“All right,” said the Inspector softly. “He doesn’t indulge. Then why in tunket does he carry a cigaret-case with cigarets in it?”

  “Precisely!” cried Ellery. “We’ve deduced that a cigaret-case was probably stolen from the murdered man. Since John Lubbock isn’t a smoker and carries a cigaret-case…you see? It’s almost tenable—it is tenable, by thunder—to say that the case John showed us was his murdered brother’s!”

  “And that would make him Harry Lubbock’s killer,” muttered the Inspector. “But there weren’t sixteen cigarets in it, El. And the six that were there are of a different brand.”

  “Pie. Naturally our friend the dilettante would ditch the ones his engineer-brother had bought and substitute not only a different number but a different kind. I don’t say this is conclusive. But at the moment the wind blows his way quite stiffly. If he’s the murderer of his own brother then his story of two teakwood cases is a fabrication, composed on the spur of the moment to explain his possession of the teakwood case should there be a search.”

  The Queens turned swiftly at a knock on the foyer-door. But it was only Dr. Eustace. He came out, leaving the door to the living room ajar. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said in gruff apology. “But I’ve got to see my other patients.”

  “You’d better be available, Doctor,” said the Inspector in a clear grim voice. “We’ve just decided to take John Lubbock down to Headquarters for a little talk, and we’ll need your routine testimony, too.”

  “Lubbock?” Dr. Eustace stared, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s none of my business. I’ll be either in my office on the mezzanine floor or I’ll leave word at the desk. Ready when you are, Inspector.” He nodded and went out.

  “Don’t scare him,” suggested Ellery, as the Inspector made a move toward the living room. “My logic may be wetter than Triton’s beard.”

  When they opened the door to the living room they found Sergeant Velie alone, sitting in the dead man’s chair, feet propped on the table. “Where’s Lubbock?” asked Ellery swiftly.

  Velie yawned; his mouth was a red cavern fringed with enamel. “Went into the bedroom a coupla minutes ago,” he rumbled. “Didn’t see any harm in it myself.” He pointed to the bedroom door, which was closed.

  “Oh, you gigantic idiot!” cried Ellery, dashing across the room. He tore open the bedroom door. The bedroom was empty.

  The Inspector yelled to his men in the corridor, Sergeant Velie flushed a wine-red and leaped to his feet….The alarm was sounded; men began to comb the halls; the elderly Orkinses poked their white heads out of Apartment A; Billy Harms flew into the central corridor in a lacy chemise; an old witch of a woman in a wheelchair propelled herself from the front door of Apartment F and sent two cursing detectives sprawling with her clumsy manipulation of the conveyance. The scene was like a farcically rapid motion-picture reel.

  Ellery wasted no time bewailing Sergeant Velie’s unexpected stupidity. From the detective in the west corridor, he discovered that John Lubbock had not emerged from the western door of his bedroom. Ellery ran back to the eastern door, the door which led into the vacant suite. The key which he had left sticking in the door was gone. Gently, without touching the head of the knob, he tried to twist the bolt-bar. It refused to budge; the door was locked.

  “The east corridor!” he yelled. “Door’s open there!” and led the pack out of Lubbock’s apartment, around the corner through the central corridor, up the east corridor and through the unlocked door into the bedroom of empty Apartment G. They tumbled through the doorway—and stopped.

  John Lubbock lay sprawled on the floor, without hat or overcoat, fixed in the unmistakable contortions of violent death. Lubbock had been strangled!

  At the instant of discovery Ellery had opened his mouth and gasped like a drowning man; the suspect himself murdered! So he sidled toward Sergeant Velie near the bedroom door—the door which communicated with Lubbock’s own bedroom—and effaced himself.

  His eyes went to this door and quickly narrowed. The key which he had last seen sticking in the lock on the Apartment H side was now in the lock of Apartment G. He fingered it thoughtfully, then slipped out of the room.

  He went into the central corridor, found the finger-print expert, and took him back through Lubbock’s bedroom to the door between the two apartments. “See what you can get out of this doorknob,” he said. The expert went to work. Ellery watched anxiously. Under the man’s ministrations several clear fingerprints appeared in white powder on the black stone of the knob. A photographer came in and snapped a picture of the fingerprints.

