Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (12 page)

The Ukrainian dismissed the questions with an airy wave of his hand. “You leave such details to me. I have done it before, so I know what I’m doing. So far as Fyodor is concerned, it is definitely you who has committed the murder. So far as the police are concerned, nothing ties the crime to you. All you have to do is to get yourself a watertight alibi for tomorrow evening.”

“Tomorrow evening?” Kenny was rather shocked by the short notice.

With a shrug, Vasili said, “Once you have decided to do something, there is no point in putting off doing it.”

“I suppose you’re right. . . .”

“Of course I am right.”

“But I’m still not clear about how you select the victim.”

“That, as I say, is not your problem. Usually, I kill one of my client’s enemies. That way, not only does Fyodor recognise there is a motive for the murder, the client also gets rid of someone who’s bugging them. It is a very efficient system—no?”

“But if your client doesn’t have any enemies . . .”

“Everyone has enemies,” said Vasili firmly. Kenny was about to say that he really didn’t think he did, but thought better of it. “So, Anatoli, have we got a deal?”

“Yes, we’ve got a deal.”

Having checked with Vasili the proposed timescale for the murder and handed over the agreed fee the next morning, Kenny set about arranging his alibi. It couldn’t involve any of the Simferopol Boys, because Fyodor wasn’t meant to know that he had an alibi. So, to keep himself safe from police suspicions, Anatoli Semyonov would have to, for one evening only, return to his old persona of Kenny Mountford.

He decided that a visit to a fringe theatre was the answer. A quick check through Time Out led to a call to an actor friend, who sounded slightly surprised to hear from him, but who agreed to join him in darkest Kilburn for an experimental play about glue-sniffing, whose cast included an actress they both knew. “You’re not going with Lesley-Jane?” asked the friend.

“No.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, Kenny, nothing.”

Normally he would have asked for an explanation of his friend’s remark, but Kenny was preoccupied with his plans for the evening. Even if the audience was small, as audiences for fringe theatre frequently are, he would still have people to vouch for where he was at the moment Vasili committed his murder for him. Kenny Mountford felt a glow of satisfaction at the efficiency of the arrangements he had made.

The serenity of his mood was shattered in the afternoon by a call from Fyodor. “Anatoli, I want you to keep an eye on Vasili. I’m not sure he’s playing straight with me.”

“How do you mean?” asked Kenny nervously.

“I’ve heard rumours he’s doing work on the side, not just jobs I give him for the Simferopol Boys.”

“What kind of work?”

“Contract killing. If you can bring me any proof that’s what he’s been doing, Anatoli, I will see to it that he is eliminated. And you will be richly rewarded.”

“Oh,” said Kenny.

He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get through to Vasili’s mobile, but it was permanently switched off. By the time he met his friend at the fringe theatre in Kilburn, Kenny Mountford was in an extremely twitchy state. There was no pretending that his situation wasn’t serious. If Fyodor found out that he had actually paid Vasili to do his qualifying murder for him, Kenny didn’t think it’d be long before there was a contract out on his own life. But he couldn’t let anyone at the theatre see how anxious he was, so all his acting skills were called for as he sat through the interminably tedious and badly acted play about glue-sniffing and then, over drinks in the bar, told the actress who’d been in it how marvellous, absolutely marvellous her performance had been.

His friend had his car with him and offered to drop Kenny off. As they were driving along they heard the Radio 4 Midnight News. The distinguished theatre director Charlie Fenton had been shot dead in Notting Hill at ten o’clock that evening.

“Good God,” said his friend. “If you hadn’t actually been with me, I’d have had you down as Number One Suspect for that murder, Kenny.”

“Why?”

But his friend wouldn’t say more.

Had Kenny Mountford not completely cut himself off from the English press and media, he would have known about the affair between Charlie Fenton and Lesley-Jane Walden. Their photos had been plastered all over the tabloids for weeks. He might also have pieced together that the director had never had any interest in him, only in Lesley-Jane—hence the request when they first met for their mutual land line rather than Kenny’s mobile number. How convenient for Charlie had been the actor’s willingness to go undercover and leave the field wide open to his rival.

