Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“No. I’m finished here. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we had to intrude this way.”

“Not at all. Under the circumstances, as you said, there was nothing else you could do.”

“You’re gracious to say so. Goodbye, Mrs. Dearly.”

“Goodbye, Lieutenant. Please find your own way out.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He looked thin and worn, almost ravaged, in his wilted seersucker. His right hand moved again in that hesitant gesture as he turned and went out of the room.

Standing quite still, listening, Mrs. Dearly heard his steps receding in the hall, then the front door closing behind him. She continued to stand there, listening intently. She had heard the movements of the police car and the Jaguar in the drive, and now, after several minutes, she heard the police car in the street, its engine starting and the swiftly diminishing sound of it as it sped away.

The silence of the house gathered around her, and she turned in silence and went through the hall into the kitchen and downstairs from the kitchen into the basement. She walked directly to the wall to her left, the wall toward the side yard where the power mower stood at rest between the clipped and shaggy grass; and she was just reaching overhead for the circular handle of a valve when someone spoke behind her.

“I don’t believe I’d do that if I were you, Mrs. Dearly,” the voice said.

How strange it was! she thought afterward. Following the first moment of terror, when her breath stopped and her heart withered, she was immediately calm and lucid and without any fear whatever. She thought clearly before turning around that Douglas must surely be kept a secret now, however difficult it might be, for he would be considered a motive at the very least, if not a conspirator — and the funny thing about it was that Douglas was not a motive at all, but only a kind of fringe benefit.

“I thought you had gone, Lieutenant,” she said.

“Dickson went,” he said. “As for me, I must confess to intruding again. I came in through the basement window there.”

He walked over and stood beside her, looking up at the valve she had intended to turn. To the right of the valve, slanting down toward the basement floor, were about six feet of pipe that made a right turn, by means of an elbow joint, and passed through the concrete foundation.

The Lieutenant began again. “While I was waiting for you to come home this afternoon from wherever you were, I got to wondering how your husband might have been poisoned — if he was poisoned, which was at least a possibility. In a container of something to drink, perhaps? In something he ate, perhaps? But that would have been dangerous, and foolishly so. The container to be analyzed. The remains of the food, ditto. Then I walked along the side of the house, and I noticed that the ground under the outside faucet was damp — and it came to me. What does the kind of man who loves working in the yard, as your husband did, almost invariably do when he gets hot and thirsty? He takes a drink from the outside faucet. Usually from his cupped hands. That’s what your husband did, Mrs. Dearly, and that’s what you knew he would do.”

The Lieutenant paused, still staring up at the valve with an expression of admiration, almost of wonder. Perhaps he was waiting for Mrs. Dearly to speak, but at the moment Mrs. Dearly did not feel like speaking.

“It was clever,” he went on. “You’re a clever woman, Mrs. Dearly. Between that inside valve and the outside faucet there are six feet of one-inch pipe. It was almost perfect for your purpose, wasn’t it? A perfect container. First, you closed the inside valve and drained the six feet of pipe. This you did merely by opening the outside faucet, letting the water in the pipe flow out, then closing the faucet afterward. Then, with a wrench, you disconnected the six feet of pipe below the valve and put into the pipe, your perfect container, whatever you used to kill your husband. This done, you reconnected the pipe to the valve, opening the valve to let water run through and fill the pipe. By closing the valve after the pipe was filled, you had a deadly liquid ready to run from the outside faucet whenever it was opened.

“It wouldn’t run long or as freely as it would have run with the valve open, of course, for six feet of one-inch pipe will hold by my arithmetic only about one quart of water. But that was enough. It was sufficient to give your husband a long, fatal drink. And now you have come down here to open the valve again and to flush from the pipe what may be left of the poison. What kind of poison did you use, Mrs. Dearly? Well, never mind. I don’t expect you to tell me. Something nearly tasteless, of course, and soluble in water. We’ll find out.”

Mrs. Dearly sighed and dusted her hands by brushing them softly together. She was feeling positively exhilarated.

“It is not I who is clever, Lieutenant,” she said “It’s you. What you have said is logical and rather convincing, I’m sure, but it is only a theory, and it will be quite exciting to see if you can prove it or not.”

But Mrs. Dearly’s exhilaration was only that of excitement, no more. The Lieutenant had no difficulty proving his theory — there was enough poison left in the pipe, and it wasn’t long before they found Douglas...

This story has a curious history. It gave your Editors what might he called “the daisy petals” — did we like it, did we not. ..

Obviously, the last daisy petal said “yes” to us, but whatever the last petal may indicate for you, this is an important story. It has something important to say, something that should be said, something that we should all listen to...

It was shortly before five o’clock on the afternoon of August 10th (the hottest August 10th in eighty-six years, the newspapers pointed out helpfully) that Charley Rosco saw, and at once recognized, Ben Lomax.

For three days in a row the heat had been killing; the plant wasn’t air-conditioned (what laundry ever was?), and each day fewer and fewer employees had turned up for work. Some had taken their cars and headed for cooler climate, others sought refuge in deliciously chill bars or movie houses, others simply stayed at home and drank cold bottles from the refrigerator and turned the fans up.

As a result, Charley had little to deliver that day. He had a private hospital and two nursing homes on his route, and by pleading “Emergency” to Max White, the foreman, had managed to get most of their linen finished. After delivering that, only a few bundles remained in his truck. Most of these, he found, belonged to customers who had evidently also fled the sweating little city.

So he had nothing to do, really; by one o’clock he could have gone home. If his car had been in good repair — but it wasn’t. Marie, his wife, didn’t take the heat too well — it made her cross, and when Marie was cross with anything, Marie was cross with everything.

So Charley did something he almost never did: he gold-bricked. He thought of it in exactly that term, and thought, too, that it had been a long time since he’d heard anybody use the word.

Anyway, he parked the laundry truck in an alley, gathered up the few bundles, and went around the corner to a bar. He made two bottles of beer last over three hours as he watched TV and joined in the conversation. It was all very pleasant, and he hated to leave.

Charley saw the man bent over the motor of the car, hood up, when he was driving back to the laundry. Sympathetic, remembering his own out-of-commission automobile, he slowed down as he came abreast of it, with some thought of stopping and offering help. The man lifted his head, and Charley, incredulous, recognized him instantly.