The Murderer is a Fox

The Murderer is a Fox

Ellery
Queen

PART
ONE

The
Fox Cubs

chapter
1

"What
time is it now, Talbot?" Emily Fox asked her husband— As
if she had never asked the question before.

"Now
Emily," sighed Talbot Fox. The Atlantic Stater doesn't pull in
for a good ten minutes yet."

Linda
sat squeezed between her foster-parents in the special touring car
the Wrightsville Committee on Welcomes had provided for the occasion.
The small bloodless oval of her face wore a formidable smile, like
the daguerreotype of Daddy Talbot's maternal great-grandmother on the
baby grand in the Fox parlor. But Linda did not feel formidable; she
felt weak inside, as if she were waiting for an operation.

As
perhaps in a way she was.

The
sun—co-operative star!—tickled the limbs of the throng
heaving in and about the squatty, venerable Wrightsville Station . .
. Lin's whole plain little world, all packaged for this moment.
Mother Emily tormenting her corsage of baby orchids, a gift from Andy
Birobatyan of the Wrightsville Florist Shop, who had contributed all
the floral decorations for the Official Reception Lunch which was to
be held later in the Grand

Ballroom
of the Hollis Hotel, in the Square. Daddy Tal trying not to steal
glances at his wristwatch. The slicked-up Selectmen chattering
politics, crops, and conversion. The American Legion Band milling
around in their newly dry-cleaned uniforms, tossing the sun from
their silver helmets like the prize bulls at the Slocum State Fair.
One-toothed Gabby Warrum yelling from the doorway of the
stationmaster's office at the swarm of yah-yahing kids with dusty
feet shoving one another about on the handtrucks. Mrs. Bradford,
nee
Patricia Wright, Chairman of the Committee on Events, hurrying down
the platform, flinging retorts right and left, on her way to confer
with some official or other about a last-minute change in the line of
march. Miss Dolores Aikin, Chief Librarian of the Carnegie Library
and unofficial genealogist of Wrightsville's first families, standing
on tiptoe on the edge of the platform, pen and foolscap in hand,
anxiously scanning the country toward Wrightsville Junction, whence
the hero's train should soon appear. Emmeline DuPre, who earned her
livelihood by giving Dancing and Dramatic Lessons to the youth of the
Wrightsville gentry, darting from group to group having a field day.
Miss Gladys Hemmingworth. Society Editor of Frank Lloyd's
Record
,
waggling her perpetual pencil decorously aloft to catch the eye of
the Chairman of the Committee on Welcomes, Hermione Wright, wife of
John F. Wright, whose great-great-great-great-something Jezreel had
founded Wrightsville in 1702.

Old Soak
Anderson tottered to the doorway of Phil's Diner next to the Station,
waving two little American flags.

All for
Davy.

Directly
above Linda's head hung a long banner which stretched from Station
eaves across the tracks to the water tower.

WELCOME
HOME CAPTAIN DAVY FOX!!

WRIGHTSVILLE
IS PROUD OF YOU!

Are you?

How
times changed.

Davy Fox
hadn't always been a hero. Davy Fox hadn't always been "just"
a Wrightsville boy, such as you could find on any street corner in
Low Village, or in any big house on the Hill. They hadn't formed
committees for Davy
then
... at least, not welcoming
committees.

Something
memorializing and fixative about the scene around her turned Linda's
thoughts backwards.

Davy Fox
hadn't lived in the Talbot Fox house . . . then. Davy had lived in
that house next door. It was only later—on that never-forgotten
day when Mother Emily locked herself in her bedroom and Daddy Tal
stumbled about the house with a hunted look and Linda wasn't allowed
to leave the playroom—it was only later that Davy came to live
with his aunt and uncle and the little girl they had taken from the
Slocum Orphanage five years before.

