Queens Full (11 page)

They looked pained.

“Am I to understand from that remark, Mr. Queen,” asked the tall elder brother courteously, “that one of us is seriously suspected of having murdered our stepmother?”

“Can you offer another suggestion, Mr. Livingston?”

“That's not my province. Though I should think a tramp—”

“Tramps break into houses to steal, Mr. Livingston. There was no break-in, and nothing was stolen or even disturbed. No convenient sneak thief, I'm afraid.”

“Then may I point out that Olivia, my brother, and I gain nothing at all by our stepmother's death?”

“Murder is not wiped off the books,” Ellery reminded Samuel Livingston, Junior, with matching courtesy, “on the ground that it fails to show a profit. The facts indicate that no one involved knew your stepmother had executed a new will Saturday morning. If that's so, she was murdered Saturday night by someone who thought the old will was still in force. By someone, you see, who
would
have gained. And that's a perfectly valid motive.”

“And that's us.” Olivia laughed. “Forgive me, darlings. I'm trying to see myself smothering Bella.”

“The trouble with you fellows is,” said Everett, “you have the typical middle-class attitude about money. It's really not that important.”

“The whole notion is mad.” Samuel Junior shrugged. “But I suppose you'll have to satisfy yourselves. Are we under house arrest, or what?”

“Let's just say,” said Chief of Police Dakin, “that we're all going to stay on for a few days till things kind of jell. I'll be in and out, but Mr. Queen and Herb Wentworth will be here to keep you company. The newspapers ain't onto this yet, so we ought to have ourselves a nice quiet time.”

When the last upstairs light blinked out in the house, Ellery came up from the black lawn to the moon-whitened back porch and sat carefully down in a rocker.

Having known Bella Livingston in life, he wanted very much to pay his peculiar respects to her in death. She had deserved a better fate than smothering. But there was simply nothing to go on. He had told that to Chief Dakin before the chief left for the night. He had told Dakin something else, too, but the old Yank had been skeptical. “That ain't in the cards, Mr. Queen,” Dakin had said, “not with you and Wentworth here.” And he had added stubbornly, “Bella was an eighth-grader in the old Piney Road School when I was a skinny little firster, and she used to wipe my bloody nose when the big boys licked me. I ain't letting go of those three.”

But it
was
in the cards.

What to do?

The sigh of the screen door and a gasp decided the question for him.

“It's only me, Miss Upham,” Ellery said, getting up. “Too hot for sleep?”

“Hot?” Amy shivered as she sat down on the top step. “I couldn't imagine who was sitting out here.” She drew her bathrobe more closely about her. “I'm glad it's you,” she said suddenly.

“Oh? Why?”

“I don't know, I just am.” She stared into the darkness. “Shouldn't I be?”

“Yes,” Ellery said. “You should be very glad it's me.”

She turned to him then. Something in the flat blacks and whites of his moonlit face made her swollen eyes widen.

Ellery sat down on the step beside her and took her little cold hands in his. “You strike me as a girl who's had to face up to a lot of disagreeable realities, Amy. I hope I'm not wrong. Because I'm going to throw the book at you.”

“I don't understand.”

“Bella Livingston made a tragic mistake when she wrote out that new will Friday night.”

“Oh, I know! She should never have left me the money—”

“That wasn't her mistake. Her mistake, Amy, was in leaving you merely the income from it for your lifetime. And providing that thereafter the principal go to her stepchildren.”

Amy looked bewildered. “She didn't want to cut them off altogether—”

“She also didn't know one of them would kill her in the belief that the old will was still in force.” Ellery tightened his grip on her hands. “Amy,” he said urgently, “lock your door at night. Try never to be alone.” Her whole slender body strained about as she stared up at him. “That clause in the new will gives Bella Livingston's murderer a second chance. Because now the only thing that stands between him and a third of a million dollars is you.”

Amy's face went white as the face of the moon. “He'd kill
me?
”

“Dakin and Wentworth don't think he'll risk it. I do. That's why I had to warn you.”

She looked utterly lost. It made him touch her reassuringly, and his touch undid her.

