They were in a small foyer, through the open door of which they could see into a large room filled with men. Ellery brushed by a uniformed officer, nodded to his father—a small bird-like creature with gray plumage and bright little eyes—and stared down at a still figure in an armchair beside a small table in the center of the room.

  “Strangled?”

  “Yes,” said Inspector Queen. “And who’s this with you, Ellery?”

  “Mr. Seaman Carter, Superintendent of the building.” Ellery idly explained the purpose of Carter’s visit; his eyes were roving.

  “Carter, who’s this dead man?” demanded the Inspector. “No one here seems to know.”

  Carter shifted, from one elephantine foot to the other. “Who?” he babbled. “Who? Why, isn’t it Mr. Lubbock?”

  A foppish young man in morning coat dotted with a boutonnière coughed hesitantly. They turned to stare at him. “It’s not Lubbock, Mr. Carter,” he lisped. “Though it does look like him from the back.” His simpering lips were pale with fear.

  “Who’s that?” asked Ellery.

  “Fullis, my assistant,” muttered the Superintendent. “Heavens, Fullis, you’re right at that.” He pushed around the armchair for a better view of the body.

  A trim tall man with a ruddy complexion came briskly into the room. He was carrying a black bag. Carter addressed him as Dr. Eustace. The physician set his bag down by the chair and proceeded to examine the dead man. Dr. Eustace was the house physician.

  Ellery drew the Inspector aside. “Anything?” he asked in low tones.

  The Inspector gasped over a generous noseful of snuff. “Nothing. A complete mystery. Body was found by accident about an hour or so ago. A woman from Apartment C across the central corridor came in here to see John Lubbock, who lives alone in this two-room suite. At least, that’s what she says.” He moved his head slightly in the direction of a platinum-haired young woman, whose tears had played havoc with the careful lacquer on her face; she was sitting forlornly across the room guarded by a policeman. “She’s Billy Harms, the ingénue of that punk comedy at the Roman Theater. Managed to squeeze out of her the information that she’s been Lubbock’s playmate for a couple of months; her maid tells me—thank God for maids!—that she and Lubbock had a lovers’ battle a few weeks ago. Seems he won’t pay her rent any more, and I guess the market on sugar-daddies has gone ’way down.”

  “Lovely people,” said Ellery. “And?”

  “She walked herself plump in here—seems it was sort of dim; only a small light in the lamp on the table—thought this chap was asleep, shook him, saw he wasn’t Lubbock and that he was dead….The old story. She screamed and a lot of people ran in—neighbors. Over there.” Ellery saw five people huddled near Billy Harms’s chair. “They all live on this floor. That elderly couple—Mr. and Mrs. Orkins, Apartment A across the hall. The sour-faced mutt next to the Orkinses is a jeweler, Benjamin Schley—Apartment B. Those other two people are Mr. and Mrs. Forrester—he’s got some kind of soft job with the city; they’re in Apartment D, next to Billy Harms.”

  “Get anything out of them?”

  “Not a lead.” The Inspector bit off the end of a gray hair from his mustache. “Lubbock left here this morning and hasn’t been seen since. He’s a man-about-town, it seems, and he’s been pretty gay with the ladies. Understand from one of the house-maids that he’s been playing around with Mrs. Forrester, too—kind of pretty, isn’t she? But there doesn’t seem to be any connection with the others.” He shrugged. “Had a few feelers out already—Lubbock has no business and nobody seems to know his source of income. Anyway, it’s not Lubbock we’re interested in right now, although we’re trying to locate him. Got Hagstrom on the job. But none of the people employed here can say who this feller is that was choked. Never saw him before, they say; and there’s nothing in his effects to show who he is.”

  Dr. Eustace signaled the Inspector; he had risen from his inspection of the corpse. The Queens moved back toward the chair. “What’s the dope, Doctor?” asked the Inspector.

  “Strangled to death from behind,” replied the physician, “a little more than an hour ago. That’s really all I can tell, sir.”

  “That’s a help, that is.”

