“A very simple, almost an elementary, series of deductions,” Ellery was saying. “Point three first. Why did the thief, instead of taking the most logical course of smashing the glass with the iron bar, choose to waste precious minutes using a ‘jimmy’ four times to force open the lid? Obviously to protect the other stamps in the cabinet which lay open to possible injury, as Mr. Albert Ulm has just graphically pointed out. And who had the greatest concern in protecting these other stamps—Hinchman, Peter, Beninson, even the mythical Planck himself? Of course not. Only the Ulm brothers, owners of the stamps.”

  Old Uneker began to chuckle; he nudged the Inspector. “See? Didn’t I say he vass smardt? Now me—me, I’d neffer t’ink of dot.”

  “And why didn’t Planck steal these other stamps in the cabinet? You would expect a thief to do that. Planck did not. But if the Herren Ulm were the thieves, the theft of the other stamps became pointless.”

  “How about that snuff business, Mr. Queen?” asked Peters.

  “Yes. The conclusion is plain from the fact that Planck apparently indulged only once during the days he worked with Mr. Beninson. Since snuff-addicts partake freely and often, Planck wasn’t a snuff-addict. Then it wasn’t snuff he inhaled that day. What else is sniffed in a similar manner? Well—drugs in powder form—heroin! What are the characteristics of a heroin-addict? Nervous drawn appearance; gauntness, almost emaciation; and most important, tell-tale eyes, the pupils of which contract under influence of the drug. Then here was another explanation for the tinted glasses Planck wore. They served a double purpose—as an easily recognizable disguise, and also to conceal his eyes, which would give his vice-addiction away! But when I observed that Mr. Albert Ulm—” Ellery went over to the cowering man and ripped the green eye-shade away, revealing two stark, pin-point pupils—“wore this shade, it was a psychological confirmation of his identity as Planck.”

  “Yes, but that business of stealing all those books,” said Hazlitt.

  “Part of a very pretty and rather far-fetched plot,” said Ellery. “With Albert Ulm the disguised thief, Friederich Ulm, who exhibited the wound on his cheek, must have been an accomplice. Then with the Ulm brothers the thieves, the entire business of the books was a blind. The attack on Friederich, the ruse of the bookstore-escape, the trail of the minor robberies of copies of Europe in Chaos—a cleverly planned series of incidents to authenticate the fact that there was an outside thief, to convince the police and the insurance company that the stamp actually was stolen when it was not. Object, of course, to collect the insurance without parting with the stamp. These men are fanatical collectors.”

  Heffley wriggled his fat little body uncomfortably. “That’s all very nice, Mr. Queen, but where the deuce is that stamp they stole from themselves? Where’d they hide it?”

  “I thought long and earnestly about that, Heffley. For while my trio of deductions were psychological indications of guilt, the discovery of the stolen stamp in the Ulms’ possession would be evidential proof.” The Inspector was turning the second stamp over mechanically. “I said to myself,” Ellery went on, “in a reconsideration of the problem: what would be the most likely hiding-place for the stamp? And then I remembered that the two stamps were identical, even the initials of the good Queen being in the same place. So I said to myself: if I were Messrs. Ulm, I should hide that stamp—like the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale—in the most obvious place. And what is the most obvious place?”

  Ellery sighed and returned the unused revolver to Sergeant Velie. “Dad,” he remarked to the Inspector, who started guiltily, “I think that if you allow one of the philatelists in our company to examine the second one-penny black in your fingers, you’ll find that the first has been pasted with non-injurious rubber cement precisely over the second!”

  The Adventure of THE BEARDED LADY

  MR. PHINEAS MASON, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW—of the richly, almost indigestibly respectable firm of Dowling, Mason & Coolidge, 40 Park Row—was a very un-Phineaslike gentleman with a chunky nose and wrinkle-bedded eyes which had seen thirty years of harassing American litigation and looked as if they had seen a hundred. He sat stiffly in the lap of a chauffeur-driven limousine, his mouth making interesting sounds.

  “And now,” he said in an angry voice, “there’s actually been murder done. I can’t imagine what the world is coming to.”

