“My dear Queen.”
“At least not yet, Mr. Humffrey.”
Humffrey settled back. “I suppose I should hear this fairy tale out.”
“You followed Connie Coy home, you took up a position on a roof overlooking her top-floor apartment, and when you saw me pumping her you aimed at a point midway between her eyes with a gun you were carrying, and you shot her dead.
“Don’t interrupt me now,” the old man said softly. “Finner was killed because he had the file on the case and knew who the baby’s parents were. Connie Coy was killed because, as the mother of the baby, she certainly knew the identity of its father. The only one who benefits by destroying those papers and shutting Finner’s and the real mother’s mouth, Mr. Humffrey, is the baby’s real father.
“You’ve committed two cold-blooded murders to keep your wife, her relatives, your blue-nosed friends, me, Jessie Sherwood, from finding out that you’d adopted, not a stranger’s child, but a child you yourself fathered in a cheap affair with a nightclub entertainer.”
Humffrey opened a side drawer of his desk.
Jessie’s heart gave a wicked jump.
As for the old man, his hand flashed up to hover over the middle button of his jacket.
But when the millionaire leaned back, Jessie saw that he had merely reached for a box of cigars.
“Do you mind, Miss Sherwood? I rarely smoke — only, in fact, when I’m in danger of losing my temper.” He lit a cigar with a platinum desk lighter and looked at Richard Queen with a mineral brightness. “This has gone beyond simple senility, Mr. Queen. You’re a dangerous lunatic. You claim that I not only committed two atrocious murders, but that I did so in order to conceal from the world that I was the blood-father of the unfortunate little boy I adopted. I can’t imagine your laying any other heinous crimes at my door, but from the beginning you and Miss Sherwood have insisted Michael was murdered. How does your diseased mind reconcile his alleged murder with my subsequent crimes? Did I murder my own child, too?”
“I think you got the idea when your nephew made that drunken, senseless attempt to break into the baby’s nursery the night of July 4th,” the Inspector said quietly. “What you couldn’t have known, of course, was that Frost would suffer an appendix attack and have to have an emergency operation — an ironbound alibi — for the very night you picked. I think you murdered Michael, Mr. Humffrey, yes. I think you selected a night when you knew Miss Sherwood would be off. I think that after your wife fell asleep you deliberately suffocated the baby, and that in the confusion after Miss Sherwood’s arrival to find the baby dead you noticed the pillowslip in the crib with its telltale handprint that indicated murder, and disposed of it. And from that moment on, of course, you kept insisting that Jessie Sherwood had been seeing things and that the baby’s death was an unfortunate nursery accident. Yes, Mr. Humffrey, that’s exactly what I think.”
“Making me out a monster with few precedents.” Humffrey’s nasal tones crackled. “Because only a monster murders his own flesh and blood — eh, Mr. Queen?”
“If he does it believing it is his own flesh and blood.”
“I beg your pardon?” The millionaire sounded amazed.
“When you found out that Connie Coy was pregnant and arranged through Finner to adopt the baby without her knowledge when it was born, Mr. Humffrey, you did it because you wanted possession of your own child. But suppose after you arranged for the secret purchase of your baby, with a forged birth certificate, with Finner paid off, with Connie Coy not knowing you had the baby and your wife not knowing the baby was yours — suppose after all this, Mr. Humffrey, you suddenly began to suspect you’d been made a fool of? That you’d gone to all that trouble and skulduggery to pass your name on to a baby that wasn’t yours at all!”
Humffrey was quite still.
“A woman who’d had an affair with one man might have had affairs with a dozen, you told yourself. Suppose you even checked back and found that the Coy girl had been sleeping around with other men at the same time you were her lover? You being what you are — a proud, arrogant man with an exaggerated sense of family and social position — your love for the child you’d thought was yours might well have turned to hate. And so one night you murdered him.”
The cigar had gone out. Humffrey was very pale.
“Get out,” he said thickly. “No, wait. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to spell out for me just what further incredible flights of your fancy, Mr. Queen, I must protect myself against. According to you, I fathered that child in a sordid affair, I murdered the child, I murdered Finner, I murdered the child’s mother. Against these insanities you have adduced just two alleged pieces of evidence — that I hired a private detective to follow you two for a week, which I have explained, and that I was seen in Grand Central Terminal last Monday watching for Chicago trains, which I deny. What else have you?”
“You were in the Nair Island house on the night of the baby’s murder.”
“I was in the Nair Island house on the night of the baby’s accidental death,” the millionaire said coolly. “A coroner’s jury supports my version of the slight difference in our phraseology. What else?”
“You had the strongest motive of anyone in the world to remove the folder marked ‘Humffrey’ from Finner’s filing cabinet and destroy it.”
“I cannot grant even the existence of such a folder,” Humffrey smiled. “Can you prove it? What else?”
“You have no alibi for the afternoon of Finner’s murder.”
“You state an assumption as a fact. But even if your assumption were a fact — neither have ten thousand other men. What else, Mr. Queen?”
“You have no alibi for the evening of Connie Coy’s murder.”
“I can only repeat my previous comment. Anything else?”
“Well, we’re working on you,” the old man drawled. “A whole group of us.”
“A whole group?” Humffrey pushed his chair back.
“Oh, yes. I’ve recruited a force of men like myself, Mr. Humffrey, retired police officers who’ve become very interested in this case. So, you see, it wouldn’t do you the least good to kill Miss Sherwood and me, as you tried to do Monday night. Those men know the whole story... and you don’t know who they are. Come, Jessie.”
All Jessie could think of was that her back was to him; she could almost hear the blast of doom exploding behind her as she went to the door. But nothing happened. Alton Humffrey simply sat in the baronial chair at his desk, thinking.
“One moment.” The millionaire came slowly around the desk toward them.
Richard Queen moved over to block the doorway. Humffrey stopped a few feet away, so close Jessie could smell the after-shave lotion on his gaunt cheeks.
“After reflection, Mr. Queen,” he said good-humoredly, “I must conclude that you and your aging cronies have exactly nothing.”
“Then you’ve got exactly nothing to worry about, Mr. Humffrey.”
“We’re in a sort of stalemate, aren’t we? I won’t go to the police to make you stop annoying me, because I prefer being annoyed in private rather than in public. You won’t go to the police with your fantastic story, because your activities could land you in jail. It looks as if you and I are going to have to grin and bear each other. By the way, that is a gun you’re carrying under your left armpit, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the old man said, showing his denture for a moment. “And I imagine you have a permit for the gun you decided not to take out of that drawer a few minutes ago.”
“Now your imagination is back within bounds, Mr. Queen,” the millionaire smiled.
“He pointed a gun at me once, Richard,” Jessie said in a piping voice. “The night I came back from New York to find the baby dead. Even after I identified myself he kept pointing it at me. For a minute I thought he was going to shoot me.”