Эллери Куин: Halfway House

“What on earth’s wrong about a man who makes his living going from place to place selling honest merchandise? You damned snob!”

“Oh, it’s honest enough. And I suppose I am a fool. He’s madly in love with Lu, and she with him; and he’s always provided for her very handsomely. The trouble with me is that lean and hungry look Cæsar mentioned.”

“You have a case.”

“Lord love you! I’ve a guilty conscience, that’s all. My apartment’s in the heart of town and I don’t get out to see Lucy very often. I’ve been beastly about it; Joe’s on the road most of the time, and she must get lonesome as the devil.”

“Oh,” said Ellery. “Then it’s woman trouble you suspect?”

Bill Angell studied his hands. “My dear old friend, I see it’s still futile trying to keep anything from you; you always were a magician in these matters. The trouble is that he’s away so much. Four, five days a week. It’s been that way for ten years — ever since they got married. He has a car, of course, and I’ve no reason except my own blasted suspicious nature to believe that he stays away on anything but business...” He looked at his watch again. “Look here, Ellery, I’ve got to be going. I’ve an appointment with my brother-in-law not far from here for nine, and it’s ten to now. When are you pushing on to New York?”

“As soon as I can breathe life into old Duesey again.”

“The Duesenberg! Lord, have you still got that ancient chariot? I thought you’d donated it to the Smithsonian long ago. How would you like a companion on your trip back to the city?”

“Bill! That’s handsome of you.”

“Can you wait an hour or so?”

“All night, if you say so.”

Bill rose and said slowly: “Joe shouldn’t take long.” He paused. When he continued it was in a casual tone. “I was intending to run down to New York tonight anyway; tomorrow’s Sunday, and I’ve a New York client who can’t be seen at any other time. I’ll leave my car in Trenton. Where will you be?”

“In the lobby yonder. You’ll stay over with Dad and me tonight?”

“Love to. See you in an hour.”

Mr. Ellery Queen relaxed, watching the wedge-like back of his friend vanish past the coatroom girl. Poor Bill! He had always shifted to his own broad shoulders the burdens of others... Ellery wondered for a moment what lay behind Bill’s appointment with his brother-in-law. Then, shrugging, he told himself that it was very clearly none of his business, and he ordered another cup of coffee. In the dumps or out of it, he reflected as he waited, Bill would be a tonic; and in the young man’s company the ninety-minute drive to the Holland Tunnel would doubtless dwindle to nothing.

And that, strangely enough, was its fate. For, although Mr. Ellery Queen was at the moment unaware of it, neither he nor Mr. William Angell, young Philadelphia attorney, was destined to leave Trenton at all that mild Saturday night, the first of June.

Bill Angell’s aged Pontiac coupé puffed along the deserted Lamberton Road, which paralleled the eastern shore of the Delaware River. It was a narrow road, and his dimmers shimmered on the puddles in the black and rubbly macadam. A warm rain had fallen in the afternoon and, although it had stopped just before seven o’clock, the road and the bleak stretches of dump and field on his left were still muddy. A few lights blinked pallidly on the river to the west, where Moon Island lay; to the east the uneven terrain was gray and flat, like paint.

Bill slowed down as he passed a long bulky mass of buildings on the riverside, the Marine Terminal. It was not far from here, he thought. According to Joe’s instructions... He knew the road well; he had often taken it in traveling by automobile from Philadelphia to Trenton by way of the Camden bridge. In the vicinity of the Marine Terminal there was nothing but dreary dumping-ground; the Sewage Disposal Plant on the east had effectively spoiled the section for housing development, and there were no dwellings in the neighborhood. The directions had been specific: a few hundred yards past the Marine Terminal, reckoning from Trenton...

He trod on his brake. To the right, toward the river, on the narrow shore between Lamberton Road and the water polished to sullen steel by the quarterlight of deep dusk, stood a building with dimly glowing windows.

The Pontiac snuffled and stopped. Bill examined the scene with fixity. The structure, black against the river, was little more than a shack — a random, dilapidated affair of weather-beaten clapboards, with a sagging roof half-denuded of its shingles and a crumbling chimney. It was set well back, approached in rather grotesque grandeur by a semicircular driveway which led from Lamberton Road past the house in an arc and back to the road. In the shadows of near night, there was something repellent about the place. An empty roadster of huge dimensions stood directly before the closed door of the shack, almost on its stone step. The snout of the silent monster faced him. Bill twisted about like a suspicious animal, searching the thick dark blue murk for other details. That car... Lucy ran a small car; she’d always had a runabout for herself — Joe was considerate enough, and he seemed to realize how much alone she was; and Joe himself ran an ancient but serviceable Packard. But this was overpowering, a magnificent sixteen-cylinder Cadillac with, he thought, a special body. Oddly, for all its bulk, there was something feminine in its appearance; it seemed in the murk to be the color of cream, and he could just make out its multiplicity of chromium gadgets. A rich woman’s sporting car...

Then Bill spied his brother-in-law’s Packard drawn up to face the side of the shack nearer him; and for the first time he noticed a second driveway, this one an unkempt dirt lane, branching off Lamberton Road a few feet in front of his car. The lane, a welter of mud, did not touch the exit of the semicircular drive, but skirted it and curved slightly inwards to lead to a second door in the side of the house. Two drives, two doors, two cars...

Bill Angell sat very still. The night was pacific, its silence accentuated by the sawing of crickets, the faint chug of a motor on the river, the hum of his own engine. Except for the Marine Terminal and a small watchman’s house facing it Bill had passed no dwelling since leaving the outskirts of Trenton; and as far as he could see beyond the shack stretched flat deserted country. This was the meeting-place.

How long he sat there he did not know; but suddenly the evening quiet exploded, touched off by a horrible sound. Bill’s heart convulsed in warning before his senses became conscious of the nature of the cry. It had been a scream, and it had been torn from a woman’s throat: a single protest of outraged vocal chords released from the paralysis of fear all at once, like a plucked string let go. It was short and sharp, and it died away as unexpectedly as it had been born. It came to Bill Angell, sitting in the Pontiac frozen to the wheel, that it was the first time he had ever heard a woman scream. Something inside him responded with a quiver, and he felt it with a sensation of pure astonishment. At the same moment, and for no conscious reason, his eyes went to the watch on his wrist and he read the time in the light of his dashboard. It was eight minutes after nine.

But he glanced up quickly; the light before him had subtly changed. The front door had flown open; he heard the bang as it struck against the inner wall of the shack. A prism of light bathed the side of the roadster before the stone step. Then it was partially blotted out by a figure. Bill half-rose behind his wheel, straining to see. The figure was a woman’s, and her hands were before her face as if to shut out the sight of something obscene. She stood there for only an instant, a silhouette the details of which were indistinguishable. With the light behind her and her figure in darkness, she might have been young or old; there was a slenderness about her that was ambiguous. He could make out no details of her dress. This woman had screamed. And she had fled from the shack as if sick and blind with loathing.