Ten Year Stretch

by Martin Edwards

  ‘No. I did come back to find a letter saying they wished to talk to me.’

  ‘Would that have been from Detective Inspector Larkin?’

  ‘Yes, you are right. I remember the name. But he never followed up the letter. Having not been here at the time, I was probably not much use as a witness. Anyway, then war was declared and everything went haywire. I was not surprised there was no follow-up.’

  ‘But if the police had questioned you, what would you have told them?’

  ‘About why Dietrich died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I would have thought it was most likely suicide.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘He was very depressed.’ I had to remind myself that she was talking about the man who had always been so welcoming and cheering for me. ‘He was depressed being here in Brighton, that his daughter was so determined to deny her Jewish heritage. That you, his grandson, would never have a bar mitzvah. Dietrich often said to me that here in England too, people wanted to destroy Jewish culture. He was afraid the whole world would follow Hitler’s example.

  ‘And then, of course, every day he would hear of some new horror from Germany itself. Dietrich could not see any future—or he could not see any future for the kind of world he wanted to live in. It brought him very low; he saw the end coming of everything he had believed in. But the real blow, I think, was the news of the death of a much-beloved colleague.’

  ‘Samuel Levisohn?’

  The old woman nodded approvingly. ‘You have done your homework—good. Yes, even though he was in England, Dietrich still worked to bring about the collapse of the Third Reich. In those endeavours, Samuel Levisohn was his accomplice—his soul mate, too, I think. The news of his death destroyed all hope in Dietrich. He could see no way forward. I think then he shot himself.’ She spoke with the certainty of a truth which she had never doubted for over fifty years.

  ‘I understand the logic of what you’re saying…’ that word again—my grandfather’s favourite—‘…but I’m afraid the circumstances in which he was found rule out the possibility of suicide.’

  Mrs Blaustein, not having viewed the file that I had and having had to rely only on the gossip of the time, had no idea about the locked doors and windows, or the absence of a weapon. So I spelled out the details to her.

  At the end she said, ‘It is like one of the Richard Treeting Locked Room Mysteries.’ She spoke with approval, and with relish for the puzzle that she had been set.

  But sadly, though we discussed the subject at great length over our black tea and kuchen, nothing she said brought me any nearer to a solution.

  As I left, she made me promise to let her know when I did work it out. She’d said ‘when,’ not ‘if’—a confidence in my abilities, which at that moment I felt to be misplaced.

  Then at the front door she held me back for a moment. ‘There is something I should give you. Something that might help.’

  She disappeared into the sitting room and came back with a notebook, whose fading marbled covers were coming apart at the spine. ‘He gave me this. His notebook.’

  ‘Dietrich Gartner’s notebook?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Blaustein. ‘Richard Treeting’s notebook.’

  It was not till I got back to my study in Muswell Hill that evening that I opened the notebook. There was a ceremonial air to the moment. Now at last the solution to my grandfather’s death was within my grasp.

  Imagine my disappointment when I found that Richard Treeting, though writing his books in perfect English, wrote his notes for them in German. Even if I could have deciphered the closely written gothic script, I did not have the language skills to make head or tail of his scribblings. And without an understanding of the accompanying text, the hastily sketched diagrams meant nothing either. I had friends who could translate for me, but there was nothing else I could do with the notebook that evening.

  I turned restlessly back to the 1939 scene of crime photographs, photocopied from Detective Inspector Larkin’s file. I had looked at them so many times I knew every detail by heart, but I thought maybe my recent viewing of the modernised room in Hove might prompt some new perception.

  Again, I was disappointed. The photographs looked exactly as they always had done.

  I turned to my usual resource in such circumstances, the Times crossword, the displacement activity to which the Commissioner had drawn attention at my retirement party. I’d done the journey down to Hove by car, so this was the first chance I’d had to look at the puzzle. Being a Monday, it was a relatively easy challenge, and I quickly filled in the bottom right quadrant.

