Ellery Queen's Crime Cruise Round the World

by Ellery Queen

  “We can take a rest here,” said Yoshiko, and Fujiko agreed.

  Sugimoto looked around. He realized they had gone deep into the woods. Seldom would anyone come here, he thought. In his imagination he saw the forest in Rinunkyo.

  “You can sit here,” said Yoshiko to Sugimoto, spreading the plastic wrapper she had undone from her parcel for him to sit on.

  The two women sat down on their handkerchiefs and stretched their legs straight out in front of them.

  The editor said, “I’m so hungry.”

  “Then why don’t we have our lunch?” asked Yoshiko.

  The two women unwrapped the lunches they had brought. Fujiko had made sandwiches. Yoshiko had prepared Sushi. These were placed on the ground along with three bottles of fruit juice.

  Taking a sandwich, Fujiko said to the others, “Please have some.”

  “Thank you, I will,” said Yoshiko, taking a sandwich, and added, “I made some Sushi and was about to eat it.”

  “Watch out, Fujiko!” shouted Sugimoto, striking the Sushi from her fingers. His face had turned white.

  “There’s poison in it!”

  Fujiko looked at him dumfounded.

  Sugimoto stared at Yoshiko’s pale face. She looked back fiercely and didn’t lower her gaze. Her eyes flashed.

  “Yoshiko, this is how you killed those two at Rinunkyo, isn’t it? You’re the one who made it look like suicide.”

  Yoshiko bit her trembling lip. She looked ghastly.

  Stammering in his excitement, Sugimoto continued, “On February 18th you invited Sakitsugu Shoda and Umeko Fukuda to go to Rinunkyo with you. You poisoned them just as you intended to poison us now, then returned alone. No one would have dreamed they had been murdered. That area is famous for suicides, so it was a perfect setup. People would just think, ‘What? Another suicide?’ and not give it a second thought. That was what you were counting on.”

  Yoshiko remained silent. Fujiko was staring wide-eyed. It seemed as if the slightest movement would tear the air.

  “You accomplished your purpose. But there was just one thing that troubled you,” Sugimoto went on. “You were worried about what would happen to the bodies. You left when they collapsed, but you wanted to know the final outcome. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to rest, isn’t that so? They say a criminal usually returns to the scene of his crime. You chose to do that through a newspaper. Or maybe you were worried whether the police would call it a suicide or suspect murder. But such a trifling incident was unlikely to appear in the Tokyo papers, so you subscribed to a Yamanashi paper, where Rinunkyo is located.

  “That was smart, Yoshiko, but you made two mistakes. You thought you had to give a reason for subscribing to the paper. So you said you wanted to read my novel. You shouldn’t have done that. That’s what made me suspicious. The other mistake you made was in ordering the paper from the 19th. Therefore, I guessed that something had happened on the previous day, on the 18th.

  “My inquiries revealed that you hadn’t gone to the club that day. Using my imagination along with the facts, I decided that you must have taken the 1:06 express train from Shinjuku. This train arrives in Kofu at 2:53. You would have to go to Rinunkyo from there, but it just so happened that the local diet member, Minister Sato, was making a speech to a throng of people at that very time. This was reported in the paper, with a photo. I was sure you would have seen it. So I decided to test you with that photo.

  “I had a private detective investigate you and Sakitsugu Shoda, and it became clear that you and he were involved with each other. And Shoda was also involved with Umeko Fukuda, the other girl. If they were made to look like a double suicide, it wouldn’t cause much of a stir. As I became more and more convinced that my reasoning was correct, I purposely left that photo of Sato for you to see. I knew it would make you suspicious of me. In other words, I wanted you to know that I was testing you. It must have made you nervous, and then you probably became afraid of me. Now it was my turn to wait for you to make the next move. You didn’t fail me.

  “You suddenly became more friendly and finally, this invitation today. You insisted I bring a girl along. That’s because if I were found dead by myself, it wouldn’t look like a suicide. If Fujiko and I had eaten your Sushi, the poison you put in it would have acted immediately. You could have left us here. Three minus one—that would leave another couple in the mountains of Izu who had evidently committed double suicide. People would be shocked to learn that we two had been so intimate. My wife would probably hide my ashes in a closet.”

