were kids,” Cleg said. “Stephen knew it would be dangerous after dark, and it was getting late then. We all agreed to go take a look.”
“Marcia and Harriet got flashlights and we all drove out in the car,” Ted said. He tossed his cigarette into the empty fireplace. “At the time I didn’t think Stephen was strong enough to make the climb, and I said so. Bob thought it was all right. I wish I’d been stubborn about it.”
“Why?”
“For God’s sake, Jim, you heard him out there! That wacky talk about murder!”
“It was a shock, naturally,” Walsh said. “He probably thought there was something he could have done to save Bob. Well, go ahead.”
“We left the car at the foot of the trail and started up,” Ted said. “You’ve been up there, Jim. There are half a dozen paths that branch off the main trail. They all come out on the ledges eventually, and the Conroy kid could have taken any of them, we assumed. I guess I left the party first, didn’t I?”
Cleg nodded confirmation. “I took the second branch-off,” he said. “We were yelling for the kid all the time, but of course he didn’t answer.”
“I left Stephen and Marcia at the next fork,” Harriet said. “They went on up the main trail together with Bob.”
“Bob must have taken the next cutoff,” Ted said, “because when I got to the ledges he was there alone. Stephen and Marcia turned up next and Harriet and Cleg joined us at about the same time. There was no sign of the kid, so we figured there wasn’t anything more we could do. We decided to take the short way down.”
“You know that narrow path, right on the edge of the ledges,” Cleg said.
Walsh nodded.
“You have to go single file,” Ted said. “We were all standing at the head of the path. I think it was Bob who suggested the girls go first. We could help light the way from behind.”
“Marcia led the way,” Harriet said. “I was right behind her.”
“I happened before we really got started,” Cleg said.
Ted lit another cigarette. He was frowning. “That’s the way it was, Jim. We were all in a sort of confused huddle there. Then Bob let out a yell and was gone. Maybe somebody jostled him going past. Maybe the ground gave way. It’s all shale.”
“We had to go down by the path,” Cleg said. “It must have been nearly three quarters of an hour before we found Bob. Then Harriet went to the car and drove for help. Maybe if we could have gotten to Bob sooner—”
Walsh shook his head. “He was killed instantly.” A startled look in Cleg’s face made him turn.
Marcia stood in the doorway. Cleg hauled himself up out of his chair and went across to her.
“What is it, sweet?” he asked.
She looked at Walsh. “Who is this Dr. Smith?” she asked.
“I don’t know much about him,” Walsh said. “He rented the Parker cottage for the summer. Supposed to be on a holiday. Why?”
