Egyptian Cross Mystery (18 page)

“Take me there at once,” said Megara curtly, and strode to the door. Isham looked doubtful, but Ellery caught his eye and nodded. They all streamed after the yachtsman.

As they took the path to the totem post and the summerhouse, Professor Yardley whispered: “Well, Queen, it looks like the finale, eh?”

Ellery shrugged. “I can’t see why. What I said about Krosac still applies. Where the devil is he? Unless Megara can identify him in his present personality—”

“That’s assuming a lot,” said the Professor. “How do you know he’s around here?”

“I don’t! But it’s certainly possible.”

The summerhouse had been swathed in canvas, and a trooper stood by on guard. Vaughn flipped the canvas back and, unwinking, Megara went in. The interior of the summerhouse appeared exactly as the investigators had discovered it on the morning after the crime—a bit of forethought on the Inspector’s part which, it seemed, was destined to bear fruit.

Megara had eyes for only one thing—he ignored the T, the bloodstain, the signs of a struggle and a butchery—the pipe with its bowl carved into a Neptune’s-head and trident. …

“I thought so,” he said quietly, stooping and picking up the pipe. “The moment you mentioned the Neptune’s-head pipe, Inspector Vaughn, I knew that something was wrong.”

“Wrong?” Vaughn was disturbed; Ellery’s eyes were bright and inquiring. “What’s wrong, Mr. Megara?”

“Everything.” Megara looked at the pipe with bitter resignation. “You think this was Tom’s pipe? Well, it wasn’t!”

“You don’t mean to tell me,” exclaimed the Inspector, “that the pipe belongs to Krosac!”

“I wish it did,” replied Megara savagely. “No. It belongs to me.”

For an instant they digested this revelation, turning it over in their minds as if to take what nourishment there was from it. Vaughn was plainly puzzled. “After all,” he said, “even if it
is—”

“Wait a minute, Vaughn,” said the District Attorney swiftly. “I think there’s more in this than meets the eye. Mr. Megara, we’ve been under the impression that the pipe was Brad’s. Stallings gave us the definite feeling that it was, although now that I think of it, it’s easy to have made such a mistake. But it has Brad’s fingerprints on it, and it was smoked on the night of the murder with his own brand of tobacco in it. Now you say it’s yours. What I can’t understand—”

Megara’s eyes narrowed; his tone was stubborn. “There’s something wrong here, Mr. Isham. That’s my pipe. If Stallings said it was Tom’s, he either lied or took it to be Tom’s just because he’d noticed it in the house before I went away last year. I left it here inadvertently when I sailed away about a year ago.”

“What you can’t understand,” said Ellery softly to Isham, “is why one man should smoke another man’s pipe.”

“That’s it.”

“Ridiculous!” snapped Megara. “Tom wouldn’t smoke my pipe, or anyone else’s. He had plenty of his own, as you can see if you open his drawer in the study. And no man puts another man’s bit into his mouth. Especially Tom; he was a fanatic on sanitation.” He turned the Neptune’s-head over in his fingers with absent affection. “I’ve missed old Neptune. … I’ve had him for fifteen years. Tom—he knew how much I prized it.” He was silent for a moment. “He would no more smoke this pipe than he would put Stallings’s false teeth into his mouth.”

No one laughed. Ellery said swiftly: “We face an interesting situation, gentlemen. The first ray of light. Don’t you see the significance of this identification of the pipe as Mr. Megara’s?”

“Significance my hind leg,” snorted Vaughn. “It means only one thing—Krosac’s trying to frame Mr. Megara.”

“Nonsense, Inspector,” said Ellery genially. “It means nothing of the sort. Krosac could not possibly expect to make us believe Mr. Megara murdered Brad. Everyone knew that Mr. Megara was off somewhere, thousands of miles away, stretching his sea-legs in a periodic water tramp. And then—the T’s, and the tie-up with the murder of Van … As good as a signature. No.” He turned to the yachtsman, who was still studying the pipe with a frown. “Where were you, sir—your yacht, yourself, your crew—on June twenty-second?”

Megara turned to his sailing master. “We expected that, didn’t we, Captain?” His mustache lifted in a brief grin. “Where were we?”

Captain Swift flushed and produced a sheet of paper from one of his bulging blue pockets. “Mem’randum from my log,” he said. “Ought to answer ye, mister.”

They examined the memorandum. It stated that on June twenty-second, the
Helene
had passed through the Gatun Locks in the Panama Canal, bound for the West Indies. Attached to the memorandum was an official-looking slip which acknowledged payment for passage to the Canal authorities.

