Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (25 page)

Feeling as if he were only a messenger boy between the two camps, McLove replied, “Billy was killed by the fall, and he’d been dead only a few minutes when they examined him. Body injuries would indicate that he fell from this height.”

“But where was he for nearly four hours?” Greene wanted to know. “Hanging there, invisible, outside the window?”

Shirley Taggert collected herself enough to join the conversation. “He got out of that room somehow and then came back and jumped later,” she said. “That’s how it must have been.”

But McLove shook his head. “I hate to throw cold water on logical explanations, but that’s how it couldn’t have been. Remember, the windows in this building can’t be opened. No other window has been broken, and the one on this floor is still covered by cardboard.”

“The roof!” Knox suggested.

“No. There still aren’t any footprints on the roof. We checked.”

“Didn’t anybody see him falling?”

“Apparently not till just before he hit.”

“The thing’s impossible,” Knox said.

“No.”

They were all looking at McLove. “Then what happened?” Greene asked.

“I don’t know what happened, except for one thing. Billy Calm didn’t hang in space for four hours. He didn’t fall off the roof, or out of any other window, which means he could only have fallen from the window in the directors’ room.”

“But the cardboard . . .”

“Somebody replaced it afterwards. And that means . . .”

“It means Billy was murdered,” Knox breathed. “It means he didn’t commit suicide.”

McLove nodded. “He was murdered, and by somebody on this floor. Probably by somebody in this room.” He glanced around.

Night settled cautiously over the city, with a scarlet sunset to the west that clung inordinately long to its reign over the skies. The police had returned, and the questioning went on, concurrently with the long-distance calls to Pittsburgh and five other cities where Jupiter had mills. There was confusion, somehow more so with the coming of darkness to the outer world. Secretaries and workers from the other floors gradually drifted home, but on 21 life went on.

“All right,” Knox breathed finally as it was nearing eight o’clock. “We’ll call a directors’ meeting for Monday morning, to elect a new president. That should give the market time to settle down, and let us know just how bad things really are. At the same time, we’ll issue a statement about the proposed merger. I gather we’re in agreement that it’s a dead issue for the time being.”

Sam Hamilton nodded, and Jason Greene reluctantly shrugged his assent. Shirley Taggert looked up from her pad. “What about old Israel Black? With Mr. Calm dead, he’ll be back in the picture.”

Jason Greene shrugged. “Let him come. We can keep him in line. I never thought the old guy was so bad anyway, not really.”

It went on like this, the talk, the bickering, the occasional flare of temper, until nearly midnight. Finally, McLove felt he could excuse himself and head for home. In the outer office, Margaret was straightening her desk, and he was surprised to realize that she was still around. He hadn’t seen her in the past few hours.

“I thought you went home,” he said.

“They might have needed me.”

“They’ll be going all night at this rate. How about a drink?”

“I should get home.”

“All right. Let me take you, then. The subways aren’t safe at this hour.”

She turned her face up to smile at him. “Thanks, McLove. I can use someone like you tonight.”

They went down together in the elevator, and out into a night turned decidedly coolish. He skipped the subway and hailed a cab. Settled back on the red leather, he asked, “Do you want to tell me about it, Margaret?”

He couldn’t see her face in the dark, but after a moment she asked, “Tell you what?”

“What really happened. I’ve got part of it doped out already, so you might as well tell me the whole thing.”

“I don’t know what you mean, McLove. Really,” she protested.

“All right,” he said, and was silent for twenty blocks. Then, as they stopped for a traffic light, he added, “This is murder, you know. This isn’t a kid’s game or a simple love affair.”

“There are some things you can’t talk over with anyone. I’m sorry. Here’s my place. You can drop me at the corner.”

He got out with her and paid the cab driver. “I think I’d like to come up,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry, McLove, I’m awfully tired.”

“Want me to wait for him down here?”

She sighed and led the way inside, keeping silent until they were in the little three-room apartment he’d visited only once before. Then she shrugged off her raincoat and asked, “How much do you know?”

“I know he’ll come here tonight, of all nights.”

“What was it? What told you?”

“A lot of things. The elevator, for one.”

She sat down. “What about the elevator?”

“Right after Billy Calm’s supposed arrival, and suicide, I ran to his private elevator. It wasn’t on 21. It had to come up from below. He never rode any other elevator. When I finally remembered it, I realized he hadn’t come up on that one, or it would still have been there.”

