Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“Mister, they didn’t none of ’em come down that way.”

The one-legged newsboy was standing at my elbow. I greeted him as if he were my pay-check.

“Come on with me,” I said, taking his arm. “You did fine down there, and now I want you to do something else for me.”

Half a block from the main street I led him up on the porch of a small yellow cottage. The front door stood open, left that way when the occupants ran down to welcome police and Marines, no doubt. Just inside the door, beside a hall rack, was a wicker porch chair. I committed unlawful entry to the extent of dragging that chair out on the porch.

“Sit down, son,” I urged the boy.

He sat, looking up at me with puzzled freckled face. I took a firm grip on his crutch and pulled it out of his hand.

“Here’s five bucks for rental,” I said, “and if I lose it I’ll buy you one of ivory and gold.”

And I put the crutch under my arm and began to propel myself up the hill.

It was my first experience with a crutch. I didn’t break any records. But it was a lot better than tottering along on an unassisted bum ankle.

The hill was longer and steeper than some mountains I’ve seen, but the gravel walk to the Russians’ house was finally under my feet.

I was still some dozen feet from the porch when Princess Zhukovski opened the door.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and then, recovering from her surprise, “your ankle is worse!”

She ran down the steps to help me climb them. As she came I noticed that something heavy was sagging and swinging in the right-hand pocket of her grey flannel jacket.

With one hand under my elbow, the other arm across my back, she helped me up the steps and across the porch. That assured me she didn’t think I had tumbled to the game. If she had, she wouldn’t have trusted herself within reach of my hands. Why, I wondered, had she come back to the house after starting downhill with the others?

While I was wondering we went into the house, where she planted me in a large and soft leather chair.

“You must certainly be starving after your strenuous night,” she said. “I will see if—”

“No, sit down.” I nodded at a chair facing mine. “I want to talk to you.”

She sat down, clasping her slender white hands in her lap. In neither face nor pose was there any sign of nervousness, not even of curiosity. And that was overdoing it,

“Where have you cached the plunder?” I asked.

The whiteness of her face was nothing to go by. It had been white as marble since I had first seen her. The darkness of her eyes was as natural. Nothing happened to her other features. Her voice was smoothly cool.

“I am sorry,” she said. “The question doesn’t convey anything to me.”

“Here’s the point,” I explained. “I’m charging you with complicity in the gutting of Couffignal, and in the murders that went with it. And I’m asking you where the loot has been hidden.”

Slowly she stood up, raised her chin, and looked at least a mile down at me.

“How dare you? How dare you speak so to me, a Zhukovski!”

“I don’t care if you’re one of the Smith Brothers!” Leaning forward, I had pushed my twisted ankle against a leg of the chair, and the resulting agony didn’t improve my disposition. “For the purpose of this talk you are a thief and a murderer.”

Her strong slender body became the body of a lean crouching animal. Her white face became the face of an enraged animal. One hand — claw now — swept to the heavy pocket of her jacket.

Then, before I could have batted an eye — though my life seemed to depend on my not batting it — the wild animal had vanished. Out of it — and now I know where the writers of the old fairy stories got their ideas — rose the princess again, cool and straight and tall.

She sat down, crossed her ankles, put an elbow on an arm of her chair, propped her chin on the back of that hand, and looked curiously into my face.

“However,” she murmured, “did you chance to arrive at so strange and fanciful a theory?”

“It wasn’t chance, and it’s neither strange nor fanciful,” I said. “Maybe it’ll save time and trouble if I show you part of the score against you. Then you’ll know how you stand and won’t waste your brains pleading innocence.”

“I should be grateful,” she smiled, “very!”

I tucked my crutch in between one knee and the arm of my chair, so my hands would be free to check off my points on my fingers.