  Suddenly a laugh erupted. Yoshiko Shioda threw back her head and laughed. Suddenly the laughter died and Yoshiko spoke sharply.

  “I must say, you really are a fiction writer! You couldn’t have made up a better story. So you claim that this Sushi is poisoned?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then let’s see if it will kill me. I’ll eat it all myself. Watch me. If there is poison in it, it should take about three or four minutes to kill me. If it’s a slower-acting poison, I’ll be in agony.”

  Yoshiko took the box of Sushi from the shocked Fujiko and began to stuff the food into her mouth.

  Sugimoto watched fascinated. He couldn’t utter a sound.

  There were seven or eight pieces of Sushi in the box. One by one Yoshiko chewed them and swallowed.

  “There, I ate them all. Thanks to you, I’m full. Now we’ll see if I drop dead.”

  And so saying, she lay down full length on the grass.

  The warm sun played on her face. Her eyes were closed. A nightingale was singing nearby. Time passed. Sugimoto and Fujiko didn’t say a word. More time passed.

  Yoshiko seemed to be sleeping. She didn’t stir. But, from the corner of her eye, tears made a track down her cheek. Sugimoto was tempted to speak to her, but at that moment she jumped up. It was like a spring uncoiling.

  “It’s been enough,” she said, glaring at Sugimoto. “If the Sushi had been poisoned, I would be dead now, or in agony. Yet here I am, perfectly normal. Is this proof enough that you’ve let your imagination run away with you? You should be more careful about making such wild claims!”

  So saying, Yoshiko collected the lunch box and bottles and tied them up into a parcel, stood up, and shook the grass from her skirt.

  “I’m going back. Goodbye.”

  Yoshiko strode back down the path. Her step was firm. Soon her figure was lost in the tangle of branches.

  Sugimoto received the following letter from Yoshiko Shioda.

  “You were completely right. I did do it. It is true. I am the person who killed those two people at Rinunkyo. Why did I do it? Well, there was no other way, was there? It was just the usual story of a man and two women.

  “The way he died is just as you deduced. When I invited the two of them to go with me to Rinunkyo, Shoda was delighted at the prospect of such a picnic. No doubt it gave him a perverse sense of pleasure to be accompanied by his two mistresses.

  “I reserved seats on the 1:16 express at one o’clock. I didn’t want anyone we might know to see the three of us together. I had about thirty minutes before the other two arrived. During that time I went to a little restaurant in front of the station and had some noodles and that’s when I saw your novel in the paper. When I met them, Sato was making a speech in the square.

  “At Rinunkyo I gave Shoda and Umeko some sweet cakes that I had made, in which I had put potassium cyanide. They died almost immediately. I got rid of the remaining cakes and returned, leaving the bodies there. Everything went perfectly.

  “What a relief! The only misgiving I had was whether the police would suspect murder. Therefore, I decided to take the local newspaper, using your novel as the pretext for subscribing to it. Because of that I ended up arousing your suspicions.

  “So I decided to kill you. In the same way I had killed Shoda.

  “But you saw through my plan. You suspected I had poisoned the Sushi, but actually the poison was in the fruit juice. I thought you would
drink the juice after eating the Sushi to quench your thirst.

  “I brought the bottles of fruit juice back with me. They won’t be wasted. I will drink one now. . .”

  Brian Garfield

  Scrimshaw

  Brenda—stranded in Hawaii. . .Brenda—listless, lonely, wretched, desperate, at the end of her emotional rope and almost penniless. . .Brenda—“she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really. . .perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her—but there were men who liked their women bony”. . .

  She suggested liquid undulation: a lei-draped girl in a grass skirt under a windblown palm tree, her hands and hips expressive of the flow of the hula. Behind her, beyond the surf, a whaling ship was poised to approach the shore, its square-rigged sails bold against a polished white sky.