That
coming across two lawns, his hand in his uncle's, a small boy of ten
in torn knickers marched from one house to another while Wrightsville
stared in hostile silence from the unkempt sidewalk of the Hill—it
had been a journey from the moon. The boy had been tight-mouthed to
keep the tears from spilling out, afraid and suspicious—too
obedient and

too
quiet and too all-inside-himself— until, inside his uncle's
house, out of sight of those accusing eyes, he was broken down by his
Aunt Emily's embrace and gave way to his fear. Davy used to say
scornfully that he'd really wanted to stamp and kick and break things
that day, but Aunt Emily had treacherously made him cry instead by
putting her arms around him.

Gabby
Warrum roared from the stationmaster's office: "She's on time!"

A sizzzz! ran through the
crowd, and then the American Legion Band burst into a nervous
tootling.

It had been forbidden to
talk about the thing that had happened. Nevertheless, Davy and Linda
sometimes braved the tabu, whispering about it through the transom
between their childhood bedrooms while Emily and Talbot Fox slumbered
in the big room down the hall. But not too often. It was too huge,
and it was too terrible—too big with big people's secrets—to
be bandied about and become commonplace and so, in time, be
forgotten. And if there were times when it might almost be forgotten,
there was always the house next door—a deserted dinginess
growing more silent by the year. Linda was scared to death of that
aging reproach. It housed great eyeless threats. And Davy would never
go near it. He avoided even looking at it.

"Hi, Linda!"
The Wrightsville High delegation was struggling to form a hollow
square at one end of the platform. They were waving placards
nailed
to broom-handles.
You Made Them Remember Kunming, Davy!!!—You
Sure Laid a Mess of Eggs, You Flying Fox!!!—Wrightsville High's
Most-Likely-to-Succeed . . . And How!!!
Linda smiled and waved
back.

How Davy had loathed them,
the jeering kids. Because they had known; the whole town knew. The
kids and the shopkeepers in High Village and the Country Club crowd
and the scrubskinned farmers who drove in on Saturdays to load
up-even the hunks and canucks who worked in the Low Village mills.
Especially the shop hands of Bayard & Talbot Fox Company,
Machinists' Tools, who merely jeered the more after the Bayard &
one day vanished from the side of the factory, leaving a whitewashed
gap, like a bandage over a fresh wound. That was another part of his
native Wrightsville that Davy shunned.

He had hated the grownups
even more than the kids, because he could jump in on the kids with
his fists or otherwise intimidate them by playing the role
Wrightsville had assigned to him—which was, simply, to be the
son of his father. There were whole years of licking kids, and being
licked. And now other kids were brandishing placards and getting
ready to give their alumnus the rackety-rax with nine locomotives,
usually reserved for football victories over Slocum High.

"What time is it now,
Talbot?" asked Emily Fox.

"Now Emily," said
Talbot Fox irritably. "There's still seven minutes."

The crowd was staring
along the twin dazzle of the rails towards Wrightsville function,
three miles up the line, as if they would bend light and see beyond
curves and past culverts and woods.

Wrightsville's 10,000-odd .
. . Other times, other scandals. That Polish family—with all
the j's and z's—they turned on the gas in their two-room warren
in Low Village and they were all found dead, the whole family—father
and mother and eight dirty children—and no one ever found out
why. The Jim Haight case involving the noble Wrights—and

today Patricia Wright
Bradford was married to the man who had prosecuted her sister's
husband for murder and only a few, like Emmy DuPre, ever recalled it.
And Lola Wright's running off with that Major, and fat Billy Ketcham,
the insurance man, being arrested when he crossed the state line with
the youngest Graycee girl, "the bad one." The world of
Wrightsville moved on, on and away from Davy Fox and the shadow under
which he had grown to manhood. Linda smiled from the car, nodding at
people she had known since she was four. They had forgotten. Or
seemed to have,

"Five minutes, Emily,"
announced Talbot Fox nervously.

"I wish that darned old
train would pull in," fretted his wife. "So we could get
all this over with and take Davy off by ourselves and—I don't
know. I've had a premonition."

"About Davy? Why,
Emily," laughed Talbot. But he seemed uneasy.

"Premonition, Mother?"
Linda frowned slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know,
Linny."

