Finally, he sat down. “To tell you the truth,” he confessed, “it doesn’t mean an awful lot to me. That letter signed Smith is a phony, of course; just a neat way of wiping out the trail to himself. The only thing I get out of the whole set-up is that the original plan was to bump Blythe off, and that something happened to make this Smith give Jack the works, too.”
“The essential point,” murmured Ellery.
“But why was Jack knocked off? Why were the warnings sent at all?” The Inspector waved his arms. “And what’s the idea of starting on Bonnie Stuart now? Say!” His eyes narrowed. “So that’s why you had me put a day-and-night tail on her!”
“If you’ll recall, I asked you to have her watched before the first warning was sent to her.”
“Then why—”
“Call it a hunch. The cards to Bonnie later confirmed it.”
“So now she’s elected,” muttered Glücke. “No savvy.”
“Have you seen her today?”
“I tried to locate her when I found out about the anonymous letters, but she’s not home, and my men haven’t reported. Matter of fact, Royle isn’t around, either.”
A chilly finger pressed on Ellery’s spine. “You haven’t been able to locate Ty?”
“Nope.” The Inspector looked startled. “Say, you don’t think he’s behind these letters? That he’s the one—!” He jumped up again. “Sure! You say yourself these last messages to Bonnie were typed on his machine!” He grabbed his phone. “Miller! Hop down to the Magna Studios on the double and bring back the typewriter in Ty Royle’s dressing-room. Careful with it — prints.” He hung up, rubbing his hands. “We’ll have to go easy, of course. Proving he sent the cards doesn’t prove he pulled the double murder. But just the same it’s a start. Motive galore—”
“You mean he killed his father, too?”
Glücke looked uncomfortable. “Well, I said we’d go easy. There’s a lot of questions to clear up. Keep this under your hat, Queen, while I start the ball rolling.”
“Oh, I will,” said Ellery dryly.
The Inspector grinned and hurried out. Ellery mused over a cigaret. When the Inspector came back he was beaming.
“We’ll locate him in short order, of course. Then a day-and-night tail without his knowledge. I’m having his house fine-combed. Maybe we’ll turn up something on the morphine and sodium allurate, too — check over his movements for a couple of weeks, drug purchases, and so on. It’s a start; it’s a start.”
“Of course, you know Ty physically couldn’t have been that masked pilot,” Ellery pointed out.
“Sure not, but he could have hired some one as a blind. Swell blind, too, having himself held up with a gun and tied like a rooster. With the girl as witness, too.”
Ellery sighed. “I hesitate to dampen your enthusiasm, Glücke, but you’re all wrong.”
“Hey? Wrong? How’s that?” Glücke looked startled.
“Ty never wrote those letters — no, any more than Jack wrote the ones that came to Blythe.”
The Inspector sucked his finger. “How come?” He looked disappointed.
“You might examine,” drawled Ellery, “the faces of the h and r keys on this machine.”
Glücke did so, frowning. The frown disappeared magically, to be replaced by a scowl. “Filed!”
“Exactly. And when you examine Ty’s typewriter, you’ll find that the b and d and t are similarly filed. There could be only one purpose in a deliberate mutilation of typewriter keys — identification of the machine from a sample of its writing. Well, who would want Jack Royle’s machine to be easily identified as the machine which typed the code sheet behind the anonymous letters? Jack Royle? Hardly, if he was sending them. And the same goes for Ty and his machine.”
“I know, I know,” said Glücke irritably. “Framed, by God.”
“So we can be sure of several things. First, that Jack Royle did not send those card messages to Blythe. Second, that Ty Royle did not send those card messages to Bonnie. And third — this follows a pattern of probability — from the fact that the same method of mutilation was used on both machines, filing of keys, a conclusion that the same person mutilated both, and consequently the same person sent both series of messages.”
“But a frame of two men!”
“See what we have. Originally a plan to murder Blythe, and in doing so to frame Jack for the murder by the device of sending those otherwise infantile messages, leaving a trail to them through Jack’s typewriter.”
“But Jack was killed, too.”
“Yes, but we also know the murderer had to change his original plans. Somehow that change necessitated the killing of Jack and the abandonment of the frame-up against him by virtue of the very fact that he had to be murdered.”
“But the cards kept coming.”
“Because the murderer had set up the machinery for having them mailed and didn’t want to risk stopping it. Think now, Glücke. We have a change of plan. Jack’s murder. Then the cards start coming to Bonnie. Had the original plans been followed through, it’s reasonable to assume that Jack would continue to be framed. But with Jack dead, some one else must be framed for the threats against Bonnie. Who? Well, we know now it’s Ty being framed for those threats. It all adds up to one thing.”
“Keep talking,” said the Inspector intently.
“Some one is using the Royle-Stuart feud as a motive background for his crime. He’s throwing you a ready-made motive. So the feud can’t be the motive at all.”
“The pilot!”
Ellery looked thoughtful. “Any trace of the pilot yet?”
“Damned shadow simply vanished. We’re still plugging along on it. I’ve sort of become discouraged myself.” He eyed Ellery. “Did you know I’ve cleared Alessandro?”
“Cleared?” Ellery elevated his brows.
“That hundred and ten grand Jack owed him was really paid. No doubt about it.”
“Was there ever any?”
The Inspector looked suspicious. “You knew it!”
“As a matter of fact, I did. How did you find out?”
“Checked over bank accounts. Found that Jack had cashed a check for a hundred and ten thousand dollars in the bank on the morning of Thursday, the fourteenth.”
“Not his bank, surely; they wouldn’t honor a check of that size for him so quickly. Tolland Stuart’s bank?”
“How’d you know that?” exploded Glücke.
“Guessed. I do know the check was signed by old man Stuart and was dated the thirteenth. I know because I asked the terrible-tempered old coot just yesterday.”
“How come Stuart forked over all that dough to Jack? Jack didn’t mean anything to him. Or did he?”
“I think not. It was Blythe’s work. She took Jack with her that Wednesday to see her father, pleaded for the money for Jack’s sake, not for her own. He says he gave it to her to get rid of both of them.”
“Sounds screwy enough to be true. Even if it wasn’t the reason, the signature’s genuine; we know the old gent did make out a check for that amount.”
“Anything else turn up?”
“Nope. Our leads on Jack’s lady-friends petered out; every one of ’em had an alibi. And the poison — not a trace.” Ellery drummed on the arm of his chair. Glücke scowled. “But this frame-up, now. If Ty’s being framed, this last card was an awful dumb one to send the girl! What kind of cluck are we dealing with, anyway?”
“A cluck who puts morphine into people’s cocktails and sends ’em dumb messages. Perplexing, isn’t it?”