Rex Stout Read Online Free Page A

fish—”
    “All right.” Skinner was brusque. “Then you’ll have to hear all of it. Shall I shoot, Humbert?”
    The police commissioner nodded. “Go ahead.”
    “Okay. I’ll condense it as much as I can.” Skinner took a thick batch of papers from a folder, laid them onthe table, and leaned back in his chair. “I suppose you know the history of Val Carew.”
    “Some.”
    “We know it all, now. Thirty-five years ago he was a gambler out in Oklahoma. We haven’t picked up anything definite earlier than 1905, when he met an Indian girl, a Cherokee, and married her. They had a son, and lived on the tribal land until 1913, when the oil thing got big and the Indians cleaned up. The Indian girl—her name was Tsianina—her father was a chief and got ten headrights, so he was rich, and he staked Carew and his daughter and they came east, straight to New York. Since Val Carew was a born gambler, he took his stake to Wall Street, where the gambling was good, and within five years, by the time the war ended, he had multiplied his pile by ten and learned all the tricks.
    “Ten years ago, in 1927, his wife died. He had introduced her around New York as an Indian princess, and apparently she really was a princess to him, or even, you might say, a goddess, for he worshipped her from the day he married her until the day she died.” Skinner rummaged among the papers, withdrew one, and tossed it across. “There’s a picture of her. People say she was even more beautiful than that; I never met her. Anyhow, by 1927 Carew was up in the really high brackets, and when his wife died he built a tomb for her out of Oklahoma sandstone on his estate at Lucky Hills, as he called it, up north of Mount Kisco. I’ve been in it; all of us have, for a special reason. It’s as big as a barn. The walls, inside, are covered with Indian relics, and there are cabinets filled with them too. The ceiling is thirty feet high. Stone steps lead up to a stone platform, and on top of the stone platform is a casket made of wood, covered with buckskin, and with a glass top. Inside the casket, in plain view, is Tsianina. You ought to see her.”
    Cramer grunted. “I ought to be in Canada fishing.”
    “Oh, forget it. Anyway, there she is. I’ve seen her. We all have. It sounds grotesque, but it isn’t, it’s impressive. But how do you like this for grotesque? All along one side, running across the wall in a straight line about twenty feet from the floor, is a row of holes eight inches in diameter. There are 365 holes. All you can see, standing on the floor and looking up, is just a hole; but if you climb a ladder and look directly into one, you find that a cylinder has been chiselled clear through the stone wall, thirty inches thick, and you are looking at daylight. What do you suppose those 365 cylinders were chiselled through that wall for?”
    Inspector Cramer shook his head. “Got me. Hell, you could have had this printed and mailed me a copy.”
    “Yeah. But you should have the picture. As I said, Val Carew was a born gambler, and so naturally was superstitious. Also, he worshipped Tsianina, his wife. Also, the Cherokees were traditionally sun worshippers, and Tsianina’s father stuck to many of the old customs which most of his tribe had discarded. I’ve had a lot of this from Amory Buysse, curator of the National Indian Museum; you’ll meet him; wait till I tell you. This is what the holes in the wall were for: they were so arranged, as to direction, that each morning, an hour after sunrise, the sun’s rays would enter through one of them and shine directly on Tsianina’s face. That took some mathematics and some engineering. Carew had experts for that.”
    “Wait a minute.” Cramer had an eye cocked and his cigar tilted up. “Seems to me I’ve heard of that stunt before.”
    “Maybe. The Egyptians did it in the Great Pyramid, but only for one day in the year. Carew saw ’em and raised ’em. In a basement beneath the tomb is an