by Bill Crider
“I didn’t do anything to be a hero to Miss Ellie,” I said. “I like to think I’m a little beyond trying to impress my fifth-grade teacher.”
“So you’re saying I’m not?”
“Me? I’d never say a thing like that.”
Dino watched the infomercial for a minute. I wondered what kind of small classified ads you’d have to place to become an instant millionaire.
“So how’d you know they were there?” Dino asked after a minute or so.
“I didn’t. But I thought they might be. Someone was going in and out of that house often enough to let Poo-Poo slip inside, and the burglaries had all been right around that area. It was a good place to hide out and wait until everyone was asleep, then break into a house. They could even watch to see whether any of the neighbors left their houses for a visit or to go to the grocery store or to a movie.”
“You think they might have tried Miss Ellie’s place?”
“Maybe. She was alone and she would have been pretty helpless against the two of them. She would have made a good target.”
“I’m glad you stopped them, then. And I guess I deserve a little of the credit, too, come to think of it.”
“Sure you do. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have gone looking for Poo-Poo.”
“And if you hadn’t gone looking for Poo-Poo, you wouldn’t have found those two punks.”
“Right. So you might want to drop by Miss Ellie’s one of these days and tell her how you saved her.”
“I don’t think so,” Dino said.
“Why not?”
He looked over at the TV set. “I’d have to go outside. I think I’ll just give her a call instead.”
“You be sure to do that,” I said.
See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have
I remember the 1950s with great fondness, and I thought it would be fun to use that era as a setting. So far, mystery writers Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry have appeared in three stories, of which this is the first.
I
Outside, the rain fell softly from a heavy gray sky, but the only sound in the room was the clacking of the keys on the old Royal typewriter as Bo Wagner's stubby fingers danced over the keyboard.
Bo was working on the final chapter of another in one of the most promising series of detective novels the 1950s had yet seen, all of them featuring Sam Fernando, the Gentleman Sleuth. The scene was one that Bo regarded as obligatory in all the books, the one in which the suspects are gathered in one spot, waiting for Sam Fernando to explain to them the mechanics of the seemingly impossible murder that formed the basis for the book's plot and, not incidentally, to reveal to all them and to the no doubt completely bumfuzzled reader just exactly who had committed the heinous crime.
Bo was really smoking along, never glancing at the keyboard but instead keeping his eyes glued to the handwritten pages on the wooden typing stand beside the Royal. He typed so fast that it seemed a miracle that the keys didn't collide and jam. He was so intent that he didn't even seem to notice the statuesque blonde who was standing not six inches behind his chair, reading every word as it appeared on the clean white typing paper:
Sam Fernando leaned at his ease against the oak door frame and looked over the suspects who were crowded into the study of the deceased Dr. Dorman. Mrs. Hutchings sat in the overstuffed leather chair near the desk, her black eyes darting left and right, her double chins quivering. Harley Montfort was on the couch opposite the desk, his long legs sticking straight out in front of him, his ankles crossed, while next to him Missy Tongate, her bright red hair a mass of timpting tangles, squirmed . . . .
"Just a cotton pickin' minute, there, Bo," Janice Langtry said in her soft Texas drawl. "What're you writin' here, a sequel to Forever Amber? Let's have us a look at this draft copy."
She reached out a hand big enough to fill a catcher's mitt and picked up the handwritten sheets. She shook them under Bo's nose. "Can you tell me where it says anything about any 'mass of timpting tangles?'?"
Bo admitted reluctantly that he couldn't find such a phrase. "But --"
"Don't but me!" Janice said. "I know it's not there, and you know it's not there. You spelled tempting wrong, too."
Janice Langtry was nearly six feet tall, and she was wearing a man's crisply starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway to her elbows, faded Levi's with the bottoms rolled into cuffs, and black suede loafers with white socks. She was also wearing White Shoulders perfume, the scent of which always made Bo a little horny, not that he ever dared mention that fact to Janice Langtry. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail and tied with a red scarf.