  The scene was depicted meticulously upon ivory: a white fragment of tusk the size of a dollar bill. The etched detail was exquisite: the scrimshaw engraving was carved of thousands of thread-like lines and the artist’s knife hadn’t slipped once.

  The price tag may have been designed to persuade tourists of the seriousness of the art form: it was in four figures. But Brenda was unimpressed. She put the piece back on the display cabinet and left the shop.

  The hot Lahaina sun beat against her face and she went across Front Street to the Sea Wall, thrust her hands into the pockets of her dress and brooded upon the anchorage.

  Boats were moored around the harbor—catamarans, glass-bottom tourist boats, marlin fishermen, pleasure sailboats, outrigger canoes, yachts. Playthings. It’s the wrong place for me, she thought.

  Beyond the wide channel the islands of Lanai and Kahoolawe made lovely horizons under their umbrellas of delicate cloud, but Brenda had lost her eye for that sort of thing; she noticed the stagnant heat, the shabbiness of the town, and the offensiveness of the tourists who trudged from shop to shop in their silly hats, their sunburnt flab, their hapless T-shirts emblazoned with local graffiti: “Here Today, Gone to Maui.”

  A leggy young girl went by, drawing Brenda’s brief attention: one of those taut tan sunbleached creatures of the surfboards—gorgeous and luscious and vacuous. Filled with youth and hedonism, equipped with all the optional accessories of pleasure. Brenda watched gloomily, her eyes following the girl as far as the end of the Sea Wall, where the girl turned to cross the street. Brenda then noticed two men in conversation there.

  One of them was the wino who always seemed to be there: a stringy unshaven tattered character who spent the days huddling in the shade sucking from a bottle in a brown bag and begging coins from tourists. At night he seemed to prowl the alleys behind the seafood restaurants, living off scraps like a stray dog: she had seen him once, from the window of her fly specked room, scrounging in the can behind the hotel’s kitchen; and then two nights ago near a garbage bin she had taken a shortcut home after a dissatisfying lonely dinner and she’d nearly tripped over him.

  The man talking with the wino seemed familiar and yet she could not place the man. He had the lean bearded look of one who had gone native; but not really, for he was set apart by his fastidiousness. He wore sandals, yet his feet seemed clean, the toenails glimmering; he wore a sandy beard but it was neatly trimmed and his hair was expensively cut, not at all shaggy; he wore a blue denim short-sleeved shirt, fashionably faded but it had sleeve pockets and epaulets and had come from a designer shop; and his white sailor’s trousers fit perfectly.

  I know him, Brenda thought, but she couldn’t summon the energy to stir from her spot when the bearded man and the wino walked away into the town. Vaguely and without real interest she wondered idly what those two could possibly have to talk about together.

  She found shade on the harborfront. Inertia held her there for hours while she recounted the litany of her misfortunes. Finally hunger bestirred her and she slouched back to her miserable little third-class hotel.

  The next day, half drunk in the afternoon and wilting in the heat, Brenda noticed vaguely that the wino was no longer in his usual place. In fact, she hadn’t seen the wino at all, not last night and not today.

  The headache was painful and she boarded the jitney bus to go up-island a few miles. She got off near the Kapalua headland and trudged down to the public beach. It was cooler here because the northwest end of the island was open to the fresh trade winds; she settled under a palm tree, pulled off her ragged sneakers, and dug her toes into the cool sand. The toes weren’t very clean. She was going too long between baths these days. The bathroom in the hotel was at the end of the corridor and she went there as infrequently as possible because she couldn’t be sure who she might encounter and anyhow, the tub was filthy and there was no shower.

  Across the channel loomed the craggy mountains of Molokai, infamous island, leper colony, its dark volcanic mass shadowed by perpetual sinister rain clouds, and Brenda lost herself in gruesome speculations about exile, isolation, loneliness, and wretched despair, none of which seemed at all foreign to her.

  The sun moved and took the shade with it and she moved round to the other side of the palm tree, tucking the fabric of the cheap dress under her when she sat down. The dress was gone—frayed, faded, the material ready to disintegrate. She only had two others left. Then it would be jeans and the boatneck. It didn’t matter, really. There was no one to dress up for.

