Queens Full (12 page)

“I can only tell you that we're checking them exhaustively. If we find that one of them is not merely broke but desperately in debt, it will pinpoint a murder motive. And I've had Dakin send the file of prints up to Boston as a check on the Connhaven laboratory.” Ellery scowled at the dappled floor. “I don't want to influence you, Amy. It's your life. But a step like this would be irrevocable.”

“You think I'm a coward.”

“No.”

“It's not the thought of dying. I'm sort of used to death. My father and mother, Uncle Horace, now Mother Livingston …” Amy bit her lip. “It's the
waiting
for it. Never knowing when the ax will fall. And I mean ax.”

Amy rose and went to the doorway. In her white summer frock the sunlight gave her a fragile transparency uncomfortably ghostlike. “I couldn't live a life like that, Mr. Queen. I'm going back to the house and tell them they can have it all.”

Ellery sprang.

The flash from the attic window and his leap were almost simultaneously. But the rifle crack reached his ears even as he bowled Amy over onto the grass and covered her with his body.

The policeman was running toward the house, tugging at his holster.

Ellery twisted his neck for a look. The attic window from which the flash had come was empty.

“What happened?” Amy's voice came muffled, but calmly.

“You're not hit?” he demanded.

“Only by you.”

He helped her to her feet and glanced about, baffled.

Then he saw it.

The bullet had ripped through the summerhouse roof a good eight feet above and beyond where Amy's head had been.

Ellery came downstairs with the rifle just as the policeman was hanging up the phone in the entrance hall.

“Chief's coming right away, Mr. Queen.”

“Have you talked to Dorcas and Morris?”

“They didn't see a thing. They were both in the kitchen, Dorcas fixing a chicken pie for supper and Morris washing the lunch dishes. All they did was duck.”

Ellery found Mr. Wentworth in the drawing room, pounding fist on palm, his incensed length between Amy and the Livingstons as if to shield her from a head-on attack.

“I'm good and darn tired of this pocus!” the lawyer was shouting. “You let this girl be, ye hear?”

“Mr. Wentworth, you bore the hell out of me.” Olivia's cheeks were splotchy with anger. She was in shorts and a halter, and her skin looked oiled.

Her brothers were glaring.

Ellery stepped into the room. The policeman blocked the doorway.

“Sam Livingston's gun,” Ellery said, holding it up. “It has his name plate on the butt.”

“Father's old deer rifle!” Samuel Junior half rose.

“Mother Livingston wouldn't part with it.” Amy sounded so grimly self-assured that Ellery glanced at her. “She kept it in the attic storeroom.”

“Where I found it, dropped near the window. Plus an old box of ammo freshly broken into. When the chief gets here we'll have the gun and box gone over.” Ellery set the rifle down with care. “While we're waiting for him, suppose I put the classic question: Where were you three when the shot was fired?”

Olivia shrilled, “I was on the roof taking a sunbath.”

“Alone?”

“Since I sunbathe in the nude, Mr. Queen, it's hardly likely that I held a soiree!”

“Fair enough.” Ellery glanced at Everett, who was no longer looking at Amy with anticipation. Everett no longer looked at Amy at all.

“I'd been down to the pond for a swim,” the chunky brother grunted, “and I was back in the house under a shower at the time the shot is supposed to have been fired. You couldn't prove it by me. I heard nothing but running water.” His thick body was wrapped in a damp terry-cloth robe.

“And I was seated right here, Mr. Queen, listening to a newscast.” Samuel Junior's nostrils were on the pinched side. “By the way, I haven't fired a gun in fifteen years—it's a sport for brutes. And I'm sure my sister and brother couldn't hit their own reflections in a mirror.”

“Neither could the one who shot at Amy,” Ellery remarked. “Mr. Wentworth, did you happen to see any of these people?”

“Not soon enough to give any of 'em an alibi,” snapped the Yankee lawyer. “The shot woke me from a nap, and by the time I got my shoes on they were congregated in the upstairs hall. Mr. Queen, if Dakin keeps these people on the premises after
this
—!”

“Before we go into the matter of improved security, I believe Amy has an announcement. Amy?”

“No.”

