The Case of the Seven Sneezes

by Anthony Boucher

  “Sorry,” he said aloud, “but I doubt if I could make it. Busy week coming up.”

  “If you must invite people for me, Stella,” Janet broke in, “you might at least—” She stopped. “Sorry, O’Breen. Nothing personal. But there’s a friend I haven’t seen in a long time and he doesn’t even know I’m in town and I don’t like to seem to go chasing after him and …” The sentence ended in total confusion. Janet was half-blushing and suddenly looking very young and untailored.

  “At that,” said Miss Paris, “that isn’t a bad idea. I could call Tom tonight and—”

  “No,” Janet interrupted firmly. “No, please don’t. Skip it.”

  Miss Paris turned back to Fergus. “Think about it, will you?”

  “Afraid I don’t see how I could make it.”

  “Please.” She held his eye for a long moment. Then, “And do you like apple pie?” she asked.

  Fergus beamed.

  He and Janet insisted on doing the dishes, while Miss Paris brought out her sewing and chatted. It was a pleasing domestic scene, and he was willing to forget his usual resentment against people who want to wangle professional services gratis. He whistled quietly as he washed, and wondered why doing dishes with a charming stranger was fun and doing them with your own beloved sister was an onerous imposition to be avoided at all costs.

  For Janet Brainard was charming, despite her cool self-sufficiency and the efficient editorial brusqueness with which she had put him in his place as a crossword critic. It would be fun to see more of her, to catch another glimpse of that shy young girl who had appeared for an instant at the dinner table. She made good bait for Blackman’s Island; but still not quite good enough.

  “Anything else I can do useful?” Fergus asked blithely as he wiped his hands on the apron.

  “If you must, you could take that trash box out to the incinerator. That sounds like a Man’s Task.”

  “Gladly.”

  He was still whistling as he reached the back porch. There he paused to steady the box against the porch rail and get a better grip. Light from the kitchen window struck the floor of the porch, and as he paused he saw something. It was interesting enough to make him set down the box and drop to his knees for a moment to peer the better at that little trail of brown spots.

  He was not whistling as he dumped the trash into the incinerator. He did not even reflect happily, as was his wont, that he was breaking a city ordinance as he set a match to it. And in the flare of that match he saw the final link.

  Near the incinerator was a little mound of freshdug earth. It was about two feet long and something under a foot wide.

  It all clicked together far too clearly in his mind. His seven sneezes and the back porch and this mound, and Lester Ferguson’s chipped-column stare and Martha Stanhope and Miss Paris’ urgency and even Lucas Quincy. And whatever you might think of Quincy, Janet was a sound person and that had been a noble dinner.

  He set the empty trash box down on the floor of the kitchen. “Any more tasks for me?” he said. “Or shall we save my energy till I get to Blackman’s Island?”

  Chapter 2

  This was on Thursday, May 9, 1940.

  You remember what happened on May 10.

  All winter long we had talked scornfully of the “phony war.” It was a nervous scorn, and perhaps it masked an unacknowledged fear; but we were scornful as all hell. The Finnish war provided a little action in the arena to tickle us in our box seats in the coliseum, but it was soon over and with an annoying reversal of the verdict of our thumbs. We relapsed into boredom and scorn.

  Then in early April came the invasion of Scandinavia, and we said in quick succession:

  “He’s extended his flank too far; he’s done for.”

  “Where the hell is the R. A. F.?” and

  “Wasn’t the retreat splendid?”

  We tucked the word Quisling away in our vocabularies and settled back in the boxes.

  For a week there was a rumorous silence. And then, on Friday, May 10, 1940, came the invasion of the Netherlands.

  Fergus had a job rounding off his odds and ends of business before leaving for Blackman’s Island. Hollywood was diving headlong into its worst panic since the closing of the banks in ’33. All the nervous terror dammed up for months burst forth now in one terrific wave, whose crest foamed furiously and incessantly the dread words FOREIGN MARKET.

