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Double, Double
By Ellery Queen MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
Copyright © 1950 Little, Brown and Company
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1703-9
CHAPTER 1
Tuesday, April 4
Ellery had thought he was through with Wrightsville. He had even developed a nostalgia about it, like the man who looks back on his boyhood home through the filtering lens of a sentimental eye. He liked to say that, although he was born in New York City, Wrightsville was his spiritual birthplace — a town of complacent elms, wandering cobbles, and crooked sidestreets nestled in the lap of a farmers' valley and leaning against the motherly abdomen of one of New England's most matriarchal mountain ranges. Here it was always forest green or immaculate with snow. Orderly fields to look at, spiced air to breathe, the unfolding satisfaction of the hills. The whole place glittered in his memory like a diamond, or an emerald.
Never a ruby, because the blood color was uncomfortably close to the mark.
The envelope cast a ruby glow.
Ellery examined it again, not touching its contents.
It was a long envelope of flawed slick bluish paper, the correspondence offering of every five-and-ten cent store in America. This one, he felt sure, came from the stationery counter of the High Village Five-and-Dime. A few doors away dozed J. C. Pettigrew, Real Estate, and at the Five-and-Dime's Upper Whistling side glared Miss Sally's Tea Roome, where the ladies of Wrightsville's haut monde forgathered daily to sample Miss Sally's celebrated caloric specialty, Pineapple Marshmallow Nut Mousse. O Wrightsville! If you sighted due west along Lower Main from the entrance of the Five-and-Dime you could just make out the limy bronze back of Founder Jezreel Wright lording it over the rustcaked horse trough in the center of the Square (which was round) and beyond, on the Square's western arc, the new marquee of the old Hollis Hotel, in certain of whose rooms could still be found the forthright china receptacles which the management in an earlier generation had provided for the nighttime convenience of its guests. And if you looked across the street, next door to Louie Cahan's Bijou you saw the cheap white glare of the Kut-Rate Drug Co. Thunder mugs and fluorescence — in focus, this was Wrightsville; and rather peevishly Ellery flipped over the envelope which had photographed his illusion.
There was no return address.
Of course there wouldn't be. People who addressed an envelope in penciled capitals, deliberately crude, announced their passionate shyness in the act. An anonymous letter. Ellery was tempted to scale it into his April fire.
He slit the envelope with care.
It contained some newspaper clippings held together at their upper lefthand corners by an ordinary steel pin.
There was nothing else in the envelope.
The topmost clipping advertised the masthead of the Wrightsville Record, Wrightsville's only daily newspaper, and the date: Wednesday, February 1.
Two months old, then. Ellery read the story through.
It reported the death from heart failure of Luke MacCaby, 74, of 551 State Street, High Village.
Ellery did not recall the name, but there was a one-column cut of the dead man's house and he thought he recognized it.
It was a very large porched, peaked, gabled, and turreted building painted the inescapable Victorian dirty tan; it was fancy with wooden embroidery and stained-glass fanlights and it drooped against the dreary earth on which it had stood for six or seven decades. State Street, which is the northeast spoke leading from the Square's hub, is the broadest thoroughfare in town, and for several blocks it is stately and beautiful. But farther up it goes seedy. This was the fashionable residential district of Wrightsville around the turn of the century, before the old families moved up to the Hill. Now the down-at-the-heel mansions are populated by the lower middle class; some of them are rooming houses. Porches sag everywhere. Latticework is broken-toothed. Walks are cracked and hairy. The entire district cries out for carpentry and paint.
If the MacCaby house was the one Ellery recalled, it stood on the corner of State and Upper Foaming and it was the largest house and it cried out in the loudest tones of any house in the neighborhood.
MacCaby, said the Record, had been The Town Hermit. He had rarely ventured from the dilapidated premises in which he crept mysteriously about; he had not been seen around the Square or Lower Main, testified High Village tradesmen, for many years. In the old days MacCaby had been thought a miser, gloating over hypothetical piles of gold and diamonds in the gaslit interior of his ancestral hovel; but this rumor, whether made of myth or matter, apparently lacked vitality, for it had faded and died off; and for a long time now The Town Hermit had been considered a pauper subsisting on crusts. This was obviously not true, since he employed a caretaker, or companion, or servant — the story was vague as to the man's status; but that Luke MacCaby had been in poor circumstances was attested by his physician, the well-known High Village general practitioner Dr. Sebastian Dodd (of whom Ellery had never heard, either). Dr. Dodd, interviewed by the Record, reluctantly confessed that for years he had kept sending the old man bills, until "I realized the poor old codger simply didn't have enough to live on decently, so I stopped dunning him." Nevertheless, Dr. Dodd had continued to take medical care of MacCaby to the day of MacCaby's death. The old man had been suffering from a chronic heart ailment. To relieve his attacks Dr. Dodd had given him certain tablets.
