Nikki seated herself on the cultivator. You had to give Ellery his head in a situation like this; you couldn’t drive him for beans. Well, she thought grudgingly, seeing how pale and how tired-looking he was after a night’s wrestling with George Washington, he’s earned it.
“The number was wrong,” said Ellery solemnly, leaning on Tobias’s ax. “Twelve trees. Washington apparently planted twelve trees—Simeon Clarke’s Diary never did mention the number twelve, but the evidence seemed unquestionable—there were twelve oaks in an equilateral triangle, each one an equal distance from its neighbor.
“And yet... I felt that twelve oaks couldn’t be, perfect as the triangle was. Not if they were planted by George Washington. Not on February the twenty-second, New Style, in the year of our Lord 1791.
“Because on February the twenty-second, 1791 — in fact, until March the fourth, when Vermont entered the Union to swell its original number by one—there was another number in the United states so important, so revered, so much a part of the common speech and the common living—and dying—that it was more than a number; it was a solemn and sacred thing; almost not a number at all. It overshadowed other numbers like the still-unborn Paul Bunyan. It was memorialized on the new American flag in the number of its stars and the number of its stripes. It was a number of which George Washington was the standard-bearer!—the head and only recently the strong right arm of the new Republic which had been born out of the blood and muscle of its integers. It was a number which was in the hearts and minds and mouths of all Americans.
“No. If George Washington, who was not merely the living symbol of all this but carried with him that extraordinary compulsion toward numbers which characterized his whole temperament besides, had wished to plant a number of oak trees to commemorate a birthday visit in the year 1791... he would have, he could have, selected only one number out of all the mathematical trillions at his command — the number thirteen.”
The sun was looking over the edge of Pennsylvania at Washington’s Grove.
“George Washington planted thirteen trees here that day, and under one of them he buried Paul Revere’s copper case. Twelve of the trees he arranged in an equilateral triangle, and we know that the historic treasure was not under any of the twelve. Therefore he must have buried the case under the thirteenth—a thirteenth oak sapling which grew to oakhood and, some time during the past century and a half, withered and died and vanished, vanished so utterly that it left no trace, not even its roots.
“Where would Washington have planted that thirteenth oak? Because beneath the spot where it once stood—there lies the copper case containing his sword and the first coin to be struck off in the new United States.”
And Ellery glanced tenderly at the cherry sapling which Tobias Clarke had set into the earth in the middle of Washington’s Grove six years before.
“Washington the surveyor, the geometer, the man whose mind cried out for integral symmetries? Obviously, in only one place: In the center of the triangle. Any other place would be unthinkable.”
And Ellery hefted Tobias’s ax and strode toward the six-year-old tree. He raised the ax.
But suddenly he lowered it, and turned, and said in a rather startled way: “See here! Isn’t today...?”
“Washington’s Birthday,” said Nikki.
Ellery grinned and began to chop down the cherry tree.
The Adventure of The Ides of Michael Magoon
It was passed in the third session of the 65th Congress and approved as of 6:55 P.M. on the twenty-fourth of February, 1919, and its title is Public—No. 254 [H.R. 12863].
Nor is there anything alarming in its subtitle, which happens to be An Act To provide revenue, and for other purposes. The fifth word may raise a few scattered goose pimples, but hardly more.
It is necessary to read on.
Nothing will be clear until you come upon the phrase, “on or before the fifteenth day of March.”
Then everything will be clear, clear as the clap of the tocsin. There is only one calamity which befalls America, urbs et suburbs, on or before the fifteenth day of March, and that is the income tax.
Before going on to Michael Magoon and his unusual tax problem, it is tempting to take a short detour into the statutes, which concern not Mike alone but very nearly all of us. There was income-tax legislation before the Revenue Act of 1918, and there has been income-tax legislation since, but Public—No. 254 [H.R. 12863] bears a curious distinction. It was the first income-tax law which pronounced the annual Judgment Day to be March the fifteenth. Its predecessors designated March the first.
Why the change in dates?
There is a reason, of course, and it is not the reason your tax expert, for all his awful knowledge, can give you.
Someone—perhaps it was Mr. Secretary of the Treasury, or a Gentleman from Indiana or Ohio, or even some lowlier lackey of the People with a finger in the legislative pie—someone with a frightening lack of humor remembered great Caesar and the bloody daggers. Someone remembered the signs and the portents and the gathering crimson thunderheads over the full Capitoline moon. He may even have recalled that postridie idus., the day following the Ides, was held by the ancient Romans to be unlucky.
And who among us, after rendering unto Caesar, will deny on any given March the sixteenth that the Romans were right?
The whole thing was certainly unlucky for Magoon.
Mike was what the fancy boys like to call a private “op,” or “eye.” These fascinating terms inevitably materialize a slim-hipped, narrow-eyed, cigaret-dragging character in a Finchley custom-drape, a Sulka tie and a $35 Dobbs, who is greased death on the draw, kills five thugs and one mastermind on every case, is as irresistible with dames as a fox in a hen-coop, carries a self-refillable flask of Scottish dew on the other hip, and speaks, when he speaks at all, in insolent monosyllables—something out of Chandler by Bogart.
Alas. Mike Magoon was a sagging 63 with a 48 waist, very large flat feet, and blinky brown eyes covered by tortoiseshell glasses, which gave him an air of groping astonishment. He wore Adam hats, suits from Barney’s, and shoes by W. L. Douglas. And he neither smoked nor drank—asthma barred the one and, as for the other, his good wife had the nasal infallibility of a beagle. He had never manhandled a lady client in his life; not that he lacked a libido, but he cherished his license more. And in the sudden-death department, he had discharged his Police Positive exactly twice since resigning from the Force four years before, and one of those times he was cleaning his pistol on the fire escape when a neighbor’s pride and joy whanged his shooting hand with a well-directed B.B. shot.
No cases came Mike’s way involving mysterious fat men with inscrutable eyes, or Maltese falcons, or gangster chieftains in luxurious penthouses. For the most part he spent his time trailing thirtyish ladies for suspicious husbands or putting the grab on shop clerks allergic to the boss’s till. On those Saturday nights when he was not working, he took his wife to the movies. On Sundays, after church, there was always The Little Ukraine on Fordham Road—Mike was mad about shashlik and borscht with sour cream. And on Wednesday nights, bingo.
The first three years Mike was a private eye he operated out of his three-room Bronx flat to cut the overhead, picking up what cases he could through tips from old friends in brass buttons. Then he and Mrs. Magoon decided that a front and a midtown telephone number might pay for more bingo games, so Mike sublet one room of a four-office suite in a 42nd Street office building, sharing the premises with a public stenographer, a commercial artist, and a little bald man with a gold tooth who had four phones which were always ringing. A week after Michael Magoon, Confidential Investigations had sprouted in gilt on his pebbled-glass door, Mike opened it to admit Mrs. Clementa Van Dome, the kind of client the Magoons of this world lie awake nights praying for: the client who pays an annual retainer for continuous services rendered. It was a klep case in which—but more of Mrs. Van Dome anon.