Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (17 page)

So the third was the lawyer brother Wash—Wash the easygoing, with a heavying gray face and a softened body. Wash Smith stood there weakly smiling, like a professional comedian caught in a tragedy and trying desperately to think of a joke.

“GI,” murmured Ellery. “That's what your stepfather wrote down, Private Smith, and what does it suggest to you?”

“What am I supposed to do,” whispered the boy in uniform, “confess because he wrote down GI? I wouldn't kill Dad—why would I kill Dad?”

“Why would Private Smith kill Dad, Dakin?” asked Ellery.

Dakin said coarsely, “Because he might not want to wait for Clint to die natural so he could collect his one-third of Clint's estate that's willed to the three Smith boys.”

“Let me alone!” shrieked the boy.

“Woodie,” said his brother Line gently.

“GI,” said Ellery. “Comes into your field in a way, Dr. Smith, doesn't it? GI—gastrointestinal?”

The young intern's fatigued eyes widened. “Are you serious? Of course. You can hardly study internal medicine without covering gastroenterology. I even treated Dad Clint for gastrointestinal flu last spring, at his insistence, although if the Medical Board found out … And naturally I have access to any amount of poison. The only thing is, I didn't poison him.”

“But the GI, Dr. Smith?” Ellery insisted.

The intern shrugged. “If Dad had thought I'd poisoned him, he'd have written my name. That would make sense. GI doesn't. Not to me, anyway.”

“Or to me,” cried Wash Smith, as if he could not wait.

So Ellery glanced at the lawyer brother. “Gin begins with the letters GI. And it was the bottle of gin that was poisoned, Mr. Smith—a bottle I understand
you
had brought home for Mr. Fosdick.”

“Well, sure, he asked me to,” said the eldest brother in a sort of agony. “But what kind of way is that to identify somebody? Line's right. Whoever Clint thought had poisoned him, wouldn't he have written the name?”

Ellery smiled ruefully; he had been chewing on that one for some time. Chief Dakin's face told nothing.

And suddenly Ellery stopped smiling, as if he had recognized the taste in his mouth. “Presidents,” he said. “Presidents! Your blood-father, I'm told, gentlemen, was named after President Thomas Jefferson. And he named his three sons after Presidents, too?”

“Why, yes,” said Wash Smith blankly. “After the three Presidents he always maintained were the greatest. I was named after Washington.”

“After Lincoln,” said Dr. Line Smith.

“After Woodrow Wilson,” quavered Private Woodie Smith.

And all three said in one voice, “Why?”

But all Ellery replied was, “Thank you. Would you mind stepping out of the room?” It was only when their guards had herded the three Smiths out that Ellery said to Dakin, “Now I can tell you whom old Clint was accusing of murder.”

“I'm listening,” said Chief Dakin.

Ellery was looking at the fallen chair as if the old man who had toppled it were still with them, gripping a pen and trying to push it along a billhead.

“Because Dr. Smith is right,” Ellery said. “Fancy verbal acrobatics are the pleasant preoccupations of detective fiction. In real life they don't happen. A man who will perform the miracle of forcing his dying brain and muscles to commit a message to paper is not trying to be subtle or clever. If he knows who did the job on him his efforts can have only one purpose: to transmit that information as directly as he can. Clint Fosdick, in writing those two letters, GI, was trying to do just one thing:
Name his killer.
”

But Dakin's expression did not change. “GI isn't even a part of any of their names, Mr. Queen. Don't you think I thought of that?”

“Well, Clint did have a problem, Dakin. Suppose the poisoner had been Wash Smith. Clint must have realized that he might start to write down the name Wash, or Washington,
but never get beyond the first letter
—he knew he was going fast. But if all he could manage to write down were the W of Washington, that W would apply equally to young Woodie, named after President Wilson. So, to avoid being misunderstood, Clint simply began to print his poisoner's
first
name.”

“First name?” The police chief blinked.

“Thomas Jefferson Smith named his three sons after Presidents. So the boys' full names, like Jeff Smith's own, must begin with the first names of the Presidents they were named for. In fact, Private Smith is actually called Woodie, obviously for Woodrow Wilson Smith. Dr. Linc Smith's full name, then, must be Abraham Lincoln Smith. A for Abraham (or L for Lincoln), W for Woodrow (or for Wilson)—neither fits the GI.

