Whereupon, as if there were nothing more to be said, the three divinities turned and gazed bleakly upon the iconoclasts.
And the catechism resumed:
ELLERY: Mr. Temple, where were you night before last between 11 P.M. and midnight?
TEMPLE: Let me see. Night before last... That was the night before New Year’s Eve. I went to bed at 10 o’clock.
ELLERY: You’re a bachelor, I believe. Do you employ a domestic?
TEMPLE: My man.
ELLERY: Was he—?
TEMPLE: He sleeps out.
SERGEANT: No alibi!
INSPECTOR: How about you, Mr. Black?
BLACK: Well, the fact is... I’d gone to see a musical in town... and between 11 and 12 I was driving home... to White Plains...
SERGEANT: Ha! White Plains!
ELLERY: Alone, Mr. Black?
BLACK: Well... yes. The family’s all away over the holidays...
INSPECTOR: No alibi. Mr. Mason?
MASON: Go to hell. (There is a knock on the door.)
SERGEANT: Now who would that be?
TEMPLE: The ghost of Bill?
BLACK: You’re not funny, Ed!
ELLERY: Come in. (The door opens. Enter Nikki Porter.)
NIKKI: I’m sorry to interrupt, but she came looking for you, Ellery. She was terribly insistent. Said she’d just recalled something about The Inner Circle, and—
ELLERY: She?
NIKKI: Come in, Mrs. Updike.
“They’re here,” said Mrs. Updike. “I’m glad. I wanted to look at their faces.”
“I’ve told Mrs. Updike the whole thing,” said Nikki defiantly.
And Inspector Queen said in a soft tone: “Velie, shut the door.”
But this case was not to be solved by a guilty look. Black, Mason, and Temple said quick ineffectual things, surrounding the widow and spending their nervousness in little gestures and rustlings until finally silence fell and she said helplessly, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” and dropped into a chair to weep.
And Black stared out the window, and Mason looked green, and Temple compressed his lips.
Then Ellery went to the widow and put his hand on her shoulder. “You recall something about The Inner Circle, Mrs. Updike?”
She stopped weeping and folded her hands, resting them in her lap and looking straight ahead.
“Was it the names of the five?”
“No. Bill never told me their names. But I remember Bill’s saying to me once: ‘Mary, I’ll give you a hint.’”
“Hint?”
“Bill said that he once realized there was something funny about the names of the five men in The Inner Circle.”
“Funny?” said Ellery sharply. “About their names?”
“He said by coincidence all five names had one thing in common.”
“In common?”
“And he laughed.” Mrs. Updike paused. “He laughed, and he said: ‘That is, Mary, if you remember that I’m a married man.’ I remember saying: ‘Bill, stop talking in riddles. What do you mean?’ And he laughed again and said: ‘Well, you see, Mary, you’re in it, too.’”
“You’re in it, too,” said Nikki blankly.
“I have no idea what he meant, but that’s what Bill said, word for word.” And now she looked up at Ellery and asked, with a sort of ferocious zest: “Does any of this help, Mr. Queen?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ellery gently. “All of it, Mrs. Updike.” And he turned to the three silent Januarians and said: “Would any of you gentlemen like to try your wits against this riddle?”
But the gentlemen remained silent.
“The reply appears to be no,” Ellery said. “Very well; let’s work it out en masse. Robert Carlton Smith, J. Stanford Jones, Peter Zissing Brown, William Updike. Those four names, according to Bill Updike, have one thing in common. What?”
“Smith,” said the Inspector.
“Jones,” said the Sergeant.
“Brown,” said Nikki.
“Updike!” said the Inspector. “Boy, you’ve got me.”
“Include me in, Maestro.”
“Ellery, please!”
“Each of the four names,” said Ellery, “has in it, somewhere, the name of a well-known college or university.”
And there was another mute communion.
“Robert—Carlton—Smith,” said the Inspector, doubtfully.
“Smith!” cried Nikki. “Smith College, in Massachusetts!”
The Inspector looked startled. “J. Stanford Jones.—That California university, Stanford!”
“Hey,” said Sergeant Velie. “Brown. Brown University, in Rhode Island!”
“Updike,” said Nikki, then she stopped. “Updike? There’s no college called Updike, Ellery.”
“William Updike was his full name, Nikki.”
“You mean the ‘William’ part? There’s a Williams, with an s, but no William.”
“What did Updike tell Mrs. Updike? ‘Mary, you’re in it, too.’ William Updike was in it, and Mary Updike was in it...”
“William and Mary College!” roared the Inspector.
“So the college denominator checks for all four of the known names. But since Updike told his wife the fifth name had the same thing in common, all we have to do now is test the names of these three gentlemen to see if one of them is the name of a college or university—and we’ll have the scoundrel who murdered Bill Updike for The Inner Circle’s fortune in securities.”
“Black,” babbled Rodney Black, Junior. “Rodney Black, Junior. Find me a college in that, sir!”
“Charles Mason,” said Charles Mason unsteadily. “Charles? Mason? You see!”
“That,” said Ellery, “sort of hangs it around your neck, Mr. Temple.”
“Temple!”
“Temple University in Pennsylvania!”
Of course, it was all absurd. Grown men who played at godhead with emblems and talismans, like boys conspiring in a cave, and a murder case which was solved by a trick of nomenclature. Eastern University is too large for that sort of childishness. And it is old enough, we submit, to know the truth:
Item: Edward I. Temple, Class of Eastern ’13, did not “fall” from the thirteenth floor of The Eastern Alumni Club on New Year’s Day this year. He jumped.
Item: The Patulcius Chair of Classics, founded this year, was not endowed by a wealthy alumnus from Oil City who modestly chose anonymity. It came into existence through the contents of The Inner Circle’s safe-deposit box, said contents having been recovered from another safe-deposit box rented by said Temple in another bank on the afternoon of December thirty-first under a false name.
Item: The Januarian room was not converted to the storage of linen because of the expanding housekeeping needs of The Eastern Alumni Club. It was ordered so that the very name of the Society of the Two-Faced God should be expunged from Eastern’s halls; and as for the stainless steel medallion of Janus which had hung on the door, the Chancellor of Eastern University himself scaled it into the Hudson River from the George Washington Bridge, during a sleet storm, one hideous night this January.
The Adventure of The President’s Half Disme
Those few curious men who have chosen to turn off the humdrum highway to hunt for their pleasure along the back trails expect—indeed, they look confidently forward to—many strange encounters; and it is the dull stalk which does not turn up at least a hippogriff. But it remained for Ellery Queen to experience the ultimate excitement. On one of his prowls he collided with a President of the United States.
This would have been joy enough if it had occurred as you might imagine: by chance, on a dark night, in some back street of Washington, D.C., with Secret Service men closing in on the delighted Mr. Queen to question his motives by way of his pockets while a large black bullet-proof limousine rushed up to spirit the President away. But mere imagination fails in this instance. What is required is the power of fancy, for the truth is fantastic. Ellery’s encounter with the President of the United States took place, not on a dark night, but in the unromantic light of several days (although the night played its role, too). Nor was it by chance: the meeting was arranged by a farmer’s daughter. And it was not in Washington, D.C., for this President presided over the affairs of the nation from a different city altogether. Not that the meeting took place in that city, either; it did not take place in a city at all, but on a farm some miles south of Philadelphia. Oddest of all, there was no limousine to spirit the Chief Executive away, for while the President was a man of great wealth, he was still too poor to possess an automobile and, what is more, not all the resources of his Government—indeed, not all the riches of the world—could have provided one for him.