Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (18 page)

And Jig caressed his Adam's apple and said that nothing from, on, or about the guy concealed secret writing. This covered every surface capable of taking a fluid impression, not excluding the guy's epidermis. Jig used the word epidermis.

By this time they were approaching Elkton, Maryland.

The monster sucked his lower lip in silence.

“Maybe,” said Nose in the silence, “maybe he memorized the names … huh?”

“Yeah!” Tic looked relieved. “They could still have the book back in New York and he's carrying it all in his head.”

The man in the chair looked up. “There's twenty-eight names to a page, and fifty-two pages—almost fifteen hundred names. Who is he, Einstein?” He said suddenly: “That phone book you picked up again. What's the gag?”

Ellery tamped a fresh load into his pipe to give his fingers something to do. “Some people relax with mystery stories. I can't—I write them. The phone book does it for me.”

“I bet.” The sore eyes glittered. “Jig, give that book the business!”

Nose tore it from Ellery's hand.

“But I already tested it for secret writing,” said Jig.

“To hell with secret writing. We're after a list of names. And in a New York phone book you got about every kind of name there is! Look for marks next to names—pinpricks, pencil dots, impressions of nails—anything!”

“Would someone mind,” Ellery asked plaintively, “giving me a light?”

They were pulling into Washington when Jig came back from the compartment in which he had set up his impromptu laboratory.

“No marks,” he mumbled. “No nothing. It's just the way it came off the press.”

“And nobody's still tried to leave that joint in New York we got covered,” muttered Tic. “Al phoned from Baltimore.”

The man in the chair said slowly, “So he's a decoy after all. They figured they'd pull us off with him while some other—got away. Only they got another figure coming. Sooner or later the real boy scout's got to try to sneak out of that building. Tic, get Al to phone New York and tell Manno if anybody gets away he can start cutting his throat … Okay, you.” He looked at Ellery. “You can get dressed now.”

The Capitol Limited was standing in the Washington terminal when Ellery, looking more like a hobo after a bad season than a respectable gentleman-writer-detective, picked up his umbrella and said with pale whimsicality, “Do I get shot in the back as I leave, or are all bets off?”

“Wait a minute,” said the monster.

“Yes?” said Ellery, nervously gripping his umbrella.

“Where you going with the umbrella?”

“Umbrella?” Ellery glanced blankly down at it. “Why, you examined this yourself—”

“So that was it,” and now the womanish voice had a vicious sting. “I examined it, all right—the wrong part!
It's in the bamboo handle
. You rolled up the pages of the ledger and stuffed them into the hollow head of that bumbershoot! Take it from him!”

Ellery found himself in Tic's grip staring fascinated as Nose demolished the handle of the umbrella.

And when it was thoroughly demolished there was nothing on the floor of the drawing room but some curved splinters of bamboo.

The monster rose, his sore eyes smoldering. “Boot him,” he choked, “boot him out of here!”

Twenty-six minutes later Ellery was escorted into the private office of a very important executive of a very important branch of the government in a very important building in Washington.

“I'm the messenger from New York,” said Ellery, “and I've brought you the Black Ledger.”

Ellery did not see the monster again until the trial in federal court. They met in the corridor during a recess. The narcotics king was surrounded by bailiffs and lawyers and newspapermen, and he was looking exactly like a criminal who expects the worst. Nevertheless, the moment he spied Ellery his face brightened and he jumped forward and seized Ellery by the arm and pulled him aside.

“Keep those monkeys away from here a minute!” he shouted, and then he said piteously: “Queen, you're a life-saver. This thing's been driving me bats. Ever since you outsmarted me on that damn train, I've been asking myself how you did it. It wasn't on you, it wasn't in you, it wasn't in that phone book or umbrella. So where was it? Would you please tell me?”

“I don't mind kicking a man when he's down,” said Ellery coldly, “not when he's a so-called man like you. Certainly I'll tell you. The phone book and umbrella were herrings. I had to keep you occupied with your own royal cleverness. The ledger never left my hand.”

“What are you giving me?” howled the monster.

“It's the size of the ledger and the quantity of its contents that threw you. You never stopped to think that size and quantity can be reduced.”

