EQMM, February 2007

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by Dell Magazine Authors




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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Dell Magazines

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE

  February 2007

  Vol. 129, No. 2. Whole No. 786

  Dell Magazines

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, NY 10016

  Edition Copyright © 2006 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications

  Ellery Queen is a registered trademark of the Estate of Ellery Queen. All rights reserved worldwide.

  All stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are fiction. Any similarities are coincidental.

  ISSN 0013-6328 published monthly except for double-issues of March/April and September/October.

  Cover Photograph: Basil Rathbone.

  CONTENTS

  FICTION

  The Missing Elevator Puzzle by BY JON L. BREEN

  Epiphany BY MARGARET MURPHY

  Garbo Writes BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  As the Saying Goes BY CONRAD LAWRENCE

  Dear Dr. Watson BY STEVE HOCKENSMITH

  A Bird in the Sand BY EDWARD D. HOCH

  The Golden Fool BY MARGARET LAWRENCE

  Pearler BY CHERYL ROGERS

  Where There's a Will... BY AMY MYERS

  POETRY

  Too High on the Hog BY HARRY HOPKINSON

  REVIEWS

  The Jury Box BY JON L. BREEN

  PASSPORT TO CRIME

  Disguised as a Normal Person BY RICARDO ADOLFO

  THE MISSING ELEVATOR PUZZLE by Jon L. Breen

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  Art by Mark Evans

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  EQMM's long-standing reviewer of crime fiction is also, as most of our readers know, a writer of mystery short stories and novels. Mr. Breen worked as a librarian during most of the years he wrote fiction and reviewed for EQMM. It's only since his recent retirement that he's been able to devote himself entirely to his writing. This is the first of three new Breen stories we'll publish this year.

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  In 1933, the novel Death in the Dark by Cecil Henderson was withdrawn from the market in Great Britain when it was found to have “an extraordinary similarity” to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, published three years earlier. Henderson told the London Daily Express, “I was so much impressed with [The Maltese Falcon] that I decided to take it as a model for my literary work. I had no intention of doing anything that could be assumed to be wrong with Mr. Hammett's novel."

  * * * *

  On Tuesday, the murder at Worden University led the TV news, statewide. On Wednesday and Thursday, even more embarrassingly for the administration, it dominated the front pages of the unfriendly local daily. On Friday, both media outlets reported that the crime had been solved, crediting the city police rather than the gifted amateur who had actually done the job. By Saturday, Professor Vanessa Strom, having listened to the gifted amateur explain his deductions to doz-ens of people on the campus, longed for a vacation (a dim hope at the outset of a long semester) if their intense but mutually abrasive romance were to survive. Sunday, the evening of the dean's annual cocktail party, seemed a very long time ago.

  Vanessa arrived at Qualen House at a quarter past six that warm September evening. According to social convention, that should have been right on time for an event called for six o'clock, but she could see through the big side window that the main room of the university's all-purpose hospitality center was already packed wall-to-wall with standing academics sipping their drinks, balancing their plates and napkins, and decorously jockeying for advantage.

  Qualen House, once the residence of Worden University's president, was no longer occupied full-time but was maintained at who knew what expense for visiting luminaries and fund-raising events. The imposing two-story building, nearly a century old, had been extravagantly furnished and modernized, and the surrounding grounds kept three full-time gardeners busy. Comparing the luxuriousness of Qualen House with Vanessa's cramped and windowless faculty office was a fruitless but inevitable exercise. The university administration's strategy was clear: present an elegant front to the world with the venerable and picturesque campus, while crying poverty in face of pleas to raise the pay of its employees or properly maintain the less visible parts of its ageing infrastructure. Even the decision to convert one wing of Qualen House to a small Museum of Plagiarism represented more of a gesture to a wealthy donor than to knowledge and scholarship.