“
No?
”

“I've changed my mind.” Amy was returning the Livingstons' stares with compound interest “I
was
going to sign everything over to you three after one of you tried to kill me with those sleeping pills. But now I'm
mad
. If you want that money, you're going to have to shoot a lot straighter that you shot today. Because I'm not going to be scared off.”

Ellery was gaping at her. “What did you say, Amy?”

“I said, Mr. Queen, they're not going to scare me any more.”

Olivia rose. “Really, I've had just about as much of this—!”

“Please sit down.” Ellery was still staring at Amy Upham. Then he said slowly, “Officer, nobody is to leave this room until Chief Dakin gets here.”

He stumbled past the policeman and disappeared.

“There you are.” Dakin shut the door of Bella Livingston's bedroom. “No prints on the gun or box of shells, no clues in the attic, no
anything
,” he said in disgust. But then he stopped, struck by Ellery's silence.

Ellery was crouched at the old lady's Governor Winthrop desk in the bay overlooking the front lawn. The room had been sealed up since the murder, and his hands were dusty. He had pulled open all the drawers and dumped their contents on the desk—letters, household bills, canceled checks, various kinds of stationery, old invitations to Wrightsville functions—the accumulation of years. But he was not looking at them; his glance was fixed on something not visible to Chief Dakin.

“Something
else
wrong, Mr. Queen?”

“What?” Ellery turned slowly around. “Oh, Dakin. Sit down. I want to talk to you.”

Mr. Wentworth was just taking the candlewick spread off his bed Friday night when someone tapped furtively on his door.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“Amy.” Her whisper was urgent. “Quick.”

The lawyer yanked his door open, alarmed. “What's the trouble?”

“Shh! I can't stay but a second—”

“Are you out of your mind, Amy? After we locked you in for the night!”

“Please, I've got to talk to you, Mr. Wentworth. Just
you
.”

“Me? Now?”

“Not now—that policeman keeps trying my door every few minutes. Meet me at the pond tomorrow morning early—say, six o'clock. Will you? Please?” Amy's brown eyes kept searching the hall. “You've got to, Mr. Wentworth,” she whispered fiercely. “
Will
you?”

The lawyer was bewildered. “But, Amy—”

But Amy was gone.

Mr. Wentworth hurried through Bella Livingston's woods in the damp of early morning Saturday, shivering. He had tossed about all night, perplexed and uneasy. What could Amy Upham possibly have to confide in him that Queen and the chief of police mustn't hear?

And why, he suddenly thought, in such an out-of-the-way spot?

The lawyer found himself wanting very much to turn back.
It's almost as though
I
were in danger
…

But that was ridiculous.

Mr. Wentworth shivered again and broke into a trot. He heard Amy's scream just as the pond began to glitter through the birch and scrub oak and pine.

“Help! Somebody! Help!”

The lawyer scrambled out on the tumble-down landing. The Livingston rowboat lay fifty yards offshore, deep in the water and settling fast. Amy was trying frantically to row through a patch of water lilies.

“Mr. Wentworth!” she shrieked. “
Somebody put a hole in the boat and I can't swim!
”

All of a sudden the boat sank and Amy sank with it.

Mr. Wentworth gasped. He kicked off his shoes in a panicky haste and dived in. When he surfaced, he saw Amy thrashing about and making glubbing sounds.

“Hang on to the boat! I'll be right there!” he yelled. He made directly for her, swimming as fast as he could against the drag of his clothing. She went under again just as he reached her. She came up spluttering, clutching at him, tangled up in the lilies. “Let
go
, Amy!” Mr. Wentworth panted. “I've got you—you won't drown …” He had to fight her all the way back to the landing. By the time he had her safely out of the pond he was exhausted.

“You—all—right?” he panted.

“You all right, Amy?” a male voice echoed.

“Yes,” said Amy; and Mr. Wentworth squirmed about in his wet things, mouth open. Two men stood almost directly behind him. His heart jumped; but then he saw who they were.

“Queen, Dakin.” He staggered to his feet gladly. “Hole in the boat—they tried to drown her—I had to jump in after her—”

“We know,” said Ellery. “We saw the whole thing.”

“You …
saw
—?”

