Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (8 page)

BOOK: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation
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The Queens exchanged glances; Ackley, Benson, and Chase were three of Center Street's incurable headaches.

“When the matter was turned over to the Yard, very hush-hush, I was placed in charge, and I bungled it.” Inspector Burke's sensitive face flushed. “Word leaked out that something big was in the wind, and all sorts of mugs with guilty consciences ran for cover before we could tighten our lines. Among them were Benson, Chase, and Ackley—all three got away to the States. One of them—exactly which one we haven't been able to determine—subsequently made contact, with demands and instructions, and I'm here to pay him off.”

Inspector Queen clucked. “When and where, Burke?”

“Tonight, in my hotel room. I'm to hand him twenty thousand pounds in American dollars—in exchange, of course, for the letters. So tonight I'll know which of the three he is—and much good will it do me.” The Englishman rose, tightening his lips. “And that's my tale of woe, Queen. I must ask you not to go near any of the trio—really my chief reason for stopping by. We can't risk another slip. Those letters must be repossessed and returned to England to be destroyed.”

“Can we give you any help?”

“No, no. Unless I botch it again—in which case,” said Inspector Burke with a twisted smile, “you might offer me a job sweeping out your office. I shan't feel very happy about going back.… Well! Gentlemen, wish me luck.”

“Luck,” said the Queens in sober unison.

They recalled the bitter twist in Burke's smile the next time they saw him, which was in his hotel room the following morning. A chambermaid had found him. He had been seated slackly in the armchair beside the neatly made bed, a bullet hole in his powder-burned right temple. He had been dead since the night before. No shot had been heard; it was an ultramodern hotel, with soundproof walls. The gun lying on the carpet below his right hand had already been checked in the police laboratory against the slug dug out of his head by the medical examiner.

The room was the picture of peace. A gladstone bag was spread on the luggage rack, undisturbed. The night table held Burke's pipe and tobacco pouch and a dogeared copy of Shakespeare's plays with Burke's signature on the flyleaf. A dispatch case initialed
L. B
. lay, open and empty, on the bed.

“Poor Burke,” muttered Inspector Queen. He handed Ellery a sheet of hotel stationery. “Found on the writing table. It has a couple of his fingerprints on it, and it's his handwriting—we've checked.”

The script was even and unhurried, as if the brain directing the hand that had written it had reached a decision:


Mine honor is my life; both grow in one;

Take honor from me, and my life is done.

—L
ESTER
B
URKE

“Epitaph by Shakespeare,” murmured Ellery. “What went wrong, Dad?”

“Apparently his man came last night with the letters, as agreed, but while Burke checked them over—probably turning away slightly—the rat sapped him; Doc says there's a slight contusion toward the back of Burke's head. Then the doublecrosser took the money
and
the letters, and skipped. Guess he figures those highborn pash notes are good for at least one more transatlantic squeeze when the heat dies down, and meanwhile he's got some fifty-odd grand to tide him over. And when poor old Burke came to and realized what he'd let happen—and all it meant—he couldn't face the disgrace and committed suicide.”

“There's no doubt it is suicide?”

“You name it. Bullet fired in contact with Burke's temple, angle of entry checks for a righthanded man, slug from Burke's own gun found in the body, Burke's prints on the stock. Suicide note in Burke's authenticated handwriting. Letters not here. Money taken. It's suicide, all right—the only question is which one of those three cuties crossed Burke up and drove him to it … Ackley, Chase, or Benson.”

Benson, a gray-haired, dapper little man with a Florida tan, was located in a barbershop on Park Row having his nails manicured. The confidence man looked like a Wall Street broker or a corporation executive. He seemed annoyed.

“Don't know what you're talking about, Inspector,” Benson snapped. “I can account for every second of my time all day yesterday until well after midnight. I was up in Westchester looking over some property with two associates of mine, we had dinner and spent the evening discussing the deal at the home of one of them in White Plains, and the other one drove me back to my apartment in town—dropped me off a few minutes past one
A.M.
Their names? Certainly!”

Benson's associates turned out to be two confidence men with slightly lesser reputations. However, they corroborated Benson's story, which was all Inspector Queen was interested in at the moment.