  Then I came across a clue which gave me a moment’s pause. ‘Mechanical flower and test (10).’ Attuned to the compiler’s thinking, I knew the solution would be a word that either meant ‘mechanical’ or ‘test.’ The ‘flower’ was part of the answer. I went through a few variations of flowers without too many letters… ‘rose,’ ‘pink,’ ‘daisy…but didn’t get anywhere.

  Then suddenly I remembered how much crossword setters like the ambiguity of the word ‘flower.’ Yes, it could be ‘a pretty plant with petals’; equally it could be ‘something that flows’… in other words, a ‘river.’ I had the solution. The ‘Indus’ was a river, a ‘test’ was a ‘trial,’ and another word for ‘mechanical’ was ‘industrial.’

  And thinking of ‘flowers’, in both senses, sent me back to the scene of crime photographs.

  It was so obvious, why hadn’t I seen it before? The picture was taken in June 1939. In the summer. And there were no flowers in my grandfather’s fireplace.

  He always put flowers there. So why were there none visible on that occasion?

  I snatched up the notebook, and flicked through its pages until I found the relevant diagram. A circle with a long line coming down from it, and at the end of the line the outline of something that was unmistakably a pistol.

  It was a Locked Room trick which Richard Treeting had considered using—but had rejected—for one of his books. Dietrich Gartner, though, had used it in real life. To stage a real death.

  My grandfather, all hope for the future gone, had sat in his chair by the fireplace. In his hand he had held the Luger Pistole 08. Attached to it was a string which was fed up through the fireplace (from which the flowers that might impede its progress had been removed) to the gas-filled balloon, maybe already floating clear of the roof.

  The trigger pulled, the death achieved, the pistol had dropped from the suicide’s hand, to be pulled up the chimney into the darkness of the Hove night. Then a crosswind, just as it had to my yellow one years before, would have carried the balloon and its cargo out to sea. As the rubber sac deflated, the Luger Pistole 08 would slowly have sunk into the eternal hiding place of the English Channel.

  Finally, I knew I was right. I also knew that I could never prove it.

  Just as my grandfather had known that it could never be proved that he had committed suicide. Otherwise, Barnaby Simpson would never have been allowed legally to inherit the money which enabled him to buy his large house in Muswell Hill.

  There was a logic to it, you see. Of course there was. My grandfather, thinking of me to the end. I loved Dietrich Gartner. But I think I felt I had more in common with Richard Treeting.

  Shorty and the Briefcase

  Lee Child

  Shorty Malone’s legendary week began on Monday, when he got shot in the leg, just barely, in a sanitation department maintenance facility. His squad went in the front door, and another went in the back door, with a vague plan to outflank a guy they knew was concealed somewhere among the parked garbage trucks. Then someone started shooting, and within a split second everyone was shooting. The official report said ninety police rounds were fired that day. No one was killed, not even the concealed guy. The only casualty was Shorty, from an unlucky ricochet. Later reconstructions showed a fellow officer had
fired, and his round had taken a gentle deflection off the sidewall of a tire, and then a violent deflection off the chassis rail of a different truck. After that it was badly misshapen and had spent most of its energy. It hit Shorty on the shin bone no worse than a smack with a ball-peen hammer. It broke the skin and cracked the bone. Shorty was immediately hospitalized.

  After that it was awkward. It was hard to work up much enthusiasm. Shorty had been in the detective division about a year, so he wasn’t a brave rookie anymore, but he wasn’t yet a grizzled veteran hero either. He was a nobody. Plus it was technically blue-on-blue. There was even some doubt about whether the concealed guy actually had a gun at all. Plus a rumor it was the wrong guy anyway. Maybe his brother. So the overall feeling was the whole affair would be better forgotten. Which was tough on Shorty. Normally a shot cop would be treated with maximum reverence. Normally Shorty would have been rolling around like a pig in shit. Half a dozen hopeful lowlifes would have started up collections on the Internet. Shorty could have been looking at a decent chunk of change. Maybe even college-fund decent.

