Black Cat Thrillogy #1

by Reginald Bretnor

  “I told Bryce he could ride down with you,” Egan said. “I was sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  She laughed again. “Not if he doesn’t.”

  Lasher indicated he didn’t mind a bit.

  “Well, let’s get started then,” she said, taking his arm. “We have to get through all the traffic and then it’s a good twenty miles. You’ll want to get there in time for cocktails and have a chance to meet everybody.”

  Egan saw them to her car, a Daimler Sovereign, and she swept expertly out into the traffic.

  “Where are we headed?” Lasher asked.

  “Didn’t Sandy tell you? Alfie Hobble has an estate out near Warhampton, a regular baronial affair—or rather what some Victorian get-rich-quick thought was baronial. He’s a fine host, and we often meet there.”

  “And who’s we? Egan mentioned Dame Euridice and a few others, but then you arrived.”

  “We call ourselves The Murderer’s Circle. There’s Aston Tourneau, the publisher, and Lacey Morland, Alfie’s daughter, who thinks she’s a femme fatale because she’s been divorced three times, and sweet old Marina Federescu, who’s a baroness and who really was a femme fatale—a spy for both sides in World War I, imagine it! But you’ll meet them all presently. Did you know I’m starting a new novel? It’s about three or four murders at a sort of super house party at a ski lodge near Aspen—that’s in your state of Colorado, isn’t it?”

  Lasher replied that indeed it was; he knew the area well; he had skied there many times. The Murderers’ Circle! he thought. Don’t these Brits even suspect how far off the beam they are with their pretty little house party setups? And now she wants to inflict that sort of garbage on Colorado! But when she started to ask him questions about American police procedure he managed to answer all of them while keeping a straight face.

  She drove fast and expertly, and once they had the worst traffic behind them the miles flew swiftly even after they left the main artery for a winding country road. Finally she braked, turning in between two great stone and iron gates.

  “Here we are,” she told him. “Hobble Manor. Cozy, isn’t it?”

  He beheld an enormous stone pile, grimly turreted but in no discernible style.

  A bald and massive butler stood at the door to greet them. A huge Irish footman who looked as though he might have survived some years of IRA bomb-throwing came out to take the car.

  “Good evening, Gudgins,” said Miss Ouseley. “I’ve brought our guest, Mr. Bryce Lasher.”

  “Good evening, sir,” rumbled Gudgins. “Mr. Hobble is awaiting you. If you and Miss Ouseley will come with me?”

  They followed him into a large room where the members of The Murderers’ Circle were chatting happily and busily drinking. Egan, surprisingly there ahead of them, made the introductions: Alf Hobble, dressed expensively but in poor taste; his daughter, much as she had been described; the aged Baroness, busy with a huge martini; His Grace, the Bishop of Thaxeter, bluff and florid, who looked as though he probably rode to hounds; Braxton Bellingham, thin and dehydrated; Peter Splain in rough tweeds, puffing a malodorous pipe; and the others whom Egan had already mentioned. Lasher was impressed by none of them, not even by Commissioner Thwaites-Horton, whom he had pictured as a ramrod-straight, sternly martial type, but who turned out to be a bit overweight, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and definitely Churchillian in outline. The only ones who looked at him as though he had been left too long out of the fridge were a Captain Something-or-other of one of the Guards regiments and his drawn, hawk-eyed wife.

  Even the Commissioner went out of his way to make Lasher welcome, remarking jocularly that after all it was murder that united them, so that difference of opinion really ought not to be allowed to spoil their fun, and Lasher for once obligingly agreed, telling himself that they really were out to butter him up.

  He had one drink—the Scotch was superb—and a second and a third, taking part in some of the small talk, and wondering when would be the best time to activate the mini-recorder he always had with him when discussing contracts.

  Presently, they trooped into the dining room, having been summoned by yet another large Irish footman, and Lasher was seated in the place of honor between the Commissioner, who apparently was to preside, and the aged Dame Euridice, who chattered away about la haute cuisine, fine wines, and the difficulty one had in finding servants nowadays. “After all, Mr. Lasher,” she sighed, “we can’t all have the luck of Alfred there and find someone as talented as Gudgins, can we?”

