The Union Club Mysteries (19 page)

It is not proper—it is not
done
—to sing in the library of the Union Club. I admit that. It was just that I had attended one of my Gilbert and Sullivan sessions the night before and my brain was brimming with it, as usual. So I did enter cheerfully, with a wave to the other three and a not very loud "When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies—" in my resonant baritone.

Jennings and Baranov looked stoical, but Griswold opened his eyes and said gratingly, "What the devil is that horrible noise?"

I stopped at once and said, "Not noise at all. It is a phenomenon I like to call music."

"I daresay," said Griswold, sipping at his drink, "that you would like to call your looks handsome, too, but you will never find agreement in either case."

"The trouble with you," I said with some little heat, I will admit, "is that you are tone-deaf."

"Whether I am or not," said Griswold, "does not alter the fact that a decent respect for the memory of Sir Arthur Sullivan should keep you from desecrating his works."

Baranov said suddenly, "Don't tell me you're a Gilbert and Sullivan fan too, Griswold."

"Not really, but once—"

He paused for another sip, and we waited. We knew nothing would stop him now.

*
      
*
      

There are such things as hit men in the world [said Griswold]. Killers for hire.

They are hard to handle for they work with professional skill, and there is no way of connecting victim and killer motivationally. Too many such murders go unsolved and the police tend to be frustrated by such cases. They're especially annoyed when they are actually on the track and yet lack that little bit required to prevent a murder or trap a murderer.

It's then that I tend to be called in. Somehow, they have the feeling that even when all else fails, I will come through. I am the soul of modesty, of course, but the facts do tend to speak for themselves.

The captain said to me, "We've made considerable progress, Griswold. We're on the track of a small group of very clever—and high-priced—killers, but we haven't been able to reach the point where we can pin them to the wall before a judge and jury. Now we have a chance to catch one of them in the act, if we move quickly and!—if we know exactly what to do."

"Suppose you tell me what you know."

The captain cleared his throat. "We keep the killers under surveillance, you understand, as far as we can. We have to be very careful, though, because we don't want them to
know
they are under surveillance, and with conditions being what they are these days, we have limited resources and can't do as much as we'd like."

"I take that all for granted," I said. "What is it you know?"

"A few scraps of dialog."

"Gained how?"

"Never mind how. We can't introduce it into court, but it's authentic."

I shrugged. "Go ahead."

"One of our characters entered, saying—or rather singing: 'As someday it may happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list—I've got a little list.' The second said, 'Oh, yes?' and the first said, 'And the favorite piece.
The
favorite piece.' Unfortunately, that's it. Nothing more." "They got out of range of the bug, did they?—Or found it?"

The captain made a rasping sound in the back of his throat.

I said, "I take it the first one was singing a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan."

"From something called
The Mikado,
I'm told. That's out of my line."

"The killers seem to have a small bit of middle culture."

"They're not your ordinary thugs," said the captain. "But they're just as deadly."

"Does the small bit of dialog help you at all?"

"Almost! We've got a modus operandi on them. At least there are two killings we think we've tied to them, each one at a theatrical performance of the kind in which there are occasional bursts of applause, and where the applause is sure to come at certain times."

"Oh?"

"No one looks at strangers during applause. You're concentrating on the stage, where the players or the performers are grinning and bowing and making gestures. If someone comes in and takes a seat during one round of applause, and leaves during the next round, no one, but no one, looks at him. No one can describe him."

"How about the people whose feet he steps all over?"

"The empty seat is on the aisle. The victim is occupying the seat second from the aisle. The killer sits down next to him. At the next round of applause, he just puts a small dart gun under his rib cage, fires it and leaves. It makes no sound that can be heard over the applause. The victim hardly feels it, I'm sure, but the dart is poisoned and in three minutes he's dead. He slumps in his chair and no one even knows he's dead till the performance is over and he doesn't get up. We know someone must have been sitting next to him at some point in the performance, but we have no witnesses who are in the least useful."

"Very clever, but surely you can find out who arranged it. Who bought the ticket for the victim and gave a companion ticket to the killer?"

"The victim buys it himself—two on the aisle, only his wife can't go—terrible headache. She hopes she can go later and asks him to leave the aisle seat for her. He gives the ticket taker the second ticket and says he's expecting someone later. She doesn't make it, but the killer does."

"Sounds to me as though the wife hired the killer."

"We've got to prove it, though," said the captain. "Suppose we wait for someone to come in midway and take an aisle seat. If we've got a policewoman dressed up as an old lady in a wheelchair, we can then move her up the aisle next to the aisle seat two behind him. He'll be looking straight ahead because he doesn't want to flash his face in any direction where someone can study it—so he won't see her. And she won't attract undue attention anyway. Wheelchairs in the aisle aren't unusual sights in these days of equal rights for the disadvantaged.

