The Four of Hearts by Ellery Queen Page A

the Lieutenant, studying the still cold faces, ‘that they should both pop off around the same time.’
    â€˜Nothing queer about it.’
    â€˜They haven’t been shot or stabbed or strangled; you can see that. Not a sign of violence. That’s why I say … Only double heart-failure isn’t – well, it’s quite a coincidence.’
    â€˜You could say,’ retorted Ellery, ‘that a man whose skull had been dashed into turkey-hash with a sledge-hammer died of heart-failure, too. Look here, Lieutenant.’
    He stooped over Royle’s body and with his thumb pressed back the lid of the right eye. The pupil was almost invisible; it had contracted to a dot.
    Ellery stepped across the littered aisle and opened Blythe Stuart’s right eye.
    â€˜Highly constricted pupils,’ he shrugged. ‘And notice that pervasive pallor – cyanosis. They both died of morphine poisoning.’
    â€˜Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart murdered ?’ The Lieutenant stared. ‘Wow!’
    â€˜Murdered.’ Bonnie Stuart stood in the cabin doorway. ‘No. Oh, no!’
    She flung herself upon her mother’s body, sobbing. Ty Royle came in then, looked down at his father. After a moment his hand felt for the cabin wall. But he did not take his eyes from that calm marble face.
    Bonnie suddenly sat up, glaring at her hands where they had touched her mother’s body. Although there was no mark on her white flesh, Ellery and the Lieutenant knew what she was staring at. She was staring at the invisible stain, the impalpable taint, the cold outer-space enamel of death.
    â€˜Oh, no,’ whispered Bonnie with loathing.
    Ty said: ‘Bonnie,’ futilely, and took an awkward step across the aisle towards her.
    But Bonnie sprang to her feet and screamed: ‘Oh, no!’ and, standing there, tall and distraught, her cheeks pure grey, her breast surging, she swayed and began to fold up like the bellows of an accordion. And as she crumpled in upon herself her eyes turned completely over in their sockets.
    Ty caught her as she fell.
    Icy bristles of mountain wind curried the plateau. Butch took Bonnie from Ty’s arms, carried her through the whipping grass to an Army plane, and threw a borrowed fur coat over her.
    â€˜Well, what are we waiting for?’ said Ty in a cracked voice. ‘Death by freezing?’
    And the Lieutenant said: ‘Take it easy, Mr. Royle.’
    â€˜What are we waiting for?’ shouted Ty. ‘Damn it, there’s a murderer loose around here! Why doesn’t somebody start tracking the scum down?’
    â€˜Take it easy, Mr. Royle,’ said the Lieutenant again, and he dived into a plane.
    Ty began to thrash around in the knee-high grass, trampling swathes of it down in blind parabolas.
    Ellery said to a pilot: ‘Just where are we?’
    â€˜On the north tip of the Chocolate Mountains.’
    He borrowed a flashlight and began to examine the terrain near the red-and-gold monoplane. But if the mysterious aviator who had borne Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart through the circumambient ether to their deaths had left tracks in making his escape from the grounded plane, the tracks had long since been obliterated by the milling feet of the Army men. Ellery wandered farther afield, skirting the rim of the plateau.
    He soon saw, in the powerful beam of the electric torch, that the task of finding the unknown pilot’s trail quickly was almost a hopeless one. Hundreds of trails led from the plateau down through scrub pine to the lowlands – chiefly horse-trails, as he saw from the many droppings and steel-shoe signs. To the east, as he recalled the topography, lay Black Butte; to the north-west the southern range of the San Bernardino Mountains; to the west the valley through which ran the Southern Pacific Railroad, and beyond it the Salton Sea and the San Jacinto range. The fleeing pilot could have escaped in any of the three