The fat man blinked, his eyes buried beneath half-moons of damp flesh. “Really?” he said, and by contrast his bass voice was tender.
“Perhaps I should have explained,” said Thorne abruptly. “Queen is a colleague of mine, Doctor. This case has interested him.”
“Case?” said the fat man.
“Legally speaking. I really hadn’t the heart to deny him the pleasure of helping me — ah — protect Alice Mayhew’s interests. I trust you won’t mind?”
This was a deadly game, Ellery became certain. Something important was at stake, and Thorne in his stubborn way was determined to defend it by force or guile.
Reinach’s puffy lids dropped over his eyes as he folded his paws on his stomach. “Naturally, naturally not,” he said in a hearty tone. “Only too happy to have you, Mr. Queen. A little unexpected, perhaps, but delightful surprises are as essential to life as to poetry. Eh?” And he chuckled.
Samuel Johnson, thought Ellery, recognizing the source of the doctor’s remark. The physical analogy «truck him. There was iron beneath those layers of fat and a good brain under that dolichocephalic skull. The man sat there on the waiting-room bench like an octopus, lazy and inert and peculiarly indifferent to his surroundings. Indifference — that was it, thought Ellery; the man was a colossal remoteness, as vague and darkling as a storm cloud on an empty horizon.
Thorne said in a weary voice: “Suppose we have lunch. I’m famished.”
By three in the afternoon Ellery felt old and worn. Several hours of nervous, cautious silence, threading his way smiling among treacherous shoals, had told him just enough to put him on guard. He often felt knotted tip and ti^ht inside when a crisis loomed or danger threatened from an unknown quarter. Something extraordinary was going on.
As they stood on the pier watching the Coronia’s bulk being nudged alongside, he chewed on the scraps he had managed to glean during the long, heavy, pregnant hours. He knew definitely now that the man called Sylvester Mayhew was dead, that he had been a pronounced paranoic, that his house was buried in an almost inaccessible wilderness on Long Island. Alice Mayhew, somewhere on the decks of the Coronia doubtless straining her eyes pierward, was the dead man’s daughter, parted from her father since childhood.