Greek Coffin Mystery (40 page)

“Now please observe,” said Ellery, turning about, “that the typist’s error consisted in not entirely releasing the shift-key after depressing the dollar-sign character, with the result that the following key which he depressed—that on which the 3 appears—left a broken, split impression on the paper. Naturally, the typist backspaced and retyped the 3, but that is not important; what is important is that the split impressions of the 3-key remained. Now, what happens when this common typing error is made—the error of not completely releasing the shift, or capital, key when you want to strike a lower-register letter? Simply this: the space where the lower-register letter is intended to be remains blank; a little above this blank space you get the imprint of the
lower
portion of the upper character; a little below this blank space you get the imprint of the
upper
portion of the lower character. You can see the effect from the rough scrawl I’ve made on the blackboard. Is that clear so far?”

There was a general bobbing of heads.

“Splendid. Suppose we think for a moment about the key on which the figure 3 appears on all standard-keyboard typewriters,” continued Ellery. “Naturally, I refer to American typewriters. What have we? The figure 3 on the lower register, and the symbol of ‘number’ on the upper register. Let me show you.” He turned to the blackboard again and chalked the following symbol: #. “Simple, eh?” he said, turning back. “But I want you to note that the error in the second blackmail letter does
not
indicate a standard-keyboard, at least to the extent of that single 3-key. For where the decapitated symbol above the backspaced 3 should be the lower half of this ‘number’ sign, it is—as you can see on the board—nothing of the kind! On the contrary, it’s a very queer symbol indeed—a little loop at the left and a curved line going to the right, leading from the loop.”

He had his audience as surely as if they were chained to him. He leaned forward. “Obviously, then, as I said before, the Remington typewriter on which this second blackmail note was typed had a peculiar symbol above its 3 where the usual sign for ‘number’”—he jerked his head toward the # on the blackboard—“should be. Obviously, too, this loop-and-curve mark is merely the lower half of some complete symbol. What can the upper half be? What is the general shape of the whole?” He straightened quietly. “Think about it for a moment. Look at that chalk-mark above the 3 I’ve scribbled on the blackboard.”

He waited. They strained their eyes. But no one answered. “It’s really most conclusive,” said Ellery at last. “I’m amazed that none of you—reporters especially—catch it. I say with all conviction, and dare any one to disprove the statement—I say that that loop-and-curve can be the lower half of only one symbol in the world which might conceivably be placed on a typewriter—and that is the sign which resembles a script capital ‘L’ with a horizontal dash running across its ascender … in other words, the symbol for the English pound-sterling!”

There was a little murmur of wonderment and appreciation. “Very well, then. We had only to look for a Remington typewriter—an American machine, of course—which had on the upper register of the 3-key the symbol for the English pound. Compute the mathematical probabilities of an American Remington typewriter having just such an alien sign on precisely that one key—I believe you’ll find it to run in the millions. In other words, if we could find a typewriter with such a symbol on just such a key, I would have every mathematical and logical right to maintain that here was the typewriter used in typing the second blackmail note.”

