The Dragon's Teeth by Ellery Queen

Author:Ellery Queen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-01-15T12:10:06+00:00

* * *

THE gold clip was loose.

“Simple enough to reconstruct what happened,” observed Mr. Queen after examination. “Whoever fired those shots at Margo Cole had to shoot through this window. So he was standing at the window—perhaps for a long time, watching from behind the drawn shade in the dark. At some point during that vigil, he stooped; and, the clip being loose, the pencil dropped from his pocket.

“By a miracle it missed both the sill and the radiator, falling through the space between them to the rug without making a sound. And it rolled several inches under the radiator. He had no reason to use a pencil, consequently he left without discovering his loss. Very considerate of him.”

“That’s all true the way you say it,” argued Beau. “But suppose it was dropped by some one who occupied this room yesterday, or last week, or last year?”

“Improbable. The room was prepared for occupancy late this evening, after the wired reservation. We know that, because the bed’s made up for the night. That means a maid cleaned up in here later than 8.45 tonight.

And a maid who left not a speck of dust under a bed would scarcely have overlooked a pencil under a radiator. No, Beau, this pencil was dropped by ‘Howard,’ whoever he is.”

“Not much of a clue,” growled Beau. “Just a plain, ordinary, garden variety of automatic pencil. He might just as well have dropped nothing.”

“Well, now, I don’t know,” murmured Mr. Queen. “Doesn’t anything about this pencil strike you as familiar?”

Beau stared at it. “Not guilty.”

“You’ve never seen one like it before?”

“I’ve seen thousands like it before,” retorted Beau. “That’s just the trouble.”

“No, no, not a pencil. Don’t you recall another writing implement of hard black rubber composition, with a gold clip?”

“Cole’s fountain-pen?” Beau laughed shortly. “That’s quite a deduction. Are you trying to tell me that, just because Cole’s pen was hard black rubber stuff and had a gold clip, this pencil wras part of Cole’s pen-and-pencil set?”

“I’m trying to tell you exactly that,” said Mr. Queen, “but not for the reason you give, although the similarity of construction and appearance are striking. Where are your eyes?”

He held the pencil up. Beau looked it over without touching it—from its leaded point, where Ellery was gripping it, up its body to the eraser-cap.And just below the cap he saw something that made him exclaim. The hard rubber was considerably scratched and dented in a sort of arced pattern; some of the nicks were deep.

“Those nicks look like the ones in Cole’s pen . . . . But that’s impossible!”

“Disregarding philosophical considerations,” said Mr. Queen with a certain excitement, “I think we may prove or disprove the theory by completely material means.”

He laid the pencil carefully down on the rug between them and produced his wallet. From an inner pocket of the wallet he extracted a series of tiny squares of film.

“The microphotographs of the nicks in Cole’s pen I asked you to take,” he explained.

“But I thought they were in the office.

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