"And what about that squirmed?" she asked. "I bet you a dollar the next word you were goin' to type was deliciously."
"Maybe," Bo said. "But--"
"I told you not to but me. You couldn't spell deliciously if you tried, anyhow. The agreement is that you type it up on the page just like I wrote it out by hand and not change a thing. Have you been readin' those Mickey Spillane books again?"
"Maybe," Bo said, "but--"
Janice put the handwritten sheets back on the wooden stand. Then she put her hands on her considerable hips and looked Bo right in the eye. A lesser man might have quailed, but Bo managed to meet her gaze squarely.
It wasn't easy. After all, he was sitting down. Even standing, he was nearly three inches shorter than she, and where she was neat, he was pretty much of a slob. His green shirt was wrinkled and there was a dark stain near the second button. Bo didn't know what the stain was. His jeans had a small rip in one knee, and his shoes looked worse than the ones the photographers had caught Adlai Stevenson in.
"I write the words," Janice said. "You just type 'em. That's the agreement, right?"
"Right," Bo said. He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a crumpled pack of Camels and a folder of matches. He stuck a Camel in his mouth and lit it.
"Those things are goin' to kill you," Janice said, waving a hand in front of her face to shoo away the smoke.
"Hey, Mickey Mantle smokes these," Bo protested. "They soothe his T-Zone."
"That's Lucky Strike."
Bo let a trickle of smoke out his nose. "Nope. Lucky Strike's slogan is LS/MFT. 'Lucky Strike means--'"
"I really don't give a big rat's rump what it means. You're just changin' the subject. You're the plotter, I'm the writer. That's the agreement. You don't change my words; I don't change your plots."
"I'm also the typist," Bo pointed out, trying not to sound defensive.
It bothered him more than a little that while his head teemed with plot ideas, he could hardly write a complete sentence without help. He had convincingly murdered people on stage during a performance of Twelfth Night, with the audience watching; in airplane cabins in full view of all the passengers; in classrooms full of students; in automobiles with all the windows rolled up and the doors locked; and in any number of other "impossible" places, including not a few very much like the study of the unfortunately deceased Dr. Dorman.
But the truth of the matter was that while he could plot like a demon, he couldn't write for spit. His spelling was loathsome, his grammar was atrocious, and his sentence structure was indescribable.
He knew all that, but he didn't like it, which was why he constantly studied the masters of detective fiction prose, like Mickey Spillane, a writer he greatly admired, hoping some of their stylistic magic would rub off on him. So far, none of it had.
Spillane's style was different from Janice's, of course, and probably not suited to the adventures of the Gentleman Sleuth, but it was exceptionally effective nevertheless, or so Bo believed. And besides, Spillane's books outsold the adventures of The Gentleman Sleuth by about ten to one. It never hurt to add a little spice to things, and that's all Bo had been trying to do.
"You're only the typist because you said you wanted to do it," Janice said. "I can type just as fast as you. Probably faster."
She was right. Bo stubbed out his
Camel in the ashtray by the typewriter and rolled the paper from the machine. He crumpled it and threw it in the trashcan by the desk.
While he was rolling in a new sheet, Janice said, "By the numbers this time."
"You're the boss," Bo said.
Janice nodded, the ponytail bobbing. "You said it."
Bo began typing again. This time he didn't add any squirming or "timpting tangles." He tried to tell himself that he didn't really care about all that descriptive stuff anyway, but it would have been nice once in a while to have something of his own in the writing. What really interested him, however, was the mechanics of the plot, and that's what he was getting to. His fingers jumped over the keys:
. . . Missy Tongate brushed her red hair off her forehead. Ferdy Dorman was behind the doctor's old desk, trying to look at home but failing miserably. Detective Lomax stared at each one of them in turn, then looked at the Gentleman Sleuth.
