And I still can’t move or speak, and I couldn’t up till now. So I want to thank you boys for giving me back to Gene, on account of that’s the only way we could tell you how Stella got killed and you could see it was self-defense.
That’s my statement. Now you understand.
The captain of detectives simultaneously shivered and wiped away his sweat. “By all the Saints,” he gasped, “there was times there I’d have sworn that—thing was really doing the talking.”
“It was, in a way,” said the psychiatrist slowly. “Singularly interesting case. I think I might get a good paper out of this,” he added, his eyes resting speculatively on Eugene Dakin, the noted ventriloquist, and his famous dummy, Jerry Malloy.
(1955)
A Matter of Scholarship
No scholar can pretend to absolute completeness, but every scholarly work must be as nearly complete as possible; any omission of available data because of carelessness, inadequate research, or (most damning of all) personal motives—such as the support of a theory which the data might contradict—is the blackest sin against scholarship itself …
Such were my thoughts as I sat working on my definitive MURDEROUS TENDENCIES IN THE ABNORMALLY GIFTED: A STUDY OF THE HOMICIDES COMMITTED BY ARTISTS AND SCHOLARS. The date was October 21, 1951. The place was my office in Wortley Hall on the campus of the University.
My conclusions seemed unassailable: Murder had been committed by eminent scholars (one need only allude to Professor Webster of Harvard) and by admirable artists (François Villon leaps first to the mind). But in no case had the motivation been connected with the abnormal gift; my study of the relationship between homicidal tendencies and unusual endowments established, in the best scholarly tradition, that no such relationship existed.
It was then that Stuart Danvers entered my office. “Professor Jordan?” he asked. His speech was blurred and he swayed slightly. “I read your piece in the Atlantic on Villon [it sounded like villain] and I said to myself, ‘There’s the guy to help you.’” And before I could speak he had placed a large typewritten manuscript on my desk. “Understand,” he went on, “I’m no novice at this. I’m a pro. I’ve sold fact-crime pieces to all the top editors.” He hiccuped. “Only now it strikes me it’s time for a little hard-cover prestige.”
I stared at the title page, which read GENIUS IN GORE, and then began flipping through the book. The theme was my own. The style was lurid, the documentation inadequate. He had taken seriously the pretensions to learning of such frauds as Aram and Rulloff; he had omitted such a key figure as the composer Gesualdo da Venosa. But I had read enough in the field to know that his abominable work was what is called “commercial.” He would have no trouble in finding a publisher immediately; and my own book was scheduled by the University Press for, at best, “some time” in 1953.
“Little nip?” he suggested, and as I shook my head he drank from his flask. “Like it? Thought maybe you could help—well, sort of goose it with a couple of footnotes … you know.”
I looked at this drunken, unscholarly lout. I saw myself eclipsed in his shadow, the merest epigone to his attack upon my chosen Thebes. And then he said, “Of course that’s just a rough first draft, you understand.”
“Do you keep a carbon of first drafts?” I asked idly. And when he shook his addled skull, I split that skull’s forehead with my heavy paperweight. He stumbled back against the wall, lurched forward, and then collapsed. His head struck the desk. I tucked his obscene manuscript away, wrapped the paperweight in a handkerchief, carried it down the hall, washed it, flushed the handkerchief down the toilet, returned to my room, and called the police. A stranger had wandered into my office drunk, stumbled, and cracked his head against my desk.
The crime, if such it can be considered, was as nearly perfect as any of which I have knowledge. It is also unique in being the only instance of a crime committed by an eminent scholar which was motivated by his scholarship …
[Excerpt from MURDEROUS TENDENCIES IN THE ABNORMALLY GIFTED (University Press, 1953), State’s Exhibit A in the trial for murder of the late Professor Rodney Jordan.]
(1955)
The Ultimate Clue
They do happen once or twice in a detective’s lifetime—the neat perfect story-book puzzles; and the neatest one that ever happened to me was the Magini-Coletti problem—or The Case of the Two-Word Solution.
This is a football story, but you don’t have to know a punt from a pontoon to figure out the answer. It happened while California was having that great series of teams under Steve Sealy, the shrewd old 280-pounder whom the sports writers called the Sagacious Seal. This was the year Cal was rated sixth nationally by the AP and fourth by the UP and all because of a couple of grape-tromping Italians from the Napa Valley.
Jack (for Giacomo) Magini was a runt of a quarterback with an aim like William Tell’s. Game by game he was tearing up all Paul Larson’s varsity records, and his favorite target was a rangy alp of an end named Tony Coletti, who had adhesive pads on his fingers like a gecko. They’d been playing together since the tenth grade; and a Ph.D. candidate in the psych department was wondering if he could use them for a thesis on ESP in athletics.