  The foreign market had been lost for months. Its approaching loss could have been foreseen for years. But it took the specific shock of this invasion to make the fact clear to producers. It was clear enough now.

  Nor was this panic confined to bigshots with financial interests to fret about. Electricians, propmen, all the ordinary honesttogod people who are no more Hollywood than is an Iowa farmer—these too felt the shocking impact of this final definite act. There was a sense throughout the city of the fall of an age, and a dread of the age to come.

  It was good to get out at last, in midafternoon, on the broad coast highway leading north to Santa Eulalia. As the road dipped near the sea from time to time, the surf roared and the sun glistened on the waves, which was hard on a driver’s eyes but most elating to his spirit. Life was momentarily fresh again. The smooth highway attested the mechanical ingenuity of man, the Burmashave jingles along the road reminded you of his business acumen, but nothing in the whole scene suggested his propensity for slaughtering his brother. For two hours and a half of steady driving Fergus was unreasoningly happy, though in the back of his mind he knew that what awaited him on Blackman’s Island might be on a smaller scale than the headlined invasions, but far more immediate.

  It was what Maureen had suggested—the complete gathering of the old group for present analysis. But calmly analyzing the past was one thing, and forestalling the present was very much another.

  He had called Lucas Quincy last night, and hung up as soon as he had dialed the private number. He could not make up his mind on this proposition. It was all very well to go dashing off quixotically to save lives, to make it stop at cats this time and avert another Stanhope case; but a fee would help. And yet Quincy’s stipulation, that all evidence should be turned over to him exclusively and kept secret from the D. A., made the job not only unethical but goddamned risky. It would take a fine fee to make up for being booted out of your profession.

  To expose the murderer and still to get a sweet sum out of Quincy: there was the problem. “And at least,” Fergus reflected, “I’ll have both my good and my evil angel working with me on this.”

  Santa Eulalia is a small town consisting chiefly of a wharf surrounded by fishing boats. The two blocks of main street feature a movie house, a bank, five saloons, a chain grocery, and a garage, at which last Fergus stored his faithful yellow roadster. From the back compartment he took his suitcase.

  A small overnight case would have sufficed for what wardrobe he had brought. But inside this largish suitcase was another case, and in that case was an admirably compact set of accessories. An island is cut off from the resources of the mainland police, and at best the resources of the Santa Eulalia police department were probably not to be trusted. There was no telling what might bear a little scientific investigation. And beside the accessory kit nestled a loaded automatic.

  Fergus carried his case down to the wharf. “Hi!” he observed to a shabby man who seemed to be trying to estimate with the naked eye the distance to China, or possibly merely to Manila. “You know Jesus Ramirez? Runs a motor launch?”

  The man lifted his right hand in acknowledgment of the greeting, but did not take his eyes off the Chinese guerrilla warfare. “Ramirez,” he said. Then after a long pause he added, “Try Flannery’s.”

  Fergus looked back at the main street. Over the smallest of the five saloons an as yet unlit neon sign said FLANNERY’S. He thanked the long-range observer and started back.

  As he drew nearer he smiled and began to whistle with delight. For beneath that sign was a smaller one which read: STEAM BEER. For some inc
omprehensible reason, this wonderful brew is not to be found anywhere in Los Angeles,* and the O’Breen palate had long been parched for it.

  The juke box was playing God Bless America. The only customer at the moment was a fat and sodden old man with a white mustache who listened raptly to the music. “Ramirez?” Fergus asked him, but he waved his hand in denial and went on listening.

  “Do you know a Jesus Ramirez?” Fergus asked the bartender.

  “Sure, Mac. Everybody knows Hokay. We call him that on account of nobody never heard him say nothing only ‘Hokay.’”

  “Has he been around here today?”

  “Ought to be in here any minute. What’ll it be while you’re waiting?”

  “Steam beer.”

