by Helen McCloy
“Without Cottle’s noticing?” protested Gus.
“Cottle was really too drunk to notice anything,” retorted Basil. “And it must have been that way because there was no trace of cyanide at all in the iced tea pitcher, or the whiskey decanter or the soda siphon—only in Cottle’s own glass.”
“But how could the murderer plan to poison the iced tea?” cried Tony. “The only people who knew that Cottle was supposed to drink iced tea were Philippa and myself and the Veseys.”
“And Vera,” added Philippa. “She saw Amos drink iced tea at our parties when they were living together.”
“But I couldn’t know beforehand that he was going to drink it last night,” said Vera. “And, as a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“Let’s face it squarely,” cried Gus. “Dr. Willing is implying that one of us—the five who knew about the iced tea—poisoned Amos.”
“Not necessarily,” remarked Basil. “The fact that Amos Cottle usually drank iced tea at parties might have been noticed and talked about. Anyone could have known it, even someone who didn’t know the reason for it. But the poisoner does have to be someone who was near Cottle after he picked up that glass of whiskey.”
“And that includes everyone at the party,” added Gus.
Meg shuddered. “You said cyanide was—quick. How quick?”
Basil answered gravely. “A matter of seconds.”
“But I’m sure there was no one near Amos in the last few minutes before he died. We were all sitting down playing that silly game. Don’t you remember?” Basil nodded. “The police are considering the possibility that the poison was in some sort of capsule. For one thing, that would explain why there was only the slightest trace of cyanide in Amos Cottle’s glass, though there was a large dose in his body.”
“A dissolving capsule?” Lepton was curious. “If the murderer planned to poison the iced tea, he’d have to have a capsule that was soluble in water. How could he be sure that such a capsule would also be soluble in alcohol? Remember there was only whiskey in Amos’s glass. No soda or water except for the water content of whiskey itself.”
Basil smiled his appreciation of Lepton’s alertness. “That’s a curious and interesting point that bothers the police chemists. How could the murderer take a chance on a capsule designed for tea dissolving in whiskey? Unless we find a reasonable answer, we’ll never know exactly how Cottle was murdered. But we’re pretty sure there was a capsule of some kind. Cottle had swallowed more than half that drink before he was affected by a poison that takes effect in a few seconds and, as Meg pointed out, no one else had been near his glass from the time we started playing Two-Thirds of a Ghost until he died. That was an interval of ten or twelve minutes.”
“This is all fantastic!” exploded Tony. “It must have been suicide. You have to have a motive for murder. No one in the world had a motive for killing Amos, least of all those at the party last night. As Vera has just told you, Gus and I were both making a lot of money out of Amos. What conceivable motive would we or our wives have for…”
“Killing the goose that laid the golden eggs?” suggested Philippa sweetly.
Tony ignored her. “Mr. Lepton is a critic and one of Amos’s most ardent admirers. You can read his review of Passionate Pilgrim in last Sunday’s Times.”
“I read it when I got home last night,” said Basil. “No motive there. But I also read Mr. Avery’s article in the Tribune.”
“Oh, Emmett didn’t care much for Amos’s work,” admitted Tony, putting it rather mildly. “But you’re hardly suggesting that a critic would murder an author because he didn’t like the author’s work?”
“It would have been kinder than that review,” put in Lepton, speaking as a connoisseur. “‘The kindest use a knife, because the dead so soon grow cold….’”
“How did Emmett Avery happen to attend a party for Amos Cottle so soon after that review?” asked Basil.
“The unspeakable Mrs. Pusey brought him, uninvited,” said Philippa acidly. “For all her literary airs, Peggy Pusey doesn’t read book reviews. Her son slept so late he missed the papers that morning. She was sorry. She told me last night that she thought all writers were bound to be friends.”
“My God!” murmured Gus.
“The Puseys had never met Amos before,” went on Tony. “Neither had Emmett or Leppy—Mr. Lepton.”
