Free The King is Dead by Ellery Queen Page A

smiled, the slightest smile. ‘And you, Mr. Queen?’
    â€˜Speechless,’ said Ellery. Now he saw something else — a sort of grotto deep beneath the sunny seas of her eyes, a place of cold sad shade.
    â€˜I have always adored the flattery of American men. It is so uncomplicated.’ Laughing, she took them across the room.
    King Bendigo stood at an Italian marble fireplace taller than himself, listening in silence to the conversation of his brother Abel and three other men. The lord of Bendigo Island looked fresh and keen, although Ellery knew he must have had a long day at his desk. The jester, Max’l, was at a table nearby helping himself to canapés with both murderous hands. Occasionally, while his great jaws ground away, he looked around at his master like a dog.
    In an easy chair opposite King sprawled a slight dark man in rumpled clothing. On his sallow face, with its intelligent features, he wore a slight dark moustache; it gave him a gloomy, almost sinister, look. It was an odd face, with a broad high forehead, a nose sharply and crookedly hooked, and a chin that came to a premature point. A bell-shaped dark green bottle stood at his elbow and he was rolling a brandy snifter between his palms as his head lolled on the back of the chair. From the slits of his deeply sunken eyes he was studying Ellery, however, with remarkable alertness.
    King greeted them graciously enough, but in a moment he had turned aside with Abel, and it was Karla Bendigo who introduced the other men. The slight dark man in the easy chair was Judah Bendigo, the middle brother; he did not rise or offer his hand. He merely squinted up at them, rolling the snifter between his palms. Either he was already drunk, or rudeness was a hereditary Bendigo trait. Ellery was glad when they had to turn to the group at the fireplace.
    One of the three was small, stout, and bald, with the unemotional stare of a man to whom nothing has value but the immediate moment. Their hostess introduced him as Dr. Storm, Surgeon-General of Bendigo Island and her husband’s personal physician, who lived on the premises. It did not surprise Ellery to learn that the second man, a tall lean swarthy individual with a catty smile, was also a permanent resident; his name was Immanuel Peabody, and he was King Bendigo’s chief legal adviser. The third man of the group looked like a football player convalescing from a serious illness. He was young, blond, broad-shouldered, and pale, and his face was rutted with fatigue.
    â€˜Dr. Akst,’ Karla Bendigo said. ‘We seldom see this young man; it is a rare pleasure. He buries himself in his laboratory at the other side of the island, fiddling with his dangerous little atoms.’
    â€˜With his what?’ said Inspector Queen.
    â€˜Mrs. Bendigo insists on making Dr. Akst out to be some sort of twentieth-century alchemist,’ said the lawyer, Peabody, smiling. ‘A physicist can’t very well avoid the little atom, but it’s hardly dangerous, Dr. Akst, is it?’
    â€˜Say it is dangerous, Doctor,’ said Karla playfully. But she flashed a glance at the lawyer. It seemed to Ellery the glance was resentful.
    â€˜Only in the sense that an experimenter,’ protested Peabody, ‘is always monkeying with the unknown.’
    â€˜Can we talk about something else?’ asked Dr. Akst. He spoke with a strong Scandinavian accent, and he sounded younger than he looked.
    â€˜Mrs. Bendigo’s eyes,’ suggested Ellery. ‘Now there’s a subject that’s really dangerous.’
    Everyone laughed, and then Ellery and the Inspector had cocktails in their hands and Immanuel Peabody began to tell the story of an old criminal trial in England, in which testimony about the colour of a woman’s eyes delivered the defendant to Jack Ketch. But all the while Ellery was wondering if his father knew that the tired young man with the humourless Scandinavian voice was