  Vanessa contemplated a solitary stroll before darkness fell around the magnificent gardens, which she could enjoy for their beauty despite the misplaced priorities they represented. But she steeled herself to do her duty and entered the imposing entry hall, picked up her obligatory nametag at a table staffed by the dean's elderly secretary in an incongruous evening gown, and entered the fray. There was still a makeshift receiving line at the door to the main room, beginning with Edgar Canfield, the courtly if ineffectual Dean of Language and Literature, and his wife Selma.

  "Professor Strom, delighted you were able to join us,” Dean Canfield said. There was no irony in his tone, though it was the sort of thing you say to a tardy student.

  "Vanessa, good evening, you look lovely,” said Selma Canfield, offering a thin, dry hand and speaking with all the animation of a robot.

  "Judd,” said Dean Canfield to the man on his wife's right, “let me present Dr. Vanessa Strom, one of the newest and, might I add, youngest full professors from the English Department. Vanessa, this is our new Vice President for Administrative Affairs, Judd Anderson."

  Anderson was very tall, prematurely gray, anchorman handsome, and fully confident of his irresistibility. That the new chief financial officer came from the corporate world rather than academia offered manifold opportunities for suspicion and second-guessing about his selection. In his few days on campus, there had been whispers and rumors of Anderson's nefarious activities but actual sightings were rare.

  "Vanessa,” he said with manufactured warmth, taking her hand but stopping short of kissing it, “I am charmed. The professors didn't look like you in my college days. And I so admire English literature. I spent several years in England."

  "How nice,” she said. “My specialty is American literature."

  "Well, I like that, too."

  Less than charmed, Vanessa smiled, offered a bit more appropriate small talk, and moved on. A much smaller man, youthful, bright-eyed, and trim as a jockey, had mischievously attached himself to the end of the line, though he clearly had no business there other than to hand her a glass of champagne. He stared at her chest in a way that would have been offensive in the absence of a nametag.

  "Vanessa Strom!” he exclaimed. "Dictionary of Feminist Quotations, right?"

  "Right,” she said, smiling and peering at his label. Stephen Fenbush, it said. The name was vaguely familiar. Should she recognize it?

  As they carried their drinks away from the reception area and toward the center of the large room, Fenbush said, “One of the reasons that book is so entertaining is that so many of the quotations aren't all that feminist."

  "Maybe we have different ideas about what constitutes feminist."

  "Maybe we do,” he said, looking meaningfully into her eyes. “We'll have to talk about that sometime. Meanwhile, here's to feminism.
Whatever it is."

  They touched glasses.

  "You have to call me Stephen, please. Never Steve. In American popular culture, Stephen spells success. Sondheim, King, Spielberg, Bochco. Steve invites only ridicule. Steve Reeves, Adam and Steve."

  "Who's Steve Reeves?"

  "You see what I mean. ‘Sixties movie actor. The Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day, but never got elected to anything, thank God. You might ask what I'm doing here, so I'll tell you and deal with the inevitable shunning. I'm Film Critic in Residence.” He paused and looked at her plaintively. “Oh, thank you for not making a face and turning away in haughty disdain. If you people don't want a visiting movie reviewer on the faculty, don't invite one, okay?"

  "The position has been somewhat controversial,” she said, putting it mildly. She remembered the vote in the Academic Senate demanding its elimination in hard budgetary times and the grudging reversal when someone pointed out it was funded in perpetuity by a bequest that could be used for nothing else.

  "Odd place,” Stephen said, looking around the room. “That picture window seems out of period, and it doesn't go with the rest of the building."

  "They put it in twenty years ago. Are you an architecture critic, too?"

  "No, but critics have to keep in practice. It's like working out. They say Gene Siskel used to review his lunch to whoever would listen."

  Vanessa found herself inexplicably attracted to the slightly hyper little man, so much so that she was already mentally considering and dismissing the reasons not to be. Age differences didn't bother her, and anyway she suspected his boyish energy made him seem younger than he was. He was probably close to her own age, late thirties. He was also a few inches shorter than she, but that was another meaningless triviality.

