Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  Like lilacs in the rain.

  “I couldn’t leave it in there,” he explained, “because it doesn’t match the setup as I’ve arranged it. It would have shown that somebody was in there, after all.” He smiled grimly. “I’m doing somebody a big favor, a much bigger favor than she deserves. But I’m not doing it for her, I’m doing it for you, to keep even a whisper of your name from being brought into it.”

  Absently she thrust the wisp of stuff into her own evening bag, where she carried her own, drew the drawstring tight once more.

  “Get rid of it,” he advised. “You can do that easier than I can. But not anywhere around here, whatever you do.”

  He glanced back toward the inside room. “What else did you touch in there—besides the gun?”

  She shook her head. “I just stepped in and—you found me.”

  “You touched the door?”

  She nodded.

  He whipped out his handkerchief again, crouched low on one knee, and like a strange sort of porter in a dinner jacket scoured the doorknobs on both sides, in and out.

  “What about these? Did you do that?” There were some almonds lying on the floor.

  “I threw them at the door, like pebbles—to attract his attention.”

  “A man about to do what he did wouldn’t munch almonds.” He picked them up, all but one which had already been stepped on and crushed. “One won’t matter. He could have done that himself,” he told her. “Let me see your shoe.” He bent down and peered at the tilted sole. “It’s on there. Get rid of them altogether when you get home. Don’t just scrape it; they have ways of bringing out things like that.”

  “What about the whole supper table itself? It’s for two.”

  “That’ll have to stay. Whoever he was expecting didn’t come and in a fit of depression aging Romeo played his last role, alone. That’ll be the story it tells. At least it’ll show that no one did come. If we disturb a perfect setup like that, we may prove the opposite to what we’re trying to.”

  He put his arm about her. “Are you ready now? Come on, here we go. And remember: you were never here. None of this ever happened.”

  A sweep of his hand behind his back, a swing of the door, and the light faded away—they were out in the starry blue night together.

  “Whose car is that?”

  “My own. The roadster Daddy gave me. I had Rufus run it down to the club for me and leave it outside after we all left for the dance.”

  “Did he check it?”

  “No, I told him not to.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. We’ve got to get them both out of here. I’ll get in mine. You’ll have to get back into the one you brought, by yourself. I’ll lead the way. Stick to my treads, so you don’t leave too clear a print. It will probably snow again before they find him, and that’ll save us.”

  He went on ahead to his own car, got in, and started the motor. Suddenly he left it warming up, jumped out again, and came back to her. “Here,” he said abruptly, “hang onto this until I can get you back down there again.” And pressed his lips to hers with a sort of tender encouragement.

  It was the strangest kiss she’d ever had. It was one of the most selfless, one of the nicest.

  The two cars trundled away, one behind the other. After a little while the echo of their going drifted back from the lonely lake. And then there was just silence.

  The lights and the music, like a warm friendly tide, came swirling around her again. He stopped her for a moment, just outside the entrance, before they went in.

  “Did anyone see you leave?”

  “Only Marie, the check girl. The parking attendant didn’t know about the car.”

  “Hand me your lipstick a minute,” he ordered.

  She got it out and gave it to him. He made a little smudge with it, on his own cheek, high up near the ear. Then another one farther down, closer to the mouth. Not too vivid, faint enough to be plausible, distinct enough to be seen.

  He even thought of his tie, pulled it a little awry. He seemed to think of everything. Maybe that was because he was only thinking of one thing: of her.

  He slung a proprietary arm about her waist. “Smile,” he instructed her. “Laugh. Put your arm around my waist. Act as if you really cared for me. We’re having a giddy time. We’re just coming in from a session in a parked car outside.”

  The lights from the glittering dance floor went up over them like a slowly raised curtain. They strolled past the checkroom girl, arm over arm, faces turned to one another, prattling away like a pair of grammar-school kids, all taken up in one another. Sunny threw her head back and emitted a paean of frivolous laughter at something he was supposed to have said just then.

  The check girl’s eyes followed them with a sort of wistful envy. It must be great, she thought, to be so carefree and have such a good time. Not a worry on your mind.

  At the edge of the floor they stopped. He took her in his arms to lead her.

  “Keep on smiling, you’re doing great. We’re going to dance. I’m going to take you once around the floor until we get over to where your father and sister are. Wave to people, call out their names as we pass them. I want everyone to see you. Can you do it? Will you be all right?”

  She took a deep, resolute breath. “If you want me to. Yes. I can do it.”

  They went gliding out into the middle of the floor.

  The band was back to Number Twenty in the books—the same song they had been playing when she left. It must have been a repeat by popular demand, it couldn’t have been going on the whole time, she’d been away too long. What a different meaning it had now.

  “But instead I trust him implicitly.

  I’ll go where he wants to go,

  Do what he wants to do, I don’t care—”

  That sort of fitted Tom. That was for him—nobody else. Sturdy reliability. That was what you wanted, that was what you came back to, if you were foolish enough to stray from it in the first place. Sometimes you found that out too late—sometimes it took you a lifetime, it cost you your youth. Like what they said had happened to poor Jane ten or twelve years ago when she herself, Sunny, had been still a child.