Vasili, however, read his tabloids and knew all about the affair. He recognised Charlie Fenton as the perfect victim. The guy had gone off with Kenny’s girlfriend! Fyodor wouldn’t need any convincing that that was a proper motive for murder.

So Vasili had laid in wait outside the Notting Hill house, confident that sooner or later Charlie Fenton would appear. As indeed he did, on the dot of ten o’clock. A car drew up some hundred yards away from Kenny Mountford’s house and the very recognisable figure of the director emerged, blowing a kiss to someone inside. Vasili drew out his favoured weapon, the PSS Silent Pistol which had been developed for the KGB, and when his quarry was close enough, discharged two bullets into Charlie Fenton’s head.

Job done. Coolly replacing the pistol in his pocket, Vasili had walked away, confident that there was nothing to tie him to this crime, as there had been nothing to tie him to any of his previous fifty-odd hits. Confident also that Fyodor would assume that the job had been done by Kenny Mountford.

What he hadn’t taken into account was Charlie Fenton’s tomcat nature. No sooner had the director bedded one woman than he was on the lookout for another, and his honeymoon of monogamy with Lesley-Jane Walden had been short. She, suspecting something was going on, had been watching at the window of the house that evening for her philandering lover to return. As soon as Charlie Fenton got out of the car she had started to video him on her camera, and thus recorded his death. The footage, when handed over to the police, also revealed very clear images of Vasili, from which he was quickly identified and as quickly arrested.

Lesley-Jane Walden was in seventh heaven. To be at the centre of a murder case—there were actresses who would kill to achieve that kind of publicity. In the event, though, it didn’t do her much good. The police made no mention of the help she had given to their investigation in any of their press conferences. They didn’t even mention her name. And all the obituaries of Charlie Fenton spoke only of “his towering theatrical originality” and his reputation as “a loving family man.” Lesley-Jane Walden was furious.

Her mood wasn’t improved when Kenny ordered her to get out of the house. She moved into a girlfriend’s flat and started badgering her agent to get her on I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here!

“You are a clever boy, Anatoli Semyonov,” said Fyodor, when they next met. “To get rid of your girlfriend’s lover and arrange things so that Vasili is arrested for the murder—this is excellent work. I have wanted Vasili out of the way for a long time. You are not just a clever boy, Anatoli, you are also a clever Simferopol Boy.”

“You mean I have qualified to join the gang?”

“Of course you have qualified. Now you will always be welcome here. You are one of the Simferopol Boys.”

So Kenny Mountford too thought: job done. Except, of course, having done that job was not going to lead on to the other job. Kenny had done what he promised—infiltrated a London gang—but the man to whom he had made that promise was no longer around. There would never be a Charlie Fenton production about London gangs. All Kenny Mountford’s efforts had been in vain.

And yet the realisation did not upset him. No one could say he hadn’t tried everything he could to achieve respectability as an actor, and now it was time to move on. Time to get back to being Kenny Mountford. All that Method, in-depth research approach to characterisation might be all right for some people in the business. But for him, he reckoned he preferred something called “acting.”

When he finally spoke to his agent, she revealed that she’d been going nearly apoplectic trying to contact him over the previous weeks. The BBC was doing a new sitcom and they wanted him to play the lead! He said he’d do it.

But Kenny Mountford didn’t lose touch with Fyodor and the Simferopol Boys. As an actor, it’s always good to have more than one string to your bow.

Copyright © 2011 by Simon Brett

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Fiction

The Teapot Mountie Ball

by James Powell

Art by Allen Davis

In 2010, Canadian-born James Powell received a nomination for the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story for his February 2009
EQMM
tale “Clown-town Pajamas.” He’s a previous winner and multiple nominee for that award. Mr. Powell has lived in the U.S. for many years, mostly in Pennsylvania. He has several series running in
EQMM,
but it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen an entry in that starring Maynard Bullock of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

On a warm October night three buses with curtained side windows drove up Canada’s Gatineau Valley Highway from the direction of Ottawa. Passing an abandoned quarry, they doused their headlights and turned off onto a narrow macadam road. Behind them, dark figures came out of the trees carrying a large metal sign marked “Road Closed.” They were followed by a loaded gravel truck which parked behind the sign to reinforce its message.