"Then just before the crucial applause breaks out, she'll move her wheelchair up next to the killer's seat. If he
is
the killer, he'll take out his dart gun, and she'll have a real gun in his ribs, and two other policemen will be closing in. We'll have him and we'll sweat out of him all the information we can get about everyone else in the organization. That's what plea bargaining is for."

I said, "It sounds good to me. Go ahead and set it up."

"I can't," growled the captain. "I don't know who the intended victim is, so I can't trail him. I don't know what the performance is, or where it will be held, or at what points the killer will enter or leave."

"Since you told me about those scraps of dialog you overheard and seem to think it's authentic, I should think the performance in question would be of
The Mikado."

"Even I could think of that, but it isn't. Here, let me describe what we've been doing."

The captain leaned back in his chair and glowered at me. "To begin with, we have reason to suspect the murder will be committed some time within a month and somewhere in this city. We're not a hundred percent sure of it, but ninety-five percent at least—and there's no performance of
The Mikado
scheduled any time this spring in the city or anywhere near it.

"So we thought it might be some other Gilbert and Sullivan production. They wrote a dozen—I've become an expert on those operettas, believe me. It turns out that there are three productions this month by three different amateur groups:
Iolanthe, Princess Ida
and
H.M.S. Pinafore.''

I said, "You've got it down to three."

"Yes, but which of the three?"

"Cover them all."

The captain ground his teeth. "There are six performances of
Iolanthe,
five performances of
Princess Ida
and eight performances of
H.M.S. Pinafore.
That's nineteen altogether. Do you think I can tie up a significant portion of my bureau in that way?"

"You'll stop a murder."

"And how many crimes will take place, or go unsolved, because I've let my men be tied up? There's such a thing as cost effectiveness even in police work. I've got to cut down the possibilities somehow. That's why I need you."

"You need
me?
What can / do?"

"Tell me the favorite piece."

"What?"

"He said—the fellow with the 'I've got a list' song— that it was the favorite piece. I assume he's talking about the piece sure to get the loudest and most prolonged applause, which makes sense, except how can we decide which that is?"

I said, "How can I tell you? I'm not a Gilbert and Sullivan fanatic."

"Neither am I. But there's one guy in the Department who has a friend who is. I called him in."

"Good move."

"It didn't help. In
Iolanthe,
he said there's a trio about 'Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady,' which is often a showstopper. But there's also what he called the Sentry's Solo, and the Chancellor's Nightmare, and the whole First Act finale. He says each of them has its devotees. In the case of
Princess Ida,
there's the trio 'Haughty, Humble, Coy, or Free,' or 'A Lady Fair of Lineage High' about a princess and an ape, and Gama's song about being a philanthropist. He says they might qualify- And in
H.M.S. Pinafore,
he listed a dozen songs, so help me, 'I'm Called Little Buttercup,' 'When I Was a Lad,' 'I Am the Captain of the Pinafore,' 'Never Mind the Why and Wherefore' and so on. He ended up saying there was no way of choosing a favorite piece because every person had his own favorite and they were all great."

"It sounds bad," I said.

"But I've been thinking. The person we overheard did not say,
'My
favorite piece.' He said
'the
favorite piece,' as though it weren't a question of personal preference, but something absolute. I thought about that and I decided it's not a question of straight Gilbert and Sullivan thinking. There's something tricky about this and so I might as well ask Griswold. Tell me you can think of something."

I had never seen him look at me so pleadingly in all our years of acquaintanceship. I said, "I take it you want me to tell you which one piece at which one theatrical performance will be the one the killer will attend on the basis of this scrap of dialog you overheard."

"Yes."

So I told him. It was a long chance, a terribly long one, but I couldn't resist that pleading look and, as it happened, I was right.

Griswold finished his drink, smiled at us fishily from under his straggling white mustache and said, "So you see, I may be tonedeaf, but I am quite capable of understanding a musical clue." And he then actually settled back in his chair and made as though to go to sleep.

I shouted in outrage, "There is no clue. / am a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast, and I tell you there is no way of deciding
the
favorite piece in any play."

"No way for
you,"
said Griswold with a sneer, "because you thought 'I've got a little list' was a quotation from
The Mikado.
Might it not have been a play on words? Suppose you spell 'list,' 'LISZT.' The word has the same pronunciation, but it now refers to Franz Liszt, the Hungarian musician, who wrote a number of pieces of which
the
favorite is
Hungarian Rhapsody
#2. There's no question of personal taste there. It's
the
favorite. At the Philharmonic, the program on one particular night included Liszt's
Hungarian Rhapsody.
It got tumultuous applause as it always does. Under the cover of the applause, the police nabbed the killer, then broke the murder ring, saved the husband and got the wife a prison sentence."

