I'm ambivalent about our relationship, but I know that when she jiggles her pinkie at me I'll come running, wagging my tail. We're stuck with each other, to each other. If we tried to pull apart now we'd rip our flesh to shreds. And I can't help it. I'm crazy about her. The heart knows what it knows.
Sutpen plops his ass down on the stool next to mine. “What're you drinking?” he asks me, looking at my glass with suspicion. He's flushed, and his shirttail is untucked under his suit coat, a dead giveaway that something big is troubling him; he's always as squared away as a West Point cadet in his sartorial presentation, even when he isn't on the job.
"Sierra Nevada,” I answer. “On draft."
"Beer gives me gas,” he says. “But a beer would be good now. Gotta keep my wits about me. Har-de-har-har. I'm beginning to wonder if I ever had a brain."
He catches Emily's eye and points to my glass. She takes a mug out of the freezer below the bar and draws him a cold one.
Sutpen rubs his knuckles on his forehead like he's trying to rub off a set of horns. Then he turns to me. His stare is more intense than Vince Lombardi's. “I screwed up, man. Big-time. I killed the wrong guy."
My knee on the barstool rung starts tattooing an Elvin Jones solo. How did he find out? Did Clara, in a moment of guilt, drunkenness, or just flat-out insanity, spill her guts? I can't imagine her breaking down, but she is human, if only occasionally.
I wonder if he's packing. He wouldn't have the audacity to kill me in here, but somewhere. The man committed murder, another one isn't going to matter if he ever goes to trial.
I flinch as he reaches into his inside breast-pocket. He pulls out a legal-sized envelope, drops it on the bar between us. “Read ‘em and weep,” he says in a flat monotone. He grabs his mug and takes a long swallow.
I open the envelope and shake out the contents. Digital photographs, printed off a computer. I spread them out on the bar and look at them.
Clara and a man in a room. An upscale hotel, it looks like. The whole megillah: combinations she and I have never even talked about, let alone tried.
I feel like a kid sneaking his first peek at Penthouse, under the covers. This knocks the wind out of me. And it hurts like hell, too. Love is so frigging blind. As if Clara ever had any real emotions about me, I rage inwardly with 20/20 hindsight. My brain starts cramping like I'm having a full-blown migraine.
"You're shaking,” Sutpen says, watching me staring at the pictures. “I don't blame you, looking at this perversion. Jesus, talk about playing the cuckold. I feel like the dumbest turd that ever got flushed down the toilet.” He gulps down half his glass. “And I didn't even get it right."
I am shaking, but not because I was party to a wrongful death, if any murder could be called that. He's the cuckold? He doesn't have a clue about what's really happening.
"Recognize him?"
I nod. My head feels like it's made of wood. “Wally Schaffer."
Clara's interior decorator. She's been redoing their house for months. It's this year's hobby, like golf last year, and serving on the art forum the year before.
"He's always around, but I thought he was light in his loafers. He's an interior decorator,” Sutpen laments. “Aren't they all gay?"
Apparently not. I'm still shaking, but for a very different reason now.
"Bonnie Walsh finally got the real goods. It's been going on for several months. Almost a year."
He scoops the pictures back into the envelope and puts it in his pocket. “They're going to L.A. together this weekend. New furniture for my study. Like I care."
He drains the rest of his beer in one long swallow. “They're booked into a cottage at a hotel in the hills above Malibu. Lots of spacing between units, for privacy. I'm going down Saturday night. Drop in late on the lovebirds, after all the night owls are back in their nests and there's nothing stirring except the air. And this time, I'll get it right."
He turns to me, his old comrade-in-arms and more recent partner in crime. “I know this is asking a lot, Kevin, but I could use your company.” Quickly, he adds, “If you can't, I completely understand."
I give Emily the high sign: We're past Miller time now. She takes down two cocktail glasses, starts fixing our drinks.
"I'll come with you,” I tell him. If for no other reason than to savor the expression on Clara's face when we make our unholy entrance.
"Good man,” he says, smiling in relief. “I can always count on you, old buddy."
