“Won’t be a minute,” stammered Luz. “So terribly sorry...”
Ellery pinched his nose, so when Victor Luz disappeared in the reception room Sergeant Velie clumped after him.
When Luz emerged from the house Ellery quietly rose and made his way to the terrace, where the Sergeant stood waiting. Luz was advancing across the lawn holding a ring aloft shamefacedly, and everyone was smiling. He handed it to Henry Yates with careful ceremony, looking relieved. The bishop, looking martyred, resumed.
“Now if you will repeat after me...”
“What did Luz do, Sergeant?” whispered Ellery.
“Went upstairs to a hall closet, fished around in a man’s topcoat, came up with the ring—”
“That’s all he did?”
“That’s all. Just beat it back downstairs with it.”
They watched.
“It’s all over!”
“And I had to miss my Turkish bath for this.” Sergeant Velie sounded disgusted.
Ellery hurried out onto the lawn. The bride and groom were surrounded by laughing people, kissing and being kissed, shaking hands, everyone talking at once. The newly minted Mrs. Henry Middleton Yates had never looked more mythically happy, her sister Effie more realistically plain, the groom more dazedly successful, the bride’s father more puzzled and relieved. As for Luz, he had quietly congratulated the bride and groom and he was now on the edge of the crowd, smiling and saying something to the white-cheeked Effie, whose eyes were tragically on her sister’s husband. Mr. Troy was conversing animatedly with the bishop. Waiters were beginning to wheel out veritable floats of tables, others were beginning to circulate with portable bars. Two photographers were busy setting up. The sun was mild, the roses sugared the air, and a barge beyond the river wall hooted its good wishes.
Ellery shrugged. Now that Helen Troy was safely Mrs. Yates, the gyrations of the past two hours seemed infantile. He would have to see Mr. Troy...
“Darling! What’s the matter?”
The voice was the groom’s. Ellery craned. The mob around the couple had stopped milling with a curious suddenness. Mr. Troy and the bishop had turned inquiringly.
With violence, Ellery shoved through the crowd.
“Henry...” The bride was leaning against her husband. Her cheeks were chalky under the make-up. She had a hand to her eyes, as if shading them from an intolerable sun.
“What is it, dearest?… Helen!”
“Catch her!” Ellery shouted.
But the bride was already on the grass in a broken white pile, staring into the sun.
Inspector Queen was definitely a menace that day. He had an unusually bitter altercation with Dr. Prouty of the medical examiner’s office, a few searing words for the bewildered Sergeant Velie, and deathly subtemperatures for his son. Having already been exposed to absolute zero in the person of Richard K. Troy before the poor man was put to bed by his physician, Ellery was thoroughly refrigerated. He hung about the proceedings like a fugitive drip of stalactite. Effie Troy was in her room in hysterics, in care of a nurse; Henry Yates sat on a chair in the reception room vacantly, drinking brandy by the water glass and not even looking up when addressed; Victor Luz was in Troy’s library chainsmoking under the murderous eye of Sergeant Velie; there was no one to talk to, no one at all. Ellery wandered miserably about, yearning for Nikki Porter.
About the only thing everyone agreed on without argument that abrasive afternoon was that it had been the quickest June marriage in society history.
Finally, after a century, the Inspector beckoned.
“Yes, Dad!” Ellery was at his father’s side like an arrow. “Why the freezeout?”
Inspector Queen looked positively hostile.
“I still don’t know how it happened.” Ellery sounded as if he were about to cry. “She just dropped, Dad. She was dead in a few minutes.”
“Seven minutes from the time the poison was administered,” the Inspector said frigidly.
“How? She hadn’t had time to eat or drink anything!”
“Directly into the bloodstream. With this.” And the Inspector opened his fist. “And you let him!”
“Her wedding ring?”
The ring gleamed on his father’s palm. It was a plain, very broad and massive gold band.
“You can handle it. The sting’s removed.”
Ellery shook his head, then he seized the ring and scrutinized it fiercely. He looked up, incredulous.
“That’s right,” nodded the Inspector. “A poison ring. Hidden automatic spring on the inner surface of the band that ejects a hollow needle point under pressure. Like the fang of a snake. And this was loaded, brother. Right after the ceremony everybody was congratulating her, kissing her, shaking her hand... Quite a gimmick. The handshaker exerts just the right amount of pressure on the hand wearing the ring, and wham—a dead bride in seven minutes. If she felt the sting, she was too excited to call attention to it. I’ve heard of the kiss of death, but the handshake of death—that’s a new one!”
“Not so new,” muttered Ellery. “Poison rings go back at least to the time of Demosthenes. And Hannibal, who killed himself with one. But those weren’t like this. This is the anello della morte with reverse Venetian. In the medieval model the hollow point was in the bezel and scratched the person with whom the wearer of the ring was shaking hands. This one pricks the wearer.”
“Medieval. Europe.” The Inspector sounded very grim; he was an incurable softie, and the sight of the beautiful young corpse in her wedding gown under the June sun had infuriated him. “It’s an antique; I’ve had it expertized. This is the kind of cute gadget an Old World blueblood like Luz might have had in his family locker for centuries.”
“It’s also the kind of thing you might pick up in a New World Third Avenue pawnshop,” said Ellery. “Is it an exact duplicate—except for the mechanism—of the ring Yates had bought?”
“I haven’t been able to get much out of Yates, but I gather it’s not quite the same. It wouldn’t be. Yates’s ring, of course, is gone. The killer counted on the excitement and tension of the ceremony preventing Yates from noticing that the poison ring was a bit different when Luz handed it to him. Yates bought his ring two weeks ago and showed it to all of them except Helen, so the killer had plenty of time to dig up a poison ring resembling it... if he didn’t have one handy all the time.”
“When did Yates turn the regular ring over to Luz?”
“Last night. Luz claims, of course, that he knows nothing about this poison ring. He says—he says — when he went upstairs to the hall closet during the ceremony and fished around in his topcoat and felt the ring, he just took it out and hurried downstairs with it without taking a good look at it, and Velie confirms that.”
“And then he handed it to Yates, who may have palmed it,” said Ellery.
“Yates? The groom? Palmed it? I don’t—”
“Suppose Henry Yates had the poison ring concealed in his hand. Luz hands him the innocent ring, Yates palms it and puts the poison ring on Helen’s finger.”
The Inspector seemed to pop from all directions. “Are you out of your mind? That boy want to kill the girl he was marrying? And what a girl! And in such a way!”
“I don’t say he did, but you’ll find,” said Ellery, “that Helen Troy came into a wad of money the instant she got married. By the will of her mother, who had an independent fortune. And Henry Yates is, after all, merely a bond salesman—a very smart bond salesman, incidentally, or he’d never have snagged the Troy girl. And you can’t ignore the corollary fact that such a time and method of murdering his bride would give Yates the perfect fall guy... the man who handed him the ring, the man who had been rejected by the bride, the man who had actually threatened to kill her if she married Yates. Not to mention the psychological advantages to Yates in picking such a time for his crime—”