“My income tax,” muttered Mike Magoon.
“The way I see it,” said the Inspector comfortably, putting his feet up on his desk, “is that this is pretty smart stuff. Vince is our baby. He’s a cutie. He knows we’ve connected the theft and the murder. Or he suspects we have, maybe because we haven’t handled Mike as a suspect, too. He decides to play it safe.”
“Sends that letter to Mrs. Van Dome,” said Nikki, “making the appointment at Penn Station—then today he wires himself to keep it!”
“And of course, promptly comes hotfooting it down to me with it instead,” nodded the Inspector. “Effect? He’s an innocent man being framed for theft, intended extortion, murder—the book.”
“But then,” protested Mike, “how’s he ever figure to blackmail Mrs. Van Dome? I thought that was the whole idea!”
“I said he’s a cutie, Mike,” replied the Inspector. “He weighs relative values. Decides his original hunch was a bad mistake and this is his way of covering up while he backs out. How does it sound to you, Ellery?”
“Admissible, but rather on the involved side, don’t you think?” Ellery scowled. “There’s an alternate theory which is much simpler. Mr. Jack Ziggy. Mr. Ziggy, too, develops chilled feet. Mr. Ziggy therefore decides to give us a fall guy. Writes the note to Mrs. Van Dome, sends the wire to Leonardo Vince.”
“Maybe he even heard a rumor about that raid,” cried Nikki, “and purposely went to that bookie place to be picked up before the eight o’clock meeting tonight at Penn Station! With Vince meeting Mrs. Van Dome, and himself arrested on a minor charge—”
“What’s wrong with that, Dad?”
“Not a thing,” snarled his father. “Two theories. Why couldn’t there be just one?”
“My income tax,” moaned Mike. “Ain’t anybody interested in my income tax? Look at the time!”
“Oh, there are more than two theories, Dad,” said Ellery absently. “I can think of at least two others—either of which would satisfy my plot appetite considerably more. The trouble is—” But then Ellery stopped. He was staring at his father’s feet.
“What’s the matter?” said the Inspector, sighting along his legs. “Hole in my shoe?”
“That brief case you’ve got your feet on,” said Ellery.
“What?”
“That’s mine,” said Mike. “You remember, Ellery, the one I brought when I came to you.”
“We took it from Mike after we got down to the offices,” said the Inspector. “Here, Mike, we’re through with it.”
“Wait a minute, Mike,” said Ellery. “You know, come to think of it, I never did examine this brief case while you were at the apartment, and finding Mrs. Carson dead at the office as soon as we got there... Dad, may I have that?”
“Sure. But it won’t tell you anything.”
“Is this the newspaper that the thief stuffed into it?” asked Ellery, drawing out a rather crumpled copy of the New York Times.
“Lemme see,” said Mike. “Yeah. I remember that tear just over the T.”
“You’re sure, Mike.”
“Sure I’m sure!”
“What are you looking so eagle-eyed about?’ sniffed Nikki, peering over Ellery’s shoulder. “It’s just a copy of yesterday’s New York Times.”
“And there isn’t an identifiable fingerprint on it,” said the Inspector.
“So now tell us you’ve made a great big blinding deduction.”
Ellery opened his mouth, but something else opened simultaneously—the door to Inspector Queen’s anteroom. Sergeant Velie stood there.
“Her Highness,” said the Sergeant, “is back from the front—madder’n hell.”
“Ah, Mrs. Van Dome!” said Ellery, jumping to his feet. “Come in, come in—you’re just in time.”
“I imagine, Mike,” said Ellery, “that your original plan didn’t include the concept of an accomplice at all.”
“What’s that?” said Mike. “What did you say, Ellery?”
“When you set fire to the reception-room settee, it was in a less involved plot. You would smell smoke, you would come running out of your office raising an outcry, Ziggy and Vince and—yes—Mrs. Carson would dash out of their offices to see what was the matter, you would put the fire out yourself, and meanwhile any of the three—yes, including Mrs. Carson—might have been the ‘thief’ who slipped into your office and stole the Van Dome kleptomania-case records. You would have given us three red herrings instead of two—a more nourishing diet.”
“What are you talkin’ about, Ellery!”
“But something went wrong. In fact, Mike, the most interesting part of your plot to extort money from Mrs. Van Dome is that it never really got started. Something went wrong at the outset. Since Mrs. Carson is the one you murdered, it takes no great intellect to infer that it was Mrs. Carson who threw the monkeywrench. What was it, Mike? Did Mrs. Carson accidentally see you set the fire with your own hands?”
Mike sat very straight in the honored chair beside the Inspector’s desk. But then, all at once, he sagged.
“Yes. She saw you do it, Mike. But you didn’t know that till you came back to the office that evening ostensibly to ‘see’ if you hadn’t left your tax records there by mistake. You found Mrs. Carson there alone, you asked her about the tax records... and she told you she had seen you set the fire. Did she also perceive dimly that you had taken your own property? I think so, Mike. I think Mrs. Carson accused you of sculduggery, and I think it was then and there that you gave up all thought of bleeding Mrs. Van Dome of considerably more than she was paying you to protect her daughter’s name. You took out your gun and shot Mrs. Carson to death. Very stupid, Mike. Lost your head. But that’s the way it is with honest men who go wrong. You’d have been better off to let Mrs. Carson talk. The worst that would have happened is that you might lose your license—you had still not committed any crime! And even if you had already tried to extort, would Mrs. Van Dome have prosecuted? No, indeed. Your very plot in its origin—setting up a straw man who ‘stole’ your tax records and so got into the position of being able to blackmail Mrs. Van Dome—was predicated on Mrs. Van Dome’s willingness to do anything rather than let the story of her daughter’s kleptomania come out.
“All this must have been obvious to you—and still you shot Mrs. Carson. Mike, Mike.”
The Inspector was sitting there with his mouth open.
“The rest,” said Ellery, scowling, “followed logically. Having killed, you then had to direct attention away from yourself. You’d already made a beginning with the fire. The killing made it look as if Mrs. Carson had been murdered by an ‘accomplice.’ The ‘accomplice’ was what you had to work with. And you worked it to death, winding up with a frame of Leonardo Vince—who was supposed to take the rap for you, but—so unpredictable are plots, Mike—who refused to fall into the trap. That was another bad mistake, Mike—picking Mr. Vince. But you made a mistake that was even worse.”
The Inspector tried twice to speak, nothing coming out but a bray and a croak. The third time he made it. “But Ellery, this is all speculation! You haven’t deduced anything. It’s guesswork!”
This was the most repulsive word in the Queen lexicon.
“Wrong, Dad. There’s a clue which, taken at the source, leads on to the logical conclusion. This newspaper.” Ellery waved the New York Times from Mike’s brief case.
Even Mike looked curious at that. Out of the stupor into which he had fallen he roused himself to blink and lick his lips and glance uneasily at the paper.