The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  ‘I thought you gave good customers more than three years’ credit?’ says I.

  The milliner looks at Mr. Yatman, and whispers to me—‘Not when a lady’s husband gets into difficulties.’

  She pointed to the account as she spoke. The entries after the time when Mr. Yatman’s circumstances became involved were just as extravagant, for a person in his wife’s situation, as the entries for the year before that period. If the lady had economised in other things, she had certainly not economised in the matter of dress.

  There was nothing left now but to examine the cash-book, for form’s sake. The money had been paid in notes, the amounts and numbers of which exactly tallied with the figures set down in my list.

  After that, I thought it best to get Mr. Yatman out of the house immediately. He was in such a pitiable condition, that I called a cab and accompanied him home in it. At first he cried and raved like a child: but I soon quieted him—and I must add, to his credit, that he made me a most handsome apology for his language, as the cab drew up at his house door. In return, I tried to give him some advice about how to set matters right, for the future, with his wife. He paid very little attention to me, and went upstairs muttering to himself about a separation. Whether Mrs. Yatman will come cleverly out of the scrape or not, seems doubtful. I should say, myself, that she will go into screeching hysterics, and so frighten the poor man into forgiving her. But this is no business of ours. So far as we are concerned, the case is now at an end; and the present report may come to a conclusion along with it.

  I remain, accordingly, yours to command,

  THOMAS BULMER.

  P.S.—I have to add, that, on leaving Rutherford Street, I met Mr. Matthew Sharpin coming to pack up his things.

  ‘Only think!’ says he, rubbing his hands in great spirits, ‘I’ve been to the genteel villa-residence; and the moment I mentioned my business, they kicked me out directly. There were two witnesses of the assault; and it’s worth a hundred pounds to me, if it’s worth a farthing.’

  ‘I wish you joy of your luck,’ says I.

  ‘Thank you,’ says he. ‘When may I pay you the same compliment on finding the thief?’

  ‘Whenever you like,’ says I, ‘for the thief is found.’

  ‘Just what I expected,’ says he. ‘I’ve done all the work; and now you cut in, and claim all the credit—Mr. Jay of course?’

  ‘No,’ says I.

  ‘Who is it then?’ says he.

  ‘Ask Mrs. Yatman,’ says I. ‘She’s waiting to tell you.’

  ‘All right! I’d much rather hear it from that charming woman than from you,’ says he, and goes into the house in a mighty hurry.

  What do you think of that, Inspector Theakstone? Would you like to stand in Mr. Sharpin’s shoes? I shouldn’t, I can promise you!

  * * * *

  FROM CHIEF INSPECTOR THEAKSTONE

  TO MR. MATTHEW SHARPIN

  12th July.

  SIR—

  Sergeant Bulmer has already told you to consider yourself suspended until further notice. I have now authority to add, that your services as a member of the Detective Police are positively declined. You will please to take this letter as notifying officially your dismissal from the force.

  I may inform you, privately, that your rejection is not intended to cast any reflections on your character. It merely implies that you are not quite sharp enough for our purpose. If we are to have a new recruit among us, we should infinitely prefer Mrs. Yatman.

  Your obedient servant,

  FRANCIS THEAKSTONE.

  * * * *

  NOTE ON THE PRECEDING CORRESPONDENCE, ADDED BY MR. THEAKSTONE

  The Inspector is not in a position to append any explanations of importance to the last of the letters. It has been discovered that Mr. Matthew Sharpin left the house in Rutherford Street five minutes after his interview outside of it with Sergeant Bulmer—his manner expressing the liveliest emotions of terror and astonishment, and his left cheek displaying a bright patch of red, which might have been the result of a slap on the face from a female hand. He was also heard, by the shopman at Rutherford Street, to use a very shocking expression in reference to Mrs. Yatman; and was seen to clench his fist vindictively, as he ran round the corner of the street. Nothing more has been heard of him; and it is conjectured that he has left London with the intention of offering his valuable services to the provincial police.

