French Powder Mystery Read Free Page A

chambermaid, and unofficially the mascot of the Detective Bureau. He emerged with a percolator and refilled the cups on the table. Ellery grasped his with a questioning hand and began to sip, his eyes riveted on the book.
    “Simple’s hardly the word,” resumed the Inspector. “Jimmy had sprinkled that whole room with fingerprint powder and found nothing but Herrin’s own prints—and Herrin was deader than a mackerel. The boys all took a whack at suggesting different places to sprinkle—it was quite a game while it lasted. …” He slapped the table. “Then Ellery marched in. I reviewed the case for him and showed him what we’d found. You remember we spotted Herrin’s footprints in the crumbled plaster on the dining-room floor. We were mighty puzzled about that, because from the circumstances of the crime it was impossible for Herrin to have been in that dining-room. And that’s where superior mentality, I suppose you’d call it, turned the trick. Ellery said: ‘Are you certain those are Herrin’s footprints?’ I told him they were, beyond a doubt. When I told him why, he agreed—yet it was impossible for Herrin to have been in that room. And there lay the prints, giving us the lie. ‘Very well,’ says this precious son o’ mine, ‘maybe he wasn’t in the room, after all.’ ‘But Ellery—the prints!’ I objected. ‘I have a notion,’ he says, and goes into the bedroom.
    “Well,” sighed the Inspector, “he certainly did have a notion. In the bedroom he looked over the shoes on Herrin’s dead feet, took them off, got some of the print powder from Jimmy, called for the copy of O’Shaughnessy’s fingerprints, sprinkled the shoes—and sure enough, there was a beautiful thumb impression! He matched it with the file print, and it proved to be O’Shaughnessy’s. … You see, we’d looked in every place in that apartment for fingerprints except the one place where they were—on the dead body itself. Who’d ever think of looking for the murderer’s sign on his victim’s shoes?”
    “Unlikely place,” grunted the Italian. “How’d it figure?”
    “Ellery reasoned that if Herrin wasn’t in that room and his shoes were, it simply meant that somebody else wore or planted Herrin’s shoes there. Infantile, isn’t it? But it had to be thought of.” The old man bore down on Ellery’s bowed head with unconvincing irritability. “Ellery, what on earth are you reading? You’re hardly an attentive host, son.”
    “That’s one time a layman’s familiarity with fingerprints came in handy,” grinned Sampson.
    “Ellery!”
    Ellery looked up excitedly. He waved his book in triumph, and began to recite to the amazed group at the table: “If they went to sleep with the sandals on, the thong worked into the feet and the sandals were frozen fast to them. This was partly due to the fact that, since their old sandals had failed, they wore untanned brogans made of newly flayed ox-hides. * Do you know, dad, that gives me a splendid idea?” His face beamed as he reached for a pencil.
    Inspector Queen swung to his feet, grumbling. “You can’t get anything out of him when he’s in that mood. … Come along, Henry—you going, Fiorelli?—let’s get down to City Hall.”
    * I had been brushing up on my Xenophon, and when I ran across the passage relating to the Retreat of the Ten Thousand through ancient Armenia, the shoe reference gave me an idea for a short story. The incident is ridiculous in retrospect, although at the time I was quite oblivious to its humor.—E. Q.

2.
“The Kings Were in the Counting-House”
    I T WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK when Inspector Queen left his apartment on West 87th Street in the company of Sampson, Cronin and Fiorelli, bound for the Criminal Courts Building.
    At precisely the same moment, some miles to the south, a man stood quietly at the library dormer-window of a private apartment. The apartment was situated on the sixth floor of French’s, the Fifth Avenue