Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Just when I was getting to the most interesting part, Mr. Humffrey?”

The old man’s grin apparently changed Humffrey’s mind. He sat down again.

“Very well,” he said. “What else have you dreamed up?”

“The Coy girl got in at Grand Central that evening. She took a taxi uptown, and you followed her to 88th Street.”

“And you have a witness to that?”

“No.”

“My dear Queen.”

“At least not yet, Mr. Humffrey.”

Humffrey settled back. “I suppose I should hear this fairy tale out.”

“You followed Connie Coy home, you took up a position on a roof overlooking her top-floor apartment, and when you saw me pumping her you aimed at a point midway between her eyes with a gun you were carrying, and you shot her dead.

“Don’t interrupt me now,” the old man said softly. “Finner was killed because he had the file on the case and knew who the baby’s parents were. Connie Coy was killed because, as the mother of the baby, she certainly knew the identity of its father. The only one who benefits by destroying those papers and shutting Finner’s and the real mother’s mouth, Mr. Humffrey, is the baby’s real father.

“You’ve committed two cold-blooded murders to keep your wife, her relatives, your blue-nosed friends, me, Jessie Sherwood, from finding out that you’d adopted, not a stranger’s child, but a child you yourself fathered in a cheap affair with a nightclub entertainer.”

Humffrey opened a side drawer of his desk.

Jessie’s heart gave a wicked jump.

As for the old man, his hand flashed up to hover over the middle button of his jacket.

But when the millionaire leaned back, Jessie saw that he had merely reached for a box of cigars.

“Do you mind, Miss Sherwood? I rarely smoke — only, in fact, when I’m in danger of losing my temper.” He lit a cigar with a platinum desk lighter and looked at Richard Queen with a mineral brightness. “This has gone beyond simple senility, Mr. Queen. You’re a dangerous lunatic. You claim that I not only committed two atrocious murders, but that I did so in order to conceal from the world that I was the blood-father of the unfortunate little boy I adopted. I can’t imagine your laying any other heinous crimes at my door, but from the beginning you and Miss Sherwood have insisted Michael was murdered. How does your diseased mind reconcile his alleged murder with my subsequent crimes? Did I murder my own child, too?”

“I think you got the idea when your nephew made that drunken, senseless attempt to break into the baby’s nursery the night of July 4th,” the Inspector said quietly. “What you couldn’t have known, of course, was that Frost would suffer an appendix attack and have to have an emergency operation — an ironbound alibi — for the very night you picked. I think you murdered Michael, Mr. Humffrey, yes. I think you selected a night when you knew Miss Sherwood would be off. I think that after your wife fell asleep you deliberately suffocated the baby, and that in the confusion after Miss Sherwood’s arrival to find the baby dead you noticed the pillowslip in the crib with its telltale handprint that indicated murder, and disposed of it. And from that moment on, of course, you kept insisting that Jessie Sherwood had been seeing things and that the baby’s death was an unfortunate nursery accident. Yes, Mr. Humffrey, that’s exactly what I think.”

“Making me out a monster with few precedents.” Humffrey’s nasal tones crackled. “Because only a monster murders his own flesh and blood — eh, Mr. Queen?”

“If he does it believing it is his own flesh and blood.”

“I beg your pardon?” The millionaire sounded amazed.

“When you found out that Connie Coy was pregnant and arranged through Finner to adopt the baby without her knowledge when it was born, Mr. Humffrey, you did it because you wanted possession of your own child. But suppose after you arranged for the secret purchase of your baby, with a forged birth certificate, with Finner paid off, with Connie Coy not knowing you had the baby and your wife not knowing the baby was yours — suppose after all this, Mr. Humffrey, you suddenly began to suspect you’d been made a fool of? That you’d gone to all that trouble and skulduggery to pass your name on to a baby that wasn’t yours at all!”

Humffrey was quite still.

“A woman who’d had an affair with one man might have had affairs with a dozen, you told yourself. Suppose you even checked back and found that the Coy girl had been sleeping around with other men at the same time you were her lover? You being what you are — a proud, arrogant man with an exaggerated sense of family and social position — your love for the child you’d thought was yours might well have turned to hate. And so one night you murdered him.”

The cigar had gone out. Humffrey was very pale.