by Ellery Queen
“He never really had a chance,” she said to them all urgently. “He never really had a chance.”
Stephen and Marcia were left alone with the doctor on the terrace. Marcia sat on the arm of her husband’s chair and their hands were tightly locked together. Some of the grayness had left Stephen’s face. His anxiety now seemed to be for Marcia. She kept glancing up to a second-floor window to the room where Walsh was waiting for Ted and Harriet to get ready for the trip to the County Attorney’s office.
“How did you know about Harriet and the business at the stable?” Marcia finally asked the doctor.
“The whole business at the stable bothered me,” the doctor said. “It didn’t fit the rest of the pattern. I kept trying to force it to fit. That was a mistake. When I gave up trying that, I saw the answer quite clearly. If it wasn’t the murderer who had searched the barn and slugged George Meadows, then it had to be someone who was trying mistakenly to shield the murderer. There was one person in this house who felt that kind of protectiveness for Ted—Harriet.”
“You always thought it was Ted?” Stephen asked.
“I had my choice narrowed down from the start. I had just two choices, it seemed to me. Ted and Cleghorn.”
“Cleg!”
The doctor nodded. “He was the one who thought I was being—I think the word was ‘incompetent’—in accepting Stephen’s story in full. I’ve had a good deal of experience with neurotics and psychotics. I knew Stephen was telling me what he believed had happened. The facts didn’t jibe with what he believed. I had to find facts that would fit—that would account for what Stephen believed had happened.
“The first thing that tended to narrow my choice was your account of Bristow’s fall, Stephen. It seemed absurd to me that Bristow would have said ‘Stephen, what have you done?’ as he fell. But someone had said it, with the intention of planting the idea in your mind.”
Marcia nodded. “I can see that.”
“Well, it seemed to me just about certain that it must have been a man who said it,” the doctor said. “If Marcia or Harriet had said it, I think even Stephen’s confused mind would have been conscious that a woman had spoken. Instead of thinking Bristow had accused him, he would have thought Marcia or Harriet had accused him. The idea that it was Bristow wouldn’t have taken root in his mind. So I told myself that it was Cleghorn or Ted.”
“What tipped the scales toward Ted?” Stephen asked.
“The man’s character and background,” the doctor said. “Anyone might have had a knowledge of psychiatry sufficient to put this scheme in operation. But Ted’s medical school background was suggestive. When a man fails to make a go of his life he usually imagines other people are responsible. This can develop into a first-class neurosis—a motive, in this case. His delight in stabbing at everyone’s little weakness and foibles—all suggestive.
“I did consider Marcia and Harriet. Marcia might have been in love with Cleg, but I got the feeling she would be loyal to Stephen if it killed her. Harriet might have maneuvered the whole thing to get what she wanted for her precious Ted. But I had the feeling that an older person would not have known the way to strike at Stephen. It seemed to me it must be one of the children he grew up with, who would have been aware of intimate little things an older person would never have known about at all.”
He stopped and took a large silver watch out of his pocket. He looked at Marcia with a tired smile.
“I’m going to leave you two together now. You’ve got a job to do—fitting the pieces of your lives into a new framework. But you can do it, because the danger is all over for both of you. There’s nothing to be afraid of any longer.”
Haskell Barkin
The Last Sassetta
Are you interested in restoration? Restoring antique furniture, perhaps? Old paintings? Vintage automobiles? Ah, you say you’re a classic-car buff? That rebuilding an engine, replating chrome, refinishing wood, turns you on? Oh, you say you’re not a fancier of early-model horseless carriages? It doesn’t matter. You’ll still be fascinated by this story of the rarest old car in the world, and of Mike Osmond’s ultimate “labor of love”. . .
Three years ago Mike Osmond stumbled across the rarest car in the world.
His consuming interest in life was restoring classic automobiles to their exact original condition. To finance this he worked at a dull job that he loathed. He refused all offers of advancement which would make additional demands on his time, and he was unmarried.