More figures with flashlights stood along the roadside to guide the buses until they reached the dark shape of the Quarryview Dance Pavilion, where their passengers stepped down. Then the pavilion doors swung open, casting a quadrangle of light that revealed sixty men and women, not one of them over five foot six inches tall, in red tunics and Stetsons formed in ranks of six abreast. From inside the building a dance band with muted horns struck up “Little Things Mean a Lot” and the new arrivals marched smartly inside. The Tenth Annual Teapot Mountie Ball had begun.

After the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s successful infiltration of organized crime during the 1980s, the mob became so gun-shy that an undercover Mountie needed more than a loud tie, an applied scar, or a fake cauliflower ear to get taken on. In fact, they gave a quick bum’s rush to any mobster wannabe who met Mountie height and weight requirements or had the hint of a steely gaze.

So the Force recruited a secret cadre of short, stout men and women for undercover work. The Mountie Academy taught them shiftiness of eye, slouching, language no Mountie would ever use, wisecracking, how to cheat at cards and, for the ladies, the seductive walk and come-hither look. The Force nicknamed these short, stout newcomers “teapots,” Mounties in every sense of the word except that they were not allowed to wear the uniform in public or enter headquarters by the front door.

Thanks to teapot infiltration, mobsters were soon crowding the halls of justice again or had fled the country. (The United States scratched its head over this sudden return of people they’d gotten rid of for years with a stiff boot in the pants, a bus ticket for Toronto or Montreal, and a stern warning not to come back.)

Searching for a way to honor these short, stout, unsung heroes, Mountie Commissioner Ralston came up with the Teapot Mountie Ball. On this occasion, Ralston decreed, the teapots would come in full dress uniform, while the Mountie brass and other members of the Force would attend in civvies.

Acting Sergeant Maynard Bullock was pop officer for the ball again that year, in charge of the soft-drink stand. He’d come on the buses’ earlier trip with the Mountie musicians and others in attendance.

Bullock never cared much for wearing civvies or what he called his mufti duds while on duty. For him, the uniform was a real morale booster and the dress uniform all the more so. One day awhile back he’d gotten himself real down in the dumps thinking he might have made a bad career move when he left field work to go into the public relations end of Mountieing, posing for tourist photographs among the flowerbeds on Parliament Hill and doing TV public-service spots with the popular Mountie mascot Winnie the Peg, the small black bear who wore a wooden replacement for a leg lost in a trap. So when good old Mavis, his wife, reminded him they’d been invited to a party that night he decided to buck himself up by going in full Mountie regalia, boots, breeks, scarlet tunic, and all. It wasn’t until their host greeted them at the door dressed as Chuckles the Clown that they remembered it was a costume party. So Bullock spent the night trying to convince the other guests in fancy dress he really was a Mountie. No one believed him, not even the guy in what looked like a Swiss cheese kilt who claimed to be Sponge Bob Squarepants’s Manhattan cousin, Harold Squarepants. The man eyed him up and down sceptically before walking away humming “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Good old Mavis hadn’t helped any by telling everyone she’d come dressed as a Mountie’s wife.

Anyway, Commissioner Ralston said mufti duds and mufti duds it was. But when the latest issue of
The Scarlet Trumpet
, the Mountie newsletter, announced that Sweden had awarded Ralston the Star of Saint Olaf, Second Class, for his work against international crime, Bullock bet himself Ralston would put on the dog and show up at the ball with the decoration around his neck. To the man’s credit, he arrived in an unadorned tuxedo so as not to distract from the teapot Mounties’ moment of glory.

Of course, Bullock’s sidekick Winnie the Peg was there in full dress uniform. He was a teapot favorite. The men liked to throw an arm over his shoulder and mock punch him in the stomach. The women loved teaching Winnie the latest dance steps.