  They repaired to the vacant bedroom of Apartment G. The physicians had completed their task and were discussing something in low tones with Inspector Queen, Ellery pointed to John Lubbock’s dead fingers.

  When the expert rose from the dusty floor he flourished a white card with ten inked fingerprints. He went to the door, unlocked it, and compared the dead man’s prints with those on the knob of Lubbock’s bedroom. “Okay,” he said. “The stiff’s mitts were on this knob.”

  Ellery sighed.

  He knelt beside John Lubbock’s body, which looked as if it had turned to stone in the midst of a fierce struggle, and explored the inside breast-pocket of Lubbock’s coat.

  Ellery looked thoughtfully at the teakwood case. “I owe an abject apology to the shade of our man-about-town. There are two cases, as he said….For this isn’t the one he showed us a few moments ago!”

  The Inspector gaped. Where they had formerly observed in the silverwork of the teakwood case a groove whose sliver of metal was missing, the ornamental design on the case in Ellery’s hand was unbroken, perfect.

  “The inferences are plain,” said Ellery. “Whoever killed John Lubbock did it for the teakwood case in his breast pocket. Everything is clear now. When the murderer strangled John Lubbock in this room, he stole John’s case from John’s body. The murderer then put into the case he had stolen from Harry’s body—the first brother—six cigarets of the same brand John’s case contained, and then placed Harry’s case with these six cigarets on John’s body, where we found it—in order to make us believe it was still John’s case. Clever, but defeated by the fact that John’s case had a sliver missing from the design whereas the engineer’s had not. The murderer probably didn’t notice the difference.”

  Ellery turned to the others; he held up his hand and they fell silent. “Ladies and gentlemen, the murderer’s exceeded himself. He’s done. I ask you to be attentive while I go over the ground and point out…Mr. Carter, stop shaking. I have every reason to believe that your executive worries are over.”

  Ellery stood at the feet of the dead man, his lean face expressionless. They watched him with stupid eyes. The detectives at the door retreated in response to Ellery’s signal; and the Orkinses, Billy Harms in a négligé, the acid-faced jeweler Schley, Mr. and Mrs. Forrester of Apartment D, and even Mrs. Mallorie in her wheel-chair, crowded into the room.

  “Certain lines of reasoning are inevitable,” said Ellery, in a dry lecture-voice; he looked at none of them, seeming to be addressing the congested veins in John Lubbock’s dead neck. “The only object taken from the first victim’s dead body was the teakwood case. This means that the teakwood case was the object of the first murder. Now John Lubbock, the second victim, has been murdered; his teakwood case has been taken, and the first one put on his body. Conclusion: The only one who could have switched cases is the one who stole the first victim’s case—the murderer. Therefore, both Harry and John Lubbock were strangled by the same hand. Two crimes and one culprit. Fundamental reasoning.

  “Why was Harry Lubbock murdered? Simply because the murderer mistook him for his brother John, and did not discover the error until after he strangled his victim and examined the first teakwood case. It was the wrong one!

  “The murderer’s error is understandable. The first victim was choked from behind; superficially the engineer bore a resemblance to his brother John; no doubt the murderer was unaware that there were two Lubbocks. In other words, the engineer’s case, the case on the floor, had nothing intrinsically to do with the crimes.”

  He leaned forward. “But mark this. Neither teakwood case in itself could have concealed anything—a hidden compartment, for example; then the cases were sought by the murderer not for themselves but for what they contained. What do cigaret-cases contain? What did both cases contain? Only cigarets. But why should a man commit murder for cigarets? Obviously, not for the pellets themselves. But if something had been hidden in those cigarets—if they had been doctored, if tobacco had been removed from them and something secreted inside, and the ends tamped up with tobacco again…then we arrive at a concrete inference.”

  Ellery straightened and drew a deep breath. “You’re Mrs. Mallorie, I take it?” he asked the invalid in the wheel-chair.

  “I am!” she replied.

  “Only two days ago you were parted from a diamond necklace. How large were the stones?”

  “Like small peas,” shrilled Mrs. Mallorie. “Worth twenty thousand dollars, the lot of ’em.”

  “Like small peas. Hmm. A housewifely description, Mrs. Mallorie.” Ellery smiled. “We progress. I postulated John Lubbock’s cigarets as the hiding-place of something valuable…Mrs. Mallorie’s rather expensive peas, ladies and gentlemen!”