One Saturday morning he left his home in Los Angeles for Winnemucca, Nevada. His current project was a 1930 Cord, and he had heard that a pair of front-wheel universals in almost perfect condition were available in Winnemucca. One way or another he would get them.
The address turned out to be a Gasoline Alley type of garage that looked as if it had been in business since Henry Ford got turned on by a conveyer belt. When Mike entered, his contact, an old-timer named Wilmer Butts, was setting the idle on a pick-up truck.
Butts was friendly enough and asked a fair price for the universals, which Mike haggled him down by one-fourth. Then Mike spent an hour picking the brains of the ancient mechanic for all the tricks of the trade and for leads to other antique parts.
As he was about to leave, Wilmer Butts said, “I seem to recall an old car rusting away up on Mother Lode Mountain that you might want to look at.”
“What kind?”
“Foreign, most likely. Damnedest long hood I ever saw, with a front seat open and the back closed in. I tried looking for a name somewhere, but there wasn’t none.”
“Any hood emblem? Any design on the hubcaps?”
“Come to think of it there was a funny-looking radiator cap. You’d call it a horse’s head, except for the horn sticking out of the forehead.”
Mike felt his stomach clench.
“You look like that means something,” Wilmer Butts said.
“Kind of,” Mike answered, forcing his voice to be calm. “Sounds like an old De Soto touring car a friend of mine’s rebuilding, and he’s going crazy trying to locate that ornament. Hell, maybe I’ll pick it up for him. You say the wreck is abandoned?”
“Far as I know. It’s government land. Used to be a gold-mining operation up there until 1931 when a fire shut it down completely. No great loss, the workings were just about dry anyway.”
He told Mike how to get there—an hour’s drive out of town and then 14 miles of dirt road up Mother Lode Mountain.
Mike raced along the state highway, taking maximum advantage of Nevada’s lack of speed limits. It can’t be, he thought as the needle tremored on 90. Nobody gets this lucky. Yet Wilmer Butts’s description could fit only one make of car—a make that the richest men in the world regularly tried to add to their collections and couldn’t.
A Sassetta.
Precisely 32 of these incredible automobiles had been produced in Italy between 1920 and 1924. Produced? Created!
Benito Sassetta was one of the greatest geniuses ever to design and build an automobile. His cars handled like racers. They rode like luxury liners. They had innovations in steering, suspension, and engineering that were 30 years ahead of their time. Some still haven’t been duplicated.
His gearbox alone was a marvel. Shifting was so fast and easy that new drivers thought the factory had forgotten to connect the bottom of the lever.
All this was familiar to Mike. It was the stuff of his dreams. He knew that 32 cars had been sold to the world’s wealthy, to its rulers. And then Benito Sassetta went insane. Maybe he was crazy all the time he was building his wonderful machines. Sane men know you can’t possibly achieve the perfection Sassetta had aimed at—and had achieved.
According to the Sassetta Society (headquarters, London), perhaps the world’s most exclusive club because you have to own one to belong, 14 of the cars were now in the possession of presidents, sheiks, and other heads of state; 8 were owned by private individuals; 7 had been wrecked in accidents and by angry mobs; 2 were in museums.<
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And only one of the magic 32 was unaccounted for, Mike told himself over and over again.
Driving as fast as he dared, it still took him over an hour to snake up the mountain road. Twice, at hairpin turns, he almost went over the edge. Finally when he was high enough to see across the valley to the next range of mountains, he came to the burnt-out mine.
There was a gaping shaft with blackened timbers cut into the side of the hill. The landscape all around was littered with enormous machinery for crushing and shaking, with pumps, parts of donkey engines, and gears. A junkyard of rusting iron. Half a dozen single-story wooden buildings stood in various stages of dilapidation.
Mike sprinted to the long shack that Wilmer Butts had said was the bunkhouse. He turned the corner and came upon the ancient automobile, its hood crushed, headlamp askew, red finish burnt and scratched, and springs curling from the driver’s seat. A silver unicorn reared up from the radiator cap, as if announcing to Mike that myths and dreams could, in the twinkling of an eye, become reality.