  “Thought so. People from out of town, they always want steam. Guess you don’t find it every place. Ain’t everybody knows how to draw it nowadays.”

  The juke box stopped. The old man rose and inserted a nickel without changing the setting. He resumed his seat, and there were tears in his rheumy blue eyes as God Bless America started again.

  “Now that’s a case for you,” the bartender said. “That’s Mr. Schulzheimer. Damned good butcher. Carve you out a roast as neat as I can draw this here now beer. So what happens to him? This morning three of his best customers get all hot and bothered after they read the news and they tell him they’re switching over to the chain store on account of he’s a German. So he comes in here and for three hours now he’s been drinking beer and playing God Bless America. Don’t ask me what it means.” All this time he had been drawing the steam beer—filling the glass with foam, letting that foam reduce itself to a minute amount of beer, refilling with foam, and so on until he had a full glass of clear brown with a firm-knit head of ideal thickness. It was—work of art might be hyperbole, but it was certainly a noble example of the finest craftsmanship.

  “You know, Mac,” he observed as he removed the beer from the glass pressure bell in which it was drawn, “I’m damned if I get it. So the Germans pick on the Jews, so now we decide we got to pick on the Germans. What I’d like’s a sort of a place where there wouldn’t nobody have to pick on nobody. That’ll be a dime, Mac.”

  Fergus shoved the coin across and looked at the old man listening, intently listening as though this sound of affirmation could drown out the forever departing footsteps of three best customers.

  Fergus tasted the beer. It was all that he had remembered and hoped. It had that smooth rich solidity which the best draught beer never seems to equal. It was cool and warming and gentle and bitter all at once. He set down the glass and grinned at his foam-bedecked lips in the bar mirror. Then in the mirror he saw an entering figure.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he and the figure exclaimed at once, and in unison answered each other, “Looking for a dope named Ramirez.”

  When Fergus first met Tom Quincy long years ago, this nephew of the eminent Lucas was just out of college and trying to decide whether to take up football, swimming, tennis, or golf as a profession. Last year Fergus had seen that large and splendid body looming at one of his sister’s parties and had asked how the decision finally came out.

  “Well, you see,” Tom had explained, “I couldn’t decide which I was best at, and the more I thought about it the more I worried, until finally I went to a psychologist friend of mine who specializes in aptitudes. And after I talked to him, I decided to be a psychologist.”

  That was what he was now, a teaching assistant in psychology filling in all his spare time with elaborate research; but to the eye he remained the same magnificent athlete. His eyes were alert and shrewd, and his words made good sense; but every woman who met him was inclined to wonder resentfully why the art of the stripper was confined to one sex.

  “So you’re in on this too,” he said now. “I’m glad of that. I can’t say this was a party I was looking forward to.”

  “And you,” said Fergus, recalling that almost girlish blush, “are Janet’s Tom. My my. I recommend the steam beer.”

  “Janet asked you?” For an instant Tom’s deep voice was not quite so friendly.

  “Miss Paris,” Fergus hastened to make clear. “Janet just happened to refer to a friend named Tom. I hadn’t any idea—”

  Tom beckoned to the barkeep. “Maybe you’ve heard me mention my bigshot uncle Lucas?”

  “Uh huh,” said Fergus casually.

  “He was an usher at this Brainard wedding, and that crowd’s always more or less stuck together. I used to know Janet pretty well before she went to New York … And where,” he looked down at Fergus’ bag as though he had some suspicion of its contents, “do you fit in?”

  “Not professionally, if that’s what you mean. I met Miss Paris through my sister’s studio. Seemed to take a fancy to me. Nothing like charm, my boy.”

  Tom’s broad face was serious. “Then softpedal the charm around Janet. I’m making an important psychological experiment. I want to see if it’s possible to cover a gap of five years.”

  Fergus lifted his glass. “Luck! And in return you can do me a favor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t mention my sotospeak profession. Detectives, even off-duty, make some people nervous.”

