Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (14 page)

And all were silent once more.

But then the Inspector slapped at a dive-bombing squadron of bluebottle flies, hopping on one foot and howling. “But how can a whole train disappear? Snowball! Snowball in July! What did Grady do, melt her down for ice-water?”

“And drank her,” said Sergeant Velie, licking his lips.

“Wait,” said Ellery. “Wait … I know where The Snowball is!” He scuttled toward the door. “And if I'm right we'd better make tracks—or kiss Lizbet goodbye!”

“But
where?
” implored Inspector Queen as the two cars flashed north again, toward Marmion.

“Down Grady's gullet,” shouted the Sergeant, wrestling his wheel.

“That's what he wanted us to think,” shouted Ellery in reply. “Faster, Sergeant! Train leaves Marmion and never shows up at the next station south, where we're waiting to take Lizbet off. Vanishes without a trace. Between Marmion and Wapaug there's nothing at all to explain what could have happened to her—no bridge to fall from, no water or ravine to fall into, no tunnel to hide in, no anything—just a straight line on flat bare country. Marvelous illusion. Only the same facts that give it the appearance of magic explain it.… No, Velie, don't slow down,” Ellery yelled as the dreary little Marmion station came into view. “Keep going north—
past
Marmion!”

“North past Marmion?” said his father, bewildered. “But the train came
through
Marmion, Ellery, headed south …”

“The Snowball's nowhere south of Marmion, is it? And from the facts it's a physical impossibility for her to be anywhere south of Marmion. So she
isn't
south of Marmion, Dad.
She never went through Marmion at all.
”

“But the Marmion stationmaster said—”

“What Grady bribed him to say! It was all a trick to keep us running around in circles between Marmion and Wapaug, while Grady and his gang held up the train
between Marmion and Grove Junction!
Isn't that gunfire up ahead? We're still in time!”

And there, four miles north of Marmion, where the valley entered the foothills, cowered The Snowball, frozen to the spot. A huge trailer-truck dumped athwart the local tracks had stopped her, and judging from the gun flashes she was under bombardment of half a dozen bandits hidden in the woods nearby.

Two figures, one lying still and the other crawling toward the woods dragging a leg, told them that the battle was not one-sided. From two of the shattered windows of a railroad car a stream of bullets poured into the woods. What Grady & Co. had not known was that Northwoodsmen Goldberg and Johnson had carried in their battered suitcases two submachine guns and a large supply of ammunition.

When the carful of New York detectives broke out their arsenal and cut loose on the run, the Grady gang dropped their weapons and trudged out with their dejected arms up.…

Ellery and the Inspector found Lizbet huddled on the floor of the smoking car with assorted recumbent passengers, in a litter of hot cartridge shells, while Detectives Johnson and Goldberg prepared rather shakily to enjoy a couple of stained cigarets.

“You all right, young woman?” asked the Inspector anxiously. “Anything I can get you?”

Lizbet looked up out of a mess of dyed hair, gunsmoke, sweat, and tears. “You said it, pop,” she hissed. “That witness chair!”

FALSE CLAIMANT DEPT.

The Witch of Times Square

If last year you had asked Father Bowen of All Souls-off-Times Square whether or not he subscribed to the Deuteronomic doctrine of an eye for an eye, he would have rebuked you—being a good Anglican—and cited some King Jamesian reminder, probably
Matthew, v, 38-39
, on the Case of the Reversible Cheek. Put the question to him today and Father Bowen is more likely to rub a leathery grin into his jaw and quote that profane authority, Ellery Queen, on the Case of the False Claimant.

Father Bowen's flock being pastured in the West Forties, it is plentifully mixed with black sheep. Until last year one of his sorriest blessings was a gay old ewe known to the touts, newspaper vendors, bartenders, carny boys, cops, and other habitués of Broadway as the Witch—a hag with lank gray-blonde locks, cheeks like bark, and runny blue eyes, who wore sidewalk-length skirts, an outrageous shawl, and a man's fedora which came from some night club trash can. The Witch lived alone in a basement hole over toward Tenth Avenue, and she bounded forth at night to sell violets, corsages of gardenias, and policy tickets under the marquees and neon signs. Toward morning—she was of English blood, her name being Wichingame—she could usually be found at some all-night bar before a long row of empty gin-and-tonic glasses, singing “Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning” or “The Church's One Foundation” in a hoarse, joyful voice. Her record of attendance at All Souls-off-Times Square was not meritorious, although she could always be depended upon in the confessional, where she went into enthusiastic clinical detail.

