“I wanted action,” said Ellery. “Nikki, look at those stars...”
“I’ve had all the action I want for one night,” said Nikki, dropping into the bamboo chair. “Yes, and romance, too. I finally got Dorothy to sleep with a pill Dr. Grand gave me, and I didn’t neglect to tell Mr. Hart a thing or two, either. I know his type. Plays golf like a professional—and women—and the stock market like a yokel. Do you suppose New York will ever stop cooking?”
“It looks,” said Ellery intently, “as if it’s only just begun.” He pointed. “The stars, Nikki, the stars.”
“What stars?” Nikki sighted along his ghostly arm. “Oh, I’m in no condition for games!”
“Nor I.” Ellery was still squinting obliquely skyward. “But this game has its points. I was lying here simmering away, waiting for you and wondering how a man who was merely going to Westport could disappear as thoroughly as David Senter seems to have done, when I began to realize there was something new under the moon. Nikki, look at the roof... Over there. Above the... the apse, I suppose you’d call it. That penthouse thing.”
“That’s David Senter’s studio,” said Nikki. “What’s come over you?”
“See his chimney?”
“Of course I see his chimney.”
“What’s hovering over it?”
“A... sort of haze, it looks like.”
“It’s smoke.”
“Well, of all things,” sniffed Nikki. “What should come out of a chimney?”
“Not smoke, Nikki. Definitely not smoke, when we’re a week and a half into what can be described with perfect decorum as a hell of a summer, the hour is almost 3 A.M., and the thermometer sticks at ninety-one. Or are you sitting there gasping like a television wrestler because you find my proximity overpowering?” Ellery rose from the bamboo chaise, still craning. “Nikki, someone’s been playing with fire up there and I’m feeling just deep-fried enough to want to know why. Coming along?”
“Yes,” said Nikki. “Maybe it’s cooler on the roof.”
A few minutes later Ellery was on his hands and knees on David Senter’s hearth, inspecting the smoldering remains of a fireplace fire with the jerky fixity of an aroused hound. The studio, which was in Byronic disorder, was otherwise dedicated to thermal science and Gabriel Fahrenheit; but Ellery’s perspiration hissed onto the grate unnoticed in the profounder concerns absorbing him. Nikki, hung up in the doorway, thought she could see him dwindling by the inch. The roof was not cooler, Nikki had learned; it was merely less infernal than the studio, whose door and windows they had found shut.
“Who the devil would start a fire in this heat?” moaned Nikki. “Or rather, who but the devil?”
“Exactly,” said Ellery, turning his nose this way and that. “Therefore heat wasn’t the desideratum. Leaving combustion. Leaving ashes. And the ashes tell me this curious conflagration,” said Ellery, “was set in motion around three hours ago. It was green wood and slow-burning. Also, the damper is partially closed—”
“What,” said Nikki wearily, “no Trichinopoly cigars?”
“No,” said Ellery, his tone glinting like his skin, “but there’s this,” and he held up what Nikki thought for a horrified instant was a severed, charred human hand. But it was only a thick white cotton glove, one of those sexless mitts which are purchasable at the gardening counter of any emporium. It was singed, soot-streaked, and spattered with mysterious-looking black specks, and immediately upon relieving Nikki it depressed her. For it sustained the crime story of the long night and made the unspeakable fire not merely devilish but, what was possibly worse, irrelevant. And when Ellery tasted several of the black specks, savored them like a gourmet, and pronounced them grains of gunpowder, Nikki nodded gloomily.
“Then that’s the glove he wore when he shot his brother. Had a fire laid, ran up here, tossed the glove on it, and a match, and got away while we were finding Miles. Trust an artist to be inefficient. The least he could have done was make sure it burned up.”
“He was in a hurry.” Ellery replaced the burned glove meticulously. “He was also unlucky. Look there, Nikki.”
Nikki looked. But all she could see were some tiny red scraps of paper or cardboard, clinging like confetti to one of the side walls of the fireplace.
“What are they?”
“Unholy relics, Nikki. A rather perverted miracle. Stay here a minute, will you? I’ll send Dad up. Some fur’s going to fly around here. The roof’s supposed to have been searched.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be in the garden,” said Ellery, and he went out so quickly Nikki had no time to assure him that she wasn’t going to stay upon the roof alone and he could put that in David Senter’s fireplace and smoke it. As it was, she had to stay until the Inspector appeared, roaring, and then she left quickly, too, with her hands over her ears.
She found Ellery at the northeast corner of the mansion, prodding the path and nearby shrubbery with the beam of his flashlight, like a man who has lost something.
“Where is it, Nikki?” Ellery demanded without looking around.
“Where is what?”
“The waterspout. That gargoyle that almost conked Miles Senter.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” said Nikki crossly. “How should I know?”
“Wasn’t it here that it fell?”
Nikki recognized a certain urgency in the casual Queen manner. It certainly wasn’t there. “It was right here on the path last time I saw it. Night before last. See? Where the flags are chipped?”
“I see where the flags are chipped,” said Ellery, suddenly austere, and he went back into the house.
The next hour bubbled. Ellery went about demanding the waterspout, waking people up, whipping them to feats of memory and muscle, and generally making himself unpopular. Why he was so bent on locating an object which, after all, had failed to be lethal he chose not to explain, and the victims of his inquisition went about muttering while they searched. Harry Hart was roused, Dorothy Senter was slapped awake, Dr. Grand was routed from his aged bed next door; not even Miles Senter was spared, although his questioning was executed with tactful dispatch. In the end, the waterspout was not found, although the house was gone over from cellar to roof and the grounds inch by inch. Nor could anyone remember having seen it since late afternoon of the day before, when the butler had stumbled over it on the spot in the path where it had crashed the night previous and, being the butler and not the gardener, had merely cursed and gone about his business. The gardener, a hickory-necked Irishman with the succinct philosophy of his profession, merely said, “Nobody told me to take the dom thing away,” and went back to bed.
So there it was, or rather wasn’t, as Inspector Queen said, and what difference its presence or absence made—
“Except that it’s absent,” said Ellery absently.
“All right, Ellery. So whoever tried to knock Senter’s brains out took the dom, the damn thing away because somehow it left a clue to his identity—”
“His fingerprints,” said Nikki with a flicker of life.
“On stone, Nikki? And anyway, if that was it, why didn’t he just wipe it off? And anyway, if he used a glove once he’d use it twice, and that reminds me of something a lot more important than missing angels, which is missing brothers who try to burn up evidence in fireplaces. Velie!” shouted the Inspector.
Sergeant Velie came wearily, drying his vast face with a crib-sized handkerchief.
“What did you find out?”
“From the Westport police nothin’ except a couple of new cuss words. They swear there’s no evidence he’s been to his shack in a month. Anyway, he ain’t in Westport. The N.Y.N.H. and H. trains stopping at Westport that left New York beginning last night can’t remember anyone of his description. The New Haven ticket sellers at Grand Central can’t remember ditto. Our taxi investigation—”