There Was an Old Woman (19 page)

28 . . . The End of the Beginning

Inspector Queen whispered: “El, are you crazy? This is a wedding!”

They'll never believe me, thought Ellery painfully. Why did I get mixed up in this fandango? “Please forgive me,” he said to Dr. Crittenden, whose expression of amazement had turned to severity. “Believe me, Doctor, I'd never have done this if I hadn't considered it imperative.”

“I'm sure, Mr. Queen,” replied the pastor coldly, “I can't understand how anything could be more important than a solemnization of marriage between two worthy young people.”

“What's happened? What's the matter, Ellery?” cried Charley. “Dr. Crittenden, please—would you be kind enough to leave us alone for five minutes with Mr. Queen?”

Sheila was looking fixedly at Ellery. “Yes, Doctor, please.”

“B-but Sheila,” began her father. Sheila took old Steve's arm and took him aside, whispering to him.

Dr. Crittenden looked appalled. Then he left the chapel with agitated steps to retire to his vestry.

“Well?” said Sheila, when the vestry door had closed. Her tone was arctic.

“Please understand. This can't wait. You two can always be married; but this can't wait.”

“What can't wait, Ellery?” demanded Charley.

“The undoing of the untruth.” Ellery cleared his throat; it seemed full of frogs and bulrushes. “The telling of the truth. I don't see it clearly yet, but something's wrong—”

His father was stern. “What are you talking about? This isn't like you, son.”

“I'm not like myself—nothing is as it should be.” Ellery shook his head as he had shaken it that night on the floor of the Potts study after Thurlow had shot at him. “We've made a mistake, that's all. I've made a mistake. One thing I do see:
the case is still unsolved.''

Sheila gave voice to a little whimper, so tired, so without hope, that Ellery almost decided to say he had slipped a gear somewhere and that this was all, all a delusion of a brain fallen ill. Almost; not quite.

“You mean Thurlow Potts is
not
our man?” cried the Inspector. “But that can't be, Ellery. He admitted it. You heard him admit the killings!”

“No, no, that's not it,” muttered Ellery. “Thurlow did commit those murders—it was his hand that took the lives of Bob and Mac Potts.”

“Then what
do
you mean?”

“There's someone else, Dad.
Someone behind Thurlow.”

“Behind Thurlow?” repeated his father stupidly.

“Yes, Dad. Thurlow was merely the hand. Thurlow pulled the triggers. But he pulled them at the dictation, and according to the plan, of a brain, a boss—the real murderer!”

Major Gotch retreated into a corner of the chapel, like a cautious bear, and it was curious that thenceforth he kept his old puff eyes fixed upon the pale blinking eyes of his crony, Stephen Brent.

“Let me analyze this dreary, distressing business aloud,” continued Ellery wearily. “I'll work it out step by step, Dad, as I see it now. If I'm wrong, call Bellevue. If I'm right—” He avoided looking at the others. Throughout most of what followed, he kept addressing his father, as if they had been alone with only the quiet walls of the chapel to keep them company.

“Remember how I proved the Old Woman's signature on that typewritten confession we found on her body was a forgery? I placed the stock memorandum against a windowpane; I placed the confession over the stock memorandum; and I worked the confession about on the memo until the signature of the one lay directly over the signature of the other. Like this.” Ellery went to a clear sunny window of the chapel and with the two documents illustrated his thesis.

“Since both signatures were identical in every curve and line,” he went on, “I concluded—and correctly—that one of the signatures had been traced off the other. No one ever writes his name exactly the same way twice.”

“Well?” The Inspector was inching toward the chapel door.

“Now since the stock memo was handed to Charley Paxton in our presence by the Old Woman herself—in fact, we saw her sign it—we had every right to assume that the signature on the
memorandum
was genuine, and that therefore the signature on the
confession
had been traced from it and was the forgery.

“But see how blind I was.” Ellery rapped the knuckles of his free hand against the superimposed documents his other hand held plastered against the window. “When a signature is traced off by using light through a windowpane, in what position must the genuine signature be in relation to the one that's to be traced from it?”