Emily puts our drinks down in front of us: my Manhattan, his martini. I raise my glass in toast. “After all,” I say, as I take my first delicious swallow, “what are friends for?"
Copyright © 2007 J. F. Freedman
[Back to Table of Contents]
THE BOOK CASE by Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu
Dale Andrews is a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Transportation and Kurt Sercu is head nurse in a casualty ward in Sijsele, Belgium. They are longtime Ellery Queen fans who first met online through “Ellery Queen, a Website of Deduction,” run by Mr. Sercu. Both attended the EQ Centenary Symposium in ‘05, where they met in person—outlining this intricate story on a train they both took after the event.
Prologue
A chilly March wind whistled through the open window of the apartment, rustling the papers on the desk and puffing the white corn-silk hair on the old man's head. He raised a thin arm to his brow and absent-mindedly smoothed his hair back into place as he scanned the letter lying on the desktop in front of him. When he was finished he pulled a blank sheet from a stack of notepads, scrawled a short sentence on it, reached for an envelope, addressed it, and then sealed the note inside. He dropped the envelope into a box on the corner of the desk, and turned to the pretty young red-haired woman patiently reading a book in the leather chair across the room.
"I think that will do it for today, Nikki. Can you see that these are posted?"
* * * *
Part 1: Reunions
Detective Harry Burke shifted his weight as he waited for the elevator to arrive. His bum right knee ached and he wondered, not for the first time, if maybe he was getting just a bit old for this line of work. He eyed his young partner ruefully. Stanley Santos, with his pegged slacks, turtleneck, and short-cropped mousse-spiked black hair, was the future. Not a transplanted ageing Scotsman like him, staring down a rapidly approaching retirement and the pension that might let him live almost comfortably somewhere, but surely not here.
Surely not here indeed. The West Park Towers was everything he had come to dislike in the New York City of this new century. Excess masquerading as taste, money intruding on refinement and dignity. Sure, the marble floors squeaked, the rooms were magically expanded by the placement of mirrors. But where was the soul? Where was the New York City he had first fallen for decades ago? The bustling, cramped city of his youth? Well, he supposed a lot of it was still out there. But it sure wasn't in here. The elevator door opened and he and Santos stepped in.
The apartment on the thirty-sixth floor was more of the same. Harry sniffed as he walked through the living room with its spare, ascetic furniture and its neatly displayed Oriental art. But this time Harry did not sniff in disdain. He sniffed, instead, in anticipation of the smell that always recurred in his line of work. The unmistakable coppery smell of death.
Harry and Santos turned the corner into the study and across the room from them, sprawled in a pool of blood on top of a desk, was what remained of Dr. Jason Tenumbra. In front of the desk there was more blood, splattered in smaller pools going toward the doorway, where a brass and ebony electrical clock lay on the floor, unplugged. The clock's hands were frozen at eight-thirty.
Harry pushed past the three policemen and the representative of the coroner's office to approach the desk, a single sheet of glass supported by chrome sawhorses. He surveyed the surface—a flat-screen computer display, a wireless keyboard, and a wireless mouse. Tenumbra was lying facedown in the middle, hands pulled up under his chest, in the pool of co
ngealed blood.
"What do we know?” Harry asked.
"We know,” Santos answered, “that up until yesterday Dr. Jason Tenumbra was a modern-day success story. A graduate of Johns Hopkins, an M.D. with post-graduate training in oncology and psychiatry from New York University. He was well off, too—used to be married to Janiel Friedman, who runs the Friedman and Norr department-store chain.
"Tenumbra didn't show up at his office this morning. His appointments didn't begin until the afternoon, but when the lunch hour came and went and no one could reach him by phone, his staff contacted the concierge desk. A building employee found the body. He entered the apartment with a passkey—actually, a magnetic entry card—and called us as soon as he was done being sick."
"Any witnesses?"
"Nope. But the concierge screens all visitors. We're getting the list once they can pull it off the computer. Judging by the blood on the floor, and the clock, it looks like Tenumbra may have lunged after the murderer. But then he must have returned to the desk, where he died."