He circled the machine in awe. He opened a door and gazed inside at the moldering splendor of wood and leather. He tenderly rubbed a sleeve against the dull surface of a fender and uncovered a sudden depth of shine that threw the sun back at him like fire and brought tears to his eyes.
Somewhere behind him a girl’s voice called out, “One of these days I’m going to chop off the top of that wreck with a can opener and plant geraniums in there.”
Mike whipped around, angry at the interruption. Advancing toward him was someone in Levi’s and a plaid lumberjack shirt. Her hair was in pigtails. As she came closer Mike saw that the girl was in her late twenties and more weathered than pretty. She held an ax, as though prepared to carry out her threat immediately.
“Who’re you?” Mike demanded.
“Well, for one thing I’m the owner of this property on which you’re trespassing.” Her voice had lost its friendliness.
“This is government land,” he said.
“And they gave me a lease. Sorry I don’t have it with me.”
“Then all this is yours? These shacks?”
“Uh huh.”
“And all the machinery and this old clunker of a car?”
“That’s right.”
This plain country girl was the most important person in the world to him. And his stupid anger had made her hostile.
“Look,” he said, flashing the smile that had persuaded dozens of classic-auto buffs to sell him treasured spare parts, “I want to apologize for being a little gruff. But I thought I ripped my sleeve on the fender of this junkheap. Friends?”
“What’re you doing up here?”
“I heard about the mine and the fire. I figured there might be a couple of old trucks up here I could cannibalize to get parts for a Cord I’m rebuilding.”
“A what?”
“A Cord. It’s a front-wheel-drive car. Sort of classic.”
“We haven’t got any trucks up here. Just this thing.” She was a little friendlier now.
“What an ugly monster,” Mike said with distaste.
“You think so? Seems kind of grand to me.”
“You know what kind of car this is?”
“Some hunter said it was an old Packard.”
“No, it’s some short-lived mongrel nobody remembers. Cars like this were built for the new rich, to impress them. But it hasn’t got any style, it’s just a collection of standard parts. That’s what makes the car so garish. Look at these fenders. They’re Packard, all right, which is what fooled your hunter friend.”
He opened the undamaged side of the long hood. It lifted silently and easily. Underneath, with its chromed exhaust pipes extending back on each side like wings, rested the great V-16 engine. Mike remembered what some owner had once written: “One does not speak while riding in a Sassetta; one listens.”
“Why are you staring at the motor like that?” the girl asked.
“It’s an engine. A motor is electric. And I’m staring because it’s disgusting how they got away with such shoddy workmanship. Parts from everywhere. Ford, De Soto, Pierce-Arrow—nothing made to go with anything else.”
“You’re quite an expert.”
“It’s a relaxing hobby. Even if it does get to be a little expensive for a guy like me.”
A cowbell clanged inside one of the old shacks.
“That’s Uncle Oscar,” the girl said. “He likes to meet people. Want to come inside?”
Mike followed her into the shack. An old man in a wheel chair sat beside an enameled kitchen table. The cowbell was on his lap. One hand trembled.
“Who the hell you been talking to out there?” the old man said.
Introductions were made, then the girl, whose name was Annie, said to Mike, “Uncle Oscar used to work at the mine until the fire.”
“Back in 1931,” Uncle Oscar said in a sort of a gasp. “Damnedest thing you ever saw! One second I’m working at the shaker with the engine rattling in my ears. Next thing there’s an explosion in the shaft and I don’t hear nothing else. Deafened me, you know? Then there was flames everywhere.”
He went on describing the disaster for half an hour, and then the operation of the mine. Mike played the perfect listener and asked interested questions. Finally he was able to say the important one.
“And that old wreck of a car, what was that doing up here?”
