“You, Walter, came nearer the truth when you satisfactorily established the ownership of the watch as the mulatto maid’s. But suppose Maid Robins had accidentally dropped the watch in Spargo’s room at the hotel during his first visit there, and he had found it and taken it to Chicago with him? That’s what probably happened. The mere fact that he wore her watch doesn’t make her his murderess.

  “You, Miss Ickthorpe, explained away the watch business with the difference-in-time element, but you overlooked an important item. Your entire solution depends on the presence in Spargo’s room of a powder-puff. Willing to believe that no puff remained on the scene of the crime, because it suited your theory, you made a cursory search and promptly concluded no puff was there. But a puff is there! Had you investigated the cap of the celluloid tube in which Spargo kept his shaving-brush, you would have found a circular pad of powder-puff which toilet-article manufacturers in this effeminate age provide for men’s traveling-kits.”

  Miss Ickthorpe said nothing; she seemed actually embarrassed.

  “Now for the proper solution,” said Ellery, mercifully looking away. “All three of you, amazingly enough, postulate a woman as the criminal. Yet it was apparent to me, after my examination of the premises, that the murderer must have been a man.”

  “A man!” they echoed in chorus.

  “Exactly. Why did none of you consider the significance of those eight buttons and the two metal clips?” He smiled. “Probably because again they didn’t fit your preconceived theories. But everything must fit in a solution….Enough of scolding. You’ll do better next time.

  “Six small pearl buttons, flat, and two slightly larger ones, found in a heap of ashes distinctly not of wood, coal, or paper. There is only one common article which possesses these characteristics—a man’s shirt. A man’s shirt, the six buttons from the front, the two larger ones from the cuffs, the debris from the linen or broadcloth. Some one, then, had burned a man’s shirt in the grate, forgetting that the buttons would not be consumed.

  “The metal objects, like a large hook and eye? A shirt suggests haberdashery, the hook and eye suggests only one thing—one of the cheap bow-ties which are purchased ready-tied, so that you do not have to make the bow yourself.”

  They were watching his lips like kindergarten children. “You, Crane, observed that Spargo’s bloody left hand had clutched something, most of the blood coming off the palm. But nothing smudged with blood had been found….A man’s shirt and tie had been burned….Inference: In the struggle with the murderer, after he had already been hit on the head and was streaming blood, Spargo had clutched his assailant’s collar and tie, staining them. Borne out too by the signs of struggle in the room.

  “Spargo dead, his own collar and tie wet with blood, what could the murderer do? Let me attack it this way: The murderer must have been from one of three classes of people: a rank outsider, or a guest at the hotel, or an employee of the hotel. What had he done? He had burned his shirt and tie. But if he had been an outsider, he could have turned up his coat-collar, concealing the stains long enough to get out of the hotel—no necessity, then, to burn shirt and tie when time was precious. Were he one of the hotel guests, he could have done the same thing while he went to his own room. Then he must have been an employee.

  “Confirmation? Yes. As an employee he would be forced to remain in the hotel, on duty, constantly being seen. What could he do? Well, he had to change his shirt and tie. Spargo’s bag was open—shirt inside. He rummaged through—you saw the confusion in the bag—and changed. Leave his shirt? No, it might be traced to him. So, boys and girls, burning was inevitable….

  “The tie? You recall that, while Spargo had laid out his evening-clothes on the bed, there was no bow-tie there, in the bag, or anywhere else in the room. Obviously, then, the murderer took the bow-tie of the tuxedo outfit, and burned his own bow-tie with the shirt.”

  Miss Ickthorpe sighed, and Crane and Burrows shook their heads a little dazedly. “I knew, then, that the murderer was an employee of the hotel, a man, and that he was wearing Spargo’s shirt and black or white bow-tie, probably black. But all the employees of the hotel wear gray shirts and gray ties, as we observed on entering the Fenwick. Except”—Ellery inhaled the smoke of his cigarette—“except one man. Surely you noticed the difference in his attire?…And so, when you left on your various errands, I suggested to my father that this man be examined—he seemed the best possibility. And, sure enough, we found on him a shirt and bow-tie bearing Johannesburg labels like those we had observed on Spargo’s other haberdashery. I knew we should find this proof, for Sparg had spent a whole year in South Africa, and since most of his clothes had been purchased there, it was reasonable to expect that the stolen shirt and tie had been, too.”

