Free Queen’s Bureau of Investigation by Ellery Queen Page A

gamblers.
    â€œRelaxation,” smiled the cardsharp. “Man gets tired playin’ with rank amateurs. Last night, Inspector? Why, I’ve been right here since we started our game four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Haven’t left this room. Have I, boys?”
    Four heads shook emphatically.
    That seemed to make it Ackley, whom they found at breakfast in a triplex Park Avenue apartment with its owner, a bejeweled society widow who was outraged at the interruption. Ackley was a tall, lean, handsome man with dark curly hair and piercing black eyes.
    â€œAckley?” echoed the lady furiously. “This gentleman is Lord Rogers, the big-game hunter, and his lordship has been entertaining me since the cocktail hour yesterday afternoon with his fascinating adventures in Kenya and Tanganyika—”
    â€œContinuously, madam?” asked Inspector Queen politely.
    â€œI ah—put him up for the night,” said the lady, coloring. “We—he retired at two A.M. Will you please get out!”
    â€œAfter you, your lordship,” said the Inspector; and the jewel thief shrugged and went along.
    Ellery followed in troubled silence.
    He was not to break that silence for a long time. For the three alibis remained unshaken, and Ackley, Chase, and Benson had to be released for lack of evidence.
    â€œOne of those alibis is rigged!” yelped the Inspector. “But which one?”
    The letters and the money failed to turn up.
    Inspector Queen raged and fumed, but the case had to be written off. Ellery fumed, too, but for other reasons. Something about the circumstances of Burke’s death was wrong, he felt in his bones, but what it was he simply could not diagnose. And Inspector Burke’s body and effects were shipped back to England, and the cables from London suddenly stopped, and that seemed the end of it.
    But it was not, and it broke out again in the oddest way. One night, weeks later, Inspector Queen came home bemoaning the deterioration of the new generation of police officers. They had all reverted to childhood, the Inspector snorted at dinner, spending their spare time at headquarters playing games.
    â€œGames?” said Ellery.
    â€œCrime puzzles. They make ’em up and challenge one another to solve ’em. They’ve even got the Chief Inspector doing it! Though come to think of it,” the Inspector chuckled, “one he tossed at me today is pretty darn clever. Typical detective-story situation: Rich man with three no-good heirs who need money bad. He’s bumped off, one of the three did it, and each claims an alibi for the time of the murder. One says he was in the Museum of Art looking at some eighteenth-century American paintings. The second says he was dialing his bookie’s private phone number, Aqueduct 4-2320, putting down a horse bet. The third says he was in a Flatbush bar talking to a French sailor named Socrates Papadapolis who was on his way to Indo-China. Question: Which alibi was the sure-enough phony? Get it, son?”
    â€œSure,” grinned Ellery; but then the grin faded, and his fork bonged against his plate. “The Burke case,” he choked.
    His father stared. “The Burke case? What about the Burke case?”
    â€œI knew we were played for suckers, Dad, but till you threw me that puzzle just now, I didn’t see how!”
    â€œHow?” repeated the Inspector, bewildered.
    â€œBurke didn’t commit suicide— he was murdered . Take your crime puzzle,” said Ellery swiftly. “The Museum of Art alibi and the Flatbush bar alibi might or might not have been false, and only an investigation would tell, but the phone-call-to-the-bookie alibi needs no investigation—it’s false on the face of it. No one can dial an exchange like Aqueduct, which starts with the letters AQ , because every phone dial in the United States has one letter of the alphabet missing. It has no letter Q .
    â€œAnd that