“Chloroformed!” They all turned, startled, upon Ellery. He was staring at Sherman with a wild light in his eyes. “Mr. Sherman,” he said slowly, coming forward, “do you mean to say you were hors de combat through the rest of it? Unconscious?”

  “Yes,” said Sherman, blinking.

  Ellery straightened. “Indeed,” he said in a strange voice. “The missing piece at last.” And he went back to the window to stare out.

  “The missing piece?” faltered the banker.

  “Let’s get this over with,” said Kittering harshly. “Joe’s in no condition—”

  Sherman passed a trembling hand over his mouth. “When I woke up I was sick. My eyes were bound. I was tied up. I didn’t know where I was. No one came near me. Once, though, some one fed me. Then—God knows how much later—I was carried out somewhere and later I knew I was in a car. They pushed me out on a road somewhere. When I came to I realized I had been untied. I took the rag from my eyes….You know the rest.”

  There was a silence. The Inspector clicked his teeth together and said pettishly: “Do you mean to say, then, you can’t identify any of your kidnapers, Mr. Sherman? How about their voices? Anything, man, to give us a lead!”

  The banker’s shoulders sagged lower. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Can’t I go now?”

  “Hold on,” said Ellery. “There’s no other information you can give us?”

  “Eh? No.”

  Ellery scowled. “There’s nothing about this you’re concealing, Mr. Sherman? You’d rather drop the whole matter, I take it?”

  “Nothing….Yes, drop it,” mumbled Sherman. “Drop it entirely.”

  “I’m afraid,” murmured Ellery, “that that’s impossible. Because, you see, Mr. Sherman, I know who kidnaped you and murdered Lily Divine.”

  “You know?” whispered. Rosanne. The banker sat like stone, and Kittering took a short step forward and stopped.

  “Knowledge is a tricky thing,” said Ellery, “but within human limitations—I know.” He thrust a cigaret into his mouth and his eyebrows twitched. Sergeant Velie, at the door, took his hands out of his pockets and looked about expectantly. “A very odd affair, you see. This won’t take long, and it may prove—interesting.”

  “But, Ellery—” frowned the Inspector.

  “Please, dad. Consider that gash on the waxed floor. Your experts maintained that it was made by the heel of a shoe. The good Sergeant here pointed out that since it was made by a shoe-heel, then clearly it denoted Mr. Sherman’s being dragged toward the window by his assailants.”

  “Well, what of it?” said the Inspector sharply. The Shermans sat dumb and fascinated; and Kittering did not stir.

  Ellery drawled: “Everything of it. It occurred to me then and there that our good Sergeant had been in error.” Velie’s face fell. “If a body is being dragged, with sufficient force to cause shoe-marks on a freshly waxed floor, then there should be two scratches, you see; because even a child knows that the usual complement of feet in bipeds is two, not one. So I said to myself: ‘Whatever, this mark on the floor means, it was certainly not caused by dragging.’ ”

  “What then?” growled the old gentleman.

  “Well,” smiled Ellery, “if the mark was made by a shoe-heel, and yet not by the shoe-heel of a man being dragged, then the only sensible alternative is that some one slipped on the floor, you see. You yourself, dad, slipped and almost fell the other night. Have we any confirmation?”

  “What’s this, a lesson in logic?” said Kittering gruffly. “You take an odd time, Queen, to go oratorical.”

  “Quiet, Kittering,” said the Inspector. “Confirmation?”

  “The three lame men,” said Ellery gently.

  “The three lame men!”

  “Precisely. We had definite evidences of lameness, of limping, in the footprints. Considerably bolstering the slip-on-the-floor, theory. The person who slipped either sprained an ankle or suffered some leg injury, not necessarily serious but painful enough to cause a temporary lameness. You see that?”

  “I’m going home,” said Rosanne suddenly. Her cheeks were scarlet.

  Ellery said quickly: “Sit down, Miss Sherman. Now we have three sets of limping prints, all of different pairs of shoes. That this fact was utterly incredible, dad, I tried to point out to you. Did three men, or even two, slip and fall and go lame in that bedroom? Ridiculous. For one thing, there was only one scratch on the floor; for another, the exact triplication of a phenomenon—three limping right feet—shows falsity, not truth.”