  But he was ignored. On Tuesday we were all reassigned to new duties. Part of forgetting. Sure, way back in history some mistakes might have been made. But that was then. We’ve moved on. Now we’re making progress. We all started learning the new stuff, and as a result, no one went to visit Shorty in the hospital anymore, except his pal Celia Sandstrom, who was another one-year nobody, except better to look at, unless she was wearing her Kevlar vest. Evidently, she stopped by the hospital frequently, and evidently, she kept old Shorty up-to-date on what was going on. And what wasn’t.

  We were assigned to Narcotics, as part of their own forgetting. All kinds of previous strategies had come to nothing. It was time to wall them off. Time to move on. Like we had. So that if someone ever mentioned a prior embarrassment, we could all wrinkle our noses and say, ‘What, that old thing?’ Like your girlfriend, when you tell her she looked good in her sweater yesterday. So their department was starting over, too, the same way ours had, and they swapped us in for their big new redemptive idea, which was to stop following the coke, and start following the money. Which needed manpower. Narcotics was a cash business. Cash was like a river. They wanted to see where it flowed. And how. Some parts they knew. Some parts they didn’t understand. They wanted us out there, watching.

  Specifically, they wanted us watching a guy delivering a briefcase from Jersey. He made the trip usually two times a week. The assumption was the briefcase was packed with paper money. A wholesale payment, maybe, or a share of the profits. One level of the pyramid scheme kicking up to the next. They said a regular briefcase could hold a million dollars. They said it was a physical transfer because money wasn’t electronic until it was in a bank. Which cash wasn’t yet. They said there was a clue in the name. They said our job was to evaluate the chances of witnessing a hand-to-hand exchange. Which would be two for the price of one. Plus disruption of a vital link in the chain. It was exciting work. No wonder everyone forgot about Shorty. Except Celia. She must have described the mission, the very same day, because that must have been about when Shorty started thinking.

  The guy with the briefcase was an older gentleman. A person of substance. Somehow powdered and expensive. A very senior figure. His very presence a mark of deep respect. With a million bucks in his hand. The briefcase was metal. Some fancy brand. He carried it along the sidewalk, plain as day, all the way to an old-style office building door. He carried it inside. Ten minutes later he came out without it. We saw him do it exactly the same way the report said he always did it.

  The office building had a narrow lobby with security. The directory showed twenty tenants. All bland names. A lot of import and export. No doubt a well-developed grapevine. All kinds of early warning systems. No point in asking questions. We wrote it up and sent it in. Our new bosses didn’t like it. They pushed back.

  They said, ‘We need to know which office suite.’

  We said, ‘We can’t get past the desk.’

  ‘Pose as maintenance.’

  ‘They don’t do maintenance.’

  ‘Then use your badge.’

  ‘The bad guys would be down the fire escape before the elevator door even opened for us in the lobby. Probably the security guy controls it with a foot pedal.’

  ‘Give him a hundred bucks.’

  ‘The bad guys give him five.’

  ‘Are you proposing to do any work at all?’

  We said, ‘First day, boss. We’re looking for leadership.’

  Afterward Celia said Shorty figured we were missing something. He didn’t know what. He was on his back with his leg up in traction. Not medically necessary, but the union thought it would make for a better photograph in the newspaper. Shorty was fretting about us, Celia said. He was missing us.

  ‘Shorty who?’ we said.

  We came in Wednesday morning and as expected found the business with the fancy briefcase already going a little lukewarm. Expectations were being retrospectively downgraded. It was a solid piece of data, another brick in the wall, as intended, nothing more.

