The Siamese Twin Mystery (7 page)

“A crab!” he gasped. “Ho, ho, ho! A
crab
!” and he went off into another gale.

“Oh, stop it!” said the old gentleman irritably. “You sound like Lawrence Tibbett singing that flea song. Stop it!”

“A crab,” gasped Ellery again, wiping his eyes.

The old man shrugged. “Mind you, I’m not saying it
was
a—a crab. Might have been a couple of crazy acrobats or wrestlers or something doing a little homework on the hall floor. But it
looked
like a crab—a giant crab. Big as a man—bigger than a man, El.” He rose nervously and grasped Ellery’s arm. “Come on, be nice. I look all right, don’t I? I haven’t got de—delusions, or something, have I?”

“Blessed if I know what you have,” chuckled Ellery, flinging himself on the bed. “Seeing crabs! If I didn’t know you so well I’d lump the crab with a particularly violent purple elephant and say you’d had a wee drappie too much. Crab!” He shook his head. “Now look here; let’s examine this thing like rational human beings, not kids in a haunted house. I was talking to you, facing you. You were looking straight ahead, down the corridor. Exactly where did you see this—this fantastic beast of yours, Inspector dear?”

The Inspector took snuff with shaking fingers. “Second door down the hall from ours,” he muttered, and sneezed. “Of course, it was just my imagination, El. … It was on our side of the hall. It was pretty dark at that spot—”

“Pity,” drawled Ellery. “With a little more light I’m sure you’d have seen at least a tyrannosaurus. Just what was your friend the crab doing when you spotted him and got the shivers?”

“Don’t rub it in,” said the Inspector miserably. “I just got a glimpse of—of the thing. Scuttled—”

“Scuttled!”

“That’s the only word for it,” said the old gentleman in a dogged voice. “Scuttled through the doorway, and then you heard the click yourself. Must have.”

“This,” said Ellery, “calls for investigation.” He jumped from the bed and strode to the door.

“El! For God’s sake be careful!” wailed the Inspector. “You simply can’t go snooping about a man’s house at night—”

“I can go to the bathroom, can’t I?” said Ellery with dignity; and he pulled open the door and vanished.

Inspector Queen sat still, gnawing at his fingers and shaking his head. Then he rose, pulled off his coat and shirt, his suspenders sagging below his seat, and stretching his arms yawned prodigiously. He was very tired. Tired and sleepy and—afraid. Yes, he admitted to himself in the privacy of that doorless chamber of the mind to which no outsider can gain admittance, old Queen of Centre Street was afraid. It was a queer thing. He had felt fear often before; it was silly to set oneself up as a Jack Dalton; but this was a new kind of fear. A fear of the unknown. It did queer things to his skin and made him want to whirl about at purely imaginary sounds behind him.

Consequently he yawned and stretched and busied himself with the score of slow little unimportant things a man does when he is undressing for bed. And all the while, despite the very genuine laughter of Ellery echoing in his brain, fear lurked there and would not be banished. He even began—sneering bitterly to himself in the same instant—to whistle.

He slipped out of his trousers and folded his clothes neatly on the Morris chair. Then he bent over one of the suitcases at the foot of the bed. As he did so something rattled at one of the windows and he looked up, prickling and alert. But it was only a half-drawn window shade.

Moved by an unconquerable impulse he trotted quickly across the room—a gray mouse of a man in his underwear—and pulled the blind. He caught a glimpse of the outdoors as the blind came down: a vast black abyss, it seemed to him; and indeed it was, for he was to find later that the house was perched on the edge of a precipice, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the next valley. His small, sharp eyes flicked sidewise. In the same instant he sprang back from the window, releasing the shade so that it flew up with a crash, and darting across the room flicked the light switch, plunging the room in darkness.

Ellery opened the door of their bedroom, stopped short in astonishment, and then slipped into the room like a wraith, shutting the door quickly and softly behind him.

“Dad!” he whispered. “Are you in bed? Why’s the light off?”

“Shut up!” he heard his father say fiercely. “Don’t make any more noise than you have to. There’s something damned fishy going on around here, and I think I know now what it is.”

Ellery was silent for a moment. As his pupils contracted under influence of the dark, he began to make out shadowy details. A faint starlight shone through the rear windows. His father, bare legged and in shorts, was crouched almost on his knees across the room. There was a third window on the right-hand wall; and it was at this window that the Inspector crouched.