Chase was located in a midtown hotel at the tail end of an all-night poker game—a big, soft-spoken rancher type of man, whose drawl and slow movements ingeniously drew attention from the smooth lightning of his long white hands. No pigeon was being plucked; Chase's companions were professional gamblers.

“Relaxation,” smiled the cardsharp. “Man gets tired playin' with rank amateurs. Last night, Inspector? Why, I've been right here since we started our game four o'clock yesterday afternoon. Haven't left this room. Have I, boys?”

Four heads shook emphatically.

That seemed to make it Ackley, whom they found at breakfast in a triplex Park Avenue apartment with its owner, a bejeweled society widow who was outraged at the interruption. Ackley was a tall, lean, handsome man with dark curly hair and piercing black eyes.

“Ackley?” echoed the lady furiously. “This gentleman is Lord Rogers, the big-game hunter, and his lordship has been entertaining me since the cocktail hour yesterday afternoon with his fascinating adventures in Kenya and Tanganyika—”

“Continuously, madam?” asked Inspector Queen politely.

“I ah—put him up for the night,” said the lady, coloring. “We—he retired at two
A.M.
Will you please get out!”

“After you, your lordship,” said the Inspector; and the jewel thief shrugged and went along.

Ellery followed in troubled silence.

He was not to break that silence for a long time. For the three alibis remained unshaken, and Ackley, Chase, and Benson had to be released for lack of evidence.

“One of those alibis is rigged!” yelped the Inspector. “But which one?”

The letters and the money failed to turn up.

Inspector Queen raged and fumed, but the case had to be written off. Ellery fumed, too, but for other reasons. Something about the circumstances of Burke's death was wrong, he felt in his bones, but what it was he simply could not diagnose. And Inspector Burke's body and effects were shipped back to England, and the cables from London suddenly stopped, and that seemed the end of it.

But it was not, and it broke out again in the oddest way. One night, weeks later, Inspector Queen came home bemoaning the deterioration of the new generation of police officers. They had all reverted to childhood, the Inspector snorted at dinner, spending their spare time at headquarters playing games.

“Games?” said Ellery.

“Crime puzzles. They make 'em up and challenge one another to solve 'em. They've even got the Chief Inspector doing it! Though come to think of it,” the Inspector chuckled, “one he tossed at me today is pretty darn clever. Typical detective-story situation: Rich man with three no-good heirs who need money bad. He's bumped off, one of the three did it, and each claims an alibi for the time of the murder. One says he was in the Museum of Art looking at some eighteenth-century American paintings. The second says he was dialing his bookie's private phone number, Aqueduct 4-2320, putting down a horse bet. The third says he was in a Flatbush bar talking to a French sailor named Socrates Papadapolis who was on his way to Indo-China. Question: Which alibi was the sure-enough phony? Get it, son?”

“Sure,” grinned Ellery; but then the grin faded, and his fork bonged against his plate. “The Burke case,” he choked.

His father stared. “The Burke case? What about the Burke case?”

“I knew we were played for suckers, Dad, but till you threw me that puzzle just now, I didn't see how!”

“How?” repeated the Inspector, bewildered.

“Burke didn't commit suicide—
he was murdered
. Take your crime puzzle,” said Ellery swiftly. “The Museum of Art alibi and the Flatbush bar alibi might or might not have been false, and only an investigation would tell, but the phone-call-to-the-bookie alibi needs no investigation—it's false on the face of it. No one can dial an exchange like Aqueduct, which starts with the letters
AQ
, because every phone dial in the United States has one letter of the alphabet missing.
It has no letter Q
.

“And that told me what we'd missed in the Burke setup.

“Dad,” cried Ellery, “
that note in Lester Burke's handwriting was a forgery
. If it was a forgery, Burke didn't write it. If Burke didn't write it, he didn't commit suicide—he was murdered. The devil sapped Burke, all right, and placed the unconscious man carefully in the armchair, shot him with his own gun, put Burke's prints on the gun and note, left the forged suicide note on the desk—the kind of note Burke might genuinely have written, a Shakespearian quotation—slipped out with the money and letters, and rejoined his alibi-ing confederates.

“But the fact that the note was a forgery identifies the killer. Ackley is a jewel thief and society impersonator. Chase is a cardsharp. Benson is a confidence man—but he's something else, too. One of his aliases is Phil the Penman—
a tag only a professional forger could have earned!

