“How do you know that?”

  “Because there’s every sign of a fierce struggle, so fierce Brown managed to tear off one of the coat buttons of his assailant’s coat. In the course of the struggle Brown was stabbed many times. His blood flowed freely. It got all over not only his own coat but the murderer’s as well. From the position of the bloodstains the murderer’s coat must have been buttoned at the time of the struggle, which means he wore it.”

  The Inspector nodded. “Left it behind because he didn’t want to be seen in a bloody coat. Ripped out all identifying marks.”

  From behind the Inspector came Paula’s tremulous voice. “Could that be your camels-hair coat, Ellery?”

  Mr. Queen looked at her in an odd way. “No, Paula.”

  “What’s this?” demanded the Inspector.

  “Ellery left his topcoat behind in Phil’s car before the fight,” Paula explained. “I told him somebody would steal it, and somebody did. And now there’s a camel’s-hair coat—in this car.”

  “It isn’t mine,” said Mr. Queen patiently. “Mine has certain distinguishing characteristics which don’t exist in this one—a cigarette burn at the second buttonhole, a hole in the right pocket.”

  The Inspector shrugged and went away.

  “Then your coat’s being stolen has nothing to do with it?” Paula shivered. “Ellery, I could use a cigarette.”

  Mr. Queen obliged. “On the contrary. The theft of my coat has everything to do with it.”

  “But I don’t understand. You just said—”

  Mr. Queen held a match to Miss Paris’s cigarette and stared intently at the body of Mike Brown.

  Ollie Stearn’s chauffeur, a hard-looking customer, twisted his cap and said: “Mike tells me after the fight he won’t need me. Tells me he’ll pick me up on the Grand Concourse. Said he’d drive himself.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was kind of—curious. I had a hot dog at the stand there and I—watched. I seen Mike come out and climb into the back—”

  “Was he alone?” demanded the Inspector.

  “Yeah. Just got in and sat there. A couple of drunks come along then and I couldn’t see good. Only seemed to me somebody else come over and got into the car after Mike.”

  “Who? Who was it? Did you see?”

  The chauffeur shook his head. “I couldn’t see good. I don’t know. After a while I thought it ain’t my business, so I walks away. But when I heard police sirens I come back.”

  “The one who came after Mike Brown got in,” said Mr. Queen with a certain eagerness. “That person was wearing a coat, eh?”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “You didn’t witness anything else that occurred?” persisted Mr. Queen.

  “Nope.”

  “Doesn’t matter, really,” muttered the great man. “Line’s clear. Clear as the sun. Must be that—”

  “What are you mumbling about?” demanded Miss Paris in his ear.

  Mr. Queen stared. “Was I mumbling?” He shook his head.

  Then a man from Headquarters came up with a dudish little fellow with frightened eyes who babbled he didn’t know nothing, nothing, he didn’t know nothing; and the Inspector said: “Come on, Oetjens. You were heared hooting off your mouth in that gin mill. What’s the dope?”

  And the little fellow said shrilly: “I don’t want no trouble, no trouble. I only said—”

  “Yes?”

  “Mike Brown looked me up this morning,” muttered Oetjens, “and says to me, he says, ‘Hymie’ he says, ‘Happy Day knows you, Happy Day takes a lot of your bets,’ he says, ‘so go lay fifty grand with Happy on Coyle to win by a K.O.,’ Mike says. ‘You lay that fifty grand for me, get it?’ he says. And he says, ‘If you shoot your trap off to Happy or anyone else that you bet fifty grand for me on Coyle,’ he says, ‘I’ll rip your heart out and break your hands and give you the thumb,’ he says, and a lot more, so I laid the fifty grand on Coyle to win by a K.O. and Happy took the bet at twelve to five, he wouldn’t give no more.”

  Jim Coyle growled: “I’ll break your neck, damn you.”

  “Wait a minute, Jim—”

  “He’s saying Brown took a dive!” cried the champion. “I licked Brown fair and square. I beat the hell out of him fair and square!”

  “You thought you beat the hell out of him fair and square,” muttered Phil Maguire. “But he took a dive, Jim. Didn’t I tell you, Inspector? Laying off that right of his—”

  “It’s a lie! Where’s my manager? Where’s Barney? They ain’t going to hold up the purse on this fight!” roared Coyle. “I won it fair—I won the title fair!”

