The Scarlet Letters by Ellery Queen Page A

nights a week, but everybody knows little Martha Lawrence is as faithful as Lucrece, and I can’t see Dirk Lawrence in the role of Tarquin, can you? Sextus … You know, considering the plot line, that’s awfully cute?”
    If Maud Ashton was still thinking such noble thoughts, hope was not dead.
    The second point advanced Ellery no further than the first. He visited 547 Fifth Avenue on Friday and discovered from the directory in the lobby that the Froehm Air-Conditioner Company occupied Suite 902-912, while Humber & Kahn, jewelers, had their showroom in 921. The occurrence of the ninth floor in the case of both envelopes suggested a certain line of investigation, and Ellery duly pursued it after six o’clock on Saturday afternoon, when most of the tenants of the building were gone. But he did not come empty-handed. First, on Saturday morning, he made one of his rare excursions to Brooklyn, to the home of an old man who owned a world-famous collection of theatrical photographs. Here, after representing himself as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine , Ellery rented a set of studio portraits of stage stars who had played Hamlet in New York within living memory. Among them, as it happened, was a portrait of Van Harrison.
    In The 45th Street Building Ellery prudently signed the after-hours check-in book in the elevator with the name “Barnaby Ross” and got off at the ninth floor. The sound of a vacuum cleaner led him to the propped-open door of a lighted office, and here he found a brawny-armed old woman in a tattered housedress with an apron over it.
    â€œThere’s nobody here,” she said, without looking up.
    â€œOh, yes, there is,” said Ellery sternly. “There’s you, and there’s me, and it won’t go any further if you come clean.”
    â€œCome what?” the cleaning woman straightened. “Don’t you know you could go to jail for what you did, Mother?”
    â€œI didn’t do nothing!” she said excitedly. “What did I do?”
    â€œYou tell me.” And Ellery thrust under her nose the portrait of Van Harrison.
    The old woman paled. “He said nobody’d ever know …”
    â€œThere you are. You got them for him, didn’t you?”
    She looked him in the eye. “You a cop?”
    Ellery sneered. “Do I look like a cop?”
    â€œYou won’t tell the super?”
    â€œI wouldn’t give that screw the time of day.”
    â€œThe man give me a big tip to keep my mouth shut …”
    â€œI gather,” said Ellery, removing a bill from his billfold, “that to open it again will require something larger.”
    â€œI’m a poor woman,” said the old lady, eying the bill in Ellery’s fingers, “and is that a twenty? The story is this: This good-looking gentleman comes up here one night after hours, like you, and he says to me he’ll make it worth my while if I’ll borry a few envelopes from some of the business offices on my floors, that’s the eighth, ninth, and tenth. I says I can’t do that, that’s dishonest, and he says sure you can, what’s dishonest about it, you heard of people who collect stamps and matchboxes and stuff, well I’m a collector of business envelopes, I go all over the city making deals like this with cleaning women who can use an extra few bucks rather than bother busy business people and maybe get thrown out on my ear. So one thing leads to another, and I get him a stack of different envelopes from different firms on the three floors, and he gives me the tenspot and goes away, and I ain’t laid eyes on him since. And that’s the whole truth, Mister, so help me, and I hope you won’t get me into no trouble with the super because I wasn’t doing no harm, just a few lousy envelopes for a fruitcake. So now can I have that twenty?”
    â€œThe Dead End Kid, that’s me,” sighed Ellery; and he