  Mr. Ellery Queen, watching the world rush by in a glaring Long Island sunlight, mused that life was like a Spanish wench: full of surprises, none of them delicate and all of them stimulating. Since he was a monastic who led a riotous mental existence, he liked life that way; and since he was also a detective—an appellation he cordially detested—he got life that way. Nevertheless, he did not vocalize his reflections: Mr. Phineas Mason did not appear the sort who would appreciate fleshly metaphor.

  He drawled: “The world’s all right; the trouble is the people in it. Suppose you tell me what you can about these curious Shaws. After all, you know, I shan’t be too heartily received by your local Long Island constabulary; and since I foresee difficulties, I should like to be forearmed as well.”

  Mason frowned. “But McC assured me—”

  “Oh, bother J. J.! He has vicarious delusions of grandeur. Let me warn you now, Mr. Mason, that I shall probably be a dismal flop. I don’t go about pulling murderers out of my hat. And with your cossacks trampling the evidence—”

  “I warned them,” said Mason fretfully. “I spoke to Captain Murch myself when he telephoned this morning to inform me of the crime.” He made a sour face. “They won’t even move the body, Mr. Queen. I wield—ah—a little local influence, you see.”

  “Indeed,” said Ellery, adjusting his pince-nez; and he sighed. “Very well, Mr. Mason. Proceed with the dreary details.”

  “It was my partner, Coolidge,” began the attorney in a pained voice, “who originally handled Shaw’s affairs. John A. Shaw, the millionaire. Before your time, I daresay. Shaw’s first wife died in childbirth in 1895. The child—Agatha; she’s a divorcee now, with a son of eight—of course survived her mother; and there was one previous child, named after his father. John’s forty-five now….At any rate, old John Shaw remarried soon after his first wife’s death, and then shortly after his second marriage died himself. This second wife, Maria Paine Shaw, survived her husband by a little more than thirty years. She died only a month ago.”

  “A plethora of mortalities,” murmured Ellery, lighting a cigaret. “So far, Mr. Mason, a prosaic tale. And what has the Shaw history to do—”

  “Patience,” sighed Mason. “Now old John Shaw bequeathed his entire fortune to this second wife, Maria. The two children, John and Agatha, got nothing, not even trusts; I suppose old Shaw trusted Maria to take care of them.”

  “I scent the usual story,” yawned Ellery. “She didn’t? No go between stepmother and acquired progeny?”

  The lawyer wiped his brow. “It was horrible. They fought for thirty years like—like savages. I will say, in extenuation of Mrs. Shaw’s conduct, that she had provocation. John’s always been a shiftless, unreliable beggar: disrespectful, profligate, quite vicious. Nevertheless she’s treated him well in money matters. As I said, he’s forty-five now; and he hasn’t done a lick of work in his life. He’s a drunkard, too.”

  “Sounds charming. And Sister Agatha, the divorcee?”

  “A feminine edition of her brother. She married a fortune-hunter as worthless as herself; when he found out she was penniless he deserted her and Mrs. Shaw managed to get her a quiet divorce. She took Agatha and her boy, Peter, into her house and they’ve been living there ever since, at daggers’ points. Please forgive the—ah—brutality of the characterizations; I want you to know these people as they are.”

  “We’re almost intimate already,” chuckled Ellery.

  “John and Agatha,” continued Mason, biting the head of his cane, “have been living for only one event—their stepmother’s death. So that they might inherit, of course. Until a certain occurrence a few months ago Mrs. Shaw’s will provided generously for them. But when that happened—”

  Mr. Ellery Queen narrowed his gray eyes. “You mean—?”

  “It’s complicated,” sighed the lawyer. “Three months ago there was an attempt on the part of some one in the household to poison the old lady!”

  “Ah!”

  “The attempt was unsuccessful only because Dr. Arlen—Dr. Terence Arlen is the full name—had suspected such a possibility for years and had kept his eyes open. The cyanide—it was put in her tea—didn’t reach Mrs. Shaw, but killed a house-cat. None of us, of course, knew who had made the poisoning attempt. But after that Mrs. Shaw changed her will.”

  “Now,” muttered Ellery, “I am enthralled. Arlen, eh? That creates a fascinating mess. Tell me about Arlen, please.”