"But he's all right,
isn't he? I mean—they said except for the exhaustion and
exposure and . . . Mother, you know something about Davy you've kept
from me!"

"No, dear, no. Really,"
said Emily Fox hurriedly.

"Emily, you talk too
blamed much," growled her husband. "Premonitions! Didn't we
all talk to Davy on the phone when they set him down in Florida?"

Linda was appeased. But she
couldn't help wondering why Daddy Talbot's voice sounded so funny.

"Imagine," sighed
Emily. "All this for Davy."

"And for his little
wife! Eh, sweetheart?" Talbot Fox patted Linda's hand.

"Linda, your nose,"
said Emily, smiling down at snub-nosed Mrs. Donald Mackenzie
(Wrightsville Personal Finance Corp.). "It's shiny."

His wife
, thought
Linda as she fumbled for her compact. That day, on his last furlough
before . . . They had gone to Pine Grove on a picnic, the nephew of
Talbot and Emily Fox and their adopted daughter. And somehow, after
the mayonnaise spilled on his tunic, and she was wiping it off his
wings, it happened. She had always known it would happen, although
not quite so absurdly. Their tie had always been stronger than mere
blood—it was the tie of waifs, woven out of secrets, a
mysterious dear bond. She was in his arms, and Davy was kissing her
with a passion that frightened her, it told so much. He was asking
her, without a word-as if he were afraid to use words. Words came
only later, as they lay side by side in the grass of the Grove
clasping hands and dreaming up into the pines. And even then they
were sober words.

"What about Uncle Tal
and Aunt Emily?" Davy had asked. "They won't go for this,
Linny."

"Won't—Why, Davy,
they
love
you, darling!"

"Oh, sure. But you're
their only child, and—you know what I am."

"You're my Davy."
Then Linda realized what he had meant and sat up crossly. "See
here, Davy Fox. In the first place, I'm a Fox by adoption. You're one
by blood—"

"Blood,â€

Untouchable?" Ellery
raised his brows. "I'm afraid I don't. Warden, quite."

The Warden shrugged. "I've
handled lots of prisoners in my time, Mr. Queen. This man is in a
class by himself. At first he wanted help—from anyone-other
inmates, guards, me. Very vocal. Sure he was railroaded, and that
sort of thing. Like all the rest. . . But then something happened to
him. He tightened up. Built a shell around himself. And that's where
he's lived ever since. Never lets go. Everything is inside. Deep, Fox
is—deep.

"He'll be a few moments
yet, Mr. Queen. Meanwhile, there's someone waiting for you in my
office."

The Warden held open his
office door, and Ellery perceived Chief Dakin of Wrightsville within,
smiling at him.

"Dakin!"

"Hullo again, Mr.
Queen."

They shook hands with
pleasure. Chief Dakin was an elongated countryman with transparent
eyes and a large Yankee nose who would have looked perfectly at home
behind a plow. But his mouth was almost tender, and there was an air
about him-of dependability, gravity, and intelligence -that lifted
him out of a type. He was baritone soloist of the First
Congregationalist choir of High Village, a tolerant teetotaler, and
the best poker player in Wright County. He had been Wrightsville's
Chief of Police for over twenty years.

"But why are you here,
Chief?" demanded Ellery. "I thought I was to meet one of
Prosecutor Hendrix's men "

"You are. Detective
Howie—Mr. Ellery Queen."

The man was sitting so still
in his corner that he had seemed part of the Warden's office
furnishings. Howie was a great fat fellow in a wrinkled blue
gabardine suit greasy with age and streaked with old cigaret ash. A
once-white handkerchief was stuffed between his wilted collar and his
mottled neck; and his puffy brick-colored paws clutched a bundle of
blue-backed papers bound with a red rubber-band.

He merely nodded at Ellery;
he neither rose nor offered his hand.

"I'm happy to make your
acquaintance, Howie," said Ellery pleasantly. "We'll be
seeing a good deal of each other in the next couple of weeks, so—"