Murder Most Foul Read online

  “Is he…is he—” began Jim Coyle, gulping.

  “The long count,” said the Inspector grimly. “Here, help me turn him over.”

  They turned him over. He lay staring up into the blinding arc-light. He was completely dressed; his hat was still jammed on his head and a gray tweed topcoat was wrapped about his body, still buttoned. He had been stabbed ten times in the abdomen and chest, through his topcoat. There had been a great deal of bleeding; his coat was sticky with it.

  “Body’s warm,” said the Inspector. “This happened just a few minutes ago.” He rose from the dust and stared unseeingly at the crowd which had gathered.

  “Maybe,” began the champion, licking his lips, “maybe—”

  “Maybe what, Jim?” asked the Inspector.

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Why don’t you go home? Don’t let this spoil your night, kid.”

  Coyle set his jaw. “I’ll stick around.”

  The Inspector yelled copper.

  Police came, and Phil Maguire and Paula Paris returned, and Ollie Stearn and others appeared from across the street, and the crowd thickened, and Ellery crawled into the back of Stearn’s car.

  The rear of the red limousine was a shambles. Blood stained the upholstery and the floor-rug, which was wrinkled and scuffed. A large coal button with a scrap of fabric still clinging to it lay on one of the cushions, beside a crumpled camel’s-hair coat.

  Ellery seized the coat. The button had been torn from it. The front of the coat, like the front of the murdered man’s coat, was badly bloodstained. But the stains had a pattern. When Ellery laid the coat on the seat, front up, and slipped the buttons through the buttonholes, the bloodstains met.

  The Inspector poked his head in. “What’s that thing?”

  “The murderer’s coat.”

  “Let’s see that!”

  “It won’t tell you anything about its wearer. Fairly cheap coat, label’s been ripped out—no identifying marks. Do you see what must have happened in here, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “The murder took place, of course, in this car, and the killer was wearing this coat.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because there’s every sign of a fierce struggle, so fierce Brown managed to tear off one of the coat buttons of his assailant’s coat. In the course of the struggle Brown was stabbed many times. His blood flowed freely. It got all over not only his own coat, but the murderer’s as well. From the position of the bloodstains the murderer’s coat must have been buttoned at the time of the struggle, which means he was wearing it.”

  The Inspector nodded. “Left it behind because he didn’t want to be seen in a bloody coat. Ripped out all identifying marks.”

  From behind the Inspector came Paula’s tremulous voice. “Could that be your camel’s-hair coat, Ellery?”

  Ellery looked at her in an odd way. “No, Paula.”

  “What’s this?” demanded the Inspector.

  “Ellery left his topcoat in Phil’s car before the fight,” Paula explained. “I told him somebody would steal it, and somebody did. And now there’s a camel’s-hair coat—in this car.”

  “It isn’t mine,” said Ellery patiently. “Mine has certain distinguishing characteristics which don’t exist in this one—cigarette burn at the second buttonhole, a hole in the right pocket.”

  The Inspector shrugged and went away.

  “Then your coat’s being stolen has nothing to do with it?” Paula shivered.

  “On the contrary,” said Ellery, “the theft of my coat has everything to do with it.”

  Ollie Stearn’s chauffeur, a hard-looking customer, twisted his cap and said, “Mike tells me after the fight he won’t need me. Tells me he’ll pick me up on the Grand Concourse. Said he’d drive himself.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was kind of—curious. I had a hot dog at the stand there and I—watched. I seen Mike come over and climb into the back—”

  “Was he alone?” demanded the Inspector.

  “Yeah. Just got in and sat there. A couple of drunks come along then, and I couldn’t see good. Only seemed to me somebody else come over and got into the car with Mike.”

  “Who? Who was it?”

  The chauffeur shook his head. “I couldn’t see good. don’t know. After a while I thought ‘it ain’t my business,’ so I walks away. But when I heard police sirens, I come back.”

  “The one who came after Mike Brown,” said Ellery, “was that person wearing a coat?”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “You didn’t see anything else that occurred?” persisted Ellery.

  “Nope.”

  “Doesn’t matter, really,” muttered Ellery. “Line’s clear. Clean as the sun. Must be that—”

  “What are you mumbling about?” demanded Miss Paris in his ear.

