by Ellery Queen
Eleanor Madeline Abbott
announces the impending
MURDER
of her husband,
Gregory Eliot Abbott,
at their home,
217 A West 86th Street,
New York City, New York,
between the hours of nine thirty and eleven o’clock
on the evening of December 16, 1971.
You are cordially invited to attend.
Branigan read through the invitation twice, then set it down on his desk and picked up the envelope it had come in. Heavy, cream-colored, black-bordered. Addressed in a neat feminine hand to Chief Inspector Lawrence A. Branigan, New York Police Department, 240 Centre Street, New York City. No zip code. No return address. Postmarked New York City.
Branigan picked up the announcement and read it again.
Eleanor Abbott, he mused. Mrs. Eleanor Madeline Abbott. . .
He reached for his telephone and began dialing.
Halfway down the dimly lit corridor, before a massive wooden door, they stopped.
The dour-faced butler stretched out a hand to the ornate brass doorknob, twisted it, and pushed the door open.
“In here, sir,” he said. “Mrs. Abbott’s expecting you.”
Branigan nodded thanks and stepped forward.
The room was dim, too. Thick damask curtains hid what might have been windows; subdued lighting trickled down from small translucent panels in the ceiling.
It was a large, plain, sparsely furnished room. No rugs or carpeting on the parquet floor, no paintings hanging on the dark gloomy walls. There was nothing extra in the room, nothing decorative. Every item, every stick of furniture was there because it was functional, because it was needed.
Like the double bed with its head flush to the far wall.
There was a man lying on the bed, propped up almost to a sitting position. His body was invisible, swathed to the neck in blankets, but his wrinkled white face almost shone through the dimness.
Gregory Abbott.
At first Branigan thought he was too late, and Abbott was already dead: the pale-gray eyes, half covered by deeply creased lids, stared emptily across the room; the ravaged face, wreathed in wisps of snowy hair, was perfectly still; no smile of welcome, no frown of disapproval crossed the thin bloodless lips.
Then he noticed the slight rise and fall of the old man’s blankets, and separated the faint sound of labored breathing from the steady ticking of the clock that hung on the wall several feet above Abbott’s head.
Branigan sighed with relief, and looked away.
To his right a high-backed chair stood against the side wall. A young woman sat on the edge of the chair, her hands folded delicately in her lap. She wore a long black gown, set off by a single strand of pearls around her neck and a sparkling solitaire on the fourth finger of her left hand.
Soft waves of thick fawn hair cascaded down around her shoulders.
Across the room from Eleanor Abbott a dozen identical chairs stood side by side. The seat closest to Branigan was empty, but each of the others was occupied. And even in the dimness of the room Branigan recognized all eleven faces. Ryan was there, from the Los Angeles Police Department, and DiNapoli from San Francisco, both of whom he had worked with in the past. There was Coszyck, who ran a local detective agency; Huber, an insurance investigator from Boston he had met once before; and Braun, a Cleveland private eye whose picture had just been featured in a national magazine. There was Devereux, a Federal District Court judge from New Orleans; Gould, a St. Louis appellate court justice; and even “the old Fox,” just retired from the bench of the United States Supreme Court. Maunders, Detroit’s District Attorney, was there, and Szambel from Pittsburgh, and Carpenter, who had left Szambel’s staff to become D.A. of Baltimore. They were all looking at him, and he could see that most of them recognized him, too.
Fourteen people in all, lining the walls of a nearly dark, nearly quiet room, the silence broken only by Gregory Abbott’s uneasy breathing and by the inexorable ticking of the clock.
Branigan’s eyes finally rested on the plain deal table in the center of the room, and on the five objects resting on its surface: a long-bladed kitchen knife, a length of iron pipe, an amber bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones, a thin strand of wire with a wooden grip attached to each end, and a revolver that glinted dully in the dim light of the room.
Branigan eased the door shut behind him, then took a step forward.
