The Egyptian Cross Mystery

Vaughn nodded. “Nobody’s doubting you people. But we’ll take a look at your log, anyway.”

Megara spread his legs and teetered back and forth; it was easy to imagine him straddling a ship’s bridge, swaying to the lift and fall of a deep-sea vessel. “Nobody’s doubting us. Indeed! Not that I care a damn if you do, you understand... The closest we came to death on the whole voyage was a pain in the groin that I developed off Suva.”

Isham looked uncomfortable, and the Inspector turned to Ellery. “Well, Mr. Queen, what’s buzzing around in your noddle? You’ve got a notion, I can see that.”

“I’m afraid, Inspector, from this material evidence,” said Ellery, pointing to the memorandum and the slip, “that we can’t very well believe Krosac intended us to think Mr. Megara his partner’s murderer.” He puffed on a cigarette before continuing. “The pipe...” He flicked the ashes of his cigarette toward the odd brier in Megara’s hand. “Krosac must have known that Mr. Megara would have an unimpeachable alibi for the general period of the murder. We discount any surmise, therefore, in that direction. But from the facts that this is Mr. Megara’s pipe and that Brad would not have smoked it, we can now establish a tenable theory.”

“Smart,” said Professor Yardley, “if true. How?”

“Brad would not have smoked this Neptune’s-head pipe, the property of his partner. Yet it has been smoked — handled, apparently, by the victim himself. But if Brad would not have smoked the pipe and yet there are evidences on it that he did, what have we?”

“Ingenious,” muttered the Professor. “The pipe was made to appear as if Brad smoked it. It would be child’s play to place the dead man’s fingerprints on its stem.”

“Precisely!” cried Ellery. “And the job of making the pipe look as if it had been smoked would be simple. Perhaps the murderer himself actually loaded it, lighted it, and puffed a bowlful. Too bad the Bertillon system doesn’t take into account the variations of individual bacteria; there’s an idea!... Now, who might want to make it appear that Brad had smoked this pipe? Surely only the murderer. Why? To confirm the impression that Brad had wandered out — in a smoking jacket — to the summerhouse smoking the pipe, and had been attacked and killed there.”

“Sounds likely,” confessed Isham. “But why should Krosac do that with Mr. Megara’s pipe? Why didn’t he pick one of Brad’s own?”

Ellery shrugged. “There’s a simple answer to that, if you stop to think about it. Krosac, got the pipe — where? In the drawer of the reading table in the library. Is that right, Mr. Megara?”

“Probably,” said Megara. “Tom kept all his pipes there. When he found mine after I left, he must have put it away in the same drawer against my return.”

“Thank you. Now, going to the drawer, Krosac sees a number of pipes. He naturally assumes they all belong to Brad. He wants to leave one pipe to make it appear that Brad was smoking in the summerhouse. So he selects a pipe which is most distinctive in appearance, going on the excellent theory that the most distinctive-looking pipe will be the most easily identified pipe. Ergo — Neptune. Fortunately for us, however, Neptune was the property of Mr. Megara, not Brad.

“Ah,” proceeded Ellery in a sharp voice, “but here we come to an interesting deduction. Friend Krosac has gone to considerable trouble, has he not, to make it appear that Brad was attacked and killed while he was smoking in the summerhouse? For, you see, had there been no pipe and no evidence of smoking, we should have questioned Brad’s presence in the summerhouse, especially since he was wearing a smoking jacket; he might have been dragged there. But when we know that a man was smoking in a certain place, we know that up to a certain point, at least, he was there of his own free will... Now we find, however, that he was not smoking there, and we know the murderer wants us to believe he was. The only sane inference is that the summerhouse was not the scene of the crime, but that the murderer wanted us very much to believe it was.”

Megara was regarding Ellery with a speculative and rather cynical light in his eye. The others kept silent.

Ellery flipped his cigarette out through the doorway. “The next step is surely clear. Since this isn’t the scene of the crime, some other place is. We must find that place and examine it. Finding it, I believe, will offer no difficulty. The library, of course. Brad was last seen alive there, occupied in playing checkers with himself. He was waiting for someone, for he had carefully cleared the house of possible witnesses or interrupters.”

“Just a minute.” Megara’s mouth was hard. “That’s a pretty speech and good hearing, Mr. Queen, but it happens to be all wrong.”