Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (3 page)

Mrs. Hood surveyed her stepdaughters with a sort of contempt, her head teetering a little. Then she said, “Dr. Benedict and Mr. Strake will speak their pieces, then I'll speak mine.”

“Last week,” began Dr. Benedict, “your stepmother came to my office for her semiannual checkup. I gave her the usual thorough examination. Considering her age, I found her in extraordinarily good health. Yet the very next day she came down sick—for the first time, by the way, in eight years. I thought then that she'd picked up an intestinal virus, but Mrs. Hood made a rather different diagnosis. I considered it fantastic. However, she insisted that I make certain tests. I did, and she was right. She had been poisoned.”

The plump cheeks of Penelope went slowly pink, and the lean cheeks of Lyra went slowly pale.

“I feel sure,” Dr. Benedict went on, addressing a point precisely midway between the sisters, “that you'll understand why I must warn you that from now on I shall examine your stepmother every day.”

“Mr. Strake,” said old Mrs. Hood, smiling.

“Under your father's will,” said Mr. Strake abruptly, also addressing the equidistant point, “each of you receives a small allowance from the income of the estate. The bulk of that income goes to your stepmother for as long as she shall live. But at Mrs. Hood's demise, you inherit the principal of some two million dollars, in equal shares. In other words, you two are the only persons in the world who will benefit by your stepmother's death. As I've informed both Mrs. Hood and Dr. Benedict—if you are not warned by your extremely good fortune in failing in this dastardly murder attempt, I shall devote what remains of my life to seeing that you are punished to the full extent of the law. In fact, it was my advice to call in the police immediately.”

“Call them now!” cried Penelope.

Lyra said nothing.

“I could call them now, Penny,” said Mrs. Hood with the same faint smile, “but you're both very clever and it might not settle anything. My strongest protection would be to throw the two of you out of this house; unfortunately, your father's will prevents me. Oh, I understand your impatience to be rid of me. You have luxurious tastes which aren't satisfied by my simple way of living. You'd both like to remarry, and with the money you could buy yourselves second husbands.” The old lady leaned forward a little. “But I have bad news for you. My mother died at ninety-nine, my father at a hundred and three. Dr. Benedict tells me I can live another thirty years, and I have every intention of doing so.” She struggled to her feet, still smiling. “In fact, I'm taking certain precautions to make sure of it,” she said; and she went out.

Exactly one week later Ellery was seated beside Mrs. Hood's great mahogany fourposter, under the anxious eyes of Dr. Benedict and Mr. Strake.

She had been poisoned again. Fortunately, Dr. Benedict had caught it in time.

Ellery bent over the old lady's face, which looked more like plaster than flesh. “These precautions of yours, Mrs. Hood—”

“I tell you,” she whispered, “it was impossible.”

“Still,” said Ellery cheerfully, “it was done. So let's resume. You had your bedroom windows barred and a new lock installed on that door, the single key to which you've kept on your person at all times. You've bought your own food. You've done your own cooking in this room and you've eaten here alone. Clearly, then, the poison could not have been introduced into your food before, during, or after its preparation. Further, you tell me you purchased new dishes, have kept them here, and you and you alone have been handling them. Consequently the poison couldn't have been put on or in the cooking utensils, china, glassware, or cutlery involved in your meals. How then was the poison administered?”

“That's the problem,” cried Dr. Benedict.

“A problem, Mr. Queen,” muttered Mr. Strake, “that I thought—and Dr. Benedict agreed—was more your sort of thing than the police's.”

“Well, my sort of thing is always simple,” replied Ellery, “provided you see it. Mrs. Hood, I'm going to ask you a great many questions. Is it all right, Doctor?”

Dr. Benedict felt the old lady's pulse, and he nodded. Ellery began. She replied in whispers, but with great positiveness. She had bought a new toothbrush and fresh tooth paste for her siege. Her teeth were still her own. She had an aversion to medication and took no drugs or palliatives of any kind. She drank nothing but water. She did not smoke, eat sweets, chew gum, use cosmetics.… The questions went on and on. Ellery asked every one he could think of, and then he shook up his brain to think of more.

Finally, he thanked Mrs. Hood, patted her hand, and went out with Dr. Benedict and Mr. Strake.

“What's your diagnosis, Mr. Queen?” asked Dr. Benedict.

