Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Ellery Queen Object Lesson[2]

The third of Ellery’s battles with contemporary problems: the lack of schoolrooms — and how overcrowded classes may contribute to juvenile delinquency... One of the most important cases in Ellery’s career.

Ellery hurried down west 92nd Street toward the main entrance of Henry Hudson High School stealing guilty glances at his watch. Miss Carpenter had been crisply specific about place, date, and time: her home room, 109; Friday morning, April 22nd; first period (“Bell at 8:40, Mr. Queen”). Miss Carpenter, who had come to him with an unusual request, had struck him as the sort of dedicated young person who would not take kindly to a hitch in her crusade.

Ellery broke into an undignified lope.

The project for which she had enlisted his aid was formidable even for a crusading young teacher of Social Studies on the 9th Grade Junior High level. For two months merchants of the neighborhood had been reporting stores broken into by a teen-age gang. Beyond establishing that the crimes were the work of the same boys, who were probably students at Henry Hudson High School, the police had got nowhere.

Miss Carpenter, walking home from a movie late the previous Monday night, had seen three boys dive out of a smashed bakery window and vanish into an alley. She had recognized them as Howard Ruffo, David Strager, and Joey Buell, all 15-year-old homeroom students of hers. The juvenile crime problem was solved.

But not for Miss Carpenter. Instead of going to the police, Miss Carpenter had gone to Ellery, who lived on West 87th Street and was a hero to the youth of the neighborhood. Howard, David, and Joey were not hardened delinquents, she had told him, and she could not see their arrest, trial, and imprisonment as the solution to anything. True, they had substituted gang loyalty for the love and security they were denied in their unhappy slum homes, but boys who worked at after-school jobs and turned every cent in at home were hardly beyond recall, were they? And she had told him just where each boy worked, and at what.

“They’re only patterning their behavior after criminals because they think criminals are strong, successful, and glamorous,” Miss Carpenter had said; and what she would like him to do was visit her class and, under the pretext of giving a talk on the subject of Notorious Criminals I Have Known, paint such a picture of weak, ratting, empty, and violently ending criminality that David and Joey and Howard would see the error of their ways.

It had seemed to Ellery that this placed a rather hefty burden on his oratorical powers. Did Miss Carpenter have her principal’s permission for this project?

No, Miss Carpenter had replied bravely, she did not have Mr. Hinsdale’s permission, and she might very well lose her job when he heard about it. “But I’m not going to be the one who gives those boys the first shove toward reform school and maybe eventually the electric chair!” And besides, what did Mr. Queen have to lose but an hour of his time?

So Mr. Queen had feebly said yes, he would come; and here he was, at the door of the determined young woman’s classroom... seven minutes late.

Ellery braced himself and opened the door.

The moment he set foot in the room he knew he had walked in on a catastrophe.

Louise Carpenter stood tensely straight at her desk, her pretty face almost as white as the envelope she was clutching. And she was glaring at a mass of boy and girl faces so blankly, so furtively quiet that the silence sizzled.

The first thing she said to him was, “I’ve been robbed.”

The terrible mass of boy and girl eyes followed him to her desk. In his nose was the pungent smell of ink, glue, paper, chalk, musty wardrobe closets; surrounding him were discolored walls, peeling paint, tarnished fixtures, warped window poles, and mutilated desks.

“Robbed in my own classroom,” Miss Carpenter choked.

He laid his coat and hat gently on her desk. “A practical joke?” He smiled at the class.

“Hardly. They didn’t know you were coming.” They had betrayed her, the sick shock in her voice said. “Class, this is Ellery Queen. I don’t have to tell you who Mr. Queen is, and how honored we are to have him visit us.” There was a gasp, a buzz, a spatter of applause. “Mr. Queen was kind enough to come here today as a special treat to give us a talk on crime. I didn’t know he was going to walk in on one.”

The spatter stopped dead.

“You’re sure there has been a crime, Miss Carpenter?”

“An envelope with seven one-dollar bills in it was stolen, and from the way it happened the thief can only be someone in this room.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He deliberately looked them over, wondering which of the 41 pairs of eyes staring back at his belonged to Joey Buell, Howard Ruffo, and David Strager. He should have asked Louise Carpenter to describe them. Now it was too late.

Or was it?

It seemed to Ellery that three of the 20-odd boy faces were rather too elaborately blank. One of them was set on husky shoulders; this boy was blond, handsome, and dead-white about the nostrils. The second was a sharp-nosed, jet-haired boy with Mediterranean coloring who was perfectly still except for his fingers, and they kept turning a pencil over and over almost ritually. The third, thin and red-haired, showed no life anywhere except in a frightened artery in his temple.