Ellery ran to his father’s side and looked out. The side window overlooked a court formed by the recession of the rear wall of the house in the middle. The court was narrow. Propped against the outside of the rear wall in the court at the first-floor level there was a balcony which led, apparently, from the bedroom adjoining the Queens’. Ellery reached the window just in time to see a flowing shadowy figure slip from the balcony through a French door and vanish. A white feminine hand shone in the starlight as it reached out of the room and drew the double door shut.

The Inspector rose with a groan, pulled all the blinds, pattered back to the door, and turned on the light switch. He was perspiring profusely.

“Well?” murmured Ellery, standing still at the foot of the bed.

The Inspector dropped onto the bed, hunched over like a little half-naked kobold, and tugged fretfully at one end of his gray mustache. “I went over there to pull the blind,” he muttered, “and just then I saw a woman through the side window. She was standing on the balcony staring off into space, seemed like. I ran back and turned off the light and then watched her. She didn’t move. Just stared up at the stars. Moony, sort of. I heard her sniffle. Cried like a baby. All by herself. Then you came in and she went back to that room next door.”

“Indeed?” said Ellery. He slipped over to the wall on the right and pressed his ear against it. “Can’t hear a thing through these walls, damn the luck! Well, and what’s fishy about that? Who was it—Mrs. Xavier, or that very frightened young woman, Miss Forrest?”

“That,” said the Inspector grimly, “is what makes it so fishy.”

Ellery stared at his father. “Riddles, eh?” He began to strip off his jacket. “Come on, out with it. Somebody we haven’t seen tonight, I’ll wager. And
not
the crab.”

“You’ve guessed it,” said the old gentleman glumly. “It wasn’t either of ’em. It was … Marie Carreau!” He uttered the name as if it were an incantation.

Ellery stopped struggling with his shirt. “Marie Carreau? Come again. Who the devil’s she? Never heard of her.”

“Oh, my God,” moaned the Inspector. “Never heard of Marie Carreau, he says! That’s what comes of raising an ignoramus. Don’t you read the papers, you idiot? She’s society, son, society!”

“Hear, hear.”

“Bluest of the blue. Pots of money. Runs official Washington. Her father’s Ambassador to France. Of French stock, dating from the Revolution. Her great-great-what-is-it and Lafayette were just like that.” The old gentleman twined his middle finger about his forefinger. “Whole damn family—uncles and cousins and nephews—all in the diplomatic service. She married her own cousin—same name—about twenty years ago. He’s dead now. No children. Never remarried, though she’s still young. She’s only about thirty-seven.” He paused for sheer lack of breath and glared at his son.

“Bravo,” chuckled Ellery, flexing his arms. “There’s the complete woman for you! That old photographic memory of yours opening again. Well, what of it? To tell the truth, I’m immensely relieved. We’re beginning to dig into some tangible mysteries. This crowd had some reason, obviously, to conceal the fact that your precious Mrs. Carreau is among those present.
Ergo,
when they heard an automobile roaring up tonight they bundled your precious social ranee into her bedroom. All that stuff about being afraid of visitors this time of night was pure hogwash. What gave mine host and the rest the jitters was trying to keep us from suspecting she’s here. I wonder why.”

“I can tell you that,” said the Inspector quietly. “I saw it in the newspapers before we started out on our trip three weeks ago, and you would have seen it, too, if you paid the least attention to what’s going on in the world! Mrs. Carreau is supposed to be in Europe!”

“Oho,” said Ellery softly. He took a cigaret out of his case and went over to the night table to hunt for a match. “Interesting. But not necessarily inexplicable. We’ve a famous surgeon here—perhaps the little lady has something wrong with her blue blood, or her gold-plated innards, and doesn’t want to have the world know. … No, that doesn’t seem to wash. It’s more than that. … Very pretty problem. Crying, eh? Perhaps she’s been kidnapped,” he said hopefully. “By our excellent host. … Where in hell’s a match?”

The Inspector disdained to reply, tugging at his mustache and scowling at the floor.

Ellery opened the drawer of the night table, found a packet of matches, and whistled. “By George,” he drawled, “what a thoughtful gentleman our precious doctor is. Just look at the junk in this drawer.”

The Inspector snorted.