Her pastor labored hard in this exasperating vineyard, but he had no cause to rejoice until one winter week, when the Witch mistook the new snowfall on her sidewalk for the coverlet of her bed and awakened in Bellevue Hospital with a case of double lobar pneumonia. She was very ill, and at some time during her sojourn in the Valley she saw the Light. She sent for Father Bowen, who hastened to cultivate this most stubborn of his vines; and when she clanged home in a jubilant ambulance, Father Bowen holding her hand, she was a permanently repentant sinner.

“Then what's the problem, Father Bowen?” asked Ellery, wincing as he tried to turn over in bed. He had been laid up for ten days by a painful attack of sciatica, and he had been about to go mad when the clergyman called.

“The root of the problem, Mr. Queen,” said Father Bowen, hooking his bony arm under Ellery's and lifting expertly, “is the love of money. See
I Timothy, vi, 10
. It turns out that Miss Wichingame is—as they say in my parish—loaded. She owns several immensely valuable parcels of property and a considerable amount of cash and bonds. The poor thing has been, of course, a miser. Now, in her spiritual regeneration, she insists on giving it all away.”

“To some needy bartender, Father?”

“I almost wish that were it,” said the old clergyman with a sigh. “I know at least three whose needs are great. But no—it's to go to her only living heir.” And Father Bowen told Ellery the curious story of the Witch's nephew.

Miss Wichingame had had a twin sister, and while they were identical in every physical respect, their tastes differed profoundly. Miss Wichingame, for example, had early shown a preference for gin and the wilder variety of oat, whereas her twin looked upon spirits as the devil's lubricant and was as moral as a breakfast cereal.

This disparity, unfortunately for Miss Wichingame, extended to their tastes in men. Miss Wichingame fell in love with a small, handsome, dark man—an Italian, or Spaniard; after forty-five years she could not recall which—but her sister, whose firm eugenic credo was “like to like,” gave her maiden heart to “a pure Nordic,” as Miss Wichingame told Father Bowen—one Erik Gaard, of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, a large sedate Viking who had gone over to the Anglican church and become a missionary priest. Miss Wichingame's Italian, or Spaniard, turned out a scoundrel who left her unwed and with pleasant if not entirely respectable memories; the Reverend Gaard, no trifler, proposed holy matrimony to Miss Wichingame's sister and was triumphantly accepted.

A son was born to the Gaards, and when he was eight years old his parents sailed him to the Orient. For a short time the missionary's wife corresponded with her twin, but as Miss Wichingame's address became increasingly fluid the letters from the mission in Korea took longer and longer to catch up with her, until finally they stopped altogether.

“I take it,” said Ellery, cautiously shifting his left leg, “that when your communicant repented her sins she asked you to locate her sister.”

“I instituted inquiries through our missionary branch,” said Father Bowen, nodding, “and discovered that Father Gaard and his wife were murdered many years ago—the pre-war Japanese made it very difficult for Christian missionaries in Korea—and that their mission was burned to the ground. Their son, John, was believed to have escaped to China, although no trace of him was found.

“My parishioner,” continued Father Bowen, and he became agitated, “revealed at this point an unexpected firmness of character. She insisted that her nephew was alive and that he must be found and brought to the United States, so that she might embrace him before she died and give him all her money. Perhaps you recall the newspaper publicity, Mr. Queen, especially among the columnists. I shall not try your patience with the details of our search—it was expensive and hopeless … hopeless, that is, to one of little faith, like myself; for Miss Wichingame's part, I must say she was perfectly confident through it all.”

“And Nephew John was found.”

