Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Who is he?” the old man repeated. His eyes were glitttering.

“It’s understood you’ll keep me out of this?”

“Personally, I don’t give a damn about you. As far as I’m concerned you’re out of it right now. Who is he, Weirhauser?”

Weirhauser got up again and shut the door to the anteroom.

“Well, he’s a rich muckamuck, lives on Park Avenue—” Even now the gray-faced man sounded grudging, as if he were being forced to sell a gilt-edged security far below its market value.

“His name!”

Weirhauser cursed. “Alton K. Humffrey.”

“Are you all right, Jessie?”

Jessie said, “I’m fine.”

They were in the tall-ceilinged foyer outside the Humffrey apartment on Park Avenue. The wall opposite the elevator was an austere greenish ivory, with plaster panel-work of cupids and wreaths. The elevator had just left them, noiselessly.

“Don’t be afraid,” Richard Queen said. “This is the one place where he won’t try anything. I wouldn’t have asked you along if I thought there was any danger.”

“I’m not afraid.” Jessie smiled faintly. “I’m numb.”

“Would you rather sit this out?”

“I’m fine,” Jessie said again.

“We’ve got to move in on him, Jessie. See just how tough a nut he’s going to be. So far he’s had it all his own way. You see that, don’t you?”

“I suppose the trouble is I don’t really believe it.” Jessie set her lips to keep them from quivering. “I want to look at his face — really look at it. Murder must leave a mark of some kind.”

The Inspector blotted the perspiration from his neck and pressed the apartment bell. He had given their names to the flunkey in the lobby with a confidence Jessie could only admire. There had been no unpleasantness. Mr. Humffrey had said on the house phone yes, he would see them. In a few minutes. He would call down when they might be sent up.

It was Friday evening, the second of September, a sizzling forerunner of the Labor Day weekend. The city had been emptying all day, leaving a sort of tautness in the vacuum.

Like me, Jessie thought.

It had been a curious three days since Richard Queen came back from George Weirhauser’s office. He had summoned his aging assistants that evening to a council of war. It was surely the strangest conference, Jessie thought, in the unlikeliest place... a gathering of old men on a bench in a secluded spot in Central Park. The handsome ex-lieutenant of Homicide, Johnny Kripps, had been there; the scar-faced Hugh Giffin; ex-Sergeant Al Murphy of the 16th, chunky, brick-skinned, with all his red hair, the youngest of the group; big Wes Polonsky, of the shaking hands; and Polonsky’s old partner, Pete Angelo, a slim tough dark man whose face was a crisscross of wrinkles, like a detail map of his seventy years.

They had listened in happy silence as Richard Queen spoke, lonely men being handed straws and grasping them thankfully. And when they had walked off into the night, one by one, each with his assignment, Jessie had remarked, “I feel sorry for him in a way.”

“For whom, Jessie?”

“Alton Humffrey.”

“Don’t waste your sympathy,” the old man had muttered. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

“Good evening,” the millionaire said.

He had opened the door himself. He stood there sharp and shoulderless in a satin-faced smoking jacket, at disciplined ease, the chill Brahmin with nothing on his wedge of face but remoteness — like a high Army officer in mufti or a Back Bay man of distinction — framed in a rectangle of rich wines and hunt-club greens and leather browns; and Jessie thought, No, it isn’t possible.

“You’re looking well, Miss Sherwood.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Queen, I can say the same about you.”

“Could we come in?” Richard Queen said.

“Sorry! Suppose we use the study. Anything less than twenty people in the drawing-room strains the vocal cords. I apologize for not having the servants here to greet you. Unfortunately, I gave them the evening off.”

“Within the last fifteen minutes?”

Alton Humffrey shook his head, smiling. “You’re an extremely suspicious man.”

“Yes,” the old man said grimly, “I suppose you could say that.”

The apartment was like a strange land, all mysterious woods and coruscating chandeliers high overhead, antiques, crystal, oil paintings, old tapestries, glowing rugs... rooms twice as large as any Jessie had ever set foot in, with no cushion crushed, no rug scuffed, no receptacle with a trace of ashes. She realized now that the Nair Island house had represented the Alton K. Humffreys en déshabille, an annual adventure in roughing it, as remote from their real life as the average family’s summer camping trip was from its suburban fireside.

What kind of people could be happy living in this dustless, stylized, dwarfing museum? Maybe, Jessie thought, that’s why Sarah Humffrey is locked in a sanatorium room in New Haven.

The study was like the drawing-room, indigestibly rich, with monumental Tudorish furnishings and impossibly tall walls of books that looked as if they were going to topple over.

“Be seated, Miss Sherwood,” Humffrey said. “May I give you some sherry?”