The Dragon's Teeth Read online

  Beau said: “He’s hiding something. Like hell.”

  Ellery sprang from the chair. “But the other thing! His pesky, unreasonable curiosity. Why should he be so anxious to find out what I think he’s hiring me for?”

  “He’s a nut, I tell you.”

  Ellery perched on the desk and stared out at Times Square’s crenellated skyline. Suddenly he grimaced; he had sat down on something long and hard. He turned round.

  “He forgot his fountain-pen.”

  “Then we’re in that much, anyway.” Beau scowled at his chocolated fingers and began to lick them clean, like a cat.

  Ellery examined the pen. Beau lit a cigaret. After a while he said indifferently: “What ho!”

  “What do you make of this, Beau?” Ellery brought the pen to the sofa.

  Beau squinted at it curiously through the smoke. It was a large fat pen, its cap considerably scratched and nicked in a sort of arced pattern. Some of the dents were deep, and the whole pen had a look of age and hard use.

  Beau glanced at Ellery’s face, puzzled. Then he unscrewed the cap and examined the gold nib.

  “I make out an old-fashioned black gold-trimmed fountain-pen that’s seen plenty of use by somebody that likes a smooth, broad stroke. It’s exactly like millions of other pens.”

  “I have an idea,” said Ellery, “that it’s exactly like no other pen in the world.”

  Beau stared at him.

  “Well, no doubt all these little mysteries will clarify in time. Meanwhile, Beau, I suggest you take micropho-tographs of the thing. From every angle and position. I want exact measurements, too. Then we’ll send the pen back to the Argonaut by messenger . . . . I wish I were sure,” he mumbled.

  “Sure?”

  “That the check’s good.”

  “Amen!”

  A glorious morrow it proved to be. The sun beamed; their messenger reported that the previous evening he had delivered the pen to the yacht, in its berth in the Hudson, and had not been arrested as a suspicious character; and Miss Hecuba Penny appeared late for work but triumphant with the announcement that the bank on which the fifteen thousand dollar check was drawn had authenticated, promptly and beyond any doubt whatever, the signature of Cadmus Cole.

  That left only the possibility that Mr. Cole had been playful and meant to stop the check. They waited three days. The check cleared. Beau salaamed thrice to the agency bankbook and sallied forth to drown the fatted calf.

  Chapter II. Last Voyage of the Argonaut

  The mortality rate among sixty-six-year-old millionaires who make out sudden wills and engage detectives for undisclosed reasons is bound to be high.

  Mr. Cadmus Cole died.

  Mr. Ellery Queen expected Mr. Cadmus Cole to die; to die, that is, under suspicious circumstances. He did not foresee that he himself would come perilously near to preceding his client through the pearly gates.

  The blow fell the afternoon of the day the check cleared. Mr. Queen had taken up his telephone to call Lloyd Goossens, the attorney, for a conference of mutual enlightenment. Just as Goossens’s secretary told him that the lawyer had left the previous night for London on an emergency business trip, Mr. Queen experienced a pang.

  He set down the telephone. The pain stabbed deeply. He said: “Everything happens to me,” and rang weakly for Miss Penny.

  Within ninety minutes Mr. Queen lay on an operating table unaware that a famous surgeon was removing an appendix which had treacherously burst. Afterwards, the surgeon looked grave. Peritonitis.

  Inspector Queen and Beau paced the corridor outside Ellery’s room all night, silent. They could hear the Queen voice raised in a querulous delirium. He was haranguing an invisible entity, demanding the answer to various secrets. The words “Cole” and “fountain-pen” ran through his monologue, accompanied by mutterings, groans, and occasional wild laughter.

  With the sun emerged the surgeon, and the House Physician, and various others. Mr. Queen, it appeared, had a chance. There was something on his mind, said the surgeon, and it was making the patient cling, perversely, to his life. It had something to do with a fountain-pen and a person named Cole.

  “How,” said Beau hoarsely, “can you kill a guy like that?”

  * * *

  MR. QUEEN merely lingered in this vale of tears, swinging recklessly on the pearly gate, sometimes in, sometimes out. But when the news came that Cadmus Cole had died, he stopped teetering and set about the business of recuperation with such a grimness that even the doctors were awed.