Ellery made up his mind.

“Well, if it’s a real live crime,” he said, turning to Louise, “I don’t imagine anyone wants to hear me ramble on about crimes that are dead and buried. In fact, I think it would be more interesting if I gave the class a demonstration of how a crime is actually solved. What do you think, Miss Carpenter?”

Understanding leaped into her eyes, along with hope.

“I think,” she said grimly, “it would be lots more interesting.”

“Suppose we begin by finding out about the seven dollars. They were yours, Miss Carpenter?”

“One dollar was mine. Miss McDoud, an English teacher, is being married next month. A group of us are chipping in to buy her a wedding present, with me as banker. All this week teachers have been dropping in to leave their dollars in an envelope I’ve had on my desk. This morning—”

“That’s fine for background, Miss Carpenter. Suppose we hear testimony from the class.” Ellery surveyed them, and there was a ripple of tittering. Suddenly he pointed to a little lipsticked girl with an Italian haircut. “Would you like to tell us what happened this morning?”

“I don’t know anything about the money!”

“Chicken.” A boy’s jeering voice.

“The boy who said that.” Ellery kept his tone friendly. It was one of the three he had spotted, the husky blond one. “What’s your name, son?”

“David Strager.” His sneer said, You don’t scare me. But his nostrils remained dead-white. He was the boy Miss Carpenter had said worked after school as a stock boy at the Hi-Kwality Supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue.

“All right, Dave. You tell us about this morning.”

The boy glanced scornfully at the girl with the Italian haircut. “We all knew the money was in the envelope. This morning before the bell rings Mrs. Morrell comes in with her buck and Miss Carpenter puts it with the other money and lays the envelope on her desk. So afterward the bell rings, Mrs. Morrell beats it out, Miss Carpenter picks up the envelope and takes a look inside, and she hollers, ‘I been robbed.’ ”

The thin boy with the red hair called out, “So what are we supposed to do, drop dead?” and winked at David Strager, who had already sat down. The big blond boy winked back.

“And your name?” Ellery asked the redhead.

“Joseph Buell,” the boy answered defiantly. He was the one who worked at Kaplan’s, the big cigar, candy, and stationery store on 89th Street. “Who wants their old seven bucks?”

“Somebody not only wants it, Joey, somebody’s got it.”

“Aaa, for all we know she took it herself.” And this was the third of the trio, the sharp-faced dark boy. If Ellery was right, he was the one who delivered part-time for O’Donnel’s Dry Cleaning on Columbus Avenue.

“And you are—?”

“Howard Ruffo.”

The Three Musketeers, rushing to one another’s support.

“You mean, Howard, you’re charging Miss Carpenter with having stolen the teachers’ money?” Ellery asked with a smile.

The boy’s dark glance wavered. “I mean maybe she took it like by mistake. Mislaid it or somepin’.”

“As a matter of fact,” came Louise’s quiet voice, “when I saw the money wasn’t in the envelope, my first thought was exactly that, Mr. Queen. So I searched myself thoroughly.”

“May I see the envelope?”

“This isn’t the one I was keeping the seven dollars in—” she handed him the envelope — “though it looks the same. I have a box of them in my locker there. The lock hasn’t worked for ages. This one must have been stolen from my locker yesterday, or earlier this week.”

“It’s a blank envelope, Miss Carpenter. How do you know it isn’t the one that contained the money?”

“Because the original had a notation in ink on the flap — Gift Fund for Helen McDoud.” She looked about and glances fell in windrows. “So this theft was planned, Mr. Queen. Someone came to class this morning armed with this duplicate envelope, previously stolen and filled with worthless paper, prepared to make a quick exchange if the opportunity arose. And it did. The class was milling around while Mrs. Morrell and I chatted.”

The paper in the substitute envelope consisted of a sheaf of rectangular strips cut to the size of dollar bills.

“At the time you placed Mrs. Morrell’s dollar among the others in the original envelope, was everybody here?”

“Yes. The door opened and closed only once after that — when Mrs. Morrell left. I was facing the door the whole time.”

“Could Mrs. Morrell, as a practical joke, have made the switch?”

“She wasn’t anywhere near my desk after I laid the envelope on it.”

“Then you’re right, Miss Carpenter. The theft was planned in advance by one of the boys or girls in this room, and the thief — and money — are both still here.”

The tension was building beautifully. The boy must be in a sweat. He hadn’t expected his theft to be found out so soon, before he got a chance to sneak the money out of the room.

“What time does the first period end, Miss Carpenter?”

“At 9:35.”

Every head turned toward the clock on the wall.

“And it’s only 8:56.” Ellery said cheerfully. “That gives us thirty-nine minutes — more than enough time. Unless the boy or girl who planned this crime wants to return the loot to Miss Carpenter here and now?”