“Yes, but wait, wait,” protested Inspector Queen. “But how do you
know
that suicide note was a fake?”

“Benson pulled a boner. Do you remember how he spelled the word ‘honor'—spelled it twice—in the quotation?”

“Honor?” The Inspector frowned. “H-o-n-o-r. What's wrong with that, Ellery?”

“Burke was an Englishman, Dad. Had he written that quotation, he'd have spelled ‘honor' the way all Englishmen spell it …
h-o-n-o-u-r. It had no letter U!

HOLDUP DEPT.

The Robber of Wrightsville

Wrightsville is a New England industrial town famous for nothing, set down in the center of an agricultural county of no particular interest. It was founded by a man named Jezreel Wright in 1701, and after two hundred and fifty-odd years its population is just past ten thousand. Parts of it are crooked and narrow, other parts glare with neon signs, and a great deal of it is downright dingy. In other words, Wrightsville is a very ordinary American town.

But to Ellery it is Shangri-La.

Pressed to explain why he runs off to Wrightsville at the drop of a phone call, Ellery will say that he sort of likes cobblestoned, grimy Low Village, and the Square (which is round), and Twin Hill Cemetery and The Hot Spot on Route 16 and the smoky burgundy of the Mahoganies to the north; that he finds Band Concert Night behind the Our Boys Memorial relaxing in direct ratio to the amount of noise and buttered popcorn produced; that the sight of the farmers' starched families coming with stiff pleasure into town on Saturday afternoons positively stimulates him; and so forth.

But if Ellery were to tell the entire truth, he would have to include the fact that Wrightsville has been wonderfully good to him in the matter of interesting crimes.

On the latest occasion he dropped off the Atlantic Stater at Wrightsville Station under the delusion that he would pass a bangup week at Bill York's Lodge on Bald Mountain, skimming down the second-rate ski slopes like a bird and sitting at tall fires afterward, soaking up contentment and hot toddies with the sportsmen of the town. He got no closer to the Lodge than the Hollis Hotel on the Square.

Ed Hotchkiss gave him the bad news as he dumped his skis into Ed's taxi outside the station and turned to churn the large Hotchkiss hand. There wasn't enough snow on Old Baldy this winter, Ed mourned, to make a passable fight for Bill York's six youngsters. But as long as Mr. Queen was in town, there
was
that darned business of Ed's second cousin Mamie and Mamie's boy Delbert …

When Ellery had checked into the Hollis, washed up, and come down to the lobby to buy a
Wrightsville Record
at Grover Doodle's cigar stand, he was already half committed to look into the case of young Delbert Hood, who was out on bail awaiting trial for a crime Ed Hotchkiss said his cousin Mamie said her boy hadn't had a thing in the world to do with.

Certain elements of the affair encouraged the great man's interest. For one thing, the victim of the crime seemed the villain of the piece. For another, Officer Jeep Jorking, one of Chief Dakin's bright young men, was in Wrightsville General Hospital, his left side incased in a cast from the hip down. For a third, everybody in town except Ed Hotchkiss and Mamie Hood Wheeler was convinced that the boy Delbert had done it.

This last by itself was almost enough for Ellery; and by the time he had rooted around among some Wrightsville ladies of his acquaintance, busy at their organizational luncheons at the Hollis and Upham House, and had chewed the fat with Chief Dakin at police headquarters and sundry others, Ellery was ready to go the whole hog.

The background of the case, according to the ladies, was as follows:

Wrightsville had awakened one morning to learn that Anson K. Wheeler was marrying the Widow Hood. This was tantamount to a revolution, for Anse Wheeler was Hill Drive and Mamie Hood was Low Village.

It was not as if Mamie Hood were young and beautiful. She was forty-six if she was a day. Her features were definitely on the common side, and one of the ladies reported that Tessie Lupin, popular operator of the Lower Main Beauty Shop, had never given Mamie Hood so much as a facial, and didn't her complexion look it! As for Mamie's figure, averred the ladies, it was spready around the top and the middle and, when you got right down to it, so to speak, around the bottom, too. She didn't know what a decent foundation garment
was
, apparently.

BOOK: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation
2.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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