  Ellery started. “Was I mumbling?” He shook his head.

  Then a man from Headquarters came up with a dude-ish little fellow who babbled he didn’t know nothing, he didn’t know nothing; and the Inspector said, “Come on, Oetjens. You were heard shooting off your mouth in that bar. What’s the dope?”

  The little fellow said shrilly, “I don’t want no trouble, no trouble. I only said—”

  “Yes?”

  “Mike Brown looked me up this morning,” muttered Oetjens, “and he says to me, ‘Hymie,’ he says, ‘Happy Day knows you. Happy Day takes a lot of your bets,’ he says, ‘so go lay fifty grand with Happy on Coyle to win by a K.O.,’ Mike says. ‘You lay that fifty grand for me, get it?’ he says. And he says, ‘If you shoot your trap off to Happy or anyone else that you bet fifty grand for me on Coyle,’ he says, ‘I’ll rip your heart out and break your hands and give you the thumb,’ he says, and a lot more. So I laid the fifty grand on Coyle to win by a K.O. and Happy took the bet at twelve to five—he wouldn’t give no more.”

  Jim Coyle growled, “I’ll break your neck, damn you.”

  “Wait a minute, Jim—”

  “He’s saying Brown took a dive!” cried the champion. “I licked Brown—I beat the hell out of him fair and square!”

  “You thought you beat the hell out of him fair and square,” muttered Phil Maguire. “But he took a dive, Jim. Didn’t I tell you. Inspector? Laying off that right of his—”

  “It’s a lie! Where’s my manager? Where’s Barney? They ain’t going to hold up the purse on this fight!” roared Coyle. “I won it fair—I won the title fair!”

  “Take it easy, Jim,” said the Inspector. “Everybody knows you were in there leveling tonight. Look here, Hymie, did Brown give you the cash to bet for him?”

  “He was busted.” Oetjens cringed. “I just laid the bet on the cuff. The pay-off don’t come till the next day. So I knew it was okay, because with Mike himself betting on Coyle, the fight was in the bag—”

  “I’ll cripple you, you creep!” yelled young Coyle.

  “Take it easy, Jim,” soothed Inspector Queen. “So you knew Mike was going to take a dive, and then you’d collect a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and give it to Mike, is that it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But that’s all, I swear—”

  “When did you see Happy last, Hymie?”

  Oetjens looked scared, and began to back away. His police escort had to prod him a little. But he shook his head stubbornly.

  “Now it couldn’t be,” asked the Inspector softly, “that somehow Happy got wind that you’d laid that fifty grand not for yourself, but for Mike Brown, could it? It couldn’t be that Happy found out it was a dive, or suspected it?” The Inspector said sharply to a detective, “Find Happy Day.”

  “I’m right here,” said a bass voice from the crowd; and the fat gambler waded through and said hotly to Inspector Queen, “So I’m the sucker, hey? I’m supposed to take the rap, hey?”

  “Did you know Mike Brown was set to take a dive?”

  “No!”

  Phil Maguire chuckled.

  And little Ollie Stearn, pal
e as his dead fighter, shouted, “Happy done it. Inspector! He found out, and he waited till after the fight, and when he saw Mike laying down, he came out here and gave him the business! That’s the way it was!”

  “You lousy rat,” said the gambler. “How do I know you didn’t do it yourself? He wasn’t taking no dive you couldn’t find out about! Maybe you stuck him up because of that fancy doll of his. Don’t tell me. I know all about you and that Ivy dame.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said the Inspector with a satisfied smile, when there was a shriek and Ivy Brown elbowed her way through the jam and flung herself on the dead body of her husband—for the benefit of the press.'

  And as the photographers joyously went to work, the Inspector said happily to his son, “Not too tough. A wrap-up. It’s Happy Day, all right, and all I’ve got to do is—”

  Ellery smiled and said, “You’re wasting your time.”

  The Inspector ceased to look happy. “What am I supposed to be doing, then? You tell me.”

  “Find my coat,” said Ellery.

  “Say, what is this about your damn coat?” growled the Inspector.

  “Find my coat and I’ll find your murderer.”