  It wasn’t that she was altogether ugly; she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really; she had studied photographs of herself over the years and she had gazed in the mirror and tried to understand, but it had eluded her. All right, perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her—but there were men who liked their women bony; that didn’t explain it. She had the proper features in the proper places and, after all, Modigliani hadn’t found that sort of face abominable to behold, had he?

  But ever since puberty there’d been something about her gangly gracelessness that had isolated her. Invitations to go out had been infrequent. At parties no one ever initiated conversations with her. No one, in any case, until Briggs had appeared in her life.

  . . .She noticed the man again: the well-dressed one with the neatly trimmed beard. A droopy brown Hawaiian youth was picking up litter on the beach and depositing it in a burlap sack he dragged along; the bearded man ambled beside the youth, talking to him. The Hawaiian said something; the bearded man nodded with evident disappointment and turned to leave the beach. His path brought him close by Brenda’s palm tree and Brenda sat up abruptly. “Eric?”

  The bearded man squinted into the shade, trying to recognize her. Brenda removed her sunglasses. She said, “Eric? Eric Morelius?”

  “Brenda?” The man came closer and she contrived a wan smile. “Brenda Briggs? What the devil are you doing here? You look like a beachcomber gone to seed.”

  Over a drink in Kimo’s she tried to put on a front. “Well, I thought I’d come out here on a sabbatical and, you know, loaf around the islands, recharge my batteries, take stock.”

  She saw that Eric wasn’t buying it. She tried to smile. “And what about you?”

  “Well, I live here, you know. Came out to Hawaii nine years ago on vacation and never went back.” Eric had an easy relaxed attitude of confident assurance. “Come off it, duckie, you look like hell. What’s happened to you?”

  She contrived a shrug of indifference. “The world fell down around my ankles. Happens to most everybody sometimes, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Just like that? It must have been something terrible. You had more promise than anyone in the department.”

  “Well, we were kids then, weren’t we. We were all promising young scholars. But what happens after you’ve broken all the promises?”

  “Good Lord. The last I saw of you, you and Briggs were off to revitalize the University of what, New Mexico?”

  “Arizona.” She tipped her head back with the glass to her mouth; ice clicked against her teeth. “And after that a state college in Minnesot
a. And then a dinky jerkwater diploma mill in California. The world,” she said in a quiet voice, “has little further need of second-rate Greek and Roman literature scholars—or for any sort of non-tenured Ph.D.’s in the humanities. I spent last year waiting on tables in Modesto.”

  “Duckie,” Eric said, “there’s one thing you haven’t mentioned. Where’s Briggs?”

  She hesitated. Then—what did it matter?—she told him: “He left me. Four years ago. Divorced me and married a buxom life-of-the-party girl fifteen years younger than me. She was writing advertising copy for defective radial tires or carcinogenic deodorants or something like that. We had a kid, you know. Cute little guy, we named him Geoff, with a G—you know how Briggs used to love reading Chaucer. In the original. In retrospect, you know, Briggs was a prig and a snob.”

  “Where’s the kid, then?”

  “I managed to get custody and then six months ago he went to visit his father for the weekend and all three of them, Briggs and the copy-writer and my kid Geoff well, there was a six-car pileup on the Santa Monica Freeway and I had to pay for the funerals and it wiped me out.”

  Eric brought another pair of drinks and there was a properly responsive sympathy in his eyes and it had been so long since she’d talked about it that she covered her face with the table napkin and sobbed.

  “God help me, Eric. Briggs was the only man who ever gave me a second look.”

  He walked her along the Sea Wall. “You’ll get over it, duckie. Takes time.”

  “Sure,” she said listlessly. “I know.”

  “Sure, it can be tough. Especially when you haven’t got anybody. You don’t have any family left, do you?”

  “No. Only child. My parents died young. Why not? The old man was on the assembly line in Dearborn. We’re all on the assembly line in Dearborn. What have we got to aim for? A condominium in some anthill and a bag full of golf clubs? Let’s change the subject, all right? What about you, then? You look prosperous enough. Did you drop out or were you pushed too?”