THE WOODY, LEATHERY, HOMELY living room of the Queens’ apartment on West Eighty-seventh Street in New York City had seen queerer visitors than Mr. Seaman Carter, but surely none quite so ill at ease.
“Really, Mr. Carter,” said Ellery Queen with amusement, stretching his long legs nearer the fireplace, “you’ve been wretchedly misinformed. I’m not a detective at all, you know. My father is the sleuth of this family! Officially I’ve no more right to investigate a crime than you have.”
“But that’s exactly the point, Mr. Queen!” wheezed Carter with a vast rolling of his porphyry eyes. “We don’t want the police. We want unofficial advice. We want you, Mr. Queen, to clear up these devilish robberies sub rosa—ahem!—so to speak; or I shouldn’t have come. The Gothic Arms can’t afford the notoriety, my dear, dear Mr. Queen. We’re an exclusive development catering to the best people—”
“Pshaw, Mr. Carter,” said Ellery between lazy puffs of the inevitable cigaret, “go to the police. You’ve had five robberies in as many months. All of jewels, all filched from different tenants on different floors. And now this latest theft two days ago—a diamond necklace from the bedroom wall-safe of a Mrs. Mallorie, an invalid and one of your oldest tenants….”
“Mrs. Mallorie!” Carter shuddered with the sinuous ripplings of an octopus in motion. “She’s an old woman. She went into hysterics—a terrible person, Mr. Queen. Insists on calling in the police, informing the insurance company….We’re at our wits’ end.”
“It seems to me,” said Ellery, fixing his sharp eyes on the man’s lumpy cheeks, which were quivering, “that you’ll be in the devil of a sweet mess, Mr. Carter, if you don’t get official help at once. You’re making an extraordinary fuss about very small potatoes.”
The telephone-bell rang and Djuna, the Queens’ boy-of-all-work, slipped into the bedroom to answer it. He popped his small gypsy head out of the doorway almost at once. “For you, Mr. Ellery. Dad Queen is on the wire and he’s hopping.”
“Excuse me,” said Ellery, abruptly, and went into the bedroom.
When he came out all amusement had fled from his lean features. He had divested his tall body of the battered old dressing-gown and was fully attired for the street.
“You’ll be interested to learn, no doubt,” he said in a flat voice, “that once more fact has outdone fiction, Mr. Carter. I’ve been treated to the spectacle of an amazing coincidence. On which floor did you say Mrs. Mallorie’s apartment lies?”
Mr. Seaman Carter shook like the damp flanks of a grumbling volcano; his little eyes became glassy. “My God!” he screeched, dragging himself to his feet. “What happened now? Mrs. Mallorie occupies Apartment F on the sixteenth floor!”
“I’m delighted to hear it. Well, Mr. Carter, your laudable effort to smother legitimate news has failed, and you have enlisted my poor services. Except that we are en route to the scene of a crime more serious than theft. My father, Inspector Queen, informs me that a man in Apartment H on the sixteenth floor of the Gothic Arms has been found foully done in. In a word, he’s been murdered.”
An express elevator took Ellery and the Superintendent to the sixteenth floor. They emerged on the west corridor of the building. A central corridor bisected the hall in which they found themselves, and at its end could be seen the bronze doors of the elevator on the east corridor. Carter, his globular carcass trembling like gelatinous ooze, led the way toward the right. They came to a door before which stood a whistling detective. The door, marked with a gilded H, was closed. Carter opened it and they went in.
They were in a small foyer, through the open door of which they could see into a large room filled with men. Ellery brushed by a uniformed officer, nodded to his father—a small bird-like creature with gray plumage and bright little eyes—and stared down at a still figure in an armchair beside a small table in the center of the room.
“Strangled?”
“Yes,” said Inspector Queen. “And who’s this with you, Ellery?”
“Mr. Seaman Carter, Superintendent of the building.” Ellery idly explained the purpose of Carter’s visit; his eyes were roving.
“Carter, who’s this dead man?” demanded the Inspector. “No one here seems to know.”
Carter shifted, from one elephantine foot to the other. “Who?” he babbled. “Who? Why, isn’t it Mr. Lubbock?”
