Эллери Куин - The Devil's Cook

“Some years ago a young pre-law student worked part time in Mr. Feldman’s law office in Los Angeles for experience and pocket money, Mr. Feldman tells me. Being in the office, the student had access to the information that Terry Miles was coming into her father’s considerable estate by the terms of his will. What’s more, this student left Los Angeles soon after Terry and Jay Miles got married, and moved east to Handclasp to enroll in the university here.

“So there was the last link. Terry Miles was murdered because she would have been able to name her kidnapper. She was murdered by the same man who planted the Personal ad as a red herring. By the same man who gave that sleeping dose to Fanny Moran — who lived directly over his apartment and might have been disturbed by what he had to do that night. Which was — after he was left alone with her early Friday afternoon and killed her — to keep her body hidden in his apartment until the night came and he could push the body out his rear window and transport it in his car to the old Skully house. Which he had rented beforehand, in disguise and under a phony name, so that he would have a place to hide the body while he tried to collect the ransom. By the same man who, Friday afternoon, prepared the ragout from the recipe Terry Miles had recited in his presence. By the same man who, made desperate by the ruin of his plans to collect ransom, because of the premature discovery of the body, had to go through the farce of playing the contactman for the ransom payment. By the only man who fits the entire picture.”

Bartholdi broke off and stood still, head cocked, diverted by the sound of a familiar action in the hall outside. He took out his old-fashioned pocket watch and carefully checked the time.

“In short,” Bartholdi concluded, “by the same man who has just slipped into his apartment across the hall under the illusion that his present danger is gone with the one man who can identify him as the former part-time officer clerk — the only suspect in this case who found it expedient not to be present with Mr. Feldman here. I’m afraid, you see, that I had Jay deliberately misinform you about Mr. Feldman’s commitment. He has no plane to catch this afternoon.”

No one moved or spoke until Jay Miles, his carefully disciplined tone broken by a kind of wonder, said, “But it’s incredible! How could he have lived here among us without ever arousing the least suspicion that he’s capable of such a thing?”

“There’s no questioning the facts, Mr. Miles. I learned a long time ago that you can’t always tell a killer from a psalm-singer.”

“But why didn’t he wait? In another year, Terry would have controlled her own money. All the complications with the estate could have been avoided.”

“We can hold Mr. O’Hara responsible for that. It must have been clear to the killer that Mrs. Miles’s marriage was about to end, and that O’Hara here would be next on her hitparade. Once she left here for good, the execution of the plan would have become much harder and more dangerous. Maybe impossible.”

“You had better go and get him,” O’Hara said suddenly, “if you don’t want me to save you the trouble.”

“There’s no hurry.” Bartholdi’s eyes engaged O’Hara’s, and for the first time there was in them a flicker of something like contempt. “I have men stationed outside, of course. And they can, if necessary, take you as easily as they’ll take Farley Moran.”

At that point, as though cued by the name, spoken at last, Fanny Moran rose.

“I believe,” she said, in a small, sick voice, “that I shall go upstairs.”

Ben Green climbed the stairs and entered Fanny’s apartment without knocking. She was seated in a chair by a window, staring out into the thickening darkness of the coming November night. He went over and placed a hand on her shoulder and stood beside her.

“Are they gone?” she asked.

“Yes, Fan.”

“I guess I’ve always known there was something wrong with him,” Fanny said. “I never liked him much, to tell the truth. It’s a hard thing to say. It was a feeling I had. A kind of — I don’t know — uneasiness, when I was with him.”

“Is that why you followed him to Handclasp? To try to look after him?”

“I’m not sure. I never asked myself. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. But I never dreamed he would come to as bad an end as this.”

“It’s the end, all right, and it’s bad, all right.”

“Yes.” She turned toward Ben Green and clutched his hand, and her voice was at once fiercely possessive and a plea for comfort. “Now, darn you, maybe you’ll stop being so sensitive about your family! The shoe’s on the other foot. Do you want to marry the half-sister of a murderer?”

“No,” said Ben Green. Fanny’s lower lip trembled; she began to blubber. “Fan... Fan, sweet bunch, don’t. Damn it all, that ‘no’ slipped out out of habit. I meant... yes!”