by Ellery Queen
“I’ll admit it was on my mind.”
A voice reached them from far away. “Velvet!” it called. “Nick Velvet, where are you?”
“You’re being paged,” she said.
“So I hear. Hope I can find my way out of this place as easily as I got in.”
“Come on.” She smiled and reached out to take his hand. “I’ll show you the way.”
“I thought you were hiding.”
“What good did it do? You found me.”
He followed her out the way he’d come in, past the walls of yew hedge, down the twisting, turning tunnel to the outer world. When they reached it, Nick saw that another car had pulled up behind the white van. He sensed in that instant something had gone wrong, and he turned to seek a way out.
“Hold it, Velvet! Hold it right there!”
He relaxed and kept turning until he faced the gun in the steady hand of Lieutenant Charlie Weston. “Well, fancy meeting you here!”
“Up with your hands, Velvet,” the detective said. “Your thieving days are over for good this time.”
“How did you find me so quickly?” Nick asked, when they had all moved into the big house. He was aware that his words were almost an echo of the question Helen Satin had asked him at the center of the labyrinth.
Charlie Weston still held the gun, and his eyes were cold and hard. “Do you think I believed you when you told me you just looked in on the Satin trial? I know you, Nick. I know your methods. I almost put you behind bars in the Brazen Letters case, and this time I’m not going to let you slip away. I’ve been working with the local police and we’ve had a tail on you these last couple of days. We had an elaborate system for following the white van, using a police helicopter. You didn’t have a chance, Nick.”
More police had arrived, and they were beginning to revive the people in the van. Two of the woman jurors were helped inside to chairs. One of the court attendants, shaking his head to clear it, walked up to Nick. “This is the one—this is the man who was driving the van that picked us up. When I realized something was wrong I tried to grab him but the gas knocked me out too quick.”
Weston nodded. “Thank you. We’ll be using your testimony.”
Gregory Satin and his wife were standing to one side, white-faced and nervous. Satin had already denounced Adam Whipple as the man behind the plot, but it seemed unlikely that Satin could completely escape blame. Whipple himself was already handcuffed, and now Weston said, “Hold out your hands, Nick.”
The handcuffs clicked into place, and for the first time in his life Nick felt helpless. Kidnapping an entire jury was likely to rate a stiff prison sentence, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Tell me one thing,” Helen Satin said. “How did you find the center of the maze so quickly?”
“The maze is a duplicate of the one at Hampton Court Palace, which is one of the most famous mazes in the world. I did a little reading about it the last few days. A number of books, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, give the solution to the labyrinth—go left on entering, then right at the next two forks, then left the rest of the way.”
She nodded, watching him with her wide eyes as she had in the center of the maze. Perhaps, he decided, she was something of a minotaur after all—if a minotaur could ever be feminine. Certainly she’d been one for Laura Indris, who had found her at the center of that maze.
“Could I speak to you?” Nick suddenly asked Lieutenant Weston. “Alone?”
The detective frowned and motioned him to one side of the huge living room. More jurors were being brought in now, and the place was becoming crowded. “No tricks now,” Weston cautioned. “You’re not squirming out of this one.”
“I just thought you might be willing to make a deal,” Nick said. “You’ve got your jury back, and nobody’s been hurt, not really.”
“But the judge will call a mistrial, which is just what you planned. Chances are Helen Satin won’t be tried again till fall, because the courts pretty much close down during July and August. And that’s just what Whipple wanted when he hired you.”
Nick shrugged. “I just thought you’d be more interested in seeing justice done than in sending me to prison.”
“Justice will be done.”
“You could score big with the local police if you handed them the true story of what happened in that maze.”
Weston frowned at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That the killing of Laura Indris couldn’t have happened the way Helen Satin says it did.”
“You mean because she was shot in the back?”
“No, I mean because Laura Indris found the center of the maze after searching a half hour.”
“You think that was too soon?”
“It was too long.”
Weston frowned and cleared his throat. “Damn it, Velvet, what do you want?”
“Just for you to take these cuffs off and let me walk away. It’s as simple as that. Promise to do it, and I’ll tell you what really happened in that maze on the night of January fifteenth.”
Weston cursed and reached out to unlock the handcuffs. “You’d better make it good.”
The entire jury had now recovered enough to come into the living room and they stood and sat along two walls. “We’ll leave it up to them,” Nick said.
He rubbed his freed wrists a bit to restore the circulation, then stepped to the center of the room, standing opposite Satin and his wife and Adam Whipple, with Weston and the other police behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “First, I want to apologize for the manner in which you were brought here. I usually do things a bit more skillfully.”
“Get to the point,” Weston said behind him.
“I will. Now, folks, I’m sure the judge is going to call a mistrial in this case, but it doesn’t seem fair to me that you shouldn’t have a chance to decide on an alternate version of the facts—a version I’m going to present to you now. If I convince you of what really happened in that maze last January, Lieutenant Weston here has agreed to let me go.”
There were some murmurs of objection from the local police, but Nick hurried on. “Since you’ve already heard most of the testimony, and since we have the two star witnesses here with us, let’s get right to it. Mrs. Satin, if we are to believe your story, it took Laura Indris a full half hour to find the center of the maze that night.”