  "And where might I read your reviews?” she asked.

  "Onlooker magazine. But I wouldn't want you to think their politics are necessarily my politics. It's their money I'm interested in."

  Vanessa was about to ask what she should look for at the local art house—the multiplex could take care of itself—when Stephen Fenbush was pulled away by a boisterous group of film buffs who wanted his opinion on whether Jackie Chan owed more to Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd. He looked back in comic apology, his eyebrows beckoning her to follow. She considered it, but one could admit to attraction without becoming ridiculous. If he wanted to talk to her, he could find her later.

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  In 1900, Theodore Dreiser's new novel Sister Carrie was discovered to take a lengthy and only lightly rewritten descriptive passage from “The Fable of the Two Mandolin Players and the Willing Performer” (1899) by fellow Indiana author George Ade. The matter would be corrected in the 1907 edition, but Ade claimed no animus, saying, “We Hoosiers are proud of him, for he erects literary skyscrapers while we're busy pounding out chicken coops or bungalows.” In 1926, newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams caught Dreiser cribbing from Sherwood Anderson, who was also publicly forgiving but lamented in private correspondence, “Another idol smashed."

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  Vanessa spent a half-hour or so circulating among the crowd and greeting colleagues until she saw a familiar figure standing alone in a corner not far from the elaborate but unimaginative buffet table and weaved her way toward him.

  One of Vanessa's favorite not-necessarily-feminist lines from her Dictionary of Feminist Quotations was, “If you can't say anything nice about anybody, come sit by me.” If Alice Roosevelt Longworth had the misfortune to find herself at the dean's cocktail party, she would have eagerly sought Manny Grade's company. The huge Shakespeare specialist—he had once played Falstaff in a university production—had chosen as his role ironic observer of the foibles of his fellow man.

  "Ah, Vanessa!” Manny cried, waving his glass in greeting. “I knew you wouldn't miss this. The dean's cocktail party occupies a special place in the university social calendar."

  Vanessa, sensing the comic tirade to come, smiled and proffered the straight line. “How do you mean?"

  Manny raised bushy eyebrows and pronounced, “It presents unique opportunities for stupefying boredom."

  "And is that so unusual on the university social calendar?"

  "Why, certainly it is,” he said, perfectly straight-faced. “Van, you know me. Am I one of those insufferable cynics who find my fellow academics tiresome cranks? Decidedly not. Most of them are well-adjusted people who wear their learning lightly and can discuss their specialties entertainingly and instructively. We're all teachers, aren't we? But somehow the Dean of Language and Literature, for all his admirable qualities—give me awhile and I shall think of some—manages to find as centerpieces of his annual soiree those few enemies of insomnia who raise esoteric triviality to an art form."

  "For example?"

  "There's that little twerp over there talking to old Finnerty, for one."

  She looked across the room to see Stephen Fenbush in intense conversation with a shrunken professor emeritus who remained the university's ranking expert on Chaucer.

  "For a bore, he seems to be doing more listening than talking,” she observed. “And anyway, I think he's sort of cute."

  Manny Grade made a face. “Film Critic in Residence, indeed! What's he doing at a Language and Literature clambake? Doesn't his position belong in Fine Arts or somewhere?"

  "Don't you realize how many sections we offer every semester of film as literature?"

  "Only literature is literature. Movies are just movies. Anyway, this Film Critic in Residence was bending my ear about the relative merits of a couple of French directors I'd never heard of, when up walks John Amber."

  "I don't think I've met him yet."

  "You'll meet him soon enough. Won't be able to avoid it. He's been appointed to the Museum of Plagiarism committee on which we serve, for our sins."

  "Manny, it's an ideal committee assignment. When it meets, all we have to do is listen and nod our heads, and it hardly ever meets."