Margaret sat frozen in the chair, her head cocked a little to one side as if listening. “What does that matter to you? You told me just this noon that none of them meant anything to you.”

“They didn’t, they don’t. But I guess you do, Margaret. I can see what he’s doing to you, and I’ve got to stop it before you get in too deep.”

“I’m in about as deep as I can ever be, right now.”

“Maybe not.”

“You said you believed me. You told them all that I couldn’t have been acting when I screamed out his name.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking that he’d heard something in the hallway. Then he said, “I did believe you. But then after the elevator bit, I realized that you never called Calm by his first name. It was always Mr. Calm, not Billy, and it would have been the same even in a moment of panic. Because he was still the president of the company. The elevator and the name—I put them together, and I knew it wasn’t Billy Calm who had walked into that directors’ room.”

There was a noise at the door, the sound of a familiar key turning in the lock. “No,” she whispered, almost to herself, “no, no, no . . .”

“And that should be our murderer now,” McLove said, leaping to his feet.

“Billy!” she screamed. “Billy, run! It’s a trap!”

But McLove was already to the door, yanking it open, staring into the startled, frightened face of W.T. Knox.

Sometimes it ends with a flourish, and sometimes with the dull thud of a collapsing dream. For Knox, the whole thing had been only an extension of some sixteen hours in his life span. The fantastic plot, which had been set in motion by his attempt at suicide that morning at the Jupiter Steel Building, came to an end when he succeeded in leaping to his death from the bathroom window of Margaret’s apartment, while they sat waiting for the police to come.

The following morning, with only two hours’ sleep behind him, McLove found himself facing Greene and Hamilton and Shirley Taggert once more, telling them the story of how it had been. There was an empty chair in the office too, and he wondered vaguely whether it had been meant for Knox or Margaret.

“He was a poor guy at the end of his rope,” McLove told them. “He was deeply involved in an affair with Margaret Mason, and he’d sunk all his money into a desperate gamble that the merger wouldn’t go through. He sold a lot of Jupiter stock short, figuring that when the merger talks collapsed the price would fall sharply. Only, Billy Calm called from the plane yesterday morning and said the merger was on. Knox thought about it for an hour or so, and did some figuring. When he r ealized he’d be wiped out, he went into the directors’ room to commit suicide.”

“Why? Why couldn’t he jump out his own window?”

“Because there’s a setback two stories down on his side. He couldn’t have cleared it. He wanted a smooth drop to the sidewalk. Billy Calm could hardly have taken a running jump through the window. It was far off the floor for even a tall man, and Billy was short. And remember the slivers of glass at the bottom of the pane? When I remembered them, and remembered the height of the bottom sill from the floor, I knew that no one—especially a short man—could have gone through that window without knocking them out. No, Knox passed Margaret’s desk, muttered some sort of farewell, and then entered the room just as I came out of Calm’s office. He smashed the window with a chair so he wouldn’t have to try to dive through the thick glass, head first. And then he got ready to jump.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because he heard Margaret shout his name from the outer office. And with the shouted word Billy, a sudden plan came to him in that split second. He recrossed the small office quickly, and stood behind the door as we entered, knowing I would think it was Billy Calm who had jumped. As soon as we were in the room, he simply stepped out and stood there. I thought he had entered the room with Margaret and me. I never gave it a second thought, because I was looking for Calm. But Margaret fainted when she saw he was still alive.”

“But she said it was Billy Calm who entered the office,” Greene protested.

“Not until later. She was starting to deny it, in fact, when she saw Knox and fainted. Remember, he carried her into the next room, and he was alone with her when she came to. He told her his money would be safe only if people thought Calm dead for a few hours. So she went along with her lover; I needn’t remind you he was a handsome fellow, even though he was married. She went along with what we all thought happened, not realizing it would lead to murder.”

Sam Hamilton lit a cigar. “The stock did go down.”

“But not enough. And Knox knew Calm’s arrival would reactivate the merger and ruin everything. I don’t think he planned to kill Calm in the beginning, but as the morning wore on it became the only way out. He waited in the private elevator when he knew Billy was due to arrive, slugged him, carried his small body to that window while we were all out to lunch, and threw him out, replacing the cardboard afterwards.”

“And the stock went down some more,” Hamilton said.

“That’s right.”

“She called him Billy,” Shirley reminded them.

“It was his name. We all called him W.T., but he signed his memo to me William T. Knox. I suppose the two of them thought it was a great joke, her calling him Billy when they were together.”

“Where is she now?” someone asked.