  “Then the case was finished when we were just beginning,” said Burrows ruefully.

  “But—who?” demanded Crane in bewilderment.

  Ellery blew a great cloud. “We got a confession out of him in three minutes. Spargo, that gentle creature, had years before stolen this man’s wife, and then thrown her over. When Spargo registered at the Fenwick two weeks ago, this man recognized him and decided to revenge him self. He’s at the Tombs right now—Williams, the hotel manager!”

  There was a little silence. Burrows bobbed his head back and forth. “We’ve got a lot to learn,” he said. “I can see that.”

  “Check,” muttered Crane. “I’m going to like this course.”

  Ellery pshaw-pshawed. Nevertheless, he turned to Miss Ickthorpe who by all precedent should be moved to contribute to the general spirit of approbation. But Miss Ickthorpe’s thoughts were far away. “Do you know,” she said, her brown eyes misty, “you’ve never asked me my first name, Mr. Queen?”

  The Adventure of THE HANGING ACROBAT

  LONG, LONG AGO IN the Incubation Period of Man—long before booking agents, five-a-days, theatrical boarding houses, subway circuits, and Variety—when Megatherium roamed the trees, when Broadway was going through its First Glacial Period, and when the first vaudeville show was planned by the first lop-eared, low-browed, hairy impresario, it was decreed: “The acrobat shall be first.”

  Why the acrobat should be first no one ever explained; but that this was a dubious honor every one on the bill—including the acrobat—realized only too well. For it was recognized even then, in the infancy of Show Business, that the first shall be last in the applause of the audience. And all through the ages, in courts and courtyards and feeble theatres, it was the acrobat—whether he was called buffoon, farceur, merry-andrew, tumbler, mountebank, Harlequin, or punchinello—who was thrown, first among his fellow-mimes, to the lions of entertainment to whet their appetites for the more luscious feasts to come. So that to this day their muscular miracles are performed hard on the overture’s last wall shaking blare, performed with a simple resignation that speaks well for the mildness and resilience of the whole acrobatic tribe.

  Hugo Brinkerhof knew nothing of the whimsical background of his profession. All he knew was that his father and mother had been acrobats before him with a traveling show in Germany, that he possessed huge smooth muscles with sap and spring and strength in them, and that nothing gave him more satisfaction than the sight of a glittering trapeze. With his trapeze and his Myra, and the indulgent applause of audiences from Seattle to Okeechobee, he was well content.

  Now Hugo was very proud of Myra, a small wiry hand some woman with the agility of a cat and something of the cat’s sleepy green eyes. He had met her in the office of Bregman, the booker, and the sluggish heart under his magnificent chest had told him that this was his fate and his woman. It was Myra who had renamed the act “Atlas & Co.” when they had married between the third and fourth shows in Indianapolis. It was Myra who had fought tooth and nail for better billing. It was Myra who had conceived and perfected the dazzling pinwheel of their finale. It was Myra’s shapely little body and Myra’s lithe gyrations on the high trapeze and Myra’s sleepy smile that had made Atlas & Co. an “acrobatic divertissement acclaimed from coast to coast,” had earned them a pungent paragraph in Variety, and had brought them with other topnotchers on the Bregman string to the Big Circuit.

  That every one loved his Myra mighty Brinkerhof, the Atlas, knew with a swelling of his chest. Who could resist her? There had been that baritone with the dancing act in Boston, the revue comedian in Newark, the tap-dancer in Buffalo, the adagio in Washington. Now there were others—Tex Crosby, the Crooning Cowboy (Songs & Patter); the Great Gordi (successor to Houdini); Sailor Sam, the low comic. They had all been on the same bill together now for weeks, and they all loved sleepy-eyed Myra, and big Atlas smiled his indulgent smile and thrilled in his stupid, stolid way to their admiration. For was not his Myra the finest female acrobat in the world and the most lovely creature in creation? And now Myra was dead.