A foppish young man in morning coat dotted with a boutonnière coughed hesitantly. They turned to stare at him. “It’s not Lubbock, Mr. Carter,” he lisped. “Though it does look like him from the back.” His simpering lips were pale with fear.
“Who’s that?” asked Ellery.
“Fullis, my assistant,” muttered the Superintendent. “Heavens, Fullis, you’re right at that.” He pushed around the armchair for a better view of the body.
A trim tall man with a ruddy complexion came briskly into the room. He was carrying a black bag. Carter addressed him as Dr. Eustace. The physician set his bag down by the chair and proceeded to examine the dead man. Dr. Eustace was the house physician.
Ellery drew the Inspector aside. “Anything?” he asked in low tones.
The Inspector gasped over a generous noseful of snuff. “Nothing. A complete mystery. Body was found by accident about an hour or so ago. A woman from Apartment C across the central corridor came in here to see John Lubbock, who lives alone in this two-room suite. At least, that’s what she says.” He moved his head slightly in the direction of a platinum-haired young woman, whose tears had played havoc with the careful lacquer on her face; she was sitting forlornly across the room guarded by a policeman. “She’s Billy Harms, the ingénue of that punk comedy at the Roman Theater. Managed to squeeze out of her the information that she’s been Lubbock’s playmate for a couple of months; her maid tells me—thank God for maids!—that she and Lubbock had a lovers’ battle a few weeks ago. Seems he won’t pay her rent any more, and I guess the market on sugar-daddies has gone ’way down.”
“Lovely people,” said Ellery. “And?”
“She walked herself plump in here—seems it was sort of dim; only a small light in the lamp on the table—thought this chap was asleep, shook him, saw he wasn’t Lubbock and that he was dead….The old story. She screamed and a lot of people ran in—neighbors. Over there.” Ellery saw five people huddled near Billy Harms’s chair. “They all live on this floor. That elderly couple—Mr. and Mrs. Orkins, Apartment A across the hall. The sour-faced mutt next to the Orkinses is a jeweler, Benjamin Schley—Apartment B. Those other two people are Mr. and Mrs. Forrester—he’s got some kind of soft job with the city; they’re in Apartment D, next to Billy Harms.”
“Get anything out of them?”
“Not a lead.” The Inspector bit off the end of a gray hair from his mustache. “Lubbock left here this morning and hasn’t been seen since. He’s a man-about-town, it seems, and he’s been pretty gay with the ladies. Understand from one of the house-maids that he’s been playing around with Mrs. Forrester, too—kind of pretty, isn’t she? But there doesn’t seem to be any connection with the others.” He shrugged. “Had a few feelers out already—Lubbock has no business and nobody seems to know his source of income. Anyway, it’s not Lubbock we’re interested in right now, although we’re trying to locate him. Got Hagstrom on the job. But none of the people employed here can say who this feller is that was choked. Never saw him before, they say; and there’s nothing in his effects to show who he is.”
Dr. Eustace signaled the Inspector; he had risen from his inspection of the corpse. The Queens moved back toward the chair. “What’s the dope, Doctor?” asked the Inspector.
“Strangled to death from behind,” replied the physician, “a little more than an hour ago. That’s really all I can tell, sir.”
“That’s a help, that is.”
Ellery strolled over to the little table by the dead man’s chair. The contents of the man’s clothes had been dumped there. A worn cheap wallet containing fifty-seven dollars; a few coins; a small automatic; a single Yale key; a New York evening newspaper; a crumpled program of the Roman Theater; the torn half of a Roman Theater ticket, dated that very day; two soiled handkerchiefs; a stiff new packet of matches, its flap bearing the imprint of the Gothic Arms; a glistening green cigaret package, half of the tin-foil and blue seal at the top torn away. The package contained four cigarets, although it was apparently a fresh one and retained its full shape.
A meagre enough grist on the surface.
Ellery picked up the small key. “Have you identified this?” he asked the Inspector.
“Yes. It’s the key to this apartment.”
“A duplicate?”
Mr. Seaman Carter took it from Ellery’s hand with slippery fingers, fumbled with it, consulted with lisping Fullis, and returned it to Ellery. “That’s the original, Mr. Queen,” he quavered. “Not the duplicate.”