  The wines were excellent, the food had been prepared by a master chef, and the two footmen had been well trained. Lasher found himself actually glowing, and he started composing, in his mind, the cutting phrases which would tell The Murderers’ Circle what he thought of it and of its absurdly dated novels. The talk flowed through him and around him until the last dessert had been praised and finished and the footmen were preparing to serve coffee and liqueurs.

  Then the Commissioner stood, held up an admonitory hand for silence, and called the meeting to order.

  “It is our good fortune this evening,” he began, “to have with us the very well-known novelist and mystery critic, Mr. Bryce Lasher, with whose work we are all familiar.” He beamed down at Lasher, who had flipped on his recorder. “I for one must say that I’m delighted to have him here in our midst.”

  The Baroness Marina Federescu emitted a throaty chuckle, and Alfred Hobble politely said, “’Ear, ’ear!”

  “Indeed yes,” the Commissioner continued, “and I’m sure that our guest will not feel that I’m imposing if I ask him to say a few words about the subject in which we’re all so deeply interested.” He looked down again and saw Lasher already rising to his feet. “Thank you,” the Commissioner said. “My fellow members, may I present Bryce Lasher.”

  Commissioner Thwaites-Horton sat down as Lasher stood to polite applause.

  Lasher looked them over. “This isn’t going to take long,” he said. “All I’m going to tell you is what’s wrong with you and your whole picture. For Christ’s sake, don’t you know Sherlock Holmes is dead? That Poirot and Appleby and all your other so-called great detectives are about as real as Mickey Mouse? Look at your country. My God, you turn out more crap about murder than anybody—and in the whole place you hardly have fifty murders a year! Fifty—Christ!—that’s less than any small town in the USA.”

  Forgetting his promise to be terse, he went on in this vein for the better part of fifteen minutes, informing them that they knew nothing about murder, and citing several works by those present to prove his point. Finally, “Let me close this with a bit of good advice,” he said. “Can it. Quit writing about something none of you know anything about. Go back to scribbling Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. That’s all.”

  He sat down, again to polite applause, and again the Commissioner arose. Gravely, he looked down at Lasher.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lasher,” he began. “Of course, all of us here were already familiar with your opinion of the British murder mystery, but it was well to hear it directly and without any of the restraints imposed by literary convention. Therefore I now shall take the liberty—which I’m sure you will not grudge me—of explaining to you how wrong you are.”

  Lasher snorted.

  “You see,” continued Thwaites-Horton, “while we British cannot claim to have invented the detective story, we have done more to nourish and develop it than any other people. In no country has the traditional murder mystery been so popular and over so many years. The traditional form has been an addiction comparable to, let us say, the supermarket tabloid in your own land. This became obvious as soon as the Sherlock Holmes stories started to appear, and it grew constantly over the years. At first its social effects were not obvious, and it wasn’t really until after the First World War that we, at Scotland Yard, began to suspect what had been going on. Why? My dear Mr. Lasher, it was because of our falling
murder rate. As you pointed out, we do not have many more than half a hundred murders a year, and this has persisted despite our increasing population. We noticed it, of course, but by the time we really understood what was going on it was too late.”

  He smiled at Lasher.

  “You see, we were getting case after case of what we knew had to be murder, case after case where all the ingredients—motive, opportunity, and so on—were present, but where it was impossible to tie the thing together. Poisoning? The poison couldn’t be identified. Blunt instrument? The instrument could not be found. Or the corpse was found where it never should have been. Or neither the instrument nor anything else significant could be linked to the obviously guilty suspect. At length—and believe me only after much soul-searching—we reached the inescapable conclusion. Our murder rate had not declined. More murders than ever were being committed here in Great Britain—but, Mr. Lasher, they were perfect murders. Our traditional detective novels had so trained our murdering public that they were now treating the whole thing as an art. Consider, just the novels of dear Dame Euridice are a compendium of every mistake a murderer shouldn’t make. We were faced with an insoluble problem.”

