Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  “After a few years we began to feel we had a tiger by the tail,” Leppy continued. “We couldn’t let go and of course we didn’t want to with so much money rolling in, but the thing had snowballed so it was a little frightening. Tony used Cottle to become a partner at Daniel Sutton, and made the firm Sutton, Kane when Dan Sutton died. Gus, as Cottle’s agent, attracted a bunch of other authors, successful but not quite so successful as Amos. Still they made the agency a going concern. I wasn’t able to launch a business on the basis of Cottle, as Gus and Tony did, but I did get my share of the profits and began living in a style to which I had never been accustomed before. Vera was a headache but we got rid of her by sending her to Hollywood. Naturally we were upset when she came back, but we’d have found some way to deal with her.”

  “Someone did,” said Basil. “Vera was killed tonight with cyanide. I can only suppose she found out something or pretended to find out something and tried blackmail. She was just naive enough to blackmail a murderer if he was someone she knew well.”

  Tony looked at Basil with narrowed eyes. “Now you know the whole truth, you must realize more than ever that none of us three had a motive for killing Cottle-Sewell. Even now he’s dead we’d rather all this didn’t come out. We still have that posthumous book on the spring list, and for fall there’s the rough draft of another book to which Leppy can give the inimitable Cottle touch.”

  Basil exchanged a glance with Alec McLean. As if it were a signal, Alec murmured something about its getting late and rose.

  Outside on the sidewalk a little unobtrusive maneuvering got Alec into Tony’s car with Phil and the Veseys. There was no room for Basil or Lepton. They called out cheerful good nights and Lepton hailed a taxi. He gave the driver his address and made no comment when Basil slid into the seat beside him.

  Ten minutes later Basil was standing before Leppy’s bookcase, looking at the handsome gold-tooled volumes that came long ago from the elder Lepton’s bindery.

  “Drink?” said Leppy.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I believe I need one.” Leppy mixed himself a long drink and came back to the bookcase. “Like to see them?” He turned the key in the lock. “This Green Willow illustrated by Warwick Gobel, this Arabian Nights with illustrations by Edmond Dulac. They don’t print books like this today. Too expensive, and who cares for illustrative art now all representation is unfashionable?”

  The paper was thick and white and heavy, the type face clear and decorative. The color prints used many tones of every color, and each picture was mounted on heavy brown paper with a cover of tissue paper to protect it, the title engraved there. “These fairy tales are nice, too,” said Leppy. “George MacDonald…This Chisholm…”

  “Yes.” Basil’s fingertips touched the intricate gold-leaf scrolls embossed on the cloth binding.

  Leppy said quietly, “How did you know?”

  “Gus and Tony each launched a business through Amos Cottle. Going concerns that will pay for themselves whether Cottle is alive or dead. You’re still a free-lance critic. Without Amos Cottle’s royalties you have nothing. You knew when Vera came back that she meant to stick with Cottle since she’d lost out in Hollywood. You knew that if she lived with Sewell-Cottle for any length of time she would find that he was not a writer. She’d soon realize he didn’t do any writing when she was around and she’d worm the truth out of him when she got him drunk. Then she’d blackmail all three of you, bleed you white. But with Amos himself dead she might never find out the truth and the thing could have gone on for years with his literary executors ‘discovering’ more and more masses of new, unpublished material. The unpublished Cottleana, notebooks and so forth, would be good for five or ten years, and then there would be all sorts of reprints and library editions. Posthumous writers can be very profitable to their publishers and agents. You were better off with Sewell-Cottle dead.”

  “But why me? It profited Gus and Tony, too.”

  “You yourself said the critical mind is the most sadistic of the literary temperaments. You even compared the critic’s morbid psychology to that of the vitriol thrower. Murder is a sadistic business so—the murderer had to be a critic, not a hack fiction writer like Gus or a businessman like Tony.”

  “How did I do it?”

  “The poison wasn’t in the whiskey or the soda, or the glass that had only a slight trace. What remained? Only one thing. The ice—and it was you who served the ice. The delayed action of the poison made us think of a capsule. We wondered about a capsule that would dissolve in either water or alcohol. But there’s one thing we all know that dissolves or rather melts in both—ice. It was you who served the ice for the second round of drinks. The poison was in a capsule of ice you brought with you.”

  “How could I make a capsule of ice?”

  “Poison poured into that little hollow on top of an ice cube that appears when the cube is half frozen in the refrigerator. Then water poured over the cube to the level of the compartment in the ice tray, and the whole thing refrozen in the refrigerator. You could have done it at the Shadbolts after they were all asleep that night you spent at their house before the party. You could have brought the poisoned ice cube with you to the Kanes in that insulating paper grocers give their customers for transporting frozen food. You could have put it on top of the ice in Tony’s bucket when you picked up the bucket and served ice to Amos with Tony’s tongs.”

