by Ellery Queen
“That’s a comfort.”
“Check that saddle girth. I’m making a bet it was deliberately made unsafe. Try and piece together, if you can, the movements of these people in relation to the switching of the soda and the poison jars.”
Walsh stood up and stretched. “There are really only three of them we have to check—Ted, Harriet, and Cleg. Marcia can’t be involved in this. She was to be the victim.”
“I’m afraid I can’t agree to eliminate her as a possibility,” the doctor said.
“What!”
“Look, Captain, Stephen’s a good provider, isn’t he? He’s kind and generous. I suspect he’s faithful to his wife. Do you think he’d let Marcia go to another man if she asked for her freedom?”
“No-o,” Walsh said slowly. “No, he’d probably raise hell.”
“I suspect Marcia knows that,” the doctor said. “Suppose she would like to go to her first love, who seems to have been Cleghorn—or anyone else? She has no grounds for acquiring her freedom from Stephen. But if she could trick him into an act of violence, for which she was prepared, she might avoid its consequences and have evidence on which any court in the land would set her free.”
“But the danger to her?”
“What danger? Suppose that was her scheme. Suppose Stephen had followed his impulse to say nothing about the broken girth. She mounts the horse and starts down for the ring. She pretends uncertainty about something, dismounts, and discovers the girth herself. She doesn’t have to take the fall. And Stephen is on the spot!”
“Good God!” Walsh said.
“Suppose Stephen had brought her the poison? She doesn’t have to gulp it down. She smells it. There’s something wrong with it. It’s poison. Then she runs screaming to the nearest judge and announces that Stephen has twice tried to do away with her. It would be almost foolproof.”
“What about the car?” Walsh asked. He was obviously grasping for some straw that would upset this distasteful idea.
“Do you know, Captain, or do I know whether she actually jumped clear at the last minute? She could have without Stephen’s noticing it in his state of mind. The point is, if this is her scheme, it has only failed because Stephen has stubbornly resisted falling into the trap.”
Walsh brought his fist down on the desk. “It’s crazy, Doctor. Why wouldn’t she just come out with it, say she was sorry but the marriage hasn’t worked?”
The doctor was silent for a moment, then he said, “Hasn’t it occurred to you, Captain, that this place—this house and all that goes with it—is a symbol of security to all these people? They grew up in it. It was their home, their base, the safe place to be. I don’t think you could pry one of them loose from it—even Cleghorn. But it belongs to Stephen! Marcia couldn’t leave Stephen and still have this house—this place of safety. And it means as much to all of them as it means to Marcia. You heard what she said. Ted belongs here. It’s been Harriet’s home for thirty years. Cleg is in and out like a member of the family.”
“You mean the desire to possess this house is the motive behind all this?”
“In a way, Captain. What this house represents is the important thing—security and safety to someone who is desperately insecure and unsafe.”
It was 6:30 in the morning. Walsh drove his car up to the door of the Parker cottage in the village. He was heavy-eyed and looked a little like a man with a bad hangover. Dr. Smith came out of the house and got into the car. He looked as he always did.
“Three hours’ sleep is worse than none,” Walsh said. He started the car and headed for the Drake place.
“How well you sleep is what counts,” the doctor said. “Not that I recommend three hours as a standard ration.”
“I had nightmares,” Walsh said. “It’s funny what a thing like this does to you. I had a kind of fixed notion about these people. You know—pleasant, charming, living the kind of life everybody would want to live. Suddenly they’re all out of focus. One of them is a killer—a vicious killer.”
“One of them is a very sick person,” the doctor said. “Murder is a sickness, Captain.”
“I keep hoping somewhere along the way something will happen to upset the whole theory,” Walsh said. “It’s not that you aren’t convincing, Doctor. It’s just that—damn it, I like them all!”
“Perhaps you’ll be lucky,” the doctor said. “Tell me something about this stableman we’re going to see.”
“George Meadows? He’s a local man. Not overbright, but wonderful with horses and completely trustworthy.”
