“So for once,” Ellery sighed, “logic comes to the support of a circumstantial case. Luz meant his threat, and left the ring in his topcoat deliberately to make it look later as if anyone could have switched rings, not merely himself. Dad was ri—”
The telephone rang.
“Ellery?” It was Inspector Queen’s sharp voice.
“Dad—” began Ellery, inhaling manfully.
But the Inspector said, “I told you Luz was our man. Dumb as hell, besides. We traced that poison ring to an antique shop on Madison Avenue, and when Luz was faced with the evidence he broke. I’ve just got through blotting the ink on his signed confession. All that fancy big-brain stuff about Henry Yates and Effie Troy! What did you want, Ellery?” Ellery swallowed. Then he said, “Nothing, Dad,” humbly, and hung up.
The Adventure of The Fallen Angel
That everlasting cicerone of the world forum, Marcus Tullius, somewhere tells us amicably that Fire and Water are “proverbial”; which is to say, these ancient elements of life are truly elementary. If it is further presumed that where life burns, death with his sprinkler cannot be far behind, the case of Miles Senter et alii may be considered classic. In that case there was Fire to the point of pyrotechnics, for though the New York summer was officially a mere ten days old, the sun was already baking the Senter garden to the charred crispness of an overlooked piecrust and barbecuing the stones of the garden walls in a temperature more commonly associated with the Underworld. As for Water, below the east wall flowed a whole stream of it, for the Senter house was one of those marginal Manhattan affairs clinging splendidly to the island’s shore and staring with hauteur at the untidy commercial profile of the Borough of Queens across the commonplace swells of the East River.
Nor was antique harmony restricted to geography and the season. Mythology shared in the Senter case, and art. The house had been designed in the highfalutin era, when architecture was cathedral and structural decoration full of monsters. The Senter pharmaceutical fortune had been baptized in the font of a purgative whose pink-on-black prose still illuminated the barns and jakes of rural America; and in building his mansion the progenitor of the Senter wealth—possibly in extenuation of its ephemeral source—had turned his eyes heavenward and builded for eternity. Or at least for greater permanence than was promised by cathartic pills. He had had his architect go for inspiration to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Unfortunately, for all the laxative riches at his command, the architect had neither an Ile de la Cité on which to build nor the papal resources of the twelfth century; consequently the astonished neighbors found themselves rubbing walls with a sort of gigantic architectural dwarf, an ecclesiastical Quasimodo of a building, vulgar, ugly, and unbelievably uncomfortable. Miles Senter, who had been born in it, once spent an uneasy six months on his analyst’s couch recollecting the horrid Gothic dreams which it had visited on his childhood.
The most frightening of these concerned the grotesque stone carvings which stuck out from the tower roofs like abnormal growths. These were the Senter architect’s versions of the chimères of Notre Dame cathedral. And the Chimaera, if you remember your Bulfinch and Bellerophon, breathed a particularly effective kind of fire. Thus Fire again. As for Water, unhappily the architect had confused chimaeras with gargoyles, and the monsters he had had hewn and installed on the cornices of the Senter towers, while they had the lion’s head, goat’s body, and dragon’s behind of the true Chimaera, served the traditional gargoyle purpose of providing outlets for the rain which collected on the roof. In a word, they were waterspouts. To complete the chaos, the founding Senter to his dying day persisted in calling them “angels,” and his grandson Miles, as he settled substantially into the Founder’s shoes, canonized the heresy. Not so Miles’s younger brother, David, who broke images as easily as he made them. David was a painter, with a studio on the roof of what—to his brother’s vague annoyance—he would call “the Cathedral.” David unfailingly remarked before guests, when Miles referred to the waterspout monsters as angels, that it gave an educational insight into their grandfather’s view of heaven... if not Miles’s.
But these are trifling, if pleasant, divagations. We were at a more serious business in the Senter garden on a recent broiling summer evening, with the East River lapping thirstily at the wall.
Two young ladies were perspiring under the sunlamp moon. One was Miles’s wife, the reigning Mrs. Senter; the other was Nikki Porter, who had exercised the private secretarial right of deserting her employer in his evening of direst need—it had something silly to do with a book publisher, and a deadline. But Nikki had run into Dorothy the day before, after a separation of years, and could auld acquaintance be forgot? Thus desertion, and the garden by the river. The reunion was scented for Nikki with the aromatic news that Dorothy was now Mrs. Miles Senter, which she had certainly not been when Nikki had known her last, and with a something else that defied analysis and so challenged it. There were moribund shadows under otherwise lively eyes and a kind of “To the barricades!” gaiety which had struck Nikki as out of tune with recent wedding harmonies. Indeed, dinner had had a faintly royal émigré flavor—a taste of noblesse oblige and tumbrils at the door. Even Miles Senter’s confidential secretary, a Mr. Hart, a Princeton-type man with a crew cut and the well-greased manners of an advertising agency junior executive, took the first opportunity to make a discreet—and relieved—retreat to his room. And thereafter the young matron, with a female smile, had sent her husband packing and steered Nikki into the dark garden and immediately burst into tears.
Nikki let Dorothy cry, wondering if it might not be the house. The house was frightful—musty and catlike, with great clanging rooms, bedrooms uniformly exposed to the noise and damp of the river, and a colossal dinginess; it had not seen decorators for a generation. It was evident that Miles Senter, though kindly and agreeable, was a man of uncompromising conservatism and no imagination. In fact, Nikki had been rather shocked by him. He claimed forty-five, looked sixty, and was probably in mid-fifties. And Dorothy was twenty-six years old. Of course it could be that, although Dorothy had always been a practical girl, with no nonsense about her and a wonderful respect for accomplishment; it was quite like her to fall in love with a rich man twice her age. Or was it David? Nikki had heard a great deal about David Senter at dinner, although the artist had not joined them — “Has a watercolor on his mind,” Miles Senter had said. “David’s always up to something in his studio.” Nikki had gathered that David was a lovable scamp, with all the absurd ideas of extreme youth — “the Greenwich Village type,” his brother had said fondly. “Practically a Red.” So she was surprised to learn—from Dorothy—that David was thirty-five years old. To Miles, he would evidently always be a teenager, to be indulged or spanked by the hand that held the pursestrings. There was a self-portrait of David in oils in the living room — “the Nave, David calls it,” Dorothy had laughed as Miles frowned—and he certainly looked Byronic enough to explain Dorothy’s tears in the garden. He was a dark handsome fellow with the devil in his eye, or at least he had painted the devil there. Yes, it might well be David.
And apparently it was. For when Dorothy began to explain her tears, the first thing she did was to praise her husband. Miles was the finest, tenderest, most considerate, most generous husband in the world. And she, Dorothy, was the most ungrateful, confused, irresponsible little bitch who had ever lured a good man into marriage. Oh, she’d thought she was in love with him, and Miles had been so... solid. And persistent, of course... She really hadn’t lured him, he’d sort of lured himself; but then it was equally true that she hadn’t been trueblue honest with herself, she’d only thought she was being... “Oh, Nikki, don’t think horrible things of me. I’ve fallen in love with Somebody Else.”