EQMM, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "That's it. That's the full story. When I last saw Jason Tenumbra he was lying on his study floor, surrounded by his damn artwork and damn books, grabbing his damn crotch and howling. He might not have been feeling that great but he sure as hell wasn't dead."

  As the threesome entered the elevator, having left behind a still-fuming Rhonda St. Regis, Harry's cell phone rang. When Harry finished the call he turned to Ellery. “That was Santos. He wants us to meet him as soon as we can at Tenumbra's apartment. He has something to show us. He'll explain when he sees us at the apartment."

  * * * *

  Jason Tenumbra's apartment was in the midst of being cleaned and straightened when Nikki, Ellery, and Harry were escorted back into the study by Stanley Santos, who wore a smile that Ellery took for smug. Arranged on the glass desk, now sparkling clean, were several items. Santos stopped at the desk and turned around to face the others.

  "Mr. Queen, during the last few weeks I've read a few of your books. They were okay for their time. Pretty good stuff. And after I read a few, I decided that you might enjoy hearing the solution to this case at the scene of the crime. That's something I could picture you doing. Of course, you might have filled the room full of possible culprits first. I'll dispense with that since, as I told you from the beginning, there is no surprise ending here.

  "What I did want to demonstrate to my partner, and to you,” he eyed Ellery, “is that as good as your so-called deductive approach used to be, there just isn't much need for it anymore. While you folks were tromping about town interviewing everyone you could think of, I did what modern detectives do. I gathered the physical evidence, sent it off to the lab, and waited for the results. And the results, my friends, tell the whole story. We live in an absolutely marvelous technological age."

  Santos turned to the table and, with a flourish, picked up a small leather case. “Exhibit One,” he said, passing the case to Harry Burke. “This is a set of scalpels that we located in Dr. Djuna's apartment. Look at the inscription embossed on the inside cover."

  Harry opened the box and read, “To Quinn, Best wishes as you embark into the field of medicine. Jason Tenumbra."

  "That box was kept in a small display cabinet in Djuna's living room. And look again—see anything missing?"

  The box contained four scalpels of varying sizes. A spot that could have held a fifth was empty.

  "Exhibit Two,” Santos continued, and picked up a scalpel from the glass desktop. “The murder weapon. Not only does it fit precisely into the open space in the carrying box,” and Santos demonstrated, “it also is a precise match to the other four scalpels. Same manufacturer, same metal alloy. The boys in the lab verified it and we were even able to trace it back to the manufacturer on the Internet using the serial number on the underside of the box. So, what do we know? We know that the weapon that murdered Dr. Tenumbra was a knife he had given to Dr. Djuna. Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

  Santos treated them to another smile before turning back to the desk. He next picked up a plastic card the size of a credit card and presented this to Harry Burke.

  "Exhibit Three, the magnetic entry card that gave Dr. Djuna uninhibited access to Dr. Tenumbra's apartment. The card was left in the middle of Dr. Djuna's desk in his apartment. So there was no reason to worry about the names on the concierge's list. With this card, Quinn Djuna could bypass the list completely. And, what's this?” Santos asked in feigned surprise. “Why, there seems to be a bloodstain on the back of the card.

  "So, let's see, Mr. Queen. What do we have? We have motive—Dr. Djuna had been jilted by his fiancée after he had been cuckolded by his partner. We have opportunity—Dr. Djuna had free access to the apartment with that bloodstained card. And we have the means—Dr. Djuna's own scalpel, found at the scene of the crime."

  "Impressive,” murmured Ellery.

  "Oh, you haven't heard anything yet,” Santos continued. “I have saved the best, the very best, for last.” He turned back to the desk and picked up the final object—a typed report held together by a black clip. “This is the forensics report on the blood at the scene of the crime. Actually, it's two reports, because it turned out there were two different blood types on the floor of the study."

  Santos gestured back to the desk. “The blood on the desk matched Tenumbra's blood. Plain and simple.” Santos turned back to the front of the desk. “But the blood out there,” he gestured toward the door, “and the blood we found in the room on the carpet, as well as that smudge of blood on the electronic entry card? That wasn't Tenumbra's blood at all. It seems that the murderer must have been cut during the struggle. And there were very good samples of that second blood type. So, what can I tell you about it?