Ellery flung the key on the table; his sharp eyes began to prowl. He spied a small metal waste-basket beneath the table, and dug it out. It was clean and empty except for a crumpled ball of tin-foil and blue paper, and a crushed cellophane wrapper. Ellery at once matched his finds to the package of cigarets; he smoothed out the silver-and-blue scrap and discovered that it exactly fitted the hole torn in the top of the package.
The Inspector smiled at his look of concentration. “Don’t get excited, sonny boy. He walked in the lobby downstairs from the street about an hour and a half ago, and bought that pack of butts at the desk; got the matches there, too, of course. Then he came upstairs. Elevatorman let him off at this floor, and that’s the last any one saw of him.”
“Except his murderer,” said Ellery with a frown. “And yet…Did you look into this package, dad?”
“No. Why?”
“If you had, you would have seen that there are only four cigarets here. And that, I believe, is significant.”
He said nothing more and commenced a leisurely amble about the room. It was large, rich, and furnished with a dilettante’s taste. But Ellery was not interested in John Lubbock’s interior decorations at the moment; he was looking for ash-trays. He saw several scattered about, of different shapes and sizes; all of them were perfectly clean. His eyes lowered to the floor, and leveled again as if they had not found what they were seeking. “Does that lead to the bedroom?” he asked, pointing to a door at the southeast corner of the room. The Inspector nodded, and Ellery crossed the room and disappeared through the doorway.
A group of newcomers—a police-photographer, a fingerprint man, the Assistant Medical Examiner of New York County—invaded the living room as Ellery left; he could hear dull booms from flashlights and the crackling insistence of the Inspector as the old man began to requestion the tenants of the sixteenth floor.
Ellery looked about the bedroom. The bed was a canopied affair, ornate with silk and tassels; there was a lush Chinese rug on the floor; and the furniture and fripperies made his simple eyes ache. He looked for exits. There were three doors—the one he had just opened from the living room; one to his right, which on investigation he found opened out on the west corridor; and one to his left. He tried the knob of this door; it was locked, but there was a key in the keyhole. He unlocked the door and found himself looking into a room devoid of furniture, architecturally the counterpart of Lubbock’s bedroom. Further investigation revealed an empty living room and a bare foyer. This, as he could see, was Apartment G; obviously unoccupied. All doors leading into Apartment G, as he discovered at once, were unlocked.
Ellery sighed, returned to Lubbock’s bedroom, and turned the key in the lock, leaving it there. On impulse he paused to take out his handkerchief and wipe the knob clean. Then he proceeded directly to a wardrobe and began to rummage through the pockets of the numerous men’s garments hanging on a rack inside—there were coats, suits, hats in profusion. He went through a curious routine; he seemed to be interested in nothing but crumbs. He turned pockets inside out and examined the sediment in the crevices. “No tobacco grains,” he murmured to himself. “Interesting—but where the deuce does it get me?”
Then he carefully restored all pockets and garments to their original condition, closed the wardrobe, and went to the west corridor door. He opened it, stepped out, and hurried down the corridor to the front door of Lubbock’s suite. He caught sight of the photographer, the fingerprint man, Sergeant Velie, and the tall, lank, saturnine figure of Dr. Prouty, Assistant Medical Examiner, standing near the elevators engaged in amiable conversation.
Nodding to the detective on guard before Apartment H—the man was still whistling—Ellery entered the foyer and repeated his odd examination of pockets in all the garments hanging in the foyer-closet; a fruitless quest, to judge from his expression.
Raised voices from the living room made him close the closet-door with a little snap. He heard his father say: “You’d better pull yourself together, Mr. Lubbock.”
Ellery hurried into the living room. The neighbors had left, or had been sent to their apartments under guard. Of the original cast of the drama, only Mr. Seaman Carter and Dr. Eustace remained. But there was a newcomer—a small, slender, sunken-cheeked dandy with sandy hair and blue eyes whose well-scraped jaws wabbled ludicrously as he stared down at the dead man.
“Who’s this?” asked Ellery pleasantly.
The man turned, looked at him without intelligence and twisted his head back toward the corpse.