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Most of our discussions at our Tuesday evenings in the Union Club library arise out of moral indignation. It was Baranov's turn, apparently.

"There are something like eight congressmen," he said, "who are being investigated on suspicion of using cocaine made available to them by a ring of congressional pages. Now that's disgusting."

I think it's disgusting, too, but I was feeling irritable, so I said, "Why? How many congressmen are half-drunk half the time? How many are mentally blurred with tobacco smoke? Why pick and choose between addictions?"

"Some addictions," said Baranov, "are against the law, which makes a difference—or it should do so to congressmen."

"How many of them stretch the facts to ribbons on their tax returns? That's against the law, too."

Jennings jerked his thumb in my direction. "That's Larry Liberal for you. If they don't ban tobacco because he doesn't smoke, then they might as well permit cocaine."

I said freezingly, "I happen not to use cocaine, either. I'm just trying to tell you that hypocrisy is not the answer. We either solve the social problems that give rise to drug abuse—and that includes tobacco and alcohol—or we'll just be bailing out the ocean with a sieve, forever."

Griswold's soft snore seemed to hit a knot at this point. He uncrossed his legs, blinked at us a bit, having clearly heard us through his sleep, as, through some
special magic, he always did.
/

"Law-enforcement officers have to enforce the law, whether that helps or not," he said. "Someone else has to solve the social problems."

Jennings said, "And I suppose you did your bit."

Griswold said, "Now and then. When asked to help. Once, I remember, that involved a ghost story—after a fashion. Or half of one, at any rate." He sipped at his scotch and soda and adjusted his position in the armchair. It was clear he was going to pretend to nap a bit more, when Jennings's shoe kicked gently against his ankle.

"Oh," said Griswold, in a dismal attempt at innocent surprise, "do you want to hear the story?"

I'm not often called into ordinary police cases [said Griswold], since the necessary methods for dealing with them represent Tom Edison's recipe for genius—ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration.

If, for instance, there is suspicion that a drug ring is operating somewhere and is getting so completely out of control that it cannot be ignored—where it is reaching into middle-class schools, for instance, or into the police stations themselves, or into Congress, as is now suspected—then the forces of the law are galvanized.

A great many people must then do a great deal of waiting, following, questioning, sifting through statements, listening to lies, staying up late, running risks—

It takes a long time, and once in a while a great deal of heroin, or cocaine, or some other drug is confiscated; various people involved in the operation are arrested and even convicted; and the newspapers have a field day.

The drugs that are confiscated, if they are properly destroyed, never find their way into human physiology. The drug dealers are taken out of circulation, for at least a while. Even so, there are always more drugs coming into the marketplace, and there are always new drug dealers arising from somewhere. As our friend here said, it has a great likeness to bailing out the ocean with a sieve. And sometimes—most of the time—the efforts are less than spectacular. The drugs are confiscated in trivial quantities, if any, and the majestic arm of the law comes to rest on the shoulders of privates in the ranks; or of helpless and miserable users, far more sinned against than sinning.

Yet, as I said, my friends in the police department have to struggle along, doing what they can. It is their job. And if we're going to allot responsibility for the world's troubles, they should get off rather lightly—at least in most places and at most times.

I suppose that to any police officer running an investigation into drugs, there may come a time when a run-of-the-mill bit of procedure suddenly, and unexpectedly, comes to bear promise of leading to some sort of major "bust." A bit of information comes in that might, just possibly, open the road to the higher echelons in the drug trade. Quite apart from mundane considerations, such as favorable attention in the media, promotions, and salary raises, the officer may well feel the thrill of striking a blow for the forces of decency and civilization.

Usually, it is the ninety-nine percent of perspiration that gets the police to that point, and then, if they're to strike fast, and give the opposition no chance to cover up, to set up a protective shield, they may sometimes need that one percent of inspiration, and—if they are smart—that's when the police call on
me.

The police lieutenant did just that on one occasion, about twenty years ago or so. He was an old friend of mine, and I didn't mind helping him if I could.

"Griswold," he said, holding up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a quarter-inch apart, "I'm this far from getting on the track of something that will lead me to the central artery of the drug flow in this city."

"Excellent," I said.

"But I may not make that little bit. I'm missing half a ghost."

"What?" For a moment, I thought the lieutenant was intending some sort of practical joke at my expense, although he was notoriously lacking in a sense of humor, practical or otherwise. He said, "We have a line of investigation that makes it quite certain that we can put our finger on someone who will serve as a perfect conduit of information to the very top."

"Grab him!" I said, for I am impatient with subtlety when the time for direct action has come.

"I can't. We only know his nickname. He's called Haifa Ghost."

"You can't be serious."