"I don't know what you're thinking of, Fernando," Lomax sneered. "You know as well as I do that everyone here was outside the room when they heard the shot that killed Dorman. And the door was bolted from the inside. The gun was on the floor beneath Dorman's body. It's a clear case of suicide."
Sam Fernando smiled. It was a smile that seemed to infuriate Detective Lomax, who had seen it all too often. "That's where you are mistaken," Fernando said.
"That's great, that's really great," Janice said. "The readers love it when Lomax does that slow burn. They know that Sam is going to drop the bomb on him one more time."
Bo turned around. He tried to avoid looking at Janice's breasts, which were quite close to him. He'd looked at them a tad too admiringly a month or so ago, and she'd belted him one right in the kisser.
"You really like that part?" he asked.
"I said I did, didn't I. Why would I lie?"
"No reason," Bo said, turning back to the typewriter.
The slow burn was Janice's idea, and Bo thought it was corny. He often wondered why the readers never seemed to get bored with it. If he were Detective Lomax, he'd retire or move to another city where he'd never have to see Sam Fernando's smugly smiling face again.
What Bo wanted to do was write a scene where his hero's nerves jangled with the kill-crazy desire to smash some greasy-haired hood's teeth down his stinking throat and rub his nose off on the filthy bricks of the nearest building. But of course he couldn't write it, and Janice wouldn't write it, so there they were.
"You see," Fernando explained, still wearing the smile that seemed to enrage Lomax and cause the policeman's face to grow almost purple and pointing to the window frame, "if the thumbtack had fallen to the outside, then we would never have known the truth. But the killer obviously miscalculated. Therefore--"
The telephone rang in the next room, and Bo stopped typing while Janice went to answer it. He leaned back in the chair and tried to overhear what his writing partner was saying. Her voice was muffled, and he could make out only part of it.
"Yes, we're busy," she said. "We're murbling on mumble mumble, and it's garble garble. . . . What? . . . And in a murbled room? . . . You're sure about that? . . . Yes. . . . Of course. . . . We'll be right there."
Bo heard the heavy click as she hung up the handset. She came back into the study with a stricken look on her face.
"What's happened?" Bo asked. "What's the matter."
"That was Lieutenant Franklin," she said.
Bo knew Franklin, of course. Every writer of mystery stories needed to know at least one good source of matters relating to police routine and procedure, and Franklin was theirs. He read each of their books to insure an air of something approaching authenticity, though Bo insisted that authenticity didn't really matter. His theory was that he and Janice were selling fantasy.
"From the way you look, I'd say he didn't call to talk about some new plot device he's dreamed up for us," Bo said.
Janice shook her head. The pony tail danced. "No. It wasn't that."
"Well, what was it, then?"
"He called to tell us that somebody's murdered Ray Thompson. In a locked house. In front of three or four witnesses. And there's no murder weapon to be found."
II
Bo Wagner was thirty-five years old, but, as Janice often reminded him, he had never grown up. Which was why they were zipping through the streets in a black chopped and channeled '49 Merc' and why Bo was wearing a red jacket just like the one James Dean had worn in Rebel without a Cause. The radio was blaring "C'mon Everybody" by Eddie Cochran. The wipers swished rain from the windshield.
"Are they sure Ray's dead?" Bo asked, taking a corner on two wheels. He worked the clutch and shifted smoothly down into third gear as the car straightened out from the turn. "Sometimes they can do wonders in the hospitals these days."
"Ray's dead all right," Janice told him. "That's what Lt. Franklin said. He was shot twice."
"Where?"
"Somewhere in the house. That's all I found out. I just said we'd get there as fast as we could."
They were on a long, straight street, and Bo mashed the accelerator to the floor.
"Not this fast!" Janice said. "Not on this wet street!"
Bo slowed down, but not much. He couldn't believe Ray was dead. There had to be some mistake, but it was pretty unlikely that Lt. Franklin would be wrong about something that important. If he said Ray was dead, then Ray was no longer among the living.
"C'mon Everybody" ended and was followed by a string of commercials. Then "It's Only Make Believe" came on.