  "That, I am told, may change. Now, Van, if you tilt your head a bit and look just to the right of Myra Buford's awful new hairdo, you'll see a balding banty rooster with a smug expression. Got him?"

  "Couldn't miss him,” Vanessa said, craning her neck for a view.

  "That's John Amber. He's a sabbatical replacement in linguistics who fancies himself Henry Higgins. Listens to you speak two sentences and tells you where you're from and where you've been. Did it to me."

  "Was he right?"

  "Well, yes, he was right, but Van, I'm easy. Texas overlaid with Boston is a slam dunk. Geoff Black was there, too, and Amber pegged him at once for New Zealand, which I don't imagine is that hard, either. Then he told your Film Critic in Residence he grew up in California with parents from Ohio. The little guy was amazed."

  "That is pretty amazing."

  "That one wasn't bad, I have to admit. But most of Amber's revelations are along the lines of, ‘Mr. Caine, you're a cockney,’ or ‘Mr. Jennings, I detect a Canadian lineage in the way you say “oot” and “aboot.” ‘And the showmanlike flourish with which he delivers these revelations, well, you'd think he was David Copperfield. I refer not to the Dickens character but to—"

  "The magician. Got it."

  "Not only that, Amber has to punctuate his party trick with little points about how he does it. For example, did you know that in the New Zealand accent, our short e comes out like a short i, so that yes comes out yis?"

  "No, I never noticed that. I'll have to listen to Geoff Black more carefully."

  "Anyway, the little movie reviewer was entranced, ate it up."

  "So might Amber's students."

  "It will take more than that to raise our current crop from their hip-hop-induced coma,” Manny responded. It was clearly a lead-in to his standard jeremiad on contemporary youth, but before he could continue, there came from the center of the room a call for attention. The Dean of Language and Literature was about to speak.

  "Good evening,” said Dean Canfield. “And thank you
all for coming."

  "Did we have a choice?” Manny muttered.

  "It is my annual pleasure to introduce to you our new faculty and visiting professors. They are fewer in number this year but no lesser in distinction. You all know that the budget situation at the university has severely limited hiring new faculty for this academic year, but I am assured several new positions are under consideration for next year."

  "We won't get them, either,” murmured Manny, who had scant appreciation for the dean's administrative abilities.

  "Secondarily, I know you had all hoped for an advance look at the new Englethorpe Museum of Plagiarism this evening, but I am informed it's not quite ready for visitors. Watch for an announcement of the official opening in your campus mailboxes and your e-mail. It will give us an excuse for another party."

  The dean paused to allow for laughter or applause that did not materialize. Manny whispered to Vanessa, “Why do we need both a paper memo to throw away and an e-mail to delete? Of everything."

  The dean went on to introduce half a dozen newcomers: three visiting professors, including Stephen Fenbush and linguist John Amber, and three very young and eager lecturers who had about the same odds of eventually achieving permanent positions as baby turtles racing for the tide. When the introductions ended to polite applause, Selma Canfield, astonishingly, left her husband's side and walked toward the corner occupied by Vanessa and Manny.

  "Vanessa, good evening, you look lovely,” the dean's wife said in a perfunctory monotone, apparently unaware it was the same thing she'd said on the receiving line earlier. Then she turned to Manny. “Professor Grade, we must speak. The committee. We must meet. Soon. It's rather—” She turned again to Vanessa, said apologetically, “You will excuse us,” and pulled Manny away.

  Vanessa wondered only briefly what committee had an emergency. The university had dozens of them, mostly unnecessary, but only one to her knowledge was chaired by the dean's wife: the Museum of Plagiarism committee. Why, though, had she pulled Manny away? Vanessa was as much a member of the committee as he was. It piqued her curiosity but didn't really bother her. She had achieved tenure and a full professorship and now wanted as few campus political entanglements as she could manage. So she strode across the room hoping to reconnect with Stephen Fenbush, whom she had sensed watching her all evening.

 

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