QED (22 page)

“Then what's the point, dad? And what does it have do with the crime syndicate you're investigating?”

“We've found out,” his father answered, “that before Prince was sent up he handled a lot of highly confidential work for Hughes, Ewing, Burke, and Falcone; in fact, the embezzlement rap stemmed from a job he did for one of Hughes's banks. He's denied it, but I have good reason to believe Prince was close to the big boys and knows who the head man is. Maybe you can think of a way to trick the information out of him.”

“And he's coming home tomorrow?” Ellery looked thoughtful. “All right, dad. Let's form a reception committee.”

At 2:15
P
.
M
. the following day the reception committee turned out to have a noisy, and unexpected, counterpart.

The Inspector's men were routinely staked out in various vestibules and tradesmen's entrances in the vicinity of the modest East Side corner apartment building in which the Princes lived. A taxi turned into the street and pulled up before the building. John Prince got out. The cab drove off, and the emaciated, rather stooped figure of the accountant turned toward the building.

At that instant a nondescript black sedan with muddied license plates careened around the corner and began to chatter and spit fire as it bolted past Prince and up the street and around the corner. Prince fell to the sidewalk, staining it red as he hit.

Squad cars roared futilely off after the vanished murder car as the Queens and Sergeant Velie ran over to the quiet man. They were almost, not quite, too late.

Sergeant Velie took one look and advised, “Better step on it.”

“Prince. Prince, listen,” Ellery said, stooping over him. “Help us get them. Talk. Can you talk?”

“Four … of them,” gasped the dying man, looking into Ellery's eyes. “Each one uses … a code name … of a city.”

“Four cities?”

“Boston … Philadelphia … Berkeley …” The voice guttered like a burned-out candle. Prince made one incredible effort. “And Houston,” he said, quite clearly.

“Which one is top man?”

But the accountant's stare glassed over and remained that way.

“Bye-bye, blackbird,” announced Sergeant Velie.

“So my hunch was right,” muttered Inspector Queen. “He did know. One second—one second more!—and he'd have told us. No, Velie, let her,” he said in a gentler tone. “Mrs. Prince, I'm sorry …” The old man sounded sorry for a number of things.

The widow stood over her husband's body. “Now you know, John,” she said to it. “Now you know how they meant to set you up.” And she brushed by the Inspector's proffered arm and went blindly back into the apartment building.

“Well?” the Inspector snapped to his son after a while. “Don't stand there with your mouth hanging open! This code business ought to be your candy; each of the four using the name of a city for identification! What did he say they were again?”

“Boston, Philadelphia, Berkeley, Houston.” Ellery was still returning the dead man's stare. Then he turned aside and said, “For the love of heaven, Velie, close his eyes, will you?”

“Well, it doesn't matter. We knew who they are,” and the Inspector turned away, too. “The only thing we didn't know—the name of the head man—he didn't get to tell us.”

“Oh,” said Ellery, “but he did.”

Ellery's solution: “If you examine them, there's a connection between the names of the crime directorate and the city code names they chose to cover their identities.

“Take one: Reilly
Burke
and the city of
Berk
eley. Burke—Berk. Identical in sound.

“Or take
Fil
ippo Falcone and
Phil
adelphia. Fil—Phil.”

“Oh, come on, Ellery,” said Inspector Queen. “Coincidence.”

“Then how about DeWitt
Hughes
and
Houston?
Hughes—Hous. Two might be a coincidence. Three? No, sir.”

“But that leaves John T. Ewing and the code name of Boston. Find me a connection between those two!”

“Ah, that's the missing ingredient,” Ellery said, watching the meat wagoneers trundling their poor freight away. “In each city name the corresponding clue was in the first syllable: Berk, Phil, Hous. Try it on Boston.”

“Boston. Bos.” The Inspector looked doubtful. Then he cried. “
Boss!
”

“Ewing is obviously the head man you're trying to identify,” Ellery nodded. “The Boss.”

THE PUZZLE CLUB

The Little Spy

The letter was written in a secretive hand on paper as thick as a pharaoh's papyrus. Instead of a name or a crest, its engraved monogram consisted of one large, gold, tickle-some question mark.