  “Sure. Anything you say. Well,” he accepted his glass from the bartender, “skoall”

  Fergus answered in kind, and for a moment the two men were silent in the enjoyment of liquid perfection. The juke box was still playing God Bless America.

  “How’s the academic career going?”

  “Good enough. My only curse is a few tastes left over from when I was a rich man’s nephew. They don’t fit in so well on an assistant’s salary.”

  “But aren’t you a nephew still? Did you go and get cut off with a shilling? And at the current rate of exchange?”

  “Not exactly. But my uncle Lucas,” said Tom dryly, “is finding a few new tastes of his own.”

  “Which by the way: Did you ever put in a plug for me professionally to your uncle?”

  “No. Should I have? I mean, you can say, ‘Friend of mine’s just opened a bakery; you might try his pies.’ That’s fine. But if you say, ‘Friend of mine’s just set up as a detective; you might need him some time’ … well, it doesn’t sound exactly tactful.”

  “Sure … You know Miss Paris, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “She had a cat, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. A fine Persian tom named Valentino, and with as much sex appeal as the original. Noble beast. But hey—!”

  “Yes?”

  “You said had.”

  “Did I?”

  Tom set down his beer and stared at Fergus. “So that’s it.” There was in his eyes the slow reluctant realization of horror.

  “So what’s what?”

  “It’s 1915 again. The wheel’s come full circle. Valentino for hors d’oeuvre, and for the entrée …”

  The bartender ran to the front door and shouted “Hokay!” at a passing paisano, who turned and shuffled toward the saloon. “That’s him,” the barkeep explained. “Ramirez.”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” said Fergus, picking up his precious case. “I think I may be damned happy you showed up.”

  As they left, Mr. Schulzheimer was putting another nickel in the juke box.

  ii

  It was dusk on Blackman’s Island. The shadow of the towering rock, once the peak of some ocean-swallowed mountain, extended over the house and the beach.

  Everybody was inside titivating, so Joe Corcoran figured he had time for a breath of fresh air and a smoke. Dinner would be late because it was the Big Dinner tonight, the anniversary. He had the roast on, and everything was all set. Plenty of time to grab a little rest.

  He didn’t think much of this job, Corcoran didn’t. Even when you have to take a job that’s chief cook and bottlewasher and valet and porter and oddjob man all rolled into one, you’ve got a right to retain your own self-respect and some kind of human dignity.

/>   And that’s just what you couldn’t, not on this job. That cocky little Brainard that was throwing the party, he had to give somebody hell every so often just to prove to himself that he was a bigshot. And he was paying Corcoran’s salary, so that elected Corcoran the goat. No matter what he did, it was wrong. If he worked carefully, he was slow and dawdling. If he hurried up, he was careless and scamping his work.

  If only he didn’t need the job so bad, he’d say the hell with the whole lot of them and clear out back to the mainland. But when you’ve had a little business of your own and it’s folded up from under you, and you’re too old to learn a good trade—well, you’ve got to take it from bastards like Brainard or that big sullen Quincy or that doctor that always seemed to have two meanings to everything he said only you knew the nasty hidden one was the one he really meant.

  Still, Corcoran thought as he looked across to the mainland where the lights of Santa Eulalia were blinking on piecemeal, still there was something pretty swell about being on an island, if you could be there with the right people. Or better yet alone. Just enough food to get by on and a pipe and some tobacco and maybe a bottle. No radio. Just alone.

  Funny. As he lit his pipe, he seemed to smell pipe-smoke even before he struck the match. Tricky things, your senses.

  He took in a full deep draught of smoke and let it out with rich pleasure. He was so absorbed in the smoke and the lights winking on and his thoughts of eventual unobtainable peace that he never heard the attacker.

  He knew nothing until the rough dull edge of the knife sawed into his throat. He knew very little after that.