“That last is an odd description for a man who would send out a horse with a faulty saddle. Unless I’m right, of course.”
“Right about what?”
“Most grooms check their equipment when it comes in from a ride,” the doctor said. “They saddle-soap it and get it ready for the next outing. They do their checking then. If he saw it was all right then, he’d have no reason to notice it particularly the next time it went out.”
“That’s probably what happened, because George is careful and reliable.”
“In that case, you see, our murderer had plenty of time to tamper with the girth. Also, I guess that it was Stephen’s habit to walk out to the barn with Marcia and to do his own checking. So the murderer could count on his finding it.”
“George will clear things up,” Walsh said.
They turned in the iron gates of the Drake place and swung off the main driveway down the road to the barn. The big sliding doors were open and they could hear the horses stamping and whinnying inside. They stopped and got out. There was no sign of George Meadows and the horses made a great clamor as they got closer.
“Sounds as though they hadn’t been fed,” Walsh said, frowning. “George usually feeds them around six.”
They stood in the doorway. The doctor could see the horses’ heads looking out over the tops of the boxstall doors. But Walsh wasn’t looking at horses.
“Holy Joe, what struck this place?” he said.
It certainly wasn’t the picture of a well-kept stable. Blankets, coolers, pieces of harness were scattered all over the floor. Two tack trunks stood with their lids open and the doctor saw that the lock on one of them had been forced.
Walsh went quickly into the barn. To the right of the entrance was the tack room. There was a half-glass door. The room itself was long and narrow, with saddle racks and bridle hooks lining one wall. The pleasant smell of saddle soap and tar greeted them. There was a potbellied stove at one end of the room. At the other was a cot, covered by a bright green-and-white-checked horse blanket. On the cot a man lay. The whole place was the same disordered mess as the main part of the barn.
Both Walsh and the doctor hurried to the cot.
“Dead drunk,” Walsh said.
“If you can get drunk by being hit over the head with a tire iron, he’s drunk,” the doctor said. He pointed to a steel bar on the floor. Then his fingers explored the wound on the side of George Meadows’ head. It was long and ugly-looking. George’s hair was matted with blood.
“He’s alive,” the doctor said after a moment, “but that’s about all. My guess is a bad fracture. It’s an emergency case. Can you get an ambulance here at once?”
“There’s a phone somewhere here in the stable,” Walsh said. He located it out near the front doors. When he came back, the doctor was standing beside the cot, looking down at Meadows.
“This fellow slept here?”
“Sometimes. His family lives on the edge of town. If he didn’t feel like going home, or was kept late, he bedded down here.”
“He made an unlucky choice last night,” the doctor said. He looked around him. “There was panic involved here—panic and great need for hurry.”
“Somebody was certainly looking for something,” Walsh said.
“They certainly were, Captain. They were looking for a saddle girth! I’m afraid they found it. Probably in that locked trunk.”
“Why would it be there?”
> “Maybe Meadows had ideas about it too,” the doctor said. “Unfortunately he isn’t going to be able to tell us about it soon—if ever.”
“It’s that bad?”
Dr. Smith nodded.
The ambulance arrived about half an hour later. The hospital was in the neighboring town of Kingsford, about twelve miles away. From the intern on the ambulance Dr. Smith got information about a staff surgeon. He called the surgeon on the phone and told him what to prepare for.
“Quite apart from the man himself,” Dr. Smith said, “his survival is important for other reasons. If he regains consciousness, be sure to have someone get what he says, and if he can be questioned, try to find out exactly what happened.”
As the doctor turned away from the phone he saw Ted Hunter coming on the run down the path from the house. He’d apparently put on only a pair of pants and a shirt. He had bedroom slippers on his feet, and his blond hair was disheveled.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded. He stared at the mess of equipment on the barn floor. Then he turned toward the tack room. The intern and the driver were carrying George Meadows out on a stretcher. Walsh followed the stretcher out of the tack room and Ted grabbed his arm. “What’s happened here?”
“Our murderer is getting a little less subtle,” Walsh said.