"Guy sounds a lot like Elvis," Bo said.
"He wishes," Janice said, but her heart wasn't in it. Bo could tell she was thinking about Ray.
Ray Thompson had been among their earliest admirers. After the publication of The Red and Blue Clue, the first Sam Fernando book, Ray had called Bo.
"I just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your work," he said. "Both yours and Miss Langtry's. I assume you share the work equally?"
Bo told him that was right.
"Well, you do it very well indeed. I haven't enjoyed anything quite so much since the first Ellery Queen novel I ever read. The Roman Hat Mystery, I believe. And to think that both you and Miss Langtry live right here in the city! I wonder if you would do me the honor of having dinner with me some evening?"
Ray had gotten their names from an article that appeared in the local newspaper after the publication of The Red and Blue Clue. No other newspapers had been interested, which was fine with Bo. He thought writers should write and not have to worry about publicizing their work.
The young reporter who came to do the interview had been struck by the fact that the book was a collaboration between a man and a woman, and he'd written a long story about how the two had met (at the library), discovered their mutual interest in mysteries (they were in the mystery section, and both of them reached at the same time for the latest John Dickson Carr novel), and decided to write together (both had friends who said things like "You read so many of those things, why don't you write one?" but neither felt competent to try it alone).
Ray Thompson loved reading, especially mysteries, and he had time to indulge himself thanks to his enviable financial situation. His father had bought a few acres of land to raise cows on and had forgotten all about the cows when a drilling company discovered oil there. He retired from raising cattle and doing much of anything except counting his money, and Ray had followed in the old man's footsteps, except that now most of the oil was gone and the money came in from investments.
Janice and Bo had gone to dinner at Ray's house a few days after the phone call. Neither had ever been in a place quite like it. When they entered the front door, they were only a few steps from the largest private library in the city, with wooden bookshelves filled from floor to ceiling with nothing but mystery novels, first editions by Agatha Christie, Naigo Marsh, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, Cornell Woolrich (and his alter ego William Irish), John Dickson Carr (and his alter ego, Carter Dickson) and even (to Bo's secret delig
ht) Mickey Spillane.
Ray was as fascinated with the two writers as they were with his books. For all his love of reading, he had never met an actual writer before, and now he was talking to two of them. After that evening they were fast friends, and Janice and Bo were frequent guests in Ray's home. But now he was dead.
"I just can't believe it," Janice said as Bo pulled to the curb in front of Ray's house.
There were several cars already there: two police cars, Lt. Franklin's unmarked Ford, and a black Lincoln Continental.
The two-story house was huge and impressive, if not exactly tasteful, with a wide front and two wings that extended backward. The outside was mostly red brick, and there flower beds along the front and down the sidewalk.
"I'm not sure I want to go in there," Janice said.
Bo wasn't so sure either. He was used to murder on the clean white pages he typed, but he had never been on the scene of an actual killing.
"We have to go in," he said.
He got out of the car and went around to open the passenger door for Janice. It was still raining lightly, and the December wind moaned out of the gray sky and whipped down the street, cutting right through Bo's red jacket. Janice was wearing a long all-weather coat with a raccoon collar. The bottom of it flapped against her legs as she stepped out on the curb.
There were two tall oak trees in the front yard of the house. The wind scattered dead, wet leaves across the yard and down the sidewalk, and they brushed across Bo's shoes as he approached the door.
The door was made of heavy carved wood, and there were long windows on either side of it. On the wall beside the windows there were drainpipes coming down from the roof gutters. The water from the drains flowed into the flower beds. There was a steady stream from one pipe, but only a trickle from the other.
In the center of the door there was a heavy brass knocker in the shape of a cowboy boot. Bo reached out for the knocker, but he didn't have to use it. The door was pulled open by Lt. Franklin, who was standing in the short hallway. Franklin had a broad face with a downturned mouth, a nose like a potato, and the suspicious eyes of the career cop.