“Mr. John Lubbock,” said the Inspector. “Tenant of this apartment. He’s just been found—Hagstrom brought him in. And we’ve identified the lad in the chair.”
Ellery studied John Lubbock’s face. “Relative of yours, Mr. Lubbock? There’s a distinct resemblance.”
“Yes,” said Lubbock hoarsely, coming to life. “He’s—he was my brother. I—he got into town from Guatemala this morning; he was an engineer and we hadn’t seen each other for three years. Looked me up at one of my clubs. I had an appointment, gave him the key to my apartment, and he said he’d take in a matinée and meet me here late this afternoon. And here I find him—” He squared his shoulders, sucked in his breath, and sanity crept back into his marbly blue eyes. “It’s beyond my comprehension.”
“Mr. Lubbock,” said the Inspector, “did your brother have any enemies?”
The sandy-haired man gripped the edge of the table. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Harry never wrote me anything—anything like that.”
Ellery said: “Mr. Lubbock, I want you to examine these things on the table. They are the contents of your brother’s pockets. Is anything missing that should be here?”
The dilettante looked at the table. He shook his head. “I really wouldn’t know,” he said.
Ellery touched his arm. “Are you certain his cigaret-case isn’t missing, Mr. Lubbock?”
Lubbock started, and something like curiosity came into his dull eyes. As for the Inspector, he was petrified with astonishment.
“Cigaret-case? What’s this about a cigaret-case, Ellery? We haven’t found any such thing!”
“Precisely the point,” said Ellery gently. “Well, Mr. Lubbock?”
Lubbock moistened his dry lips. “Now that you mention it—yes,” he said with, an effort. “Though how in God’s name you knew is more than I can see. Why, I forgot it myself! Before Harry left the States for Central America three years ago he showed me two cigaret-cases, exactly alike.” He fumbled in the inner breast-pocket of his jacket and brought out a shallow dull-black case, intricately inset with an Oriental design in silver, one tiny sliver of which was missing from its groove.
Ellery opened the case, which contained half a dozen cigarets, with shining eyes; a rabid worshiper of the weed himself, cigaret-cases were one of Ellery’s cherished passions.
“A friend of Harry’s,” continued Lubbock wearily, “sent the two cases to him from Bangkok. Finest teak wood in the world comes from the East Indies, you know. Harry gave one of them to me, and I’ve had it ever since. But how did you know, Mr. Queen, that—”
Ellery snapped the lid down and returned the case to Lubbock. He was smiling. “It’s our business to know things, although really my knowledge isn’t the least bit mysterious.”
Lubbock was stowing the case carefully away in his breast-pocket—quite as if it were a treasure—when there came a mutter of voices from the foyer and two white-clad internes marched in. The Inspector nodded; they unrolled their stretcher, hauled the dead man out of the armchair, dumped him unceremoniously upon the canvas, covered him with a blanket, and marched out toting their burden as if it were a side of fresh-killed beef. John Lubbock clutched the edge of the table again, his pale face grew paler, he gulped, retched, and began to slip to the floor.
“Here! You, Eustace! Doc Prouty, out there! Quick!” cried the Inspector as he and Ellery lunged forward and caught the fainting man. Dr. Eustace opened his bag as Dr. Prouty dashed in. Lubbock muttered thickly: “Guess it was—too much—for me—seeing them take—Poor Harry…Give me a sedative—something—brace me up.”
Dr. Prouty snorted and went right out again. Dr. Eustace produced a bottle and thrust it beneath Lubbock’s nostrils. They quivered and Lubbock grinned faintly. “Here,” said Ellery, pulling out his own cigaret-case. “Have a smoke. Do your nerves good.” But Lubbock shook his head and pushed the pellet away. “I’ll—be all right,” he gasped, struggling erect. “Sorry.”
Ellery said to Superintendent Carter, who stood like a blind rhinoceros near the table, perspiration pouring down his face: “Please send up the maid who cleans this suite, Mr. Carter. At once.”
The fat man nodded eagerly and waddled out of the living room as fast as his jelly legs could carry him. Sergeant Velie, strolling in, scowled at Carter with disgust. Ellery glanced at his father, jerked his head toward the foyer, and the old man said: “You stay here and rest up a bit, Mr. Lubbock; we’ll be back shortly.”