“My dear Mr. Queen,” Ellery read. “It is the pleasure of The Puzzle Club to invite you to our next regular meeting, which takes place at 7:30
P
.
M
. Wednesday at the address below. Purpose: to offer you our membership test, which we believe without modesty will challenge your logical powers.

“Ours is a very small, congenial group. There are no dues or other obligations. You will be the only outsider present. Informal dress.

“We hope you will respond affirmatively.”

None of Ellery's reference books, including the telephone directory, listed a Puzzle Club. On the other hand, the signature and address made it unlikely that this was the gambit to a mugging party or badger game. So Ellery dashed off an acceptance note; and Wednesday evening found him, at 7:30 to the tick, pushing the bell of a penthouse foyer in the nobbiest reaches of Park Avenue.

The lordly Englishman who opened the door turned out to be a butler, who took his hat and vanished; and the rumpled-looking Texan giant who greeted him was unmistakably Ellery's correspondent and host. The big man's name was Syres, and he was one of the ten wealthiest men in the United States.

“On the dot,” Syres boomed. “Welcome, Mr. Queen!” He was all but grinding his muscular hands; and he rushed Ellery into a museum of massive Western furniture, studded leather, burnished woods, antique carpets, old masters, and twinkling crystal and copper. “I see you're admiring my traditionalism. I loathe contemporary anything.” Except, Ellery thought, contemporary oil wells and the profits therefrom; but he meekly followed his host into a living room vast enough for a hidalgo's rancho.

In a moment Ellery was shaking hands with the other members of The Puzzle Club. Three were present besides Syres, and not altogether to his surprise Ellery recognized each of them. The dark, tall, mustache-eyebrowed man was the celebrated criminal lawyer, Darnell, who was being mentioned frequently these days for the next opening on the Supreme Court. The trim, short, peach-cheeked one was the noted psychiatrist, Dr. Vreeland. The third was Emmy Wandermere, the poet, a wisp of a woman with shocking blue eyes and the handclasp of a man.

Ellery gathered that The Puzzle Club was of recent origin. It had no more purpose than any other association in gamesmanship, perhaps less; and while its members were all prominently implicated in the world as it was, the Club's bylaws, he was promptly told, forbade discussion at its monthly meetings of any subject not connected with puzzles. As the psychiatric Dr. Vreeland put it, “Other people meet regularly to play bridge. We meet to mystify each other—as man has done with riddles since prehistory—in a sort of ritual adoration of the question mark.”

They sat him down in a roomy armchair near the man-high fireplace, and the English butler brought him a Scotch, a napkin, and a little tray of sizzling canapés.

“And that's all you get, Mr. Queen, until the test is over,” the oil man explained. “We don't eat dinner until afterward.”

“The Arabs have a proverb,” said Dr. Vreeland. “When the stomach speaks, wisdom is silent.”

“Or as Stevenson put it,” murmured Miss Wandermere, “the sort who eat unduly must never hope for glory.”

“You see, Queen, we want you to be at your best,” said Darnell, the lawyer, staring piercingly at their victim. “Our membership rules are quite harsh. For example, application is by unanimous invitation only. Our fifth member, Dr. Arkavy, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, who's away at a science conference, voted by cable all the way from Moscow to invite you.”

“You should understand, too,” said Tycoon Syres, “that if you fail to solve the puzzle we're going to throw at you tonight, you'll never be invited to try again.”

“Harsh, indeed,” said Ellery, nodding. “You titillate me. How exactly is the puzzle propounded?”

“In story form,” said the lady poet. “How else?”

“Have I the option of asking questions?”

“As many as you like,” said the little psychiatrist.

“In that case,” Ellery said, “you-all may fire when ready.”

“It happened during World War II,” the multimillionaire host began the story. “You'll remember how hectic everything was—government departments mushrooming overnight, new bureaus scrambling to get organized, all sorts of people pulled out of the woodwork to help with the war effort, and security officers going crazy with the work load suddenly dumped on their shoulders.”