Eleanor Abbott stood up. A long brown lock of hair fell across her eyes and she carelessly brushed it back with the tips of her fingers.
“Well,” she smiled, “the foreman of the jury has arrived. I’m glad you could make it, Inspector Branigan. Now, if you’ll just take your seat, we’ll be ready to start.”
She spoke softly, pleasantly, almost in a whisper, but her voice carried across the room. It was a good voice, Branigan decided. It suited her.
“I’m glad you were all able to get here,” she resumed, once he was seated. “I wanted a nice even dozen of you—three dedicated police officers, three respected private investigators, three eminent judges, three successful District Attorneys. Twelve of the country’s top legal and law-enforcement minds.
“I guess you must be wondering by now just why you’re all here. Well, your reasons for coming are probably all different; you’re here because your curiosity was piqued, or because you wanted to save a threatened human life, or perhaps because you didn’t have anything better to do tonight. But my reason for bringing the twelve of you together is a simple one: as it said in your invitations, I want you to witness a murder.”
She paused—dramatically, Branigan realized with a start. He glanced down the row of his colleagues’ faces and saw eleven pairs of eyes fixed, unwavering, on Eleanor Abbott. Only the old man in the bed was not looking at her; his blank eyes never moved from an invisible spot on the door across the room.
“Now,” she went on, “for some history. I was born in Philadelphia on September 13, 1945. I came to New York about four years ago, when I was twenty-two. Over the next couple of years I lived in a lot of different places around the city and worked a lot of different jobs. About a year and a half ago I was working at a little restaurant in Greenwich Village, waiting on tables.
“One night Gregory came in with a crowd of friends. They ate and left without paying any more attention to me than anyone ever pays to a waitress; but when I got off work a few hours later, Gregory was waiting for me outside.”
For the first time since Branigan had entered the room she turned to look at the man on the bed. After a while she sighed and turned back.
“Gregory was an incredible man. He was in his late sixties, but he looked fifty, then, and he had the energy of a man of thirty. He pretty much swept me off my feet—he was charming and full of life, and he was very rich, too. He’d started with a small store that used to be his father’s, and he’d built it up into a chain of department stores worth millions.
“So there I was: I’d been living on sixty dollars a week plus tips and thinking I was pretty lucky to be doing that well. Then all of a sudden there was Gregory.
“We were married inside of three months.
“Please, don’t get me wrong. I loved him, I really did. He was a wonderful person, the first person who’d really cared about me in years. I would have married him even if he hadn’t had all that money, and we would have been just as happy.
“It was an exciting marriage for both of us. Gregory never liked sitting still, so we were always moving, doing, going places. There was nothing he liked better than nightclubbing until three or four in the morning, drinking and dancing and—I’d never done that kind of thing before in my life, but it didn’t take me long to learn to enjoy it as much as he did. He was a wonderful dancer.”
She stopped for a second, looking through them, remembering.
“I used to make him mad,” she smiled. “I was always telling him he should start slowing down a little. But he
never listened. He—”
She broke off and turned again to the double bed. There was mist in her eyes.
“Less than six months after our wedding, Gregory tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. I was with him when it happened. It—it was terrible. The shock of the fall brought on a very serious heart attack.
“He was in critical condition for a long time. Somehow he managed to pull through, but it left him like—like that—totally paralyzed. He can’t hear or see. He can’t even think.
“For some time now, the only thing that’s changed is the way he looks. He never gets any better or any worse, just every day he looks a little bit older than he did the day before. Gregory’s sixty-eight years old, but look at him! You’d swear he’s eighty!
“His doctors say there’s no chance that he’ll ever recover, but they think that with the proper care and treatment it should be possible to keep him alive for as long as ten years.
“Ten years! Can—can you even conceive of what that means? Ten years! That’s a hundred and twenty months of nothing!