  “You mean,” said Mrs. Sherman with a puzzled frown, “that there weren’t three men who kidnaped my husband, Mr. Queen?”

  “Exactly,” drawled Ellery. “I say that the argument shows that one man, the one who slipped on the floor, was responsible for all three different sets of limping footprints. How? Obviously, by using three different pairs of shoes.”

  “But what happened to the shoes, El?”

  “They weren’t found. So the limper must have taken them away with him. Any corroboration? Yes; one of Lily Divine’s bags was missing.” Ellery’s gray eyes hardened. “The crux of the matter is, of course, the answer to the question: Why did the limper go to the trouble of falsifying the trail, of planting three sets of apparently different footprints? The answer again must be apparent: to make the kidnaping look like the work of more than one person—specifically, of three. This suggests a gang, surely? Inversely, then, the limper is probably not a gangster at all. But aside from that we have now reached the point where we may say that our limper, a lone wolf, was the murderer of Lily Divine and the kidnaper of Mr. Sherman!”

  No one said anything. Sergeant Velie’s hands opened and closed tentatively.

  Ellery sighed. “The window and the fire-escape tell most of the rest of the story. With the bedroom door found bolted from the inside, then the kidnaper got away through the only window in the room giving upon the fire-escape. The window is small, and on its sill there is an immovable window-box. The window-box reduces the size of the window opening by at least one-third, leaving about two feet of space vertically for possible exit.

  “Now Mr. Sherman here is a giant of a man—well over six feet tall and weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. How would the limper get Mr. Sherman’s unconscious body through that small window-space? Sling it over his shoulder and climb through? A palpable absurdity, under the circumstances; certainly the most difficult method, and it probably would not even occur to him. But even if it had, he would have found the method unsuccessful. There are only two other ways to get out with the body: one would be to climb out first, leaving the body hanging over the window-box to be accessible from outside, and then pull the body out onto the fire-escape. But he didn’t use this method; nowhere did the snow on the fire-escape or directly below the window-sill show a sign of disturbance such as would have been made by a heavy body resting even partly in it. The remaining method would be to push the body out first, and then climb out after it. But here the same objection holds: there was no impression of a body in the snow; only footprints.”

  The Inspector blinked. “But I don’t see—”

  “I didn’t either, for some time,” said Ellery. His face was like stone now. “The immediate conclusion was unquestionably that an unconscious body was not taken out of the window!”

  Joseph E. Sherman got to his feet with a hoarse cry. His splotched cheeks were furrowed with tears. “All right!” he shouted. “I did it! I planned the whole thing. I wrote the first note to myself and all the others. I brought the three pairs of shoes into the apartment at odd times in the past two weeks, under cover, and hid them there. The night—the other night when I’d—I’d done it I used the earth in the window-box to muddy the bottoms of the shoes. I killed her to make it look like a kidnaping of myself, killed her because she was bleeding me, the slut! She’s been hammering at me to divorce Enid and marry her. Marry her! I couldn’t stand it. I was trapped. My position…”

  Mrs. Sherman was staring at her husband with the glazed dullness of a dying animal. “But I knew—” she whispered.

  He grew calmer. He said quietly: “I knew you knew, Enid darling. But I went crazy.”

  The Inspector said, with pity, in his eyes: “Take him away, Thomas.”

  “But you must have known the whole story right there on the scene,” complained the Inspector with some asperity an hour later, when the sordid business of Sherman’s commitment had been finished.

  Ellery shook his head sombrely. “No. The apex of my argument couldn’t be arrived at until I knew definitely whether Sherman had been unconscious or not. That’s why I recommended paying the ransom and getting the man to come back. I wanted to hear his story. When he said he’d been chloroformed in the apartment, my case was complete. Because I knew that no unconscious body was carried or dragged through the window. Sherman was lying, then, when he said that he had been chloroformed. In other words, there was no kidnaping. If there was no kidnaping, then obviously it was Sherman who had slipped on the floor, who limped, who had faked a kidnaping of himself to cover up the fact that he had murdered Lily Divine, concocting a plot by which he hoped to foster the illusion that a gang had kidnaped him and killed the woman incidentally. His slip on the floor was pure accident; he probably didn’t realize that the tracks he was leaving would show the limping characteristics.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Ellery smoking and the Inspector staring out his iron-barred window. Then the old gentleman sighed. “I feel sorry for her.”

