“Double drinks, Mr. Bascom?”
“Bring the bottle, for gossakes. Can’t you see I got a sucker? The fifteen-year Monnet.”
The waiter grinned and padded away.
“Let’s see,” murmured Ellery, “what the last letter in Mr. Smith’s kitbag had to say. The one that hadn’t yet been mailed.”
He ripped off one end of the sealed envelope and squeezed. A blue-backed playing-card dropped out.
The card was the ace of spades.
It was unnecessary to refer to the code sheet Ellery had found in John Royle’s dressing-room.
All the world and his wife and children knew the cartomantic significance of the ace of spades.
“Death,” said Ty nervously. “That’s... But it came — I mean it was scheduled to come— She was killed before it came.”
“Exactly the point,” said Ellery, fingering the card.
“You and your points,” snorted Lew. “How about tipping your mitt for a change?”
Ellery sat gazing at the card, and the envelope, and the memorandum slip attached to the envelope.
“One thing is sure,” said Ty, his face screwed up. “It’s the baldest kind of frame-up. Somebody had it in for Blythe and framed dad for the crime. Dad’s feud with Blythe furnished an ideal background for a frame-up, gave him a motive. And anybody could have got to that typewriter of dad’s.”
“Eh?” said Ellery absently.
“It’s true the date on this ‘Smith’s’ note — twenty-seventh of last month — ought to give us a clue to where the note was typed; I mean as between the dressing-room on the lot and our house. But, damn it, dad was always lugging the machine from one place to the other. I can’t remember in which place it was before the twenty-seventh.”
“Why did he have a typewriter, Ty?”
“To answer fan mail. He despised secretaries and liked to correspond personally with the writers of the more interesting letters he received. Hobby of his. He wouldn’t let the studio handle it at all. As a matter of fact, I do the same thing.”
“You say any one could have used his machine?”
“The whole population of Hollywood,” groaned Ty. “You know what our house was like, Lew, when dad was alive — a club for every hooch-hound in town.”
“Am I supposed to take that personally?” chuckled Lew.
“And dad’s dressing-room was a hangout for everybody on the lot. He was framed, all right — by some one who got hold of the typewriter either in the house or on the lot.” He scowled. “Somebody? It could have been anybody!”
“But what I can’t understand,” said Lew, “is why this palooka Smith planned for two letters to be mailed to Blythe after she died. That in itself would screw up a frame against Jack, because Jack was knocked off, too; and dead men send no mail. And if Jack was meant to be framed, why was he murdered? It don’t make sense.”
“That,” said Ty between his teeth, “is what I’d like to know.”
“I believe,” murmured Ellery, “we’ll get along better if we take this problem scientifically. That alternate inference I mentioned this morning, by the way, was arrived at by mere common sense. On the assumption that the writer of those addresses was sane, not a crank, it was evident that the only sane reason ascribable to the fact that a letter was mailed to Blythe after Blythe’s death was... that the writer had no control over the source of mailing.”
“I see,” said Ty slowly. “That’s what made you think of a mailing service.”
“Precisely. I stopped in at the post-office on the off-chance that the writer may have arranged to have the letters mailed directly by the postmaster. But of course that was a far-fetched possibility. The only other one was an organization which made a business of mailing letters for people.”
“But if Smith murdered Blythe and dad, why didn’t he try to get the last two letters back from that outfit around the corner before they were mailed? Lucey said himself there’s been no such attempt.”
“And lay himself wide open to future identification?” jeered Lew. “Act your age, younker.”
The waiter arrived bearing a bottle of brandy, a siphon, and three glasses. Lew rubbed his hands and seized the bottle.
“Of course,” said Ellery, “that’s perfectly true.”
“As a matter of fact, why those last two letters at all?”
Ellery leaned back, clutching the glass Lew had filled. “An important question, with an important answer. Have you noticed the date, you two, on which our friend Smith intended this last letter to be mailed — the envelope bearing the unfriendly ace of spades?”
Lew looked over his glass. Ty merely looked. The date typed on the memorandum slip clipped to the envelope containing the ace of spades was “Thursday the 28th.”
“I don’t see the point,” said Ty, frowning.
“Simple enough. What were the two cards mailed in one envelope to Blythe on Thursday the fourteenth — the envelope that arrived on Friday the fifteenth, two days before the murder?”
“I don’t recall.”
“The ten of spades and the deuce of clubs, meaning together: ‘Great trouble in two days or two weeks.’ The fact that the murders did actually occur two days after the receipt of that message was a mere coincidence. For what do we find now?” He tapped the card and envelope before him. “The ace of spades in this unmailed envelope, meaning ‘Death,’ is clearly marked for mailing on Thursday the twenty-eighth, or receipt by Blythe on Friday the twenty-ninth. So the murder of Blythe was obviously planned to occur not earlier than the twenty-ninth; or in other words she was scheduled to die, not two days, but two weeks after the Friday-the-fifteenth warning of ‘Great Trouble.’”
“A week from today,” growled Ty. “If he hadn’t changed his plans, Blythe would still be alive. And dad, too.”
“Exactly the point. For what was the murderer’s original plan? To murder Blythe — Blythe alone. Corroboration? The fact that the playing-cards were sent only to Blythe, that the ace of spades was meant to go, as you can see by the address on the envelope, only to Blythe. Also the plan included a frame-up of Jack for the murder of Blythe when it should occur — witness the use of Jack’s typewriter in the typing of the code-sheet, the planting of the code-sheet in his dressing-room.”
“Well?”
“But what actually happened? Blythe was murdered, all right — but not alone. Jack was murdered, too. What made the murderer change his plans? What made him murder not only Blythe, as originally planned, but Jack as well — the very man scheduled to take the rap for that murder?”
They were both silent, frowning back at him.
“That, as I see it, is the most significant question arising out of the whole chain of events. Answer that question and I believe you’ll be well on the road to an answer to everything.”
“Yeah, answer it,” muttered Lew into his brandy. “I still say it’s baloney.”
“But what I don’t understand,” protested Ty, “is why the date was advanced. Why did Smith hurry up his crime? It seems to me he could have waited until the ace of spades was delivered and then murdered the two of them. But he didn’t. He abandoned his own time-schedule, the whole elaborate machinery of the letters which he had set up. Why?”
“Opportunity,” said Ellery succinctly. “It’s more difficult, you know, to contrive the killing of two people than of one. And the honeymoon jaunt in your plane gave Smith an opportunity to kill both Blythe and Jack which he simply couldn’t pass up.”
“As the situation stands, then, the frame-up against dad is a flop and the murderer knows it.”
“But there’s nothing he can do about that except make an effort to get back the letters and the code list, and particularly his own telltale note in the files of the mailing company. As Lew suggested, he probably figured the relative risks involved and chose not to make the attempt.”