“The police are still questioning her. I’m going down there now, to be with her. She’s been through a lot.” He thought probably this would be his final day at Jupiter Steel. Somehow he was tired of these faces and their questions.

But as he got to his feet, Sam Hamilton asked, “Why wasn’t Billy here for the meeting at ten? Where was he for those missing hours? And how did Knox know when he would really arrive?”

“Knox knew because Billy phoned him, as he had earlier in the morning.”

“Phoned him? From where?”

McLove turned to stare out the window, at the clear blue of the morning sky. “From his private plane. Billy Calm was circling the city for nearly three hours. He couldn’t land because of the fog.”

Copyright ©1965 by Edward D. Hoch

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Fiction

THE MENTOR

by Dave Zeltserman

The last two short stories Dave Zeltserman contributed to
EQMM
featured the inimitable anthropomor-phic computer who plays Archie to his detective, Julius Katz. The first of those stories, entitled “Julius Katz,” recently won both the PWA’s Shamus Award for Best Short Story and the SMFS’s Derringer for Best Novella. Mr. Zeltserman is also a much-lauded novelist, whose forthcoming novel,
Outsourced
(Serpent’s Tail) is already optioned for film. Also not to be missed, 2010’s
The Caretaker of Lorne Field
. The last two short stories Dave Zeltserman contributed to
EQMM
featured the inimitable anthropomorphic computer who plays Archie to his detective, Julius Katz. The first of those stories, entitled “Julius Katz,” recently won both the PWA’s Shamus Award for Best Short Story and the SMFS’s Derringer for Best Novella. Mr. Zeltserman is also a much-lauded novelist, whose forthcoming novel,
Outsourced
(Serpent’s Tail) is already optioned for film. Also not to be missed, 2010’s
The Caretaker of Lorne Field
.

Patrick was fifteen when he got ahold of a dog-eared paperback copy of Charlie Valtrone’s 1960 hardboiled crime novel
I, the Killer.
The novel was Charlie Valtrone’s first and was considered a cult classic. It was also unlike anything Patrick had read before or even imagined that a book could be, both in its realistic depiction of violence and mob-related crime and the raw visceral energy within it, which hit Patrick as hard as if he’d been smacked in the face with a sledgehammer. After that book, Patrick greedily devoured everything else he could find of Charlie Valtrone’s, and would later buy every subsequent book as it was published.

It was because of Charlie Valtrone and the power of those books that Patrick wanted to become a writer. He majored in English Literature in college and supported himself now installing carpets while he worked on his unpublished manuscript. For a long time Charlie Valtrone had been his literary hero. Now the great man was not only his acknowledged mentor but his buddy. Hell, the two of them, at that moment, were drinking Buds and smoking Cohiba cigars as they lounged in the backyard of Charlie’s modest Paterson, New Jersey home, while porterhouse steaks sizzled on the gas grill.

A year ago Patrick had sent Charlie his manuscript. He fantasized that he might get a short note back from the man, but certainly didn’t expect anything. After all, Charlie Valtrone was a legend while Patrick was an unpublished twenty-six-year-old nobody. Even though he only lived a couple of towns over from Charlie, the last thing Patrick expected was Charlie calling him to tell him, “Kid, there’s some good stuff in this. But you need to fix a few things. Let’s get together.”

Patrick didn’t waste any time getting together with his idol. That first meeting was spent drinking whiskey and talking about everything except writing. More late evenings followed, and before long Patrick was coming over to Charlie’s home three or four times a week. It was more than Charlie becoming his mentor, it was as if Charlie and his wife, Eunice, had adopted him. They’d feed him when he’d come over, and after Eunice went to bed, he and Charlie would drink long into the night, with Charlie telling him about his younger days when he used to hang out with members of the mob.

“Now, remember,” Charlie would say, “I was just hanging around these guys. Doing a little bookmaking on the side, a few errands here and there, but nothing heavy. I wasn’t going around breaking legs or nothin’ like that, so don’t get any big ideas in your head.”

“Yeah, right,” Patrick would respond. “Someone late in paying up, and you telling me you wouldn’t lean on them?”

“Me?” Charlie would wink and show a thick-lipped grin from ear to ear. “I’m a regular pussycat. Who could I have scared into paying up?”