So far as was known, Luke MacCaby was the last of his line; his wife had died in 1909 and they had had no "issue," according to the Record. He left behind only the questionable memories of his caretaker-companion-servant, Harry Toyfell. Toyfell had cared for MacCaby for fifteen years. He was an old man himself — another of the town characters, it seemed, for he was known as The Town Philosopher. Even better, Toyfell was often seen at Gus Olesen's Roadside Tavern on Route 16 in the company of Tom Anderson and Nicole Jacquard. At the encounter with Tom Anderson, Ellery warmed; here at last was an old acquaintance, he who was known to Wrightsville not unaffectionately as The Town Drunk and/or The Town Beggar. Nicole Jacquard eluded him for a moment. Unless ... By gar! Back in '40 or '41 Ellery had been told of a Low Village French Canadian (in Wrightsvillese, "Canuck") family named Jacquard, the heads of which had specialized in the production of children; hadn't there been something about "another" set of triplets ...? If Nicole Jacquard was that Jacquard, as seemed likely, he was not exactly a model of Low Village deportment. That Jacquard — and Ellery hoped he was motivated by nothing more reprehensible than the necessity of keeping the innumerable little Jacquard mouths filled — had been frankly known as The Town Thief. Ellery felt a positive glow; it was like coming home again.
There was little more to the newspaper story. Toyfell and his queer employer had been known "to fight like a cat and a dog." Asked why he had remained in the sour ruin for so many years tending a crotchety hermit who (presumably) paid him little or nothing, Toyfell had replied in four profound words: "He liked flowers, too." Toyfell had green fingers; he had worked miracles in the MacCaby garden, the only vital spot on the premises, with cuttings allegedly raped from North Hill estates as his material. The MacCaby Giant Gladiolus was a seasonal feature of Andy Birobatyan's Wrightsville Florist Shop on Washington Street.
Now that his employer was dead, Toyfell was asked his "plans." He replied: "For five years Mr. John Hart's been pesterin' me to take over his gardenin'. Guess I'll do it now." John Hart — John Spencer Hart — was the millionaire owner of "the old cotton mill" in Low Village, the Record reminded its readers. Knowing Wrightsville, Ellery was not astonished to learn that this was a locutionary tie with the past; no cotton had been milled in the old cotton mill for twenty years. Mr. John Spencer Hart's millions came from dyes, and over the ugly plant at Washington and Lower Whistling ran the stainless steel legend, WRIGHTSVILLE DYE WORKS.
"So ends another romantic chapter in Wrightsville history. Services for the deceased will be conducted by Dr. Ernest Highmount, assistant pastor of the First Congregational Church on West Livesey Street. Interment will be at East Twin Hill Cemetery, in the MacCaby family plot."
Requiescat in pace. And Harry Toyfell, may your new gardening job with Millionaire John Spencer Hart add material peace to your philosophy. But why in hell should anyone think I'd be interested?
Ellery glanced at the byline at the head of the clipping.
By Malvina Prentiss.
He shook his head and flipped the clipping back.
A second excerpt from the Wrightsville Record. A later one: Monday, February 13. And this second story was scareheaded. The Record had a sensation by the tail and it was shouting. (Somehow, it did not seem like the Record of Frank Lloyd's day, or even of Diedrich Van Horn's. It was blary. Under new publishership, apparently.)
The second clipping followed up the obituary story of February 1. Luke MacCaby, the eccentric old pauper, had been no pauper at all. He had died one of the wealthiest men in Wrightsville!
So there is matter in myth after all.
Secretly, MacCaby had been a full partner in the Wrightsville Dye Works.
Why MacCaby had chosen to remain a silent partner in a multimillion-dollar plant which had mushroomed during the war and had been spreading ever since "will never be known. According to Mr. Hart, Mr. MacCaby insisted that their business relationship be kept a secret without ever revealing his reason. Mr. Hart believes that Mr. MacCaby's eccentricity," etc.
It appeared that MacCaby had kept his stock, his dividends, virtually all his assets, in a large safe deposit box in the vaults of the Wrightsville National Bank; even the officers of the bank (said Mr. Wolfert Van Horn, president) had been ignorant of MacCaby's partnership in the Wrightsville Dye Works. Hart had established a special account in a Connhaven bank; all partnership checks went into this account and MacCaby's funds came to him — at his request, said Hart — in cash.
Sensation.
The story came out, said the Record, when Otis Holderfield, a local attorney, filed a will for probate with the County Surrogate which, said Holderfield, Mr. MacCaby had had him draw only a few weeks before the old man's death.