“You've got to put the document being forged
above
the genuine signature, of course,” replied the Inspector. He was looking around, restlessly.

“Or in other words, first you lay down on the window-pane the genuine signature, then you place the document to be forged
over
it. Or to put it still another way, it's the genuine document that lies against the glass, and the fake document that lies against the genuine one. Therefore,” said Ellery, stepping back from the window, “if the signature on the confession was the traced one, as we believed, then the confession must have been lying
upon
the stock memo, and the stock memo must have been lying against the windowpane. Is that clear so far?”

“Sure. But what of it?”

“Just a minute, Dad. Now, all the Old Woman's signatures were written with a heavy, soft leaded pencil.” The Inspector looked puzzled by this irrelevance.

“Such pencils leave impressions so thick and soft that when they are pressed on and written over, as would have to be done in the tracing of a signature written by one of them,
they necessarily act like a sheet of carbon paper.
That is, when two sheets are pressed together, one on top of the other, and a soft-pencil signature on the bottom sheet is traced onto the top sheet, the very act of tracing, the very pressure exerted by the tracing agent,
will produce a faint pencil impression on the back of the top sheet,
because it's that back surface on the top sheet which is
in direct contact
with the soft lead of the original signature on the bottom sheet. Is
that
clear?”

“Go on.”

“I've already shown that, in order to have been a forgery, the confession must have been the top sheet of the two. But if the confession was the top sheet, there should be a faint pencil impression of Cornelia Potts's signature (in reverse, of course, as if seen in a mirror)
on the back of the confession sheet.
”

“Is there?”

Ellery walked over to his father, who by this time was standing, alert, against the chapel door. “Look Dad.”

The Inspector looked, quickly. The reverse side of the confession was clean, without smudge.

“That's what I saw a few moments ago, for the first time. There is not the slightest trace of a pencil mark on the back of this confession. Of course, there could have been such an impression and for some reason it might have been erased; but if you examine the surface sheet carefully, you'll find no signs of erasure, either. On the other hand, look at the back of the stock memorandum! Here”— Ellery held it up— “here is the clear, if light, impression of the signature ‘Cornelia Potts' on the back of the memo, in reverse. And if you'll hold it up to the light, Dad, you'll see—as I saw—that the reverse impression of the signature lies directly behind the signature on the face of the memo, proving that the impression was made at the same time as the forgery.

“What does all this mean?” Ellery tapped the stock memorandum sharply. “It means that
the stock memo was the top sheet
of the two employed in the forgery. It means that
the confession was the bottom sheet,
lying flat against the windowpane.

“But if the confession was the bottom sheet,
then it was the signature on the confession which was being used as a guide
and it was the signature on the stock memo which was traced from it!

“But if the signature on the confession was being used as a guide then that signature was the
genuine
one, and the one on the stock memo was the forgery. Or, to put it in a capsule,” said Mr. Queen grimly,
“the Old Woman's confession was not a forgery as we believed, but was actually written and signed by her own hand.”

“But El,” spluttered the Inspector, “that would make the Old Woman the killer in this case!”

“One would think so,” said his son. “But strangely enough, while Cornelia Potts actually wrote that confession of guilt, and signed it, she did
not
murder her two sons, nor could she have been the person behind Thurlow who used Thurlow as a tool in the commission of the murders.”

“How can you know that?” asked the Inspector in despair.

“For one thing, Dad, we now know that there never was a substitution of
bullets
in that first Colt .25—we know that there was a substitution of
guns.
Yet in her confession the Old Woman wrote—” Ellery consulted the confession hastily— “the following: ‘It was I who substituted a lethal bullet for the blank cartridge the police had put into Thurlow's weapon.' But no bullet
was
substituted! In other words, the Old Woman thought the same thing we thought at the time—that a substitution of bullets had been made. So she didn't even know how the first murder was really committed! How, then, could she have been in any way involved in it?