Ellery and the Inspector went out into the foyer, and Ellery very softly closed the door to the living room.
“What the devil’s up now?” growled the Inspector.
Ellery smiled and said: “Wait.” He put his hands behind his back and began to stroll about.
A trim little colored girl in black regalia hurried up to the apartment door, her face an alarming violet.
“Ah,” said Ellery. “Come in. You’re the maid who cleans this suite regularly?”
“Yes, suh!”
“You cleaned it this morning as usual?”
“Yes, suh!”
“And were there any ashes in the ashtrays?”
“No, suh! Nevuh is in Mistuh Lubbock’s apa’tment ’ceptin’ when he’s had comp’ny.”
“You’re positive of that?”
“Cross mah haht, suh!”
The girl retreated hastily. The Inspector said: “I’ll be jiggered.”
Ellery had dropped his cloak of insouciance; he drew his father’s slender little body closer. “Listen. The maid’s testimony was all we needed. Delicate situation, O venerable ancestor. Follow my reasoning.
“The package of cigarets from Harry Lubbock’s pocket: a fresh package, observe, confirmed by the fact that he purchased it just before coming up here, by the scrap, of perfectly fitting tin-foil and blue paper from the basket, by the cellophane wrapper, and by the uncrushed condition of the package itself. Harry Lubbock came up here to wait for his brother. He sat down in the armchair, his back to the foyer door. He didn’t smoke; no ashes anywhere; no cigaret-stubs. Yet despite the fact that this was a new package, we find only four cigarets inside. What happened to the other sixteen, since there are twenty to the pack? First possibility is that his murderer took them away, stealing them from the package. Psychologically rotten—can’t visualize a murderer taking fresh cigarets from his victim’s package. Second possibility: that Lubbock himself opened the package before the arrival of the murderer in order to fill a cigaret-case. This would explain the peculiar number of missing cigarets; many cigaret-cases hold sixteen. Yes, I was convinced that the sixteen missing cigarets had been placed by Harry Lubbock, the engineer, in his case. But where was the case? Obviously, since it’s gone, the murderer took it away.” The Inspector chewed upon that, then nodded. “Good! Now where are we? The cigarets themselves, being brand new, couldn’t have been the object of the theft. Then the case must have been the object of the theft!”
Inspector-Queen pursed his old lips. “Why? There certainly isn’t a hidden spring or compartment in that case. It’s not thick enough to conceal a Chinaman’s breath in the wood itself.”
“Don’t know, sire, don’t know. Haven’t the faintest notion why. But it’s so.
“Now as to John Lubbock. Three psychological indications….But I’ll give them to you more graphically. Maid’s testimony: no ashes in this apartment, ever, except after guests. Sign of a non-smoker? Oui, papa. John Lubbock half faints, asks for a sedative, and refuses the cigaret I offer him! Sign of a non-smoker? Decidedly; in moments of emotional stress a smoker by habit falls back on the weed—it’s the nicotine-addict’s nerve soother. And third: there isn’t a shred of tobacco in any pocket of any garment in John Lubbock’s closets! Ever examine my coat-pocket? There’s always tobacco in small grains lurking in the crevices. None in John Lubbock’s clothes. Sign of a non-smoker? You answer.”
“All right,” said the Inspector softly. “He doesn’t indulge. Then why in tunket does he carry a cigaret-case with cigarets in it?”
“Precisely!” cried Ellery. “We’ve deduced that a cigaret-case was probably stolen from the murdered man. Since John Lubbock isn’t a smoker and carries a cigaret-case…you see? It’s almost tenable—it is tenable, by thunder—to say that the case John showed us was his murdered brother’s!”
“And that would make him Harry Lubbock’s killer,” muttered the Inspector. “But there weren’t sixteen cigarets in it, El. And the six that were there are of a different brand.”
“Pie. Naturally our friend the dilettante would ditch the ones his engineer-brother had bought and substitute not only a different number but a different kind. I don’t say this is conclusive. But at the moment the wind blows his way quite stiffly. If he’s the murderer of his own brother then his story of two teakwood cases is a fabrication, composed on the spur of the moment to explain his possession of the teakwood case should there be a search.”