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s the worst thing in the world that could have happened to Gregory, can you understand that? As long as he was active he was happy, but any time he had to just sit and relax, he was miserable. He knew he was pushing himself too hard, but he just didn’t care. He couldn’t stand being idle. If he’d have known this was going to happen, he’d have—he would have killed himself first! He would have died gladly before he’d let himself waste ten years of his life in a—in a bed!”
Then her lips were trembling, and suddenly her face was buried in her hands and her whole body was shaking.
Branigan leaned forward. He wanted to go to her, to wipe away the tears he knew were coming—
Hui suddenly she shuddered and took a long deep breath. When she looked up again, her face was drawn, her eyes were dry and cold.
“There’s more to it than that,” she went on. “When we got married, Gregory rewrote his will in my favor. Right now my share of his estate is worth close to ten million dollars. And I want that money.
“I’ve been taking care of Gregory twenty-four hours a day, every day, for nearly nine months now, and I’m tired of it. There’s too much else to do, too many other things that are more important. I want that money and I want it now—while I’m still young enough and attractive enough to enjoy it.”
There was something new in her voice, something insistent, almost hypnotic, and they stared at her, as motionless as the old man in the double bed.
“Yes, I love Gregory. Because I love him, I just can’t let him go on like this any more. And I can’t go on this way any more, either. Which means there’s only one thing for me to do.
“I’ve got to kill him. For both our sakes. I think—I think if Gregory knew I was going to do it, he’d say I was doing the right thing, the only thing.”
“Wait a minute,” Branigan interrupted, but she smiled at him and said, “I know, Inspector. Murder is against the law, no matter how morally justifiable it might be. That’s another reason I brought the twelve of you here: to give you a chance to stop me. If you can, I give you my word I won’t try it again.
“But I’m warning you: I am going to kill my husband, tonight, within an hour’s time. It’s now”—she turned her head to glance at the clock hanging over the bed—“it is now ten o’clock. By eleven o’clock, in one hour, Gregory Abbott will be dead.”
No one spoke. The woman in the long black gown sat down to complete silence, except for the weak sound of her husband’s breathing and the ticking of the clock on the wall.
They sat looking at each other, quiet, spellbound, waiting, not quite sure what they should be doing, not at all sure there was anything they could do.
Until 10:10 when Eleanor Abbott rose, walked quickly to the table of weapons in the center of the room, and picked up the amber bottle of poison.
Then they moved, and strong hands grabbed her from both sides before she could step away from the table. Branigan pulled the bottle away from her, and he and Coszyck led her back to her chair. Then they went back to their own seats.
At 10:20 she rose again. She was halfway to the table when Branigan and Coszyck stopped her, turned her around, and again reseated her.
This time they stayed by her chair, one on each side.
Again the old man’s breathing and the ticking of the clock were the only sounds in the room. Once Carpenter put a hand to his mouth and coughed softly. Eleanor Abbott seemed not to notice, and Gregory Abbott stared vacantly; the others glared at him.
At 10:30 Huber jumped up and moved impatiently from his seat to the old man’s bedside. He went down to his hands and knees and carefully examined the area underneath the bed. As he straightened up, dusting off the legs of his trousers, Braun and Devereux looked at each other, nodded, and got up and joined him. The three ranged themselves on three sides of the bed, watching Abbott and his wife and the clock uneasily.
At 10:40 Eleanor Abbott suddenly stood up, but Branigan and Coszyck clamped firm hands on her shoulders and forced her back into her chair.
Not a word was said.
The red second hand of the clock swept around and around, as the minute hand labored slowly up the numbered face. DiNapoli glanced from the clock to his wrist watch, then quickly back at the clock. He frowned, then silently adjusted his watch so that the two timepieces were synchronized.
At 10:50 Maunders and Ford stood up together, grim-faced, and stepped to the table of weapons, Fox, his arthritic fingers quivering slightly, picked up the dull-black revolver. He broke open the cylinder, emptied out the cartridges, shrugged, put the cartridges in his pocket, snapped the cylinder shut, and placed the gun back at the table.