Not quite a pussycat. Even at seventy-four Charlie was an imposing figure. A big man, barrel-chested, thick heavy arms and large hands with knuckles as hard as concrete. Although his hair had turned from black to white over the years, he still had all of it, and it was still cut short in that trademark bristle cut of his. His jaw heavy and his face broad and square and with enough scars marking it to show that he’d seen his share of barroom brawls and back alley scraps in his younger days. You’d know this even if you didn’t notice his somewhat flattened nose. Patrick watched as Charlie blissfully blew smoke rings from his mouth. He tried to imagine what it would be like if he didn’t know Charlie and the guy came knocking on his door to collect on a late loan. Yeah, if that were to happen, even with Charlie Valtrone being a geezer in his seventies, the sight of the guy standing outside his front door would probably have caused Patrick to piss his pants.

Patrick was still watching his mentor blow smoke rings when Eunice walked over to Charlie and started rubbing his shoulders. She was maybe fifteen years younger than Charlie. Patrick had seen pictures of her when she was a young woman, and she was gorgeous back then and she was still a good-looking woman now. Over the years she’d kept herself slender without ever becoming bony. There weren’t many wrinkles on her face and she dyed her thick long hair the same red that it had naturally been twenty years earlier. She was a woman of class. Charlie slid his eyes sideways so he could look at his wife without moving his head. In his raspy, gruff voice he asked her how the steaks were coming.

“Look at the kid,” he growled. “The boy’s famished. We got to feed him soon before he keels over on us.”

Eunice laughed at that. “I think he’ll survive another five minutes.”

“I don’t know. The kid’s all skin and bones. He’s wasting away in front of our eyes.”

That wasn’t exactly true. Patrick carried twenty pounds more than he should thanks to all the junk food he ate on the job, as well as all the booze and good food Charlie and Eunice fed him. Eunice rolled her eyes and told Charlie she’d get them a couple more Buds and that that would tide them over. As she walked away, Charlie reached out to smack her playfully on the rear. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled wickedly before stepping back into the house.

“Ah, nothin’ like a good woman,” Charlie said in a contented growl. “Kid, you need to get yourself one.”

“I’m working on it.” Patrick looked away and found himself tensing as he asked whether Charlie had had a chance yet to look at the latest draft of his manuscript.

“Yeah, I did. Kid, you’re getting closer. Plot, pacing, structure, characters are all good. This book could be great, but some of the scenes just don’t ring true to me. Especially your bank heist scene. Too over-the-top, not realistic enough.” Charlie paused to blow out another smoke ring. He sat pensively and watched as the smoke dissipated into the air before he continued.

“I don’t know, kid. I think you need to have more experiences in life. Maybe spit in some tough guy’s eye and get yourself in a barroom fight. And go to a damn shooting range so you know what it feels like to fire off a clip. And goddamn it, wake up in a drunk tank some morning!”

Patrick nodded, feeling his disappointment. He had been hoping this latest version would get his mentor’s seal of approval. Somewhat dryly, he said, “Or maybe you could just introduce me to some of your old friends and I could break a few legs for the experience like you once did.”

Charlie gave Patrick a dull-eyed smile. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.”

“Yeah, sure you don’t.”

“Seriously, kid, I don’t. But you’re being kind of bold here, don’cha think?”

“Come on, Charlie. I read
Leave Them Screaming.
Several times, in fact. There’s no way you could’ve written that if you hadn’t really worked as muscle for the mob.”

“Nah, that was all imagination.” Charlie tapped his skull with a thick, stubby index finger. “All of that came from up here. Sure, I listened to stories that guys in the neighborhood were telling, but no, I never did any of that stuff.”

“Damn, I’d love to meet some of those guys and hear their stories.”

Charlie’s small pale eyes grew wistful. “Yeah, I know you would, kid. The problem is all the guys I knew back then are either dead or missing.”

A cell phone ringing interrupted them. Charlie took from his pocket what looked like a cheap disposable cell phone and listened intently for several minutes as a hardness settled over his features. Then, with the same irritable suddenness that you’d see with an old dog turning surly, he lashed out. “What are you talking about,” he demanded into the phone, his face reddening with anger. “The thirtieth is still a week away! You nuts or something?”

It was the thirtieth. Patrick got Charlie’s attention and signaled to him that it was the thirtieth. Charlie looked at him with a perplexed uncertainty before realizing his mistake. He turned away from Patrick. His voice low and tight, he said into his cell phone, “I was just screwing with you. Of course I know what day it is, so don’t go thinking this is some sort of senior moment.” There was a long pause before Charlie muttered into the phone for the other party not to worry about nothin’. After he ended the call, he stared into space until Patrick brought his attention back by asking whether he had missed a book deadline.