Uncle Oscar laughed and shook his head. “Belonged to the owner himself, Mr. Peacock. He was here visiting that very day. Happened to be in the shaft when it exploded. Anyway, I started clerking in a hardware store after that. But I still came up here every weekend for a little private prospecting.”
“Any luck?”
“A couple of hundred dollars a year,” Annie said. “Or about a nickel an hour.”
Later, when Annie and Mike were outside, she said, “Since his stroke last March I drive him to the mine as often as possible. He loves it up here. I guess I do, too. No more prospecting, of course. Mostly he just sits and remembers.”
“You know what? I like him, I really do.”
She smiled warmly. Like a schoolgirl offering to show her doll collection, both proud and uncertain of being accepted, Annie suggested a tour of the site. Mike accepted enthusiastically.
Later they came to the old car again. Mike shook his head, as though still astonished that such a monstrosity could have been built. Suddenly he snapped his fingers.
“I’ll be damned!” he said, and reached in to grip the steering wheel, that circle of wood that Benito Sassetta had fashioned from the beams of century-old farmhouses.
“Uh huh, that’s a Chevy steering wheel all right,” he said.
“Why is that unusual if the car is all different parts?”
“There’s this old guy I know who’s restoring a ’25 Chevy, like the one he drove cross-country on his honeymoon. His wife died last year and he really misses her. So I guess he’s trying to bring back memories, kind of like your uncle and this place. He’s been going crazy looking for the right steering wheel, and here it is.”
He paused to let her make the offer.
“Mike, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a draftsman.” Can’t you take a hint, stupid?
“Does your wife work with you on the Cord?”
“I’m not married. Say, I just got a crazy idea. Will you sell me this wreck? I can give Charley his steering wheel and make enough reselling the parts to do a little more work on my Cord. I don’t know what to offer you. Does a hundred bucks sound fair?”
“The car isn’t for sale, Mike.”
“Why not?”
“Uncle Oscar is attached to everything at the mine. Especially since his stroke. Nothing new comes up here, and nothing leaves.”
Sentimental value, eh? The girl was sharper than she looked. “Annie, I’ve got two hundred and four dollars with me. Cash. It’s all I can afford, okay?”
“You sure doubled your price fast.”
“B
ecause I can understand how your uncle feels. And I can probably still make a little.”
“If I hold out would you double the offer again?”
“That’s all there is, Annie. And if my gamble doesn’t pay off I live on beans for a month.”
“I don’t think you’re playing straight with me. And I don’t like being treated like some country bumpkin. Maybe you’d just better get out of here. Right now.”
“Oh, I’m a shrewd character, all right,” Mike spat out sarcastically. “Two hundred dollars, and I can sell the parts for maybe four hundred. After towing the carcass down fourteen miles of dirt road, advertising in all the car magazines, and finally becoming wealthy as the responses roll in. Boy, am I shrewd! Well, you can keep your hunk of junk!”
As she stared back at him, still defiant, Mike could see a new element in her mood. Uncertainty.
“I’m sorry, Annie,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be nasty. I guess it hurt me, hearing that from you.”
“What’s so special about me?”
“Hard to say. But I’d like to find out, if you’ll give me a chance. I’m on vacation this week. Maybe you’ll let me take you out to dinner, if I stay around.”
“No need for that.”
“I promise you, not a single word about you-know-what. Okay?”
Monday morning he phoned his boss to say he’d be out sick for a while. And he saw Annie every night that week. She was easy to flatter and hungry for affection.
Late Friday night, after they spent an hour necking in his car, Mike begged Annie to come to his motel. She refused and hoped he understood. It was just something she wasn’t ready to do. But she did like him a lot. She really did.
Her declaration was more than enough. Now he knew that his plan for Sunday would succeed, and make him the owner of the rarest car in the world.
He persuaded Annie to spend the whole weekend with him, instead of taking Uncle Oscar up to the mine. On Sunday afternoon the two of them had a picnic in a field near town. When the chicken was eaten and the wine bottle was empty, Mike lay back with his head on Annie’s lap while she stroked his hair.