"He chose it himself apparently, and that's all we've got. He's a
whole
ghost for any chance we seem to have of identifying him."

"You have no idea at all as to who he might be?"

"Yes, we have some idea. Indirect evidence leads us to suppose he's a member of the Black Belts, a street gang."

"Might not one of them turn state's evidence, suitably induced?"

The lieutenant rolled his eyes upward, as though calling on Heaven to witness my stupidity. "Get one of those petty hoodlums to sing? Not talking is the chief item in their own perverted notion of rules of honor. And by the time we broke one of them down, Half a Ghost would know we were after him and be gone."

"Take them all."

"We couldn't hold them. This isn't a police state— more's the pity, I sometimes think. And that would alert them, too. Isn't there some way you can tell us who Half a Ghost is right now, with enough certainty so that we can hope to catch him by surprise and sweep him into giving us the information we need?"

"Do you have anything for me to go on? Anything? Even I can't give you something in return for nothing."

"We suspect that Half a Ghost has something to do with his first name. Don't ask me what. A private joke of his own, I suspect. The trouble is we have the first names of the ten members of the gang who are old enough and have heft enough to be Half a Ghost, and not one of those first names means anything at all ghostwise."

"What are they?" "Here they are, in alphabetical order."

I looked at the list: Alex, Barney, Dwayne, Gregory, Jimmy, Joshua, Lester, Norton, Roy, Simon.

I said, in disbelief, "One of them is called Dwayne?"

"He's called Bugsy for short. Every one of them is nicknamed, but one of them has Half a Ghost in addition, that's all. Which one?"

"Look," I said, "If the nickname were Rock, I would feel reasonably sure that it was taken from the name Simon. Simon means rock in Aramaic, according to the Bible, so the Apostle Simon was called Petrus in Latin, or Peter in English. Most people know that; perhaps even these two-bit hoods. If the nickname were King, I'd bet on Roy, which is the French word for king. If it were Jericho, I'd bet on Joshua."

"Why are you telling me all that? The nickname is Half a Ghost."

"Are you certain? There's no mistake?"

"Who can be certain, one hundred percent? Give it a good ninety, though."

"Are you sure of the Black Belts?"

''Another good ninety.''

"Are you sure of the first names?"

"One hundred percent. We checked with the birth certificates. And Griswold, I need it fast. I need it now. Come on, look at the list."

I looked, "It's certainly nothing obvious."

"Would I need you if it were obvious?"

"Do you know anything about these individuals aside from their names? Do you know their schooling?"

"They all went to school—officially. How much they actually attended—what they listened to—I suppose they can read after a fashion. They're streetwise, though, and they're no dummies."

"Hasn't one of them had a real education? Finished high school at least. Gone to college maybe. Don't tell me which one. Just tell me if one of them has. Or if one of them is a reader and is known to go to the library— anything like that."

The lieutenant looked astonished. "Well, as a matter of fact, one of them fits that. He went to one of the city colleges for two years before dropping out. I didn't take that seriously. These days they're experimenting with taking in anyone, you know, whatever the marks. Do you want me to check his transcript?"

"Maybe that won't be necessary. Just one, you say?"

"Just one."

"Would it be that one?" and I pointed to one of the names on the list.

The lieutenant's mouth fell open, and he said, "Yes. How the hell could you know just from the name?"

I explained and said, "Grab him!"

The lieutenant did and what followed may not have been strictly and entirely legal—it was just before the Supreme Court got into the act—but he had his big bust. And you have to admit that, in a way, that's a ghost story.

Griswold yawned, sipped at his drink and closed his eyes, but Baranov, who had copied down the list of names when Griswold had given them, said, "Damn it, Griswold, there's nothing in this list that refers to a ghost, or half a ghost, or an education, and you can't tell us there is."

Griswold sneered. "A ghost is a specter, isn't it? An immaterial apparition, or appearance. Well, when Isaac Newton first passed sunlight through a prism he got a rainbow of colors, an immaterial apparition. So he called it a spectrum, and we still call it a spectrum today. People who take physics in college, or even in high school, would know that. And if he had a sense of humor, as the lieutenant didn't, he would think of the spectrum as a ghost.

"The spectrum is made up of a rainbow of colors, as I said, and these colors are in a certain order. In order to memorize the order of colors, students are frequently given a sentence such as: Read Out Your Good Book In Verse. The initials stand for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, though Indigo is not usually considered a separate color. It's just a deep blue, really, and is generally omitted. The initial letters representing the order of colors in the spectrum or 'ghost' are ROYGBV, if you leave out indigo, and the letters in the first half of the ghost are ROY.

"If, then, Roy is the only one with any schooling to speak of, and if ROY represents Half a Ghost, after a fashion, what else do you need?"

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