  "Let me spare you from plowing through a long report. We'll start with some general observations, and then we will move to the specifics. Now, as you know, even blood work can't positively identify who the blood came from. All that DNA analysis can do is to establish the odds, and they're usually astronomical, that the blood came from a particular person. But there is one thing, one very special thing, that any blood test can tell you with absolute certainty. It can tell you the sex of the person who produced that blood. All male blood has an X and a Y chromosome. Not so with the ladies,” said Santos, and winked at Nikki. “The ladies carry only two X's.

  "I bet you can see this one coming,” he continued, smiling patronizingly at Ellery. “The blood in front of the desk and the blood on the entry card, in other words, the blood that was not Tenumbra's, was the blood of a male. Shows up clear in the analysis—X's and Y's all over the place. Of course, all that does is rule out about fifty percent of the population as the murderer. But guess what? Surprise again! It rules out everyone you three have been wasting your time on this past week—every one of those ladies. None of them could have done it. It's scientifically impossible.

  "But, as I said, we can also move from the general to the specific. We know more than the fact that the murderer was a man. The test also shows that the blood in front of the desk and on the entry card, again, the blood that is not Tenumbra's, is in fact a perfect match to Dr. Quinn Djuna—the murderer, and then, the suicide. Just like I told you from the start."

  "Very impressive,” Ellery repeated, now in a tired voice.

  Harry, however, still looked unconvinced. “What about the books?” he said.

  "Will you forget about the damned books?” Santos exploded. “This is not about the books. They don't matter."

  Ellery stared across the room and his eyes brightened. “I see,” he said, “that the volumes have been returned to the bookcase."

  "Yeah,” replied Santos. “But not for long. It seems that while Tenumbra brought in a lot of money, he spent a lot more. Recipe for fiscal disaster. Apparently he died in the red both actually and metaphorically. The family has scheduled an auction here to sell off his art and his library. They've been pushing us to get the place back in order before the high rollers show up."

  Ellery pushed himself to his feet, his ancient joints protesting. Not for the first time he wished that he could exercise over his body the control he still wielded over his mind. Haltingly, Ellery Queen walked across the room to the wall of books. They were, as he remembered them, tightly shelved, spine to spine. He fingered the volumes of Catherine Aird at the beginning of the collection. Then he walked stiffly to the end of the library to examine the Emile Zola volumes that ended the collection tight against a book rest. Ellery straightened, returned to the middle of the collection, and stared at his own volumes. His eyes widened and he gasped. Between the end of the Queen collection and the beginning of the volumes of Ruth Rendell there was a gap of approximately 8 inches of blank shelf.

  "Thank God,” Ellery whispered, his voice no longer tired. “The light. It hasn't failed.” Ellery laughed out loud, and across the room Nikki, Harry Burke, and Santos turned to look at him, uncomprehending.

  "Of course,” Ellery marveled, and he laughed, almost giddily now. “It's Poe! Poe had the answer
all along!"

  * * * *

  Part 3: An After-Dinner Chat

  The dinner dishes in the Queen apartment had been cleared, and Ellery, Nikki, Harry Burke, and Elise Djuna sat back in their chairs over steaming cups of coffee. With some exasperation Harry interrupted what had been light, if strained, after-dinner conversation.

  "Look, Ellery. That was a great dinner, but I ended up suffering through it. You've been playing coy ever since we left Tenumbra's apartment yesterday. You promised to let us in on that epiphany you had there, and I, for one, am on the edge of my seat. So what did you figure out?"

  "I admit,” Ellery responded, “that I have been taking my old sweet time on this. As I've grown older I've come to feel that with knowledge comes responsibility, and to act responsibly one sometimes needs to step back and ponder a little.

  "Well, where to begin? I used to start out, as Detective Santos noted, by gathering all of the suspects together. But as I grew older I found that sometimes managing all of those people can be a chore in itself, and one that gets in the way of clean explication. Sometimes it is better just to talk the matter through with friends.

