Inspector Queen’s Own Case

Ellery Queen Inspector Queen’s Own Case

1 At First the Infant

The dove-colored Chevrolet was parked fifty feet from the hospital entrance. The car was not new and not old, just a Sunday-hosed-looking family job with a respectable dent here and there in the fenders.

The fat man squeezed behind the wheel went with it like a used tire. He wore a home-pressed dark blue suit with a few food spots on the lapels, a white shirt already damp from the early morning June sun, and a blue tie with a wrinkled knot. A last summer’s Macy’s felt hat with a sweat-stained band lay on the seat beside him.

The object in point was to look like millions of other New Yorkers. In his business, the fat man liked to say, visibility was the worst policy. The main thing was not to be noticed by some nosy noonan who could lay the finger on you in court afterwards. Luckily, he did not have to worry about impressing his customers. The people he did business with, the fat man often chuckled, would avail themselves of his services if he came to work in a Bikini.

The fat man’s name was Finner, A. Burt Finner. He was known to numerous laboring ladies of the nightclubs as Fin, from his hobby of stuffing sharp five-dollar bills into their nylons. He had a drab little office in an old office building on East 49th Street.

Finner cleaned his teeth with the edge of a match packet cover, sucked his cheeks in several times, and settled back to digest his breakfast.

He was early, but in these cases the late bird found himself looking down an empty worm hole. Five times out of ten, Finner sometimes complained, they wanted to change their confused little minds at the last second.

He watched the hospital entrance without excitement. As he watched, his lips began to form a fat O, his winkless eyes sank deeper into his flesh, the pear-shaped face took on a look of concentration; and before he knew it he was whistling. Finner heard his own music happily. He was that rarity, a happy fat man.

The tune he whistled was Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.

My theme song, he called it.

When the girl came out of the hospital the fat man was on the steps to greet her, smiling.

The seven-passenger limousine wound correctly along the slow lane of the parkway. It was old-fashioned, powerful, and immaculate.

A chauffeur with white hair and a red face was at the wheel. Beside him rode a comfortably buxom woman with a pretty nose. She was in her late forties. Under her cloth coat she wore a nurse’s nylon uniform.

Behind the chauffeur and the nurse there was shining glass, and behind the shining glass sat the Humffreys.

Sarah Stiles Humffrey leaned forward to complain to the speaking-tube, “Henry, can’t you drive faster?”

The white-haired chauffeur said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Then why don’t you?” Mrs. Humffrey cried.

“Because the legal limit on the Hutchinson River Parkway is forty, ma’am.”

“You’re being difficult again. Alton, tell him to go faster.”

Her husband smiled. “We’ll get there, Sarah.”

“I’m nervous as a cat!”

He patted her hand. She had a large hand, beautifully groomed. Mrs. Humffrey was a large woman, with large features over which she regularly toiled and despaired. She was not vain; she had long ago given up vanity to indulge a childish resentment at the genie that had drawn her body out like a Yankee farmer’s. It was really ironic, she would pout, because the last farmer in her family had pastured his cows on the Boston Common in the seventeenth century.

Her husband might have been her male twin. This, too, was Mrs. Humffrey’s secret sorrow. Once, early in their marriage, she had shed tears in his arms. “Oh, Alton, why is it that what’s distinguished-looking in a man is so often ugly in a woman?”

The outburst had displeased him. She never referred to her physical shortcomings again. But after that she began to wear — within the limits of conservative taste, of course — the most feminine frocks her dressmaker could design.

Her husband was an angular man in a black suit so dreary it could only have been planned. A Humffrey had made the Mayflower crossing; and from the days of Cole’s Hill and Plimoth Plantation Humffreys had deposited their dust among the stones of New England. Many had distinguished themselves in colonial history; one of them founded the fortune; his sons and their sons and grandsons increased it; the Humffrey millions became a historic responsibility; tycoons arose among them, preachers, statesmen, Brahmins; and they all culminated in Alton K. Humffrey.

He had married Sarah Stiles because he was the last of his line.