Ellery gestured largely. “This preliminary explanation is essential to a comprehension of what is to follow. Please attend closely. I discovered, while talking to James Knox during the period when Sloane was still considered a suicide and before the receipt of the first blackmail letter, that Knox had in his possession a new typewriter on which one key had been replaced. I learned this accidentally when I visited Knox and he was instructing Miss Brett to make out a check to pay a bill for a new typewriter. He cautioned her to be sure to add on the small charge for the
single replacement key.
Further, from Miss Brett I discovered in the same approximate period that this machine was a Remington—she mentioned that specifically; and I learned that it was the only typewriter in the house, the old one Knox having in my presence instructed Miss Brett to send to the Bureau of Charities. Miss Brett began to type a memorandum of some serial-numbers for me; she stopped short, threw away the sheet, and exclaimed: ‘I’ll have to
write out
the word “number”.’ The emphasis, of course, is mine. And although, at that time it meant nothing to me, I nevertheless had the basis for knowing that Knox’s Remington, the only machine in the house, had no symbol for ‘number’—otherwise why did Miss Brett have to
write out
the word ‘number’?—and that on this machine one key had been replaced. Now, since there was one key replaced on this new typewriter, and since the number-sign was missing, it must by strict logic have been the number-sign key, on which the 3 is the lower-register character, that had been replaced! Elementary logic. Now, I had to discover only one further fact, and my argument would be complete; if, on this replaced key, I found an English-pound symbol above the 3, where the ‘number’ sign should be, then I could say with perfect justification that this Remington typewriter was probably the one which had been employed in typing the second blackmail note. Naturally, I had only to glance at the machine’s keyboard to settle this point after the receipt of the second blackmail letter. Yes, the symbol was there. In fact, District Attorney Sampson, Assistant District Attorney Pepper, and Inspector Queen will recall that, had they known what to look for, they should have seen this without actually looking at the typewriter itself; for at the time Inspector Queen wrote out a cablegram to Scotland Yard in Knox’s den, one of the words in his message contained the figures for ‘hundred and fifty thousand pounds,’ and when Miss Brett had copied the Inspector’s penciled message on the typewriter, lo and behold! she had used not the word ‘pounds’ but the symbol of the script capital ‘L’ with the horizontal cross-bar! Even if I had never seen the machine itself, the mere fact that Miss Brett was able to type a pound-sign in the cable, coupled with the other facts in my possession, would have made the deduction inevitable. … The proof, as mathematically certain as any inferential proof could be, stared me in the face: the machine used to type the second blackmail letter had been Mr. James J. Knox’s.”

The reporters were sitting in the front row; their notes grew like Alice in Wonderland. No sound was audible except heavy breathing and the scraping of pencils. Ellery ground a cigaret beneath his sole with a bland disregard of Headquarters regulations and the ordinary proprieties.
“Eh bien,”
he said pleasantly,
“nous faisons des progrès.
For we know that from the time he received the first blackmail letter Knox permitted no visitors of any description in his house, not even Mr. Woodruff, his temporary attorney. This means that the only persons who could have used Knox’s machine in the typing of the second note were: Knox himself, Miss Brett, and the menial members of Knox’s household. Now, because the letters had both been written on halves of the promissory note—which in turn could only have been in the possession of the murderer—this means that one of the abovementioned group was the murderer.”

Ellery forged ahead so rapidly that a slight movement from the rear of the room—really, it should be noted, from the seat in which Inspector Richard Queen was crouched—went unnoticed, and a grim smile lifted Ellery’s lips at this deliberate stifling of a possible criticism. “Let us eliminate,” he said quickly. “Let us take the last category first. Was the writer possibly one of the servants? No; for none of the servants had been in the Khalkis house during the period of the first investigations—accurate lists were kept by one of the District Attorney’s men—and therefore none of the servants could have planted the false clews against Khalkis and later Sloane; an essential characteristic, this planting business, of the murderer.”

Again an irritable movement from the rear, and again Ellery’s instant resumption of his remarks. “Could it have been Miss Brett?—you’ll forgive me, Miss Brett,” Ellery said with an apologetic grin, “for bringing you into this argument, but logic is no respecter of the gallantries. … No, it couldn’t have been Miss Brett, for while she
was
in the Khalkis house during the period when the false clews were planted, on the other hand she couldn’t have been Grimshaw’s partner, another necessary qualification of the murderer. How do we know that she couldn’t have been Grimshaw’s partner, aside from the obvious grotesquerie of the thought? Very simply.” He paused, sought Joan’s eyes, found something in them consoling, and continued rapidly: “Miss Brett confessed to me that she has been for some time, and is now, an operative of the Victoria Museum.” Whatever he was about to say was drowned in a wave of excited exclamations. For a moment the meeting seemed doomed to eruption; but Ellery rapped on the blackboard, quite like a schoolmaster and the hubbub died away. He went on without looking at Sampson, Pepper, or his father, all of whom were regarding him with mingled expressions of reproach and anger. “As I began to say, Miss Brett confessed to me that she was employed by the Victoria Museum as an under-cover operative, and gained access to the Khalkis household originally for the sole purpose of tracing the stolen Leonardo. Now Miss Brett told me this after Sloane’s apparent suicide and before the arrival of the first blackmail letter. At this time she showed me some steamship tickets—she had purchased passage back to England. Why? Because she felt that she had lost the trail to the painting, and was no longer needed on a detective hunt which had become too involved for her. What did this purchase of passage out of the country mean? Obviously, that she did not know where the painting then was—otherwise she would have remained in New York; her very intention to return to London was proof of her lack of knowledge. Yet what was the prime characteristic of our murderer? That he
did
know where the painting was!—in Knox’s possession, to be exact. In other words, Miss Brett couldn’t have been the murderer and therefore couldn’t have written the second blackmail note—or the first either, for that matter, since both were written by the same person.