  They buzzed and peep-peeped like fowls in a barnyard. Ellery silenced them: “Yes, we have arrived at the point where it is indicated that your neighbor John Lubbock was not only a dilettante but a jewel thief as well!”

  “Mr. Lubbock!” wheezed Seaman Carter in a shocked voice.

  “Exactly. Inspector Queen has not been able to discover our man-about-town’s source of income. A gigolo? Gigolos do not pay for ladies’ apartments; the shoe is rather on the other foot. Ah, but the jewels! Here, then, is a minor mystery solved.” Billy Harms stretched her white neck like an ostrich and sniffed. “But note that John Lubbock was murdered for those diamond-concealing cigarets,” Ellery continued. “Who could have known that he had those diamonds—moreover, in such a fantastic hiding-place? Surely none but an accomplice. In other words, when we lay hands on the murderer of Harry and John Lubbock we shall have found John Lubbock’s partner-in-thievery.”

  The vague relief they had all exhibited gave way again to fear. No one stirred. Mrs. Mallorie was glaring at John Lubbock’s purple face with the utmost malevolence. Ellery smiled again—a very playful and annoying smile. “Now,” he said softly, “for the last act of our little drama: the details of the second murder. Jimmy,” he said to the Headquarters fingerprint expert, “what did you find in your search?”

  “This dead man on the floor had his fingers on the other side of this door—the side where his bedroom is.”

  “Thank you. Now it happens, ladies and gentlemen, that just before John Lubbock was murdered I had myself wiped the knob of his bedroom door—the door that leads into this vacant apartment—clean of all fingerprints. This means that Lubbock himself, when he went into his bedroom a few moments ago, put his fingers on the knob. This means that he deliberately opened the door in order to enter this vacant apartment. Was John Lubbock trying to escape? No; he did not don hat or overcoat, for one thing; for another, he could not hope to get far; and even if he did, escape would certainly tar him with the brush of suspicion that he had murdered his brother—and he, of course, was innocent, since he himself has been murdered. Then why did he go into this vacant apartment?

  “I was talking with the Inspector some minutes ago in the foyer of Lubbock’s apartment next door. At that time we had reason to believe John guilty of his brother’s murder. I had myself shut the door to the living room so that he should not overhear. But when Dr. Eustace came out to visit his other patients in the building, unfortunately he left the door ajar, and it was at that moment that the Inspector, no doubt unaware that the door was open, said distinctly that we were intending to take John Lubbock down to Headquarters ‘for a talk’—obviously, to search him and put him on the grid. The harm was done. Sergeant Velie, you were in the living room with Lubbock at that time. Did you hear the Inspector make that remark?”

  “I did that,” muttered the Sergeant, digging his heels into the floor. “I guess he did, too. Only a minute later he said he wanted to go into the bedroom for something.”

  “Q. E. D.,” murmured Ellery. “Lubbock, hearing that he was about to be taken to Police Headquarters, thought rapidly. The stolen diamonds were imbedded in the cigarets in his teakwood case; a thorough search would certainly reveal them. He must rid himself of those cigarets! So now we know why he went into the vacant apartment—not to escape, but to hide the cigarets somewhere until he could regain possession of them later. Naturally, he intended to return.

  “But how could the murderer possibly anticipate John Lubbock’s instantaneous decision to dispose of the jewels in this vacant apartment, the only immediately available hiding-place? Only if the murderer, too, had heard the Inspector’s remark about taking Lubbock to Headquarters, had realized that Lubbock had also heard, had foreseen what Lubbock would instantly have to do.”

  Ellery smiled wickedly and leaned forward; his long fingers were curved in a predatory hook; his body was tense. “Only five people overheard the Inspector’s remark,” he snapped. “The Inspector himself, I, Sergeant Velie, the late John Lubbock, and—”

  Billy Harms screamed, and old Mrs. Mallorie screeched like a wounded parrot. Some one had plunged toward the door to the east corridor, bellowing and scattering people aside like a maddened bull-elephant, like a Malay running amuck, like an ancient Norseman in a berserker rage….Sergeant Velie flung his two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle forward; there was a wild mix-up, the thudding of the Sergeant’s chunky fists, clouds of dust….Ellery stood quietly waiting. The Inspector, who had observed Sergeant Velie in action on many former occasions, merely sighed.

