Inspector Queen’s Own Case

It was early, almost as early as when he used to wake in the old days. The alarm would go off to find him already prone on the braided rug doing his fifty push-ups — summer or winter, in green spring light or the gray of the autumn dawn. The hot shave and cold shower, with the bathroom door shut so that his son might sleep on undisturbed. The call-in from the Lieutenant, while breakfast was on the hod, to report any special developments of the night. The Sergeant waiting outside, the drive downtown. Headed for another working day. Listening to the general police calls on the way down, just in case. Maybe a direct word for him on the radiophone from the top floor of the big gold-domed building on Centre Street. His office... “What’s new this morning?”... orders... the important mail... the daily teletype report... the 9 a.m. lineup, the parade of misfits from the Bullpen...

It was all part of a life. Even the corny kidding, and the headaches and heartaches. Good joes sharing the raps and the kudos while administrations came and went, not touching them. Not really touching them, even in shakeups. Because when the dust settled, the old-timers were still there. Until, that is, they were shoved out to pasture.

It’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime, he thought. It’s impossible. What do those old horses think about, munching the grass of their retirement? The races they’d won? The races they could still win, given the chance?

The young ones coming up, always coming up. How many of them could do fifty push-ups? At half his age? But there they were, getting set, getting citations and commendations if they were good enough, a Department funeral if they stopped a bullet or a switchblade...

There they were. And here am I...

Becky was stirring carefully in the next room. Richard Queen knew it was Becky, not Abe, because Abe was like a Newfoundland dog, incapable of quiet; and the old man had been visiting in the beach house with its papery walls long enough to have learned some intimate details of the Pearls’ lives.

He lay in the bed idly.

Yes, that was Becky creeping down the stairs so as not to wake her husband or their guest. Soon the smell of her coffee, brown and brisk, would come seeping up from the kitchen. Beck Pearl was a small friendly woman with a big chest and fine hands and feet that were always on the move when her husband was around.

On the beach the gulls were squabbling over something.

Inspector Queen tried to think of his own wife. But Ellery’s mother had died over thirty years ago. It was like trying to recall the face of a stranger glimpsed for an instant from the other end of a dark corridor.

Here comes the coffee...

For a while the old man let the drum and swish of the surf wash over him, as if he were lying on the beach below the house.

As if he were the beach, being rhythmically cleaned and emptied by the sea.

What should he do today?

A few miles from where Richard Queen was lying in the bed swam an island. The island was connected to the Connecticut mainland by a private causeway of handsome concrete. A fieldstone gatehouse with wood trim treated to look like bleached driftwood barred the island end of the causeway. This gatehouse was dressed in creeper ivy and climber roses, and it had a brief skirt of garden hemmed in oyster shells. A driftwood shingle above the door said:

Nair Island

PRIVATE PROPERTY

Restricted

For the Use of

Residents & Guests

ONLY

Two private policemen in semi-nautical uniforms alternated at the gatehouse in twelve-hour shifts.

Nair Island had six owners, who shared its two hundred-odd acres in roughly equal holdings. In Taugus, the town on the mainland of which the island was an administrative district, their summer retreat was known — in a sort of forelock-tugging derision — as “Million-Nair” Island.

The six millionaires were not clubby. Each estate was partitioned from its neighbors by a high, thick fieldstone wall topped with shells and iron spikes. Each owner had his private yacht basin and fenced-off bathing beach. Each treated the road serving the six estates as if it were his alone. Their annual meetings to transact the trifling business of the community, as required by the bylaws of the Nair Island Association, were brusque affairs, almost hostile. The solder that welded the six owners together was not Christian fellowship but exclusion.

The island was their fortress, and they were mighty people. One was a powerful United States Senator who had gone into politics from high society to protect the American way of life. Another was the octogenarian widow of a railroad magnate. Another was an international banker. A fourth was an aging philanthropist who loved the common people in the mass but could not stand them one by one. His neighbor, commanding the seaward spit of the Island, was a retired Admiral who had married the only daughter of the owner of a vast shipping fleet.

The sixth was Alton K. Humffrey.