“In a certain very important government war bureau newly set up,” Psychiatrist Vreeland said as he lit a cigar, “one of the working force taken on was a little man named Tarleton, J. Aubrey Tarleton, who came out of retirement to do his bit for Uncle Sam. J. Aubrey was an ex-civil servant with a good if undistinguished record in government service. The bureau was an essential and very sensitive one. There was no time to do more than a conventional security check, but Tarleton's long record seemed to speak for itself.”

“If you had seen old Mr. Tarleton,” Miss Wandermere, the poet, took up the tale, “he would have struck you as a throwback—say, someone out of the British civil service in Rudyard Kipling's day. He had a Colonel Blimp mustache, he invariably dressed in ultraconservative clothes of Edwardian cut, he actually wore a piped vest and spats, carried a silver-headed cane, and he was never without a boutonnière pinned to his lapel, usually a white gardenia. A spic-and-span, courtly little old gentleman out of a long-dead age.

“His tastes were as elegantly old-fashioned,” the lady poet went on, “as his manners. For instance, Mr. Tarleton was something of a gourmet and a connoisseur of vintages. Also, he would talk endlessly about his hobby, which was painting tiny landscapes on little ovals of ivory and ceramic—even worse, going on and on about his collection of Eighteenth Century miniatures by Richard Cosway and Ozias Humphry and other artists practically no one had ever heard of. In short, he was a good deal of a bore, and the younger people in the bureau especially vied with one another inventing new ways of avoiding him.”

“Then something happened,” Lawyer Darnell chimed in, “that threw the spotlight on little Mr. Tarleton. It was shortly before D-Day, and the dapper old gent suddenly wangled a priority airline passage to London. And just then Intelligence received an anonymous tip that Tarleton was in the pay of the Nazis—that he was a German spy. There were thousands of such tips during the war, most of them checking out as baseless, the result of malice, or spy fever, or what-have-you. But in view of Tarleton's access to top-secret material, and rather than take a chance at such a critical time, they yanked old Tarleton off the plane just as it was about to take off, and they gave him a going-over.”

“This,” asserted Oil Man Syres gravely, “was the most thorough search in the long and honorable history of spy-catching. It took a very long time, because at first it was entirely unsuccessful. In the end, of course, they found it.”

“The plans for the Allied invasion of Europe, no doubt,” Ellery said, smiling.

“Exactly,” said Miss Wandermere, looking faintly disapproving. “The date cycle for D-Day, the location of the landings, the strength of the Allied forces—everything the German high command needed to smash the invasion in its tracks. There it was, to the last detail, all written down in plain uncoded English.

“The question you've got to answer, Mr. Queen, is a simple one. But watch out! Where did the Intelligence people find the spy message?”

“Or to put it the other way,” Darnell, the criminal lawyer, said, “where did Tarleton conceal the spy message?”

“May I rule out the plane?” Ellery asked promptly. “That is, he didn't conceal it somewhere on board just before he was grabbed? Or in his luggage, or someone else's luggage?”

“He did not.”

“He didn't pass it to a confederate?”

“No.”

“The message was found on his person?”

“It was.”

“Well, let's see.” Ellery frowned. “I assume the obvious places of possible concealment yielded nothing—hat, coats, vest, trousers, shirt, tie, shoes, socks, spats, underclothing, galoshes or rubbers, that sort of thing?” There was a general nod. “The flower in his buttonhole? It was a real flower?”

“Nature's own,” said Dr. Vreeland.

“The contents of his pockets?”

“Every object he carried in his pockets was minutely gone over, without result.”

“The pockets themselves?”

“Concealed nothing.”

“A secret pocket? Anywhere in his clothing?”

“No.”

“Was he carrying a book?”

“No.”

“A newspaper? Magazine? Directory? Any printed material whatever?”

“None.”

“There must have been some printed matter in his wallet—credit cards, driver's license—”

“All carefully examined,” Syres chuckled, “including, I might add, the material of the wallet itself—for secret writing. And no dice.”

“Was his bare skin examined for secret writing?”

“It was, including his scalp, ears, and finger and toenails,” the oil man grinned, “and there wasn't any. They looked under infrared and ultraviolet and every other kind of light known to science. They peered at every square inch through a microscope. They used every chemical known to bring out secret writing. They even parboiled him—applied heat.”