The Drake household had that strange look of being caught unaware. An unshaved, unmade-up kind of unawareness that makes for self-consciousness. Harriet had on some sort of gray thing that was best described as a wrapper. Her dark hair was drawn back severely from her face, revealing streaks of gray that were hidden by her normal coiffure. Marcia had on a pale-blue linen housecoat. There was no color in her cheeks and her eyes were shadowed. She reminded Walsh of a very tired little girl. Ted had lost some of his usual mocking composure. He kept lighting one cigarette after another.
They were sitting around the big table in the dining room. A maid brought coffee and eggs and toast. Walsh had sent one of his men, who’d come out from the State Troopers’ barracks, to fetch Mike Cleghorn. After the first breaking of the news no one had done much talking.
Stephen was still sleeping heavily as a result of Dr. Smith’s tablets. The doctor had suggested letting him sleep.
“To me this whole business at the stable is entirely senseless,” Harriet said. “Why should anyone attack George?”
“That part is simple enough,” Ted said. “Whoever it was was looking for something. They turned the place upside down. But for what?”
“A saddle girth,” Walsh said.
“A saddle girth!”
“A ripped saddle girth,” Walsh said. “The one that was on Marcia’s saddle two weeks ago. Dr. Smith and I went there to find it ourselves. Somebody beat us to it. George evidently interfered.”
“I don’t think he interfered,” Dr. Smith said. His expressionless, gray eyes moved slowly from face to face. “I think he was asleep. I think the person who wanted the girth slipped quietly into the tack room and slugged him with the tire iron without giving him any chance at all. There were no signs of a struggle—only frantic haste in searching.”
“Not a pleasant picture,” Harriet said. “But will somebody please tell me what is so important about a broken saddle girth?”
“It’s evidence in the case,” Walsh said. “I hoped it might prove Dr. Smith was wrong. Now I know he’s right.”
“And would you mind telling me what a broken saddle girth has to do with Dr. Smith’s idiotic theory that someone’s been trying to drive Stephen crazy?” Harriet asked.
“No, I don’t mind,” Walsh said. He put it to them flatly, baldly, without frills or supporting argument. He put it to them as fact. He needed no more convincing himself.
Marcia listened, as though hearing the words from him made them more believable than when she’d heard them from the doctor. Harriet sat rigidly in the armchair at the head of the table, her hands clamped tightly over the knobs of the chair arm. Her lips were drawn together. She looked like a person set firmly to take a blow. Ted, too, seemed to be absorbing punishment. His color had faded; his cigarette burned forgotten in the ashtray beside his coffee cup.
When Walsh finished nobody spoke for a moment. Then Harriet said, “You ask us to accept this as fact?”
“It is fact,” Walsh said. “One of you tried to drive Stephen out of his mind. One of you pushed Bob Bristow off the ledge. One of you smashed in George Meadows’ skull with a tire iron.”
There was an angry exclamation from the doorway. Cleghorn stood there. His hands were doubled up at his sides. “A pretty damned incompetent summing up, if you ask me,” he said. He walked around the table to an empty chair. As he passed behind Marcia he touched her shoulder with the tips of his fingers.
For the first time some of Ted’s familiar mockery returned. “Perhaps it should be pointed out that nobody did ask you, Cleg,” he said.
“I don’t give a damn whether they ask me or not,” Cleg said.
“Will you have some coffee, Cleg?” Harriet asked.
“The hell with coffee!” Cleg put his big hands down flat on the table. He fixed his eyes on Dr. Smith. “I would like to ask you one question, sir. Just where does Stephen fit into this picture?”
“I should call him one of the victims,” the doctor said.
“It’s a very convenient explanation, isn’t it, Doctor? Only I don’t go for it.”
“No?”
“No! You set up a picture here of a completely unbalanced person at work. A person so unbalanced as to murder Bob and attack George Meadows. You sit there and blandly accuse the four of us, who show no signs of any mental unbalance, and pass over Stephen who has obviously been ill for weeks! You base your whole theory on a story Stephen has told you—Stephen, who is clearly way the hell off base!”