At 10:55 Branigan and Coszyck rested their hands lightly on Mrs. Abbott’s shoulders.
Devereux, at Abbott’s bedside, pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped beads of moisture from his forehead.
The old man on the bed breathed weakly, in and out, in and out, and the pile of blankets rose and fell almost imperceptibly.
At 10:57 Gould stood up fitfully, then flung himself back into his chair.
10:58. They tensed.
Huber and Braun and Devereux inched closer to the old man’s bed. Branigan and Coszyck tightened their grips on Eleanor Abbott’s shoulders. Maunders and Fox braced themselves, as if defying her to seize one of the weapons on the table. Even the five men still seated—Szambel, Carpenter, DiNapoli, Ryan, Gould—found themselves on the edges of their chairs, ready to spring into action.
But as the clock on the wall ticked loudly and its minute hand crawled closer and closer to the twelve, Eleanor Abbott sat calmly on her high-backed chair—and didn’t move.
At 10:59 Gregory Eliot Abbott’s breathing stopped. His wrinkled eyelids flickered, jerked open, then closed.
“Gentlemen!” Eleanor Abbott’s voice shot through the uproar. “If you’ll all get back to your seats and calm down, I’d be glad to explain.”
They obeyed her.
She stood by the side of her chair, watching them, her full lips turned slightly upward.
“I warned you,” she said. “I told you I was going to kill him, and I did.”
“How?” Huber rasped.
Her smile broadened.
“My husband’s accident left his heart much too weak to function normally by itself. In fact, the only thing that kept it going was a certain medication, a heart stimulant he was getting at regular intervals.”
Branigan’s eyes went wide. She waited, though, until Maunders saw it and Szambel, and DiNapoli.
“Gregory’s stimulant,” she continued, pointing to the table of weapons, “is kept in that bottle there. It’s an extremely powerful drug, which makes it very dangerous to people with normal hearts. If a healthy person was to swallow some of it, his heart would speed up enormously, and would actually burn itself out. That’s why the bottle is labeled with a skull and crossbones: even a small dose would be
fatal to the wrong person.
“But Gregory needed that stimulant to stay alive, and he needed it frequently. He was due for a dose just after ten o’clock. I tried to give it to him, but you stopped me.”
“You said it was poison!” Carpenter protested.
“I said no such thing. You assumed it was poison. But it was vital medicine for Gregory, and each of the three times I tried to give it to him you prevented me. Without it his heart just wasn’t strong enough to keep beating, so he died—almost to the minute I predicted.”
The twelve criminologists were silent.
Until, “Well?” Ryan said, his voice thick.
“Well,” Eleanor Abbott told them, “there are only two possible things you can do. You can take me into custody and accuse me of murdering my husband—but just stop and think about that for a minute. What good will it do? You’ll obviously never get a conviction. After all, I tried to save Gregory. You are the ones who stopped me, causing his death. You killed him, not me. In fact, you might even be legally responsible for his death. But even if you’re not, once the story gets out of how you sat back and let this happen, your names and reputations will be ruined. Your careers will be over.”
“She’s right,” Judge Gould said heavily. “Sure, she’d get slapped on the wrist for not telling us what was in the bottle, but with a story like this, no jury in the country would convict her of murder.”
“And we’d be sunk,” Carpenter added. “Nobody would dare to try and make out any kind of case against us, but the publicity would destroy us.”
Fox cleared his throat nervously.
“You said we had two possible courses of action,” he reminded her.
“Yes, I did. You can turn me in—or you can work with me. Did I really do anything so terrible? I’m not the only one to benefit from Gregory’s death: Gregory is better off, too. Together we could make his death look like an unhappy, but unavoidable accident.”
“You want us to help you get away with murder?” Szambel demanded.
She held up a hand.
“I’m not asking for any favors. Arrest me and ruin yourselves—or help to protect me. The choice is entirely yours.”