The Inspector, however, seemed singularly unimpressed. He waved his visitors to chairs, and called for coffee, and began to talk about a projected change in the personnel of one of the city departments as if the Field case interested him not at all.
“Here, here!” growled Sampson. “What’s the matter with you? You ought to be throwing out your chest, Q. You act as if you’d pulled a dud rather than succeeded.”
“It’s not that, Henry,” said the Inspector with a sigh. “I just can’t seem to be enthusiastic about anything when Ellery isn’t by my side. By jingo, I wish he were here instead of in those blamed Maine woods!”
The two men laughed. Djuna served the coffee and for a time the Inspector was too occupied with his pastry to brood. Over his cigarette Cronin remarked: “I for one merely dropped in to pay my respects, Inspector, but I’m curious about some aspects of this case. … I don’t know much about the investigation as a whole, except what Sampson told me on the way up.”
“I’m rather at sea myself, Q.,” put in the District Attorney. “I imagine you have a story to tell us. Let’s have it!”
Inspector Queen smiled sadly. “To save my own face I’ll have to relate it as if I did most of the work. As a matter of fact, the only really intelligent work in the whole sordid business was Ellery’s. He’s a sharp lad, that son of mine.”
Sampson and Cronin relaxed as the Inspector took some snuff and settled back in his armchair. Djuna folded himself quietly in a corner, ears cocked.
“In going over the Field case,” began the Inspector, “I will have to refer at times to Benjamin Morgan, who is really the most innocent victim of all.6 I want you to bear in mind, Henry, that whatever I say about Morgan is to go no further, either professionally or socially. I already have Tim’s assurance of silence. …”
Both men nodded wordlessly. The Inspector continued:
“I needn’t explain that most investigations of crime begin with a search for the motive. Many times you can discard suspect after suspect when you know the reason behind the crime. In this case the motive was obscure for a long time. There were certain indications, like Benjamin Morgan’s story, but these were inconclusive. Morgan had been blackmailed by Field for years—a part of Field’s activities of which you gentlemen were ignorant, despite your knowledge of his other social habits. This seemed to point to blackmail as a possible motive—or rather the choking off of blackmail. But then any number of things could have been the motive—revenge, for example, by some criminal whom Field had been instrumental in ‘sending up.’ Or by a member of his criminal organization. Field had a host of enemies, and undoubtedly a host of friends who were friends only because Field held the whip-hand. Any one of scores of people—men and women both—might have had a motive for killing the lawyer. So that, since we had so many other pressing and immediate things to think about and do that night at the Roman Theatre, we did not bother much with motive. It was always in the background, waiting to be called into service.
“But mark this point. If it was blackmail—as Ellery and I eventually decided, since it seemed the most likely possibility—there were most certainly some papers floating about in Field’s possession which would be enlightening, to say the least. We knew that Morgan’s papers existed. Cronin insisted that the papers for which he was looking were about somewhere. So we had to keep our eyes constantly on the alert for papers—tangible evidence which might or might not make clear the essential circumstances behind the crime.
“At the same time, in the matter of documents, Ellery was piqued by the great number of books on handwriting-analysis he found among Field’s effects. We concluded that a man like Field, who had blackmailed once to our knowledge (in the case of Morgan) and many times to our suspicions; and who was keenly interested in the science of handwriting, might have been a forger to boot. If this were true, and it seemed a plausible explanation, then it probably meant that Field made a habit of forging the original blackmail papers. The only reason he could have for doing this, of course, would be to sell the forgeries and keep the originals for further extortion. His association with the underworld undoubtedly helped him master the tricks of the trade. Later, we discovered that this hypothesis was true. And by that time we had definitely established blackmail as the motive of the crime. Remember, though, that this led us nowhere, since any one of our suspects might have been the blackmail victim and we had no way of telling who it was.”
The Inspector frowned, settled back into his seat more comfortably.
“But I’m tackling this explanation the wrong way. It just goes to show you how habit will take hold of a man. I’m so accustomed to beginning with motive. … However! There is only one important and central circumstance which stands out in the investigation. It was a confounding clue—rather, the lack of a clue. I refer to the missing hat. …
“Now the unfortunate thing about the missing hat was that we were so busy pressing the immediate inquiry at the Roman Theatre on Monday night we couldn’t grasp the full significance of its absence. Not that we weren’t bothered by it from the beginning—far from it. It was one of the first things I noticed when I examined the body. As for Ellery, he caught it as soon as he entered the theatre and bent over the dead man. But what could we do? There were a hundred details to take care of—questions to ask, orders to give, discrepancies and suspicious discoveries to clear up—so that, as I say, we inadvertently missed our great