“And look at this.” Ellery waved the confession again. “‘Later it was I who stole one of Thurlow's other guns and hid it from the police and went with it into my son Maclyn's bedroom in the middle of the night and shot him with it,' and so on. Stop and think, Dad: Cornelia Potts couldn't have done that, either! Dr. Innis told me, just before he left the Old Woman's bedside that night—shortly before Mac was shot to death—that he had given the Old Woman a sedative by hypodermic injection
which would keep her asleep all night.

“No, the Old Woman didn't have a thing to do with the murder of the twins, even though she wrote out a confession of guilt and signed it with her own hand. So apparently, knowing she was about to die and had nothing more to lose in this life, she wrote out a false confession to protect whichever whelp of her first litter was guilty. She was a wonderfully shrewd woman, that old lady; I shouldn't be surprised that she suspected it was Thurlow, her pet. By confessing on her deathbed, she believed the case would be officially closed and, with its close, Thurlow would be safe.”

The Inspector nodded slowly. “That makes sense. But if it wasn't the Old Woman who was masterminding Thurlow, who was it, son?”

“Obviously,
the person who made us believe the signature on the confession was false when it wasn't.
And, by the way, that was a very clever piece of business. It was necessary to make us think the confession was false, for reasons I'll go into in a moment. In order to accomplish that, what did our criminal require? A signature which would be identical with the signature on the confession. No true signature of Cornelia's could possibly be
identical
with the confession signature, so our criminal had to manufacture one. In doing so, he could only use for tracing purposes the confession signature itself. He chose the stock memo he knew we remembered having seen the Old Woman sign, typed off its message exactly on similar paper, destroyed the genuine memo, and then traced the confession signature onto the spurious stock memo. Very clever indeed.”

“But who was it, Ellery?” The Inspector glared about. They were all so quiet one would have thought them in the grip of a paralyzing gas.

“We can get to that only obliquely, Dad. Having established that the real criminal, the brains behind Thurlow, wanted us to believe the Old Woman's confession a forgery, the inevitable question is: Why?

“The reason must be evident. It could only be because he did not want us to accept the Old Woman as the killer, he did not want the case closed—he wanted someone other than Cornelia Potts to be arrested and convicted for the murder of the twins.

“When I proved the case against Thurlow, I thought the series of crimes had come to an end. Well, I was wrong. One more puppet in the play had to be eliminated—
Thurlow himself.”
The Inspector looked befogged. “Yes, Dad, Thurlow was a victim, too. Oh, this is as fancy a plot as any that ever came out of Hollywood. It's not double murder, it's triple murder. First Bob, then Mac—and now Thurlow. For, as we know now, Thurlow was the instrument of the crime, and his being caught doesn't solve it. There's still the person behind him. Then since we see that the criminal wanted someone other than Cornelia to be caught and tried and convicted for the murders, and we've actually pinned it on Thurlow—isn't it clear that
Thurlow's capture, too, was part of the criminal's plan?”

The Inspector blinked. “You mean—he wanted to get not only the twins, but Thurlow, whom he used to kill 'em, out of the way?”

“Exactly. And here's why I say that. Ask the question: Who benefits most by the elimination of the twins
and
Thurlow? Can you answer that?”

“Well,” muttered the Inspector, “the twins were killed for control of the Potts Shoe Company—as a result of their murder. Thurlow became President and got control . . .”

“But with Thurlow out of the way as well, who has control now?”

“Sheila.”

It was not the Inspector's voice which answered Ellery.

It was Stephen Brent's.

Stephen Brent was staring at his daughter with the feeble error of a parent who sees his child, for the first time, as others see her.

29 . . . The End of the End

“Yes, Sheila,” said Ellery Queen, in the saddest voice imaginable.

And now he looked at her, with remorse, and with pity, and with something else that was neither. Sheila was glaring from her father to Ellery in a jerky arc, her lips parted and her breath jerky, too.

Major Gotch made a little whimpering noise in his corner.

Charley was glaring, too—glaring at Ellery, his hands beginning to curl into fists. “Idiot!” he shouted, lunging forward. “The Potts craziness has gone to your head!”