  Ellery strolled over to the little table by the dead man’s chair. The contents of the man’s clothes had been dumped there. A worn cheap wallet containing fifty-seven dollars; a few coins; a small automatic; a single Yale key; a New York evening newspaper; a crumpled program of the Roman Theater; the torn half of a Roman Theater ticket, dated that very day; two soiled handkerchiefs; a stiff new packet of matches, its flap bearing the imprint of the Gothic Arms; a glistening green cigaret package, half of the tin-foil and blue seal at the top torn away. The package contained four cigarets, although it was apparently a fresh one and retained its full shape.

  A meagre enough grist on the surface.

  Ellery picked up the small key. “Have you identified this?” he asked the Inspector.

  “Yes. It’s the key to this apartment.”

  “A duplicate?”

  Mr. Seaman Carter took it from Ellery’s hand with slippery fingers, fumbled with it, consulted with lisping Fullis, and returned it to Ellery. “That’s the original, Mr. Queen,” he quavered. “Not the duplicate.”

  Ellery flung the key on the table; his sharp eyes began to prowl. He spied a small metal waste-basket beneath the table, and dug it out. It was clean and empty except for a crumpled ball of tin-foil and blue paper, and a crushed cellophane wrapper. Ellery at once matched his finds to the package of cigarets; he smoothed out the silver-and-blue scrap and discovered that it exactly fitted the hole torn in the top of the package.

  The Inspector smiled at his look of concentration. “Don’t get excited, sonny boy. He walked in the lobby downstairs from the street about an hour and a half ago, and bought that pack of butts at the desk; got the matches there, too, of course. Then he came upstairs. Elevatorman let him off at this floor, and that’s the last any one saw of him.”

  “Except his murderer,” said Ellery with a frown. “And yet…Did you look into this package, dad?”

  “No. Why?”

  “If you had, you would have seen that there are only four cigarets here. And that, I believe, is significant.”

  He said nothing more and commenced a leisurely amble about the room. It was large, rich, and furnished with a dilettante’s taste. But Ellery was not interested in John Lubbock’s interior decorations at the moment; he was looking for ash-trays. He saw several scattered about, of different shapes and sizes; all of them were perfectly clean. His eyes lowered to the floor, and leveled again as if they had not found what they were seeking. “Does that lead to the bedroom?” he asked, pointing to a door at the southeast corner of the room. The Inspector nodded, and Ellery crossed the room and disappeared through the doorway.

  A group of newcomers—a police-photographer, a fingerprint man, the Assistant Medical Examiner of New York County—invaded the living room as Ellery left; he could hear dull booms from flashlights and the crackling insistence of the Inspector as the old man began to requestion the tenants of the sixteenth floor.

  Ellery looked about the bedroom. The bed was a canopied affair, ornate with silk and tassels; there was a lush Chinese rug on the floor; and the furniture and fripperies made his simple eyes ache. He looked for exits. There were three doors—the one he had just opened from the living room; one to his right, which on investigation he found opened out on the west corridor; and one to his left. He tried the knob of this door; it was locked, but there was a key in the keyhole. He unlocked the door and found himself looking into a room devoid of furniture, architecturally the counterpart of Lubbock’s bedroom. Further investigation revealed an empty living room and a bare foyer. This, as he could see, was Apartment G; obviously unoccupied. All doors leading into Apartment G, as he discovered at once, were unlocked.

  Ellery sighed, returned to Lubbock’s bedroom, and turned the key in the lock, leaving it there. On impulse he paused to take out his handkerchief and wipe the knob clean. Then he proceeded directly to a wardrobe and began to rummage through the pockets of the numerous men’s garments hanging on a rack inside—there were coats, suits, hats in profusion. He went through a curious routine; he seemed to be interested in nothing but crumbs. He turned pockets inside out and examined the sediment in the crevices. “No tobacco grains,” he murmured to himself. “Interesting—but where the deuce does it get me?”

  Then he carefully restored all pockets and garments to their original condition, closed the wardrobe, and went to the west corridor door. He opened it, stepped out, and hurried down the corridor to the front door of Lubbock’s suite. He caught sight of the photographer, the fingerprint man, Sergeant Velie, and the tall, lank, saturnine figure of Dr. Prouty, Assistant Medical Examiner, standing near the elevators engaged in amiable conversation.