“But how about Wash-for-Washington Smith,” said Ellery, “always having to be bailed out of trouble, a lawyer ‘when he works at it'—probably over his ears in debt and desperately needing his third of Clint's fortune now? There's your chuck in the woodpile, Dakin—the brother Lettie Dowling saw dosing the gin bottle with poison in the pantry yesterday morning. It was George Washington Smith Lettie saw, wasn't it? It's his fingerprints on the poison bottle?”

“Yes,” said Wrightsville's chief of police slowly. “Wash is my man, all right. But Mr. Queen, Clint wrote GI—and Wash's first name, George, starts with GE.”

“Tricky,” said Ellery, squeezing Dakin's arm. “Poor old Clint got the G down all right, Dakin, but he died just as he completed the downstroke of the E.”

NARCOTICS DEPT.

The Black Ledger

The Case of the Black Ledger was one of the biggest cases Ellery ever undertook, and its size was not reduced by the littleness of the effort involved. It consisted merely in acting as an errand boy, the errand being to take the ledger from the City of New York to Washington, D.C.

Why the transportation from one city to another of an account book worth perhaps three dollars should be a problem, why Ellery was the messenger instead of a federal agent, why he deliberately set forth on his mission alone, without even a weapon … the answers to these engrossing questions may be found in the proper place, which is not here. This story begins where that one ends.

In appearance the Black Ledger was unexciting. It had a hard binding lined with black leatherette which was scraped along the edges, its dimensions were six inches by eight and one-half inches, and it contained fifty-two thick, limp ledger pages rule-printed in blue and red lines, and all rather dirty. And yet it was one of the most infamous and historic volumes in the library of American crime. For on the blue lines of those fifty-two jammed pages were written the name and address of every important regional distributor of illegal narcotics in the United States, and the list was in the handwriting of the master of the ring.

In the spreading epidemic of dope addiction which was plaguing the forty-eight states, the federal authorities wanted this list desperately. The Black Ledger was a monstrous indiscretion, and to keep it from reaching Washington the quiet monster who had compiled it would stop at literally nothing. The two government agents who secured possession of it paid for their triumph with their lives. But by that time the Black Ledger was—for the moment—safe in New York.

At this point Ellery entered the problem.

The place where he examined the ledger and accepted the mission and prepared to carry it out was, they were positive, under surveillance. The chieftain of this continent-wide criminal organization was no petty gang lord. He was a genius of withered soul, with immense power, resources, and connections, who had raised vicious crime almost to the level of respectable big business. Ordinary methods were bound to fail. At the least, a show of force on the spot might turn the entire area into a bloody battlefield, causing the deaths of innocent people. Ellery's plan was accepted.

A drawing room on the Capitol Limited was reserved for him officially by telephone, and at the appointed time Ellery went down into the streets.

The fall day was gray, with raw skies, and Ellery had hung an umbrella with a bamboo handle over his left arm. He was wearing a lined topcoat and he carried a bulging briefcase.

Ellery seemed unaware that from the instant his foot touched the pavement his life expectancy dwindled to the vanishing point. Smoking his big brier pipe placidly, he stepped to the curb and glanced around as if for a taxicab.

Two things happened at once. His arms were seized from behind and a seven-passenger sedan shot to the curb and blocked him off.

The next moment he was in the car, prisoner of four large men whose complete silence was more quieting than threats.

Ellery was not surprised when the sedan deposited them at Pennsylvania Station and three of his four silent captors strolled him unarguably through Gate 3 down into the Capitol Limited and Drawing Room A of the fifth car, which was his reservation. Two of the large men took him in and one of them carefully bolted the drawing room door.

As Ellery had expected, the monster was waiting for him. He occupied the best armchair, an immaculately dressed man of middle age with grudging pale hair parted cleverly in the middle and hot, sore-looking eyes. This creature was a millionaire, thought Ellery, a millionaire who had made his millions by destroying the will and health and future of thousands of foolish people, many of them children and adolescents.

And Ellery said, “You had the phone tapped, of course.”

The narcotics king did not reply. He glanced at the larger of his two strong-arm men, the one with the boneless nose.

Nose said instantly, “He didn't speak to nobody when he come out. Nobody come near him. He didn't touch nothing. He didn't drop nothing.”

