Face to Face Read Online Free PDF

master bath with a sunken marble tub and gold-plated fixtures, into an untidy den—if it had been human, Ellery would have called it disheveled. “She was shot in here.”
    Except for the clutter, the room was surprisingly Spartan. One scatter rug on the parquet floor, a kneehole desk and a leather swivel chair behind it, facing the doorway; a far-out armchair of some black wood, covered with what Ellery could have sworn was elephant hide; one work of art on a pedestal, a carving in ebony of a Watusi warrior, of native African craftsmanship, and not very good, he thought. There was not a painting on the wall, and the lamp beside the armchair had a mica shade that was flaking. High above the Watusi warrior, inset in the wall near the ceiling, was a wood-framed grille of some coarse, potato-sack like material, with a volume regulator, which Ellery took to conceal a speaker that piped music in from the elaborate player he had noticed in the living room downstairs; he had seen a similar speaker in one of the bedroom walls, and one in the bathroom. And that was all except for the bookcases, which ran around three walls to a height of some eight feet. The shelves were mobbed with books—lying down, leaning both ways, protruding (chiefly detective stories, Ellery noted with interest—he spotted Poe, Gaboriau, Anna Katharine Green, Wilkie Collins, Doyle, Freeman, Christie, Sayers, Van Dine among many others, including a number of his own early books); scrapbooks of all sizes and colors, tricks, puzzles, whatnots … the accumulation of what must have been many years. Ellery strolled over to one shelf and plucked a Double-Crostics book at random from a small army of them. He riffled through it; all the puzzles had been completed, in ink. In his experience, there was nothing quite so useless as a filled-in Double-Crostics book, especially one filled in ink, the mark of the thirty-third degree. Glory Guild Armando had evidently been unable to part with anything relating to her hobbies, even the things that had served their purpose.
    The top of the kneehole desk was a mess. The desk blotter, centered before the swivel chair, was considerably stained with dry, oxidized blood.
    â€œChest wound?” Burke said, studying the bloodstains.
    â€œTwo of them,” Inspector Queen said. “One bullet through the right lung, the other in the heart. The way we put it together, she’d come in here—some time after you left, Burke—maybe intending to write in her diary, more likely to make some notes for her book of memoirs. Miss Temple says she’d been doing that before she went to bed practically every night for the last few months, and then she’d dictate the notes to Miss Temple the next day, to be typed up. Probably Glory’d just sat down at the desk when her killer showed up and shot her, most likely from the doorway there, Doc Prouty says. The angles of entry of the two bullets fired into her confirm this. The blood got on the blotter when she fell forward on being shot, as you guessed, Burke. It’s a cinch she saw who shot her.”
    â€œDid she die instantly?” Ellery asked.
    â€œNo, she lived a few minutes, Doc says.” The Inspector’s tone was peculiar.
    â€œAh me and oh my,” Ellery mourned. “Wouldn’t it be tidy if she’d left a dying message? But that’s too much to expect.”
    â€œAsk and ye shall receive,” rasped his father in the same nasally mysterious way. “And may it do you a lot more good than it does us. As far as I’m concerned it could be ancient Martian.”
    â€œDon’t tell me—”
    â€œThat’s just what I’m doing. She lived long enough, and had enough strength—though where she got it Doc says he can’t imagine, with that heart wound—to pick up a pen, or maybe she already had it in her hand, and write something on the nearest piece of paper.”
    Ellery was