  "The physical evidence summarized yesterday by Mr. Santos is impressive. And we must not ignore it. But what always, I believe, troubled my old friend Harry was the pile of books on the floor. Certainly that's what coaxed me into the fray.

  "The books had to have been swept to the floor either by Dr. Tenumbra—and due to the absence of blood on the volumes he'd've had to do this before he was stabbed—or by the murderer. And the meaning of the pile of books varies based on who put them there. If Tenumbra left the books on the floor, presumably he did so to identify his murderer, but if the murderer moved the books it would have been for a different reason, no doubt to misdirect our attention.

  "Let's first assume that the books were moved by Tenumbra. What could he have been trying to tell us? This is always a problem with dying messages: They are all too often murky. Was Tenumbra trying to tell us that the murderer was somehow associated with the word “queen"? If so, this is no help. Every single person who had access, or may have had access, to Tenumbra's apartment that night has some obscure connection to that word. Janiel Friedman is proud to be known as the merchandising ‘queen’ of Forty-second Street—the phrase is even used in advertising for the Friedman and Norr chain. Tabitha DuVal is about to appear on Broadway as a character who, to avenge injustice, becomes the ‘Spider Queen.’ And Rhonda St. Regis? Well, ‘Regis’ derives from the Latin 'regina,' literally, ‘queen.’ And, of course, Quinn Djuna is easily linked to the Queen books that were originally his father's.

  "These clues leave us with nothing. If each suspect can be identified by at least one such obscure reference to ‘queen,’ how could Tenumbra have concluded that a pile of my books would predictably lead us to the actual culprit? The answer is that he could not.

  "Equally puzzling is why all of the books were removed to the floor. Wouldn't just one book convey the same message, whatever it is? I must admit that until yesterday none of this made any sense to me."

  "So what changed yesterday?” Harry asked.

  "I'll come to that. But first let's focus for just a minute on the books themselves. I think we can learn a great deal about Tenumbra from those volumes, and from other things we know."

  "I'm puzzled now,” Nikki interjected. “We already know that the Queen books were the volumes you sent to Elise and Quinn's father over the years. If that library was acquired, in total, by Tenumbra, how can it tell us anything about him?"

  "It is true that Tenumbra acquired Djuna's library,” Ellery replied. “But remember that Djuna only had an interest in the Queen books in which Dad or I appeared, and those are the only books I sent to him. They were all on the floor, but there were two other volumes there as well: The Glass Village and Cop Out. While I wrote those books, they were never in Djuna's library. Why? Because Dad and I weren't characters in either of them. So Tenumbra must have acquired those two first editions elsewhere.

  "And we also know that Tenumbra had contacted me to find out if I would be interested in parting with copies of my nonfiction volumes, books that were not yet in his library. Finally, we know that Tenumbra was completely uninterested—and in this regard I applaud his taste—in any of the ‘farmed out’ Queen volumes: the Mike McCall and Tim Corrigan works, and other paperbacks that bore my name but that I really had nothing to do with."

  "I don't see where this gets us if all of the books that he had were in fact on the floor,” Harry groused. “And what does this have to do with all of your mutterings about Poe?"

  "It has everything to do with Poe. We know from Poe that the best place to hide a book is on a bookcase. This is just the obverse. The best way to hide the absence of a book is by emptying a bookcase."

  Harry rolled his eyes. “Look, Ellery, I'm trying to stay with you on this, but it's making no sense at all. Absence of what book? All of your books, except the ones you wouldn't sell to Tenumbra, were on the floor. You already said that."

  "No. What I said was that Tenumbra was a collector of books that I had written, and that this was true regardless of whether Dad and I were characters in the books. All of that I knew, but it told me nothing until yesterday when I saw, for the first time, my books replaced on the bookcase in Tenumbra's study. As you all observed, the books by other authors were shelved tightly, ending with a bookend after the last Zola volume. But when the Queen library was reshelved, in the same space it previously occupied, there was a blank space of approximately eight inches after the last Queen volume.

  "When I saw that, I understood everything. The books on the floor could not be the dying message. They were red herrings, misdirecting us not toward someone, but away from something. The real dying clue, what the murderer couldn't allow us to find, was no longer there."