“Charley, cut it out,” said Inspector Queen in a tired voice.

Charley stopped impotently. It was plain that he dared not glance at Sheila; he dared not. And Sheila simply stood there, her head jerking to and fro.

The Inspector asked quietly: “You mean this girl with the dimples is the brains behind this nasty business?
She
used Thurlow as a tool?
She's
the real killer?” He shook his head. “Charley's right, Ellery. You've gone haywire.”

And then Ellery said an odd thing. He said: “Thank you, Dad. For Sheila.” And at this they were still with wonder again.

“Because, from the facts, it couldn't be Sheila,” Ellery went on in a faraway voice. “All Sheila wants to be is … somebody's wife.”

“Somebody's wife?” Charley Paxton's head started the pendulum now—from Ellery Queen to Sheila, from Sheila to Ellery.

Mr. Queen looked full upon Mr. Paxton. “This was all planned by the man who missed a brilliant career in criminal law—you told me that yourself, Dad, that very first morning in the Courthouse. The man whose every effort has been to get Sheila to marry him. The man who knew that, married to Sheila and with her twin brothers and Thurlow out of the way, he could control the rich Potts enterprises. That's what was behind your ‘insistence,' as Sheila said only yesterday, Charley, on ‘running the business' in the reorganization, while she sat back to be your figurehead—wasn't it?”

Charley's skin turned claret.

“Don't you see?” Ellery avoided Sheila's eyes. “Charley Paxton planned every move, every countermove. Charley Paxton played on Thurlow's susceptible mind, on Thurlow's psychopathic obsession with the honor and name of Potts. Charley Paxton convinced Thurlow that he had to murder the twins to protect himself, the business, and the family name. Charley Paxton planned every step of the crime for Thurlow—showed him how to commit two daring murders with safety, planned the scene before the Courthouse, the purchase of the fourteen guns, the duel—everything, no doubt rehearsing Thurlow patiently. A furiously vacillating brain like Thurlow's might have conceived murder, but Thurlow scarcely possessed the cunning and the application necessary to have planned and carried it out as these subtle crimes were planned and carried out. Only a sane mind could have planned these crimes. And that was why I was dissatisfied with Thurlow as the criminal even though all the evidence indicated that his hands and his person had performed the physical acts required to pull the crimes off … No, no, Charley, I can assure you you wouldn't stand a chance. Just stand still and refrain from unnecessary movements.”

The Inspector took a small police pistol from his shoulder holster and released its safety mechanism.

Ellery continued in a murmur: “You'll recall I conjectured that Thurlow had found out by eavesdropping that we intended to substitute a blank cartridge for the live one in the first Colt automatic. But now perceive. Who suggested the device of substituting a blank? Whose plan was it?
Charley Paxton's.”

Sheila's eyes grew wider; she began to tremble.

“So now we have a much more reasonable answer to how Thurlow knew about the blank.
Charley, his master, told him.
Paxton waited for me or someone else to suggest the ruse, and when none of us did, he jumped in himself with the suggestion. He had to, for he'd already told Thurlow that was what was going to happen—he'd see to it.

“All along this fine, smart young lawyer who had missed a brilliant career in criminal law set traps—in particular for me. If I fell into them—excellent. But if I hadn't seen the significance of the two pairs of Colt and Smith & Wessons, if I hadn't worked out Thurlow's motive, if I hadn't deduced just how Thurlow switched the guns before our eyes on the lawn that morning—if I hadn't seen through all these things, you may be sure Mr. Charles Hunter Paxton would have managed to suggest the ‘truth' to me.

“Think. How closely Paxton clung to me! How often he was there to put in a word, a suggestion, to lead me along the path of speculation he had planned for me to take! I, too, have been a pawn of Counsellor Paxton's from the beginning, thinking exactly what he wanted me to think, eking out enough of the truth, point by point, to pin it on Thurlow and so accomplish the final objective of the Paxton campaign—the elimination of Thurlow.”