  Nodding to the detective on guard before Apartment H—the man was still whistling—Ellery entered the foyer and repeated his odd examination of pockets in all the garments hanging in the foyer-closet; a fruitless quest, to judge from his expression.

  Raised voices from the living room made him close the closet-door with a little snap. He heard his father say: “You’d better pull yourself together, Mr. Lubbock.”

  Ellery hurried into the living room. The neighbors had left, or had been sent to their apartments under guard. Of the original cast of the drama, only Mr. Seaman Carter and Dr. Eustace remained. But there was a newcomer—a small, slender, sunken-cheeked dandy with sandy hair and blue eyes whose well-scraped jaws wabbled ludicrously as he stared down at the dead man.

  “Who’s this?” asked Ellery pleasantly.

  The man turned, looked at him without intelligence and twisted his head back toward the corpse.

  “Mr. John Lubbock,” said the Inspector. “Tenant of this apartment. He’s just been found—Hagstrom brought him in. And we’ve identified the lad in the chair.”

  Ellery studied John Lubbock’s face. “Relative of yours, Mr. Lubbock? There’s a distinct resemblance.”

  “Yes,” said Lubbock hoarsely, coming to life. “He’s—he was my brother. I—he got into town from Guatemala this morning; he was an engineer and we hadn’t seen each other for three years. Looked me up at one of my clubs. I had an appointment, gave him the key to my apartment, and he said he’d take in a matinée and meet me here late this afternoon. And here I find him—” He squared his shoulders, sucked in his breath, and sanity crept back into his marbly blue eyes. “It’s beyond my comprehension.”

  “Mr. Lubbock,” said the Inspector, “did your brother have any enemies?”

  The sandy-haired man gripped the edge of the table. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Harry never wrote me anything—anything like that.”

  Ellery said: “Mr. Lubbock, I want you to examine these things on the table. They are the contents of your brother’s pockets. Is anything missing that should be here?”

  The dilettante looked at the table. He shook his head. “I really wouldn’t know,” he said.

  Ellery touched his arm. “Are you certain his cigaret-case isn’t missing, Mr. Lubbock?”

  Lubbock started, and something like curiosity came into his dull eyes. As for the Inspector, he was petrified with astonishment.

  “Cigaret-case? What’s this about a cigaret-case, Ellery? We haven’t found any such thing!”

  “Precisely the point,” said Ellery gently. “Well, Mr. Lubbock?”

  Lubbock moistened his dry lips. “Now that you mention it—yes,” he said with, an effort. “Though how in God’s name you knew is more than I can see. Why, I forgot it myself! Before Harry left the States for Central America three years ago he showed me two cigaret-cases, exactly alike.” He fumbled in the inner breast-pocket of his jacket and brought out a shallow dull-black case, intricately inset with an Oriental design in silver, one tiny sliver of which was missing from its groove.

  Ellery opened the case, which contained half a dozen cigarets, with shining eyes; a rabid worshiper of the weed himself, cigaret-cases were one of Ellery’s cherished passions.

  “A friend of Harry’s,” continued Lubbock wearily, “sent the two cases to him from Bangkok. Finest teak wood in the world comes from the East Indies, you know. Harry gave one of them to me, and I’ve had it ever since. But how did you know, Mr. Queen, that—”

  Ellery snapped the lid down and returned the case to Lubbock. He was smiling. “It’s our business to know things, although really my knowledge isn’t the least bit mysterious.”

  Lubbock was stowing the case carefully away in his breast-pocket—quite as if it were a treasure—when there came a mutter of voices from the foyer and two white-clad internes marched in. The Inspector nodded; they unrolled their stretcher, hauled the dead man out of the armchair, dumped him unceremoniously upon the canvas, covered him with a blanket, and marched out toting their burden as if it were a side of fresh-killed beef. John Lubbock clutched the edge of the table again, his pale face grew paler, he gulped, retched, and began to slip to the floor.

  “Here! You, Eustace! Doc Prouty, out there! Quick!” cried the Inspector as he and Ellery lunged forward and caught the fainting man. Dr. Eustace opened his bag as Dr. Prouty dashed in. Lubbock muttered thickly: “Guess it was—too much—for me—seeing them take—Poor Harry…Give me a sedative—something—brace me up.”