But this was nothing compared with the revelation to come. Luke MacCaby had willed his entire estate to a well-known Wrightsvillian, a worthy man known for his good works; in fact — hold your breath, now — to none other than ... Dr. Sebastian Dodd!
Sensation!
Dr. Sebastian Dodd's fees were still two dollars "at the office," three on house call. Dr. Sebastian Dodd's patients were poor farmers, poor Low Villagers, poor High Villagers; he specialized in poverty. He was known to own only two suits and he ran an antediluvian "tin lizzie." He could not have survived without the occasional Hill patient who, since Dr. Milo Willoughby's death, came to him instead of to one of "the young men." Dr. Sebastian Dodd's waiting room was always full and his checking account always empty. He was so busy being a failure that he had even taken a young associate, Dr. Kenneth Winship, to help him stay poor.
This was the man who had come into an estate worth over four million dollars. The Record waxed ecstatic. Who said Virtue went Unrewarded?
Dr. Sebastian Dodd was flabbergasted. "Why, what can I say? I don't know what to say. I never had the least idea ... he never let on ..." At first the elderly physician had insisted feebly that it must be a hoax. Four million dollars! But when Attorney Otis Holderfield cited him clause and codicil, and Mr. John Spencer Hart confirmed it, Dr. Dodd turned sparkly-eyed. He began to speak of the deplorable condition of the Wrightsville General Hospital. Until 1946, Dr. Dodd pointed out, Wrightsville's only hospital had not even possessed a private pavilion. Its equipment was out-of-date and inadequate and its bed capacity far too small to cope with the medical needs of a community numbering ten thousand souls. "'When I took over as chief of staff from the late Milo Willoughby in '48,' said Dr. Dodd," said the Record, "'I promised myself by golly I wouldn't rest till the Wrightsville General got at least the modern children's wing we need so awfully bad. Now, through Mr. MacCaby's generosity, I can endow one.'"
To Harry Toyfell, The Town Hermit had left exactly nothing.
The Town Philosopher came nobly to the support of his reputation when the Record reporter asked him how he felt about having been overlooked in the will of the old man he had served for so long. "'Thy money perish with thee,'" he said, the Record identifying the source of this wisdom as Acts VIII, 20. "The grave manured by gold grows weeds," Toyfell had added, quoting himself this time (or the Record was unable to locate the quotation). "Money wouldn't make me a better man, now would it? In the eyes of the Lord all men are equal. Read your Jesus. Read your Paine." The Record commented on Toyfell's Christian character and said there was a deep lesson for all its readers in this humble old man's stern spirituality. The Record did a little quoting of its own, mentioning the needle's eye.
No, Harry Toyfell had not suspected MacCaby's affluence.
The story was bylined: By Malvina Prentiss.
Ellery, frowning, turned to the next-underlying clipping.
This one — it was the last — was dated Monday, February 20. One week later the story had shot up like the Beanstalk. John Spencer Hart had committed suicide.
This time Ellery read with naked devotion.
On learning that he was Luke MacCaby's sole heir to some four millions of dollars, Dr. Sebastian Dodd had retained Otis Holderfield, the lawyer who had drawn MacCaby's astonishing will, to watch over his legal interests. Accordingly, Holderfield had presented a letter for his new client's signature which was addressed to Mr. John Spencer Hart, president of the Wrightsville Dye Works, requesting a preliminary accounting of the plant's financial status. Dr. Dodd had signed the letter, Attorney Holderfield had mailed it to Mr. Hart by Registered Mail, Return Receipt Requested, the receipt had come back duly signed by addressee; and that night the millionaire had pleaded a grippey feeling, he had handed his wife into the Harts' town-and-country job, watched her drive off to a housewarming at the Hallam Lucks'— who had just moved from Hill Drive to a magnificent new house on Skytop Road — stepped back into his house, and he had dismissed the four inside servants for the evening. Hart had then gone into his library, locked the door, written a note to his wife, and blown his brains out.
This spectacular effect had obviously rocketed from a cause, which could only have been the slightly dangerous legal letter the late millionaire had just received. (To the Record, faithfully reflecting Wrightsville mores, all "lawyer letters" had a sinister undertone.) But what was the fireworks ingredient? Investigation soon isolated it. Unknown even to his wife, Hart had been gambling and speculating like a madman for years, his acumen apparently having been restricted to the dye business. His personal fortune had been consumed; his interest in the Wrightsville Dye Works was eaten away; he had even gnawed a chunk out of his silent partner's interest. Hart had teetered on the brink of ruin and prison at the very moment when his new partner's formal request for an accounting arrived. A well-placed bullet seemed the reasonable solution.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Double, Double by Ellery Queen. Copyright © 1950 Little, Brown and Company. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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