  “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?” sneered Lasher. “So what did you do then? You sure as hell didn’t all up and resign!”

  “Certainly not. We simply recognized that murder, once so crude a business, was now being practiced as an art and that we would—discreetly of course—have to make the best of it. As I believe you say in the States, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ That is the reason some of us founded The Murderers’ Circle.”

  “Honest to God! Do you expect me to believe that hogwash?” Lasher pushed his chair back roughly. “Well, listen! I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m not buying any of it. But—” he grinned triumphantly. “—you’ve given me lots of nice hot material good for about twenty columns, and you aren’t going to be able to deny any of it.” He tapped his pocket. “I’ve got it all on tape.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t worry us—”

  Suddenly Lasher realized that the members of The Murderers’ Circle—including the ravishing Miss Ouseley—were watching him very, very intently.

  “My dear fellow, I wasn’t trying to persuade you. I explained the situation to you simply because we felt that under the circumstances we owed it to you. But you certainly don’t worry us.”

  Again, the Commissioner smiled benignly.

  “After all,” he said, “nobody is ever going to know that you were here.”

  THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE DEAREST DEFUNCT

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1990.

  Alastair Alexandrovitch Timuroff looked up from the cheap little grey envelope with its Italian stamp at his friend, Lieutenant Peter Cominazzo of the Homicide Bureau, who had just presented it to him. “The emotional Russian in me,” he said, “tells me that the Orfanotrofio Sant’Antonio is an institution probably run by some religious order and dedicated to charitable works. The prudent Scot in me, who I confess is now dominant, tells me that this is an appeal for funds.”

  His secretary Olivia, Lieutenant Cominazzo’s wife, giggled. “You’re right on both counts,” she told him. “That’s why Pete’s trying to push it off on you, even though it’s from his own countrymen. Who’d think a great big six-footer would stoop to anything so low?”

  “What do you mean, my countrymen? Me, born right here in San Francisco? Anyhow, they’re Sicilianos, and my folks came from way up north, from Brescia. Go ahead, open it up, read it. But first take a gander at who it’s addressed to.”

  Timuroff had not looked at the address. Now he did, and the scar that ran from the corner of his trim moustache to his Tartar cheekbone twitched very slightly. “What the devil? Signor Willis Ganymede. How on earth did our brave little supervisor get on their mailing list?”

  “Don’t ask me, Tim. I don’t know how Minky Ganymede gets on anything. Look inside.”

  Rather gingerly, Timuroff removed the contents: a return envelope and a slip of printed paper.

  The first side cried out:

  HEED!

  and continued I), II), III), IV) with instructions as to how remittances should be sent. It ended up:

  With best thanks and wishes,

  We are

  The orphan boys of Sant’Antonio

  “Well,” commented Timuroff, “I must say I’m surprised to find Signor Ganymede interesting himself in such a worthy project.”

  “Turn it over,” Pete told him Timuroff obeyed. He frowned and read aloud:

  “Write in this square the name of the dearest Defunct; for this Defunct the orphan boys will pray in a special way.

  “If you wish, you can stick also the Defunct’s photography and send it us.”

  “It sounds a little coarse, doesn’t it?” Timuroff murmured. “And here, just under his ‘photography,’ is the Defunct’s name, Cesare Spirella—whoever he was. Not the sort you’d want to meet in a back alley late at night. My word! Here’s a name I know—one of my customers, Mrs. Lydia Hanuman, and the amount she’s sending: fifty dollars. All very picturesque and interesting, but—”

  “Ha,” Pete broke in, “you may well say but.”

  Timuroff looked at him inquiringly.

  “Cesare may very well have been our Minky’s dearest—though I’d never have thought it of him—but defunct he’s not.

  “Cheesy Spirella’s a Mafia soldier—a hitman. In his trade, a guy can become a defunct any time. The question is, how did Minky know he was scheduled to be wiped? And how come he’s willing to pass the word along to this Mrs. Hanuman so she can pungle up fifty bucks for prayers?”