The Queens turned swiftly at a knock on the foyer-door. But it was only Dr. Eustace. He came out, leaving the door to the living room ajar. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said in gruff apology. “But I’ve got to see my other patients.”
“You’d better be available, Doctor,” said the Inspector in a clear grim voice. “We’ve just decided to take John Lubbock down to Headquarters for a little talk, and we’ll need your routine testimony, too.”
“Lubbock?” Dr. Eustace stared, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s none of my business. I’ll be either in my office on the mezzanine floor or I’ll leave word at the desk. Ready when you are, Inspector.” He nodded and went out.
“Don’t scare him,” suggested Ellery, as the Inspector made a move toward the living room. “My logic may be wetter than Triton’s beard.”
When they opened the door to the living room they found Sergeant Velie alone, sitting in the dead man’s chair, feet propped on the table. “Where’s Lubbock?” asked Ellery swiftly.
Velie yawned; his mouth was a red cavern fringed with enamel. “Went into the bedroom a coupla minutes ago,” he rumbled. “Didn’t see any harm in it myself.” He pointed to the bedroom door, which was closed.
“Oh, you gigantic idiot!” cried Ellery, dashing across the room. He tore open the bedroom door. The bedroom was empty.
The Inspector yelled to his men in the corridor, Sergeant Velie flushed a wine-red and leaped to his feet….The alarm was sounded; men began to comb the halls; the elderly Orkinses poked their white heads out of Apartment A; Billy Harms flew into the central corridor in a lacy chemise; an old witch of a woman in a wheelchair propelled herself from the front door of Apartment F and sent two cursing detectives sprawling with her clumsy manipulation of the conveyance. The scene was like a farcically rapid motion-picture reel.
Ellery wasted no time bewailing Sergeant Velie’s unexpected stupidity. From the detective in the west corridor, he discovered that John Lubbock had not emerged from the western door of his bedroom. Ellery ran back to the eastern door, the door which led into the vacant suite. The key which he had left sticking in the door was gone. Gently, without touching the head of the knob, he tried to twist the bolt-bar. It refused to budge; the door was locked.
“The east corridor!” he yelled. “Door’s open there!” and led the pack out of Lubbock’s apartment, around the corner through the central corridor, up the east corridor and through the unlocked door into the bedroom of empty Apartment G. They tumbled through the doorway—and stopped.
John Lubbock lay sprawled on the floor, without hat or overcoat, fixed in the unmistakable contortions of violent death. Lubbock had been strangled!
At the instant of discovery Ellery had opened his mouth and gasped like a drowning man; the suspect himself murdered! So he sidled toward Sergeant Velie near the bedroom door—the door which communicated with Lubbock’s own bedroom—and effaced himself.
His eyes went to this door and quickly narrowed. The key which he had last seen sticking in the lock on the Apartment H side was now in the lock of Apartment G. He fingered it thoughtfully, then slipped out of the room.
He went into the central corridor, found the finger-print expert, and took him back through Lubbock’s bedroom to the door between the two apartments. “See what you can get out of this doorknob,” he said. The expert went to work. Ellery watched anxiously. Under the man’s ministrations several clear fingerprints appeared in white powder on the black stone of the knob. A photographer came in and snapped a picture of the fingerprints.
They repaired to the vacant bedroom of Apartment G. The physicians had completed their task and were discussing something in low tones with Inspector Queen, Ellery pointed to John Lubbock’s dead fingers.
When the expert rose from the dusty floor he flourished a white card with ten inked fingerprints. He went to the door, unlocked it, and compared the dead man’s prints with those on the knob of Lubbock’s bedroom. “Okay,” he said. “The stiff’s mitts were on this knob.”
Ellery sighed.
He knelt beside John Lubbock’s body, which looked as if it had turned to stone in the midst of a fierce struggle, and explored the inside breast-pocket of Lubbock’s coat.
Ellery looked thoughtfully at the teakwood case. “I owe an abject apology to the shade of our man-about-town. There are two cases, as he said….For this isn’t the one he showed us a few moments ago!”
The Inspector gaped. Where they had formerly observed in the silverwork of the teakwood case a groove whose sliver of metal was missing, the ornamental design on the case in Ellery’s hand was unbroken, perfect.