  They were all assembled in Jim Coyle’s dressing room; there was a noise at the door, and they saw Big Barney Hawks, the new champion’s manager, standing on the threshold in the company of several officials and promoters.

  “What ho,” said Barney Hawks with a puzzled glance about. “You still here, champ? What goes on?”

  “Plenty goes on,” said the champ savagely. “Barney, did you know Brown took a dive tonight?”

  “What? What’s this?” said Big Barney, looking around virtuously. “Who says so, the dirty liar? My boy won that title on the up and up, gentlemen!”

  “Brown threw the fight?” asked one of the men with Hawks, a member of the Boxing Commission. “Is there any evidence of that?”

  “The hell with that,” said the Inspector politely. “Barney, Mike Brown is dead.”

  Hawks began to laugh, then he stopped laughing and sputtered, “What’s this? What’s the gaggeroo? Brown dead?”

  Jim Coyle waved his huge paw. “Somebody bumped him off tonight, Barney. In Stearn’s car across the street.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” inhaled his manager, staring. “So Mike got his, hey? Well, well. Tough. Loses his title and his life. Who done it, boys?”

  “Maybe you didn’t know my boy was dead!” shrilled Ollie Stearn. “Yeah, you put on a swell act, Barney! Maybe you fixed it with Mike so he'd take a dive so your boy could win the title! Maybe—”

  “There’s been another crime committed here tonight,” said a mild voice, and they all looked wonderingly at Ellery advancing toward Mr. Hawks.

  “Hey?” said Coyle’s manager, staring stupidly at him.

  “My coat was stolen.”

  “Hey?” Big Barney kept gaping.

  “And unless my eyes deceive me, as the phrase goes,” continued Ellery, stopping before Hawks, “I’ve found it.”

  “Hey!”

  “On your arm.” And Ellery gently removed from Mr. Hawks’s arm a shabby camel’s-hair topcoat, unfolded it, and examined it. “Yes. My very own.”

  Barney Hawks turned green in the silence.

  Something sharpened in Ellery’s eyes, and he bent over the camel’s-hair coat again. He spread out the sleeves and examined the armhole seams. They had burst. As had the seam at the back of the coat. He looked at Mr. Hawks reproachfully.

  “The least you might have done,” he said, “is to have returned my property in the same condition in which I left it.”

  “Your coat?” said Barney Hawks damply. Then he shouted, “What the hell is this? That’s my coat! My camel’s-hair coat!”

  “No,” said Ellery, “I can prove this is mine. You see, it has a cigarette burn at the second buttonhole, and a hole in the right-hand pocket.”

  “But—I found it where I left it! It was here all the time! I took it out of here after the fight and went up to the office to talk to these gentlemen and I’ve been—’’ The manager stopped, and his complexion faded from green to white. “Then where’s my coat?” he asked slowly.

  “Will you try this on?” asked Ellery with the deference of a clothing salesman, and he took from a detective the bloodstained coat they had found abandoned in Ollie Steam’s car.

  Ellery held the coat up before Hawks; and Hawks said thickly, “All right. It’s my coat. I guess it’s my coat, if you say so. So what?”

  “So,” replied Ellery, “someone knew Mike Brown was broke, that he owed his shirt, that not even his champion’s share of the purse tonight would be enough to pay his debts. Someone persuaded Mike Brown to throw the fight tonight, offering to pay him a large sum of money, I suppose, for taking the dive. That money no one would know about. That money would not have to be turned over to the clutches of Mike Brown’s loving wife and creditors—or to the Internal Revenue Bureau. That money would be Mike Brown’s own. So Mike Brown said yes, realizing that he could make even more money by placing a large bet with Happy Day through the medium of Mr. Oetjens. And with this double nest-egg, he could jeer at the unfriendly world.

  “And probably Brown and his tempter conspired to meet in Stearn’s car immediately after the fight for the payoff, for Brown would be insistent about that. So Brown sent the chauffeur away, and sat in the car, and the tempter came to keep the appointment—armed not with the pay-off money, but with a knife. And by using the knife he saved himself a tidy sum—the sum he’d promised Brown—and also made sure Mike Brown would never be able to tell the wicked story to the wicked world.”

  Barney Hawks licked his dry lips. “Don’t look at me. Mister. You got nothing on Barney Hawks. I don’t know nothing about this.”