  But Sunny was lucky, she had found it out in time. It had only taken her—well, the interval between a pair of dance selections, played the same night, at the same club. It had only cost her—well, somebody else had paid the debt for her.

  And so, it was back where it had begun. And as it had begun.

  At exactly 10:55 this Saturday, this Washington’s Birthday Saturday, the dance is still on full-blast; the band is playing “The Object of My Affections,” Number Twenty in the leader’s book. Jane is sitting back against the wall. And Sunny is twinkling about on the floor, once more in the arms of Tom Reed, the boy who loved her all through high school, the man who still does now at this very moment, the man who always will, through all the years ahead—

  “Here are your people,” he whispered warningly. “I’m going to turn you over to them now.”

  She glanced at them across his shoulder. They were sitting there, Jane and her father, so safe, so secure. Nothing ever happened to them. Less than an hour ago she would have felt sorry for them. Now she envied them.

  She and Tom came to a neat halt in front of them.

  “Daddy,” she said quietly. And she hadn’t called him that since she was fifteen. “Daddy, I want to go home now. Take me with you.”

  He chuckled. “You mean before they even finish playing down to the very last half note? I thought you never got tired dancing.”

  “Sometimes I do,” she admitted wistfully. “And I guess this is one of those times.”

  He turned to his other daughter. “How about you, Jane? Ready to go now?”

  “I’ve been ready,” she said, “ever since we first got here, almost.”

  The father’s eyes had rested for a moment on the telltale red traces on Tom’s cheek. They twinkled quizzically, but he tactfully refrained from saying anything.
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br />   Not Jane. “Really, Sunny,” she said disapprovingly. And then, curtly, to Tom: “Fix your cheek.”

  He went about it very cleverly, pretending he couldn’t find it with his handkerchief for a minute. “Where? Here?”

  “Higher up,” said Jane. And this time Mr. Brainard smothered an indulgent little smile.

  Sunny and Tom trailed them out to the entrance, when they got up to go. “Give me your spare garage key,” he said in an undertone. “I’ll run the roadster home as soon as you leave and put it away for you. I can get up there quicker with it than you will with the big car. I’ll see that Rufus doesn’t say anything; I’ll tell him you and I were going to elope tonight and changed our minds at the last minute.”

  “He’s always on my side anyway,” she admitted.

  He took a lingering leave of her by the hand.

  “I have a question to ask you. But I’ll keep it until next Saturday. The same place? The same time?”

  “I have the answer to give you. But I’ll keep that until next Saturday too. The same place. The same time.”

  She got in the back seat with her father and sister, and they drove off.

  “It’s beginning to snow,” Jane complained.

  Thanks, murmured Sunny, unheard, Thanks, as the first few flakes came sifting down.

  Jane bunched her shoulders defensively. “It gets too hot in there with all those people. And now it’s chilly in the car.” She stifled a sneeze, fumbled in her evening bag. “Now, what did I do with my handkerchief?”

  “Here, I’ll give you mine,” offered Sunny, and heedlessly passed her something in the dark, out of her own bag.

  A faint fragrance, invisible as a finespun wire but just as tenuous. Like lilacs in the rain.

  Jane raised it toward her nose, held it there, suddenly arrested. “Why, this is mine! Don’t you recognize my sachet? Where’d you find it?”

  Sunny didn’t answer. Something had suddenly clogged her throat. She recognized the scent now. Lilacs in the rain.

  “Where did you find it?” Jane insisted.

  “Hattie—Hattie turned it over to me in the ladies’ lounge. You must have lost it in there—”

  “Why, I wasn’t—” Jane started to say. Then just as abruptly she didn’t go ahead.

  Sunny knew what she’d been about to say. “I wasn’t in there once the whole evening.” Jane disliked the atmosphere of gossip that she imagined permeated the lounge, the looks that she imagined would be exchanged behind her back. Sunny hadn’t thought quickly enough. But it was too late now.

  Jane was holding the handkerchief pressed tight to her mouth. Just holding it there.

  Impulsively Sunny reached out, found Jane’s hand in the dark, and clasped it warmly and tightly for a long moment.

  It said so much, that warm clasp of hands, without a word being said. It said: I understand. We’ll never speak of it, you and I. Not a word will ever pass my lips. And thank you, thank you for helping me as you have, though you may not know you did.

  Presently, tremulously, a little answering pressure was returned by Jane’s hand. There must have been unseen tears on her face, tears of gratitude, tears of release. She was dabbing at her eyes in the dark.

  Their father, sitting comfortably and obliviously between them, spoke for the first time since the car had left the club.

  “Well, another Saturday-night dance over and done with. They’re all pretty much alike—once you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all. Same old thing week in and week out. Music playing, people dancing. Nothing much ever happens. They get pretty monotonous. Sometimes I wonder why we bother going every week, the way we do.”

  John Ball

  Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body

  The first thing Officer Frank Mitchell heard was a violent thud directly behind him; it was so powerful it seemed for a second that the very ground had shaken under his feet. He turned quickly, saw the body scarcely thirty feet away, and had a sudden, compelling desire to be sick. Only seven months out of the academy, he was still not used to the sight of sudden and violent death.

