by Ellery Queen
“Is that what you say, Mabel?” Salanda had softly opened the door behind her. He came forward into the room, doubly dwarfed by her blonde magnitude. “I say if it wasn’t for you, my dear, Ella wouldn’t have been driven away from home in the first place.”
She turned on him in a blubbering rage. He drew himself up tall and reached to snap his fingers under her nose. “Go back into the house. You are a disgrace to women, a disgrace to motherhood.”
“I’m not her mother, thank God.”
“Thank God,” he echoed, shaking his fist at her. She retreated like a schooner under full sail, menaced by a gunboat. The door closed on her. Salanda turned to me.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. I have difficulties with my wife, I am ashamed to say it. I was an imbecile to marry again. I gained a senseless hulk of flesh and lost my daughter. Old imbecile!” he denounced himself, wagging his great head sadly. “I married in hot blood. Passion has always been my downfall. It runs in my family, this insane hunger for blondeness and stupidity and size.” He spread his arms in a wide and futile embrace on emptiness.
“Forget it.”
“If I could.” He came closer to examine my face. “You are injured, Mr. Archer. Your mouth is damaged. There is blood on your chin.”
“I was in a slight brawl.”
“On my account?”
“On my own. But I think it’s time you leveled with me.”
“Leveled with you?”
“Told me the truth. You knew who was shot last night, and who shot him, and why.”
He touched my arm, with a quick tentative grace. “I have only one daughter, Mr. Archer, only the one child. It was my duty to defend her, as best as I could.”
“Defend her from what?”
“From shame, from the police, from prison.” He flung one arm out, indicating the whole range of human disaster. “I am a man of honor, Mr. Archer. But private honor stands higher with me than public honor. The man was abducting my daughter. She brought him here in the hope of being rescued. Her last hope.”
“I think that’s true. You should have told me this before.”
“I was alarmed, upset. I feared your intentions. Any minute the police were due to arrive.”
“But you had a right to shoot him. It wasn’t even a crime. The crime was his.”
“I didn’t know that then. The truth came out to me gradually. I feared that Ella was involved with him.” His flat black gaze sought my face and rested on it. “However, I did not shoot him, Mr. Archer. I was not even here at the time. I told you that this morning, and you may take my word for it.”
“Was Mrs. Salanda here?”
“No, sir, she was not. Why should you ask me that?”
“Donny described the woman who checked in with the dead man. The description fits your wife.”
“Donny was lying. I told him to give a false description of the woman. Apparently he was unequal to the task of inventing one.”
“Can you prove that she was with you?”
“Certainly I can. We had reserved seats at the theater. Those who sat around us can testify that the seats were not empty. Mrs. Salanda and I, we are not an inconspicuous couple.” He smiled wryly.
“Ella killed him then.”
He neither assented nor denied it. “I was hoping that you were on my side, my side and Ella’s. Am I wrong?”
“I’ll have to talk to her before I know myself. Where is she?”
“I do not know, Mr. Archer, sincerely I do not know. She went away this afternoon, after the policemen questioned her. They were suspicious, but we managed to soothe their suspicions. They did not know she had just come home, from another life, and I did not tell them. Mabel wanted to tell them. I silenced her.” His white teeth clicked together.
“What about Donny?”
“They took him down to the station for questioning. He told them nothing damaging. Donny can appear very stupid when he wishes. He has the reputation of an idiot, but he is not so dumb. Donny has been with me for many years. He has a deep devotion for my daughter. I got him released tonight.”
“You should have taken my advice,” I said, “taken the police into your confidence. Nothing would have happened to you. The dead man was a mobster, and what he was doing amounts to kidnaping. Your daughter was a witness against his boss.”
“She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”
“Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”
“A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.
“Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”
Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”
“It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”
“You ask me to believe you?”
“I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.
“My daughter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”
“She must have told you where she was going.”
“No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”
“You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”
He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars. The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel.
For the second time that day I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.
“Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.
“You know me, Donny.”
The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.
“Anybody with you?”
Sounds of movement in the living room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”
“I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”
Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice. “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”
“Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back.
“What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”
“When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit, she made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”
“What did she write in the note?”
He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.
She said, “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us
.”
“I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the anguished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”
“I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I talked to Angel.”
“Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.
“No. I came alone.”
“You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”
“I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”
“Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”
His sneakered feet made soft indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily, “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.”
“What kind of a case?”
“A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”
“Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”
“You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”
Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.
