Эллери Куин - The Devil's Cook

“The whole lot. Otis and Ardis Bowers. Farley and Fanny Moran. Ben Green. Even Orville Reasnor.”

“Good.” Bartholdi glanced at his watch. “O’Hara here is a bonus... We’re a few minutes early. I suggest you make yourselves comfortable while we’re waiting.”

They had just sat down when Fanny appeared, with Ben in tow. Fanny’s eyes were dime-bright with curiosity. It was apparent that, early as she was, she would have preferred being earlier, while Ben, for his part, would have preferred being later, or even absent.

“Well, here we are,” Fanny said. “Ben kept dragging his heels, but I saw to it that he didn’t sneak off and hide. Jay, why have you been avoiding everyone just when we wanted to help?”

“Come in and sit down, Miss Moran,” Bartholdi said, stepping between Jay and the question.

“Yes,” said Ben, “and, for God’s sake, shut up.”

“Don’t pay any attention to Ben,” Fanny said. “Did you know that we’re going to be married?”

“Like hell!” said Ben.

“Congratulations,” said Bartholdi. “Is your brother Farley coming?”

“He’s coming, but he had to go somewhere first. Ben, where did Farley have to go, and when will he be back?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Never mind,” Bartholdi said. “I know what he’s doing.”

“I don’t see why Farley always has to be the one who’s asked to do things,” Fanny said.

Bartholdi said, “Here are the others now.”

And so they were: Ardis and Otis Bowers and Orville Reasnor. They came into the room, Reasnor trailing a couple of paces as became a man who knew his place.

“I want to know what this is all about,” announced Ardis. “I don’t like being ordered around with no reason given.”

“You’ll see, Mrs, Bowers,” Bartholdi said. “Please sit down and be patient.”

“Be patient and be quiet,” Otis snapped to his wife with rare asperity. “Jay, I won’t even try to tell you how terrible I feel about all this.”

“Thanks,” said Jay. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Perhaps you all know Mr. O’Hara by reputation if not by sight,” Bartholdi said. “This other gentleman is Attorney Maurice Feldman, who has come on from Los Angeles. His time is limited — he’s got to return on the five o’clock jet. I specifically asked that you all be informed of that. Were you informed, Miss Moran?”

“Oh, yes,” said Fanny in a puzzled way. “So was Ben.”

“I told them all, as you instructed,” Jay said.

“Good. Then we’d better start.”

Bartholdi, pausing, divided a long look six ways, beginning with Fanny, as brightly inquisitive as a bird, and ending with O’Hara, as still as a stone. “What I’m going to do is to tell you who killed Terry Miles and take her murderer into custody.”

Even Fanny’s impetuosity was for the moment stilled.

“Practically from the beginning,” Bartholdi said, “I was convinced that Terry Miles was murdered by someone who knew her well — someone who saw her regularly. Three pieces of evidence — three clues, if you want — all pointed to this.

“First, there was the companion-newspaper carrying the Personal that was assumed, as was intended, to be addressed to the victim. I found it, you may remember, in the Miles’s kitchen, where it had been left with other newspapers, and where it went unnoticed by the murderer. The other paper had been planted in the living room, where it could easily be found, or pointed out if necessary.

“The only reasonable purpose of the Personal ad, I figured, was to draw attention away from this building, and to be attributed later to a kidnapper who was still to show his hand.

“Secondly, there was the casual remark of a certain young lady. After coming back to this building late last Friday night she had a nightcap, not prepared by her; and then, in spite of all the excitement, she got suddenly very sleepy and went to bed and slept like a log. This in itself would not be remarkable except that she was impressed enough by it to mention it afterward. The incident became significant when I considered the locations of the four apartments in the building in relation to one another. Was the sound sleep artificially induced — by sleeping pills in her drink, say — to insure non-interference with something that had to be done secretly and quickly nearby?

“Finally,” continued Bartholdi, “and of first importance, there was the ragout left simmering in the skillet. It’s common practice for a wife to prepare her husband’s dinner, even if she doesn’t intend to be there to eat it with him — yes, and even though she’s invited a guest to share it. But why, if Terry Miles did prepare her husband’s dinner, should she have prepared it in such a manner as to make her husband find it disagreeable, if not inedible? The ragout contained far too much onion for Mr. Miles’s well-advertised tastes — such an excess, in fact, that he was moved to complain about it openly and repeatedly during and after the meal. Did his wife put too many onions into the ragout out of malice? Hardly — not when she thought she was bound for an assignation; under such circumstances a woman would want, not to arouse her husband’s anger, but to keep conditions as normal as possible.

“The way it looked to me,” said Bartholdi, “Terry Miles did not prepare that ragout. Someone else did.” He paused, and in the pause he could see that he had them fast in his grip. “That ragout, if it had not been made by Terry Miles, must therefore have been prepared, cooked, and left simmering in the skillet by her murderer — only her murderer would want it thought that she was still alive; and the ragout, being an extension of her, so to speak, had to be left on the stove as if she had prepared it and left it there. She had announced her intention of making a ragout for dinner in the presence of a third party, who would certainly remember it later and mention it to the police. The murderer had no difficulty preparing it, because Mrs. Miles had recited the recipe. What he didn’t know, of course, was that when she made Student’s Ragout for her husband she modified the recipe and used far less onions than it called for.

“And that, together with all the other facts in this case, told me who the murderer was.”

Bartholdi fell silent, staring about him. The face of the murderer seemed to be hanging in midair before some of them; to others, apparently, it was a mere outline, still to be filled in with flesh and blood.

“The motive for Terry Miles’s murder was certainly the ransom to be collected after her supposed kidnapping,” Captain Bartholdi went on, “although the murderer had no intention of letting her live — she knew him and could identify him. What I needed was confirmation that the murderer could have had the one piece of information vital to his crime — that Terry Miles was an heiress; in other words, that there would be plenty of money available to ransom her. (Of course, his ransom plot never got off the ground; those two boys accidentally running across the dead woman in that empty house put a crimp in everything.)

“Who knew that Mrs. Miles had a fortune in her name? Her husband here knew — but Mr. Miles is eliminated as the kidnapper-murderer because he is the only suspect in this case who would have no reason to put too many onions in the ragout; in fact, every reason not to. Mrs. Miles knew. Attorney Feldman knew. But Mr. Feldman was in Los Angeles when all this was taking place, and there was all kinds of testimony to the effect that neither of the Mileses mentioned a word to anyone of Terry’s inheritance.

“Mr. Feldman has given me the link to the murderer’s knowledge about that inheritance.