“You can't be serious,” said Charley. “You can't really believe—”

“And that isn't all. When he needed proof against Thurlow—when you specifically asked for it, Dad—who told us about the tailor and the double pocket in Thurlow's tweed jacket?”

“Mr. Paxton.”

“And when Thurlow came tearing into the study from the terrace, whom did he attack—me? The man who had worked out the solution? Oh, no. He jumped for
Charley's
throat, mouthing frenzied threats to kill. Isn't it obvious that Thurlow went mad of rage because he had just heard Charley
double-cross
him? The man who had planned the crimes and no doubt promised to protect Thurlow—now giving the vital evidence that would convict him! Luckily for Counsellor Paxton, Thurlow's last link to sanity snapped at that point, or we should have heard him pour out the whole story of Paxton's complicity. But even this was a small risk for Paxton to take, although from the ideal standpoint it was the weakest part of his plot … that Thurlow would blab. But Paxton must have thought: ‘Who'd believe the ravings of a man already well established as a lunatic in face of the incontrovertible evidence against him?' ”

“Poor Thurlow,” whispered Sheila. And for the first time since the truth had come from Ellery's lips she turned and regarded the man she had been about to marry. She regarded him with such loathing that Steve Brent quickly put his hand on her arm.

“Yes, poor Thurlow,” said Ellery grimly. “We broke him before his time—although no matter what had happened, Thurlow would have come to the same end—a barred cell and white-coated attendants … It's Sheila I was most concerned about. Seeing the truth, I had to stop this wedding.”

And now Sheila turned to look upon Ellery, and he flushed slightly under her gaze.

“Of course, that's it,” said Charley Paxton, clearing his throat. His hand came up in a spontaneous little gesture. “You see what's happened, Inspector, don't you? This son of yours—he's in love with Sheila himself—he practically admitted as much to me not long ago—”

“Shut up,” said the Inspector.

“He's trying to frame me so he can have her himself—”

“I said shut up, Paxton.”

“Sheila, you certainly don't believe these malicious lies?”

Sheila turned her back on him.

“Anything you say—” began the Inspector.

“Oh, don't lecture me!” snarled Charley Paxton. “I know the law.” And now he actually smiled. “Stringing a lot of pretty words together is one thing, Mr. Queen. Proving them in court's another.”

“The old story,” growled the Inspector.

“Oh, no,” said Mr. Queen, returning smile for smile. “Quite the new story. There's your proof, Dad—the forged stock memorandum and the Old Woman's confession.”

“I don't get it.”

“I told you he's talking through his hat,” snapped Paxton. He shrugged and turned to the clear window of the chapel. “Dr. Crittenden will be getting impatient, waiting in the vestry,” he remarked, without turning. “Sheila, you can't give me up on this man's unsupported word. He's bluffing, because as I said—”

“Bluffing, Paxton?” cried Ellery. “Then let me disabuse that clever mind of yours. I'll clear up a few untouched points first.

“If no one had interfered with this chap's original plans, Dad, Paxton would have got away with the whole scheme. But someone did interfere, the last man in the world Paxton had dreamed would interfere—his own creature, Thurlow.”

Charley Paxton's back twitched, and was still.

“Thurlow did things—and then one other did things—which Mr. Paxton in his omniscience hadn't anticipated and therefore couldn't prepare counter-measures against. And it was this interference by others that forced our clever gentleman to make his only serious mistake.”

“Keep talking,” said Charley's voice. But it was a choked voice. “You always were good in the gab department.”

“The first interference wasn't serious,” Ellery went on, paying no attention to the interruption. “Thurlow, flushed with his success in getting away with the murder of his brother Robert, began to think of himself—dangerous, Mr. Paxton, dangerous, but then your egocentric type of mind is so blind that it overlooks the obvious in its labor toward the subtle.

“Thurlow began to think. And instead of following his master's instructions in the second murder, he was so tickled with himself that he decided to add a touch or two of his own.