“Some people have taken much longer than that—hours, in fact. She’d never been there before, never seen the maze before—and she’d obviously not read about it in the encyclopaedia, as you did.”
Nick smiled at Helen Satin. “It’s possible she consulted a reference book.”
She shook her head. “You forget that it was I who chose the maze as the site of the duel. She couldn’t have prepared herself in advance, because she didn’t know I’d run in there.”
“All right,” Nick granted. “She arrived at the entrance to a maze she’d never seen before, with you hiding somewhere inside it with a gun. I repeat my question. Why did it take her a half hour to find you? Because, as two witnesses have testified, it had snowed earlier that evening. Your route through the labyrinth, Mrs. Satin, would have been as sharp and clear as your footprints in the snow under a full moon.”
One of the jurors gasped, and every eye in the room turned to Helen Satin. “I—the footprints! I never thought of them. I was so frightened I never even looked down.”
“But they were there. Are we to believe your story, that with the footprints to guide her, it still took Laura Indris at least thirty minutes to find you?”
“Why should I lie? Why would I make up such a fantastic story, about the duel and all, if it weren’t true?” She was trying to control herself, but the composure she’d shown during the trial was now cracking.
Nick Velvet turned to face the jury, feeling like a prosecuting attorney about to score a telling point. “I don’t think you did lie, Mrs. Satin. If you thought up a lie like that, you would certa
inly have thought up a slight additional lie to cover the bullet wound in the back. You told what you thought was the truth. And yet—Laura Indris still waited a full half hour before following your footprints to the center of the labyrinth. Why?”
“All right, why?” Charlie Weston asked from behind Nick.
“Well, we know that Helen Satin was playing for time, hiding in the maze in the hope her husband would return. If Laura Indris was also waiting, it could only have been for the same thing. She waited a half hour for Gregory Satin to return—to help with the murder of his wife!”
Satin took a step toward Nick, his hands balled into fists, and then thought better of it. “That’s crazy,” he growled. “I was still at my office.”
“I think not. You said you phoned your London office and had to get the manager out of bed, at five in the morning London time. Since there’s six hours’ difference between here and London, that means you left the office shortly after eleven, not twelve. This is confirmed by the fact that it was still snowing when you started home. We know from both your wife and Detective Reager that the full moon was out and the skies clear by midnight. You started home sometime after eleven, and reached home at just about the time Laura Indris started into the maze. You were with her, you had the second gun, and you fired the fatal shot.”
“I shot her!” Helen Satin almost screamed. “He wasn’t there!”
“The twin guns left out so conveniently, loaded so conveniently. Gregory meant it to happen just as it did. He was sure that, given a choice, you’d run into the maze. Both guns were loaded with blanks—till he arrived home and loaded Laura’s weapon with real bullets.”
“I saw her with the gun—I tell you I saw her!”
“You saw her raise her arm, that’s all—but not holding a gun. You heard a shot—fired by your husband. Then you fired an instant later and Laura fell dead. It was a simple matter afterwards for Gregory to switch the two pistols so that it would appear you had fired the fatal one.”
“But why?”
“Why?” Nick repeated. “I don’t know why. Did he aim for you and hit Laura by accident, or did he mean to kill her all along? Did he mean to get rid of you both with this one scheme? Suppose we ask him.”
But Gregory Satin had already broken away. He ran out the door before any of the police could stop him. “He’s heading for the maze!” Adam Whipple shouted.
Nick turned and faced the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.”
A few of them broke into applause, and then the others joined in. Charlie Weston walked over. “I’ll give you five minutes to get out of here, Nick. Then I put out an alarm for you.”
“Thanks.”
“You won’t thank me the next time, but a deal’s a deal.”
“What about me?” Whipple asked.
Weston unlocked his handcuffs. “Get out! We can’t arrest you without Velvet.”
Whipple followed Nick. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride back to town.”
“You’ll give me more than that,” Nick reminded him. “The rest of my fee.”
“That too.”
“What’s with you, Whipple?” he asked as they got into the car. “You wanted more than the money.”
“She told me she was afraid he’d kill her. I knew he did kill her, and I wanted to delay the trial till I could find some evidence against him. You see, she was my kid sister.”
“Helen Satin?”
“No. Laura Indris. Laura Whipple.”
They pulled around the curving driveway, past the yew-hedge maze where the police were moving in now, tracking Gregory Satin to its very center. Nick watched out the window and then said, “Maybe they just won’t find him in there. Maybe for people like Gregory Satin there’s always a minotaur waiting at the center of the maze.”
But the five minutes Lieutenant Weston had given Nick were almost up, so he didn’t wait to find out.
Joel Townsley Rogers
The Murderer
Joel Townsley Rogers’ “The Murderer” first appeared in the November 23, 1946 issue of “The Saturday Evening Post.” The editors of the SEP considered it “one of the most unusual mystery stories the ‘Post’ ever ran.” And although more than a quarter of a century has passed since the story’s first publication, “The Murderer” is still a comparatively neglected “classic” of its kind. . .
