“Here are more silver ones, Ellery...”
“Those aren’t silver.” Ellery picked one up. “This is platinum, Nikki...”
“And look at those old coins! What’s this one?”
“What?”
“This coin!”
“Oh? El peso duro. A piece of eight.”
“Gosh...” Nikki suddenly thrust both hands into the chest.
And at this precise moment, through the young air of the island’s morning, there came a dull crack, like the faraway slam of a door, and quickly after—so quickly it sounded like an echo of the first—another.
Ellery vaulted across the hole and leaped onto the flat rock. “Nikki, those were gunshots—”
“Huh?” Nikki was still on a quarterdeck with her jewels. “But Ellery—the treasure! You can’t leave—” But Ellery was gone.
They found Eric Ericsson in a robe and slippers lying in the doorway of Captain Kidd’s roost, across the sill. He had tumbled head first into the empty room. In his right hand there was a .38 automatic pistol.
When they turned him over they saw a red hole in his forehead and red thickening fluid on the floor where the forehead had rested.
His body was still warm.
Ellery got up, and he said to the Hobbes-Watkinses and the marble-faced girl and the one-legged caretaker and Nikki, “We will go downstairs now and we will bar the tower door.” So they went downstairs quietly, and Ellery excused himself for a moment and disappeared in his room, and when he appeared again he had a police revolver in his hand. “Nikki, you and Inga will take the launch and go over to the mainland and notify the Coast Guard and the Suffolk County police; there’s no phone here. You won’t come back until someone in authority can come with you. You gentlemen will wait here with me—with me, that is, and my shooting iron.”
Late that day Ellery came downstairs from the tower room and conferred with the Coast Guard officer and the police captain from the mainland. Finally he said, “I appreciate that. It’s something I owe poor Ericsson,” and he waited until the people were brought in and seated before him.
The hearty bloat had gone out of Colonel Hobbes-Watkins; it was supplanted wholly by the muscular alertness Ellery had glimpsed the day before. Tony Hobbes-Watkins was very still, but he was no longer remotely languid. Inga was the palest projection of herself. Even Long John jiggled his peg nervously.
“Fifteen minutes or so after sunrise this morning,” Ellery began, “just about the time I was down at the beach opening the treasure chest, Eric Ericsson was climbing the stairs in this house to the tower room. He was in his robe and slippers, and he carried his .38 automatic, with a full clip. His bedroom is below the tower shaft, which acts as an amplifier; evidently he was awakened by some noise from the tower room and decided to investigate. He took a gun with him because, even in his own house, he was afraid to be without it.”
“I say—” began the Colonel furiously; but he did not say after all, he wiped the rolls on his neck.
“Someone was in the tower room. What was this person doing there—at dawn, in an empty room? There is only one thing of utility in that room—the peephole I punctured through the wall last night. The person Ericsson heard was watching me through the peephole. Watching me dig up the treasure.”
They stared at him.
“Ericsson came to the landing and flung open the door. The man at the peephole whirled. Maybe they talked for a little while; maybe Ericsson was put off his guard. His gun came down, and the man across the room whipped out a revolver and fired a .22 caliber bullet into Ericsson’s head, killing him instantly. But Ericsson’s automatic had come up again instinctively as his murderer drew, and it went off, too—a split second after the murderer’s. We know two shots were fired almost simultaneously because Miss Porter and I heard them, and because we found a .22 caliber bullet in Ericsson’s head and a .38 shell on the floor near Ericsson’s .38 automatic.”
And Ellery said clearly, “The murderer ran down the tower stairs after the shots, heard the others coming—you’d all been awakened by the shots and dashed out of your rooms at once, you’ve said—realized he was trapped, and thereupon did the only thing he could: he pretended that he, too, had been awakened by the shots and he ran back up the stairs with the rest of you. The gun he managed to dispose of before I got back to the house from the beach.
“One of you,” said Ellery, “was that murderer.
“Which one was it?”
There was no sound in the room at all.
“We found the empty shell of Ericsson’s discharged cartridge, as I say, near his body. He had fired once at his murderer, his automatic had ejected the shell, and the bullet had sped on its way.
“But here is the interesting fact: We haven’t found Ericsson’s bullet.”
Ellery leaned their way. “The tower room has been gone over all day by these officers and me. The bullet isn’t there. There is no sign of it or its passage anywhere in the room—floor, walls, ceiling. The windows remain intact. They weren’t open at the time of Ericsson’s shot; as you remarked yesterday, Inga, they’ve been stuck fast for generations; and when we tried to open them today without breaking something, we failed.
“Nor did Ericsson’s shot go wild. He was killed instantly, falling into the room head first; this means that when he fired, he was facing into the room. But just to be thorough, we went over the landing and the tower shaft, too. No bullet, no bullet mark, and no slightest opening through which the bullet might have passed.”
“The peephole!” Nikki said involuntarily.
“No. There is considerable thickness to the walls. Ericsson in the doorway was at an extremely acute angle to the peephole. So while the bullet conceivably might have passed through the opening of the hole inside the tower room, it would have to have lodged inside the wall, or at least left some sign of its passage if it went clear through. We’ve torn down part of the wall to get a look inside. There is no bullet and no mark of a bullet.
“So the extraordinary fact is that while Ericsson’s bullet must have struck something in that room, there is no sign of its having done so.
“Impossible? No.
“There is one logical explanation.”
And Ellery said, “The bullet must have struck the only thing in that room which left it—the murderer. One of you is concealing a bullet wound.”
Ellery turned to the silent officers. “Let’s have these three men stripped to the skin. And Nikki,” he added, “go you somewhere with Inga—yes, I said Inga! — and do likewise.”
And when the Colonel, raging, had been reduced to his fundamental pinkness, and his intent son stood similarly unclothed, and when what there was of Long John was grimly revealed also—and no wound was found on any of them, not so much as a scratch—Ellery merely blinked and faced the door through which Nikki had taken the murdered man’s niece, the heir to his fortune and the treasure.
And the men redressed quickly, as if time were at their heels.
And when Nikki came back with Inga the police captain asked, “Where is Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins’s wound, Miss Porter?”
“Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins,” replied Nikki, “has no wound.”
“No...?”
“Maybe,” said the Coast Guard officer awkwardly, “maybe you didn’t look—uh—”
“And maybe I did,” said Nikki with a sweet smile. “I work for the great Ellery Queen... you know?”
So now the two officers turned to look at the great Ellery Queen, but with no appreciation of his greatness at all.
And the Coast Guard officer said, “Well,” and the police captain from the mainland did not say even that but turned on his heel.