  “For whom?” said Ellery absently.

  “Mrs. Sherman.”

  Ellery shrugged. “You always were a sentimentalist. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this case is its moral.”

  “Moral?”

  “The moral that even a hardened criminal tells the truth sometimes. Lily called McKee, probably to get McKee to apply the well-known pressure to Sherman after Sherman refused to marry her. McKee was delayed, and he walked into the arms of the police. But he told the truth throughout….So “suppose,” drawled Ellery, “you call up the Tombs—a detail you’ve forgotten in the excitement—and get poor old Mac his well-earned release.”

  The Adventure of THE INVISIBLE LOVER

  ROGER BOWEN WAS THIRTY, blue-eyed, and white. He was taller than most, laughed a little more readily, spoke English with an apologetic Harvard accent, drank an occasional cocktail, smoked more cigarets than were good for him, was very thoughtful of his only living relative—an elderly aunt living, chiefly upon his bounty, in San Francisco—and balanced his reading between Sabatini and Shaw. And he practised what law there was to practise in the town of Corsica, N. Y. (population 745), where he had been born, stolen apples from old man Carter’s orchard, swum raw in Major’s Creek, and sparked with Iris Scott of Saturday nights on the veranda of the Corsica Pavilion (two bands, continuous dancing).

  To listen to his acquaintances, who comprised one hundred percent of the population of Corsica, he was a “prince,” a “real good boy,” “no darned highbrow,” and a “reg’lar guy.” To listen to his friends—who for the most part shared the same residence, Michael Scott’s boarding house on Jasmine Street off Main—there was no jollier, kindlier, gentler, more inoffensive young man in the length and breadth of the land.

  Within a half-hour of his arrival in Corsica from New York, Mr. Ellery Queen was able to gauge the temper of the Corsican populace concerning its most talked-of citizen. He learned something from a Mr. Klaus, the grocer on Main Street, a juicy morsel from a nameless urchin playing marbles in the road near the County Courthouse, and a good deal from one Mrs. Parkins, wife of the Corsican postmaster. He learned least of all from Mr. Roger Bowen himself, who seemed a decent enough sort, and quite plainly hurt and bewildered.

  And as he left the county jail and headed for the boarding house and Roger Bowen’s inner circle of friends, who were responsible for his hurried journey from Manhattan, it struck Mr. Ellery Queen that it was uncommonly curious such a paragon of all the virtues should be lying disconsolately on a cot in a dingy iron-barred cell awaiting trial on a charge of murder in the first degree.

  “Now, now,” said Mr. Ellery Queen after a space, rocking gently back and forth on the rose-curtained porch, “surely it can’t be as black as all that? From all I’ve heard about young Bowen—”

  Father Anthony clasped his bony hands tightly. “I baptized Roger myself,” he said in a trembling voice. “It isn’t possible, Mr. Queen. I baptized him! And he has told me he did not shoot McGovern. I believe him; he wouldn’t lie to me. And yet…John Graham, the biggest lawyer in the county, who is defending Roger, Mr. Queen, says it’s one of the worst circumstantial cases he has ever seen.”

  “For that matter,” growled towering Michael Scott, snapping his suspenders over his burly breast, “the boy says so himself. Hell, I wouldn’t believe it even if Roger confessed! Beggin’ your pardon, Father.”

  “All I say,” snapped Mrs. Gandy from her wheel-chair, “any one says Roger Bowen shot that sneaky, black-haired devil from New York is a fool. Suppose Roger was in his room, alone, the night it happened? A person has the right to go to sleep, hasn’t he? And how on earth would there be a witness to that, hey, Mr. Queen? The poor child’s no flibbertigibbet, like some I know!”

  “No alibi,” sighed Ellery.

  “Makes it bad,” grumbled Pringle, chief of police of Corsica, a very fat and brawny old man. “Makes it downright bad. Better if he’d had some one with him that night. Not,” he added hastily at Mrs. Gandy’s outraged glare, “that Roger would, ye understand. But when I heard about that there, now, fight he’d had with McGovern—”

  “Oh,” said Ellery softly. “They came to blows? There were threats?”