John Bantreagh backed away from her a step on caving knees, with his gaze still on her. She looked so helpless, and somehow innocent, lying here on the meadow grass in the gray, still dawn, in front of his farm-truck wheels. In her white dress with its big red polka dots and red patent-leather belt, and her white shoes with their red heels. With her red mouth and light-brown curly hair, and her hazel eyes open.
Looking at him, it seemed like, out of dream-filled sleep, a little blankly. As she did sometimes in the early mornings, while he dressed quietly to go out and do the chores, with eyes wide-open, though not yet all awake. But, of course, she wasn’t. There was an opaqueness on her lenses, there was a cold dew on her face, and she was dead.
One wheel had gone over her throat and the other over her sheer-clad ankles. Her legs had hardly been hurt at all, he thought; the ground was soft, and they had just been pressed down into the mire and grass roots. Only her throat had been broken—the trachea, the larynx, and pharynx, or whatever else there was in people’s throats that made them live and breathe. That made them talk, too. Her eyes were on him, with that look they had. But she would never say who had done it.
John Bantreagh felt as if his own throat had been crushed, as he tried to pull his gaze away, with his knees caving. As if a heavy wheel had rolled onto it and—not like with her—had not backed away. He looked around him slowly with his reddened gaze. He had a feeling that other eyes were watching him, if not hers. But it was a lonely meadow, on a lonely road. Just dark pine woods around, and the dirt road two or three hundred yards away, beyond the tumble-down snake fence that bordered it.
His truck motor had died. He must start it and back down across the meadow to the road again. Get on back home before anyone was stirring. Let her be found by someone else. It would be hours, way off here—it might be even days. That would be too much to endure, knowing she was here. This evening, if no one had found her before then, he might suggest, just offhandedly, looking along here, as if it were something that had occurred to him without any reason.
There was just so much a man could stand.
The air had lightened from dark silver to pearl. It was not full light yet, but it was no longer night. He had never known a moment so quiet and still. Across the meadow grass he could see the tracks of his truck coming in at a diagonal from the road, through the break in the fence, where the weeds were crushed down that grew in the shallow roadside ditch and along the field side of the fence. Two parallel lines, with only moderate waves in them, coming directly to where his truck stood now with its front tires almost touching her. Smooth-worn front tires, but cleated rear tires, which had left their tracks of broad, deep, transverse ridges. They were a pair he had ordered from the mail-order catalogue, and had cost a lot of money. He had got them from the freight office only yesterday morning, along with the things for Mollie and the kids, and the rest of the order; and had put them on when he got back home, with her and the kids watching him.
Just yesterday forenoon Mollie had been rinsing out some things on the back porch bench beside the pump, with her wrists buried in the washbasin, and soapy water splashing on the ground off the porch edge. She had paused to brush back her tendrils of damp hair with the inside of her elbow, squeezing out a handful of sand-colored fabric.
“You’re proud of those tires, aren’t you, John?”
“Sure am!” he told her as he knelt on the gravel unwrapping one of them. “I’ll bet nobody else has anything like them in the whole county. Eight-ply, tractor tread, guaranteed for fifty thousand miles. Could have got a good-enough tire for six fifty less apiece, maybe. But it’s smart to get something
that lasts, as I can see it.”
“I reckon you’re pretty smart, John.”
“Sure am, honey. I got you.”
“How long do you figure I’m guaranteed for?”
“Till death to us part,” he had replied, grinning.
She had laid the sand-colored fabric down on the bench and had squeezed out a handful of something black—her dark blue blouse, it must be, that looked black because it was wet. She didn’t have any black things. She didn’t seem altogether pleased. The tires had cost a lot of money. Maybe she was thinking of the nice things it could have bought.
“What are you washing out, honey?” he had asked her.
“Just my rayon stockings and some old things.”
“Maybe some day you’ll have a pair of nylons, so you won’t have to take such care of those rayons. I saw Lily belle wearing a pair the other day. I wouldn’t know, but she said they were. I guess every woman likes them.”
“Does Lilybelle have nylon underwear, too?”
She like to tease him at times about Lilybelle. It was just a joke. She wasn’t really jealous of Lilybelle. She hadn’t any reason to be that he knew of.
“She didn’t say, honey,” he told her.
She had said something else then, brushing back her hair again, but he hadn’t heard, having begun to pry one of the old bare-tread shoes off a rim with a mallet and tire iron. The kids had been jumping around and yelling, and she might have been reprimanding them. . .Vaguely, in the back of his mind, he wondered who would take care of the kids now. It was the first time he had thought of it.
His knees caved and caved. He had heard of men’s knees doing that, but it didn’t seem natural. He couldn’t control them, though. He stiffened them, and they jerked down again as if they were only water. He planted a hand on the mudguard of his truck, taking a dragging step back toward the seat. He must start his engine and back down to the road again and go on home. Now.
There was no sound of distant barnyard roosters. It must be a good mile at least, maybe two or five, to the nearest house. If there was any wildlife in the woods around the meadow—fox, bobcat, possum—it was keeping very still.