Cal was a 20-point favorite in the Big Game—and in Northern California the Big Game means Cal-Stanford. Oh, there are other games of some bigness in their own regions, like Yale-Harvard and Army-Navy, but the Big Game is … well, it’s the Big Game. Point-spread never means too much, and sometimes the smart money goes on the underdog; so nobody was surprised when the 20-point favorite only just squeaked by at 26-20. But plenty of people were surprised by how it happened—including the Pacific Coast Conference, which hired me to look into it.
Three times Coletti was in the clear without a defender between him and the goal line, and Magini had all the protection in the world to get his pass away … but the ball and the receiver didn’t connect. The pass was too long—or the end was too slow reaching his assigned spot. The pass was short—or the receiver had gone out too far. The old rapport, the ESP, wasn’t working. And who could tell whose fault it was?
Excepting Magini. And Coletti. And possibly the gambling syndicate.
For the pure among you, let it be noted that gambling on football games isn’t usually on a win-or-lose basis. It’s by point-spread—that is, by the margin of victory. And those three incomplete passes, each of which would have been a sure touchdown, meant that the underdog-betters collected, probably in six figures, even though Stanford still lost and Cal racked up an undefeated season.
When the PCC gave me the assignment, the first man I wanted to talk to was old Steve Sealy. But the Seal stalled. “Give me eight hours,” he said. “Come around late tonight, O’Breen, and maybe I’ll have earned your fee for you. I’m talking to those two boys—talking like I never talked between halves. I know them better than their fathers—the ones they were born with and the ones that hear their confessions. And if one of them sold out, I’ll know which.”
He did, too, I guess; but he never lived to tell me. Not directly. He’d been dead about two hours when I let myself into his unlocked home after ten minutes of doorbell pushing. Why will an otherwise intelligent man equip his desk with a paper cutter as lethal as a switchblade? It had gone through all that flesh straight to his heart and your guess is as good as mine as to how long he lived with that steel in him.
There was a book on the floor beside him. It was a biography of Knute Rockne and it had left a gap in a shelf of books about the football greats. The shelf was crowded; the Rockne book couldn’t have fallen.
I looked at it while I was waiting for the police. The lower half of the last page was torn out. What was left seemed to be the full text of the last page with some white space under it.
In the ashtray on the desk there were paper ashes, powdered beyond any possibility of reconstruction.
So I could see what happened—and I knew who killed him.
He had been still barely alive, unable to pull his 280 pou
nds off the floor. He couldn’t get to the desk to write, so he grabbed a book and tore out what made the exact message. But the killer hadn’t gone yet; he came back and ripped the message out of the dying pudgy hand and burned it.
But I knew what the message was. For perfectionism I had to check an undamaged copy of the Rockne book and prove what was on that destroyed half page; and then, once we knew which boy to concentrate on, it was easy enough for the police to establish the gambling contacts and piece together the rest of a perfect case for Murder One.
All that took time; but the story-book puzzle solved itself as soon as it was stated. For of course that missing half of the last page told me that the murderer wasn’t the quarterback. He was
THE END
(1960)
About the Author
Anthony Boucher was an American author, critic, and editor, who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dramas. Between 1942 and 1947 he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by the Estate of Anthony Boucher
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5737-0
Screwball Division. © 1942 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1970 Davis Publications, Inc.
QL 696. C9. © 1943 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1971 Davis Publications, Inc.
Black Murder. © 1943 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1971 Davis Publications, Inc.
Death of a Partriarch. © 1983 Phyllis White.
Rumor, Inc. © 1944 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1972 Davis Publications, Inc.
The Punt and the Pass.
Like Count Palmieri. © 1946 The American Mercury, Inc; © 1974 Davis Publications, Inc.
Crime Must Have a Stop. © 1950 Mercury Publications, Inc.; © 1978 Davis Publications, Inc.
The Girl Who Married a Monster. © 1954 Mercury Publications, Inc.; © 1982 Davis Publications, Inc.
Coffin Corner. © 1943 Little, Brown & Co.
The Stripper. © 1945 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1973 Phyllis White.
Threnody. © 1952 Mystery Writers of America, Inc.; © 1980 Phyllis White.
Design for Dying. © 1941.
Mystery for Christmas. © 1943 The American Mercury, Inc.; © 1971 Davis Publications, Inc.
Code Zed. © 1944 Anthony Boucher; © 1972 Phyllis White.
The Ghost with the Gun. © 1945 Macfadden Publications, Inc.; © 1973 Phyllis White.
The Catalyst. © 1945 Popular Publications, Inc., © 1973 Phyllis White.
The Retired Hangman. © 1947 Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; © 1975 Phyllis White.
The Smoke-filled Locked Room. © 1968 Random House.
The Statement of Jerry Malloy. © 1955 Brett Halliday.
A Matter of Scholarship. © 1955 Mercury Publications, Inc.
The Ultimate Clue. © 1960 Davis Publications, Inc.
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Exeunt Murderers Page 31