“He must be very stupid,” said Ellery.
“Sure,” said his father cheerfully. “They’re only smart in the fairy tales you write. Now if this were one of your mystery plots, Ellery, you know who’d be the criminal?”
“Mike,” said Ellery.
“Me!” Mike immediately looked guilty.
“Sure, Mike,” chuckled the Inspector. “By the way, what time was it when you got back here last night? Your return trip, Mike—when you came back to see if you’d left your papers behind?”
“So that’s it,” growled Mike. “Listen here, Inspector...!”
“Oh, don’t be an ass, Mike,” said Ellery irritably. “What time was it? Was she alive? Was her light on? What?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Must have been a quarter of eight or so. She was workin’ in her office here. I says Mrs. Carson did you find any papers of mine around from my brief case and she says no Mr. Magoon I didn’t. I says where’s Ziggy and that nut artist and she says oh they went home long ago. So I says good night and goes back home myself.”
“How did she seem to you at the time, Mike?”
“Okay.”
“Not nervous?”
“Hell, I don’t know. She was always nervous.”
“Well.” The Inspector scratched his head. “The best Doc Prouty can give us is that she was killed between seven and nine last night. The cleaning woman’s no help—she was through giving the offices a lick and a promise by seven o’clock, she says, and she says Mrs. Carson was here alone. So, Mike, if you left her alive near eight, then she was bopped between eight and nine.”
“By one of these two characters,” said Sergeant Velie from the doorway.
The first man was a tall, frayed, decaying-looking fellow with prehensile dirty fingers and half-slices of lemon under his eyes. The second was a little bald-headed man with a very gold tooth. Their eyes bugged at the thing lolling on the typewriter and they both back-pedaled fast. But Sergeant Velie was leaning in the doorway, licking a cigar.
The tall man went over to the window and opened it and stuck his face out into the cold March airstream. The small man went over to Mrs. Carson’s wastebasket and bent over, almost embracing it.
“How can you stand it? How can you stand it?” the tall man kept saying.
“Arrrgh,” said the little man.
“That’s Vince the artist,” said Mike. “That’s Jack Ziggy the bookie,” said Mike.
“I didn’t kill her,” said the tall man. “I’m an artist. I’m interested in life. I couldn’t kill a spider crawling up my leg. Ask anybody. Don’t think you’ll make me say I did it. Cut pieces out of me—” Leonardo Vince was getting worked up, blood in his musty face again.
“You’ve made your point, Vince,” said the Inspector mildly. “I suppose, Ziggy, you didn’t kill her either.”
The little bald man raised his head to reply, but then he stooped quickly again and repeated: “Arrrgh.”
Sergeant Velie drawled: “Inspector.”
“Huh?” The old gentleman did not glance at him.
“The night man here says Vince and Ziggy both came back to the buildin’ last night. He can’t remember the exact times but he says they came separate, and they came between eight and nine.”
Mrs. Carson was a pall, definitely. Even Sergeant Velie sucked on his cigar with more enjoyment when she floated out of the office between two Welfare men.
Leonardo Vince shut the window, shivering, and the little bookmaker straightened up with the wastebasket, glancing around apologetically. The Inspector nodded to a detective and Jack Ziggy went out holding the basket high and wide.
“Cobalt blue,” said the Inspector to the artist. “You were saying...?”
“You can’t make it out red or ocher or any damned thing but what I say it was,” said Vince wearily. “It was cobalt blue. Go into my office and see if you can find the tube. You can’t. It’s not there. I took it home last night. That’s why I came back. I may serve commerce during the day, and damn the shriveled souls of all agency men!—but my nights are dedicated to Art, gentlemen, with a capital and profitless A. I got home, had a bite, went to my easel, and found I had no cobalt blue which I happened to need for a purpose which would be far above your vulgar understanding. The supply stores were closed. I returned to the office here for a tube of—”
“Cobalt blue,” said the Inspector, nodding. He stared at Vince hard. Vince stared back, with hate. “And Mrs. Carson was—?”
“Am I supposed to contradict myself?” asked the artist bitterly. “But how could I? A child could repeat this story ad infinitum. I didn’t even see Mrs. Carson. There was a light on in her office but the door was shut. Don’t bother to ask the next question. It was about eight-fifteen. No, the homunculus wasn’t here—I refer to the creature who calls himself Ziggy—at least, I didn’t see him. And I have no idea if the woman was alive or dead; I heard not a whisper from her office. And lastly, I am a woman-hater. Now what do I do—say it all over again?”
On the heels of this remarkable soliloquy came the homunculus, with the detective but without the wastebasket.
“And me,” whined Ziggy, “me, I don’t know—”
“Nuttin.”
“—nuttin. But from nuttin.”
“You had a couple of parties to ring up,” prompted Inspector Queen politely, “and—?”
“Yeah. Private calls, see? Confidentially, some of my clients owe me some back dough and they been tryin’ to sucker me, so I come back at eight-thirty to use my own phone, see? More private, like. And I don’t remember a thing, not a thing. No light, no Mrs. Carson, no nuttin. I don’t remember nuttin. I don’t see nobody, I don’t hear nobody—”
“Oh, hell,” said the Inspector. “Ellery, have you got anything?”
“I see no reason,” said Ellery absently, “to hold these two men any longer.”
His father frowned.
“You’ve established no connection between these fellows and Mrs. Carson, beyond a common tenancy. The woman was obviously killed by someone else. Get them out of here, Dad—I’m sicker of them than you are.”
When Leonardo Vince and Jack Ziggy were gone, the old gentleman said: “All right, Master Mind. What’s the great big plot?”
“And why’d you warn us not to say anything about Mike’s income tax stuff on Mrs. Van Dome bein’ swiped?” demanded Sergeant Velie.
“Suppose,” said Ellery, “suppose thief-killer-potential-blackmailer is in desperate need of ready cash.” He looked at them.
“He wouldn’t dare,” breathed his father. “Not now.”
“Maestro, he’s hot!”
“He doesn’t know we’ve made the least connection between the theft of Mike’s records and the murder of Mrs. Carson.”
Inspector Queen trotted around the office, pulling at his mustache.
Then he stopped and said: “Mike, phone that Mrs. Van Dome. I want to talk to her.”
The next morning, when Ellery hung up, he said to his audience: “It’s a curious experience, speaking to Mrs. Van Dome. Didn’t you find it so yesterday, Dad?”
“Never mind how I found that snooty, upstaging, cop-hating old battle-ax,” grunted the Inspector. “What did she just say, Ellery?”
“Like a dream-trip through outer space. It leaves you with an exhilarating memory of indescribable grandeurs and only the vaguest sense of reality. Mike, does she really exist?”
“Never mind the fancy stuff,” growled Magoon. “What did she say?”
“She received the note in the first mail this morning.”
“Really, Ellery,” said Nikki, “your omniscience is disgusting.”