“The inferences are plain,” said Ellery. “Whoever killed John Lubbock did it for the teakwood case in his breast pocket. Everything is clear now. When the murderer strangled John Lubbock in this room, he stole John’s case from John’s body. The murderer then put into the case he had stolen from Harry’s body—the first brother—six cigarets of the same brand John’s case contained, and then placed Harry’s case with these six cigarets on John’s body, where we found it—in order to make us believe it was still John’s case. Clever, but defeated by the fact that John’s case had a sliver missing from the design whereas the engineer’s had not. The murderer probably didn’t notice the difference.”
Ellery turned to the others; he held up his hand and they fell silent. “Ladies and gentlemen, the murderer’s exceeded himself. He’s done. I ask you to be attentive while I go over the ground and point out…Mr. Carter, stop shaking. I have every reason to believe that your executive worries are over.”
Ellery stood at the feet of the dead man, his lean face expressionless. They watched him with stupid eyes. The detectives at the door retreated in response to Ellery’s signal; and the Orkinses, Billy Harms in a négligé, the acid-faced jeweler Schley, Mr. and Mrs. Forrester of Apartment D, and even Mrs. Mallorie in her wheel-chair, crowded into the room.
“Certain lines of reasoning are inevitable,” said Ellery, in a dry lecture-voice; he looked at none of them, seeming to be addressing the congested veins in John Lubbock’s dead neck. “The only object taken from the first victim’s dead body was the teakwood case. This means that the teakwood case was the object of the first murder. Now John Lubbock, the second victim, has been murdered; his teakwood case has been taken, and the first one put on his body. Conclusion: The only one who could have switched cases is the one who stole the first victim’s case—the murderer. Therefore, both Harry and John Lubbock were strangled by the same hand. Two crimes and one culprit. Fundamental reasoning.
“Why was Harry Lubbock murdered? Simply because the murderer mistook him for his brother John, and did not discover the error until after he strangled his victim and examined the first teakwood case. It was the wrong one!
“The murderer’s error is understandable. The first victim was choked from behind; superficially the engineer bore a resemblance to his brother John; no doubt the murderer was unaware that there were two Lubbocks. In other words, the engineer’s case, the case on the floor, had nothing intrinsically to do with the crimes.”
He leaned forward. “But mark this. Neither teakwood case in itself could have concealed anything—a hidden compartment, for example; then the cases were sought by the murderer not for themselves but for what they contained. What do cigaret-cases contain? What did both cases contain? Only cigarets. But why should a man commit murder for cigarets? Obviously, not for the pellets themselves. But if something had been hidden in those cigarets—if they had been doctored, if tobacco had been removed from them and something secreted inside, and the ends tamped up with tobacco again…then we arrive at a concrete inference.”
Ellery straightened and drew a deep breath. “You’re Mrs. Mallorie, I take it?” he asked the invalid in the wheel-chair.
“I am!” she replied.
“Only two days ago you were parted from a diamond necklace. How large were the stones?”
“Like small peas,” shrilled Mrs. Mallorie. “Worth twenty thousand dollars, the lot of ’em.”
“Like small peas. Hmm. A housewifely description, Mrs. Mallorie.” Ellery smiled. “We progress. I postulated John Lubbock’s cigarets as the hiding-place of something valuable…Mrs. Mallorie’s rather expensive peas, ladies and gentlemen!”
They buzzed and peep-peeped like fowls in a barnyard. Ellery silenced them: “Yes, we have arrived at the point where it is indicated that your neighbor John Lubbock was not only a dilettante but a jewel thief as well!”
“Mr. Lubbock!” wheezed Seaman Carter in a shocked voice.
“Exactly. Inspector Queen has not been able to discover our man-about-town’s source of income. A gigolo? Gigolos do not pay for ladies’ apartments; the shoe is rather on the other foot. Ah, but the jewels! Here, then, is a minor mystery solved.” Billy Harms stretched her white neck like an ostrich and sniffed. “But note that John Lubbock was murdered for those diamond-concealing cigarets,” Ellery continued. “Who could have known that he had those diamonds—moreover, in such a fantastic hiding-place? Surely none but an accomplice. In other words, when we lay hands on the murderer of Harry and John Lubbock we shall have found John Lubbock’s partner-in-thievery.”
