The Player on the Other Side (13 page)

Strolling along the southeast margin of York Park, he wondered what this killer was made of. Am I right in concluding, he thought, that the H-card may be meant for Myra York rather than Emily? Have I really anticipated his strategy? In either case, how will he move?
If at all!
— since it suddenly occurred to Ellery that the Player's first move might have been his last — that threatening the life of Emily …
or
Myra … was a tactical feint, the prime purpose of the Game, the removal of Robert from the Board having been its only purpose. And is the dropping of two-hundred-pound granite blocks his M.O., or is his earmark versatility? …

At this moment a patrol car pulled into the Square and passed Ellery. Instead of turning off and away at the next corner, it cruised all around the park and suddenly screeched about and rocked to a stop, its headlights exploding in his eyes.

‘Oh,' said the patrol car. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Queen.' The car shot back and moved on. Through watering eyes Ellery saw it pause at the northwest corner while a man in a light topcoat stepped out of nowhere and exchanged a few words.

And maybe he does mean to try again, Ellery thought, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

At the southern point of York Park stood the person he was (at the moment) looking for. She was staring reflectively at the dark rectangle of a bronze plaque inlaid in the turf. Ellery came silently up behind her and squinted over her shoulder.

IN LIVING MEMORY

OF

NATHANIEL YORK, JR.

B
ORN
A
PRIL 20, 1924

‘Looks like a misprint,' he remarked.

‘
Oh!
' she shrieked, starting violently; and there came whirling into the yellow light toward Ellery a face so harmoniously proportioned, with such liquidly level great eyes, so sculptured a mouth, such delicately arched nostrils, that his pulse raced off in instant pursuit; in spite of his father's warnings, Ellery had expected anything but this.

‘Wow,' Ellery said. ‘I mean, I beg your pardon. I mean, for frightening you half to death. I certainly didn't mean to.' There was a ferocious ‘Yeep!' from the puppy at the other end of the leash she was holding, and Ellery recoiled and said foolishly, ‘There seem to be two or three “means” too many.'

With indignation already chasing fear, she dropped both to laugh. He had not heard such music in his life. To his own amazement, he felt himself moved to coyness. ‘And, sir, your pardon, too,' he heard his voice say to the puppy. ‘You must be Miss Drew.'

‘
I'm
Miss Drew,' said the girl (Mozart, he thought, the shimmery movement of the 40th). ‘
That
is Bub. Short for Beelzebub, my bodyguard.'

‘Again your pardon, sir,' he said to the puppy.

‘Miss,' she corrected him.

He defended himself — ‘It
is
dark' — and smiled at her. For sheerest joy, that there could be any face ever quite so pleasing. ‘My name is Queen.'

‘
Ellery
Queen.' She was not visibly impressed. ‘I know your father.' And she began to speak of the Inspector in the warmest way, as if he were an old dear friend.

Ellery had to chuckle. He was always running into perfect strangers, passersby, who breathed, ‘
Ellery Queen?
Why, I've read your — or ‘Queen! Who solved the Yiffniff Case?' He had even felt it not too unbecoming on occasion, in his books, to refer to that looking-glass version of himself as ‘the great man.' So far none of this was in effect in York Square. It was the paternal Queen who had apparently opened doors and hearts.

‘You make my feet feel too small for his footsteps,' he said sweepingly. ‘And my
chapeau
too big for my suddenly shrunken head.'

‘Oh, I know about you, too.' Ann Drew said quickly; and how, in that ochreous light, could he know that she blushed? ‘What was that you said about a misprint?'

He pointed to the plaque, its Walt-burnished letters shining faintly from the darkness. ‘
Living
memory,' he said. ‘It's usually
loving
.'

‘Not with old Nathaniel it wasn't,' the girl said promptly. ‘From what I've heard, he didn't make mistakes — misprints or any other kind. And as for “loving,” the scuttlebutt is he hadn't much of that in him.'

‘Nathaniel, Junior, was his son?'

‘And only child,' Ann nodded. ‘Loving or not, that old monster had an empire to leave Junior and he meant to do just that. Young Nathaniel had other ideas and got out from under. Senior simply wouldn't accept it. So much so that when word came of Junior's death the old man refused to acknowledge it.'