  It was Brinkerhof himself, with a gaunt suffering look about him that mild Spring night, who had given the alarm. It was five o’clock in the morning and his Myra had not come home to their theatrical boarding-house room on Forty-seventh Street. He had stayed behind with his wife after the last performance in the Metropole Theatre at Columbus Circle to try out a new trick. They had rehearsed and then he had dressed in haste, leaving her in their joint dressing-room. He had had an appointment with Bregman, the booker, to discuss terms of a new contract. He had promised to meet her back at their lodgings. But when he had returned—ach! no Myra. He had hurried back to the theatre; it was locked up for the night. And all the long night he had waited….

  “Prob’ly out bummin’, buddy,” the desk-lieutenant at the West Forty-seventh Street station had said with a yawn. “Go home and sleep it off.”

  But Brinkerhof had been vehement, with many gestures. “She never haf this done before. I haf telephoned it the theatre, too, but there iss no answer. Captain, find her, please!”

  “These heinies,” sighed the lieutenant to a lounging detective. “All right, Baldy, see what you can do. If she’s piffed in a joint somewhere, give this big hunk a clout on the jaw.”

  So Baldy and the pale giant had gone to see what they could do, and they had found the Metropole Theatre locked, as Brinkerhof had said, and it was almost six in the morning and dawn was coming up across the Park and Baldy had dragged Brinkerhof into an all-night restaurant for a mug of coffee. And they had waited around the theatre until seven, when old Perk the stage-door man and timer had come in, and he had opened the theatre for them, and they had gone back-stage to the dressing-room of Atlas & Co. and found Myra hanging from one of the sprinkler-pipes with a dirty old rope, thick as a hawser, around her pretty neck.

  And Atlas had sat down like the dumb hunk he was and put his shaggy head between his hands and stared at the hanging body of his wife with the silent grief of some Norse god crushed to earth.

  When Mr. Ellery Queen pushed through the chattering crowd of reporters and detectives backstage and convinced Sergeant Velie through the door of the dressing-room that he was indeed who he was, he found his father the Inspector holding court in the stuffy little room before a gang of nervous theatrical people. It was only nine o’clock and Ellery was grumbling through his teeth at the unconscionable inconsiderateness of murderers. But neither the burly Sergeant nor little Inspector Queen was impressed with his grumblings to the point of lending ear; and indeed the grumblings ceased after he had taken one swift look at what still hung from the sprinkler-pipe.

  Brinkerhof sat red-eyed and huge and collapsed in the chair before his wife’s dressing-table. “I haf told you everything,” he muttered. “We rehearsed the new trick. It was then an appointment with Mr. Bregman. I went.” A fat hard-eyed man, Bregman the broker, nodded curtly. “Undt that’s all. Who—why—I do not know.”

  In a bass sotto voce Sergeant Velie recited the sparse facts. Ellery took another look at the dead woman. Her stiff muscles of thigh and leg bulged in rigor mortis beneath the tough thin silk of her flesh tights. Her green eyes were widely open. And she swayed a little in a faint dance of death. Ellery looked away and at the people.

  Baldy the precinct man was there, flushed with his sudden popularity with the newspaper boys. A tall thin man who looked like Gary Cooper rolled a cigaret beside Bregman—Tex Crosby, the cowboy-crooner; and he leaned against the grime-smeared wall and eyed the Great Gordi—in person—with flinty dislike. Gordi had a hawk’s beak and sleek black mustachios and long olive fingers and black eyes; and he said nothing. Little Sam, the comedian, had purple pouches under his tired eyes and he looked badly in need of a drink. But Joe Kelly, the house-manager, did not, for he smelled like a brewery and kept mumbling something drunken and obscene beneath his breath.

  “How long you been married, Brinkerhof?” growled the Inspector.

  “Two years. Ja. In Indianapolis that was, Herr Inspector.”

  “Was she ever married before?”

  “Nein.”

  “You?”

  “Nein.”

  “Did she or you have any enemies?”

  “Gott, nein!”

  “Happy, were you?”

  “Like two doves we was,” muttered Brinkerhof.

  Ellery strolled over to the corpse and stared up. Her ropy-veined wrists were jammed behind her back, bound with a filthy rouge-stained towel, as were her ankles. Her feet dangled a yard from the floor. A battered stepladder leaned against one of the walls, folded up; a man standing upon it, he mused, could easily have reached the sprinkler-pipe, flung the rope over it, and hauled up the light body.

