Egyptian Cross Mystery (5 page)

Colonel Pickett stepped into the breach once more. “Maybe I’d better tell it, Mr. Stapleton, and expedite the business of the inquest. Krosac’s always kept himself under cover, as far as we could find out. Couple of years now that he’s been with this man. Mysterious sort of fellow. Acted as business manager and advertising agent, sort of, letting Harakht here take care of the hokum. Harakht picked him up out West somewhere. The last time Krosac was with Harakht was Christmas Eve. They’d been camped up near Holliday’s Cove”—a few miles from Weirton; Ellery remembered certain signposts. “Krosac went off around ten o’clock or so, and that’s the last What’s-His-Name claims to have seen of him. The times match, all right.”

“You’ve found no trace of this Krosac?”

The Colonel looked irritated. “Not yet,” he snapped. “Disappeared as if the earth swallowed him. But we’ll find him. He can’t get away. We’ve sent out descriptions of him and Kling.”

“Harakht,” said the Coroner, “have you ever been in Arroyo?”

“Arroyo? No.”

“They never got that far north in West Virginia,” explained the Colonel.

“What do you know about Krosac?”

“He is a true believer,” asserted Harakht deliberately. “He worships at the altar with reverence. He partakes of
kuphi
and hears the holy writings with high spirit. He is the pride and the glory—”

“Oh, all right,” said the Coroner wearily. “Take him away, Trooper.”

The trooper grinned, rose, grasped Brown-Beard’s skinny arm, and hauled him off the stand. The Coroner heaved a sigh of relief as the two disappeared in the crowd.

Ellery echoed the sigh. His father had been right. It looked very much as if he were due to return to New York, if not precisely with his tail between his legs, at least with a hangdog look about him. The entire proceeding was so insane, the affair so incomprehensible, so impervious to logic, that it hinged on farce. And yet—there was that brutally mutilated body, crucified to …

Crucified!
He started, almost with an audible gasp. Crucifixion—ancient Egypt. Where had he run across that odd fact?

The inquest proceeded swiftly. Colonel Pickett produced a number of articles which he had found in Harakht’s wagon and which Harakht had said belonged to Krosac. They were inconsequential, of no value either intrinsically or as possible clues to the man’s background or identity. There had been no photograph of Krosac, as the Coroner pointed out to the jury—a fact which made the apprehension of the man even more difficult. To augment the difficulties, there were no samples available of the man’s handwriting.

Other witnesses were called. Small points were brought out. No one could be found who had had Andrew Van’s house under observation on Christmas Eve, or who saw Krosac after Croker the garagemen left him at the crossroads. Van’s house was the only dwelling in the vicinity of the crossroads, and no one had passed by that night. … The spikes found in Van’s crucified body had come from his own tool box, usually kept in his kitchen-pantry. They had been purchased by Kling from storekeeper Bernheim long before, it was revealed; many of them having been used in the construction of a woodshed.

Ellery came to a consciousness of his surroundings just as Coroner Stapleton was rising to his feet. “Gentlemen of the Jury,” the Coroner was saying, “you have heard the proceedings of this inqu—”

Ellery leaped to his feet. Stapleton stopped to look around, annoyed at the interruption. “Yes, Mr. Queen? You’re interfering with the business of the—”

“One moment, Mr. Stapleton,” said Ellery quickly, “before you address the Coroner’s jury. There is in my possession a fact which it seems to me is pertinent to your inquiry.”

“What’s that?” cried District Attorney Crumit, starting from his seat. “A new fact?”

“Not a new fact, Mr. District Attorney,” replied Ellery, smiling. “A very old one. More ancient than the Christian religion.”

“Here,” said Coroner Stapleton—the audience was craning and whispering, and the jury had risen from their seats to stare at this unexpected witness—“what are you getting at, Mr. Queen? What’s the Christian religion got to do with it?”

“Nothing—I hope.” Ellery leveled his pince-nez at the Coroner. “The most significant feature of this horrible crime,” he said severely, “if I may, be permitted to say so, has not been touched upon at all in this inquest. I refer to the fact that the murderer, whoever he was, deliberately went out of his way to plaster the letter or symbol T around the scene of his crime. The T shape of the crossroads. The T shape of the signpost. The T shape of the corpse. The T scrawled in blood on the victim’s front door. All these things have been commented upon in the press—and rightly so.”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted District Attorney Crumit with a sneer, “we know all that. Where’s your fact, though?”