‘Hence
Living
. Hm!' Ellery studied the plaque. ‘Hence a birth date only — no date of death. Quaint! Junior
is
dead, I take it?'

‘Well, unless you're a hair-splitter. He ran away to sea, jumped ship in a one-burro Central American port, headed for the jungle — and except for some broken camera parts, a sun hat and a belt buckle he was never seen alive again. The hat, by the way, was split in two by some unblunt instrument.'

‘Where were the things found?'

‘About forty miles upstream, in a shallow grave. The native who stumbled over it headed downriver to spread the news and get a reward, if any, and he brought the belt buckle with him in proof of his story. Unfortunately,' the girl added, ‘when the port authorities went back with him they found that he'd left the grave open. You just don't do that in those jungles, not unless you're satisfied with bits and pieces.'

Ellery looked at her wonderingly. ‘A gruesome tale for lips of coral.'

‘The grue wears off after you've heard the tale twenty times and told it twenty more,' she said coolly. ‘Oh, I can be shocked, Mr. Queen. You should have heard my maidenly shriek when that devil Tom Archer told me why my shepherd's name is Beelzebub.'

‘What is it?'

‘That,' said Ann Drew grimly, ‘I'll never tell. You or
anybody.
'

‘Oh,' said Ellery, trying not to dislike Tom Archer on such vague grounds. ‘So old Nathaniel would never admit his son was dead?'

She toed the plaque with the tip of her improbably slim little shoe. ‘That's the evidence. He backed it up, too, with that will of his.'

‘Oh, yes, the will,' Ellery murmured. ‘The papers have been full of it since Robert lost his head. They haven't been able to make much out of that first clause after the whereases, the one leaving everything to young Nathaniel if only he'll show up breathing to claim it. And that would be a matter of some concern to the York cousins, of course. Aren't they all nephews and nieces of Nathaniel, Senior?'

‘That's right. It's a complicated genealogy, but as I understand it Nathaniel, Senior, was the only one in the direct line, so he inherited all the money and York Square and so on. The whole family's dead — and accounted for, incidentally; no belt-buckle business — except the four cousins.'

‘Three.'

‘Three,' she amended soberly. ‘Who did it, Mr. Queen?'

‘I'll tell you,' Ellery promised, ‘but not now.'

‘You don't know now.'

‘Something like that.' He regarded her with fixity, and she held it with level eyes. ‘Have you any ideas?'

Ann made a face, but what she could make, with a lovely face like that, was only another lovely face. He noticed her glance flicker toward the northeast house, and away. ‘Whatever I think is pure wish,' she said, and suddenly performed a tomboy grin Ellery found enchanting. ‘Don't quote me, or anything. It's only a feeling.'

‘Percival?' At her guilty start Ellery said, ‘You glanced at his house. Any more substantial basis for the feeling?'

‘Oh … the disgusting way he talks — and most of all, I suppose, the way he looks at me. As if …' A rather helpless sound came through those astonishing nostrils. ‘Well, look. I'm afraid to wear a fitted coat. Actually. Just last week I bought something designed by Omar the Tentmaker. I
hate
it,' she said between her teeth, turning now to face Percival York's castle resentfully. ‘I suppose you'll think that's silly, buying something you don't like because of the way a man looks at you?'

Ellery had to brace to keep his arms from offering their manly sympathy. ‘There are girls who accept that sort of look as a compliment,' he said avuncularly.

‘To be looked at as if you're stark naked? No, thank you! But it's worse than that. He looks your
skin
off, too. Sees right through to your bones like an X-ray, drooling all the while. I don't know who did that — that thing to Robert York, Mr. Queen, but any time something like that happens to
him
' — it struck him suddenly that not once had she voiced Percival's name, as if to do so would materialize him like an evil spirit — ‘you'd better come looking for me.'

Poor, lovely, troubled child, Ellery thought, still in the uncle vein. ‘If I do,' he smiled down at her, ‘it needn't be for committing a murder. So don't. I mean,
please
don't'.

It worked. She began to twinkle. ‘All right, Mr. Queen, I won't'.

