“You satisfied now?” demanded Inspector Queen, turning around. “Now where the devil did he go?”
“Miles Senter’s study,” said Nikki.
At this moment the study door opened and Ellery appeared.
“Senter’s definitely missing. You satisfied now?”
“That he’s definitely missing? Definitely.”
“Velie, general alarm for David Senter. Put it through and then let’s all go home and take a shower. I’m not coming back till he’s found, and that’s that.”
“Make it...” Ellery glanced at his wristwatch. “Make it seven or eight hours, Dad. Take some time at this hour to get the equipment here that I phoned for in your name... oh, say, noon.”
“Equipment? Noon?”
“You want David Senter, don’t you?”
“Certainly I want David Senter!”
“Noon.”
“Here?”
Ellery sat down on a settee, his knees apart and his palms supporting him, like an old lady who had been climbing stairs. “It’s the old arithmetic,” he said. “Two and two, no trick to it... A solid stone object weighing one hundred pounds is missing. A man is missing. And beside the house runs a river. Missing man, missing weight, deep water. David Senter was murdered and his body sunk in the East River, and as soon as the harbor police can get their diver and dragging apparatus here... Does anyone mind if I catch my forty?”
They fished David Senter out with twenty-five minutes to spare; and Inspector Queen, who had not gone home after all, stamped in to announce with bleary wrath that Miles Senter’s artist-brother had an artistic bullet-hole through his head and had had same, from all the superficial signs, for at least twelve hours.
“They’re still looking for the gun,” said the Inspector, glaring about Miles Senter’s bedroom, where everyone was congregated. “But we’ll get it, we’ll get it, and when we do—”
“I don’t think,” said Ellery, “we’ll have to wait that long. Mrs. Senter, wouldn’t you prefer a chair? The evidence of who murdered David and almost murdered you, Mr. Senter—the logical evidence—is all in; we merely have to assemble it. And by the way, Mr. Senter, are you sure you’re feeling well enough to go through this? It consists of four elements: the grains of gunpowder peppering the cotton glove which failed to be consumed in David’s fireplace; the little scraps of red cardboard clinging to the fireplace wall; the shot that was fired in the upper part of the house while we were coming up the stairs; and, of course, the date.”
“The date,” said Inspector Queen.
“The date?” said Nikki.
“That’s very nearly the best part of it,” Ellery said enthusiastically. “Summer became official as usual on June twenty-first, a week and a half ago, so the holiday David Senter meant to spend reproducing a Westport barn was obviously the Fourth of July, as it’s hardly necessary to point out. And putting an incipient Fourth of July holiday together with gunpowder grains, pieces of red cardboard, and a loud noise, you can scarcely avoid getting... a firecracker.
“Now it was midnight when we got here, Nikki,” said Ellery, “and I told you at 3 A.M. that the fire in the roof studio was about three hours old. So that noise we heard coming up the stairs on our arrival, Nikki, which we took to be a revolver shot, must have been a firecracker exploding in David Senter’s studio fireplace. And since there was only one explosion that we heard, you couldn’t have been shot at that time, Mr. Senter. You must have been shot a few minutes earlier.”
“Then why didn’t we hear the real shot?” Nikki demanded. She knew she looked like the wrath, her clothes felt leprous, and her friend Dorothy insisted on reminding her of something repulsive at Madame Tussaud’s. So there was a snap in her voice. “Everything was so quiet we’d certainly have heard it, even from the street.”
“The answer to that, I think,” said Inspector Queen grimly, “is coming this way right now. The gun, Velie? Wrapped up in a pillow.” And now he said, an amiable old gentleman: “All right, Sergeant. Wrap it up, and shut the door behind you.”
And there was nothing to be heard in that room but Sergeant Velie’s weighty tread and the life-cutting switch of the closing door. And the Inspector patted himself under the left arm, looking around.
“An explosion that was planned to be heard,” said Ellery pleasantly, “and a prior explosion that was planned not to be heard. What was achieved? A miracle. The firecracker going off was taken to be the revolver shot. A simple illusion designed to make us think you were being shot while we were coming up the stairs, Mr. Senter, when actually you’d been shot a few minutes before. A falsification of the time of the shooting which could have had only one purpose: to seem to give the shooter an alibi, an alibi for the false time, when the firecracker went off.
“And who had an alibi when the firecracker went off?” Ellery went on, smiling. “You, Dorothy Senter? No, you were alone in the boathouse. You, Mr. Senter—to be absurd? No, you were alone in your sitting room with a well-creased scalp. You, Dr. Grand—to be fantastic? No, even you were alone, dozing in your garden. And David Senter was also alone—alone at the bottom of the East River.
“So I’m afraid,” said Ellery, and now he was not smiling, “I’m afraid that leaves you, Hart, and by a curious coincidence you did have an alibi for the time when the firecracker went off. A very strong alibi, Hart; in fact, the strongest possible. You were walking up the stairs between Nikki Porter and me. An excellently planned bit of stagecraft.
“But as a technician I find you wanting. You had two tries at Miles Senter and you flubbed both. First you loosened the gargoyle waterspout and pushed it off the roof while Miles Senter was passing along the path below. You chose that method because his brother David’s studio was on the roof, and David, with his money motive, would be the natural suspect. When that didn’t work, you rather extended yourself. Yesterday you hid the waterspout and last night you shot David to death, weighted his body with the waterspout, and sank it in the river, thinking he would make the perfect scapegoat, since he would presumably never be found. Then you went to Miles Senter’s sitting room, had your chat, walked out, and immediately walked back in and shot him in the head through a muffling pillow—and did you witness that, Mrs. Senter? I think you did—and you left your heroine’s husband for dead, Hart, which was criminally careless of you. The rest was timing. You hurled the gun into the river from one of the windows, dashed up to the studio where you had a firecracker ready on a fuse, dropped the glove with which you’d handled everything into the fireplace, tossed a match on the prearranged fire which was to destroy all the evidence—and didn’t—and you hurried downstairs to meet me and Nikki at the gate and copper-rivet your alibi when the firecracker went off. Clever, Harry, clever; but a little on the intricate side, don’t you agree... post mortem? The hard ones are the simple ones.”
Thus Fire, and Water, in a case which aficionados say will become proverbial. Should time bear them out Ellery will be pleased, for he has always considered Marcus Tullius Cicero one of the soundest old earbenders in the business.
The Adventure of The Needle’s Eye
This being a tale of pirates and stolen treasure, it is a gratification to record that it all happened in that season of the year to which the moonstone and the poppy are traditionally dedicated. For the moonstone is a suprisingly moral object. To its lawful owner it brings nothing but good: Held in the mouth at the full of the moon, it reveals the future; it heats the lover and it cools the heated; it cures epilepsy; it fructifies trees; and so on. But rue and blight upon him who lays thievish hands on it, for then it invokes the black side of its nature and brings down upon the thief nothing but evil. Such exact justice is unarguably desirable in a story of piracy which, while boasting no moonstones—although there were buckets of other gems—did reach its apogee in Augustus Caesar’s month, which is the moonstone’s month. And the poppy springs from the blood of the slain, its scarlet blooms growing thickest on battlefields and in places of carnage. So it is a poetic duty to report that there is murder in this August tale, too.