  “A double-crossing villain as well as a twofold murderer,” said Ellery at last when the Sergeant had hammered his adversary into red pulp. “He wanted not only to get rid of John Lubbock, his accomplice, the only human being who knew his guilt as a thief and suspected no doubt his guilt as a murderer, but also to have Mrs. Mallorie’s jewels all for himself. Dad, you will find the diamonds either on his person, in his bag, or somewhere about his quarters. The problem,” said Ellery, lighting a cigaret and inhaling gratefully under the stony stares of his audience, “was after all a simple one, one which admitted of a strictly logical attack. The facts themselves pointed to that man on the floor as the only possible culprit.”

  The man writhing in Sergeant Velie’s inexorable grip was Dr. Eustace.

  The Adventure of “THE TWO HEADED DOG”

  AS THE LOWSLUNG DUESENBERG hummed along the murk-dusted road between row? of stripped and silent trees, something in the salty wind which moaned over the tall slender man at the wheel on its journey across Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod’s heel, and Buzzards Bay stirred him. Many a traveler on that modern road had quivered to the slap of the Atlantic winds, prickled with molecules of spray, responding uneasily to the dim wind-call of some ancestor’s sea-poisoned blood. But it was neither blood nor nostalgia which stirred the man in the open car. The wind, which was ululating like a banshee, held no charm for him, and the tingling spray no pleasure. His skin was crawling, it was true, but only because his coat was thin, the October wind cold, the spray distinctly discomforting, and the bare nightfall outside New Bedford indefinably grim and peopled with shadows.

  Shivering behind the big wheel, he switched on his headlights. An antiqued sign sprang whitely into view some yards ahead and he slowed down to read it. It swung creaking to and fro in the wind, hinged on scabrous iron, and it flaunted a fearsome monstrosity with two heads whose genus had apparently eluded even the obscure wielder of the paints. Below the monster run the legend:

  “THE TWO-HEADED DOG”

  (Cap’n Hosey’s Rest)

  Rooms—$2 And Up

  Permanent—Transient

  Auto-Campers Accommodated

  In Clean Modern Cabins

  DRIVE IN

  “Even Cerberus would make an acceptable host tonight,” thought the traveler with a wry smile, and he swung the car into a gravelly driveway lined with trees, soon bringing the machine to rest before a high white house crisply painted, its green shutters clear as eyeshades. The inn sprawled over considerable territory, he saw, examining the angular structure in the glare of floodlights over the clearing. Around both sides ran carlanes, and dimly toward the sides going rearwards he made out small cabins and a large outbuilding which was apparently a garage. There was a smack of old New England about the inn, disagreeably leavened with the modern cabins on its flanks. The huge old ship’s lantern creaking and gleaming in battered brass above the front door somehow lost its savor.

  “Might be worse, I suppose,” he grumbled, leaning on his klaxon. “Hybrid!” The unearthly racket caused the heavy-timbered door to pop open almost instantly. A young woman in a reefer that contrived to look rakish appeared under the brass lantern.

  “Ah,” sighed the traveler, “the farmer’s daughter. No, I’m in the wrong county. Could this be Cap’n Hosey? My dear skipper, is it possible for a sore and weary wayfarer to secure food and shelter this wretched night? That portrait of a misbegotten Cerberus painted on the sign yonder wasn’t too alluring.”

  “We’re in the business, if that’s what you mean,” said the young woman crisply, in a cultured voice. “And I’m not Cap’n Hosey; I’m his daughter. Jump out. I’ll have your—” she regarded the dusty old Duesenberg with a sniff and grinned—“your equipage taken round to the garage.”

  The man crawled out onto the gravel, shivering, and from nowhere appeared a shambling oil-smeared creature in dungarees who silently climbed into the car.

  “Take her around, Isaac,” directed the young woman. “Luggage?”

  “I lost it somewhere between here and Davy Jones’s Locker,” groaned the tall young man. “No, by St. Elmo, here it is!” He chuckled and plucked a battered suitcase out of the car. “Proceed, Charon, and treat my steed well….Ah! Is that codfish. polluting the vigorous air? I might have known.”