“Leppy?” Basil looked up. “You’ve known each other a long time?”
Philippa laughed. “My dear Basil, the writing and publishing world is a very small one. Everybody has known everybody else for a long time. A lot of them have inherited their jobs in one way or another and when it comes to second- and third-generation marriages it gets positively’ incestuous like medieval dynasties.”
“Yet Cottle had never met Avery or Lepton before?”
“Amos was a really dedicated artist who lived alone as much as he could and devoted himself to his work,” explained Tony. “And he wasn’t born into this world as the rest of us were. He’d had no contact with publishers or writers before he began writing himself and he’d only been writing for the last four years. Now Meg’s father was editor of the old Anybody’s. Emmett Avery’s father was a certified accountant who specialized in publishers’ and authors’ accounts and knew more about contracts than any man in the business. Emmett worked in that office for several years before he became a critic. Leppy’s father ran a small bookbinding firm in Chicago. The Lepton de luxe editions are collectors’ items today. Unfortunately he was too much of an artist to make any money and bookbinding is just a hobby with Leppy now. My own father was a contract book salesman who represented various New York houses on the West Coast. Gus’s father was an editor at Scribner’s for years. We’re all lice in the locks of literature except Philippa.”
“And Vera,” added Philippa. “And the Puseys.”
“Wasn’t there anything in the least literary about Amos Cottle’s family?” inquired Basil.
“No. You can tell that from the biographical note on the jacket flap of Retreat “
“Retreat?”
“His first book, Never Call Retreat. You can’t say all those words every time. We call it N.C.R., or Retreat. All that stuff is copied in his obit in the papers this morning. It often happens that way. We who edit and publish and sell books may produce critics sometimes, but rarely creative writers. There’s no accounting for their origin.”
“‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,’ “ added Leppy. “Taste is inherited and even talent, but not genius.”
“You consider Cottle a genius?”
Leppy shrugged. “I thought so. Emmett didn’t. Time will tell. That’s what makes publishing a speculative business. There’s no yardstick.”
“But Amos had a knack of writing books that sold,” added Tony. “What more can a publisher ask?”
Basil waited until the two had run down, then he spoke gently. “I read the biographical note on the jacket of Retreat this morning. You had told me last night that Amos Cottle was not a pen name. So this morning I pointed out to Captain Drew that the jacket note was a convenient thumbnail sketch of Cottle’s personal history and that we could get more facts about him if we followed the leads it offered. He and I agreed that the University of Peking was a little remote both geographically and politically at the present time, but we got in touch with the police in Akron, Ohio, the press relations offices of the Protestant churches, the Navy Department in Washington and the staff of the Blue Grotto Night Club in Miami.”
No one took advantage of Basil’s pause. He went on more slowly. “The city of Akron has no record of residents named Cottle, the birth of a Martin Cottle or his marriage to a woman named Amanda. The Methodist Church has no record of two missionaries in China in the thirties named Martiil and Amanda Cottle and parents of a child named Amos. The Blue Grotto in Miami opened in 1935 and it has no record of a bartender employed there at any time named Amos Cottle. The Navy Department has no record of an enlisted man in the Seabees na
med Amos Cottle. There is no record in Washington of a draft card or a social security card or a ration card being issued during the last war to anyone named Amos Cottle. According to all available records, Amos Cottle never existed at all.”
Basil looked directly at Gus and Tony. “Who was the man who called himself Amos Cottle? What was he?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tony’s face was a hard blank, a true poker face. Gus, more responsive by temperament, allowed a look of ironical resignation to flit across his face swiftly and silently as a cloud-shadow racing before the wind on a hillside. Maurice Lepton’s eyes were extraordinarily bright as they shifted from Tony to Gus and back to Tony. Meg looked utterly bewildered as if events were developing too fast for her reflexes to respond, like a moving picture projected at a speed that makes it a jerky blur to the human eye. Philippa was staring at Basil as if his question had opened a whole new world of speculation and conjecture. Vera was the only one who answered vocally. For the first time her soft voice became rough and sharp. “What on earth are you getting at, Dr. Willing?”