“Your verdict,” said Mr. Strake impatiently.

“Gentlemen,” said Ellery, “when I eliminated her drinking water by examining the pipes and faucets in her bathroom and finding they hadn't been tampered with, I'd ruled out the last possibility.”

“And yet it's being administered orally,” snapped Dr. Benedict. “That's my finding and I've been careful to get medical corroboration.”

“If that is a fact, Doctor,” said Ellery, “then there is only one remaining explanation.”

“What's that?”

“Mrs. Hood is poisoning herself. If I were you I would call in a psychiatrist. Good day!”

Ten days later Ellery was back in Sarah Hood's bedroom. The old lady was dead. She had succumbed to a third poisoning attack.

On being notified, Ellery had promptly said to his father, Inspector Queen, “Suicide.”

But it was not suicide. The most painstaking investigation by police experts, utilizing all the resources of criminological science, failed to turn up a trace of the poison, or of a poison container or other possible source, in Mrs. Hood's bedroom or bath. Scoffing, Ellery went over the premises himself. His smile vanished. He found nothing to contradict either the old lady's previous testimony or the findings of the experts. He grilled the servants. He examined with remorseless efficiency Penelope, who kept weeping, and Lyra, who kept snarling. Finally, he left.

It was the kind of problem which Ellery's thinking apparatus, against all the protests of his body, cannot let alone. For forty-six hours he lived in his own head, fasting and sleepless, ceaselessly pacing the treadmill of the Queen apartment floor. In the forty-seventh hour Inspector Queen took him forcibly by the arm and put him to bed.

“I thought so,” said the Inspector. “Over a hundred and one. What hurts, son?”

“My whole existence,” mumbled Ellery; and he submitted to aspirins, an ice bag, and a rare steak broiled in butter.

In the middle of the steak he shouted like a madman and clawed at the telephone.

“Mr. Strake? Ellery Queen! Meet me at the Hood house immediately!—yes, notify Dr. Benedict!—yes, now I know how Mrs. Hood was poisoned!”

And when they were gathered in the cavern of the Hood drawing room Ellery peered at plump Penelope and lean Lyra and he croaked, “Which one of you is intending to marry Dr. Benedict?”

And then he said, “Oh, yes, it has to be that. Only Penelope and Lyra benefit from their stepmother's murder, yet the only person who could physically have committed the murder is Dr. Benedict.… Did you ask how, Doctor?” asked Ellery courteously. “Why, very simply. Mrs. Hood experienced her first poisoning attack the day after her semiannual medical checkup—by you, Doctor. And thereafter, you announced,
you would examine Mrs. Hood every day
. There is a classic preliminary to every physician's examination of a patient. I submit, Dr. Benedict,” said Ellery with a smile, “that you introduced the poison into Mrs. Hood's mouth on the same thermometer with which you took her temperature!”

RARE BOOK DEPT.

“My Queer Dean!”

The queerness of Matthew Arnold Hope, beloved teacher of Ellery's Harvard youth and lately dean of liberal arts in a New York university, is legendary.

The story is told, for instance, of baffled students talking Dr. Hope's Shakespeare course for the first time. “History advises us that Richard II died peacefully at Pontefract, probably of pneumonia,” Dr. Hope scolds. “But what does Shakespeare say, Act V, Scene V? That Exton struck him down,” and here the famous authority on Elizabethan literature will pause for emphasis, “with a blushing crow!”

Imaginative sophomores have been known to suffer nightmare as a result of this remark. Older heads nod intelligently, of course, knowing that Dr. Hope meant merely to say—in fact, thought he was saying—“a crushing blow.”

The good dean's unconscious spoonerisms, like the sayings of Miss Parker and Mr. Goldwyn, are reverently preserved by aficionados, among whom Ellery counts himself a charter member. It is Ellery who has saved for posterity that deathless pronouncement of Dr. Hope's to a freshman class in English composition: “All those who persist in befouling their theme papers with cant and other low expressions not in good usage are warned for the last time: Refine your style or be exiled from this course with the rest of the vanished Bulgarians!”

But perhaps Dean Hope's greatest exploit began recently in the faculty lunchroom. Ellery arrived at the dean's invitation to find him waiting impatiently at one of the big round tables with three members of the English Department.