  Then, even before the coffee was made, it went right back to the top of the agenda. New evidence came in, from a different direction, and it pointed to the same office building. To a specific tenant. They knew for sure the specific guy was sending money out. Now they wanted to square the circle. They wanted to see the same money going in. They wanted eyeballs inside the specific guy’s suite. They wanted eyewitness testimony, about the older gentleman maybe placing the briefcase on a table, and the other guy maybe spinning it around and clicking the latches with his thumbs. If we could get close enough to seize the actual cash, well, that would be the icing on the cake.

  Afterward Celia said, ‘Shorty says obviously that’s all impossible.’

  We said, ‘We don’t need the voice of doom drifting down a hospital corridor to tell us that. Of course it’s all impossible.’

  ‘So what should we do?’

  ‘Nothing. Maybe they’ll move us to Vice. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.’

  But the mention of Shorty recalled the previous mention, at the end of Tuesday, which no detective liked to hear, that we were missing something. No one said anything out loud, but I know we all surreptitiously and individually checked everything we could, from the beginning to the end, in the original files, from the handwritten notes.

  The guy drove from Jersey, just him alone at the wheel, no driver, in a nice but unspectacular car, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and south, to a parking garage in the West Twenties, which was the nearest to the old-style office building. A small man in a black vest and a bow tie parked his car, while he walked out with the briefcase and set out carrying it on his long march down the sidewalk. His journey invariably ended after a block and a half in the office building lobby, where he was nodded past the desk after respectful but not casual inspection. On every occasion he spent ten or so minutes inside, and on every occasion he came back out empty-handed. Those were the facts. That was what we knew.

  Celia pretended to have given the matter no thought at all, but later she said, ‘Shorty is sure there’s something wrong.’

  Which was not what we wanted to hear right then, because the stakes had just been raised even higher. A couple more puzzle pieces had fallen into place. Suddenly the folks upstairs realized they could take out the whole chain at once. It would be the bust of the year. Medals for sure. Votes for the mayor. The whole nine yards. But they needed it immaculate. Every link in the chain had to be rock-solid on the witness stand. Evidence was key.

  We argued we couldn’t get it. We said instead we should bust the guy on the sidewalk, before he got to the office building, with the money still in the briefcase. Because it was legally justified to assume he was heading for the specific guy in the unknown suite. Where else would he be going? It was as good as eyeballing a transfer. Really the sam
e thing, at an earlier stage. A different snapshot. A previous frame from the same movie.

  Nothing was ever more persuasive than having no alternative, so they agreed. We waited in a ready room, for a call from Jersey. The local PD over there was watching the guy’s residence. Any occasion he drove out in the direction of the tunnel, they would let us know right away. Traffic was usually bad. We would get plenty of warning. No rush at all.

  But the call didn’t come. Not on Wednesday. Not on Thursday. It came on Friday. Some apple-cheeked trooper out in the burbs told us the guy was on the move in his nice but unspectacular car, and seemed to be heading for Manhattan. Celia was not in the room with us at that point. She came in a minute later and we told her about the call.

  She said, ‘Shorty says we’re thinking all wrong.’

  Which was not what we wanted to hear right then, because we were trying to get all pumped up, ahead of taking a guy down on the sidewalk. But she insisted. She said Shorty had been lying there, with plenty of time to think. We should listen. We were torn. On the one hand, Celia was in the squad. She might be a nobody, but she was ours. Shorty too. On the other hand, the bust of the year was at stake. Medals and votes. Not a thing to screw up by taking the initiative. No one wanted to be the guy who blew it.

  Celia said, ‘Do we really believe it’s legally persuasive, if we take him down on the street with a bag of cash?’

  ‘Kind of,’ we said. ‘Somewhat. Maybe. Good enough, probably.’

  ‘Would his lawyer be worried?’

  ‘A little bit. Maybe not slitting his wrists.’

  ‘But whatever, it’s a huge hassle, right?’ she said. ‘It’s a million bucks in cash. The IRS would get involved. Maybe the Treasury Department. Why take the risk? Why carry that briefcase so openly?’