“Huh?”

“Microfilm,” said Ellery. “During the war the government used it to reduce each letter of troop mail to one quarter of a square inch. A ton of ordinary mail—eighty-five thousand letters—on microfilm weighs only twenty pounds. All I had to do was have fifty-two sheets six by eight and a half inches photographed down to microfilm. Result: a mere thirteen feet of film less than a half-inch in width. When it was wound up in a tight roll …”

“But in your
hand
,” said the monster dazedly. “I'd have bet a million to one you couldn't be palming anything …”

“I'd hardly have taken a foolish chance like that,” said Ellery. “No, the roll of film was in something—in fact, in two things. And I kept applying matches to it regularly all the way from New York to Washington.”

“Matches! You set
fire
to it?”

“Nice touch, don't you think? Oh, it was a in a fireproof container, an old cartridge shell just big enough to hold it, and capped tightly. The container was tucked away in the bottom of my pipe bowl—the only thing I carried you didn't search. It made a brassy smoke,” said Ellery, “but when I think of all those kids who've learned to smoke your marijuana and shoot themselves full of your heroin, I'd say it was worth it—wouldn't you?”

KIDNAPPING DEPT.

Child Missing!

The Billy Harper kidnapping case—in Sergeant Thomas Velie's quaint linguistic goulash—took the cake for kicking the form sheet in the brisket. For one thing—and there were others—the FBI came into it at no time whatsoever. Inspector Queen explained the abstention of the Federal Bureau by saying that he could hardly bother J. Edgar's Ph.D.s with a crime problem that never amounted to more than child's play.

But the Inspector said that after Ellery solved the case. At the time it did not seem a simple business at all.

Billy Harper was only seven years old—a bright but unfortunate child, everyone agreed. When you were seven, it was an unhappy experience to be taken away from your father's big house beside the park and to be installed in a little box of a hotel apartment across town with your swollen-nosed mother and a nurse who was pretty but hardly a substitute for your father.

Billy had heard bitter words like “divorce” and “No-I-won't-give-up-ten-years-of-my-life-quite-
that
-easily-Lloyd-Har-per!” Also, some mysterious creature named “Jarryl Jones” had been booted about in the parental war which Billy had illegally heard raging from abovestairs that dreadful night. (This Jarryl Jones was a “model,” it seemed, which made no sense at all, since models were airplanes and ships and things.) An unknown word, “infatuation,” came into it several times, and a vaguely frightening one called “custody” which got both his parents very angry indeed. And finally Billy's mother said something icy-sharp about “a six months' trial separation,” whatever that was, “after which, if you still think you want to marry this girl, Lloyd, I'll give you your divorce.” And then his mother and Miss M'Govern had taken Billy away to the little box on the other side of the park, leaving his father behind. When Miss M'Govern took Billy to visit his father, which she did every Friday afternoon thereafter, the greatest man in the world was so tightly gentle it scared Billy, because that wasn't his father at all—in the old days he had bellowed and rough-housed wonderfully. It was like visiting a stranger. And as Billy roamed disconsolately over his old house from cellar to attic on those Friday afternoons, the house was a stranger, too. Whatever it meant, it was devastating.

And then Billy Harper was kidnaped.

He was snatched at a few minutes past 6
P.M.
after the fifth consecutive Friday visit to his father's house. Miss M'Govern sobbed that she had turned her back on Billy for no more than a
second
—to post a letter at the West Side exit from the park on their way back from Mr. Harper's—but when she looked around Billy had disappeared.

At first Miss M'Govern had been annoyed, thinking he had darted back into the park against her strict injunction. But when she could not find him she became alarmed and sought a policeman. The policeman had no better luck. Calls from the park station to Mrs. Harper's apartment and Lloyd Harper's house brought Billy's parents on the run; each said that Billy had not come “home,” and they quarreled over the sad ambiguous word while the desk sergeant tried patiently to get it all straight. With night coming on the entire park patrol was alerted for a “a lost boy seven years of age”; by 3
A.M.
the last negative report was in, it dawned on everyone that Billy's disappearance might have a grimmer explanation, and a general alarm went out.