He gathered her up in his arms, and she hung on to him, sobbing. “I'm afraid. I'm afraid …”

II

Even at the door of her room Amy would not let go of him.

“I know I'm being stupidly silly, but I can't help it …” Her teeth were chattering.

“How could you, after I've scared you half to death?” Ellery squeezed her arm. “Let's have a look together.”

He searched her bedroom and bathroom. “Nobody here but us chickens,” he said, and she smiled very faintly. “Now you lock and bolt your door and go to bed. I can get to you in five seconds from across the hall. All right, Amy?”

“All right,” said Amy, and not altogether to his surprise she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. She flushed scarlet and pushed him into the hall.

He did not move from before her door until he heard the key turn over and the bolt slide into place.

Ellery made a groping tour of the sleeping rooms, soundlessly trying doors. Old Dorcas's and Morris Hunker's on the attic floor were unlocked, as was the door to the guest room where Mr. Wentworth snored melodiously. But the Livingston brothers had locked themselves in. He could hear them tossing about in their beds.

The door of their sister's room gave to his touch. He nudged it open, listening.

“Who is that?” Olivia's voice came out of the dark sharply.

“Oh,” said Ellery. “Sorry. I thought this was my room.”

He let the door click shut loudly.

She must sleep like a cat … It seemed to him, as he crawled into bed, that there was a mocking quality to the darkness.

He floundered and wallowed after sleep, his cheeks still tingling where Amy had put her kiss. Lonely little thing … remarkably strong, too; his biceps ached where she had clutched him in her terror. Old Bella's money would make a full life possible for her … And sudden death, too, unless by some miracle he could perceive guilt where no guilt showed.

He kept straining after every sound in the old house until, exhausted, he fell asleep.

When he came downstairs Wednesday morning, Ellery found Olivia and Herbert Wentworth at breakfast.

“Ah, the man who mislaid his bedroom,” said Olivia. “Did you ever find it, Mr. Detective?”

Ellery smiled back. “Your brothers still asleep?”

“Sam and Ev? They rarely roll out before noon.”

“I wish Amy would get up,” the lawyer said crossly. “I told her last night she'd have to sign some papers this morning. I've got to run over to the Court House.”

“Just coffee, please, Dorcas.” Ellery frowned. “Amy hasn't been down yet?”

“Oh, let the child sleep,” said Olivia. “She'll collect her million a day later.”

Mr. Wentworth glanced at her with dislike. “Dorcas—”

“Never mind Dorcas.” Ellery jumped up. “I'll fetch her.”

He had to force himself to walk sedately up the stairs. I've really got to stop acting like an old biddy, he thought, and knocked on Amy's door.

“Amy?”

He knocked again, harder.

“Amy.” He tried the door; it was locked. “Amy?”

He rattled the knob.

Doors opened. Everett Livingston's voice grumbled somewhere.

“Something wrong, Queen?” That was Samuel Junior.

“I don't know. Amy!” Ellery was pounding now.

Olivia and the Wrightsville lawyer came hurrying up the stairs. “What's the matter?”

“Help me with this damn door …”

At the second lunge the lock and bolt gave, and the door crashed back. Amy was lying on her bed in a queer position, very still.

“My God,” said Wentworth.

“Is she … dead?” asked Olivia.

“No.” Ellery was working over the unconscious girl. “Mr. Wentworth, phone a doctor—Conk Farnham, if you can get him. And Dakin. And have Dorcas come up immediately—I'll need her till the doctor comes. The rest of you—out!”

Dr. Conklin Farnham opened Amy's door. “It's all right to talk to her now.”

They went into the bedroom. The late afternoon sun illuminated a bloodless Amy, propped on pillows and looking very young and small and lost in the big bed. A strapping woman with a football player's jaw, dressed in a nurse's uniform, sat by the bed.

Ellery took Amy's hand. It clutched.

“Feeling better now?”

“Lots.” She tried to smile.

“What happened last night?”

“I don't know.”

“I take it you didn't unlock your door or let anyone in. I found it locked this morning.”

“I never went near it. I took a sleeping pill with some prune juice I had on my night table and went to bed. That's all I remember.”