“There’s a man,” said Ellery admiringly, “with admirable singleness of purpose. Apparently gaming of the innocuous sort is a phobia with him, so that he can’t forbear inflicting his phobia on his guests. Here’s the complete solution to a dull weekend. A crisp new pack of cards, never opened, a book of crossword puzzles—actually virgin, by Vesta!—a checkerboard, one of those questions-and-answers books, and heaven knows what else. Even the pencil is sharpened. Well!” He sighed, closed the drawer, and lit his cigaret.

“Beautiful,” muttered the Inspector.

“Eh?”

The old gentleman started. “I was thinking out loud. The lady on the balcony, I mean. Really a gorgeous creature, El. And crying—” He shook his head. “Well, I suppose it’s all really none of our business. We’re a pair of the world’s nosiest louts.” Then he jerked his head up and some of the old wariness leapt into his gray eyes. “I forgot. Anything doing outside? Find out anything?”

Ellery deliberately lay down on the other side of the bed and crossed his feet on the footboard. He puffed smoke toward the ceiling. “Oh, you mean about the—ah—giant crab?” he said with a twinkle.

“You know damn well what I mean!” snarled the Inspector, blushing to his ears.

“Well,” drawled Ellery, “it’s problematical. Corridor was empty, and all the doors closed. No sounds. I crossed the landing noisily and went into the bathroom. Then I came out—without noise. Didn’t remain there long. … By the way, do you happen to know anything about the gastronomical predilections of crustaceans?”

“Well, well?” growled the Inspector. “What’s on your mind now? You always have to say it with trimmings!”

“The point is,” murmured Ellery, “that I heard footsteps on the stairs and had to dodge back into the darkness of the corridor near our door. Couldn’t cross the landing to get into the bathroom again, or whoever it was that was coming up would have spotted me. So I watched that patch of light at the landing. It was our buxom Demeter, our nervous provider of provender, Mrs. Wheary.”

“The housekeeper? What of it? Probably going to bed. I suppose she and that lout of a scoundrel, Bones—cripes, what a name!—sleep on the attic floor upstairs.”

“Oh, no doubt. But Mrs. Wheary was not bound for blessed dreamland, I’ll tell you that. She was carrying a tray.”

“Ah!”

“A tray, I might add, heaped with comestibles.”

“Bound for Mrs. Carreau’s room, I’ll bet,” muttered the Inspector. “After all, even society women have to eat.”

“Not at all,” said Ellery dreamily. “That’s why I asked you if you knew anything about the gustatory tastes of crustaceans.
I’ve
never heard of a crab drinking a pitcher of cow’s milk and eating meat sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, and gulping fruit. … You see, she barged right into the room next to Mrs. Carreau’s with not the faintest sign of fear. The room,” he said slyly, “into which you saw your giant crab—ah—” the Inspector threw up his hands and dug into the suitcase for his pajamas—“scuttle!”

E
LLERY OPENED HIS EYES
and saw brilliant sunlight splashing the counterpane of the unfamiliar bed on which he lay. For a moment he did not remember where he was. There was a singed soreness in his throat and his head felt like a pumpkin. He sighed and stirred and heard his father say: “So you’re up,” in a mild voice; and he twisted his head to find the Inspector, fully dressed in clean linen, fastidious little hands clasped behind his back, staring out of the rear windows with quiet abstraction.

Ellery groaned, stretched, and crawled out of bed. He began to peel off his pajamas, yawning.

“Take a look at this,” said the Inspector, without turning.

Ellery shuffled to his father’s side. The wall with two windows between which stood their bed was at the rear of the Xavier house. What had seemed a profound black abyss the night before turned out to be a sheer drop of contorted stone; so deep and disturbing that for a moment Ellery closed his eyes against a surge of vertigo. Then he opened them again. The sun was well over the distant range; it painted microscopic details of valley and cliffside with remarkable clarity. They were so high that the still, deserted world in the cup of the mighty well was the merest miniature; fluffy clouds drifted a little below them, striving to cling to the mountain’s top.

“See it?” murmured the Inspector.

“See what?”

“Way down there, where the cliff begins to slope into the valley. At the sides of the Mountain, El.”

Then Ellery saw. Curling around the edges of Arrow Mountain, far down at the knife-edge sides where the tight green mat of vegetation abruptly ended, were little fluttering pennants of smoke.

“The fire!” exclaimed Ellery. “I’d almost got myself to the point of thinking the whole blessed thing was a nightmare.”