“Yes, Mr. Queen. Two of him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He appeared at my rectory in two installments, as it were, each part of him fresh from Korea, and each part of him insisting
he
was John Gaard, son of Erik and Clementine Gaard, and that the other fellow was a cheeky impostor. An embarrassment of blessings. Frankly, I'm up the creek.”

“I suppose they look alike?”

“Not the least bit. While both are blond and about thirty-five—the correct age—there's no resemblance at all, either to each other or to Father and Mrs. Gaard, an old photo of whom exists. But there is no authenticated photograph of John Gaard, so even their dissimilarity doesn't help.”

“But I should think,” protested Ellery, “visas, passports, ordinary proofs of identity, records of background—”

“You forget, Mr. Queen,” said Father Bowen with a certain steeliness, “that Korea in recent years has not been exactly a garden of tranquillity. The two young men, it appears, had been close friends, both having worked for the same oil company in China. When the Chinese Communists closed in, they fled—quite irregularly—to Korea. The North Korean invasion caught them there, and they got out with a mob of refugees after the Communist armies first took Seoul. There was a great deal of official confusion and a relaxation of the normal precautions. Each young man exhibits documents in the name of John Gaard, and each came out by plane through a different airfield.”

“How do they explain the identical documents?”

“Each says the other stole his credentials and had them duplicated—except, of course, for the passport photographs. Each says he told the other of an aunt in the United States. No checkup can be made in Korea and, unfortunately, the oil company records in China are not accessible. All our inquiries of the Chinese Communist authorities, made through diplomatic intermediaries, have been ignored. You may take my word for it, Mr. Queen, there's simply no way of checking back on their identities.”

Ellery was surprised to find himself sitting up in bed, a position he had been unable to achieve in over a week. “And the Witch?” he exclaimed.

“Bewildered, Mr. Queen. The last time she saw her nephew was when he was seven years old, just before his parents took him to the Far East. He spent an exciting week in New York with her—during which week, by the way, she kept a diary. She still has it—”

“There you are,” said Ellery. “All she has to do is question each man about that week. The genuine one surely remembers something of such a great boyhood adventure.”

“She has done so,” said Father Bowen sorrowfully. “Each recalls part of it. Each claims with dismaying bitterness that the other can answer such questions because he told him all about it—forgive me if my pronouns are confused. The poor woman has quite worn herself out trying to trip one of them up. She's ready to divide her money between them—and I won't have that!” said the old shepherd sternly. “Can you see a way out, Mr. Queen?”

Ellery asked every question he could think of, and he thought of a great many.

“Well, Father,” he said at last, shaking his head, and Father Bowen's lean face fell, “I don't see …” And suddenly he stopped shaking his head.

“Yes?” cried the clergyman.

“Or maybe I do! A way to get at the truth … yes … Where are the two Johns now, Father?”

“At my rectory.”

“Could you have them here in, say, an hour?”

“Oh, yes,” said Father Bowen grimly. “Oh, yes, indeed!”

One hour later the aged cleric herded two angry-looking young men into Ellery's bedroom and shut the door with a sinister little snick.

“I've had a lot of trouble keeping them from manhandling each other, Mr. Queen. This, gentlemen, is Ellery Queen,” said Father Bowen coldly, “and
he'll
soon put an end to this nonsense!”

“I don't care who he is and what he says,” growled the first young man. “I'm John Gaard.”

“You dug-up
shi
,” bellowed the second young man, “you took those words right out of my mouth!”

“Did you ever get your head knocked off by a corpse?”

“Try it, you—”

“Would you two stand side by side, please,” said Ellery, “facing that window?”

They grew quiet.

Ellery looked them over sharply. The first young man was blond and tall, with big shoulders, sun-squinted brown eyes, a snub nose, and huge feet and work-battered hands. The second was short and sandy-haired, squintily blue-eyed and curve-nosed, with small feet and clever-looking hands. They were as unlike as two kittens in an alley litter, but two pairs of fists were at the ready, and both glowered, and it was impossible to say which seemed more honestly outraged, the Witch's nephew or his impostor.

“You see?” said Father Bowen despairingly.

“Indeed I do, Father,” said Ellery, smiling through his travail, “and I'll be happy to identify John Gaard for you.”