  Dr. Prouty snorted and went right out again. Dr. Eustace produced a bottle and thrust it beneath Lubbock’s nostrils. They quivered and Lubbock grinned faintly. “Here,” said Ellery, pulling out his own cigaret-case. “Have a smoke. Do your nerves good.” But Lubbock shook his head and pushed the pellet away. “I’ll—be all right,” he gasped, struggling erect. “Sorry.”

  Ellery said to Superintendent Carter, who stood like a blind rhinoceros near the table, perspiration pouring down his face: “Please send up the maid who cleans this suite, Mr. Carter. At once.”

  The fat man nodded eagerly and waddled out of the living room as fast as his jelly legs could carry him. Sergeant Velie, strolling in, scowled at Carter with disgust. Ellery glanced at his father, jerked his head toward the foyer, and the old man said: “You stay here and rest up a bit, Mr. Lubbock; we’ll be back shortly.”

  Ellery and the Inspector went out into the foyer, and Ellery very softly closed the door to the living room.

  “What the devil’s up now?” growled the Inspector.

  Ellery smiled and said: “Wait.” He put his hands behind his back and began to stroll about.

  A trim little colored girl in black regalia hurried up to the apartment door, her face an alarming violet.

  “Ah,” said Ellery. “Come in. You’re the maid who cleans this suite regularly?”

  “Yes, suh!”

  “You cleaned it this morning as usual?”

  “Yes, suh!”

  “And were there any ashes in the ashtrays?”

  “No, suh! Nevuh is in Mistuh Lubbock’s apa’tment ’ceptin’ when he’s had comp’ny.”

  “You’re positive of that?”

  “Cross mah haht, suh!”

  The girl retreated hastily. The Inspector said: “I’ll be jiggered.”

  Ellery had dropped his cloak of insouciance; he drew his father’s slender little body closer. “Listen. The maid’s testimony was all we needed. Delicate situation, O venerable ancestor. Follow my reasoning.

  “The package of cigarets from Harry Lubbock’s pocket: a fresh package, observe, confirmed by the fact that he purchased it just before coming up here, by the scrap, of perfectly fitting tin-foil and blue paper from the basket, by the cellophane wrapper, and by the uncrushed condition of the package itself. Harry Lubbock came up here to wait for his brother. He sat down in the armchair, his back to the foyer door. He didn’t smoke; no ashes anywhere; no cigaret-stubs. Yet despite the fact that this was a new package, we find only four cigarets inside. What happened to the other sixteen, since there are twenty to the pack? First possibility is that his murderer took them away, stealing them from the package. Psychologically rotten—can’t visualize a murderer taking fresh cigarets from his victim’s package. Second possibility: that Lubbock himself opened the package before the arrival of the murderer in order to fill a cigaret-case. This would explain the peculiar number of missing cigarets; many cigaret-cases hold sixteen. Yes, I was convinced that the sixteen missing cigarets had been placed by Harry Lubbock, the engineer, in his case. But where was the case? Obviously, since it’s gone, the murderer took it away.” The Inspector chewed upon that, then nodded. “Good! Now where are we? The cigarets themselves, being brand new, couldn’t have been the object of the theft. Then the case must have been the object of the theft!”

  Inspector-Queen pursed his old lips. “Why? There certainly isn’t a hidden spring or compartment in that case. It’s not thick enough to conceal a Chinaman’s breath in the wood itself.”

  “Don’t know, sire, don’t know. Haven’t the faintest notion why. But it’s so.

  “Now as to John Lubbock. Three psychological indications….But I’ll give them to you more graphically. Maid’s testimony: no ashes in this apartment, ever, except after guests. Sign of a non-smoker? Oui, papa. John Lubbock half faints, asks for a sedative, and refuses the cigaret I offer him! Sign of a non-smoker? Decidedly; in moments of emotional stress a smoker by habit falls back on the weed—it’s the nicotine-addict’s nerve soother. And third: there isn’t a shred of tobacco in any pocket of any garment in John Lubbock’s closets! Ever examine my coat-pocket? There’s always tobacco in small grains lurking in the crevices. None in John Lubbock’s clothes. Sign of a non-smoker? You answer.”

  “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!”