Free The Devil To Pay by Ellery Queen

identification? Didn’t you see his face at all?”
    “I won’t stand here—” cried Val.
    “You’ll stand here and like it. Well, Frank?”
    “I didn’t see his face,” mumbled Frank, “but I knew it was him, anyway. From his coat. From his camel’s-hair coat. I knew him.”
    Walter very slowly slumped back against his chair. Val flashed a glance of pure hatred at him and Rhys sat down, jaws working, in the chair she had vacated.
    “Oh, come,” said Ellery with amusement. “Every second man in Hollywood wears a camel’s-hair coat. I wear one myself. Are you sure it wasn’t I you saw, Frank? I’m about the same size as Mr. Jardin.”
    Anger shone from Frank’s eyes. “But your coat ain’t torn,” he said shortly.
    “Oh,” said Ellery; and the Inspector’s face cleared.
    “Torn, Frank?”
    “Yes, sir. This afternoon, when Mr. Jardin left after the auction, his coat caught on the handle of his car and tore. Tore a flap right down under the pocket on the right side, a big piece.”
    “I thought you said,” remarked Ellery, “that you saw only the man’s back.”
    “He was walkin’ slow,” muttered Frank, with a malevolent glance at his tormentor, “like he was thinking about something, and he had his hands behind his back under his coat. So that was how I saw the pocket and the rip. So I knew it was Mr. Jardin.”
    “Q.E.D.,” murmured Ellery.
    “I even called out to him, I said: ‘Mr. Jardin!’ in a real loud voice, but he didn’t turn around, he just kept walking. So I went back to the booth. Like he didn’t hear me.”
    “I absolutely insist—” began Val in an outraged voice, when a man came in and held up something.
    “Look what I found,” he said. It was a long narrow strip of tan camel’s-hair cloth tapering to a point.
    “Where?” demanded Glücke, seizing it.
    “On top of one of those stakes on the fence. Right over the spot where the bench was pushed.”
    The Inspector examined it with avid fingers. “It was torn already,” he mumbled, “and when he climbed over the fence the torn piece caught and ripped clean away the length of the coat from the pocket down.” He turned and eyed Rhys Jardin deliberately. “Mr. Jardin,” he said in a cold voice, “where’s your camel’s-hair coat?”
    The room was drowned in a silence that crushed the eardrums. By all the rules of romantic justice Walter should have jumped up and explained what had happened, how he had taken Rhys’s coat by mistake, how—But Walter sat there like a tailor’s dummy. Val saw why with acid clarity. He could not acknowledge having worn her father’s coat without admitting he had lied. He had said he never entered the grounds at all. Yet it was clear now that he had entered the grounds with the key he also carried, that Frank had mistaken him for Rhys Jardin because of the torn coat, and that he had gone up to his father’s house and… And what? And what ? Was that—Val said it to herself in a chill small voice—was that why Walter had lied? Was that why he had hidden or thrown away the telltale coat? Was that why he sat there so dumbly now, letting the police think Rhys had gone into Spaeth’s house about the time Spaeth had been skewered?
    Val knew without looking at him that her father was thinking exactly the same thoughts. It would be so easy for him to say—or for her—to Glücke: “Now look here, Inspector. Walter Spaeth took that coat by mistake this afternoon, and Frank mistook him for me. I haven’t even got the coat. I don’t know where it is. Ask Walter.” But Rhys said nothing. Nothing. And as for Val, she could not have spoken now if her life depended on one little word. Oh, Walter, why don’t you explain, explain?
    “So you won’t talk, eh?” said the Inspector with a wry grin. “All right, Mr. Jardin. Frank, did any one but Miss Moon and Mr. Jardin enter Sans Souci after the auction today?”
    “N-no, sir,” said Frank, half out of the room.
    “Walewski, when