Squinting, Harry eyed the bookcase behind the desk.
"What the hell ... ?!"
"Yeah,” Santos replied. “I, for the life of me, don't know what that is all about."
Both men gazed at the bookcase. While the books on either side of the desk were arranged neatly, spine to spine, directly behind the lifeless body of Dr. Tenumbra all of the books had been pulled from the shelves. They lay piled haphazardly on the floor of the study behind the corpse.
From across the room one of the uniformed policemen approached.
"The coroner is finished with the initial forensics. They say we're free to check out the body."
As the two officers turned the body over, two things presented themselves to Harry Burke. The first was the silver scalpel protruding from the bloody center of Tenumbra's throat. The second, less obvious, was the small sheet of paper, barely visible, clasped in the doctor's bloody death grip. Harry gingerly pried apart the fingers of the corpse and unfolded the paper. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, wide-eyed.
"What? What is it?” asked Santos, but already Harry was on his knees examining the pile of books.
"Son of a bitch!” he repeated. “Goddammit, of all the people I didn't expect to run into again..."
Santos bent over the desk to examine the paper. At the top was a date: March 30, 2007. Below the date one sentence was scrawled: “I have received your inquiry, but I have no books that I wish to sell.” Across the top of the note, finely embossed above a black line, was a name: “Ellery Queen.” Only then did Stanley Santos also gaze down at the books scattered on the floor. Each bore the name on the note—"Ellery Queen."
Santos shook his head, perplexed. “Who the hell is Ellery Queen?"
* * * *
The sunlight in the apartment was dwindling when Harry and Stanley Santos heard the soft knocking. They turned as a uniformed officer opened the door. Into the room walked an ancient but remarkably erect man dressed in tweeds. He supported himself with a cane in his right hand, and a young woman—late twenties, Santos thought (he had an eye for that particular detail)—lightly supported the old man on his left. Stanley glanced at his partner, who stared wide-eyed at the couple.
Harry Burke watched the old man's approach in amazement. He was ancient. Harry couldn't remember ever seeing anyone older. The gait was halting, and the old man seemed to move only through sheerest willpower. Harry offered his hand. “Ellery,” he said, “it has certainly been a long time."
"That, Harry, it has."
At the sound of the old man's voice Harry Burke was lost in a second wave of amazement. The voice was unchanged, unbowed by age.
"Dad told me years ago that you had returned to this side of the pond,” the old man continued, “and I knew you'd joined the force here.... But I understood why you might not want to renew our acquaintance."
"Those times were tough on me,” Harry agreed. “The way they ended...” He fell awkwardly silent.
For a moment Santos wondered what was up with his partner, but then quickly dismissed such idle curiosity. Who really cared? “Mr. Queen,” he said, intruding between Burke and the elderly man, “maybe you two can catch up on old times later. We could have handled this over the phone, as I told your...” He searched for a word. “...companion...."
"Ms. Porter is my assistant, Officer...?"
"Santos.” Stanley replied. “Stan Santos. And it's Detective. As I told Ms. Porter, we're investigating a murder in which you may have some involvement.” Santos held up the bloodstained note, now protected in a plastic Ziploc bag. “Do you recognize this?"
Ellery stared at the note, his left eye squinted almost shut. “I do, indeed. It's one of my notepads, and the writing is mine.” Turning to Nikki he asked, “When was it that we sent this out?"
"One week ago.” She turned toward Santos. “A little over a week ago we received an inquiry from a Dr. Jason Tenumbra, who, I believe,” she glanced around the room nervously, “you told me is the victim. Dr. Tenumbra said that he was a collector of books, particularly detective first editions. He inquired whether Mr. Queen would be interested in selling copies of certain books that he wrote many years ago."
"What? Detective stories?” Santos asked.
Ellery raised an eyebrow. “Actually he was interested in some nonfiction writings of mine, analytic works concerning the detective novel."
"Any idea why Tenumbra would have had the note in his hand when he died?"
