QED (9 page)

“At the time you placed Mrs. Morrell's dollar among the others in the original envelope, was everybody here?”

“Yes. The door opened and closed only once after that—when Mrs. Morrell left. I was facing the door the whole time.”

“Could Mrs. Morrell, as a practical joke, have made the switch?”

“She wasn't anywhere near my desk after I laid the envelope on it.”

“Then you're right, Miss Carpenter. The theft was planned in advance by one of the boys or girls in this room, and the thief—and money—are both still here.”

The tension was building beautifully. The boy must be in a sweat. He hadn't expected his theft to be found out so soon, before he got a chance to sneak the money out of the room.

“What time does the first period end, Miss Carpenter?”

“At 9:35.”

Every head turned toward the clock on the wall.

“And it's only 8:56.” Ellery said cheerfully. “That gives us thirty-nine minutes—more than enough time. Unless the boy or girl who planned this crime wants to return the loot to Miss Carpenter here and now?”

This time he stared directly from David to Howard to Joey. His stare said,
I hate to do this, boys, but of course I'll have to if you think you can get away with it
.

The Strager boy's full lips were twisted. The skinny redhead, Joey Buell, stared back sullenly. Howard Ruffo's pencil twirled faster.

It's one of those three, all right
.

“I see we'll have to do it the hard way,” Ellery said. “Sorry I can't produce the thief with a flick of my wrist, the way it's done in books, but in real life detection—like crime—is pretty unexciting stuff. We'll begin with a body search. It's voluntary, by the way. Anybody rather not chance a search? Raise your hand.”

Not a muscle moved.

“I'll search the boys, Miss Carpenter. You roll those two bulletin boards over to that corner and search the girls.”

The next few minutes were noisy. As each boy was searched and released he was sent to the blackboard at the front of the room. The girls were sent to the rear.

“Find anything, Miss Carpenter?”

“Rose Perez has a single dollar bill. The other girls either have small change or no money at all.”

“No sign of the original envelope?”

“No.”

“I found two boys with bills—in each case a single, too. David Strager and Joey Buell. No envelope.”

Louise's brows met.

Ellery glanced up at the clock. 9:07.

He strolled over to her. “Don't show them you're worried. There's nothing to worry about. We have twenty-eight minutes.” He raised his voice, smiling. “Naturally the thief has ditched the money, hoping to recover it when the coast is clear. It's therefore hidden somewhere in the classroom. All right, Miss Carpenter, we'll take the desks and seats first. Look under them too—chewing gum makes a handy adhesive. Eh, class?”

Four minutes later they looked at each other, then up at the clock.

9:11.

Exactly twenty-four minutes remaining.

“Well,” said Ellery.

He began to ransack the room. Books, radiators, closets, supplies, lunchbags, schoolbags. Bulletin boards, wall maps, the terrestrial globe. The UN poster, the steel engravings of Washington and Lincoln. He even emptied Louise's three pots of geraniums and sifted the earth.

His eyes kept returning to the clock more and more often.

Ellery searched everything in the room, from the socket of the American flag to the insect-filled bowls of the old light fixtures, reached by standing on desks.

Everything.

“It's not here!” whispered Louise in his ear.

The Buell, Ruffo, and Strager boys were nudging one another, grinning.

“Well, well,” Ellery said.

Interesting. Something of a problem at that
.

Of course! He got up and checked two things he had missed—the cup of the pencil sharpener and the grid covering the loudspeaker of the PA system. No envelope. No money.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck.

Really it's a little silly. A schoolboy!

Ellery glanced at the clock.

9:29.

Six minutes left in which not only to find the money but identify the thief!

He leaned against Louise's desk, forcing himself to relax.

It was these “simple” problems. Nothing big and important, like murder, blackmail, bank robbery. A miserable seven dollars lifted by a teen-age delinquent in an overcrowded classroom …

He thought furiously.

