QED by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online

last to come back, if it comes back at all. Certainly no one could bank on the old man’s being able to talk suddenly. Did the killer order Godfrey to write the combination down, under threat of the knife? Even so, Godfrey would have been a fool to do it; his daughter not withstanding, he seems to have been very far from a fool. He’d have known he was a goner the moment he wrote it.
    â€œI’ll admit,” scowled Ellery, “that all these unlikelihoods don’t make for exclusive conclusions. But they do accumulate a certain mass, and the weight of them convinces me that the killer put Mumford out of his misery simply to hurry up the inheritance of the pendant, not to steal it; that the killer then left, and Mumford wrote M-U-M on his own.”
    â€œYou talk all-fired pretty,” said Chief Newby with a grin. “There’s only one thing.”
    â€œAnd that is?”
    â€œIf the killer didn’t swipe the pendant, where is it?”
    â€œThat,” Ellery nodded morosely, “is Bingo.”
    â€œI don’t mean to high-hat my betters,” twanged Newby, “but you have to admit you’ve got a tendency to bypass the obvious. All right, you hit on M-U-M as Godfrey’s 13-21-13 safe combination. But why does that have to have anything to do with his reason for writing MUM on the pad? He was a bug on mums, so it was natural for him to use M-U-M as the combination. But he could have meant something entirely different when he wrote M-U-M on the pad. I still say he was fingering his murderer. And when you have a suspect around who’s actually known as M-U-M, and called Mum, what more do you want?”
    â€œMum Caswell isn’t the only obvious referent.”
    â€œCome again?”
    Ellery’s reasoning organ, needled by a phrase Newby had used, was busy with its embroidery.
    â€œA bug on mums, you say. My point is, it’s absolutely bizarre and incredible that MUM should have been his dying message. MUM is the symbol of the man who wrote it. He was a famous horticulturist specializing in mums. Everything about the man said MUM, from the flowers in his greenhouse to the oil paintings and prints and sculptures and intaglios and jewelry and Lord knows what else of them throughout the place. MUM was Mumford’s trademark: a mum is on his stationery, as I’ve taken the trouble to check; also on his wallet, and on his car, and in wrought iron over the front entrance. The moldings and doorknobs are all decorated with carved mums. And did you notice that his shirts sport an embroidered mum instead of his monogram? Also, if you’ll pardon me, there’s the irony of the knife that took his life, Godfrey’s boyhood knife. How many times, allow me to wonder, did little Goddie Mumford play mum blety-peg with it?”
    At this terminal extravagance—this spacecraft leap into whimsy—the Chief could not avoid a groan. Ellery rose, undismayed.
    â€œIt’s that kind of case, Newby. And by the way, there’s one line of investigation I haven’t followed through yet. The search for that safe combination sidetracked me. I’ll look into it tomorrow morning.”
    January 12: Having strained his prerogatives as a houseguest by arranging to borrow one of the Mumford cars, Ellery came downstairs the next morning before anyone else was up; and as he was passing the table in the foyer something caught his eye. There was a letter on the silver salver.
    Being the world’s nosiest noonan, Mr. Q paused to look it over. The dime-store envelope was unstamped, unpostmarked, and addressed in a childishly disguised scrawl.
    The envelope read: To Ellery .
    He was surprised and delighted—surprised because the letter was so totally unexpected, delighted because he was in great need of a new point of inquiry. He tore open the envelope and removed from it a sheet of cheap notepaper.
    The handwriting of the message was similarly