More Tales of the Black Widowers (17 page)

“I think I might, sir,” said Henry calmly.

Trumbull said, “What?”

Evans said in Trumbull's direction, “Is he joking?”

Henry said, “I think it is possible, on the basis of what we have heard here this evening, to work out what may really have happened.”

Evans said indignantly, “What really happened other than what I have told you? This is nonsense.”

Trumbull said, “I think we ought to hear Henry, Mr. Evans. He's got a knack too.”

“Well,” said Evans, “let him have his say.”

Henry said, “It occurs to me that because of Mr. Williams' foolish behavior at the interview you were virtually forced to recommend Mr. Adams—yet it is hard to believe that Mr. Williams could be so stupid as to imagine he could pretend to smoke when he was a non-smoker. It is common knowledge that a non-smoker will cough if he inhales cigarette smoke for the first time.”

Evans said, “Williams says he was tricked into it by Adams. It was more likely, stupidity. It may be hard to believe that a person could be stupid, but under pressure some quite intelligent people do stupid things and this was one of those occasions.”

“Perhaps it was,” said Henry, “and perhaps we are looking at the matter from the wrong end. Perhaps it was not Adams who tricked Williams into attempting to smoke, thus forcing you to recommend Adams for the job. Perhaps it was Williams who did it deliberately in order to force you to recommend Adams for the job.”

“Why should he do that?” said Evans.

“Might the two not have been working together, with Williams the brains of the pair? Williams arranged to have Adams do the actual work while he remained in the background and directed activities. Then might not Williams, after arranging a murder as cleverly as he had arranged the theft, have taken the profits? And if all that is so, would you not expect Williams, right now, to know where the stolen goods are?”

Evans merely stared in utter disbelief and it fell to Trumbull to put the general stupefaction into words. “You've pulled that from thin air, Henry.”

“But it fits, Mr. Trumbull. Adams could not have arranged the smoking attempt. He wouldn't have known the cigarettes would be there. Williams would know; he was sitting there. He might have had something else in mind to force Adams into the job but, seeing the cigarettes, he used those.”

“But it's still out of whole cloth, Henry. There's no evidence.”

“Consider,” said Henry earnestly. “A non-smoker can. scarcely pretend to be a smoker. He will cough; nothing will
₍
prevent that. But anyone can cough at will; a cough need never be genuine. What if Williams was, in actual fact, an accomplished smoker who had once given up smoking? It would have been the easiest thing for him to pretend he was a non-smoker by pretending to cough uncontrollably.”

Evans shook his head stubbornly. “There is nothing to indicate Williams was a smoker.”

“Isn't there?” said Henry. “Is it wise of you, sir, to concentrate so entirely on one particular variety of behavior pattern when you interview a prospect? Might you not miss something crucial that was not part of the immediate pattern you were studying?”

Evans said coldly, “No.”

Henry said, “You were watching the cigarette, sir, and nothing else. You were not watching the match with which it was lit. You said you heard him scratch the match; you didn't see it.”

“Yes, but what of that?”

Henry said, “These days, there is no occasion to use matches for anything but cigarettes. A non-smoker, in an age when electricity does everything and even gas stoves have pilot lights, can easily go years without striking a match. It follows that a non-smoker who cannot inhale smoke without coughing cannot handle a matchbook with any skill at all. Yet you described .Williams as having held his cigarette with his right hand and having used his left hand only to light it.” “Yes.”

“An unskilled smoker,” said Henry, “would surely use two hands to light a cigarette, one to hold the matchbook and one to remove the match and strike it on the friction strip. A skilled smoker pretending to be unskilled might be so intent on making sure he handled the cigarette with the properly amateurish touch that he might forget to do the same for the match. In fact, forgetting the match altogether, he might, absent-mindedly, use the kind of technique that only an accomplished smoker could possibly have learned and have lit the match one-handed. I have seen Dr. Drake do such a thing.”

Drake, who had, for the last minute, been laughing himself into a quiet coughing fit, managed to say, “I don't do it often anymore, because I use a cigarette lighter these days, but here's how it goes.” Holding a book of matches in his left hand, he bent one of the matches double with his left thumb so that the head came up against the friction strip. A quick stroke set it aflame.

Henry said, “This is what Williams must have done, and that one-handed match strike indicates an accomplished smoker far more surely than any number of coughs would indicate a non-smoker. If the police look back into his past life far enough, they'll find a time when he smoked. His act in your office will then seem exactly what it was—an act.” “Good God, yes,” said Trumbull, “and you can preserve Black Widower confidentiality. Just tell the police that you remember—what you actually remember, what you've told us tonight.”

“But to have not realized this,” said Evans confusedly, “will make me seem more a fool than ever.”

“Not,” said Henry softly, “if your statement leads to a solution of the crime.”

6
  
Afterword

“No Smoking” appeared in the December 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the title of “Confessions of an American Cigarette Smoker.”

I'm growing ever more fanatical on the subject of smoking. Trumbull in this story is speaking for me. I allow no smoking in either my apartment or my office, but one is limited in one's dictatorial powers elsewhere. The meetings of the Trap Door Spiders are indeed made hideous with smoke— as are almost all other meetings I attend.

There's nothing I can do about it directly, of course, except to complain when the law is with me. (I once plucked the cigarette out of the hand of a woman who was smoking under a “No Smoking” sign in an elevator and who wouldn't put it out when I asked her, politely, to do so.) It helps a bit, though, to write a story expressing my views.

To Table of Contents

Thomas Trumbull, whose exact position with government intelligence was not known to the other Black Widowers, creased his face into a look of agonized contempt, bent toward Roger Halsted, and whispered, “Greeting Cards?”

