“No,” Ellen said, “but we’ve found this. Maybe it’ll tell you something.”
Ellery took the sheet of paper. It was a bill of sale for the wall safe.
“Dated nine years ago.” He pinched his nose, which was itching. “Must have been ordered just after he got back from that trip to the Orient you told me about, when he acquired the Imperial Pendant. Especially ordered, then, to be the repository of the pendant. Invoice tallies — same name and address of manufacturer; terse description, ‘Wall safe per order.’ ”
“That’s it,” said Christopher. “No doubt about it.”
“Is it important, Mr. Queen?” asked Jo, in spite of herself.
“It could be mighty important, Miss Caswell. While I have fiddled and burned, you may have discovered a treasure.”
“Then you have better eyes than I,” said Ellen. “Anyway, where do we go from here?”
“Patience, Mrs. Nash. Chris, I want you to take a trip to New Haven. Check out the safe company and learn everything you can about this particular model — details of the original order, any special instructions accompanying the order — and, yes, check the price, which seems very high to me. Also, the Vulcan Company may have the combination on file, which would simplify matters. If they don’t, hire one of their experts to come back with you, in case we have to force the safe.
“Meanwhile, you girls keep searching for a record of the combination. Cover every room in the house. Not excluding the greenhouse.”
January 11
Christopher’s return taxi from the Wrightsville airport produced a clamor. Jo flew into the foyer from the direction of the kitchen, followed by Mum; Ellen descended from upstairs in jumps. Ellery, a lonely stag, was meandering among the red spruce and birch outside; and Joanne, booted and mackinawed, was dispatched to fetch him.
Assembled in the drawing room, they saw from Christopher’s expression that he was no courier of good news.
“Briefly,” Christopher told them, “the Vulcan Safe and Lock Company, Inc. no longer exists. The plant and all its files were destroyed by a fire in 1958. The firm never went back into business. Fellow sufferers, I return to your bosoms with nothing — not a clue, not a record of anything connected with the purchase of the safe.”
“The high price,” Ellery asked, frowning. “Did you remember to check the price?”
“Right. I did. And you were. Right, I mean. The price father paid was just about twice what safes of similar size and type were bringing the year he ordered it. It’s funny that father would let himself be skinned that way. He may have been careless about his lawyer, but he was a good enough businessman, after all, to have made millions in packaged seeds before he went chrysanthemum-happy.”
“There was nothing wrong with your father’s business sense, Chris,” said Ellery. “Nothing at all.” And his eyes promptly went into hiding.
Ellen, who held a more cynical view of her late sire, was clearly of the opinion that the father’s simplicity had been passed on to his son. “Didn’t you at least bring back a safe expert to open the bloody thing?”
“No, but I got in touch with another New Haven safe outfit, and they’ll send a man up as soon as I phone them.”
“Then do it. Put through a trunk call right now. What kind of fool are you?”
Christopher’s ears had turned a lovely magenta. “And you, sister mine, you’re a greedy little devil. You’re so hot to lay your hands on that pendant that you’ve lost the few decent instincts you used to have. You’ve waited this long, can’t you wait another couple of days? Father’s hardly settled in his grave.”
“Please,” murmured Mum.
“Please!” cried Jo.
His reflections disturbed by the sibling colloquy, Ellery roused himself. “It may not be necessary to call in anybody. Your father left a dying message — MUM. Chief Newby is positive that Godfrey was leaving a clue to his killer’s identity — Mum Caswell here. But if Godfrey meant to identify his murderer, why did he choose to write MUM? MUM can mean a great many different things, which I shan’t go into now; but, as an identification, it’s an ambiguity. Had he wanted to accuse Mrs. Caswell, he could simply have written down her initials, MC. If he’d meant to accuse Joanne or Mr. Thorp — JC or WT. One of his children? ‘Son’ or ‘daughter’— or their initials. Any one of which would have been specific and unmistakable.
“I choose to proceed, then,” Ellery went on, “on the assumption that Godfrey, in writing MUM, did not mean his killer.
“Now. What had he promised to leave for you? The combination of the safe containing the only considerable asset in his estate. So his dying message may have been meant to be the safe combination. If so, the theory can be tested.”
Going to the painting, he pushed it aside. Entranced, they trooped after him.
“Study this dial for a moment,” Ellery said. “What do you see? Twenty-six numbered notches. And what does twenty-six suggest? The number of letters in the alphabet!
“So let’s translate M-U-M into numbers. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, U the twenty-first. Safe combination: 13-21-13. Now first we twirl the dial a few revolutions — to clear the action, so to speak. Then we turn to 13 and set it directly under the alignment notch — there. Next we turn the dial to the right — we’ll try that direction first — and align the 21. And now to the left — usually the directions alternate — back to 13.”
Ellery paused. The crucial instant was at hand. There was no movement behind him, not even a breath.
He took hold of the knob and pulled, gently.
The thick, heavy door of the safe swung open.
A shout of triumph went up — and died as if guillotined.
The safe was empty. Utterly. No pendant, no jewel box, not even a scrap of paper.
Later that day, true to his commitment, Ellery visited Anse Newby at police headquarters and reported the opening of the safe, including its emptiness.
“So what have you accomplished?” the Chief growled. “Somebody killed the old man, opened the safe, swiped the pendant. That doesn’t knock my theory over. It just gives us the motive.”
“You think so?” Ellery squeezed his lower lip. “I don’t. According to everyone’s testimony, Godfrey told them he was the only one who knew the combination. Did one of them figure out the M-U-M combination before I did and beat me to the safe? Possible, but I consider it unlikely, if you’ll pardon the self-puff. It takes experienced follow-through thinking to make the jump from M-U-M to 13-21-13.”
“All right, try this,” argued Newby. “Somebody sneaked downstairs in the middle of that night and got lucky.”
“I don’t believe in that sort of luck. Anyway, it would call on one of them to be a mighty good actor.”
“One of them is an actor.”
“But, I gather, not a good one.” “Or maybe she—”
“Let’s keep it a neutral ‘he’.”
“—maybe he forced old Godfrey to tell him the combination before sinking the knife into him.”
“Even less likely. Everyone knew that Godfrey’s paralysis included his speaking apparatus, which even in a good recovery is usually the last to come back, if it comes back at all. Certainly no one could bank on the old man’s being able to talk suddenly. Did the killer order Godfrey to write the combination down, under threat of the knife? Even so, Godfrey would have been a fool to do it; his daughter notwithstanding, he seems to have been very far from a fool. He’d have known he was a goner the moment he wrote it.
“I’ll admit,” scowled Ellery, “that all these unlikelihoods don’t make for exclusive conclusions. But they do accumulate a certain mass, and the weight of them convinces me that the killer put Mumford out of his misery simply to hurry up the inheritance of the pendant, not to steal it; that the killer then left, and Mumford wrote M-U-M on his own.”