The vague relief they had all exhibited gave way again to fear. No one stirred. Mrs. Mallorie was glaring at John Lubbock’s purple face with the utmost malevolence. Ellery smiled again—a very playful and annoying smile. “Now,” he said softly, “for the last act of our little drama: the details of the second murder. Jimmy,” he said to the Headquarters fingerprint expert, “what did you find in your search?”
“This dead man on the floor had his fingers on the other side of this door—the side where his bedroom is.”
“Thank you. Now it happens, ladies and gentlemen, that just before John Lubbock was murdered I had myself wiped the knob of his bedroom door—the door that leads into this vacant apartment—clean of all fingerprints. This means that Lubbock himself, when he went into his bedroom a few moments ago, put his fingers on the knob. This means that he deliberately opened the door in order to enter this vacant apartment. Was John Lubbock trying to escape? No; he did not don hat or overcoat, for one thing; for another, he could not hope to get far; and even if he did, escape would certainly tar him with the brush of suspicion that he had murdered his brother—and he, of course, was innocent, since he himself has been murdered. Then why did he go into this vacant apartment?
“I was talking with the Inspector some minutes ago in the foyer of Lubbock’s apartment next door. At that time we had reason to believe John guilty of his brother’s murder. I had myself shut the door to the living room so that he should not overhear. But when Dr. Eustace came out to visit his other patients in the building, unfortunately he left the door ajar, and it was at that moment that the Inspector, no doubt unaware that the door was open, said distinctly that we were intending to take John Lubbock down to Headquarters ‘for a talk’—obviously, to search him and put him on the grid. The harm was done. Sergeant Velie, you were in the living room with Lubbock at that time. Did you hear the Inspector make that remark?”
“I did that,” muttered the Sergeant, digging his heels into the floor. “I guess he did, too. Only a minute later he said he wanted to go into the bedroom for something.”
“Q. E. D.,” murmured Ellery. “Lubbock, hearing that he was about to be taken to Police Headquarters, thought rapidly. The stolen diamonds were imbedded in the cigarets in his teakwood case; a thorough search would certainly reveal them. He must rid himself of those cigarets! So now we know why he went into the vacant apartment—not to escape, but to hide the cigarets somewhere until he could regain possession of them later. Naturally, he intended to return.
“But how could the murderer possibly anticipate John Lubbock’s instantaneous decision to dispose of the jewels in this vacant apartment, the only immediately available hiding-place? Only if the murderer, too, had heard the Inspector’s remark about taking Lubbock to Headquarters, had realized that Lubbock had also heard, had foreseen what Lubbock would instantly have to do.”
Ellery smiled wickedly and leaned forward; his long fingers were curved in a predatory hook; his body was tense. “Only five people overheard the Inspector’s remark,” he snapped. “The Inspector himself, I, Sergeant Velie, the late John Lubbock, and—”
Billy Harms screamed, and old Mrs. Mallorie screeched like a wounded parrot. Some one had plunged toward the door to the east corridor, bellowing and scattering people aside like a maddened bull-elephant, like a Malay running amuck, like an ancient Norseman in a berserker rage….Sergeant Velie flung his two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle forward; there was a wild mix-up, the thudding of the Sergeant’s chunky fists, clouds of dust….Ellery stood quietly waiting. The Inspector, who had observed Sergeant Velie in action on many former occasions, merely sighed.
“A double-crossing villain as well as a twofold murderer,” said Ellery at last when the Sergeant had hammered his adversary into red pulp. “He wanted not only to get rid of John Lubbock, his accomplice, the only human being who knew his guilt as a thief and suspected no doubt his guilt as a murderer, but also to have Mrs. Mallorie’s jewels all for himself. Dad, you will find the diamonds either on his person, in his bag, or somewhere about his quarters. The problem,” said Ellery, lighting a cigaret and inhaling gratefully under the stony stares of his audience, “was after all a simple one, one which admitted of a strictly logical attack. The facts themselves pointed to that man on the floor as the only possible culprit.”
The man writhing in Sergeant Velie’s inexorable grip was Dr. Eustace.