“Why not?” asked Halsted, his eyebrows lifting and encroaching on the pink expanse of his forehead. “It's an honorable occupation.”

Trumbull had arrived late to the monthly banquet of the Black Widowers and had been introduced to the guest of the evening even while Henry, the wonder-waiter, had placed the scotch and soda within the curve of his clutching fingers. The guest, Rexford Brown, had a markedly rectangular face, a good-humored mouth, a closely cut fuzz of white hair, a soft voice, and a patient expression.

Trumbull said discontentedly, “It's the season for it, with Christmas next week; I'll grant you that much. Still it means we'll have to sit here and listen to Manny Rubin tell us his opinion of greeting cards.”

“Who knows?” said Halsted. “It may turn out that he's written greeting-card rhymes himself. Anyone who's been a boy evangelist—”

Emmanuel Rubin, writer and polymath, had, as was well known, an incredible sharpness of hearing where mention was made, however tangentially, of himself. He drifted over and said, “Written what?”

“Greeting-card rhymes,” said Halsted. “You know—'There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion—'“

“No limericks, damn you,” shouted Trumbull. Geoffrey Avalon looked up from the other end of the room and said in his most austere baritone, “Gentlemen, I believe Henry wishes to inform us that we may be seated.”

Mario Gonzalo, the club artist, had already completed his sketch of the guest with an admirable economy of strokes and said lazily, “I've been thinking about Roger's limericks. Granted, they're pretty putrid, but they can still be put to use.”

“If you printed them on toilet paper—” began Trumbull.

“I mean money,” said Gonzalo. “Look, these banquets cost, don't they? It would be nice if they could be made self-supporting, and Manny knows about a half dozen publishers who will publish anything if they publish his garbage—”

Drake, stubbing his cigarette out with one hand, put the other over Mario's mouth. “Let's not get Manny into an explosive mood.”

But Rubin, who was inhaling veal at its most Italian with every indication of olfactory pleasure, said, “Let him talk, Jim. I'm sure he has an idea that will add new dimensions to the very concept of garbage.”

“How about a Black Widowers' Limerick Book?”

“A what?” said Trumbull in a stupefied tone.

“Well, we all know limericks. I have one that goes, There was a young lady of Sydney Who could take it—'“

“We've heard it,” said Avalon, frowning.

“And, There was a young fellow of Juilliard With a—”

“We've heard that one too.”

“Yes,” said Gonzalo, “but the great public out there hasn't. If we included all the ones we make up and all the ones we can remember, like Jim's limerick about the young lady of Yap, the one that rhymes 'interstices' and 'worse disease'—”

“I will not,” said Trumbull, “consent to have the more or less respectable name of the Black Widowers contaminated with any project of such infinite lack of worth.”

“What did I tell you about garbage?” said Rubin.

Gonzalo looked hurt. “What's wrong with the idea? We could make an honest buck. We could even include clean ones. Roger's are all clean.”

“That's because he teaches at a junior high school,” said Drake, snickering.

“You should hear some of those kids,” said Halsted. “How many are in favor of a Black Widowers? Limerick Book?

Gonzalo's hand went up in lonely splendor. Halsted looked as though he might join him; his arm quivered—but stayed down.

Rexford Brown asked mildly, “May I vote?”

“It depends,” said Trumbull suspiciously. “Are you in favor or not?”

“Oh, I'm in favor.”

“Then you can't vote.”

“Oh well, it wouldn't change the result, anyway, but I’m for anything that will bring moments of pleasure. There aren't enough of those.”

Gonzalo, speaking with his mouth full, said, “Tom never had one. How would he know?”

Rubin, with a clear effort to keep from sounding sardonic, and marking up a clear failure, said, “Is it those moments of pleasure that justify you in spending your life in the greeting-card business, Mr. Brown?”

“One of the ways,” said Brown.

“Hold it, Manny,” said Avalon. “Wait for the coffee.”

The conversation then grew general, though Gonzalo kept sulkily silent and was observed to be fiddling with his napkin, on which he wrote, in careful Old English lettering, “There once was a group of dull bastards—” but never got to a second line.

Over the coffee, Halsted said, “Okay, Manny, you nearly got to it earlier, so why don't you start the grilling?”

Rubin, who was just holding up his hand to Henry to indicate that he had enough coffee for the moment, looked up at this, his eyes owlish behind the thick lenses of his glasses and his sparse beard quivering.

“Mr. Brown,” he said, “how do you justify your existence?”

Brown smiled and said, “Very good coffee. It gives me a moment of pleasure and so does a greeting card. But wait, that's not all. There's more to it than that. You may take no pleasure from what you consider doggerel or moist sentiment or tired wit That is you, but you are not everyone. The prepared greeting card is of service to those who can't write letters or who lack the time to do so or who wish only to maintain a minimal contact. It supplies the needs of those to whom doggerel is touching verse, to whom sentiment is a real emotion, to whom any wit at all is not tired.”

Rubin said, “What is your function in connection with them? Do you manufacture them, ship them, design them, write the verses?”

“I manufacture them primarily, but I contribute to each of the categories, and more besides.”

“Do you specialize in any particular variety?”

“Not too intensively, although I'm rather weak on the funny ones. Those are for specialized areas. I must say, though, the discussion on limericks interested me. I don't know that limericks have ever been used on greeting cards. How did yours go, Roger?”

“I was just improvising,” said Halsted. “Let's see now— There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion—' “

Trumbull said, “Imperfect rhyme.”

Halsted said, “That's all right. You make a virtue out of necessity and keep it up. Let's see. Let's see—”

He thought a moment and said:

“There once were three travelers Magian, Who on a most festive occasion