The Third Mystery by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, detective, Crime, sleuth, Suspense
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE FACES OF DANGER, by Rufus King

Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1960.

The trade winds swept their leisured passage along Florida’s eastern seaboard. They brushed its sands. They flowed across the balcony of Mr. Galli’s costly suite in the Hotel Napoleon I, and entered its living room where Mr. Galli was conferring with his accomplice, Madame Freda Alcott.

In his stylized Sicilian manner of speech Mr. Galli was saying, “Apart from the fact that Miss Bellington is a young woman of great wealth, and from a visual viewpoint unprepossessing, what facets of character have you unearthed that will be of value to our discreet assignment?”

Madame Alcott, who a decade or two ago had once been partially tapped for the Met, announced in her unique mezzo-basso, “Her sincerity is beyond question. No breath of scandal has ever touched her. In hideous truth, I have found her a paragon of all the virtues.”

“Excellent. Then the threat of exposure will bring her to her knees.”

“Among her more irritating conceits,” Madame Alcott continued, “is an obsession for the poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Even to oral quotes.”

“Ah! But that is precisely in line with the information I require. It is priceless. O love, O lover, loose or hold me fast, I have thee first, whoever have thee last—stuff like that would provide the perfect answer.”

Mr. Galli thereupon sketched for Madame Alcott an outline of their immediate moves, all of which were perilous to the future of Miss Bellington, and as devious as Mr. Galli’s Borgia-type blood.

“It boils down to one simple fact,” he said. “She must be trapped into committing herself in writing. Notes, letters—we will determine the exact medium later—but of such a nature that when we deliver it to our client he can dangle it as a sword of Damocles over Miss Bellington’s head. And now tell me this: Were you able to gauge the depth of her emotions toward her fiancé?”

Madame Alcott’s superb bosom gave a profound heave. “To one, such as myself, who has squeezed the very essence of passion even from a stone, their romance is an anemic jest. She admires this man Lyle Dasher. She is comfortable with him. But love him? Absurd!”

“Good. Then our proposed strategy strikes you as effective?”

“Beyond doubt.”

“Another point: Did you determine just how far she has progressed with the Governor?”

“Miss Bellington has had several audiences at Tallahassee and His Excellency is enchanted. They are already considering a suitable tract for the Foundation—a thousand or more acres of state-owned land. All that is now required, the Governor pointed out, is a sufficiently aroused and favorable public opinion in order to sway the legislature into giving its stamp of approval.”

“Which is precisely where you will come in as Publicity Director for the Bellington Foundation.”

“One takes it for granted,” Madame Alcott said with a hardening of her theatrical eyes, “that our client’s financial rating is sufficient to meet our fee?”

“Fifty thousand?” Mr. Galli shrugged a set of expensively padded shoulders. “To him, a mere bagatelle.

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