“Oh, grandfather!” said Bonnie, and she went to him and sat down on the bed. He sank back on the pillows, exhausted.
“He meant to kill me, then?” mumbled the old man.
“I think not, Mr. Stuart. I think — I know — he meant to let Nature take her course. You are an old man... Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.
“Now for element two — opportunity. How had Lew Bascom committed the murders at the airport? That took a bit of figuring.”
“That’s right, too,” said Alan Clark suddenly, from his position between Sam Vix and silent, grim Jacques Butcher. “Lew was with you and me last Sunday, Ellery, when this fake pilot made off with the plane. So Lew couldn’t possibly have been that pilot. I don’t understand.”
“True, Alan; he couldn’t have been the kidnapper of the plane. I saw that, if I could clear the kidnapper of complicity in the murder, I could pin the actual poisoning by a stringent process of elimination on Lew.
“Well, who was the kidnapper? One thing I knew beyond question, as you’ve just pointed out; whoever the kidnapper was, he wasn’t Lew.”
“How did you know,” asked Inspector Glücke, “that he mightn’t have been Bascom’s accomplice? That’s the way I would figure it.”
“No, he couldn’t have been Lew’s accomplice, either, Inspector. Paula Paris gave me the necessary information — the first of the two clues which I got through her.”
“The Paris woman? You mean she’s mixed up in this, too?”
“Lord, no! But Paula was tipped off to the kidnapping before it happened by some one who phoned her from the airport — she didn’t tell you that, but she told it to me. Who could have known of the kidnapping and phoned Paula before it took place? Only the person who planned, or was involved in the plan, to do it. But this person, in tipping off Paula, made no secret of his identity — she admitted that to me, although she wouldn’t for ethical reasons divulge the name.”
“The interfering little snoop!” snarled Glücke. “I’ll break her now. Suppressing evidence!”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” said Ellery. “Before we’re finished you’ll thank her, Glücke; if not for her this case would never have been solved.
“Now, if the kidnapper had been involved in the murders as Lew’s accomplice, would he have revealed his identity to a newspaperwoman, especially before the crime occurred? Absurd. And if he had been the criminal himself — not Lew — would he have revealed himself to Paula, putting himself in her power? Utterly incredible. No, indeed; his telephone call to her, his willingness to let her know who he was, indicated that he had no idea murder was about to occur, eliminated him either as the poisoner or as the poisoner’s accomplice; or even, for that matter, as a kidnapper.”
“This gets worse and worse,” groaned Glücke. “Say that again?”
“I’ll get around to it,” grinned Ellery. “For the moment let me push along on the Lew tack. I was satisfied that the kidnapper wasn’t involved in the murders in any way. That meant he didn’t poison the thermos bottles.
“If the kidnapper didn’t, who did? Well, who could have? The bottles were all right when the last round of cocktails was drunk before the plane — obvious from the fact that no one who drank, and many did, suffered any ill effects. Therefore the morphine-sodium allurate mixture must have been slipped into the bottle after the last round was poured.
“Exactly when? Well, it wasn’t done in the plane, because we’ve eliminated Jack, Blythe, and the kidnapper as the possible murderers, and they were the only three who entered the plane between the last round of drinks and the take-off. Then the bottles were poisoned before the hamper was stowed away in the plane, but after the last round. But after the last round I myself sat on that hamper, and I got up only to hand it to the kidnapper when he was stowing the luggage away in the plane.
“So you see,” murmured Ellery, “I arrived by sheer elimination to only one conceivable time and only one conceivable person. The bottles must have been poisoned between the time the last round was poured and the time I sat down on the hamper. Who suggested the last round? Lew Bascom. Who immediately after returned the bottles to the hamper? Lew Bascom. Therefore it must have been Lew Bascom who dropped the poison into the bottles, probably as he was screwing the caps back on after pouring the last round.”
The Inspector grunted a little crossly.
“So both elements — motive and opportunity — pointed to Lew as the only possible criminal. But what proof did I have that would satisfy a court? Absolutely none. I had achieved the truth through a process of reasoning; there was no confirmatory evidence. Therefore Lew had to be caught red-handed, trapped into giving himself away. Which occurred today.”
“But who the hell was the kidnapper?” asked Butch.
“I said, you’ll recall, that he wasn’t even that, really. Had the kidnapper seriously intended to spirit Jack and Blythe away by force, hold them for ransom, or whatever, would he have told a newspaperwoman first? Naturally not. So I saw that it wasn’t intended to be a real kidnapping at all. The wraith we were chasing had staged a fake kidnapping!”
“Fake?” shouted Glücke. “The hell you say! After we’ve worn our eyes out looking for him?”
“Of course, Inspector. For who would stage a kidnapping and inform a famous newspaper columnist about it in advance? Only some one who was interested in a news story, publicity. And who could have been interested in a publicity splash centering about Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart?” Ellery grinned. “Come on, Sam; talk. You’re caught with the goods.”
Vix grew very pale. He gulped, his one eye rolling wildly, looking for an avenue of escape.
The Inspector gasped: “You? Why, you ornery, one-eyed baboon—”
“Peace,” sighed Ellery. “Who can quell the instincts of the buzzard or the dyed-in-the-wool publicity man? It was the opportunity of a lifetime, wasn’t it, Sam?”
“Yeah,” said Vix with difficulty.
“The marriage of two world-famous figures, the gigantic splash of that airport send-off... why, if those two were thought to be kidnapped, the Magna picture Butch was going to make would get a million dollars’ worth of publicity.”
“A million dollars’ worth of misery to me, as it turned out,” groaned Vix. “It was to be a surprise; I didn’t even tell Butch. I figured I’d let on to Jack and Blythe once we were safely away, and then we’d hide out somewhere for a few days. They wanted a little peace and quiet, anyway... Oh, nuts. When I turned around and saw those two dead, my stomach turned over. I knew I was in the worst kind of jam. If I gave myself up and told the truth, nobody’d believe me, certainly not a one-cylinder flattie like Glücke. I could see myself tagged for a twin killing and going out by the aerial route, kicking. What could I do? I set the plane down on the first flat place I could find and took it on the lam.”
“You,” said Inspector Glücke venomously, “are going up on charges. I’ll give you publicity!”
“Take it easy, Inspector,” growled Jacques Butcher. “Why make the studio suffer? It was a dumb stunt, but Sam can’t be considered in any way responsible for what happened; if there’d been no murder there wouldn’t have been any harm done. He’ll take his rap in the papers, anyway; and you’ve got your man.”
“Not only have you got your man,” said Ellery pleasantly, “but if you’re a good doggie, Glücke, maybe I’ll give you something else.”
“Isn’t this nightmare over yet?” Glücke threw up his hands.
“Well, what forced Lew to change his plans?” asked Ellery. “What forced him to kill not only Blythe, but Jack Royle? What happened between the inauguration of his playing-card threats against Blythe and the day of the murder?