  “Take it easy, Jim,” said the Inspector. “Everybody knows you were in there leveling tonight. Look here, Hymie, did Brown give you the cash to bet for him?”

  “He was busted,” Oetjens cringed. “I just laid the bet on the cuff. The payoff don’t come till the next day. So I knew it was okay, because with Mike himself betting on Coyle the fight was in the bag—”

  “I’ll cripple you, you tinhorn!” yelled young Coyle.

  “Take it easy, Jim,” soothed Inspector Queen. “So you laid the fifty grand on the cuff, Hymie, and Happy covered the bet at twelve to five, and you knew it would come out all right because Mike was going to take a dive, and then you’d collect a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and give it to Mike, is that it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But that’s all, I swear—”

  “When did you see Happy last, Hymie?”

  Oetjens looked scared and began to back away. His police escort had to shake him a little. But he shook his head stubbornly.

  “Now it couldn’t be,” asked the Inspector softly, “that somehow Happy got wind that you’d laid that fifty grand not for yourself, but for Mike Brown, could it? It couldn’t be that Happy found out it was a dive, or suspected it?” The Inspector said sharply to a detective: “Find Happy Day.”

  “I’m right here,” said a bass voice from the crowd; and the fat gambler waded through and said hotly to Inspector Queen: “So I’m the sucker, hey? I’m supposed to take the rap, hey?”

  “Did you know Mike Brown was set to take a dive?”

  “No!”

  Phil Maguire chuckled.

  And little Ollie Stearn, pale as his dead fighter, shouted: “Happy done it, Inspector! He found out, and he waited till after the fight, and when he saw Mike laying down he came out here and gave him the business! That’s the way it was!”

  “You lousy rat,” said the gambler. “How do I know you didn’t do it yourself? He wasn’t taking no dive you couldn’t find out about! Maybe you stuck him up because of that fancy doll of his. Don’t tell me. I know all about you and that Ivy broad. I know—”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said the Inspector with a satisfied smile, when there was a shriek and Ivy Brown elbowed her way through the jam and flung herself on the dead body of her husband for the benefit of the press.

  And as the photographers joyously went to work, and Happy Day and Ollie Stearn eyed each other with hate, and the crowd milled around, the Inspector said happily to his son: “Not too tough. Not too tough. A wrap-up. It’s Happy Day, all right, and all I’ve got to do is find—”

  The great man smiled and said: “You’re riding a dead nag.”

  “Eh?”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  The Inspector ceased to look happy. “What am I supposed to be doing, then? You tell me. You know it all.”

  “Of course I do, and of course I shall,” said Mr. Queen. “What are you to do? Find my coat.”

  “Say, what is this about your damn coat?” growled the Inspector.

  “Find my coat, and perhaps I’ll find your murderer.”

  It was a peculiar sort of case. First there had been the ride to the Stadium, and the conversation about how Phil Maguire didn’t like Mike Brown, and then there was the ringside gossip, the preliminaries, the main event, the champion’s knockout, and all the rest of—all unimportant, all stodgy little details … until Mr. Queen and Miss Paris strolled across the parking lot and found two things—or rather, lost one thing—Mr. Queen’s coat—and found another—Mike Brown’s body; and so there was an important murder case, all nice and shiny.

  And immediately the great man began nosing about and muttering about his coat, as if an old and shabby topcoat being stolen could possibly be more important than Mike Brown lying there in the gravel of the parking space full of punctures, like an abandoned tire, and Mike’s wife, full of more curves and detours than the Storm King highway, sobbing on his chest and calling upon Heaven and the New York press to witness how dearly she had loved him, poor dead gorilla.

  So it appeared that Mike Brown had had a secret rendezvous with someone after the fight, because he had got rid of Ollie Stearn’s chauffeur, and the appointment must have been for the interior of Ollie Stearn’s red limousine. And whoever he was, he came, and got in with Mike, and there was a struggle, and he stabbed Mike almost a dozen times with something long and sharp, and then fled, leaving his camel’s-hair coat behind, because with blood all over its front it would have given him away.

  That brought up the matter of the weapon, and everybody began nosing about, including Mr. Queen, because it was a cinch the murderer might have dropped it in his flight. And, sure enough, a radio-car man found it in the dirt under a parked car—a long, evil-looking stiletto with no distinguishing marks whatever and no fingerprints except the fingerprints of the radio-car man. But Mr. Queen persisted in nosing even after that discovery, and finally the Inspector asked him peevishly: “What are you looking for now?”