“In reconstructing what happened, we can ascribe these things to Thurlow because they are the kind of fantastic nonsense an addled brain like Thurlow's would conceive and are precisely not the things a cold and practical brain like Paxton's would conceive.”

“What are you referring to?” The Inspector's pistol was pointed at Paxton's back.

“Thurlow shot Mac Potts in his bed in the middle of the night,” replied Ellery with a curl and a twist to his tone that snapped Paxton's head up as if he had been touched with a live wire. “Shot him, whipped him with his riding crop, and left a bowl of chicken broth near by. Why? Deliberately to make the murder look like a Mother Goose crime. How sad!” said Mr. Queen mockingly. “How sad for master-minding Mr. Paxton. Upset the orderly creation, you see . . .”

“I d-don't understand that,” stuttered Steve Brent. His arm was about Sheila's shoulders; she was clinging to him.

“Well, sir,” retorted Ellery in a cheerful way, “all your late wife's first brood have been fed Mother Goose nonsense ever since she was first dubbed the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Mother Goose squatted on your rooftree, as it were, Mr. Brent, and her shadow was heavy and inescapable. Thurlow must have said to himself, in the ecstasy following his first successful homicide: ‘I'm safe, but a little more safety can't do any harm. No one even suspects me for the murder of Robert in the duel. If the police and this fellow Queen see these Mother Goose clues—the whipping, the broth—they'll think of my brother Horatio, the Boy Who Never Grew Up. They'll certainly never think of
me
!
”

“It was precisely the murky sort of smoke screen a psychopathic personality like Thurlow's would send up. But it had a far greater significance for Paxton than for us. For it warped Charley's plot, which had been planned on a straight, if long, line. Charley Paxton didn't
want
suspicion directed toward Horatio. Charley Paxton wanted suspicion directed toward, and to land plumb and squarely upon, chubby little Thurlow. How annoyed you must have been, Charley! But I'll hand it to you: the foolishness being done, you took the wisest course—did nothing, hoping the authorities wouldn't recognize, or would be thrown off the scent by, the Mother Goose rigmarole. When I spotted it, you could only hope I'd dismiss it and get back on the Thurlow spoor.”

“You said something about proof,” said Paxton in crisp tones.

“Mmm. In good time, Charley. You're a patient animal, as you've proved.

“The next unanticipated interference came from what must have been a shocking source, Charley—the Old Woman. And here's where we hang you . . . no, burn you, to use the more accurate vernacular of the State of New York.

“What did the Old Woman do? She wrote out a confession of guilt, which was untrue. Most unreasonable of her, Charley; that
was
a blow to your plans. So serious a blow that it forced you into activities which you couldn't control, which controlled
you.
Oh, you made the most of your material, I'll give you that. You were ingenious and versatile, you overlooked no bet—but that false confession of Cornelia Potts's controlled you, Charley, and what it made you do is going to make you pay for your crimes by due process of law.”

“Talk,” sneered Paxton. But then he added: “And what did it make me do, Mr. Queen?”

“It made you say to yourself: ‘If the police believe that meddling Old Woman's confession, my whole scheme is shot. They won't pin it on Thurlow, and Thurlow will take the reins of the Potts enterprises, and I'll never get to control them through Sheila.' Very straight thinking, Charley; and quite true, too. So you had to do something, or give up all hope of eating the great big enormous pie you'd set your appetite on.”

“Get on with it!” snarled Mr. Paxton.

“You were clever. But cleverness is not wisdom, as Euripides said a couple of thousand years ago: you'd have been better advised to be wiser and less clever, Charley.”

“How long do I have to listen to this drivel?”

“You couldn't destroy the large sealed envelope containing the Old Woman's will and smaller envelope with the confession in it,
for the absurd reason—”

“That we all saw the envelope in the dead woman's hand,” snapped the Inspector. “Go on, son!”

“Nor could you destroy the confession itself
—”

“Because,” said the Inspector, “the Old Woman had typed at the bottom of the will a paragraph saying that in the smaller sealed envelope was a paper which would tell us who'd murdered the twins.”