  On the interesting domestic subject of Mr. and Mrs. Yatman still less is known. It has, however, been positively ascertained that the medical attendant of the family was sent for in a great hurry, on the day when Mr. Yatman returned from the milliner’s shop. The neighbouring chemist received, soon afterwards, a prescription of a soothing nature to make up for Mrs. Yatman. The day after, Mr. Yatman purchased some smelling-salts at the shop, and afterwards appeared at the circulating library to ask for a novel, descriptive of high life, that would amuse an invalid lady. It has been inferred from these circumstances that he has not thought it desirable to carry out his threat of separating himself from his wife—at least in the present (presumed) condition of that lady’s sensitive nervous system.

  THE FACES OF DANGER, by Rufus King

  Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1960.

  The trade winds swept their leisured passage along Florida’s eastern seaboard. They brushed its sands. They flowed across the balcony of Mr. Galli’s costly suite in the Hotel Napoleon I, and entered its living room where Mr. Galli was conferring with his accomplice, Madame Freda Alcott.

  In his stylized Sicilian manner of speech Mr. Galli was saying, “Apart from the fact that Miss Bellington is a young woman of great wealth, and from a visual viewpoint unprepossessing, what facets of character have you unearthed that will be of value to our discreet assignment?”

  Madame Alcott, who a decade or two ago had once been partially tapped for the Met, announced in her unique mezzo-basso, “Her sincerity is beyond question. No breath of scandal has ever touched her. In hideous truth, I have found her a paragon of all the virtues.”

  “Excellent. Then the threat of exposure will bring her to her knees.”

  “Among her more irritating conceits,” Madame Alcott continued, “is an obsession for the poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Even to oral quotes.”

  “Ah! But that is precisely in line with the information I require. It is priceless. O love, O lover, loose or hold me fast, I have thee first, whoever have thee last—stuff like that would provide the perfect answer.”

  Mr. Galli thereupon sketched for Madame Alcott an outline of their immediate moves, all of which were perilous to the future of Miss Bellington, and as devious as Mr. Galli’s Borgia-type blood.

  “It boils down to one simple fact,” he said. “She must be trapped into committing herself in writing. Notes, letters—we will determine the exact medium later—but of such a nature that when we deliver it to our client he can dangle it as a sword of Damocles over Miss Bellington’s head. And now tell me this: Were you able to gauge the depth of her emotions toward her fiancé?”

  Madame Alcott’s superb bosom gave a profound heave. “To one, such as myself, who has squeezed the very essence of passion even from a stone, their romance is an anemic jest. She admires this man Lyle Dasher. She is comfortable with him. But love him? Absurd!”

  “Good. Then our proposed strategy strikes you as effective?”

  “Beyond doubt.”

  “Another point: Did you determine just how far she has progressed with the Governor?”

  “Miss Bellington has had several audiences at Tallahassee and His Excellency is enchanted. They are already considering a suitable tract for the Foundation—a thousand or more acres of state-owned land. All that is now required, the Governor pointed out, is a sufficiently aroused and favorable public opinion in order to sway the legislature into giving its stamp of approval.”

  “Which is precisely where you will come in as Publicity Director for the Bellingto
n Foundation.”

  “One takes it for granted,” Madame Alcott said with a hardening of her theatrical eyes, “that our client’s financial rating is sufficient to meet our fee?”

  “Fifty thousand?” Mr. Galli shrugged a set of expensively padded shoulders. “To him, a mere bagatelle. For example, our Berne correspondent reports a receipt from the Union Bank of Switzerland, Zurich, for a million dollars deposited by cheque drawn on the Hibernia National Bank of New Orleans and credited to our client’s personal account. I could go on—there are fortunes secreted in banks all over the world.”

  Mr. Galli gazed for a moment through the balcony jalousies—out across the enigmatic reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. His eyes were bleak. “Unhappily,” he said, “there is the other side of the coin. Any failure on our part would result in a payment more deadly than fifty thousand dollars.”

  Madame Alcott waved any such contingency aside. “We have never failed. We shall not now.”

