The Egyptian Cross Mystery

If the problem was too much for him, it was certainly too much for Coroner Stapleton, District Attorney Crumit, Colonel Pickett, the Coroner’s jury, the citizens of Arroyo and Weirton, and the scores of newspapermen who had flocked to town on the day of the inquest. Directed by the Coroner, who sternly resisted the temptation to leap to the obvious but unsupported solution, the jury scratched its collective head and brought in a verdict of “death at the hands of person or persons unknown.” The newspapermen prowled about for a day or so, Colonel Pickett and District Attorney Crumit went about in ever slowing circles, and finally the case died in the press — a death warrant indeed.

Ellery returned to New York with a philosophic shrug. He was inclined to believe, the longer he mulled over the problem, that the explanation was after all simple. There was no reason, he felt, to doubt the overwhelming indications of the evidence. Circumstantial, to be sure, but positive in their implications. There was a man by the name of Velja Krosac, an English-speaking foreigner, something of a charlatan, who for dark reasons of his own had planned, sought, and finally taken the life of a country schoolmaster, also foreign-born. The method, while interesting from the criminological standpoint, was not necessarily important. It was the horrible but comprehensible expression of a mind buckled by the strange fires of manic psychology. What lay behind — what sordid story of fancied wrong or religious fanaticism or blood-demanding vengeance — would probably never be known. Krosac, his gruesome mission accomplished, would naturally vanish, and perhaps even now was on the high seas, bound for his native country. Kling, the manservant? Undoubtedly the innocent victim, caught between two fires, done away with by the executioner because he had witnessed the crime or caught a glimpse of the murderer’s face. Kling represented in all likelihood a bridge that Krosac felt compelled to burn behind him. After all, a man who did not shrink from severing a human head merely to illustrate in broken flesh the symbol of his revenge would hardly turn squeamish at the necessity of killing an unexpected danger to his own safety.

And so Ellery returned to New York to accept the shrewd twigging of the Inspector.

“I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” chuckled the old man over the dinner table on the night of Ellery’s return, “but I want to point out a moral.”

“Do,” murmured Ellery, attacking a chop.

“The moral is: Murder is murder, and ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of the murders committed anywhere on the face of the globe, you young idiot, are as easy as pie to explain. Nothing fancy, you understand.” The Inspector beamed. “I don’t know what in time you expected to accomplish down in that God-forsaken country, but any flatfoot pounding a beat could have told you the answer.”