  “Not exactly blows, Mr. Queen,” said Father Anthony, wincing. “But they did quarrel. It was the same evening: McGovern was shot about midnight, and Roger had words with him only an hour or so before. As a matter of fact, sir, it wasn’t the first time. They had quarreled violently on several previous occasions. Enough to establish motive to the District Attorney’s satisfaction.”

  “But the slug,” growled Michael Scott. “The slug!”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Dodd, a short mousy intelligent-looking man; he spoke unhappily. “I’m county coroner as well as local undertaker, you see, Mr. Queen, and it was my duty to examine that bullet when I dug it out of McGovern’s body on autopsy. When Pringle held Roger on suspicion and got hold of the boy’s gun, we naturally compared the bore-marks….”

  “Bore-marks?” drawled Ellery. “Really!” He inspected Chief Pringle and Coroner Dodd with rather grudging admiration.

  “Oh, we didn’t trust our own judgment in the matter,” said the coroner hastily, “although under my microscope it did look….It was all very nasty, Mr. Queen, but duty’s duty, and an officer of the law has his oath to uphold. We sent it to New York, with the gun, for examination by a ballistics expert. His report came back confirming our findings. What were we to do? Pringle arrested Roger.”

  “Sometimes,” said Father Anthony quietly, “there is a higher duty, Samuel.”

  The coroner looked miserable. Ellery said: “Does Bowen have a license to carry firearms?”

  “Yep,” muttered the fat policeman. “Lot of folks up this way do. Good huntin’ in the hills yonder. It’s a .38 did the job, all right—Roger’s .38. Colt automatic, and a dandy, too.”

  “Is he a good shot?”

  “I’ll say he is!” exclaimed Scott. “That boy can shoot.” His hard face lengthened. “I ought to know. I’ve got six pieces of shrapnel in my left leg right now where a Heinie shell came after me in Belleau.”

  “Excellent shot,” faltered the coroner. “We’ve often gone rabbit-hunting together, and I’ve seen him pot a running target at fifty yards with his Colt. He won’t use a rifle; too tame for real sport, he says.”

  “But what does Mr. Bowen say to all this?” demanded Ellery, squinting at the smoke of his cigaret. “He wouldn’t talk to me at all.”

  “Roger,” murmured Father Anthony, “says no. He did not kill McGovern, he says. That’s enough for me.”

  “But scarcely for the District Attorney, eh?” Ellery sighed again. “Then, since his automatic was used, it logically follows that—granted he’s telling the truth—some one stole it from him and replaced it secretly after the murder?”

  The men looked at one another uncomfortably, and Father Anthony smiled a faint proud smile. Then Scott growled: “Damnedest thing. Graham—that’s our lawyer—Graham he says to Roger: ‘Listen, young man. It’s absolutely necessary for you to testify that the gun could have been stolen from you. Your life may depend on it,’ and all that. And what do you think that young fool says? ‘No,’ he says, ‘that’s not the truth, Mr. Graham. Nobody did steal my gun. I’m a light sleeper,’ he says, ‘and the bureau with the gun in it is right next my bed. And I’d bolted my door that night. Nobody could have got in and taken it. So,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to testify to any such thing!’ ”

  Ellery expelled smoke in a whistle. “Our hero, eh? That’s—” He shrugged. “Now, this—ah—series of quarrels. If I understand correctly, it concerned—”

  “Iris Scott,” said a cool voice from the screen-door. “No don’t get up, Mr. Queen! Oh, it’s quite all right, father. I’m of age, and there’s no point in keeping from Mr. Queen what the whole town knows anyway.” Her voice stopped and caught on something. “What do you want to know, Mr. Queen?”

  “Mr. Queen, it was to be feared, was temporarily incapable of coherent speech. He was on his feet, gaping like a lout in a museum. If he had found a perfect diamond winking in the dust of Corsica’s Main Street he could not have been more flabbergasted. Beauty anywhere is a rarity; in Corsica it was a miracle. So this is Iris Scott, he thought. Well named, O Michael! She was fresh and soft and handsomely made, and dewy and delicate as the flower itself. Strange soil to spring from! Her queerly wide black eyes held him fascinated, and he lost himself in her loveliness. In the gloom of the doorway she stood alone, a thing of beauty. It was joy just to look at her. If there was seductiveness in her, it was the unconscious lure of perfection—the swoop of an eyebrow, the curve of lips, the poise of a sculptured breast.