QED (8 page)

“And who was it you saw, Ellen?”

“It was … it was …” And her arm shot out—“… it was Wolcott Thorp!”

Ellery went early to his room, packed his suitcases, and slipped like the Arab silently away, leaving behind a bread-and-butter note. He did not check back in to the Hollis, the savor having for now gone out of Wrightsville; but he had a couple of hours to kill before plane time, and he killed them, appropriately, at police headquarters.

“Ellery!” Chief Newby greeted him, rising and seizing his hand. “I was hoping you'd drop in. I never did get to thank you properly. That was a slick scene you put on last night. You told a real whopper.”

“I may have told,” said Ellery soberly, “several.”

“You said you knew what Ellen knew.”

“Oh, that. Yes, of course. But I had to get her to talk; I was reasonably certain that was what she was holding back. And that letter business—”

“Did you really think she wrote that letter?”

“Not for a moment. Except for psychos, murderers don't admit their killings—even in disguised handwritings—at a time when they're not even suspected. And Ellen's Britishness was so blatant that anyone could have used the British dating system to frame her. So although I knew she hadn't written that threatening letter to herself, I accused her of it last night to frighten her into putting the finger on Thorp.

“Thorp, of course, was the one who wrote the letter. He counted on my spotting the Anglicism and pinning it on Ellen for the reason I gave—that double whammy about if-she-wants-us-to-think-she's-innocent-she-must-be-guilty. And if I hadn't spotted it, he could always have called it to my attention.

“It may even be that Thorp originally designed the frame-up letter to be used by him in the event Ellen did talk and accused him of what she'd seen. The trouble was, even when Ellen kept her mouth shut, Thorp had second thoughts. That poisoned chocolate business wasn't an attempt on Ellen's part to make herself look innocent, as I mendaciously suggested last night in putting the pressure on her; it was a genuine attempt by Thorp to shut her mouth before she could open it. He expected us—if it had succeeded—to accept it as a suicide-confession.”

“Incidentally,” said the Chief, “you said you knew it was Thorp—”

“A slight exaggeration. I had reason to suspect Thorp, but I had no proof—not an iota; and I was afraid another attack on Ellen might succeed.”

“But why,” asked the Chief, “would a man like Thorp murder his best friend in cold blood? He's confessed to the killing, but we haven't been able to get a word out of him about motive. It certainly can't be that measly twenty thousand Godfrey was leaving him.”

Ellery sighed. “The collector breed are a strange lot, Newby. In spite of what he told Godfrey, Thorp probably didn't consider himself too old to go on that expedition to West Africa; he must have been waiting desperately for years for what he thought was going to be a hundred thousand dollars to finance the trip. When he learned that Godfrey's carelessness had caused it to shrink to only one-fifth of that, he flipped. That expedition was the dream of his life. Is there anyone we can come to hate more than the loved one who disappoints and frustrates us?”

Newby held up his hand as Ellery rose. “Wait a minute! What made you suspect Thorp in the first place? It must be something fancy I missed.”

Ellery did not display pride. His Wrightsville triumphs too often felt like defeats. Perhaps it was because he loved the old town, and it had been his lot to clean up her filth.

“Nothing fancy, Newby. The dreariest kind of slip on Thorp's part. When you and I first went to the house, they told us in detail what had gone on at the discovery of the body. The line of previous action was very clear. Margaret Caswell rushed out of Godfrey's bedroom, crying out that the old man was—mark the word—
dead
. They all rushed upstairs except Thorp, who went to the downstairs phone, called Dr. Farnham, then called you here at headquarters. And what did Thorp tell you? That Mumford had been found, not merely dead, but
murdered
. Why should Thorp have leaped to the conclusion that the old man's death was unnatural
unless he already knew it?

“You know, Newby,” Ellery said with a half smile that apologized in advance, “Wolcott Thorp would have been far, far better off if he'd followed his own advice and—forgive me—kept mum.”

CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS IN DEDUCTION

Object Lesson

Ellery hurried down West 92nd Street toward the main entrance of Henry Hudson High School stealing guilty glances at his watch. Miss Carpenter had been crisply specific about place, date, and time: her home room, 109; Friday morning, April 22nd; first period (“Bell
at 8:40
, Mr. Queen”). Miss Carpenter, who had come to him with an unusual request, had struck him as the sort of dedicated young person who would not take kindly to a hitch in her crusade.

Ellery broke into an undignified lope.

The project for which she had enlisted his aid was formidable even for a crusading young teacher of Social Studies on the 9th Grade Junior High level. For two months merchants of the neighborhood had been reporting stores broken into by a teen-age gang. Beyond establishing that the crimes were the work of the same boys, who were probably students at Henry Hudson High School, the police had got nowhere.

Miss Carpenter, walking home from a movie late the previous Monday night, had seen three boys dive out of a smashed bakery window and vanish into an alley. She had recognized them as Howard Ruffo, David Strager, and Joey Buell, all 15-year-old home-room students of hers. The juvenile crime problem was solved.

But not for Miss Carpenter. Instead of going to the police, Miss Carpenter had gone to Ellery, who lived on West 87th Street and was a hero to the youth of the neighborhood. Howard, David, and Joey were
not
hardened delinquents, she had told him, and she could
not
see their arrest, trial, and imprisonment as the solution to anything. True, they had substituted gang loyalty for the love and security they were denied in their unhappy slum homes, but boys who worked at after-school jobs and turned every cent in at home were hardly beyond recall, were they? And she had told him just where each boy worked, and at what.

“They're only patterning their behavior after criminals because they think criminals are strong, successful, and glamorous,” Miss Carpenter had said; and what she would like him to do was visit her class and, under the pretext of giving a talk on the subject of Notorious Criminals I Have Known, paint such a picture of weak, ratting, empty, and violently ending criminality that David and Joey and Howard would see the error of their ways.

It had seemed to Ellery that this placed a rather hefty burden on his oratorical powers. Did Miss Carpenter have her principal's permission for this project?

No, Miss Carpenter had replied bravely, she did
not
have Mr. Hinsdale's permission, and she might very well lose her job when he heard about it. “But I'm
not
going to be the one who gives those boys the first shove toward reform school and maybe eventually a life sentence!” And besides, what did Mr. Queen have to lose but an hour of his time?

So Mr. Queen had feebly said yes, he would come; and here he was, at the door of the determined young woman's classroom … seven minutes
late
.

Ellery braced himself and opened the door.

The moment he set foot in the room he knew he had walked in on a catastrophe.

Louise Carpenter stood tensely straight at her desk, her pretty face almost as white as the envelope she was clutching. And she was glaring at a mass of boy and girl faces so blankly, so furtively quiet that the silence sizzled.

The first thing she said to him was, “I've been robbed.”

The terrible mass of boy and girl eyes followed him to her desk. In his nose was the pungent smell of ink, glue, paper, chalk, musty wardrobe closets; surrounding him were discolored walls, peeling paint, tarnished fixtures, warped window poles, and mutilated desks.

“Robbed in my own classroom,” Miss Carpenter choked.

He laid his coat and hat gently on her desk. “A practical joke?” He smiled at the class.

“Hardly. They didn't know you were coming.” They had betrayed her, the sick shock in her voice said. “Class, this is Ellery Queen. I don't have to tell you who Mr. Queen is, and how honored we are to have him visit us.” There was a gasp, a buzz, a spatter of applause. “Mr. Queen was kind enough to come here today as a special treat to give us a talk on crime. I didn't know he was going to walk in on one.”

The spatter stopped dead.

“You're sure there has been a crime, Miss Carpenter?”

“An envelope with seven one-dollar bills in it was stolen, and from the way it happened the thief can only be someone in this room.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

He deliberately looked them over, wondering which of the forty-one pairs of eyes staring back at his belonged to Joey Buell, Howard Ruffo, and David Strager. He should have asked Louise Carpenter to describe them. Now it was too late.

Or was it?