This time he stared directly from David to Howard to Joey. His stare said, I hate to do this, boys, but of course I’ll have to if you think you can get away with it.

The Strager boy’s full lips were twisted. The skinny redhead, Joey Buell, stared back sullenly. Howard Ruffo’s pencil twirled faster.

It’s one of those three, all right.

“I see we’ll have to do it the hard way,” Ellery said. “Sorry I can’t produce the thief with a flick of my wrist, the way it’s done in books, but in real life, detection — like crime — is pretty unexciting stuff. We’ll begin with a body search. It’s voluntary, by the way. Anybody rather not chance a search? Raise your hand.”

Not a muscle moved.

“I’ll search the boys. Miss Carpenter. You roll those two bulletin — boards over to that corner and search the girls.”

The next few minutes were noisy. As each boy was searched and released he was sent to the blackboard at the front of the room. The girls were sent to the rear.

“Find anything, Miss Carpenter?”

“Rose Perez has a single dollar bill. The other girls either have small change or no money at all.”

“No sign of the original envelope?”

“No.”

“I found two boys with bills — in each case a single, too. David Strager and Joey Buell. No envelope.”

Louise’s brows met.

Ellery glanced up at the clock. 9:07.

He strolled over to her. “Don’t show them you’re worried. There’s nothing to worry about. We have twenty-eight minutes.” He raised his voice, smiling. “Naturally the thief has ditched the money, hoping to recover it when the coast is clear. It’s therefore hidden somewhere in the classroom. All right, Miss Carpenter, we’ll take the desks and seats first. Look under them too — chewing gum makes a handy adhesive. Eh, class?”

Four minutes later they looked at each other, then up at the clock.

9:11.

Exactly 24 minutes remaining.

“Well,” said Ellery.

He began to ransack the room. Books, radiators, closets, lunch-bags, schoolbags. Bulletin boards, wall maps, the terrestrial globe. The UN poster, the steel engravings of Washington and Lincoln. He even emptied Louise’s three pots of geraniums and sifted the earth.

His eyes kept returning to the clock more and more often.

Ellery searched everything in the room, from the socket of the American flag to the insect-filled bowls of the old light fixtures, reached by standing on desks.

Everything.

“It’s not here!” whispered Louise in his ear.

The Buell, Ruffo, and Strager boys were nudging one another, grinning.

“Well, well,” Ellery said.

Interesting. Something of a problem at that.

Of course! He got up and checked two things he had missed — the cup of the pencil sharpener and the grid covering the loudspeaker of the PA system. No envelope. No money.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck.

Really it’s a little silly. A schoolboy!

Ellery glanced at the clock.

9:29.

Six minutes left in which not only to find the money but identify the thief!

He leaned against Louise’s desk, forcing himself to relax.

It was these “simple” problems. Nothing big and important like murder, blackmail, bank robbery. A miserable seven dollars lifted by a teen-age delinquent in an overcrowded classroom...

He thought furiously.

Let the bell ring at 9:35 and the boy strut out of Miss Carpenter’s room undetected, with his loot, and he would send up a howl like a wolf cub over his first kill. Who says these big-shot law jerks ain’t monkeys? The biggest! He’s a lot of nothin’. Wind. See me stand him on his ear? And this is just for openers. Wait till I get goin’ for real, not any of this kid stuff...

No, nothing big and important like murder. Just seven dollars, and a big shot to laugh at. Not important? Ellery nibbled his lip. It was probably the most important case of his career.

9:30½.

Only four and a half minutes left!

Louise Carpenter was gripping a desk, her knuckles white. Waiting to be let down.

Ellery pushed away from the desk and reached into the patch pocket of his tweed jacket for his pipe and tobacco, thinking harder about Helen McDoud’s seven dollar gift fund than he had ever thought about anything in his life.

And as he thought...

At 9:32 he was intently examining the rectangles of paper the thief had put into the substitute envelope. The paper was ordinary cheap newsprint, scissored to dollar-bill size out of a colored comics section. He shuffled through the dummy dollars one by one, hunting for something. Anything!

The 41 boys and girls were buzzing and giggling now.

Ellery pounced. Clinging to one of the rectangles was a needle-thin sliver of paper about an inch long, a sort of paper shaving. He fingered it, held it up to the light. It was not newsprint. Too full-bodied, too tough-textured...

Then he knew what it must be.

Less than two minutes left.

Feverishly he went through the remaining dollar-sized strips of comic paper.

And there it was. There it was!

This strip had been cut from the top of the comic sheet. On the margin appeared the name of a New York newspaper and the date April 24, 1955.