“Is it your idea, Mr. Cleghorn, that mentally unbalanced people always go around gibbering and plaiting daisies in their hair?” the doctor asked.
“Of course it isn’t!” Cleghorn said impatiently. “I just don’t understand why, when you’re dealing with insanity of some kind, you calmly pass by the one person we know is out of whack.”
“Stephen couldn’t have attacked George down at the stables,” Marcia said. “He’s been asleep. The doctor gave him something to make him sleep.”
“Sure. That’s great,” Cleg said. “Did anybody see him take the pills?”
“He obviously took them,” the doctor said. “I’ve just come from examining him.”
“Could you tell when he took them?” Cleg demanded. “Couldn’t he have done this job at the barn first?”
“It’s possible,” the doctor conceded.
“Then for God’s sake, let’s approach this intelligently. You say someone was playing Svengali to Stephen’s Trilby! And the object? To murder Marcia! We forget about Bob and George Meadows for a minute. They were afterthoughts, according to you. Bob had uncovered this fantastic business, you say. George was slugged, you say, because your villain knew you were going to look for a saddle girth that’s evidence in the case. But you basic theory has to do with a fancy scheme for murdering Marcia. Right?”
“That’s right, Mr. Cleghorn,” the doctor said. The mildness of his manner seemed to increase Cleghorn’s blood pressure.
“Well, let’s look at that!” he said. “Let’s say we’re all nuts, just for the hell of it! What possible lunatic reason could I have for wanting Marcia dead?” He laughed harshly. “I guess it’s not a secret from anybody that I’ve been in love with Marcia all my life.”
“Cleg!” Marcia protested.
“This is getting really fascinating,” Ted drawled.
“You’re always so damned smartly smug, Ted,” Cleghorn said. “I’m just stating facts. I love Marcia and always have. I lost out to Stephen and that was okay. She’s been happy. But if I did go off my trolley I wouldn’t be murdering Marcia. I’d be murdering Stephen.”
“Perhaps you could call this oration a sort of murder by proxy,”
Ted said.
“Shut up, Ted. Let’s take you!”
“By all means,” Ted said, grinning. “I offer my beautiful body to the cause of science.”
“Loopy as he might be, Ted wouldn’t murder Marcia,” Cleg said. “She’s his direct route to three square meals a day, a comfortable home, and a life of leisure. You don’t think Stephen supports Ted because he’s in love with Ted, do you? Take Marcia out of the picture and Ted might actually have to rustle his own ham and eggs.”
Ted’s smile had frozen and his blue eyes were cold and angry. “Portraiture has never been your forte, Cleg. You ought to stick to landscapes. Do you deliberately pass over the fact that Marcia is my sister and that I might be fond of her?”
“Have you ever been fond of anyone but yourself, Ted?” Cleg demanded.
“Why, you jerk!” Ted said. Then he laughed, his good humor apparently returning. “I can’t wait for your thumbnail sketch of Harriet.”
“Give me one reason why Harriet would want Marcia out of the way?” Cleg said. “Just one reason! You’re not going to tell me she secretly loves Stephen, are you?”
“This is your party, Mr. Cleghorn,” the doctor said.
Harriet’s face was expressionless. “I suppose I have the normal amount of envy any homely woman feels for a beautiful woman,” she said. “I suppose I secretly wish I might have lived a full rich life with the man I loved, as Marcia is. Perhaps that could be called a motive.”
“Rot!” Cleghorn said. “The simple fact is there aren’t any motives, sane or insane.”
“Go on, Mr. Cleghorn,” the doctor said.
“That about covers all of us,” Cleghorn said.
“What about Mrs. Drake?” the doctor asked.
“Marcia?”
“Yes.”
“But she’s the one who was supposed to get killed.”
“That’s the way it’s made to look, at any rate,” the doctor said. He outlined briefly his case against Marcia. As he finished, Cleghorn half rose from his chair.