“Here.” Ellery stared at him hard, and Crumit flushed and sat down. “I fail to see the connection—I confess to complete bewilderment—but do you know that the symbol T may quite possibly not refer to the alphabet at all?”

“What do you mean, Mr. Queen?” asked Coroner Stapleton anxiously.

“I mean that the symbol T has a religious significance.”

“Religious significance?” repeated Stapleton.

A portly old gentleman wearing a clerical collar rose from the thick of the audience. “If I may make so bold,” he said sharply, “to interrupt the learned speaker—I am a minister of the gospel, and
I
have never heard of a religious significance embodied in the symbol T!”

Some one cried: “That’s tellin’ him, Parson!” and the minister blushed and sat down.

Ellery smiled. “If I may contradict the learned dominie, its significance is this: There is one cross among the many religious symbols which takes the shape of a T. It is called the
tau
cross, or
crux commissa.”

The minister started from his seat. “Yes,” he cried, “That’s true. But it isn’t originally a Christian cross, sir. It was a
pagan
sign!”

Ellery chuckled. “Exactly, sir. And wasn’t the Greek cross in use by pre-Christian peoples for centuries before the Christian era? The
tau
antedates the familiar Greek cross by many hundreds of years. It’s thought by some to have been a phallic symbol in origin. … But the point is this.”

They waited in bated silence as he paused and drew a breath. Then he leveled his pince-nez at the Coroner again and said crisply: “The
tau,
or T, cross is not its only name. It is sometimes called”—he paused, and concluded quietly—“the
Egyptian
cross!”

“When a crime is committed by a nonhabitual criminal, that is the time for the policeman to watch out. None of the rules he has learned will apply, and the information he has amassed through years of studying the underworld becomes so much dead wood.”

—Danilo Rieka

A
ND THAT WAS ALL.
Extraordinary, incredible—but it died there. The cryptic connection which Ellery Queen pointed out to the Weirton populace deepened rather than lightened the mystery. As for himself, he could see no solution. He consoled himself with the thought that one could scarcely apply logic to the divagations of a madman.

If the problem was too much for him, it was certainly too much for Coroner Stapleton, District Attorney Crumit, Colonel Pickett, the Coroner’s jury, the citizens of Arroyo and Weirton, and the scores of newspapermen who had flocked to town on the day of the inquest. Directed by the Coroner, who sternly resisted the temptation to leap to the obvious but unsupported solution, the jury scratched its collective head and brought in a verdict of “death at the hands of person or persons unknown.” The newspapermen prowled about for a day or so, Colonel Pickett and District Attorney Crumit went about in ever slowing circles, and finally the case died in the press—a death warrant indeed.

Ellery returned to New York with a philosophic shrug. He was inclined to believe, the longer he mulled over the problem, that the explanation was after all simple. There was no reason, he felt, to doubt the overwhelming indications of the evidence. Circumstantial, to be sure, but positive in their implications. There was a man by the name of Velja Krosac, an English-speaking foreigner, something of a charlatan, who for dark reasons of his own had planned, sought, and finally taken the life of a country schoolmaster, also foreign-born. The method, while interesting from the criminological standpoint, was not necessarily important. It was the horrible but comprehensible expression of a mind buckled by the strange fires of manic psychology. What lay behind—what sordid story of fancied wrong or religious fanaticism or blood-demanding vengeance—would probably never be known. Krosac, his gruesome mission accomplished, would naturally vanish, and perhaps even now was on the high seas, bound for his native country. Kling, the manservant? Undoubtedly the innocent victim, caught between two fires, done away with by the executioner because he had witnessed the crime or caught a glimpse of the murderer’s face. Kling represented in all likelihood a bridge that Krosac felt compelled to burn behind him. After all, a man who did not shrink from severing a human head merely to illustrate in broken flesh the symbol of his revenge would hardly turn squeamish at the necessity of killing an unexpected danger to his own safety.

And so Ellery returned to New York to accept the shrewd twigging of the Inspector.