Think over. Take your time. Lots of seconds in a minute.

The buzzing and giggling had died. Louise Carpenter was on her feet, looking at him imploringly.

A bell began clanging in the corridor.

First period over.

9:35.

Ellery rose and said solemnly, “The case is solved.”

With the room cleared and the door locked, the three boys stood backed against the blackboard as if facing a firing squad. The bloom was gone from David Strager’s cheeks. The blood vessel in Joey Buell’s temple was trying to wriggle into his red hair. And Howard Ruffo’s eyes were liquid with panic.

It’s hard to be fifteen years old and trapped.

But harder not to be.

“Wha’d I do?” whimpered Howard Ruffo. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

“We didn’t take Miss Carpenter’s seven dollars,” said David Strager, stiff-lipped.

“Can you say the same about Mr. Mueller’s baked goods last Monday night, Dave?” Ellery paused gently. “Or any of the other things you boys have been making love to in the past two months?”

He thought they were going to faint.

“But this morning’s little job,” Ellery turned suddenly to the red-haired boy, “you pulled by yourself, Joey.”

The thin body quivered. “Who, me?”

“Yes, Joey, you.”

“You got rocks in your skull,” Joey whispered. “Not me!”

“I’ll prove it, Joey. Hand me the dollar bill I found in your jeans when I searched you.”

“That’s my dollar!”

“I know it, Joey. I’ll give you another for it. Hand it over... Miss Carpenter,”

“Yes, Mr. Queen!”

“To cut these strips of newspaper to the same size as dollar bills, the thief must have used a real bill as a pattern. If he cut too close, the scissors would shave off a sliver of the bill.” Ellery handed her Joey’s dollar. “See if this bill shows a slight indentation along one edge.”

“It does!”

“And I found this sliver clinging to one of the dummies. Fit the sliver to the indented edge of Joey’s bill. If Joey is guilty, it should fit exactly. Does it?”

Louise looked at the boy. “Joey, it does fit.”

David and Howard were gaping at Ellery.

“What a break,” Joey choked.

“Criminals make their own bad breaks, Joey. The thing inside you that told you were doing wrong made your hand shake as you cut. But even if your hand hadn’t slipped, I’d have known you were the one who substituted the strips of paper for the money.”

“How? How could you?” It was a cry of bewilderment.

Ellery showed him the rectangular strip with the white margin. “See this, Joey? Here’s the name of the newspaper, and the date is April 24, 1955. What date is today?”

“Friday the 22nd...”

“Friday, April 22nd. But these strips of colored comics come from the newspaper of April 24th, Joey — this coming Sunday’s paper. Who gets advance copies of the Sunday comics? Stores that sell newspapers in quantity. Getting the bulldog editions in advance gives them a jump on the Sunday morning rush, when they have to insert the news sections.

“Nothing to it, Joey. Which of you three boys had access before this morning to next Sunday’s bulldog editions? Not David — he works in a supermarket. Not Howard — he works for a dry cleaner. But you work in a big cigar and stationery store, Joey, where newspapers must be one of the stock items.”

Joey Buell’s eyes glassed over.

“We think we’re strong, Joey, and then we run into somebody stronger,” Ellery said. “We think we’re the smartest, and someone comes along to outsmart us. We beat the rap a dozen times, but the thirteenth time the rap beats us. You can’t win, Joey.”

Joey burst into tears.

Louise Carpenter made an instinctive gesture toward him. Ellery’s head-shake warned her back. He went close to the boy and tousled the red head, murmuring something the others could not hear. And after a while Joey’s tears sniffled to an end and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve in a puzzled way.

“Because I think this is going to work out all right, Joey,” Ellery said, continuing their curious colloquy aloud. “We’ll have a session with Mr. Hinsdale, and then with some pretty right guys I happen to know at Police Headquarters. After that it will be up to you.”

Joey Buell gulped. “Okay, Mr. Queen.” He did not look at his two friends.

David and Howard communicated silently. Then David turned to Ellery. “Where do we stand, Mr. Queen?”

“You and Howard are coming along.”

The blond boy bit his lip. Then he nodded, and after a moment the dark boy nodded, too.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Ellery dipped briskly into the jacket pocket that held his pipe and tobacco. His hand reappeared with a wrinkled envelope, its flap written over. From the envelope protruded the corners of some one-dollar bills. “Your Helen McDoud wedding gift fund. Miss Carpenter. With Joey’s compliments.”

“I did forget!” gasped Louise. “Where did you find it?”

“Where Joey in desperation slipped it as I was frisking the other boys. The only thing in the room I didn’t think of searching — my own pocket.” Ellery winked at the three boys. “Coming fellas?”