“Dr. Agnes Lovell, Professor Oswald Gorman, Mr. Morgan Naseby,” the dean said rapidly. “Sit down, Ellery. Mr. Queen will have the cute frocktail and the horned beef cash—only safe edibles on the menu today, my boy—well, go fetch, young man! Are you dreaming that you're back in class?” The waiter, a harried-looking freshman, fled. Then Dr. Hope said solemnly, “My friends, prepare for a surprise.”

Dr. Lovell, a very large woman in a tight suit, said roguishly: “Wait, Matthew! Let me guess. Romance?”

“And who'd marry—in Macaulay's imperishable phrase—a living concordance?” said Professor Gorman in a voice like an abandoned winch. He was a tall freckled man with strawberry eyebrows and a quarrelsome jaw. “A real surprise, Dr. Hope, would be a departmental salary rise.”

“A consummation devoutly et cetera,” said Mr. Naseby, immediately blushing. He was a stout young man with an eager manner, evidently a junior in the department.

“May I have your attention?” Dean Hope looked about cautiously. “Suppose I tell you,” he said in a trembling voice, “that by tonight I may have it within my power to deliver the death blow—I repeat, the death blow!—to the cockypop that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays?”

There were two gasps, a snort, and one inquiring hum.

“Matthew!” squealed Dr. Lovell. “You'd be famous!”

“Immortal, Dean Hope,” said Mr. Naseby adoringly.

“Deluded,” said Professor Gorman, the snorter. “The Baconian benightedness, like the Marlowe mania, has no known specific.”

“Ah, but even a fanatic,” cried the dean, “would have to yield before the nature of this evidence.”

“Sounds exciting, Doc,” murmured Ellery. “What is it?”

“A man called at my office this morning, Ellery. He produced credentials identifying him as a London rare book dealer, Alfred Mimms. He has in his possession, he said, a copy of the 1613 edition of
The Essaies of Sir Francis Bacon Knight the kings solliciter generall
, an item ordinarily bringing four or five hundred dollars. He claims that this copy, however, is unique,
being inscribed on the title page in Bacon's own hand to Will Shakespeare.
”

Amid the cries, Ellery asked: “Inscribed how?”

“In an encomium,” quavered Dean Hope, “an encomium to Shakespeare expressing Bacon's admiration and praise for—and I quote—
‘the most excellent plaies of your sweet wit and hand'!
”

“Take that!” whispered Mr. Naseby to an invisible Baconian.

“That does it,” breathed Dr. Lovell.

“That would do it,” said Professor Gorman, “if.”

“Did you actually see the book, Doc?” asked Ellery.

“He showed me a photostat of the title page. He'll have the original for my inspection tonight, in my office.”

“And Mimms's asking price is—?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“Proof positive that it's a forgery,” said Professor Gorman rustily. “It's far too little.”

“Oswald,” hissed Dr. Lovell, “you creak, do you know that?”

“No, Gorman is right,” said Dr. Hope. “An absurd price if the inscription is genuine, as I pointed out to Mimms. However, he had an explanation. He is acting, he said, at the instructions of the book's owner, a tax-poor British nobleman whose identity he will reveal tonight if I purchase the book. The owner, who has just found it in a castle room boarded up and forgotten for two centuries, prefers an American buyer in a confidential sale—for tax reasons, Mimms hinted. But, as a cultivated man, the owner wishes a scholar to have it rather than some ignorant Croesus. Hence the relatively low price.”

“Lovely,” glowed Mr. Naseby. “And so typically British.”

“Isn't it,” said Professor Gorman. “Terms cash, no doubt? On the line? Tonight?”

“Well, yes.” The old dean took a bulging envelope from his breast pocket and eyed it ruefully. Then, with a sigh, he tucked it back. “Very nearly my life's savings … But I'm not altogether senile,” Dr. Hope grinned. “I'm asking you to be present, Ellery—with Inspector Queen. I shall be working at my desk on administrative things into the evening. Mimms is due at eight o'clock.”

“We'll be here at seven-thirty,” promised Ellery. “By the way, Doc, that's a lot of money to be carrying around in your pocket. Have you confided this business to anyone else?”

“No, no.”

“Don't. And may I suggest that you wait behind a locked door? Don't admit Mimms—or anyone else you don't trust—until we get here. I'm afraid, Doc, I share the professor's skepticism.”