Ellery Queen's International Case Book by Ellery Queen

Author:Ellery Queen
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: detective, mystery, SSC
ISBN: 9783453103375
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1964-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Philippines: DEATH IN MANILA

The big American, sprawled across the blood-soaked bed in the pearly Pacific dawn, was naked except for shorts. One bullet had made a mess of his cranium, a second had caught him in the mouth, and two others had crashed into his chest.

“I heard my husband stumbling into the house a little past four o’clock this morning,” sobbed half-clad Mrs. Elena Delaney to the silent little men in brown uniforms. “I went into his bedroom and found him staggering around and mumbling. He was drunk. I helped him undress and went downstairs to make him some coffee. At four- thirty by the kitchen clock I heard what I thought were backfires of an automobile; they sounded very loud. I took the coffee upstairs to Bill’s room . . .”

“I, too, heard the backfire reports,” said Serafina, the Delaney housemaid, who slept upstairs. “I jumped out of bed. The Señora was coming up the stairs with coffee. She went into the Señor’s room, and she screamed. When I saw what had happened I ran down to Tomas’s room . . .”

“The backfires woke me from sleep,” said Tomas Ilologuay, the Delaney houseman. “From my doorway I saw Mrs. Delaney carrying coffee up the stairs. I went to my window, but I could see no moving car in the night. Then came the screams, and Serafina ran into my room crying out that I should call Dr. Arenas and the police, that Mr. Delaney was shot. The backfires, I then knew, had been bullets.”

Under the body on the bed lay a woman’s white glove.

The victim had been killed with his own gun; the little brown police found it on the ground below his bedroom balcony. Someone had worked with deadly speed—someone who had come and killed and ransacked the room and gone in the terrible twinkling of a nightmare.

I heard the remarkable story of William Dodge Delaney’s murder from the lips of a grizzled mestizo lieutenant of the Manila police during a stopover in the Philippines on my recent round-the- world crime hunt. As a demonstration of life imitating fiction to the point of disbelief, I found no comparable case anywhere in my travels.

Joseph Conrad would have loved Bill Delaney. He had been a tough, smart, dashing officer of U. S. Army Intelligence, and he was equally as well-known to Manila’s socialites as to the 8- tongued, multicolored, dangerous Filipino underworld.

After the war, in partnership with another ex- Army C. I. D. man, Edwin K. Trace, Delaney organized a business that bought and sold surplus commodities. When more than a billion dollars’ worth of government stores of tools, machinery, drugs, and other vital goods were released, the company made a fortune.

Meanwhile, Delaney had met Elena Descaldo, an attractive widow with three children. Elena had fought in the war by the side of her husband, a Filipino guerrilla leader who fell in the fight. The American was smitten with fiery Elena; he pursued her, won her, and married her.

Delaney became wealthy.

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