“Whole ship’s crew aboard,” rasped Captain Swift. “My log’s open to inspection. We been cruisin’ the Pacific workin’ east. We been as far as Australia on the westward passage.”

Vaughn nodded. “Nobody’s doubting you people. But we’ll take a look at your log, anyway.”

Megara spread his legs and teetered back and forth; it was easy to imagine him straddling a ship’s bridge, swaying to the lift and fall of a deep-sea vessel. “Nobody’s doubting us. Indeed! Not that I care a damn if you do, you understand … The closest we came to death on the whole voyage was a pain in the groin that I developed off Suva.”

Isham looked uncomfortable, and the Inspector turned to Ellery. “Well, Mr. Queen, what’s buzzing around in your noddle? You’ve got a notion, I can see that.”

“I’m afraid, Inspector, from this material evidence,” said Ellery, pointing to the memorandum and the slip, “that we can’t very well believe Krosac intended us to think Mr. Megara his partner’s murderer.” He puffed on a cigarette before continuing. “The pipe …” He flicked the ashes of his cigarette toward the odd brier in Megara’s hand. “Krosac must have known that Mr. Megara would have an unimpeachable alibi for the general period of the murder. We discount any surmise, therefore, in that direction.
But
from the facts that this is Mr. Megara’s pipe and that Brad would not have smoked it, we can now establish a tenable theory.”

“Smart,” said Professor Yardley, “if true. How?”

“Brad would not have smoked this Neptune’s-head pipe, the property of his partner. Yet it has been smoked—handled, apparently, by the victim himself. But if Brad would not have smoked the pipe and yet there are evidences on it that he did, what have we?”

“Ingenious,” muttered the Professor. “The pipe was made to
appear
as if Brad smoked it. It would be child’s play to place the dead man’s fingerprints on its stem.”

“Precisely!” cried Ellery. “And the job of making the pipe look as if it had been smoked would be simple. Perhaps the murderer himself actually loaded it, lighted it, and puffed a bowlful. Too bad the Bertillon system doesn’t take into account the variations of individual bacteria; there’s an idea! … Now, who might want to make it appear that Brad had smoked this pipe? Surely only the murderer. Why? To confirm the impression that Brad had wandered out—in a smoking jacket—to the summerhouse smoking the pipe, and had been attacked and killed there.”

“Sounds likely,” confessed Isham. “But why should Krosac do that with Mr. Megara’s pipe? Why didn’t he pick one of Brad’s own?”

Ellery shrugged. “There’s a simple answer to that, if you stop to think about it. Krosac, got the pipe—where? In the drawer of the reading table in the library. Is that right, Mr. Megara?”

“Probably,” said Megara. “Tom kept all his pipes there. When he found mine after I left, he must have put it away in the same drawer against my return.”

“Thank you. Now, going to the drawer, Krosac sees a number of pipes. He naturally assumes they all belong to Brad. He wants to leave one pipe to make it appear that Brad was smoking in the summerhouse. So he selects a pipe which is most distinctive in appearance, going on the excellent theory that the most distinctive-looking pipe will be the most easily identified pipe.
Ergo
—Neptune. Fortunately for us, however, Neptune was the property of Mr. Megara, not Brad.

“Ah,” proceeded Ellery in a sharp voice, “but here we come to an interesting deduction. Friend Krosac has gone to considerable trouble, has he not, to make it appear that Brad was attacked and killed while he was smoking
in the summerhouse?
For, you see, had there been no pipe and no evidence of smoking, we should have questioned Brad’s presence in the summerhouse, especially since he was wearing a smoking jacket; he might have been dragged there. But when we know that a man was smoking in a certain place, we know that up to a certain point, at least, he was there of his own free will. … Now we find, however, that he was
not
smoking there, and we know the murderer wants us to believe he was. The only sane inference is that
the summerhouse was not the scene of the crime,
but that the murderer wanted us very much to believe it was.”

Megara was regarding Ellery with a speculative and rather cynical light in his eye. The others kept silent.

Ellery flipped his cigarette out through the doorway. “The next step is surely clear. Since this isn’t the scene of the crime, some other place is. We must find that place and examine it. Finding it, I believe, will offer no difficulty. The library, of course. Brad was last seen alive there, occupied in playing checkers with himself. He was waiting for someone, for he had carefully cleared the house of possible witnesses or interrupters.”

“Just a minute.” Megara’s mouth was hard. “That’s a pretty speech and good hearing, Mr. Queen, but it happens to be all wrong.”