Let the bell ring at 9:35 and the boy strut out of Miss Carpenter's room undetected, with his loot, and he would send up a howl like a wolf cub over his first kill.
Who says these big-shot law jerks ain't monkeys? The biggest! He's a lot of nothin'. Wind. See me stand him on his ear? And this is just for openers. Wait till I get goin' for real, not any of this kid stuff
…

No, nothing big and important like murder. Just seven dollars, and a big shot to laugh at. Not important? Ellery nibbled his lip. It was probably the most important case of his career.

9:30:30.

Only four and a half minutes left!

Louise Carpenter was gripping a desk, her knuckles white. Waiting to be let down.

Ellery pushed away from the desk and reached into the patch pocket of his tweed jacket for his pipe and tobacco, thinking harder about Helen McDoud's seven-dollar gift fund than he had ever thought about anything in his life.

And as he thought …

At 9:32 he was intently examining the rectangles of paper the thief had put into the substitute envelope. The paper was ordinary cheap newsprint, scissored to dollar-bill size out of a colored comics section. He shuffled through the dummy dollars one by one, hunting for something. Anything!

The forty-one boys and girls were buzzing and giggling now.

Ellery pounced. Clinging to one of the rectangles was a needle-thin sliver of paper about an inch long, a sort of paper shaving. He fingered it, held it up to the light. It was not newsprint. Too full-bodied, too tough-textured …

Then he knew what it must be.

Less than two minutes left
.

Feverishly he went through the remaining dollar-sized strips of comic paper.

And there it was. There it was!

This strip had been cut from the top of the comic sheet. On the margin appeared the name of a New York newspaper and the date
April 24, 1955
.

Think it over. Take your time. Lots of seconds in a minute
.

The buzzing and giggling had died. Louise Carpenter was on her feet, looking at him imploringly.

A bell began clanging in the corridor.

First period over.

9:35.

Ellery rose and said solemnly, “The case is solved.”

With the room cleared and the door locked, the three boys stood backed against the blackboard as if facing a firing squad. The bloom was gone from David Strager's cheeks. The blood vessel in Joey Buell's temple was trying to wriggle into his red hair. And Howard Ruffo's eyes were liquid with panic.

It's hard to be fifteen years old and trapped
.

But harder not to be
.

“Wha'd I do?” whimpered Howard Ruffo. “I didn't do nothin'.”

“We didn't take Miss Carpenter's seven dollars,” said David Strager, stiff-lipped.

“Can you say the same about Mr. Mueller's baked goods last Monday night, Dave?” Ellery paused gently. “Or any of the other things you boys have been making love to in the past two months?”

He thought they were going to faint.

“But this morning's little job,” Ellery turned suddenly to the red-haired boy, “you pulled by yourself, Joey.”

The thin body quivered. “Who, me?”

“Yes, Joey, you.”

“You got rocks in your skull,” Joey whispered. “Not me!”

“I'll prove it, Joey. Hand me the dollar bill I found in your jeans when I searched you.”

“That's my dollar!”

“I know it, Joey. I'll give you another for it. Hand it over … Miss Carpenter.”

“Yes, Mr. Queen!”

“To cut these strips of newspaper to the same size as dollar bills, the thief must have used a real bill as a pattern. If he cut too close, the scissors would shave off a sliver of the bill.” Ellery handed her Joey's dollar. “See if this bill shows a slight indentation along one edge.”

“It does!”

“And I found this sliver clinging to one of the dummies. Fit the sliver to the indented edge of Joey's bill. If Joey is guilty, it should fit exactly. Does it?”

Louise looked at the boy. “Joey, it does fit.”

David and Howard were gaping at Ellery.

“What a break,” Joey choked.

“Criminals make their own bad breaks, Joey. The thing inside you that told you you were doing wrong made your hand shake as you cut. But even if your hand hadn't slipped, I'd have known you were the one who substituted the strips of paper for the money.”

“How? How could you?” It was a cry of bewilderment.

Ellery showed him the rectangular strip with the white margin. “See this, Joey? Here's the name of the newspaper, and the date is
April 24, 1955
. What date is today?”