  Ellery gazed out at three sets of eyes that only returned silent stares. He sighed again. “This may become a little clearer if we examine the next set of books in Tenumbra's collection.

  "What next set of books?” Harry asked in exasperation.

  "The books that, alphabetically, immediately follow the Queen collection—the first editions of Ruth Rendell's works. Tell me, Harry, did you notice anything telling about those volumes?"

  "No. And I am so confused now that I'm just going to shut up and let you work this through to the end."

  "And we are almost there,” Ellery replied. “The Ruth Rendell books are informative because all of her works are there. By this, I mean all of the books she authored, both under the name ‘Ruth Rendell’ and under her nom de plume, ‘Barbara Vine.’ And the Vine books are shelved together with the rest of Rendell's works.

  "When I saw that, it was immediately clear what must have happened, particularly in light of what Mr. Santos had just told us. Not only did I know which of my own volumes were missing, I also knew which of those particular volumes Tenumbra must have grasped and pulled from the shelf while grabbing my note to him in his other hand. Tenumbra left a clue to the identity of his murderer and at the same time did his best to ensure that I would be called upon to interpret his dying message."

  Ellery gazed across the room at his guests. “There were only four fiction works that I wrote that were not on the floor of Tenumbra's apartment—the books I wrote under the pseudonym ‘Barnaby Ross.’”

  Ellery was quiet for a moment. His eyes now looked as old as his years, and sadder. “I think you expected this, Elise."

  Silently, Elise Djuna nodded, and at the same time pulled two volumes from her bag: The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y. Both volumes were stained with blood, and on the cover of the first volume, roughly sketched in the blood of the dying Jason Tenumbra, was an “O” with a cross at the bottom. “I expected you'd figure it out, Ellery,” she said. “So I brought the books with me. I have no interest in prolonging this."

  "Wait a minute,” said Harry, knowledge and anger welling up in equal parts. “I don't like where this is he
aded. But in any event, you're wrong. Remember the DNA analysis? Elise can't have had anything to do with this."

  "Of course I remember the DNA analysis,” Ellery replied. “But unfortunately DNA has everything to do with this. Blood is, in fact, the key."

  Ellery locked eyes with Elise. “What was it? Leukemia? Hodgkin's?"

  In a small and resigned voice Elise answered, “Leukemia."

  Now it was Nikki's turn to be perplexed. “Ellery, I am lost. What is this all about?"

  "Like everything else in this case, it's about blood, blood and books,” Ellery sighed. “We knew from the very first day that both Elise and Quinn had previously been patients of Dr. Tenumbra. Elise told us that. And we also knew, again from Elise's own words, when she was explaining the nature of Quinn's recurring bouts with depression, that she herself was utterly unfamiliar with psychiatry—something that no one who had personally struggled through psychiatric analysis would have said. Therefore her consultations with Dr. Tenumbra must have had nothing to do with psychiatry.

  "But we also know that Tenumbra at some point had another specialty—oncology. When Elise told us that Quinn saved her life, she meant it literally. Quinn saved her with his blood. Djuna and his wife adopted Elise and Quinn, but Quinn was, in fact, your fraternal twin, wasn't he, Elise?"

  Elise nodded.

  "How could you have known that, and why would it matter?” Nikki asked.

  "The best and most reliable cure for leukemia, or for Hodgkin's disease, involves a bone-marrow transplant, and the best match for a donor transplant,” Ellery continued, “is, predictably, a sibling. In order to effect a remission in those circumstances, the recipient's blood and bone marrow is literally eliminated through radiation treatment. Bone marrow from the host, in this case Quinn, is injected. The transferred marrow then begins producing blood, blood that eventually replaces the recipient's blood. And the new blood cells are identical, in all respects, to those of the donor. Elise, in fact, owes her life to the fact that she has the blood—and the identical blood DNA—of her brother, Quinn. While Santos was correct that the blood of a female would have only X chromosomes, Elise's veins pulse with Quinn's blood. Blood that carries, like that of all males, both an X and a Y chromosome.