Lloyd Harper was a wealthy man; the Harpers had been mentioned slyly in several recent newspaper columns; one columnist had stacked his story by referring to young Billy's Friday afternoon “commutation trips across the park.”

It began to add up.

Inspector Queen of headquarters entered the case at 8 o'clock the following morning. At 9:06
A.M.
the postman on his regular rounds delivered Lloyd Harper's mail; at 9:12
A.M.
Inspector Queen made a certain surreptitious telephone call; at 9:38
A.M.
Ellery rang the Harper bell and was admitted by none other than Sergeant Velie of the Inspector's staff.

“This,” the Sergeant announced to Ellery forbiddingly, “is one for the nanny goats.”

Ellery found his father in the drawing room making like a spectator. The little Inspector came to him at once.

“The FBI? No, not yet, son,” said the Inspector in an affable
sotto voce
. “It's kind of a funny case.… Yes, there's been a ransom note, but wait till Piggott's through with that nurse.… Who? Oh, the babe who's sitting there doing a bum. That's Jarryl Jones, the other woman. Harper had a date with her last night which of course he couldn't keep, and she stormed over first thing this morning to give him what-for and walked into this. Bet she's sorry, heh-heh! Shhh.” Jarryl Jones was beautiful and Mibs Harper—at least this morning—was definitely not; nevertheless, Lloyd Harper stood over his wife's chair, stubble-cheeked and hollow-eyed, with his back to his great love.

Miss M'Govern talked breathily. No, she had nothing to hide. The letter which she had turned her back on little Billy Harper to post the day before? It had been addressed to her boy friend. Mr. Harper will tell you. Ralph Kleinschmidt is his name. Ralph Kleinschmidt had been the Harpers' chauffeur … sort of a hothead, yes … he did drink a bit too much at times …

“I fired him two weeks ago for drunkenness,” said Lloyd Harper shortly. “With no references. He got pretty nasty.”

“Lloyd! Do you really think—?”

“So he's getting even,” said Velie sadly. “Now you don't want to get mixed up in this, girlie, so what's the address you wrote on your letter to this guy?”

“General Delivery, main post office,” whispered Miss M'Govern. “We've corresponded that way before when one of us was on the wing looking for a job—”

“Where's Kleinschmidt's hideout?” barked Detective Piggott.

“I don't know! Won't you believe me? Anyway, Ralph wouldn't—couldn't do a thing like this.…”

At Inspector Queen's unexcited nod, Piggott took her down to headquarters.

“We're wasting valuable time,” snarled Lloyd Harper.

“I want my baby,” moaned Mibs Harper.

“That ransom note, Inspector—!”

“Yes, the ransom note,” said Inspector Queen, producing an envelope. “Ellery, what do you make of this?”

The envelope was squarish and large, of heavy cream-colored crushed bond. Obviously expensive. Lloyd Harper's address was blocklettered in smeary pencil in a style so crude as almost to defy deciphering. The envelope had passed through the local substation the night before; from the postmark, about two hours after Billy Harper's abduction.

The single sheet of notepaper inside was made to fit a much smaller envelope. It was tinted mauve, a fine deckle-edged rag paper.

The same smeary, crude blockprinting said, without salutation:
The price is 50 grand to get the kid back safe. Small bills in oilcloth bundle. Father to drive alone by southwest corner La Brea and Wilshire Boulevards, exactly
11:15
a.m. today, throw bundle to sidewalk, keep going. Follow orders or else
. There was no signature.

“Mailed last night, couldn't possibly be delivered before this morning's mail,” said Inspector Queen, “which was a few minutes past nine.…”

“I take it what you have in mind,” murmured Ellery, “is that, the southwest corner of La Brea and Wilshire Boulevards being located in only one city in the world—Los Angeles, California—and the time for deposit of the ransom money on said corner being set for 11:15 this morning, the whole thing's impossible.”

“Which the kidnaper of course knows,” said the Inspector. “It'll be a long time before you can go from Manhattan to Los Angeles in two hours. So you agree, Ellery, this note is a phony?”