The monster in the chair glanced at the other large man, the one with the tic in his right eyelid.

“Nobody else gets out up there,” said Tic. “And Al is keeping in touch by the train phone from the lounge.”

The sore eyes now turned their full animal suffering on Ellery. “You want to live?” He had a soft, womanish voice.

“As much as the next man,” said Ellery, trying to keep his tongue from rattling.

“Then hand it over.”

Ellery swallowed and said, “Oh, come.”

Nose grinned, but the monster said to him, “No. First open his bag.”

Nose dumped the contents of Ellery's briefcase on the floor. It consisted of a single object, a crisp new Manhattan telephone directory.

“Nothing else in the bag?”

“Not a thing.” Nose tossed the empty briefcase to one side. He picked up the big directory and riffled it twice.

“Screwy thing to be lugging around,” remarked Tic.

“My favorite train reading,” said Ellery. He felt urgently like asking for a drink of water, but he decided against it.

“Not in here,” said Nose.

“His coat and hat.”

Nose shucked him like an ear of corn while Tic examined Ellery's snapbrim.

“It wouldn't be in here,” he complained. “It's too big.”

Nose jeered. “With the cover it's too big. This is a smart operator. He tore out the pages and crumbled 'em.”

“But fifty-two pages,” protested Tic.

The monster said nothing. His red glance was fixed on the furled umbrella, which Ellery had retrieved and was clutching. Suddenly he reached over and yanked. He removed the umbrella cover slowly and slowly pressed the catch and pushed. The umbrella opened. After a moment he tossed it away.

Nose said, “Not in the coat.” The lining lay on the floor, he had torn the pockets out, and he had ripped the seams wherever the material doubled over.

“Strip him.”

Ellery felt his knees buckle under the pain of Nose's grip. Tic did the stripping, without kindness. Sore Eyes watched the denuding process with the unblinking patience of a crocodile.

“Leave me my shorts!” said Ellery wildly.

They left him nothing. Mother-naked, he was permitted to wrap himself in the wreck of his topcoat, crouch in a chair, and smoke his pipe. It tasted like fuming brass, but it gave him comfort.

He reached for the Manhattan telephone book just as the Capitol Limited pulled out of Pennsylvania Station. He knew that the conductor was taken care of and that there would be no interruptions until he reached Washington—if indeed he ever reached it.

But he was wrong. At Newark, when the train stopped, a man entered the drawing room. Nose called him Doc. Doc, a fat little man with three chins and no hair, was carrying a black bag. He eyed Ellery with the brisk anticipation of a professor approaching the cadaver tank in a dissecting room.

Ellery clutched the Manhattan directory and braced himself.

The Limited was roaring through New Brunswick when Doc, busily at work, referred to himself jestingly as Secretary of the Interior. By the time the train was rolling into the Trenton station Doc was no longer jesting: he was perspiring.

Shutting his bag, he made his report to the man in the armchair in a strained voice.

It was negative.

The man in the armchair said to Tic, “Tell Al to phone Philly. I want Jig with some equipment.” Then he looked at Ellery and for the first time showed his false teeth in a nightmarish smile. “Secret writing,” he said softly. “Just in case.”

Jig got on at North Philadelphia. At Wilmington Nose made some exterior reports, and Jig completed them. Jig was a tall skinny man with no shoulders and a club foot.

The Black Ledger, whole or in parts, was not in Ellery's suit, as the ruins of his trousers and jacket testified. His oxford shirt, necktie, undershirt, shorts, and socks had been carefully manhandled. His shoes had been tapped, probed, slit, and all but turned inside out. Even his belt, an unmistakably single strip of cowhide, had been cut apart.

All his possessions were on display. Keys and coins were pronounced solid. His wallet contained ninety-seven dollars, a money order stub, a New York State operator's license, a dues receipt from the Mystery Writers of America, five business cards, and seven jottings of ideas for stories. His checkbook had been gone over page by page, including the stubs. His tobacco pouch had been found to contain pipe tobacco, and an unopened packet of cigarets was opened and found to contain cigaret tobacco. A letter from his publisher demanded the return of galley proofs three weeks overdue, and a letter postmarked Orangeburg, New York, from a man signing himself Joseph MacCurty threatened to kill Ellery Queen unless Ellery Queen saved the writer from being killed by an invisible enemy.