“In fact,” Chief Dakin said, “you might say it was kind of a trap.”

“Trap.” The lawyer shook his head in a dazed way. “I don't understand. Trap?”

Ellery squatted on a log and lit a cigaret. “You're certainly entitled to an explanation, Mr. Wentworth. Right, Amy?”

But Amy said nothing. She was sitting Indian-fashion on the landing, shaking out her blond hair.

“Thursday afternoon, Mr. Wentworth,” Ellery said, “Amy remarked in the drawing room that she wasn't going to be ‘scared' out of her inheritance. I blush to confess that that hadn't occurred to me—that the non-lethal dose of sleeping pills and the rifle shot that missed so wildly were actually attempts, not to kill Amy, but to
frighten
her—scare her into giving up the estate. It was the wrong hypothesis, as it turned out, but without it I probably wouldn't have arrived at the right one.”

“Maybe you know what you're talking about,” said the Wrightsville lawyer testily, “but I surely don't.”

“We'd been taking it for granted that Bella Livingston's killer was also out to kill Amy,” Ellery went on, surveying Amy's graceful gestures. “But suppose he hasn't been? Suppose he's only been trying to make it look that way? That's what I asked myself. And I saw that so long as we kept assuming that Amy also was meant to be murdered, the motive continued to point to the three Livingstons, the only people who'd benefit from Amy's death. But … if Amy was
not
really meant to be murdered, then the whole assumption of the Livingstons' guilt was out of joint and we had to re-examine the case from the beginning.

“Which is precisely what I did, Mr. Wentworth. I went back to Bella Livingston's will.”

Amy was stripping off her dress quite calmly. There was a bathing suit under it, and much sun-burnished skin. Mr. Wentworth gaped.

“It struck me at once what a curious-
looking
will that is,” Ellery said dreamily. “With all sorts of writing paper to choose from—I checked old Bella's desk in her bedroom—her will was nevertheless written on onionskin paper. Why
onionskin
, a paper so thin it's translucent? Translucent … you can see through it, especially in the light—use it as tracing paper. Tracing paper! Was it possible the old lady had written her new will on ordinary paper,
but someone had traced over it and substituted the tracing for the original?
”

Ellery flicked his cigaret into the pond. “You see how one thought led to another, Mr. Wentworth. Now—assuming I was right, why a
tracing
of old Bella's will? Obviously, to make a change. A simple change, of course; because a complex one—as in forming new words—would have required the tracer to be an expert forger, in this case a most remote possibility.

“What simple change? I recalled that the will gave, as the approximate value of Mrs. Livingston's principal estate, the figure $1,000,000. Then it came to me: Suppose the will had given the value of the estate, not as $1,000,000, but as $4,000,000, or $7,000,000, or even $9,000,000? How easy it would be, in a tracing, to leave out the wedge of the 4, or the horizontal stroke of the 7, or the loop of the 9. Then 4, 7, or 9 becomes 1, and a multimillion-dollar estate becomes a million-dollar estate.

“And that led to a remarkable conclusion, Mr. Wentworth. For who could have made such a tracing? Why, only the person who had possession of the new will from Saturday morning, when Bella Livingston signed it before witnesses in his office, until Tuesday afternoon, when he produced the tracing after the funeral and purported it to be the original. Also, who would benefit by such a change? Strangely enough, one person and only one—the same man who had exclusive possession of the new will—the man who's been handling Bella Livingston's financial affairs for years and who's named administrator of her estate.”

Herbert Wentworth squatted like a terrified toad on the landing.

“You're not half your father's son, Wentworth,” said Ellery. “Your father, from what I've heard of him, would have cut his right hand off before he touched a penny of any moneys entrusted to him.

“But you couldn't resist the opportunity handed to you on a golden platter. You had the new will, its contents unknown. You had the stocks and the bonds and the records. And in old Bella's house were three live suspects, if anything should happen to her. So you stole into her house at three
A
.
M
. last Sunday, crept into her bedroom, and smothered her in her sleep—knowing that you had until Tuesday to make a tracing of her holograph will and change the figure she had written down to a 1 … giving you the balance to pocket and all the time in the world—you thought—to cover your tracks.”