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

told me what we’d missed in the Burke setup.
    â€œDad,” cried Ellery, “ that note in Lester Burke’s handwriting was a forgery . If it was a forgery, Burke didn’t write it. If Burke didn’t write it, he didn’t commit suicide—he was murdered. The devil sapped Burke, all right, and placed the unconscious man carefully in the armchair, shot him with his own gun, put Burke’s prints on the gun and note, left the forged suicide note on the desk—the kind of note Burke might genuinely have written, a Shakespearian quotation—slipped out with the money and letters, and rejoined his alibi-ing confederates.
    â€œBut the fact that the note was a forgery identifies the killer. Ackley is a jewel thief and society impersonator. Chase is a cardsharp. Benson is a confidence man—but he’s something else, too. One of his aliases is Phil the Penman— a tag only a professional forger could have earned! ”
    â€œYes, but wait, wait,” protested Inspector Queen. “But how do you know that suicide note was a fake?”
    â€œBenson pulled a boner. Do you remember how he spelled the word ‘honor’—spelled it twice—in the quotation?”
    â€œHonor?” The Inspector frowned. “H-o-n-o-r. What’s wrong with that, Ellery?”
    â€œBurke was an Englishman, Dad. Had he written that quotation, he’d have spelled ‘honor’ the way all Englishmen spell it … h-o-n-o-u-r. It had no letter U! ”

HOLDUP DEPT.
    The Robber of Wrightsville

Wrightsville is a New England industrial town famous for nothing, set down in the center of an agricultural county of no particular interest. It was founded by a man named Jezreel Wright in 1701, and after two hundred and fifty-odd years its population is just past ten thousand. Parts of it are crooked and narrow, other parts glare with neon signs, and a great deal of it is downright dingy. In other words, Wrightsville is a very ordinary American town.
    But to Ellery it is Shangri-La.
    Pressed to explain why he runs off to Wrightsville at the drop of a phone call, Ellery will say that he sort of likes cobblestoned, grimy Low Village, and the Square (which is round), and Twin Hill Cemetery and The Hot Spot on Route 16 and the smoky burgundy of the Mahoganies to the north; that he finds Band Concert Night behind the Our Boys Memorial relaxing in direct ratio to the amount of noise and buttered popcorn produced; that the sight of the farmers’ starched families coming with stiff pleasure into town on Saturday afternoons positively stimulates him; and so forth.
    But if Ellery were to tell the entire truth, he would have to include the fact that Wrightsville has been wonderfully good to him in the matter of interesting crimes.
    On the latest occasion he dropped off the Atlantic Stater at Wrightsville Station under the delusion that he would pass a bangup week at Bill York’s Lodge on Bald Mountain, skimming down the second-rate ski slopes like a bird and sitting at tall fires afterward, soaking up contentment and hot toddies with the sportsmen of the town. He got no closer to the Lodge than the Hollis Hotel on the Square.
    Ed Hotchkiss gave him the bad news as he dumped his skis into Ed’s taxi outside the station and turned to churn the large Hotchkiss hand. There wasn’t enough snow on Old Baldy this winter, Ed mourned, to make a passable fight for Bill York’s six youngsters. But as long as Mr. Queen was in town, there was that darned business of Ed’s second cousin Mamie and Mamie’s boy Delbert …
    When Ellery had checked into the Hollis, washed up, and come down to the lobby to buy a Wrightsville Record at Grover Doodle’s cigar stand, he was already half committed to look into the case of young Delbert Hood, who was out on bail awaiting trial for a crime Ed Hotchkiss said his cousin Mamie said her boy hadn’t had a thing in the world to do