  “Beau, for heaven’s sake,” implored the patient, “talk!”

  Beau talked. The yacht Argonaut, Captain Herrold Angus, master, had cleared New York Harbor the night of the day Cole had visited Ellery Queen, Inc. She carried her owner, his friend and companion Edmund De Carlos, her master, and a crew of twelve.

  “Nobody else?” asked Mr. Queen instantly.

  “That’s all we know about.”

  On 13 June the Argonaut anchored in the Gulf of Paria, off Port of Spain, and, taking on fresh water and fuel, then sailed north and west into the Caribbean.

  On 21 June she spoke a passing cruise liner 100 miles northwest of Port Gallinas. Captain Angus exchanged the usual courtesies of the sea with the liner’s master.

  At eight bells on the night of 30 June, during a squall, the Argonaut’s wireless sputtered a general distress call directed to any vessel carrying a medical officer. The message stated that Cadmus Cole had suffered a severe heart-attack and that while Captain Angus had medical equipment in his locker and was capable of administering simple treatment, he felt the serious condition of his owner demanded immediate professional advice.

  White Lady, lying some 200 miles northeast, promptly responded. Her chief medical officer radioed for details of pulse, respiration, blood-pressure, and superficial symptoms. This information was supplied him via wireless.

  White Lady’s physician then advised digitalis injections, applications of ice, and other emergency measures. Captain Angus kept him informed by five-minute radio exchanges of the sick man’s condition. Meanwhile, the liner steamed towards the Argonaut at full speed.

  But she was too late. An hour and fifty minutes after the original distress call, a radio message signed by Captain Angus and Edmund De Carlos announced that Cadmus Cole had passed away. The message concluded with thanks for White Lady’s assistance and the information that the millionaire’s last wish before expiring had been to be buried at sea.

  “No, no!” shrieked Mr. Queen. “Stop them!”

  “Whoa, Silver,” said Beau soothingly. “Cole’s been lying at the bottom of the Caribbean in a canvas shroud for a week.”

  “A whole week!” groaned Ellery. “Is it July already?”

  “Wednesday, July fifth.”

  “Then we’ve got to speak to De Carlos, to Angus, to the radio operator, the crew! Where are they now?”

  “The Argonaut showed up at Santiago de Cuba two days after Cole kicked in—that was last Sunday. By Monday Captain Angus and the crew were paid off and discharged.”

  “De Carlos?” asked Ellery after a profound silence.

  “Yeah. De Carlos then put the Argonaut in drydock down there, shipping Cole’s personal effects to the States, and hopped a plane. He ought to be here tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  Mr. Queen was ominously quiet. Then he said: “Fee-fi-fo-fum.”

  “What?”

  “A heart-attack in the middle of the Caribbean during a convenient storm, death before a certified medical officer can examine the dying man, sea-burial before an autopsy can be performed—and now the Captain and crew dispersed before they can be questioned!”

  “Look at it this way, Master-Mind,” said Beau, “because this is the way it’s going to be looked at by John Q. Public. Cole’s ticker gave out? He was sixty-six. Died at sea? Funny if he hadn’t, since he spent his last eighteen years aboard a yacht. Buried fathoms deep? Natural request of a dying man who loved the sea.”

  “And De Carlos’s discharging Captain Angus and the crew in Cuba?” asked Mr. Queen dryly.

  “Sure, he could have had them sail the Argonaut back north. But a plane is faster, and it would be natural for De Carlos to want to get back to New York as quickly as possible. No, son, the set-up is as smooth as a baby’s—”

  “Don’t like it,” said Ellery irritably. “Cole makes out a will, hires us, acts mysterious, dies—some people would use a nasty word, Beau . . . murder!”

  “There’s an ol’ debbil in de law,” said Beau dryly, “and his name is corpus delicti. I’ll be squashed if I see how we’d do it, but suppose we could prove murder. We’d have to produce a body, wouldn’t we? And where’s the body? Making fish-food at the bottom of the Caribbean. No, sir, all we can have is suspicions, and they don’t pay off on those in this racket.”

  “Just the same,” muttered Mr. Queen, “we’ve got fifteen thousand dollars of Cole’s money that say somebody’s not going to get away with Cole’s murder!”