“Yeah, something like that,” Charlie murmured out of the side of his mouth. As he sat staring blankly at Patrick, confusion dulled his eyes and his lips folded downwards into a dour frown.

Eunice came back then with fresh beers. After she reported that the steaks were done, they moved inside. Charlie seemed distracted during dinner and made only a few guttural responses to Eunice’s attempts to engage him in conversation. After dinner, while Eunice was clearing away the dishes, Charlie turned to Patrick and told him he needed his help.

“I’ve got an errand to run,” he said. “A half-hour driving back and forth to Paramus, but we’ll be back in an hour. But kid, I could use your help.”

“Sure.”

Charlie nodded, and lumbered to his feet. He left the room, and when he came back he was carrying a gym bag. He signaled with a tilt of his head for Patrick to follow him. On the way out he stopped in the kitchen to give Eunice a kiss on the cheek.

“I’ll be back soon, doll,” he told her.

“You two be careful out there,” she scolded him. “I don’t want you corrupting our boy here by taking him to a strip club, or anything like that!”

Charlie made a face at the suggestion and left the house with Patrick following behind. Once they got on the road, Charlie pulled into a strip mall parking lot a few miles from his home and parked his Cadillac Escalade before getting into an older model Buick Regal nearby. “Don’t ask,” he told Patrick. “I got to deliver this piece of crap. It’s a long story.”

“I thought that call was over a book deadline?”

“Yeah, it was. This is a different matter.”

During the ride to Paramus, Charlie made small talk about politics and recent TV shows and the Yankees prospects for the upcoming season, but seemed mostly distracted and didn’t appear to pay attention to any of Patrick’s responses. After a while, Patrick found himself drifting asleep, partly from his friend’s ramblings and mostly from the steak dinner and beer. He was jerked awake when they slowed down in front of a small run-down-looking ranch-style house, and with some curiosity noticed that Charlie had turned off the headlights before gliding the car into the driveway. As they left the car, Charlie put a finger to his lips, hushing Patrick. Charlie had taken his gym bag with him, and while they walked to a side door of the house, Charlie removed a couple of objects from the bag, one of which he pressed into Patrick’s hand. It was too dark for Patrick to see what it was, but it had a cold metal feel and it was heavy. It wasn’t until Charlie was rapping his knuckles against the door that Patrick realized he had been handed a gun and that Charlie held one also. He was still trying to make sense of this when the door opened a few inches and Charlie shot the man on the other side of the door in the chest. The man fell backwards into the house. The noise the gunshot made was only a puff. A silencer must’ve been used. Patrick was still trying to understand what was happening when Charlie pushed the door open. The man who had been shot looked dead as he lay on the floor. He was thin and wiry, in his thirties, and wore a wife-beater tank top and khakis with his chest torn open by the bullet. As Charlie moved past him he shot the man one more time in his right eye, then turned and nearly snarled at Patrick as he ordered him to follow him into the house. Patrick obeyed, at this point moving purely on autopilot. Even without Charlie ordering him to do so, he shut the door behind him.

There was a man’s voice from deeper inside the house. This man was yelling to someone named Tony, asking him what was happening. Charlie moved quickly and stealthily towards that voice, and Patrick followed him, his mind still refusing to accept the events that he had witnessed.

As they moved through the house, a man walked out of a bathroom. He was bigger than the man Charlie had earlier shot, taller and wider in the shoulders, and he must’ve been the one who had been shouting out to someone named Tony. His eyes grew wide as he saw Charlie. Before he could reach for the gun he had tucked away in his waistband, Charlie fired three rounds, each of them leaving expanding red dots on the man’s chest. He toppled backwards. Charlie moved to him so he could search through the dead man’s pockets. He was doing this when a noise sounded from behind Patrick.

“Goddamn it, kid,” Charlie growled in exasperation. “There’s someone behind you! Do your job as backup!”

Without even realizing he was doing it, Patrick started firing his gun as he turned. Like Charlie, his gun had a silencer attached to it, and the bullets made only a soft puff as they hit their target. It was a girl. She was unarmed, no older than twenty, and was half naked, wearing only a pair of panties. She must have stepped out of a bedroom to see what was happening. Patrick had shot her twice in the stomach, and she collapsed on the floor and moaned in agony. Charlie pulled a thick roll of bills from the dead man’s pocket and gave Patrick a disgusted look. Patrick stood paralyzed as the girl writhed on the floor nearby.