“This is the turning point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evilest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”
“A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”
“I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”
I waited. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny. “Let me see that note.”
He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.
“What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border; the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it had to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”
Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”
She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backward through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.
I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.
I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.
Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap. Incredibly he spoke, in a loud sighing voice, “You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”
“Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”
“You like me better than you used to? Now?”
“I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”
She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.
His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of paper towel:
“Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.”
I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.
Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.
“Q”
Robert L. Fish
Muldoon and the Numbers Game
A few of those who believed in the powers of old Miss Gilhooley said she did it with ESP, but the majority claimed she had to be a witch, she having come originally from Salem, which she never denied. The ones who scoffed, of course, said it was either the percentages, or just plain luck. But the fact was, she could see things—in cloud formations, or in baseball cards, or in the throwing of bottle caps, among other things—that were truly amazing.
Muldoon was one of those who believed in old Miss Gilhooley implicitly. Once, shortly after his Kathleen had passed away three years before, old Miss Gilhooley, reading the foam left in his beer glass, told him to beware of a tall dark woman, and it wasn’t two days later that Mrs. Johnson, who did his laundry, tried to give him back a puce-striped shirt as one of his own that Muldoon wouldn’t have worn to a Chinese water torture. And not long after, old Miss Gilhooley, reading the lumps on his skull after a brawl at Maverick Station, said he’d be taking a long voyage over water, and the very next day didn’t his boss send him over to Nantasket on a job, and that at least halfway across the bay?
So, naturally, being out of work and running into old Miss Gilhooley having a last brew at Casey’s Bar & Grill before taking the bus to her sister’s in Framingham for a week’s visit, Muldoon wondered why he had never thought of it before. He therefore took his beer and sat down in the booth across from the shawled old Miss Gilhooley and put his problem directly to her.
“The unemployment insurance is about to run out, and it looks like nobody wants no bricks laid no more, at least not by me,” he said simply. “I need money. How do I get some?”
Old Miss Gilhooley dipped her finger in his beer and traced a pattern across her forehead. Then she closed her eyes for fully a minute by the clock before she opened them.
“How old’s your mother-in-law?” she asked in her quavering voice, fixing Muldoon with her steady eyes.
Muldoon stared. “Seventy-four,” he said, surprised. “Just last month. Why?”
“I don’t rightly know,” old Miss Gilhooley said slowly. “All I know is I closed my eyes and asked meself, ‘How can Muldoon come up with some money?’ And right away, like in letters of fire across the insides of me eyeballs, I see, ‘How old is Vera Callahan?’ It’s got to mean something.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon said glumly. “But what?”
; “I’ll miss me bus,” said old Miss Gilhooley, and came to her feet, picking up her ancient haversack. “It’ll come to you, don’t worry.” And with a smile she was through the door.
Seventy-four, Muldoon mused as he walked slowly toward the small house he now shared with his mother-in-law. You’d think old Miss Gilhooley might have been a little more lavish with her clues. She’d never been that cryptic before. Seventy-four! Suddenly Muldoon stopped dead in his tracks. There was only one logical solution, and the more he thought about it, the better it looked. Old Miss Gilhooley and Vera Callahan had been lifelong enemies. And his mother-in-law had certainly mentioned her life-insurance policy often enough when she first used it ten years before as her passport into the relative security of the Muldoon menage. And, after all, 74 was a ripe old age, four years past the biblical threescore and ten, not to mention being even further beyond the actuarial probabilities.
Muldoon smiled at his own brilliance in solving the enigma so quickly. Doing away with his mother-in-law would be no chore. By Muldoon’s figuring, she had to weigh in at about a hundred pounds dripping wet and carrying an anvil in each hand. Nor, he conceded, would her passing be much of a loss. She did little except creep between bed and kitchen and seemed to live on tea. Actually, since the poor soul suffered such a wide variety of voiced ailments, the oblivion offered by the grave would undoubtedly prove welcome.
He thought for a moment of checking with the insurance company as to the exact dollar value of his anticipated inheritance, but then concluded it might smack of greediness. It might also look a bit peculiar when the old lady suffered a fatal attack of something-or-other so soon after the inquiry. Still, he felt sure it would be a substantial amount; old Miss Gilhooley had never failed him before.
When he entered the house, the old lady was stretched out on the couch, taking her afternoon nap (she slept more than a cat, Muldoon thought) and all he had to do was to put one of the small embroidered pillows over her face and lean his two hundred pounds on it for a matter of several minutes, and that was that. She barely wriggled during the process.