Ellery lost his smile. “Eh? I don’t understand. Wherein is the analysis faulty?”

“It’s wrong in the assumption that Krosac didn’t know the pipe is mine.”

Ellery took off his pince-nez and began to swab its lenses with his handkerchief—an infallible sign in him of perturbation, satisfaction, or excitement. “An extraordinary statement, if true, Mr. Megara. How could Krosac know the pipe belonged to you?”

“Because the pipe was in a
case.
Did you find a case in the drawer?”

“No.” Ellery’s eyes glittered. “Don’t tell me that your initials were on the case, sir!”

“Better than that,” snapped Megara. “My full name in gilt letters was stamped on the morocco cover. The pipe was in the case when I last saw it. The case naturally has as odd a shape as the pipe, and couldn’t possibly be used for another pipe, unless it was a replica of this.”

“Oh, splendid!” cried Ellery, smiling broadly. “I take it all back. You’ve given us a new lease on life, Mr. Megara. It puts an entirely different complexion on matters. Gives us even more to work on … Krosac knew it was your pipe, then. Nevertheless, he deliberately selected your pipe to leave in the summerhouse. The case he took away, obviously, since it’s gone. Why take away the case? Because if he had left it, we should have found it, seen the resemblance between the shape of the Stephen Megara case and the shape of the supposed Brad pipe, and known at once that the pipe wasn’t Brad’s. By taking the case away, Krosac made us believe
temporarily
that the pipe was Brad’s. You appreciate the inference?”

“Why temporarily?” demanded Vaughn.

“Because,” said Ellery triumphantly, “Mr. Megara
did
come back,
did
identify the pipe,
did
tell us about the missing pipe case! Surely Krosac knew Mr. Megara would eventually do this. Conclusion—
until Mr. Megara arrived,
Krosac wanted us to believe that the pipe belonged to Brad, and that therefore the summerhouse was the scene of the crime.
After Mr. Megara arrived,
Krosac was willing that we should know the summerhouse was
not
the scene of the crime; willing, furthermore, since it would be inevitable, to have us look for the
real
scene of the crime. Why do I say willing? Because Krosac could have avoided all this merely by choosing another means of making the summerhouse seem the scene of the crime; merely, in fact, by choosing one of Brad’s own pipes!”

“You hold, then,” said the Professor slowly, “that the murderer deliberately desires us to return to the real scene of the crime. I can’t understand why.”

“Sounds funny to me,” said Isham, shaking his head.

“It’s so abominably plain,” grinned Ellery. “Don’t you see—Krosac wanted us to look at the scene of the crime
now
—not a week ago, mind you, but
now.”

“But why, man?” asked Megara impatiently. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Ellery shrugged. “I can’t tell you specifically, but I’m convinced it makes rather remarkable sense, Mr. Megara. Krosac wants us to
find
something now—
while you are at Bradwood—
which he didn’t want us to find while you were on the Pacific somewhere.”

“Nuts,” said Inspector Vaughn with a scowl.

“Whatever it is,” said Isham, “I’m prepared to doubt it.”

“I suggest,” said Ellery, “that we follow along with Messer Krosac. If he wanted us to find it, let’s oblige him. Shall we go to the library?”

T
HE LIBRARY HAD BEEN
sealed since the morning after the discovery of Brad’s mutilated body. Isham, Vaughn, Megara, Professor Yardley, and Ellery went into the room; Captain Swift had rolled back to the dock, and the Brads and Lincoln were in their own quarters. Dr. Temple had vanished long before.

Megara stood to one side as the search was made—no perfunctory examination, this time, but a crevice-exploring expedition which left not a particle of dust undisturbed. Isham turned the secretary into a scene of carnage, strewing it with the crumpled bodies of vagrant papers. Vaughn took it upon himself to go over the furniture, piece by piece. Professor Yardley, self-delegated, retired to the alcove where the grand piano stood and amused himself by ravishing the music cabinet.

Almost at once the discovery was made—or at least a discovery, whether it were the one Velja Krosac had intended or not being at the moment of no consequence. It was a discovery of major importance—and made by Ellery, who was prowling by the Inspector’s side. Quite by accident, or in the interest of thoroughness, Ellery grasped a corner of the divan and pulled it back from before the book-filled wall so that it stood completely on the Chinese rug, where before its rear legs had rested on the bare floor. As he did this he exclaimed aloud and stooped swiftly to examine something on the part of the rug which had been hidden under the divan. Isham, Vaughn, and Yardley hurried to his side; Megara craned, but did not move. “What is it?”