  Mr. Galli returned from the Atlantic Ocean. “And now that you have established the tepid emotional balance between Miss Bellington and her fiancé, do you not agree that having Herschel Pompey as your aide is a brilliantly perfect choice?” Madame Alcott evoked a mind’s-eye portrait of Herschel Pompey, a young buck from Massachusetts, recently recruited among the operatives in Mr. Galli’s singular business agency which posed under the trade name of Services Unlimited.

  Herschel Pompey’s physique, as she evoked it, was superb with the rippled muscles of youth. His face was of a nature that even a mother-in-law would trust, while his eyes were dark-lashed and of a candor-blue.

  “Dear friend,” she said compassionately, “you are out of your head. Surely you must concede that the very heart of Lucille Bellington’s project is to rehabilitate the physically disabled—and Herschel Pompey is the least disabled physical animal I have ever met. He is a veritable god!”

  “Too true.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Let us suppose,” Mr. Galli murmured smugly, “that he were deaf and dumb.”

  “But he isn’t.”

  “No, he is not,” Mr. Galli agreed. And absently added, “Not yet.”

  * * * *

  The quartet, somnolent in bamboo long chairs on the terrace beside Lucille Bellington’s papaya-shaped swimming pool, afforded a good composite picture of Florida’s Gold Coast human fauna.

  It was composed of Madame Alcott, frighteningly encased in a cerise terry-cloth robe beneath which strained a tropical swim suit picked out in a dolphin motif; Lucille, in a more conservative cabana toilette; her fiancé, Lyle Dasher, loosely stolid in a pair of plum-toned Jansen trunks; and Herschel Pompey, the fanfaron, the bully boy of Mr. Galli’s choice. They were occupied with reading in the morning papers the day’s publicity releases on Lucille’s philanthropic brain child.

  The general mis-en-scène comprised the original Bellington homestead in Halcyon—a reserved little town that breathes unconcerned between the swelter of Miami and the suaver Venetian-canal effects of Fort Lauderdale.

  Grandfather Eustace had settled in Halcyon with an eye on tomatoes which were, of that era and district, a lucrative commercial crop and became the basis of the Bellington pile—later judiciously transferred to papayas, then juiced and frozen into Lucille’s present fistful of millions.

  It would be a mistake to underestimate Lucille. True, the quixotic, the idealistic keynotes of her character almost smothered her native common sense, but enough of it remained in action to check her from developing into a feminized version of the village idiot.

  Years ago—she was now twenty-two—Lucille had given up all hope of being swept off her feet by any prototype of Mr. America for her sake alone, said sake, as Mr. Galli had pointed out, being unalluring to a generous degree.

  Following papa’s and mama’s sad deaths in a plane crash in the Ozarks, Lucille’s status as sole heiress of the Bellington fortune had made her justifiably suspicious of the several men of assorted vintages, titles, and handsome façades who had claimed to be smitten with her charms. Hence, one can only suppose, the reason for her current betrothal to Lyle Dasher.

  Lyle was safe. Furthermore, for anyone to label him a fortune-hunter would cause eyebrows to raise along the Gold Coast to scornful heights, as the Dasher bundle (Griptread Tires) not only equaled the Bellington papayas, but surpassed them by several significant digits.

  Loot then being ruled out, what was left? Love? Their friends in general doubted it, preferring compatibility as an answer—two earnest, solvent souls with a strong similarity in ideals and in over-all do-goodness.

  Concerning the fanfaron, the now presumably muted and deafened young terrorist, Herschel Pompey, Madame Alcott’s previously noted description failed to do the modern Adonis complete justice. Even in this golden, sun-tanned land of Florida, where the noteworthy male body rates a dime a dozen, Herschel Pompey in skin-tight navy briefs stood among his competitors as a blinding sun, and his effect on the opposite sex can only be assessed as pulverizing.

  Lucille, who for several years now had steeled herself against just such visual impacts, and who furthermore was sitting within fingertip touch of her comfortable fiancé, could not subdue a strange warmth within her chest that might, if left uncontrolled, burst dangerously into a flame.

