Inspector Queen’s Own Case

The old man did not reply.

At the gatehouse Chief Pearl crooked his finger at Peterson. Inspector Queen listened quietly.

“All right, Peterson, let’s have it all over again,” Abe Pearl said.

The guard pushed his fleshy lips forward. “I’ll give it to you just once, Chief, then I’m getting the hell off this Island and so help me I’ll never come back! The last car that went through this gate last night before the Humffrey kid was found dead, like I told the troopers, was that Dodge coop belongs to the nurse up there, that Miss Sherwood, who came in around 12.30 a.m. Before Miss Sherwood, there was an incoming car about an hour earlier, some of old Mrs. Dandridge’s servants coming back from the Taugus movies. Before that, around 11 p.m., the Senator’s chauffeur—”

“Did a car drive through at any time since you came on duty, going in or out,” the chief interrupted, “that you didn’t recognize? Had to check?”

“No.”

Richard Queen’s voice startled Peterson. “Did anyone walk through?”

“Huh?”

“Somebody on foot? Going either way?”

“Nope.”

“But somebody could have come through on foot without your seeing him. Isn’t that so?”

“Listen, friend,” Peterson snarled, “this gatehouse is a joke. I got to sit down sometimes. I got to step into the bushes once in a while. I got to feed my face. There’s a hundred ways a guy can get onto this Island without being seen. Go look for your patsy some place else. I’m taking no fall but for nobody.”

“You know, Abe, Peterson’s right,” the old man murmured as they crossed the causeway. “Nair Island is accessible to anyone who wants to go to a little trouble. A rowboat to one of the private beaches at night... a sneak past the gate... a young fellow like Ron Frost could even have swum over from one of the Taugus beaches and got back the same way.”

His friend glanced at him. “You’re dead set that this is murder, Dick, aren’t you? And that the Frost kid pulled it?”

“I’m not dead set on anything. It’s just that I believe Jessie Sherwood saw something on that pillowslip. If it was a handprint she saw, murder is indicated. And if it was murder, young Frost is your hottest suspect.”

“Not any more he isn’t. The report came in while you were nosing around the beach for row-boat tracks. Frost can’t possibly have been on Nair Island last night.”

“Why not?”

“The baby died on the Island between 10.30 p.m. and around half-past midnight. In that two-hour period Ronald Frost was in Stamford, unconscious.”

“Unconscious?”

“He was rushed to Stamford Hospital in an ambulance from a friend’s house on Long Ridge Road about 9 p.m. He was operated on for an emergency appendectomy at 10.07 p.m., and he didn’t come out of the anesthetic till three o’clock this morning.” Abe Pearl grinned as he swung his car into the street of little beach houses. “What do you think of your Nurse Sherwood’s pillowslip yarn now?”

Richard Queen blinked.

His friend pulled up, turned off the motor, and clapped him on the back. “Cheer up, Dick! Do you have to see a murder to make time with the Sherwood number? Take her out like a man!” He sniffed mightily. “I can smell Becky’s bacon from here. Come on, Dick — hot breakfast — few hours’ shuteye—”

“I’m not hungry, Abe,” the old man said. “You go on in. I’ll sit here for a while.”

He sat there for a long time.

Jessie Sherwood braked up to the barrier and honked impatiently for Monty Burns, the day guard, to come out of the gatehouse and pass her through. It was a week after the tragedy, seven days that had dragged like years. The weekend had brought with it the first hurricane of the season; some Nair Island cellars were flooded, and fifteen-foot breakers had weakened the causeway — it was still under repair.

But it would have taken more than a hurricane to keep Nurse Sherwood on the Island that Thursday. The week had been hellish. A dozen times she had regretted giving in to Alton Humffrey’s stiffish request that she stay on to nurse his wife. The big house was too full of the dead baby, and Sarah Humffrey’s antics had Jessie’s nerves at the shrieking point. But what else could I have done? she thought. That Mrs. Humffrey was on the verge of a nervous breakdown Jessie’s professional eye told her quite without the necessity of Dr. Wicks’s warnings. Mea culpa... The inquest and funeral by themselves would have unnerved a healthy woman, let alone a guilt-ridden hysteric.

Her chief recollection of the inquest was of sweaty bodies, goggling eyes, and her own humiliation and anger. They had treated her as if she were some malicious trouble-maker, or a psychopath. By contrast Sarah Humffrey had got off lightly. Alton Humffrey, Jessie thought grimly, had seen to that.

The verdict had been death by inadvertence, an accident. Accident!

And the funeral...