  Ellery went on, “A pretty problem, my friends. You see, the tempter came to the scene of the crime in a camel’s-hair coat, and he had to leave the coat behind because it got bloodstained and would have given him away. But in the car next to the murder-car lay my own camel’s- hair coal, its only virtue that it was not stained with a man’s blood.

  “We found a coat abandoned in Stearn’s car and my coat stolen. Coincidence? Hardly. The murderer certainly must have taken my coat to replace the coat he was forced to leave behind.”

  Ellery glanced at Miss Paris, who was staring at him with a soul-satisfying worship. Mind over matter, thought Mr. Queen, remembering with special satisfaction how Miss Paris had stared at Jim Coyle’s muscles. Yes sir, mind over matter.

  “Well?” said Inspector Queen. “Suppose this bird did take your coat? What of it?”

  “But that’s exactly the point,” murmured Ellery. “He took my poor, shabby, worthless coat. Why?”

  “Well, I suppose to wear it.”.

  “Precisely.” Ellery paused, then murmured, “But why should he want to wear it?”

  The Inspector looked angry. “See here, Ellery—” he began.

  “No, dad, no. I’m talking with a purpose. There’s a point. The point. You might say he had to wear it because he’d got blood on his suit under the coat and required a coat to hide the bloodstained suit.”

  “Sure,” said Phil Maguire. “That’s it.”

  “You may be an Einstein in your sports department, Mr. Maguire, but here you’re just a palooka. No,” said Ellery, shaking his head, “that’s not it. He couldn’t possibly have got blood on his suit. The coat shows that at the time he attacked Brown he was wearing it buttoned. If the topcoat was buttoned, his suit wouldn’t catch any of Brown’s blood.”

  “He certainly didn’t need a coat because of the weather,” muttered Inspector Queen.

  “True. It’s been warm all evening. You see,” smiled Ellery, “what a pretty little problem it is. He’d left his own coat behind, its labels and other identifying marks taken out, unworried about its being found—otherwise he would have hidden it or thrown it away. Such being the case, you would say he’d simply make his escape in the clothes he w
as wearing beneath the coat. But he didn’t. He stole another coat, my coat, for his escape.” Ellery coughed gently. “So surely it’s obvious that if he stole my coat for his escape, he needed my coat for his escape? That if he escaped without my coat he would be noticed?”

  “I don’t get it,” said the Inspector. “He’d be noticed? But if he was wearing ordinary clothing—”

  “Then obviously he wouldn’t need my coat,” nodded Ellery.

  “Or—say! If he was wearing a uniform of some kind—say he was a Stadium attendant—”

  “Then he still wouldn’t need my coat. A uniform would be a perfect guarantee that he’d pass in the crowd unnoticed. No, there’s only one answer to this problem. If the murderer had been wearing clothes—any normal body-covering—under the bloodstained coat, he could have made his escape in those clothes. But since he didn’t, it can only mean that he wasn't wearing clothes.”

  There was a short silence, and finally Paula said, “Wasn’t wearing clothes? A…naked man? Why, that’s like something out of Poe!”

  “No,” smiled Ellery, “merely something out of the Stadium. You see, we had a classification of gentlemen in the vicinity tonight who wore no—or nearly no—clothing. In a word, the pugilists . . . Wait!” he said swiftly. “This is an extraordinary case, chiefly because I solved the hardest part of it almost the instant I knew there was a murder. For the instant I discovered that Brown had been stabbed, and that my coat had been stolen by a murderer who left his own behind, I knew that the murderer could have been only one of thirteen men—the thirteen living prizefighters left after Brown was killed. For you’ll recall there were fourteen fighters in the Stadium tonight—twelve in the six preliminary bouts, and two in the main bout.

  “Which of the thirteen living fighters had killed Brown? That was my problem from the beginning. And so I had to find my coat, because it was the only concrete connection between the murderer and his crime. And now I’ve found my coat, and now I know which of the thirteen murdered Brown.

  “I’m a tall, fairly broad man,” continued Ellery. “And yet the murderer, in wearing my coat to make his escape, burst its seams at the armholes and back! That meant he was a much bigger man than I am—much bigger and broader.