Free Queens Full by Ellery Queen Page A

doors open, all Manson had to do was drape his jacket over his injured arm to conceal the cast, mingle with the crowd in the alley, stroll into the theater, and make his way to the backstage door on the side where the star dressing room is. He simply wasn’t noticed then or afterward, when he slipped out and parked in the Hollis bar—where Dullman and the Record reporter found him.”
    â€œBut Mark Manson and dope ,” Joan said.
    Ellery shrugged. “Manson’s an old man, Joan, with no theatrical future except an actors’ home and his scrapbooks. But he’s still traveling in stock, hitting small towns and big-city suburbs. It’s made the perfect cover for a narcotics distributor. No glory, but loot galore.”
    â€œHe did a keen Wrightsville business before he took that tumble. We’ve already picked up the two local pushers he supplied.” Chief Newby folded his napkin grimly. “Middlemen in the dope racket are usually too scared to talk, but I guess the pain of that wrist you broke for him all over again, Fowler, was kind of frazzling. Or maybe he figures it’ll help when he comes up on the murder rap. Anyway, Manson got real chatty last night. The Feds are pulling in the big fish now.”
    Ellery pushed his chair back. “And that, dear hearts, as the late Mr. Benedict might have said, is my cue to go on. On to that vacation waiting for me in the Mahoganies.”
    â€œAnd for yours truly it’s back to work,” Newby said, following suit.
    â€œWait! Please?” Joan was tugging at Roger’s sleeve. “Rodge … haven’t you always said—?”
    â€œYes?” Roger said alertly.
    â€œI mean, who wants to be an actress?”
    That was how it came about that young Roger Fowler was seen streaking across the Square that afternoon with young Joan Truslow in breathless tow, taking the short cut to the town clerk’s office, while far behind puffed the chief of police and the visiting Mr. Queen, their two witnesses required by law.

E = MURDER

The title of Ellery’s lecture being The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, it was inevitable that one of the talks on his tour should be crowned by the greatest misadventure of all. It came to pass just after his stint at Bethesda University, in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where misadventures of all sorts are commonplace.
    Ellery had scribbled the last autograph across the last coed’s Humanities I notebook when the nearly empty auditorium resounded with a shout, almost a scream.
    â€œMr. Queen, wait! Don’t go yet!”
    The chancellors of great universities do not ordinarily charge down center aisles with blooded cheeks, uttering whoops; and Ellery felt the prickle of one of his infamous premonitions.
    â€œSomething wrong, Dr. Dunwoody?”
    â€œYes! I mean probably! I mean I don’t know!” the head of Bethesda U. panted. “The President … Pentagon … General Carter … Dr. Agon doesn’t—Oh, hell, Mr. Queen, come with me!”
    Hurrying across the campus in the mild Maryland evening by Dr. Dunwoody’s heaving side, Ellery managed to untangle the chancellorial verbiage. General Amos Carter, an old friend of Ellery’s, had enlisted the services of Dr. Herbert Agon of Bethesda University, one of the world’s leading physicists, in a top-secret experimental project for the Pentagon. The President of the United States himself received nightly reports from Dr. Agon by direct wire between the White House and the physicist’s working quarters at the top of The Tower, Bethesda U.’s science citadel.
    Tonight, at the routine hour, Dr. Agon had failed to telephone the President. The President had then called Agon, and Agon’s phone had rung unanswered. A call to the Agon residence had elicited the information from the physicist’s wife that, as far as she knew, her husband was working as usual in his laboratory in