  “And where would I get cyanide?”

  Again Basil looked at the gold tooling on the book in his hand. “Do they still use cyanide for polishing gold leaf? They certainly did in your father’s day. You must have inherited his effects. There’d be some cyanide. And you still carry on bookbinding as a hobby. Did Vera blackmail you?”

  Lepton nodded. “Not about Cottle. About my making love to Philippa. That’s why I had to follow her this afternoon and force her to take poison—my first act of real violence, something that was repugnant to me but necessary to my own safety, I thought. Phil always sought literary qualities in her lovers. Her intuition was quite sensitive. She had been Cottle’s mistress but she’d begun to doubt his literary taste. The moment she met me she was drawn to me because she realized unconsciously that mine was the mind she had met in the Cottle books, that I was the real thing she had been seeking. I was flattered. It was a kind of recognition and I’d had no other recognition as a novelist from anyone. But—it would have broken up the whole conspiracy if Tony had found out. He couldn’t have forgiven me. I was a fool to play around with Phil, but…” Lepton shrugged. “We all make mistakes. To think that my last words should be a cliche!” Basil knocked the glass from his hand before it reached his lips.

  “You’re coming downtown with me now to see Inspector Foyle of the Police Department. By this time I think Alec McLean will be waiting for us in a taxi downstairs. I told him we’d be down in about thirty, minutes.”

  Lepton looked at the spreading stain on the Chinese rug. There was a faint, rank odor of poison in the air familiar to criminologists. “I suppose I can plead insanity.”

  “And probably get away with it,” returned Basil. “No one totally outside the literary world is ever going to believe that any literary person is sane.”

  The End

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  The Value of the Mystery Novel

  The mystery novel, as opposed to hardboiled crime fiction, achieved its greatest popularity in the 1920s and ’30s, a period that has become known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The social and political currents of the era presented a complementary environment for the genre. The aftermath of the First World War and its then-unsurpassed horrors saw the beginnings of rapid and often disturbing social change. Eleven years after the Armistice, the Great Depression began, itself ending only with the start of a conflict even bloodier than “the war to end all wars.” For the average American, the economics of vast poverty and the politics of widespread warfare were distant concepts that paled in importance to the reality of their effects. The individual had no control over the larger issues, and increasingly limited control over day-to-day life. The Depression, Prohibition and resulting organized crime, and global war created a chaotic atmosphere that lacked security and personal agency. From this atmosphere came the need for a particular and multi-faceted form of escapism, a form the mystery novel suited ideally. In “The Mystery as Mind-Stretcher,” Verda Evans explores the appeal of mystery and detective novels, and differentiates three motivators from escapism. In fact, these motivators are each directly founded in the escapism that draws readers to the mystery genre. They are easily placed within the context of society in a period of upheaval, as was the period between 1918 and 1945.

&n
bsp; The first attraction Evans notes is the fulfillment of the readers’ desire to experience order—“a beginning, middle, and end” (492)—in the fictional world, as their own reality is disordered. With the possible exception of postmodern literature, here irrelevant, the presence of a beginning, a middle, and an end is a basic requirement for narrative fiction. The mystery novel is not unique in this sense, but it is, at least, a very good example of an entire genre whose essence is the restoration of a known social structure. The fictional environment begins in an ordered and peaceful state, one soon disrupted by a scoundrel whose crime puts into question other characters’ understanding of their world. It is not the crime alone that creates disconcertion but the crime as well as the perpetrator’s good standing within the social structure.

  We take comfort in an environment which exists as we expect. It is familiar, safe, and predictable. This perception is not upset if the murderer is found to be the town hoodlum who lurks by night in dark alleys; that would be expected. Instead, the murderer is almost always someone whose normal conduct had been compatible with the mores of civil society. When the murderer’s identity is unknown, the knowledge that the killer is one of “us” disrupts those accepted ideas that provide comfort. The world as it was understood must be questioned.

  The sleuth enters the new environment, now characterized by disorder, suspicion, and ignorance. Social familiarity and trust must be temporarily abandoned as the suspect list grows. In this new state the hero begins to reorganize the pieces of the social environment, broken and scattered by the villain. Each clue is a step closer to bringing the villain to justice and to rebuilding the safe, familiar world he or she threw into disarray. The mystery novel can be seen representing the reader’s broken world and the need to mend it. The plotting of the mystery novel parallels the early twentieth century’s progression from peace to conflict to recovery. The fictional problems, however, are created and resolved within a few hundred pages. The mystery novel is therefore ideal as a means of temporary escape from the broken world the reader inhabits.