  The body of the suicide, if that’s what it was, had landed so hard the skull had split and what was revealed took all of Officer Mitchell’s courage to face. Partly by reflex action he looked up, far up the side of the towering building in front of which he was standing. He saw an immensity of structure and glass that was totally unmoved by what had just happened. On Mitchell’s first inspection, the building gave no clue to the point from which the now smashed body had been launched into the air.

  When he had seen and noted that, Officer Mitchell turned to do his unwelcome but necessary duty. There were a few others who had witnessed the terrible death; they hung back in a kind of hypnotized horror, unwilling either to come closer or to go away. Then through the small ring of spectators a slender but well built black man came running forward, peeling off his coat at the same time. Because the man was headed straight toward the body on the sidewalk, Officer Mitchell held up his hands to stop him.

  He could have saved himself the trouble; he was ignored. Instead, the intruder dropped to one knee and threw his coat over the head and shoulders of the fallen man. Then he looked up at Mitchell. “Tibbs,” the man said. “Pasadena Police. Get some backup and an ambulance.”

  Mitchell came out of his near shock and responded by taking his small portable police radio out of its belt carrier. He raised it to his face and put out an urgent call. His immediate duty done, he walked the few steps to where the now covered body lay grimly still on the concrete. “Thank you,” he said. “It got to me for a moment.”

  “Of course.” The Pasadena policeman got to his feet and had his own look at the sheer face of the massive building. “He probably came from halfway up, or more. Did you note the condition of the skull?”

  Mitchell swallowed and nodded. “Frank Mitchell,” he introduced himself.

  “Virgil Tibbs.”

  “What do you work?”

  “Robbery-Homicide.”

  “Look, if you’d care to stick around until my backup—”

  “Of course. This isn’t my jurisdiction, but I’ll do what I can.” He took out his Pasadena ID and clipped it to his shirt pocket.

  Mercifully, the gathering crowd showed no signs of wanting to come closer. A single young man armed with a small pocket camera started to move in, but retreated when Mitchell waved him away. After that the scene was static until a black-and-white patrol car coming Code Two pulled up with its roof lights still on. A sergeant got out; he was closing the car door when a second unit rolled in.

  The sergeant took in the situation with a single careful look, then he too scanned the vast side of the huge building. He raised a hand to wave Virgil Tibbs away, then he saw the plastic identification clipped to his pocket. He came close enough to read it before he spoke. “You covered the body.” It was a statement.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. The ambulance will be here right away.”

  As he spoke, a red paramedic unit from the fire department rolled up. The two-man crew had already been notified what to expect; one man riding on the passenger side had a blanket ready on his lap. He jumped out, walked quickly to the body, took off Tibbs’s coat, and satisfied himself that life was extinct. Then he snapped the blanket open and dropped it over the corpse. After that he picked up the coat once more and returned it to its owner. “It may be stained,” he warned.

  Tibbs checked it carefully, then put it back on. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll have it cleaned.”

  Mitchell was talking to his sergeant, reporting on what he had seen. It took him only a few moments, then he introduced Tibbs.

  The Los Angeles sergeant was obviously experienced, but unpretentious. “I’m glad you were here to give us a hand,” he said. “Bob Opper.”

  “Anything else I can do?”

  “If you’ve got the time, I’d like to get your account of this.”

  “Whatever you want.”

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nbsp; “You work homicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “It looks like a jumper, of course, but I want to check it out. You’re welcome if you want to come along.”

  That didn’t call for an answer; as the sergeant turned toward the entrance of the very high building, Tibbs fell in beside him. “Did you get a look at the body before it was covered with the blanket?” Virgil asked.

  “Partially. Why, did you catch something?”

  “Perhaps,” Tibbs replied.

  They walked together into the huge lobby. By that time there were blue uniforms everywhere; the L.A.P.D. was definitely efficient. Behind them a coroner’s unit arrived and two men got out. It was hardly ten minutes since the body had hit the sidewalk, but the official machinery to clean up was already functioning smoothly.

  There was a uniformed guard in the lobby; at the sergeant’s instruction he rang for the building manager.

  That done, Opper turned to his black colleague from Pasadena. “You said you caught something.”

  “The deceased had on a brand-new pair of shoes. The soles were hardly scratched.”

  “And you figure that a man wouldn’t go and buy himself a new pair of shoes just before he killed himself.”

  “That’s right. Buying a pair of shoes takes selection and fitting: if he was planning to take his life within the next hour, that wouldn’t be a logical thing for him to do. From the condition of the soles he couldn’t have walked more than two or three blocks at the most.”

  “He could have put on a new pair of shoes and then driven here.”

  “Agreed, but the percentages are against it; again, it wouldn’t be logical unless his decision to kill himself was very sudden.”

  A patrolman came in with a wallet in his hands. “Here’s the ID of the deceased,” he said. “Robert T. Williamson, DOB 13 June 1932. His home address is in Orange County.”