“The laboratory report indicates that you swallowed about six tablets. Luckily for you, not a lethal dose. You're positive you took only one before you went to bed?”

“Yes. I'm always careful about drugs—my Uncle Horace was a doctor and he taught me that. It came from a bottle in my medicine chest.”

“We know, Amy,” Chief Dakin said gently. “Who brought you the prune juice?”

“Nobody, Mr. Dakin. I'd poured it myself in the kitchen and taken it upstairs with me when I first started to go to bed. But I felt restless, so I went back downstairs, where I found Mr. Queen on the porch—”

“Leaving the glass of juice on the night table.” Ellery glanced at Dakin. “I noticed it there when I brought Amy back up last night.”

“By then it was doped.” The old chief glowered. “Somebody snuck into her room while she was down on the back porch talking to you, and he fixed that prune juice just dandy … without leaving a print on anything.”

“Mr. Queen,” Amy said, “I'd like to talk to you.”

“You'll do the rest of your talking tomorrow, young lady,” said Dr. Farnham. “Now don't worry about her,” he told them in the hall. “She'll be as good as new by morning. Mrs. Olin will stay with her all night.”

On the way downstairs Chief Dakin said, “I guess I owe you an apology, Mr. Queen. I just never figured anyone'd try it.”

“And I never thought to check that prune juice.” Ellery scowled. “Dakin, is the nurse reliable?”

“Libby Olin?” Dakin snorted. “It's a brave man who'd try to get past
her
.”

They found the Livingston trio sprawled in the drawing room, waiting peacefully under the codfish eye of Mr. Wentworth and one of Chief Dakin's brawnier young policemen.

“She's going to be all right, Mr. Wentworth,” Ellery said; and he turned to the Livingstons with his bitterness showing. “Whichever one of you tried to overdose Amy last night took a losing gamble. She's very much alive, and there are a number of us in this house who are dedicated to the proposition that she's going to stay that way.”

“From now on,” growled the chief of police, “Amy Upham's going to be guarded twenty-four hours a day.”

“A smart poker player knows when his luck's run out,” Ellery told the silent three. “You can't win that million any more, but you can stand pat on the gamble that we won't be able to call you for Bella Livingston's murder or the attempt on Amy.”

“And don't be thinking that because we haven't called you yet,” added Dakin, “you can pick up and run.” His Yankee jaw aimed at them. “You ain't setting a pinkie toe off these grounds. Not one of you.”

“You know,” murmured Samuel Livingston, Junior, “you fellows amaze me. How long do you suppose you could hold us here if we insisted on leaving? You have absolutely no grounds for this.”

“And for the simplest of reasons.” Olivia said and smiled. “We haven't done anything.”

“What's keeping us here,” chimed in Everett, “is a temporary embarrassment and the three crude but nourishing meals a day.”

“In my case it's rather more than that.” The elder brother set his drink down with a little bang and looked up at Ellery and Chief Dakin with no charm whatever. “In the beginning your accusations were on the amusing side, but the humor has begun to pall. I'm feeling persecuted, gentlemen, and it's a feeling I don't care for.”

“On top of which,” said Olivia, “a Livingston never tucks his tail between his legs.”

“Besides,” said Everett with a grin, “you might just clap us in the pokey. In the present state of my finances, a suit for false arrest would buy me that basketball franchise.”

“Neat,” said Ellery. “Even convincing. But I repeat—don't crowd your luck.”

He strode out with a self-confident righteousness he did not feel.

“I can't say I blame you, Amy,” Ellery said.

“Well, I've had lots of time to think since yesterday.” Amy looked out over the lawn. Ellery kicked one of the loose floorboards.

It was Thursday afternoon, and they were sitting in the old summerhouse on the back lawn. The young policeman was fidgeting under a tree nearby. The sun through the latticework checkered Amy's hollow cheeks and frightened eyes in a grotesque pattern. She kept staring out through the summerhouse doorway. The rear windows of the big mansion shimmered like eyes.

“We could let them go, of course,” Ellery grumbled.

“And suppose one of them sneaked back next week? Or next year, for that matter!” Amy shook her head. “Don't you see, Mr. Queen, I'd never have another day's peace for the rest of my life?”