  Her pity was already on the simmer whenever her thoughts lingered compassionately on the heroic event that had rendered this admirable chassis of young manhood deaf and dumb.

  Madame Alcott had given Lucille the Galli version of the unhappy occurrence with a bravura comparable to a competent Valkyrie in a Wagnerian opera: “…and thus it was that with a pantherine clutch Herschel swept the child safely back from the cliff’s brink, and in doing this thoughtful act lost his balance. Down! Fifty, sixty, seventy feet down plunged his body and, with its head in advance, crashed into the boiling, rock-infested waters of the State of Massachusetts.” (All this with a running obbligato of telling gestures, closed eyes and bosomly heaves.) “The shock—the impact—the deep submerge up from which he gallantly debouched himself as a local hero of indisputable réclame. But also, alas, as a now permanently deaf-and-dumb total mute.”

  Being ever the most trusting of creatures, Lucille had accepted this dramatic bag of hot popcorn in complete good faith. Just as trustingly as she had accepted Madame Alcott’s Galli-arranged credentials as Publicity Director for the upcoming Revels Humane—a charity ball to be given in the beach auditorium as the final fillip toward establishing public support for Lucille’s project.

  Whether it was Lucille or Lyle Dasher who originated the Foundation idea is debatable, and it had best be considered as having come to them a month or so ago in a joint revelation. Both had been drying off from a dip in the surf and were watching television in a Bellington cabana. The broadcast had dealt with a manufacturing concern up north, the personnel of which was exclusively composed of disabled persons.

  “Why—” Lucille had said.

  “Why—” Lyle had said.

  “Why—” both had said, “not establish such a foundation right here in Florida?”

  To give any detailed picture of the program later worked out and presented by Lucille to His Excellency—the various plants, equipment, housing, commissary, and the whole maze of logistics—would only obliterate the human drama in the grand plan. It is enough to say that these details were compiled by a high-salaried professional staff and put into the blueprint and statistical stage.

  This portion of the undertaking fell within Lyle Dasher’s department but he had insisted, perhaps from some abstruse business or sentimental reason, that the job be credited to his betrothed alone and be publicized as the Bellington Foundation.

  “An odd thing happened this morning,” Lucille was now saying, “as I came back from the beach. A face.”

  Madame Aleott gave her a startled look and echoed, “A face?”

  “Yes. Just a glimpse of it among the bougainvillea.”

  Lyle Dasher wanted to know whose
face, while Herschel Pompey let his candor-blue eyes rest on Lucille with a well-done stab at the questioning noncomprehension of a deaf-mute.

  “I don’t know whose face. As I say, it was only a glimpse and then—well, it sort of evaporated.”

  “Did it scare you?” Lyle asked.

  “Why should it? There’s always a sprinkle of trespassing tourists during the season. But this one was different. His eyes.”

  “What about his eyes?”

  “They had the Bela Lugosi touch, if you know what I mean. In that vampire series, just as he steps out of the coffin.”

  “Did you go after him?”

  “Why on earth should I? The thing’s of no consequence.”

  Now that the Episode of the Face had been explored, Madame Alcott took over with her publicity agenda for the day. “I have an appointment,” she said, “with Molly Newhouse of Channel 10 TV. Lucille, you will be interviewed by her tomorrow on that current events program for procrastinating housewives. Herschel, in poignant muteness, shall sit at your side. His role a symbol, a tragic éclaircissement—”

  “A blistering tear jerker,” Lyle Dasher muttered, for the trace of a certain radiance that tinged his betrothed’s cheeks whenever she was in the proximity of muscle boy Pompey had not escaped his attention.

  “—éclaircissement,” Madame Alcott repeated coldly, “of the Armageddon that is so shortly to be crowned by the Revels Humane. And now, Lyle dear boy, there are certain statistical details I shall require in order to develop a proper outline for the interview. I shall be dressed in an hour. Be good enough to meet me then within.”

  “Within,” in opera-ese, signified the house proper. This was a large turreted affront to Spanish-American architecture that Grandfather Eustace had dreamed up, obviously during one of his more exalted bourbon-and-branch-water moments.