“Friday the 22nd …”

“Friday, April 22nd. But these strips of colored comics come from the newspaper of April 24th, Joey—
this coming Sunday's paper
. Who gets advance copies of the Sunday comics? Stores that sell newspapers in quantity. Getting the bulldog editions in advance gives them a jump on the Sunday morning rush, when they have to insert the news sections.

“Nothing to it, Joey. Which of you three boys had access before this morning to next Sunday's bulldog editions? Not David—he works in a supermarket. Not Howard—he works for a dry cleaner. But you work in a big cigar and stationery store, Joey, where newspapers must be one of the stock items.”

Joey Buell's eyes glassed over.

“We think we're strong, Joey, and then we run into somebody stronger,” Ellery said. “We think we're the smartest, and someone comes along to outsmart us. We beat the rap a dozen times, but the thirteenth time the rap beats us. You can't win, Joey.”

Joey burst into tears.

Louise Carpenter made an instinctive gesture toward him. Ellery's head-shake warned her back. He went close to the boy and tousled the red head, murmuring something the others could not hear. And after a while Joey's tears sniffled to an end and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve in a puzzled way.

“Because I think this is going to work out all right, Joey,” Ellery said, continuing their curious colloquy aloud. “We'll have a session with Mr. Hinsdale, and then with some pretty right guys I happen to know at Police Headquarters. After that it will be up to you.”

Joey Buell gulped. “Okay, Mr. Queen.” He did not look at his two friends.

David and Howard communicated silently. Then David turned to Ellery. “Where do we stand, Mr. Queen?”

“You and Howard are coming along.”

The blond boy bit his lip. Then he nodded, and after a moment the dark boy nodded, too.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Ellery dipped briskly into the jacket pocket that held his pipe and tobacco. His hand reappeared with a wrinkled envelope, its flap written over. From the envelope protruded the corners of some one-dollar bills. “Your Helen McDoud wedding gift fund, Miss Carpenter. With Joey's compliments.”

“I did forget!” gasped Louise. “Where did you find it?”

“Where Joey in desperation slipped it as I was frisking the other boys. The only thing in the room I didn't think of searching—my own pocket.” Ellery winked at the three boys. “Coming, fellas?”

No Parking

Modesta Ryan played her greatest role not on a Broadway stage but in her penthouse off Madison Avenue. The performance took place one midsummer night against a backdrop of flooding rain, thunder, and lightning; power failures darkened some buildings in the Central Park area; and, of course, the Athenia Apartments was one of them. So Modesta even got to play her big scene by the light of candles, a surefire touch.

Ellery was not surprised. Modesta Ryan specialized in melodrama. Everything she touched went off like a rocket. She could not walk her dog without landing on the front page. Her last pet had broken his leash on Fifth Avenue and been run over by a car carrying the ambassador of an Iron Curtain country.

Modesta was spectacularly unlucky in love. She had never married. The men she wanted always seemed to prefer lisping ingénues or hat-check girls, and those who wanted her she could not stand. Her suitors ran to hand-kissers, cigaret-holder smokers, jodhpur-wearers, and gloomy college boys with mother fixations.

But suddenly, there he was. It was too impossibly wonderful. There he was—all three of him.

For naturally, when the right man did come along, two others equally right showed up, too.

It was a typical Modesta Ryan sensation, and for some months Broadway speculated on little else. Which of the three would she marry?

Jock Shanville was male lead in the new play Modesta was rehearsing, a costume piece set in medieval Venice. It was type-casting, for besides flaunting a doge's profile, a wicked eye, and a fine leg in tights, Shanville excelled in scene-stealing, reputation-poisoning, character assassination, and other closet arts of the theater. Jock had a wife, an ex-show girl named Pearline, but she was no problem; his rapier tongue had been backing her toward the nearest divorce court long before he decided on Modesta Ryan as her successor.

Then there was Kid Catt, a black-browed fighting machine who dealt bloody unconsciousness from both fists with a cold smile that had become his TV trademark. The Kid's body was his god, self-denial his creed; and women sat high on his proscribed list. So when he fell in love with Modesta it was with the violent passion of a fallen monk. Modesta found holding the beautiful young brute at bay an enchanting experience.