‘And according to the will the four cousins have had to occupy the four houses to be eligible for the jackpot?'

‘You change subjects right deftly, sir,' Ann Drew murmured. ‘Yes, for ten years, which in six months they'll have duly done. I think old Nathaniel hoped they'd all raise little Yorks to live on and on here and create race memory and preserve family tradition and all that. The will permits them to do anything they want with the interiors of the houses, but the Square and York Park have to remain untouched by human hands, except for maintenance.'

‘But none of the four married?'

‘Not one. Robert was afraid, Emily couldn't bear the thought, Myra just wouldn't, and Percival just can't — he's already married to his own sweet self.'

‘Now, now,' Ellery cautioned her, waving her away from the dark subject — and in a self-betraying moment, finding his hands grasping her upper arms to turn her forcibly away from the northeast castle. Her flesh was soft-not soft, just right for male hands, and he released her and with an effort avoided inspecting his hands which, for a mad moment he was convinced, must now be luminous. ‘You're probably right about Robert's fear of marriage — his perfectionism and rather defensive sense of fairness would have shied him off. And my father gave me a pretty succinct impression of Emily; you may be right there, too. But why do you say Myra wouldn't?'

‘I can't tell you that,' she said without hesitation.

‘You can't, or you shan't?'

‘All right, I shan't.'

‘Oh, come —' Ellery began, only half teasing; but she said, ‘No. Please. It isn't my story to tell. It's Myra York's. And will you take my word that it wouldn't affect the case?'

He considered her carefully. He liked her loyalty. He also liked … But just now he was working. He said suddenly, ‘It concerns Mallory, doesn't it?'

‘Then you do know!'

Blessing the darkness, Ellery stood still and kept silent.

‘He must have been a real stinker,' Ann said passionately.

‘Mm,' agreed Ellery. He tried a wild one. ‘She expects him back, doesn't she?'

‘Every minute. Every living minute. And the older she gets, the worse it gets. It's got so she thinks every knuckle on the door, every passing footstep, is Mallory's.'

‘She thought I was Mallory, according to Mrs. Schriver.'

‘Ellery — Mallory — of course! Oh, dear!' Ann cried. ‘She's so
fuddled
. She's lived so long with the single idea of turning him away if he ever comes back that nothing else exists for her. She's quite sensitive in some ways, you know — about the phone, the doorbell; she's quick as a cat to hear them. And then sometimes she figures things out with remarkable good sense. Like … well, I remember thinking, with Robert dead and the big estate coming due — so much more of it now — that would bring Mallory back if anything would. I naturally didn't voice this. You know, the very next day after Robert was killed — when everyone was saying oh, poor old Myra York, she doesn't even grasp what's happened — she said to me out of a clear sky, “Well, Ann, I suppose he'll be back the moment he hears about
this.
” And then she asked me, “Do I still have that lovely black lace dress, the one with the little collar?” She's actually planning to be all dressed up for the big scene when Mallory shows up and she tells him haughtily to go and never darken her door again! Which, of course, she wouldn't tell him at all,' Ann said suddenly, ‘even if he did show up. She'd go all to pieces, I think beyond mending. But it's all she has, this dream of telling Mallory off for having left her at the church. That, and … Well, it's all she has.'

Ellery decided to ignore the ‘and …' for the moment. ‘It's been a long time, hasn't it?'

‘Oh, yes, nearly fifteen years. During which the poor thing's been slipping slowly downhill until —' But the girl stopped there.

Ellery made a lightning decision. ‘Miss Drew, you'd better be aware of this. I'm afraid Myra York may be in considerable danger of sharing Robert's fate.'

‘
Myra
York?' gasped Ann. ‘But …” And then she spun about. ‘
Who's that
?'

A male figure was clattering toward them, waving his arms like a Signal Corpsman at the height of a battle. ‘Ann! Ann, is that you?'

‘Tom!'

Tom Archer came panting up out of the gloom, gasping and gulping. ‘Ann …'

‘Tom, what's the matter, what's happened?'

‘Ann.' The young man stared unseeingly at Ellery. ‘Miss York's been
killed!
'