“Then you agree with me.” He sagged against the chair.
“Oh, no,” said Ellery, smiling. “I’ve drawn a possible conclusion from a pair of facts, one of which is not a fact but an opinion.”
“Well, there’s a third fact I failed to mention,” said Senter, and now his voice was hard, “and this one would satisfy a bank examiner. My father left the Senter enterprises to me during my lifetime. But when I die, David gets them.”
Ellery sighed. “People will do odd things, won’t they?” He rose. “While I can’t share your certainty, Mr. Senter, I certainly appreciate your fears. How and when can I examine the roof without your brother David’s knowledge? The sooner, I should say, the better.”
Miles Senter promised to notify Ellery when the condition could be met, and later that day he telephoned naming that very night for the investigation. “I’ll have my secretary meet you at the side gate at midnight,” he said, and he hung up before Ellery could raise his brows.
Ellery left his car on First Avenue and he and Nikki walked toward the river, slowly, for they were a few minutes early and the night steamed. There was a simmering lambency over the world that made straight lines fluid, so that when they came to the Senter house the whole incredible mass seemed in motion, as if it were about to change into something else. Ellery felt his arm clutched and he murmured something soothing about heat waves and optical illusions, but Nikki’s hold did not relax until a man stepped from the wrought-iron gateway and she recognized Miles Senter’s secretary.
“I’m certainly glad it’s you, Mr. Hart, and not some priest of the Black Mass!”
Mr. Hart looked baffled. But then he shook hands footballishly with Ellery, made a hearty remark about the heat, and ushered them across the front lawn. Ellery walked rubbernecking. But at the skyline the mansion was still doing tricks.
Nikki clung.
“I take it you know why I’m here tonight, Mr. Hart?”
“Mr. Senter’s just told me.” The secretary sounded secretarial.
“What’s your opinion?”
“Fellow in my spot has no opinions. Right, Miss Porter?… David? Oh, David has a shack in Westport where he gets away from it all when we poor goofs bore him or he wants to paint Connecticut barns. He was to leave tonight for over the holiday, but Mr. Senter didn’t know what train he was making, so he set midnight as... I’m sure he must have. I haven’t seen him—just got in from a party—but it’s so late... This way, please. Mr. Senter’s waiting upstairs for you. His own rooms. He’s given the servants the night off, so you’ll have a clear field. Mrs. Senter? I really couldn’t say. I’d assume Mr. Senter’s seen to, er, that arrangement personally.” Mr. Hart, it appeared, was urbanely determined to be the most confidential—and uninvolved—of secretaries.
There were three doors, as in Paris, little early Gothic imitations surmounted by twenty-eight reduced kings of Israel and Judah, a skimpy rose window, and other shrunken wonders. Having passed through the central door, they entered a sort of medieval never-never land which was mercifully in darkness, or at least in that curious negation of light passing for illumination by which material objects are guessed at rather than seen. No one was about, and the great hall was as deeply hushed as a Hollywood sound-stage; in fact, Ellery would not have been surprised had someone suddenly appeared in puttees and in a loud voice ordered the set to be struck. For all its age, blackened oak, and inky iron, it looked as insubstantial as a backdrop.
They were halfway up the grand staircase and Ellery was just remarking respectfully, “Is that a bona fide suit of Norman armor, Mr. Hart, or are we in the Metropolitan Museum?” when from somewhere above, slightly damped, came a short explosive kwap! like a little clap of thunder.
It brought them to a military halt, and for a moment they listened. But the angry sound was not repeated, and they looked at one another.
“What,” asked Nikki in the strangest voice, “was that?”
“It couldn’t be,” said Miles Senter’s secretary, with an uneasy laugh, “what it sounded like.”
“Why not?” snapped Ellery; and he was away.
They found him a moment later in a sitting room upstairs, kneeling beside an outstretched man who seemed to have run head on into a copious quantity of tomato purée.
“Oh, no,” said Hart idiotically.
“Oh, yes,” said Nikki. “I was right. He was right. Murdered.”
“Not quite.” Ellery glanced quickly about. “Head wounds are often a bloody mess. No sign of the gun... I don’t think it’s fatal. Nikki, poke your head out the window and yell.”
“Yell?”
“For that doctor! Next door, didn’t you say? Hart, you come with me.” Ellery was already in the hall.
“But Mr. Senter,” began the secretary.
“Don’t touch him!” Hart blundered into the hall. “Whoever shot Senter can’t have got far. Hart, where’s the other way down?”
“Other way down?”
“Damn it, Hart! We came up the front stairs and didn’t see anyone, so Senter’s assailant must have escaped another way! Isn’t there a second stairway?”
“Oh! Yes, Mr. Queen. Backstairs. Up the hall there—”
Ellery ran, and Hart trotted dismally after. Behind them Nikki’s demoniac voice shrieked for Dr. Grand.
The backstairs went gloomily down to an iron-clasped oak door which opened on the rear of the great hall.
“Hart, you search the front—lawn, shrubbery, street. I’ll take the rear.” He gave the man a shove.
The kitchens were dark. Ellery blundered through several coppery caverns, bumping into things and cursing. Finally he sighted a star, set a straight course, and in a moment was plunging through a doorway. He found himself in a stingy strip of back garden, and the first thing he spied was a spidery figure not ten feet away, clinging to the top of the wall separating the Senter property from its neighbor.
Ellery jumped, clutching. His hands closed triumphantly about a bony ankle.
“Oh, thank you,” said a testy voice. “I’m not as spry getting over this wall as I used to be when Elmo Senter imagined himself dying, which was regularly once a week. Catch me, please,” and Ellery received in his arms first a medical bag and then a panting old gentleman who was chiefly bones. “Well, well? What’s happened now? Speak up, man! That woman yelled bloody murder. And who, by the way, are you?”
“Miles Senter first, Doctor—his upstairs sitting room. Gunshot scalp wound. You’d better hurry.”
Dr. Grand looked incredulous. Snatching his bag, he scurried into the house.
Ellery followed the Senter-Grand wall toward the river. When he met the river wall he turned north and toed his way among the Senter flowerbeds. Two upper windows glared out of the dark mass on the other side of the garden; Ellery saw Nikki swoop across one of them like an agitated fly. Then his hand encountered the splintery side of a wooden structure, which interrupted the river wall apparently for some distance. Exploring it cautiously, he discovered that it was a long low shed, with its back to the garden and a flight of wooden steps along its north side that went down to the river. A boathouse... It struck him that a guilty man might find it irresistible.
Taking a grip on his slippery flashlight, and wishing wistfully that he were Dan’l Boone, Ellery began to edge down the steps. But the steps squeaked and groaned abominably, as he had known they would, so he jumped the rest of the way, scrambled around the corner of the boathouse, found a doorway, and went in sidewise to sweep the interior with his light and catch in its beam the frightened face of a young woman. There was no one else in the building, and it was stifling, so Ellery sat down on a coil of nylon rope and he asked, “Has anyone come this way in the last few minutes? Besides yourself, I mean?”