“Find anything, Miss Carpenter?”
“Rose Perez has a single dollar bill. The other girls either have small change or no money at all.”
“No sign of the original envelope?”
“No.”
“I found two boys with bills — in each case a single, too. David Strager and Joey Buell. No envelope.”
Louise’s brows met.
Ellery glanced up at the clock. 9:07.
He strolled over to her. “Don’t show them you’re worried. There’s nothing to worry about. We have twenty-eight minutes.” He raised his voice, smiling. “Naturally the thief has ditched the money, hoping to recover it when the coast is clear. It’s therefore hidden somewhere in the classroom. All right, Miss Carpenter, we’ll take the desks and seats first. Look under them too — chewing gum makes a handy adhesive. Eh, class?”
Four minutes later they looked at each other, then up at the clock.
9:11.
Exactly 24 minutes remaining.
“Well,” said Ellery.
He began to ransack the room. Books, radiators, closets, lunch-bags, schoolbags. Bulletin boards, wall maps, the terrestrial globe. The UN poster, the steel engravings of Washington and Lincoln. He even emptied Louise’s three pots of geraniums and sifted the earth.
His eyes kept returning to the clock more and more often.
Ellery searched everything in the room, from the socket of the American flag to the insect-filled bowls of the old light fixtures, reached by standing on desks.
Everything.
“It’s not here!” whispered Louise in his ear.
The Buell, Ruffo, and Strager boys were nudging one another, grinning.
“Well, well,” Ellery said.
Interesting. Something of a problem at that.
Of course! He got up and checked two things he had missed — the cup of the pencil sharpener and the grid covering the loudspeaker of the PA system. No envelope. No money.
He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck.
Really it’s a little silly. A schoolboy!
Ellery glanced at the clock.
9:29.
Six minutes left in which not only to find the money but identify the thief!
He leaned against Louise’s desk, forcing himself to relax.
It was these “simple” problems. Nothing big and important like murder, blackmail, bank robbery. A miserable seven dollars lifted by a teen-age delinquent in an overcrowded classroom...
He thought furiously.
Let the bell ring at 9:35 and the boy strut out of Miss Carpenter’s room undetected, with his loot, and he would send up a howl like a wolf cub over his first kill. Who says these big-shot law jerks ain’t monkeys? The biggest! He’s a lot of nothin’. Wind. See me stand him on his ear? And this is just for openers. Wait till I get goin’ for real, not any of this kid stuff...
No, nothing big and important like murder. Just seven dollars, and a big shot to laugh at. Not important? Ellery nibbled his lip. It was probably the most important case of his career.
9:30½.
Only four and a half minutes left!
Louise Carpenter was gripping a desk, her knuckles white. Waiting to be let down.
Ellery pushed away from the desk and reached into the patch pocket of his tweed jacket for his pipe and tobacco, thinking harder about Helen McDoud’s seven dollar gift fund than he had ever thought about anything in his life.
And as he thought...
At 9:32 he was intently examining the rectangles of paper the thief had put into the substitute envelope. The paper was ordinary cheap newsprint, scissored to dollar-bill size out of a colored comics section. He shuffled through the dummy dollars one by one, hunting for something. Anything!
The 41 boys and girls were buzzing and giggling now.
Ellery pounced. Clinging to one of the rectangles was a needle-thin sliver of paper about an inch long, a sort of paper shaving. He fingered it, held it up to the light. It was not newsprint. Too full-bodied, too tough-textured...
Then he knew what it must be.
Less than two minutes left.
Feverishly he went through the remaining dollar-sized strips of comic paper.
And there it was. There it was!
This strip had been cut from the top of the comic sheet. On the margin appeared the name of a New York newspaper and the date April 24, 1955.
Think over. Take your time. Lots of seconds in a minute.
The buzzing and giggling had died. Louise Carpenter was on her feet, looking at him imploringly.
A bell began clanging in the corridor.
First period over.
9:35.
Ellery rose and said solemnly, “The case is solved.”
With the room cleared and the door locked, the three boys stood backed against the blackboard as if facing a firing squad. The bloom was gone from David Strager’s cheeks. The blood vessel in Joey Buell’s temple was trying to wriggle into his red hair. And Howard Ruffo’s eyes were liquid with panic.
It’s hard to be fifteen years old and trapped.
But harder not to be.
“Wha’d I do?” whimpered Howard Ruffo. “I didn’t do nothin’.”
“We didn’t take Miss Carpenter’s seven dollars,” said David Strager, stiff-lipped.
“Can you say the same about Mr. Mueller’s baked goods last Monday night, Dave?” Ellery paused gently. “Or any of the other things you boys have been making love to in the past two months?”
He thought they were going to faint.
“But this morning’s little job,” Ellery turned suddenly to the red-haired boy, “you pulled by yourself, Joey.”
The thin body quivered. “Who, me?”
“Yes, Joey, you.”
“You got rocks in your skull,” Joey whispered. “Not me!”
“I’ll prove it, Joey. Hand me the dollar bill I found in your jeans when I searched you.”
“That’s my dollar!”
“I know it, Joey. I’ll give you another for it. Hand it over... Miss Carpenter,”
“Yes, Mr. Queen!”
“To cut these strips of newspaper to the same size as dollar bills, the thief must have used a real bill as a pattern. If he cut too close, the scissors would shave off a sliver of the bill.” Ellery handed her Joey’s dollar. “See if this bill shows a slight indentation along one edge.”
“It does!”
“And I found this sliver clinging to one of the dummies. Fit the sliver to the indented edge of Joey’s bill. If Joey is guilty, it should fit exactly. Does it?”
Louise looked at the boy. “Joey, it does fit.”
David and Howard were gaping at Ellery.
“What a break,” Joey choked.
“Criminals make their own bad breaks, Joey. The thing inside you that told you were doing wrong made your hand shake as you cut. But even if your hand hadn’t slipped, I’d have known you were the one who substituted the strips of paper for the money.”
“How? How could you?” It was a cry of bewilderment.
Ellery showed him the rectangular strip with the white margin. “See this, Joey? Here’s the name of the newspaper, and the date is April 24, 1955. What date is today?”
“Friday the 22nd...”
“Friday, April 22nd. But these strips of colored comics come from the newspaper of April 24th, Joey — this coming Sunday’s paper. Who gets advance copies of the Sunday comics? Stores that sell newspapers in quantity. Getting the bulldog editions in advance gives them a jump on the Sunday morning rush, when they have to insert the news sections.
“Nothing to it, Joey. Which of you three boys had access before this morning to next Sunday’s bulldog editions? Not David — he works in a supermarket. Not Howard — he works for a dry cleaner. But you work in a big cigar and stationery store, Joey, where newspapers must be one of the stock items.”