  “Rather mysterious old man with two passions: devotion to Mrs. Shaw and a hobby of painting. Quite an artist, too, though I know little about such things. He lived in the Shaw house about twenty years. Medico Mrs. Shaw picked up somewhere; I think only she knew his story, and he’s always been silent about his past. She put him on a generous salary to live in the house and act as the family physician; I suspect it was rather because she anticipated what her stepchildren might attempt. And then too it’s always seemed to me that Arlen accepted this unusual arrangement so tractably in order to pass out of—ah—circulation.”

  They were silent for some time. The chauffeur swung the car off the main artery into a narrow macadam road Mason breathed heavily.

  “I suppose you’re satisfied,” murmured Ellery at last through a fat smoke-ring, “that Mrs. Shaw died a month ago of natural causes?”

  “Heavens, yes!” cried Mason. “Dr. Arlen wouldn’t trust his own judgment, we were so careful; he had several specialists in, before and after her death. But she died of the last of a series of heart-attacks; she was an old woman, you know. Something-thrombosis, they called it.” Mason looked gloomy. “Well, you can understand Mrs. Shaw’s natural reaction to the poisoning episode. ‘If they’re so depraved,’ she told me shortly after, ‘that they’d attempt my life, they don’t deserve any consideration at my hands.’ And she had me draw up a new will, cutting both of them off without a cent.”

  “There’s, an epigram,” chuckled Ellery, “worthy of a better cause.”

  Mason tapped on the glass. “Faster, Burroughs.” The car jolted ahead. “In looking about for a beneficiary, Mrs. Shaw finally remembered that there was some one to whom she could leave the Shaw fortune without feeling that she was casting it to the winds. Old John Shaw had had an elder brother, Morton, a widower with two grown children. The brothers quarrelled violently and Morton moved to England. He lost most of his money there; his two children, Edith and Percy, were left to shift for themselves when he committed suicide.”

  “These Shaws seem to have a penchant for violence.”

  “I suppose it’s in the blood. Well, Edith and Percy both had talent of a sort, I understand, and they went on the London stage in a brother-and-sister music-hall act, managing well enough. Mrs. Shaw decided to leave her money to this Edith, her niece. I made inquiries by correspondence and discovered that Edith Shaw was now Mrs. Edythe Royce, a childless widow of many years’ standing. On Mrs. Shaw’s decease I cabled her and she crossed by the next boat. According to Mrs. Royce, Percy—her brother—was killed in an automobile accident on the Continent a few months before; so she had no ties whatever.”

  “And the will—specifically?”

  “It’s rather queer,” sighed Mason. “The Shaw estate was enormous at one time, but the depression whittled it down to about three hundred thousand dollars. Mrs. Shaw left her niece two hundred thousand outright. The remainder, to his astonishment,” and Mason paused and eyed his tall young companion with a curious fixity, “was put in trust for Dr. Arlen.”

  “Arlen!”

  “He was not to touch the principal, but was to receive the income from it for the remainder of his life. Interesting, eh?”

  “That’s putting it mildly. By the way, Mr. Mason, I’m a suspicious bird. This Mrs. Royce—you’re satisfied she is a Shaw?”

  The lawyer started; then he shook his head. “No, no, Queen, that’s the wrong tack. There can be absolutely no question about it. In the first place she possesses the marked facial characteristics of the Shaws; you’ll see for yourself; although I will say that she’s rather—well, rather a character, rather a character! She came armed with intimate possessions of her father, Morton Shaw; and I myself, in company with Coolidge, questioned her closely on her arrival. She convinced us utterly, from her knowledge of minutiae about her father’s life and Edith Shaw’s childhood in America—knowledge impossible for an outsider to have acquired—that she is Edith Shaw. We were more than cautious, I assure you; especially since neither John nor Agatha had seen her since childhood.”

  “Just a thought.” Ellery leaned forward. “And what was to be the disposition of Arlen’s hundred-thousand-dollar trust on Arlen’s death?”

  The lawyer gazed grimly at the two rows of prim poplars flanking a manicured driveway on which the limousine was now noiselessly treading. “It was to be equally divided between John and Agatha,” he said in a careful voice. The car rolled to a stop under a coldly white porte-cochère.

  “I see,” said Ellery. For it was Dr. Terence Arlen who had been murdered.

  A county trooper escorted them through high Colonial halls into a remote and silent wing of the ample old house, up a staircase to a dim cool corridor patrolled by a nervous man with a bull neck.