“I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” chuckled the old man over the dinner table on the night of Ellery’s return, “but I want to point out a moral.”

“Do,” murmured Ellery, attacking a chop.

“The moral is: Murder is murder, and ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of the murders committed anywhere on the face of the globe, you young idiot, are as easy as pie to explain. Nothing fancy, you understand.” The Inspector beamed. “I don’t know what in time you expected to accomplish down in that God-forsaken country, but any flatfoot pounding a beat could have told you the answer.”

Ellery laid down his fork. “But logic—”

“Mumbo-jumbo!” snorted the Inspector. “Go on and get some sleep.”

Six months passed, during which Ellery completely forgot the bizarre events of the Arroyo murder. There were things to do. New York, unlike its kin in Pennsylvania, was not exactly a city of brotherly love; homicides were plentiful; the Inspector dashed about in an ecstasy of investigation, and Ellery trailed along, contributing his peculiar faculties to those cases which piqued his interest.

It was not until June, six months after the crucifixion of Andrew Van in West Virginia, that the Arroyo murder was forcibly brought back to his mind.

It was on Wednesday, the twenty-second of the month, that the spark was touched off. Ellery and Inspector Queen were at breakfast when the doorbell rang, and Djuna, the Queens’ boy-of-all-work, answered the door to find a messenger there with a telegram for Ellery.

“Queer,” said Ellery, tearing open the yellow envelope. “Who the deuce could be wiring me this early in the morning?”

“Who’s it from?” mumbled the old man out of a mouthful of toast.

“It’s from—” Ellery unfolded the message and glanced down at the typed signature. “From Yardley!” he cried, in vast surprise. He grinned at his father. “Professor Yardley. You remember, Dad. One of my profs at the University.”

“Sure I do. The Ancient History feller, hey? Stayed with us one weekend when he came into New York. Ugly chap with chin whiskers, as I recall.”

“One of the best. They don’t make ’em that way any more,” said Ellery. “God, it’s years since I’ve heard from him! Why on earth should he—”

“I’d suggest,” said the old man mildly, “That you read the message. That’s generally the way to find out why a person writes to you. In some ways, my son, you’re thicker than mud.”

The twinkle in his eye disappeared as he watched Ellery’s face. That gentleman’s jaw had dropped perceptibly.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Inspector in haste. “Somebody die?” He still preserved the middle-class superstition that telegrams boded no good.

Ellery tossed the yellow slip across the table, jumped from his chair, hurled his napkin at Djuna, and dashed into the bedroom, flinging off his dressing gown as he went.

The Inspector read:

THOUGHT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO COMBINE BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE STOP WHY NOT PAY ME THAT LONG DEFERRED VISIT STOP YOU WILL FIND NICE JUICY MURDER ACROSS THE ROAD FROM MY SHACK STOP HAPPENED THIS VERY MORNING AND LOCAL GENDARMES STILL ARRIVING STOP VERY INTERESTING STOP MY NEIGHBOR FOUND CRUCIFIED TO HIS TOTEM POST WITH HEAD MISSING STOP I SHALL EXPECT YOU TODAY

YARDLEY

T
HAT SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY WAS
going on was apparent miles before the old Duesenberg arrived at its destination. The Long Island highway it was following at Ellery’s customary reckless speed was thick with country troopers, who for once seemed uninterested in the spectacle of a tall earnest young man traveling at the rate of fifty-five miles per hour. Ellery, with the egotism of the specially favored speedster, was half hoping that some one would stop him. He would then have the opportunity of hurling “Police special!” in the teeth of his motorcycled antagonist; for he had cajoled the Inspector into telephoning the scene of the crime and explaining to Inspector Vaughn of the Nassau County police that “my famous son,” as the Inspector subtly said, was on his way, and would Vaughn accord the young hero every courtesy? Especially since, as the old man put it, this famous son had information which should prove of remarkable interest to Vaughn and the District Attorney. Then another call to District Attorney Isham of Nassau County, with a repetition of the encomia and the promise. Isham, a much harassed man that morning, mumbled something about “any news will be good news, Inspector; send him along,” and promised that nothing would be removed from the scene of the crime until Ellery arrived.

It was noon when the Duesenberg swung into one of Long Island’s immaculate private roads and was challenged by a trooper on a motorcycle.