“Why, Red, I leave these matters to those who can attend to them far more quickly and efficiently than I ― or you, Red. Or the Atomic Age Tree Boy over here. Lieutenant Keats had all that information within a few hours and he passed it along to me. Why should I saute myself in the California sun when I can sit here in comfort and think?” Laurel’s lip wiggled and Ellery burst into laughter. He shook up her hair and tilted her chin. “Just the same, that was enterprising of you, Laurel. That was all right.”
“Not so all right.” Laurel sank into a chair, tragic. “I’m sorry, Ellery. You must think I’m an imbecile.”
“Not a bit of it. It’s just that you’re impatient. This business is a matter of legs, brains, and bottoms, and you’ve got to learn to wait on the last-named with philosophy while the other two are pumping away. What else did you find out?”
“Nothing,” said Laurel miserably.
“I thought it was quite a piece,” said Crowe Macgowan. “Finding out that Alfred bought the poison that knocked Roger for a loop... that ought to mean something, Queen.”
“If you jumped to that kind of conclusion,” said Ellery dryly, “I’m afraid you’re in for a bad time. Keats found out something else.”
“What’s that?”
“It was your mother, Mac, who thought she heard mice in the cellar. It was your mother who told Wallace to buy the rat poison.”
The boy gaped, and Laurel looked down at her hands suddenly.
“Don’t be upset, Mac. No action is going to be taken. Even though the mice seem to have been imaginary ― we could find no turds or holes... The fact is, we have nothing positive. There’s no direct evidence that the arsenic in Priam’s tuna salad came from the can of rat poison in the cellar. There’s no direct evidence that either your mother or Wallace did anything but try to get rid of mice who happen not to have been there.”