  “It’s very strange indeed,” Timuroff said thoughtfully. “Ganymede, you may recall, was the most beautiful boy ever born, whereupon old Zeus, who relished that sort of pulchritude, sent an eagle to kidnap him up to Olympus to serve as his—well, cup-bearer. All this was probably of value to our supervisor during his early stage career as a female impersonator, and we can, I think, conclude that he was not born Ganymede. Then we have Lydia Hanuman, the wife of Briscoe Hanuman the lawyer, who is full of money and collects Near Eastern swords of various kinds.”

  Timuroff gestured at the racks of antique weapons which were his stock in trade. “He waves them around ferociously before he buys them, making the most frightful faces. Didn’t Olivia mention him?”

  “I just didn’t connect the names,” Olivia said. “So he has a wife? Slave girls seemed more likely.”

  “I’ve met her several times, and a handsome bit of work she is, though somewhat on the splashy, slightly poisonous side, with a wild eye for the boys and a firm belief that she’s a jet-setter—”

  Timuroff closed his eyes for an instant, frowning.

  “Tim,” said Pete, “your body language tells me a light just turned on. Am I right?”

  “You are, you are. First we have Willis Ganymede. Then we encounter Briscoe Hanuman. Hanuman may or may not be his real name—he has rather a Punic look about him—but it is the name of the Hindu monkey-god, born of a strange coupling between a monkey and a breeze. So here we have a Greek boy-god, a Hindu monkey-god—or at least his wife—and a Mafia soldier all mixed up together, with the first two wangling prayers for the third from a Catholic orphanage in Sicily.”

  “I don’t figure it.”

  “Nor I. It could be coincidence—or should I say synchronicity? Two godlings out of three is just too many, but in the San Francisco we have today anything is possible. Just where did Mr. Ganymede happen to lose this little souvenir?”

  “At the Gay Sensitivity Day celebration, I guess when Mayor Verdugo was making his stirring speech. Terry Horikawa, who was protecting His Honor, found it and turned it in to me. He figured I’d be interested because Cheesy was involved.”

  “Well, then, don’t yo
u think you ought to sniff around and see if there are any other minor deities in the woodwork?”

  Peter snorted. “I’ve got enough with homicides that have already happened. What makes you think this god deal’s important?”

  “I heard a little bell ring.” Timuroff smiled. “And I have faith in little bells. So just this once I’ll be happy to look into the matter for you.”

  “I think that’s very nice of you,” said Olivia loyally. “Are you still going to take us both to lunch?”

  * * * *

  They lunched at Oliver’s, in the old financial district, and though they spoke of all sorts of other matters—about Pete’s putative ancestor, the great gunmaker Lazarino Cominazzo, and how Timuroffs Liselotte Cantelou was triumphing at the Vienna Staatsoper—Timuroffs mind was trying to uncover what his little mental bell had hinted at.

  He returned to his shop alone, after giving Olivia the afternoon off to go shopping. The premises had once been occupied by a dishonest furrier who, in escaping, had abandoned the infinity of mirrors behind his glass wall cases, making it seem as if the number of Timuroffs muskets and fowling pieces, claymores and katanas and sabers was absolutely unlimited.

  He turned on his stereo, and found himself listening to Holst’s The Planets, which seemed to fit in with people also named after gods and godlings. He sat back, cudgeling his brains, and presently a bell did ring—the one informing him a customer had arrived. Sighing, he pressed the button that unlocked the door and called, “Come in.”

  As he stood up, Lydia Hanuman swept in with a flourish.

  Well, well, he thought. Synchronicity with a vengeance!

  Everything about Mrs. Hanuman was expensive. Indeed it was difficult to look at her without seeing price-tags—in her made-to-be-modeled dress in the latest trendy fashion, in her hat, her startling jewels, even her white, white teeth, her raven hair, her flashing-jet-black eyes, and the cloud of perfume in which she swam.

  She saw that Olivia was out and beamed at him. “Dear Tim,” she purred. “You don’t mind my calling you Tim, do you? Briscoe always does. Oh, I’m so glad we’re alone!”