  “The stepladder was found against the wall there?” he murmured to the Sergeant, who had come up behind him and was staring with interest at the dead woman.

  “Yep. It’s always kept out near the switchboard light panel.

  “No suicide, then,” said Ellery. “At least that’s something.”

  “Nice figger, ain’t she?” said the Sergeant admiringly.

  “Velie, you’re a ghoul….This is a pretty problem.”

  The dirty rope seemed to fascinate him. It had been wound tightly about the woman’s throat twice, in parallel strands, and concealed her flesh like the iron necklace of a Ubangi woman. A huge knot had been fashioned beneath her right ear, and another knot held the rope to the pipe above.

  “Where does this rope come from?” he said abruptly.

  “From around an old trunk we found backstage, Mr. Queen. Trunk’s been here for years. In the prop-room. Nothin’ in it; some trouper left it. Want to see it?”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Sergeant. Property room, eh?” He sauntered back to the door to look the people over again.

  Brinkerhof was mumbling something about how happy he and Myra had been, and what he would do to the verdammte Teufel who had wrung his pretty Myra’s neck. His huge hands opened and closed convulsively. “Joost like a flower she was,” he said. “Joost like a flower.”

  “Nuts,” snapped Joe Kelly, the house-manager, weaving on his feet like a punch-drunk fighter. “She was a floozy, Inspector. You ask me,” and he leered at Inspector Queen.

  “Floo-zie?” said Brinkerhof with difficulty, getting to his feet. “What iss that?”

  Sam, the comic, blinked his puffy little eyes rapidly and said in a hoarse voice: “You’re crazy, Kelly, crazy. Wha’d’ye want to say that for? He’s pickled, Chief.”

  “Pickled, am I?” screamed Kelly, livid. “Aw right, you as’ him, then!” and he pointed a wavering finger at the tall thin man. “What is this?” crooned the Inspector, his eyes bright. “Get together, gentlemen. You mean, Kelly, that Mrs. Brinkerhof was playing around with Crosby here?”

  Brinkerhof made a sound like a baffled gorilla and lunged forward. His long arms were curved flails and he made for the cowboy’s throat with the unswervable fury of an animal. Sergeant Velie grabbed his wrist and twisted it up behind the vast back, and Baldy jumped in and clung to the giant’s other arm. He swayed there, struggling and never taking his eyes from the tall thin man, who had not stirred but who had gone very pale.

  “Take him away,” snapped the Inspector to Sergeant Velie. “Turn him over to a couple of the boys and keep him outside till he calms down.” They hustled the hoarsely breathing acrobat out of the room. “Now, Crosby, spill it.”

  “Nothin’ to spill,” drawled the cowboy, but his drawl was a little breathless and his eyes were narrowed to wary slits. “I’m Texas an’ I don’t scare easy, Mister Cop. He’s just a squarehead. An’ as for that pie-eyed sawback over there”—he stared malevolently at Kelly—“he better learn to keep his trap shut.”

  “He’s been two-timin’ the hunk!” screeched Kelly. “Don’t b’lieve him, Chief! That sassy little tramp got what was comin’ to her, I tell y’! She’s been pullin’ the wool over the hunk’s eyes all the way from Chi to Beantown!”

  “You’ve said enough,” said the Great Gordi quietly. “Can’t you see the man’s drunk, Inspector, and not responsible? Myra was—companionable. She may have taken a drink or two with Crosby or myself on the sly once or twice—Brinkerhof didn’t like her to, so she never drank in front of him—but that’s all.”

  “Just friendly, hey?” murmured the Inspector. “Well, who’s lying? If you know anything solid, Kelly, come out with it.”

  “I know what I know,” sneered the manager. “An’ when it comes to that, Chief, the Great Gordi could tell you somethin’ about the little bum. Ought to be able to! He swiped her from Crosby only a couple o’ weeks ago.”

  “Quiet, both of you,” snapped the old gentleman as the Texan and the dark mustachioed man stirred. “And how could you know that, Kelly?”

  The dead woman swayed faintly, dancing her noiseless dance.

  “I heard Tex there bawl Gordi out only the other day,” said Kelly thickly, “for makin’ the snatch. An’ I saw Gordi grapplin’ with her in the wings on’y yest’day. How’s ’at? Reg’lar wrestler, Gordi. Can he clinch!”