Basil looked at Tony. “Well?”
Tony’s glance flicked Gus—a strategist signaling a staff officer that the time had come to put Plan X into operation, that he wanted whole-hearted support and all flanks protected.
Gus looked at Tony reproachfully. “If only you’d told Willing last night that Amos Cottle was a pen name!”
“How could I tell Amos was going to be murdered?” returned Tony. “If it weren’t for that, who’d care whether Amos was a pen name or not? Who ever bothers to check the veracity of a jacket note?”
Gus took a deep breath. “The biographical information on the jacket of Amos’s books was furnished by Amos himself and now he’s dead so…”
Tony sighed. “It’s no use, Gus. Sooner or later the police will trace our connection with Dr. Clinton. Basil is our only friend at court. We’d better put all our cards on the table for him while we have the chance.” Gus shrugged. “Roger. Over to you.”
“Are we to infer,” said Lepton, “that the jacket note was a fabrication of yours, Tony? I had no idea you had such a talent for creative writing!”
“ ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,’” murmured Philippa. “I hope you kept the TV rights in it.”
Tony ignored this flippancy and turned toward Basil, squaring his shoulders as if he were summoning all his agility and address to meet a physical challenge head-on.
“All right, Basil.” Tony’s curtness lent an air of candor to his words. “We’ll tell you everything. The true story of Amos Cottle is known only to Gus and myself, now Amos himself is dead. Not even Phil or Meg know the truth. A secret shared is no longer a secret, especially a secret shared with women, so we made up our minds from the beginning not to let the women in on it. I’m sorry so many people have to know it now. I can only hope that it will go no farther. After all, Amos Cottle is still a valuable property, and all of us present have a stake in him except Basil and Leppy.”
“Even. Leppy has a sort of stake,” interrupted Gus. “He’s gambled his critical reputation on Amos’s genius. Not that that would ever sway his opinion of Amos’s work, but I don’t see why anything in Amos’s personal history should alter Leppy’s appreciation of his writing.”
“Of course not,” said Lepton. “You may count on my loyalty to Amos.”
“And you, Basil?” demanded Tony.
“I can’t promise anything,” answered Basil. “I can only hope that when Amos Cottle’s murderer is arrested, the story of Cottle’s past will not be so germane to the prosecution’s case that it has to be mentioned in court.”
Tony took a deep breath. “Amos Cottle was a man without a past. We haven’t the slightest idea who he was or where he came from.”
“How is that possible?”
“To explain, I must go back to 1952. Meg, would you like to tell Basil how you discovered Amos’s first book?”
“It was quite simple.” Meg’s voice was strained thin, almost transparent. “Before the war, Gus was a radio writer. When peace came, he used his severance pay to establish the agency. We were living on Long Island then, in a crowded little development. Gus rented desk space in the office of a friend who was already an established agent and tried to keep things going by freelance radio writing until his own agency should show a profit. He realized that TV was going to kill radio in a few years and he wasn’t at all sure he could adapt himself to TV technique, or compete with the movie writers who were pouring into TV because there was so much money involved while Gus was still in the Marines.
“The agency seemed our only hope, but Gus had little time to read all the scripts that came to him as an agent. Most of them were incredibly bad, things by rank amateurs like Mrs. Pusey or things by professionals that had already been rejected by every editor in town. So, while Gus worked on his radio plays, I read the agency scripts in the evening, after the babies were asleep and the dishes washed.
“One night, long after Gus had gone to bed. I was sitting in the living room plodding through this awful tripe when I came across the script of a book in a shabby old box that had once held a ream of typing paper. On the lid was a pasted label that read: The Battlefield by Amos Cottle. I thought, what a funny name for a writer! And I began to read, thinking I’d just skim through the first fifty pages and, unless there was something in them that caught my interest, I’d tell Gus to send the whole thing back to this Mr. Cottle in the morning. After all, as the critics say, you don’t have to eat all of an egg to know if it’s rotten.