  “My coat,” explained Mr. Queen. “Do you see anyone with my coat?”

  But there was hardly a man in the crowd with a coat. It was a warm night.

  So finally Mr. Queen gave up his queer search and said: “I don’t know what you good people are going to do, but, as for me, I’m going back to the Stadium.”

  “For heaven’s sake, what for?” cried Paula.

  “To see if I can find my coat,” said Mr. Queen patiently.

  “I told you you should have taken it with you!”

  “Oh, no,” said Mr. Queen. “I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad I left it behind in Maguire’s car. I’m glad it was stolen.”

  “But why, you exasperating idiot?”

  “Because now,” replied Mr. Queen with a cryptic smile, “I have to go looking for it.”

  And while the morgue wagon carted Mike Brown’s carcass off, Mr. Queen trudged back across the dusty parking lot and into the alley which led to the Stadium dressing rooms. And the Inspector, with a baffled look, herded everyone—with special loving care and attention for Mr. Happy Day and Mr. Ollie Stearn and Mrs. Ivy Brown—after his son. He didn’t know what else to do.

  And finally they were assembled in Jim Coyle’s dressing room, and Ivy was weeping into more cameras, and Mr. Queen was glumly contemplating Miss Paris’s red straw hat, which looked like a pot, and there was a noise at the door and they saw Barney Hawks, the new champion’s manager, standing on the threshold in the company of several officials and promoters.

  “What ho,” said Barney Hawks with a puzzled glance about. “You still here, champ? What goes on?”

  “Plenty goes on,” said the champ savagely. “Barney, did you know Brown took a dive tonight?”

  “What? What’s this?” said Barney Hawks, looking around virtuously. “Who says so, the dirty liar? My boy won that title on the up and up, gentlemen! He beat Brown fair and square.”

  “Brown threw the fight?” asked one of the men with Hawks, a member of the Boxing Commission. “Is there any evidence of that?”

  “The hell with that,” said the Inspector politely. “Barney, Mike Brown is dead.”

  Hawks began to laugh, then he stopped laughing and sputtered: “What’s this? What’s this? What’s the gageroo? Brown dead?”

  Jim Coyle waved his huge paw tiredly. “Somebody bumped him off tonight, Barney. In Stearn’s car across the street.”

  “Well, I’m a bum, I’m a bum,” breathed his manager, staring. “So Mike got his, hey? Well, well. Tough. Loses his title and his life. Who done it, boys?”

  “Maybe you didn’t know my boy was dead!” shrilled Ollie Stearn. “Yeah, you put on a swell act, Barney! Maybe you fixed it with Mike so he’d take a dive so your boy could win the title! Maybe—”

  “There’s been another crime committed here tonight,” said a mild voice, and they all looked wonderingly around to find Mr. Ellery Queen advancing toward Mr. Hawks.

  “Hey?” said Coyle’s manager, staring stupidly at him.

  “My coat was stolen.”

  “Hey?” Hawks kept gaping.

  “And, unless my eyes deceive me, as the phrase goes,” continued the great man, stopping before Barney Hawks, “I’ve found it again.”

  “Hey?”

  “On your arm.” And Mr. Queen gently removed from Mr. Hawks’s arm a shabby camel’s-hair topcoat, and unfolded it, and examined it. “Yes. My very own.”

  Barney Hawks turned green in the silence.

  Something sharpened in Mr. Queen’s silver eyes, and he bent over the camel’s-hair coat again. He spread out the sleeves and examined the armhole seams. They had burst. As had the seam at the back of the coat. He looked up and at Mr. Hawks reproachfully.

  “The least you might have done,” he said, “is to have returned my property in the same condition in which I left it.”

  “Your coat?” said Barney Hawks damply. Then he shouted: “What the hell is this? That’s my coat! My camel’s-hair coat!”

  “No,” Mr. Queen dissented respectfully, “I can prove this to be mine. You see, it has a telltale cigarette burn at the second buttonhole, and a hole in the right-hand pocket.”

  “But—I found it where I left it! It was here all the time! I took it out of here after the fight and went up to the office to talk to these gentlemen and I’ve been—” The manager stopped, and his complexion faded from green to white. “Then where’s my coat?” he asked slowly.