  “Oh, Mr. Mason,” he said eagerly, coming forward. “We’ve been waiting for you. This is Mr. Queen?” His tone changed from unguent haste to abrasive suspicion.

  “Yes, yes. Murch of the county detectives, Mr. Queen. You’ve left everything intact, Murch?”

  The detective grunted and stepped aside. Ellery found himself in the study of what appeared to be a two-room suite; beyond an open door he could see the white counterpane of a bird’s-eye-maple four-poster. A hole at some remote period had been hacked through the ceiling and covered with glass, admitting sunlight and converting the room into a sky-light studio. The trivia of a painter’s paraphernalia lay in confusion about the room, overpowering the few medical implements. There were easels, paint-boxes, a small dais, carelessly draped smocks, a profusion of daubs in oils and water-colors on the walls.

  A little man was kneeling beside the outstretched figure of the dead doctor—a long brittle figure frozen in death, capped with curiously lambent silver hair. The wound was frank and deep: the delicately chased haft of a stiletto protruded from the man’s heart. There was very little blood.

  Murch snapped: “Well, Doc, anything else?”

  The little man rose and put his instruments away. “Died instantly from the stab-wound. Frontal blow, as you see. He tried to dodge at the last instant, I should say, but wasn’t quick enough.” He nodded and reached for his hat and quietly went out.

  Ellery shivered a little. The studio was silent, and the corridor was silent, and the wing was silent; the whole house was crushed under the weight of a terrific silence that was almost uncanny. There was something indescribably evil in the air….He shook his shoulders impatiently. “The stiletto, Captain Murch. Have you identified it?”

  “Belonged to Arlen. Always right here on this table.”

  “No possibility of suicide, I suppose.”

  “Not a chance, Doc said.”

  Mr. Phineas Mason made a retching sound. “If you want me, Queen—” He stumbled from the room, awakening dismal echoes.

  The corpse was swathed in a paint-smudged smock above pajamas; in the stiff right hand a paint-brush, its hairs-stained jet-black, was still clutched. A color-splashed palette had fallen face down on the floor near him….Ellery did not raise his eyes from the stiletto. “Florentine, I suppose. Tell me what you’ve learned so far, Captain,” he said absently. “I mean about the crime itself.”

  “Damned little,” growled the detective. “Doc says he was killed about two in the morning—about eight hours ago. His body was found at seven this a.m. by a woman named Krutch, a nurse in the house here for a couple of years. Nice wench, by God! Nobody’s got an alibi for the time of the murder, because according to their yarns they were all sleeping, and they all sleep separately. That’s about the size of it.”

  “Precious little, to be sure,” murmured Ellery. “By the way, Captain, was it Dr. Arlen’s custom to paint in the wee hours?”

  “Seems so. I thought of that, too. But he was a queer old cuss and when he was hot on something he’d work for twenty-four hours at a clip.”

  “Do the others sleep in this wing?”

  “Nope. Not even the servants. Seems Arlen liked privacy, and whatever he liked the old dame—Mrs. Shaw, who kicked off a month ago—said ‘jake’ to.” Murch went to the doorway and snapped: “Miss Krutch.”

  She came slowly out of Dr. Arlen’s bedroom—a tall fair young woman who had been weeping. She was in nurse’s uniform and there was nothing in common between her name and her appearance. In fact, as Ellery observed with appreciation, she was a distinctly attractive young woman with curves in precisely the right places. Miss Krutch, despite her tears, was the first ray of sunshine he had encountered in the big old house.

  “Tell Mr. Queen what you told me,” directed Murch curtly.

  “But there’s so little,” she quavered. “I was up before seven, as usual. My room’s in the main wing, but there’s a storeroom here for linen and things….As I passed I—I saw Dr. Arlen lying on the floor, with the knife sticking up—The door was open and the light was on. I screamed. No one heard me. This is so far away….I screamed and screamed and then Mr. Shaw came running, and Miss Shaw. Th-that’s all.”

  “Did any of you touch the body, Miss Krutch?”

  “Oh, no, sir!” She shivered.

  “I see,” said Ellery, and raised his eyes from the dead man to the easel above, casually, and looked away. And then instantly he looked back, his nerves tingling. Murch watched him with a sneer.