  “We’ve got it, but not for long. I meant to save the bad news till you were well enough to stand the shock. El, we’ve got to pay that dough back to the Cole estate.”

  “What!” exclaimed Mr. Queen. “Why?”

  “Because Cole hired you, and you won’t be able to investigate whatever it is he wanted you to investigate. The doc tells me you’ve got to go away for at least six weeks.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” snapped Ellery. “You’re Ellery Queen, Inc., not I. You’ll investigate.”

  “No can do.” Beau was glum. “Cole hired you personally, and you accepted. That constitutes a contract for personal services. A contract for personal services can’t be assigned. We’re out fifteen thousand bucks and the prospect of being filthy rich.”

  “The hell you say,” scowled Mr. Queen, and he fell into an aggressive reverie. After a time he smiled diabolically. “Beau, whom did Cole say he was appointing executor-trustees of his estate?”

  “Lloyd Goossens and this De Carlos.”

  “Do they know you?”

  “No, and the ignorance is mutual. So what?”

  “They don’t know me either.” Ellery grinned. “You see?”

  “Why, you two-timing pretzel, you!” shouted Beau. “Talk about confidence men!”

  “When Goossens asks for Ellery Queen, you answer.”

  “I stand in for you! And neither Goossens nor De Carlos will know the difference.” Beau pounced. “Let me shake the hand of a genius!”

  “Please, my operation. Of course, you know we’re conspiring to commit a crime?”

  “Are we?” Beau scratched his head. “Let’s see. Well, I guess we are, although I’ll be a frosted chocolate if I know what the crime is. And what’s more, I don’t give a rooty-toot. Adios, Mr. Queen!” said Mr. Rummell.

  “Vaya con Dios, Mr. Queen!” said Mr. Queen.

  * * *

  LLOYD GOOSSENS telephoned the next morning.

  Mr. Rummell, alias Mr. Queen, made the subway journey downtown to Park Row in record time.

  Goossens was a big, pleasant man in his late thirties, dressed as for the salon. He had a gray and sleepless look. Beau, who read Winchell, knew that Goossens alternated socially between Park Avenue and 52nd Street, with and without his society wife, as suited the occasion. As they shook hands, Beau sighed; it must be swell to be rich, he thought.

  “De Carlos just got in on the Florida plane,” said the lawyer, waving his fuming pipe towards an inner office. “I suppose you know who he is, Mr. Queen?”

  “Mr. Queen” looked around to see where Mr. Queen was, but then, realizing that he was Mr. Queen, said: “Lord Chamberlain, wasn’t he? By the way, why all the mystery, Goossens?”

  Goossens frowned. “Mystery?”

  “Cole wouldn’t disclose the nature of the case. He made quite a secret of it.”

  “I don’t see why,” said the lawyer, puzzled. “His registered letter to me, in which he outlined the terms of your employment, made it perfectly clear. And then it’s down in his will in black and white.”

  “You mean there’s nothing sensational about it?”

  Goossens grinned. “It has its points. Come in and meet the Grand Vizier, and we’ll go over the whole business.”

  A moment later Beau was shaking hands with a medium-sized man browned by years of exposure to salt wind and windy sun. De Carlos’s hair was a wavy black fur, and he wore a piratical-looking black beard. The eyes behind his silver-rimmed spectacles were widely open, naive—much too naive, Beau thought.

  Beau was preoccupied when he left the two executors. At the hospital he told Ellery, who was in a fever of impatience, exactly what had happened, and all about De Carlos.

  “He looks like a pirate. Just off the Spanish Main, too!”

  “Yes, yes. But how about the case?”

  “Oh, the case.” Beau stared out the window. “That mysterious case we were all hopped up about. Well, prepare for a shock. Either old man Cole was as nutty as a chocolate bar, or we’re up against a real baffler.”

  “What’s the assignment, you aggravating sea-lawyer?”

  “Merely to find a couple of missing heirs!”

  “Oh, no,” groaned Ellery. “That’s too much. It can’t be. How about the will itself? Did you see it?”

  “Yes, and it has its screwy angles.” Beau explained Cole’s will to Ellery.

  “But how is it that Cole didn’t know where his heirs were?” demanded Ellery when Beau had finished.