  “Will you try this on?” asked Mr. Queen with the deference of a clothing salesman, and he took from a detective the bloodstained coat they had found abandoned in Ollie Stearn’s car.

  Mr. Queen held the coat up before Hawks; and Hawks said thickly: “All right. It’s my coat. I guess it’s my coat, if you say so. So what?”

  “So,” replied Mr. Queen, “someone knew Mike Brown was broke, that he owed his shirt, that not even his lion’s share of the purse tonight would suffice to pay his debts. Someone persuaded Mike Brown to throw the fight tonight, offering to pay him a large sum of money, I suppose, for taking the dive. That money no one would know about. That money would not have to be turned over to the clutches of Mike Brown’s loving wife and creditors. That money would be Mike Brown’s own. So Mike Brown said yes, realizing that he could make more money, too, by placing a large bet with Happy Day through the medium of Mr. Oetjens. And with this double nest egg he could jeer at the unfriendly world.

  “And probably Brown and his tempter conspired to meet in Stearn’s car immediately after the fight for the payoff, for Brown would be insistent about that. So Brown sent the chauffeur away, and sat in the car, and the tempter came to keep the appointment—armed not with the payoff money but with a sharp stiletto. And by using the stiletto he saved himself a tidy sum—the sum he’d promised Brown—and also made sure Mike Brown would never be able to tell the wicked story to the wicked world.”

  Barney Hawks licked his dry lips. “Don’t look at me, mister. You got nothing on Barney Hawks. I don’t know nothing about this.”

  And Mr. Queen said, paying no attention whatever to Mr. Hawks: “A pretty problem, friends. You see, the tempter came to the scene of the crime in a camel’s-hair coat, and he had to leave the coat behind because it was bloodstained and would have given him away. Also, in the car next to the murder car lay, quite defenseless, my own poor camel’s-hair coat, its only virtue the fact that it was stained with no man’s blood.

  “We found a coat abandoned in Stearn’s car and my coat, in the next car, stolen. Coincidence? Hardly. The murderer certainly took my coat to replace the coat he was forced to leave behind.”

  Mr. Queen paused to refresh himself with a cigarette, glancing whimsically at Miss Paris, who was staring at him with a soul-satisfying worship. Mind over matter, thought Mr. Queen, remembering with special satisfaction how Miss Paris had stared at Jim Coyle’s muscles. Yes, sir, mind over matter.

  “Well?” said Inspector Queen. “Suppose this bird did take your coat? What of it?”

  “But that’s exactly the point,” murmured Mr. Queen. “He took my poor, shabby, worthless coat. Why?”

  “Why?” echoed the Inspector blankly.

  “Yes, why? Everything in this world is activated by a reason. Why did he take my coat?”

  “Well, I—I suppose to wear it.”

  “Very good,” applauded Mr. Queen, playing up to Miss Paris. “Precisely. If he took it he had a reason, and since its only function under the circumstances could have been its wearability, so to speak, he took it to wear it.” He paused, then murmured: “But why should he want to wear it?”

  The Inspector looked angry. “See here, Ellery—” he began.

  “No, Dad, no,” said Mr. Queen gently. “I’m talking with a purpose. There’s a point. The point. You might say he had to wear it because he’d got blood on his suit under the coat and required a coat to hide the bloodstained suit. Or mightn’t you?”

  “Well, sure,” said Phil Maguire eagerly. “That’s it.”

  “You may be an Einstein in your sports department, Mr. Maguire, but here you’re just a palooka. No,” said Mr. Queen, shaking his head sadly, “that’s not it. He couldn’t possibly have got blood on his suit. The coat shows that at the time he attacked Brown he was wearing it buttoned. If the topcoat was buttoned, his suit didn’t catch any of Brown’s blood.”

  “He certainly didn’t need a coat because of the weather,” muttered Inspector Queen.

  “True. It’s been warm all evening. You see,” smiled Mr. Queen, “what a cute little thing it is. He’d left his own coat behind, its labels and other identifying marks taken out, unworried about its being found—otherwise he would have hidden it or thrown it away. Such being the case, you would say he’d simply make his escape in the clothes he was wearing beneath the coat. But he didn’t. He stole another coat, my coat, for his escape.” Mr. Queen coughed gently. “So surely it’s obvious that if he stole my coat for his escape, he needed my coat for his escape? That if he escaped without my coat he would be noticed?”