“Well, Dr. Willing, I sat up till nearly four in the morning reading every word of that book. I forgot I was tired. I forgot that Polly would wake promptly at six. I forgot that we were nearly broke and wholly discouraged. As I turned the last page down on its face, I heard a skylark sing. At least I think it was a skylark. I don’t know much about birds—I’m a city person really—but this song was high and clear and pure, the essence of a blithe spirit, so it must have been a lark. And when I lifted my eyes, I saw that the sky beyond the unshaded windows had turned the purest azure I ever saw and I knew it was about half an hour before dawn. The bird’s song and the strange blue sky seemed to be saying the same thing, one in light and one in music. It was one of those moments when it really is a joy to be alive and they are rare after twelve or thirteen.
“You see I knew right then that Amos’s book was something unusual and that this was a turning point in our lives.”
“She told me at breakfast,” Gus took up the story. “I read the first fifty pages going in on the train. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Meg, but I did realize that this was the first script we had received that was anywhere near professional standards. It was a bit long. I thought about a hundred pages could be cut to advantage. And I didn’t like the title. What could be more pedestrian than The Battlefield? Even Field of Battle would be better.
“I sent a rather guarded letter to the author saying I liked it and I was going to try it on one or two publishers to see if they shared my opinion. I knew that a beginning author would never cut a hundred pages on an agent’s say-so, but he might if a publisher got interested and dangled a contract in front of him.’’
“Gus brought it to me two days after Meg read it,” said Tony. “I was then senior editor at Daniel Sutton and Company, and Dan Sutton was still alive. I’d known Gus and Meg for years, but I hadn’t much faith in Gus’s agency. I didn’t think he had enough capital to hold out long enough to get a foothold in the business.”
“Enough capital? No capital at all!” muttered Gus. “The only other thing he’d brought me was an anthology of short stories that were so bad they were almost funny, but not quite funny enough to publish as a burlesque on the short story, so—naturally I turned this Cottle script over to a girl I was training to be one of our ‘first readers.’ She was a pert little thing just out of Sarah Lawrence, the daughter of one of Philippa’s well-heeled Wall Street friends. Her report, in about two weeks,
was cool and neutral. She’d done very well in her English literature courses and her one idea with all scripts was to correct grammar, punctuation, and delete any idiosyncrasies or individual variations in prose style. She was the only literate person we could get for a token salary—she didn’t need money—and I gambled on the hope that she had enough common sense not to turn down anything that was actually publishable before I got her trained.”
“The way Gide turned down Proust,” mused Lepton. “Was Gide a reader for Hachette or Gallimard?”
“Unfortunately,” went on Tony, “this girl was much better educated than the reading public we were trying to reach, so I had to watch her reports pretty carefully.
“Her word for Amos’s first book was ‘readable.’ She had an itching pencil. She wanted us to cut out all the ‘verys,’ straighten out the ‘shoulds’ and ‘woulds,’ and change words like ‘jeopardize’ to ‘put in jeopardy.’ Her English professor would have been proud of her, but—there never was a bunch of marines who spoke such impeccable English as Amos’s would have if Susan had had her way. And in her report she demurely questioned each four-letter word.
“When she said ‘readable’ that meant I had to read it myself. Her unreadables I rejected without more than a glance at the first page to make sure she hadn’t pulled a boner. So I took Amos’s book up to the apartment where Phil and I were living then, intending to read it that night, but Phil had a party on and what with one thing or another I forgot all about it for three weeks. Then Gus gave me a ring at the office. I really felt guilty because he was an old friend. I swore I’d read it that very night and I did. I shooed Phil out of my study after dinner, mixed a stiff brandy and soda and sat down, wondering what I could say to poor old Gus if the stuff was as rotten bad as I expected.