  Beau shrugged. Cadmus Cole’s unfortunate marital experience in Windsor at the turn of the century had embittered him against the whole institution of marriage. He had had a younger brother, Huntley, whom he had sent to New York to study art. In 1906, in New York, Huntley Cole secretly married his model, a woman named Nadine Malloy. In 1907 a child, Margo, was born; and Cadmus, for the first time learning of his younger brother’s marriage, became enraged at what he considered Huntley’s ingratitude.

  Cadmus stopped sending Huntley money and swore he should never speak to his brother again. Huntley took his wife and infant daughter to Paris, where he painted futilely for two years, living in poverty, his only means of support his wife’s meager earnings as a model.

  “This Huntley,” Beau explained, “was too proud to write to his rich brother. But his wife wasn’t, because her brat was starving, and so she wrote to Cadmus pleading for help. Cadmus replied—that’s how we know about the Parisian episode of the Huntley branch—saying that his brother had made his bed, and so on—the usual sanctimonious tripe.

  “Anyway, Cadmus turned his sister-in-law down cold. Huntley found out about it, apparently, because right after Cadmus’s letter arrived he committed suicide. There’s absolutely no record of what happened to Nadine and little Margo. So one of our jobs is to pick up that thirty-year-old trail.”

  “That makes Margo Cole one heiress—if she’s found and if she qualifies under the will. How about the other?”

  “Well, Cadmus and Huntley had a younger sister, Monica. Reading between the lines it seems that, hearing about Huntley’s suicide in Paris, Monica blamed Cadmus for it and just upped and quit her sourpuss brother cold. Walked out on Cadmus and the Windsor ancestral mansion and disappeared. That was not long after Huntley’s death in 1909.

  “We know sketchily what happened to her, too, after leaving Vermont. She had a lot of tough luck supporting herself until 1911, when she met a man named Shawn, an accountant or something, in Chicago. Shawn married her. A daughter, Kerrie, was born to Monica in 1918—just about the time her husband died of spinal meningitis in a Chicago hospital.

  “Monica was left without a cent. Desperate, she wrote to her brother Cadmus, explaining what had happened and asking for help, just as Huntley’s wife had written nine years before. Well, Monica received practically the same answer: she’d put herself outside the reservation by marrying, and she could go take a flying jump at the moon. That’s the last record Cadmus had of his sister’s—and little Kerrie’s—whereabouts. Monica’s letter was postmarked Chicago, September eighth, 1918.”

  “Nothing for Monica, eh?” mused Mr. Queen.

  “Not a jit. Of course, she may be dead. Cole left the bulk of his estate, as I said, to his two nieces, Margo Cole and Kerrie Shawn . . . when, as, and if.”

  “How about insanity?” asked Mr. Queen hopefully.

  “No dice. Goossens has already consulted psychiatrists. From the picture, they agree Cole was medically sane. Legally, of course, he had a right to put any cockeyed conditions he pleased on the passing of his estate. De Carlos, who’s in the best position to know, pooh-poohs the whole idea, of course. He ought to, since Cole’s left him a million bucks in cash and a home for life if he wants it in the Tarry town mansion!”

  “Did you question De Carlos about the circumstances of Cole’s death?”

  Beau nodded. “But he’s a cool customer, and he stuck to his yarn. I bawled him out for not holding on to Captain Angus and the radio operator when he scattered the crew of the yacht all over creation.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The witnesses who attested the validity of Cole’s signature at the bottom of the will were Angus, the radio operator, and De Carlos.”

  “What of that?”

  “Before a will may be probated, two of the subscribing witnesses must be produced and examined, if they’re within the State and are competent and able to testify. In the absence of any witness, the Surrogate at his discretion may dispense with his testimony and admit the will to probate on the testimony of the other. So that in the absence of Captain Angus and the radio operator, we’ll have to rely completely on the testimony of De Carlos.”

  Mr. Queen frowned. “I don’t care for that.”

  “Well, we’ll have a check-up, because the Surrogate undoubtedly will insist on better proof of signature than the mere word of a single witness. He’ll want proof of the testator’s handwriting, and of Angus’s, and so on. There must be hundreds of Cole’s autographs extant, and they’ll all be examined.”