“Very well. If Miss Brett and the servants are eliminated as suspects, then only Knox himself is left as the writer of the second letter, and therefore as Grimshaw’s partner and murderer.

“How does this check? Knox satisfies the characteristics of the murderer: he was in the Khalkis house during the period when the false clews were planted against Khalkis, for one thing. On the other hand, to digress a moment, why did Knox come forward and explode his own false clews by confessing that he was the third man—after he had gone to all the trouble of making it appear that there
wasn’t
a third man? For a very good reason: Miss Brett had already exploded the theory of the third man by her tea-cup story in his presence … so he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by seeming to come to the assistance of the investigation—a daring move to support his pretended innocence. He also fits into the mold of the Sloane case: he could have been the person who accompanied Grimshaw into the Hotel Benedict and in this way learned that Sloane and Grimshaw were brothers, whereupon he sent the anonymous letter to us as a jog toward framing Sloane; as the murderer, moreover, he possessed the will he took from Khalkis’ coffin and could therefore have planted it in the basement of his empty piece of property next door and put a duplicate key in Sloane’s humidor; and, finally, as the murderer he would possess Grimshaw’s watch and could have placed it in the safe behind Sloane after killing his second victim in the Khalkis Galleries.

“Why, however, did he write letters to
himself
and trump up a seeming theft of his own painting? For an excellent reason: the Sloane suicide had been publicly discredited, and he knew the police were still seeking a murderer. Also he was being pressed to return the Leonardo—and by writing the letters to himself he made it appear that the murderer, still at large, and whoever he was, was at least not Knox, and that some outsider had written the letters—for of course he would never have written the letters at all had he thought they would be traced back to his own typewriter.

“Now, in stealing the painting from himself he furthered the illusion by making it appear that this fictitious outsider had deliberately lured the police from the house in order to steal the painting; he tampered with his own burglar-alarm in advance and expected, no doubt, after we should have returned from the Times Building empty-handed, that this tampered burglar-alarm would prove to us that the painting had been stolen while we were away on the vain hunt. It was a clever plan; for the stealing of the painting eliminated his obligation to return it to the Museum, while he secretly retained it thereafter, safe on all counts.”

Ellery smiled toward the rear of the room. “I see the honorable District Attorney biting his lips with vexation and worry. My dear Sampson, it is evident that you are anticipating the argument of Mr. Knox’s lawyers. For undoubtedly his battery of legal lights will attempt to show, by producing samples of Knox’s own customary typewriting style, that these differ from the style exhibited in the two blackmail notes which you will charge he wrote to himself. Don’t worry about it: it will be evident to any jury that Knox would
deliberately
alter his habitual typewriting style—spacing, punctuation, the heaviness with which he strikes certain letters, and so on—in typing these blackmail notes to strengthen the illusion of their having been typed by some one other than himself. …

“As to the paintings themselves. There are two possibilities: that Knox had both to begin with, as he claims, or that he had only one—the one he purchased from Khalkis. If he had only one, then he lied about its being stolen, because I found one in his house after he claimed it was stolen. And when he saw that I had found it, he hurriedly utilized the history of the two paintings to make us believe that he had had two all the time, and that the one we found was the copy, the original having been taken by this mythical thief. By this means, it is true, he sacrificed the painting, but saved his own skin—or so he thought.