Thorne said abruptly: “This is all beside the point.”
“No, no, it’s all very much to the point,” replied the fat man in a sad bass. “Now the canker annoying your friend, Mr. Queen — since it seems a shame to keep you on tenterhooks any longer — is roughly this: My half-brother Sylvester, God rest his troubled soul, was a miser. If he’d been able to take his gold with him to the grave — with any assurance that it would remain there — I’m sure he would have done so.”
“Gold?” asked Ellery, raising his brows.
“You may well titter, Mr. Queen. There was something mediaeval about Sylvester; you almost expected him to go about in a long black velvet gown muttering incantations in Latin. At any rate, unable to take his gold with him to the grave, he did the next best thing. He hid it.”
“Oh, lord,” said Ellery. “You’ll be pulling clanking ghosts out of your hat next.”
“Hid,” beamed Dr. Reinach, “the filthy lucre in the Black House.”
“And Miss Alice Mayhew?”
“Poor child, a victim of circumstances. Sylvester never thought of her until recently, when she wrote from London that her last maternal relative had died. Wrote to friend Thorne, he of the lean and hungry eye, who had been recommended by some friend as a trustworthy lawyer. As he is, as he is! You see, Alice didn’t even know if her father was alive, let alone where he was. Thorne, good Samaritan, located us, gave Alice’s exhaustive letters and photographs to Sylvester, and has acted as liaison officer ever since. And a downright circumspect one, too, by thunder!”
“This explanation is wholly unnecessary,” said the lawyer stiffly. “Mr. Queen knows—”
“Nothing,” smiled the fat man, “to judge by the attentiveness with which he’s been following my little tale. Let’s be intelligent about this, Thorne.” He turned to Ellery again, nodding very amiably. “Now, Mr. Queen, Sylvester clutched at the thought of his new-found daughter with the pertinacity of a drowning man clutching a life-preserver. I betray no secret when I say that my half-brother, in his paranoic dotage, suspected his own family — imagine! — of having evil designs on his fortune.”
“A monstrous slander, of course.”
“Neatly put, neatly put! Well, Sylvester told Thorne in my presence that he had long since converted his fortune into specie, that he’d hidden this gold somewhere in the house next door, and that he wouldn’t reveal the hiding-place to anyone but Alice, his daughter, who was to be his sole heir. You see?”
“I see,” said Ellery.
“He died before Alice’s arrival, unfortunately. Is it any wonder, Mr. Queen, that Thorne thinks dire things of us?”
“This is fantastic,” snapped Thorne, coloring. “Naturally, in the interests of my client, I couldn’t leave the premises unguarded with that mass of gold lying about loose somewhere—”
“Naturally not,” nodded the doctor.
“If I may intrude my still, small voice,” murmured Ellery, “isn’t this a battle of giants over a mouse? The possession of gold is a clear violation of the law in this country, and has been for several years. Even if you found it, wouldn’t the government confiscate it?”
“There’s a complicated legal situation, Queen,” said Thorne; “but one which cannot come into existence before the gold is found. Therefore my efforts to—”
“And successful efforts, too,” grinned Dr. Reinach. “Do you know, Mr. Queen, your friend has slept behind locked, barred doors, with an old cutlass in his hand — one of Sylvester’s prized mementoes of a grandfather who was in the Navy? It’s terribly amusing.”
“I don’t find it so,” said Thorne shortly. “If you insist on playing the buffoon—”
“And yet — to go back to this matter of your little suspicions, Thorne — have you analyzed the facts? “Whom do you suspect, my dear fellow? Your humble servant? I assure you that I am spiritually an ascetic—”
“An almighty fat one!” snarled Thorne.
“—and that money, per se, means nothing to me,” went on the doctor imperturbably. “My half-sister Sarah? An anile wreck living in a world of illusion, quite as antediluvian as Sylvester — they were twins, you know — who isn’t very long for this world. Then that leaves my estimable Milly and our saturnine young friend Nick. Milly? Absurd; she hasn’t had an idea, good or bad, for two decades. Nick? Ah, an outsider — we may have struck something there. Is it Nick you suspect, Thorne?” chuckled Dr. Reinach.
Keith got to his feet and glared down into the bland damp lunar countenance of the fat man. He seemed quite drunk. “You damned porker,” he said thickly.
Dr. Reinach kept smiling, but his little porcine eyes were wary. “Now, now, Nick,” he said in a soothing rumble.
It all happened very quickly. Keith lurched forward, snatched the heavy cut-glass brandy decanter, and swung it at the doctor’s head. Thorne cried out and took an instinctive forward step; but he might have spared himself the exertion. Dr. Reinach jerked his head back like a fat snake and the blow missed. The violent effort pivoted Keith’s body completely about; the decanter slipped from his fingers and flew into the fireplace, crashing to pieces. The fragments splattered all over the fireplace, strewing the hearth, too; the little brandy that remained in the bottle hissed into the fire, blazing with a blue flame.
“That decanter,” said Dr. Reinach angrily, “was almost a hundred and fifty years old!”
Keith stood still, his broad back to them. They could see his shoulders heaving.
Ellery sighed with the queerest feeling. The room was shimmering as in a dream, and the whole incident seemed unreal, like a scene in a play on a stage. Were they acting? Had the scene been carefully planned? But, if so, why? What earthly purpose could they have hoped to achieve by pretending to quarrel and come to blows? The sole result had been the wanton destruction of a lovely old decanter. It didn’t make sense.
“I think,” said Ellery, struggling to his feet, “that I shall go to bed before the Evil One comes down the chimney. Thank you for an altogether extraordinary evening, gentlemen. Coming, Thorne?”
He stumbled up the stairs, followed by the lawyer, who seemed as weary as he. They separated in the cold corridor without a word to stumble to their respective bedrooms. From below came a heavy silence.
It was only as he was throwing his trousers over the footrail of his bed that Ellery recalled hazily Thome’s whispered intention hours before to visit him that night and explain the whole fantastic business. He struggled into his dressing-gown and slippers and shuffled down the hall to Thome’s room. But the lawyer was already in bed, snoring stertorously. Ellery dragged himself back to his room and finished undressing. He knew he would have a head the next morning; he was a notoriously poor drinker. His brain spinning, he crawled between the blankets and fell asleep almost stertorously.
He opened his eyes after a tossing, tiring sleep with the uneasy conviction that something was wrong. For a moment he was aware only of the ache in his head and the fuzzy feel of his tongue; he did not remember where he was. Then, as his glance took in the faded wall-paper, the pallid patches of sunlight on the worn blue carpet, his trousers tumbled over the footrail where he had left them the night before, memory returned; and, shivering, he consulted his wrist-watch, which he had forgotten to take off on going to bed. It was five minutes to seven. He raised his head from the pillow in the frosty air of the bedroom; his nose was half-frozen. But he could detect nothing wrong; the sun looked brave if weak in his eyes; the room was quiet and exactly as he had seen it on retiring; the door was closed. He snuggled between the blankets again.