It seemed to Ellery that three of the twenty-odd boy faces were rather too elaborately blank. One of them was set on husky shoulders; this boy was blond, handsome, and dead-white about the nostrils. The second was a sharp-nosed, jet-haired boy with Mediterranean coloring who was perfectly still except for his fingers, and they kept turning a pencil over and over almost ritually. The third, thin and red-haired, showed no life anywhere except in a frightened artery in his temple.

Ellery made up his mind.

“Well, if it's a real live crime,” he said, turning to Louise, “I don't imagine anyone wants to hear me ramble on about crimes that are dead and buried. In fact, I think it would be more interesting if I gave the class a demonstration of how a crime is actually solved. What do you think, Miss Carpenter?”

Understanding leaped into her eyes, along with hope.

“I think,” she said grimly, “it would be
lots
more interesting.”

“Suppose we begin by finding out about the seven dollars. They were yours, Miss Carpenter?”

“One dollar was mine. Miss McDoud, an English teacher, is being married next month. A group of us are chipping in to buy her a wedding present, with me as banker. All this week teachers have been dropping in to leave their dollars in an envelope I've had on my desk. This morning—”

“That's fine for background, Miss Carpenter. Suppose we hear testimony from the class.” Ellery surveyed them, and there was a ripple of tittering. Suddenly he pointed to a little lipsticked girl with an Italian haircut. “Would you like to tell us what happened this morning?”

“I don't know anything about the money!”

“Chicken.” A boy's jeering voice.

“The boy who said that.” Ellery kept his tone friendly. It was one of the three he had spotted, the husky blond one. “What's your name?”

“David Strager.” His sneer said,
You don't scare me
. But his nostrils remained dead-white. He was the boy Miss Carpenter had said worked after school as a stock boy at the Hi-Kwality Supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue.

“All right, Dave. You tell us about this morning.”

The boy glanced scornfully at the girl with the Italian haircut. “We all knew the money was in the envelope. This morning before the bell rings Mrs. Morrell comes in with her buck and Miss Carpenter puts it with the other money and lays the envelope on her desk. So afterward the bell rings, Mrs. Morrell splits, Miss Carpenter picks up the envelope and takes a look inside, and she hollers, ‘I been robbed.'”

The thin boy with the red hair called out, “So what are we supposed to do, drop dead?” and winked at David Strager, who had already sat down. The big blond boy winked back.

“And your name?” Ellery asked the redhead.

“Joseph Buell,” the boy answered defiantly. He was the one who worked at Kaplan's, the big cigar, candy, and stationery store on 89th Street. “Who wants their old seven bucks?”

“Somebody not only wants it, Joey, somebody's got it.”

“Aaa, for all we know she took it herself.” And this was the third of the trio, the sharp-faced dark boy. If Ellery was right, he was the one who delivered part-time for O'Donnel's Dry Cleaning on Columbus Avenue.

“And you are—?”

“Howard Ruffo.”

The Three Musketeers, rushing to one another's support.

“You mean, Howard, you're charging Miss Carpenter with having stolen the teachers' money?” Ellery asked with a smile.

The boy's dark glance wavered. “I mean maybe she took it like by mistake. Mislaid it or somepin'.”

“As a matter of fact,” came Louise's quiet voice, “when I saw the money wasn't in the envelope, my first thought was exactly that, Mr. Queen. So I searched myself thoroughly.”

“May I see the envelope?”

“This isn't the one I was keeping the seven dollars in”—she handed him the envelope—“though it looks the same. I have a box of them in my locker there. The lock hasn't worked for ages. This one must have been stolen from my locker yesterday, or earlier this week.”

“It's a blank envelope, Miss Carpenter. How do you know it isn't the one that contained the money?”

“Because the original had a notation in ink on the flap—
Gift Fund for Helen McDoud
.” She looked about and glances fell in windrows. “So this theft was planned, Mr. Queen. Someone came to class this morning armed with this duplicate envelope, previously stolen and filled with worthless paper, prepared to make a quick exchange if the opportunity arose. And it did. The class was milling around while Mrs. Morrell and I chatted.”

The paper in the substitute envelope consisted of a sheaf of rectangular strips cut to the size of dollar bills.