The Inspector stared at him, rose, and went to the window. He sighed at once. The sky above the treetops was a ruddy dark glow. He had quite forgotten the fire in the excitement of the evening.
The Inspector turned the shade of the lamp on the night table to direct more light upon the wounded lawyer. He gazed gloomily down upon the parchment of Xavier’s skin and then with another sigh returned to his armchair. He shifted it so that by merely a half-turn of his head he could see both the single door and the man on the bed. After a moment he thought of something, made a wry face, and took his service revolver from his hip pocket. He looked at it soberly for a moment and placed it in the right-hand pocket of his jacket
He slumped back in the chair in the half light and folded his hands on his flat stomach.
For more than an hour there were intermittent sounds — doors closing, people walking up the corridor, the murmur of low voices. Then silence, gradually, in a subsidence of dull familiar noises, which soon became so complete that the Inspector might have fancied himself a thousand miles from the nearest conscious human being.
He lay in the chair, relaxed, but alert as he had never been in his life. He realized with the penetration of a lifetime’s study of human desperation where the danger lay. A man was dying, and in the power of that feeble tongue lay the danger. No measure, no matter how rash, would be too much for a murderer... He half wished, as he sat there, that he might have the freedom now to steal into all those darkened rooms about him and surprise someone still awake, or crouching in the gloom. But he would not leave the dying man for an instant. A sudden qualm made him tighten his grip on the weapon in his pocket; then he rose and went to the windows. But access to the bedroom was impossible from that source. Reassured, he returned to his chair.
Time dragged. Nothing changed. The man on the bed lay still.
Once, long after, the little gray man thought he detected a sound from the corridor outside. It was almost, he thought as he sat up tingling in every fiber, as if someone had closed or opened a door. With the thought he sprang noiselessly from the chair, switched off the lamp on the night table, and in the darkness sped to the door. Revolver in hand, he turned the knob without sound, pulled quickly, leaped aside, and waited.
Nothing happened.
He closed the door softly, switched on the lamp again, and returned to his chair. He was not particularly surprised. Even trained nerves were prone to jangle in the black reaches of the night. The sound had probably existed only in his imagination, an echo of his own fears.
Nevertheless, because he was a practical man in all things, he did not put the revolver back into his pocket. Instead, he let it lie loosely in his lap, ready to be snatched up the split second after an alarm.
The night deepened without further sound or incident. His lids began to feel monstrously heavy and from time to time he shook himself awake. It was less hot now than it had been, but it was still stifling enough and his clothes stuck miserably to his body... He wondered what the hour was and dragged out his heavy gold watch.
It was twelve-thirty. He put the watch away, sighing.
Almost precisely at one — he consulted his watch again the instant after it occurred — his nerves were tingling again. But this time not from real or fancied sounds outside. This sound came from the bed a few feet away. It emanated from the dying man.
Jamming his watch back, the Inspector jumped up and bounded across the rug to the bed. Xavier’s left arm was stirring, and the sound was the thick burble he had heard hours before downstairs. There was even a movement of the head. The burble rose in volume, ending in a raucous cough. The Inspector thought the whole house must be aroused, it ripped out so harshly and loudly. He bent over Xavier, whose face was turned away from the light, and gently tugged until he worked his right arm under the man’s neck. With his left arm he managed to turn Xavier over without permitting the wounded back to touch the bed; so that finally, when he straightened, the recumbent figure lay on its left side, face to the light. The eyes were still closed, although the sounds continued.
Xavier was slowly regaining consciousness.
The Inspector hesitated. Should he wait, make the man talk? Then he remembered Dr. Holmes’s admonition, and the thought that delay might well deal the wounded man his death blow made him hurry to the chair, snatch up the revolver, and run to the door. He could not leave Xavier alone even for an instant, he thought quickly. No one was going to take advantage of him while he slipped out to summon the doctor. He would open the door, stick out his head, and yell for Holmes. If the others wakened, the hell with them.
He grasped the knob, turned it noisily, and pulled the door open. He thrust out his head and opened his mouth.
To Ellery it seemed that he was struggling upward along the black glassy side of an animate abyss, striving to keep from slipping back to the cauldron of fire raging below. He battered his hands and bruised his fingers on the hard smooth jeering walls, and in his head was an inferno that matched the blaze in intensity. His head began to puff, to swell, to burst. He was sliding, sliding... He awoke with a start, bathed in cold perspiration.
The room was dark and he fumbled on the night table for his wrist watch. By its luminous dial he saw that it was five minutes past two. He crept groaning out of bed, his body an aching mess of damp flesh and protesting muscles, and groped for his clothes.
The house was very still as he slipped out of his room and made his way up the corridor. The landing bulb was burning and to his blinking eyes everything seemed normal. All doors were shut.
He reached the end of the corridor and paused outside Xavier’s room. He had made no noise walking, the door was shut, and there was no reason to suppose that anyone, including his father, had heard him. The thought filled him with a sudden surge of alarm. Lord, what applied to him might very well have applied to someone else! Suppose the old gentleman...
But the old gentleman, as he knew from varied and pleasant experience, was quite capable of taking care of himself. And then there was the revolver, which already had—
Shaking aside his fears as childish, he opened the door and said softly: “El, dad. Don’t be alarmed.” There was no response. He pushed the door farther and then froze to the spot, his heart stopping.
The Inspector lay on the floor near the door, face down, the revolver a few inches from his motionless hand.
Dazedly he shifted his gaze to the bed. The drawer of the night table before it was open. Mark Xavier’s right hand dangled to the floor, clutching something. His body lay half out of the bed, head hanging horribly. What Ellery could see of the face sickened him — twisted features back in a grin to expose the teeth and oddly bluish gums.
The man was dead.
But he had not died of the festering bullet in his lung. Ellery divined that even before he glimpsed the evidence. The tortured face, as if Xavier had died in exquisite agony; significant. And significant, too, the empty vial that lay on the rug some feet from the bed, dropped there by a defiant hand.
Mark Xavier had been murdered.
Part IV
“I felt as if I was going crazy. Just plain crazy. I sat there and they stood over me and nobody said anything and all the while that damned bloody shirt lay there with the light on it and I could see his face even though he was a stiff in the Morgue. So I came through. I couldn’t stand it. I felt as if I was going crazy. I confessed.”
— A. F.’s Statement to the Press While Awaiting Execution at Sing Sing Prison, November 21, 19—