"None at all,” replied Ellery, “but I can assure you that at whatever time he did in fact die, Ms. Porter should be able to corroborate that I was either napping, working on Sudoku puzzles, or taking medicine. That's about all I do nowadays."
"There's something else that you'll be interested in,” Santos said, and gestured toward the pile of books still scattered behind the glass-and-chrome desk in the study.
Supported by Nikki, Ellery crossed the room to the pile of books. “First editions,” he murmured. “Tell me, the volume under that one—” he gestured to the left—"is that The French Powder Mystery?"
Nikki bent down to examine the book.
"Yes,” she said, “and it has a dust jacket."
Ellery turned and surveyed the rest of the library, still neatly shelved. “Apparently Dr. Tenumbra was an organized fellow,” he observed. “His library is grouped by author, and then arranged alphabetically. So the volumes on the floor, the Queen works, were shelved between the Poe collection and the Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine books."
Ellery turned back toward Santos and Harry Burke. “I can't tell you why these books are on the floor. But I may be able to give you a pretty educated guess as to where Dr. Tenumbra acquired them. To my knowledge, there are virtually no remaining volumes of The French Powder Mystery with original dust jackets. In fact, I personally know of only two. I have one. This is, no doubt, the other. These books were almost certainly from Djuna's library. There should be an inscription in the front cover."
Santos donned a pair of plastic gloves and gingerly picked up the red volume. Flipping open the front cover he read: “To Djuna, with continuing admiration and thanks, Ellery Queen.” Santos turned back toward the old man. “You mind telling me who this Djuna is?"
"Djuna worked for my father and me decades ago when he was little more than a boy. He was an orphan. We supported him and eventually sent him off to school. I used Djuna, or someone much like Djuna, as a character in my early novels. This was always a source of pride to him. He was always obsessed with the analytic process, that and sports. I retired from writing in nineteen seventy-one, and from editing in nineteen eighty-two, but when I was still writing I always sent Djuna an inscribed first edition of every book in which Dad or I appeared as characters."
"Maybe we need to talk to this fellow,” Santos muttered.
"That,” replied Ellery, “won't be possible. Djuna and his wife died in the late nineteen eighties. I suspect these books must have been acquired from the estate. I
don't know why, but Dad and I somehow lost touch with Djuna and his family a long, long time ago. After graduating from Columbia, Djuna opened a successful West-side restaurant that eventually grew into a chain. He was a workaholic. He didn't even marry until the mid ‘fifties, when he was already in his forties. Djuna and his wife were unable to have children, but they eventually adopted two newborns, in the late nineteen sixties, I think. Quinn and Elise. Both of the children attended Columbia as well. I haven't seen either of them for years but I believe Quinn eventually became a doctor. Elise was a professor of English at Columbia the last I heard."
Harry Burke looked up sharply at this. “Wait a minute,” he said, and stepped back into the living room. Returning, he handed a pad of paper to Santos. The top sheet bore the inscription: “Dr. Jason Tenumbra, Dr. Quinn Djuna, Consulting Psychiatric Services."
Santos's eyes met Burke's. “Yeah,” Burke said. “Apparently they were partners. Another thing. I was just on the phone with Tenumbra's office. Dr. Djuna wasn't due in the office until this afternoon, and now he hasn't shown up either. The office can't raise anyone on his phone. His apartment is two blocks from here. I was just about to send a couple of uniforms over."
"Let's do this ourselves. I'm starting to have a bad feeling,” Santos muttered.
"That,” said Ellery, “would make at least two of us. If you could slow the pace a little, perhaps Ms. Porter and I might be permitted to tag along?"
* * * *
Dr. Quinn Djuna's apartment building was much more to Harry Burke's liking. Old and solid, 1930s New York, with gargoyles on the roof. And no concierge here, just a management company that grudgingly reported that if entry to Dr. Djuna's apartment was required, their files showed that his sister, Professor Elise Djuna, had custody of the spare key. She had already been called by the precinct and had been informed of both Tenumbra's murder and the need to locate her brother.
EQMM, May 2007 Page 8