Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“When you’re not offered what you want, you grab it.” Her voice shut out himself and his misery. “Goodbye, Harry.”

“All right! But we needn’t be stagey. Let me drive you home.” She had turned her back and was already letting herself out of the flat. “Unless you’re afraid of being grabbed and murdered on the way,” he shouted after her.

That certainly was petty, he reflected. All right, so it was petty. And there would be some more pettiness tomorrow. If she thought she would still get Rose Cottage without even saying thank-you, she would find she had pulled the wrong string. He was not a puppet. Rose Cottage was inconsiderable as a property, and as a symbol it symbolized only — puppetry.

Before he went to bed he wrote an order for its demolition.

A man was behaving in an unusual manner with a cottage. A man had behaved in an unusual manner with a bell-rope. There was nothing to connect the two events — nothing except the mind of Detective Inspector Rason.

From the local contractor he heard the whole story of Rose Cottage, and he enjoyed every word of it. He interviewed various local persons including George Dobson, who told him the bicycle story and other things which were already in the dossier — events which he now re-interpreted by pinning them all on the bell-rope.

A week later he reported to Chief Inspector Karslake.

“Thaleham case. Remember that bell-rope? What does a sane man want with a bell-rope? He wants it to ring a bell. See what I mean, sir?”

“No,” said Karslake. “Do you?”

“Brendwright never agreed to deal. The old loony got hot about it and Finchmoor wanted to ring the bell hoping it would bring somebody to help cool him down — not knowing that the bell-rope was a dummy. Meaning, they quarreled like hell and in the end Finchmoor lassoed him with the bell-rope.”

“Maybe,” grunted Karslake. “Look — unless you’ve got a witness that Finchmoor did not dine at his club at 8:15 and then go back to his flat and stay there—”

“If I’d got that I’d have pulled him in. I wrote him a nice letter, asking him if he could drop in one day this week and tell me why he’s demolishing Rose Cottage. He’s downstairs now. If I may use your intercom I’ll tell ’em to show him into my room.”

“All right,” Karslake conceded, holding himself in, “but if you bring in any of that bell-rope bilge I shall break up the party.”

When Finchmoor was announced Rason admired his stance. Not the slightest trace of anxiety. Indeed, Harry felt no anxiety. He knew that, by the nature of the case, no new event could rivet the time of death to his movements.

Civilities were exchanged. “Mr. Finchmoor has kindly come along to clear up the mystery of Rose Cottage for us,” said Rason.

“It’s not very mysterious,” began Finchmoor. He outlined the facts, beginning with Mrs. Harbutt posting Brendwright’s letter enclosing the check for fifty pounds to start restoration. “When I found Miss Brendwright had lost interest I thought I’d clear the site for a modern house.”

Finchmoor’s self-satisfaction, thought Rason, made it easy to hit him.

“If Brendwright was alive when you left the house — you mustn’t mind my putting it like that, Mr. Finchmoor — why didn’t he write at once to cancel the order and save his fifty quid?” Rason added. “I mean, you tell us he had just made a deal with you which blotted him out from everything except the manor house. Looks as if he didn’t understand what he was doing.”

“He certainly did understand,” asserted Finchmoor. “He was quite clear about his legal position. I had brought all the papers in the case but he only glanced at one letter — he accepted the documents as read.”

“Then try it this way,” persisted Rason. “You expected a bit of an argument. But within a short time you clinched the deal. Weren’t you a bit surprised at your success?”

“I don’t know about that,” smiled Finchmoor. “I certainly expected it to take a bit longer.”

“Then why were you in such a mortal hurry, Mr. Finchmoor, to catch that 6:20 train?”

That told Finchmoor there was more in it than Rose Cottage.

“I hardly know, after all this time. I suppose it was in my mind that I would have to make a digest of our discussion and link it up with the documents — for my lawyers.”

“You would have missed that train but for George Dobson’s bike — you very nearly missed it with the bike. Dobson says you wobbled all over the road.”

“I hadn’t ridden one since I was a boy — but I did manage it.”

“We know that Mr. Finchmoor caught the 6:20,” put in Karslake.

“We do, sir,” beamed Rason. “We checked it by the time at which he dined at his club, didn’t we? But I’m still worried about all those legal documents, et cetera, which Brendwright did not read.”

“He didn’t need to read them, Mr. Rason,” said Finchmoor patiently. “He accepted my statements—”

“Yes, but I mean what did you do about ’em. When you were wobbling about on Dobson’s bike, were you balancing a big heavy deedbox on the handlebars?”

Good murderers don’t panic. Finchmoor’s boast now helped him to keep up appearances.

“I don’t remember.”

Rason kept up the pressure.

“Dobson remembers that you were carrying nothing. So does Hawkins, the stationmaster, who bundled you into the train. So — when you caught the 6:20, you had left your deedbox in the manor house.” Rason shuffled papers from the dossier, but it was only stage business. “The following morning you returned that deedbox to Safe Deposit — you said so yourself. Now, Mr. Finchmoor, how did you regain possession of your deedbox? Did you return that night in your car—”

Finchmoor was not listening. He was thinking about Lorna — and the color of truth...

Miss Millie had been his old schoolteacher, ’way back in the tenth grade, and now she had been brutally murdered... Mr. John was glad he was a tough cop.

I’m tough enough, though it’s not anything to brag about. It’s part of my job — like being a good typist for a secretary or liking people for a politician. I catch most of the dirty work, not just because I’m tough but because I look tough. That’s part of my natural equipment, too.

It doesn’t bother me. I can look into the mirror every morning and shave that ugly mug of mine — with the underslung jaw and the little eyes and the nose that got broken twice when I tried to do a little boxing in my younger days — without worrying that I’m not Tony Curtis. There’s a lot of satisfaction in knowing that you’re good at the work you do. My face and my big hands and my hulking shoulders are just as much a part of my equipment as the gun on my hip.

I do a lot of the interrogation. So I wasn’t surprised to get a call from the jail asking me to come down and question a suspect in the Miss Millie Burden killing. I was still out at the Burden house, watching the younger fellows go through the routines they learned at the F.B.I. school. The body was already gone by then, and there was really no use in my hanging around there any more.

But I did. I’d known Miss Millie for a long time. A small town like ours, you know everybody. Miss Millie had taught me in the tenth grade at school. She was a little sprite of a woman with a sharp kindly face, one of the toughest teachers in the school, the kind of tough teacher that you either like a lot or you hate the guts of. I’d always liked her. And now she had had her brains knocked out of her head all over her kitchen floor.

She lived alone. It was the big old house the Burdens had always lived in. They were all gone now but Miss Millie. She’d retired from teaching long since, of course, living on her social security and the little bit of Burden money that was still left — nobody knew how much or how little it was — and puttering around in her garden all day every day.