Ball security was always tight. The underworld must not learn the identities of these secret Mounties. Tonight it was tighter still. Last year, an attaché at the Norwegian Embassy had tried to crash the event disguised as the piano tuner. But an alert constable spotted the cleated horseshoe on the man’s cuff links, the insignia of the Royal Norwegian Mounted Police. This cavalry unit, famous in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’s day for using cleated horseshoes to smite the sledded Polacks on the ice, had morphed into the Consolidated Scandinavian Intelligence Service known popularly as the Scandihoofs.

(Along with infiltrating the mob, the teapot Mounties worked to frustrate Canadian crime at every level, even loitering on street corners in plainclothes to arrest drug pushers, street hoodlums, and scofflaw jaywalkers. Word had it that gloom descended over the Scandinavian countries when they heard rumors Canada was about to pass them in the United Nations’ annual listing of nations with the highest quality of life. Baffled—they considered Canadians a frivolous southern people much like the Italians—they had ordered the Scandihoofs to investigate.)

When those less-than-standard-size Mounties swept into the dance hall ramrod proud in the uniforms they so seldom got to wear, everyone stood and applauded. Bullock got a lump in his throat. Yes, he’d been sceptical. But, by Godfrey, the teapots had proved themselves an invaluable arm of the Force.

The uniformed arrivals were followed by their spouses and well-vetted dates. Now Commissioner Ralston stepped forward to invite the wife of Corporal Tinker, the ranking male teapot, to take his arm for the opening dance while Tinker bowed and led the commissioner’s wife onto the floor. The band struck up the first foxtrot of the night.

The young Mountie working behind the counter with Bullock was Constable Preston Armstrong, an advanced weapons expert and recent transfer from Regina. Earnest in manner, he’d proved a tireless listener to Bullock’s locker-room stories of his early adventures with the Force.

Becoming a Mountie had been Armstrong’s boyhood dream. But somehow along the way he’d fallen under the spell of the Force’s predecessor, the North West Mounted Police. So Bullock felt obliged to take him in hand and tell him about the Retros. This small backward-looking Mountie faction had been long before Armstrong’s time. They despised the Stetson as a cowboy thing and yearned for the NWMP’s scarlet and gold pillbox hat and the rugged days of yore when one Mountie on horseback could stare down whole tribes of Indians, crews of drunken miners come to town to raise hell, or rival lumberjack gangs out for blood. The Retros scorned everything modern from the automobile to the Internet. Their bellyaching grew louder when women were admitted to the Force. A few years later, along came Constable Arthur McAdoo, who transformed these malcontents into the Retro Lodge, a disciplined fraternal organization with a secret handshake and initiation rites.

When the first women took part in the Musical Ride, McAdoo and the Retros were outraged. Perhaps they wouldn’t have minded as much if the women had ridden sidesaddle, but they rode astride. The Retros protested by detonating a bomb hidden in the buffalo head on the wall behind the commissioner’s desk. When the fur stopped flying, the commissioner, who only moments before had gone down the hall to the canteen for tea and a butter tart, ordered an internal investigation, including a Force-wide foot inspection. (Many Retros emulated NWMP Constable “Gimpy” Flanagan, who’d sworn never to pull his revolver without drawing blood, an oath that cost him several toes.) After the courts- martial of McAdoo and the ringleaders, most Retros resigned from the Force. But there were still some sympathizers around and they didn’t like the teapots. Recently Bullock found this written above a headquarters urinal: “Constable Pillbox says: You can’t stare the bad guy down if you’re staring up at him.”

Clearly impressed when he heard Bullock was pop officer for the ball, Armstrong had asked if he needed any help. “The more the merrier,” Bullock replied. The young constable had come in his own car. Bullock was happy he’d found the place since he was new to the Ottawa area.

Now the O’Haras, a quartet from the Scarlet Ladies, the female Mountie chorus, came out on stage to sing some lively numbers from the forties and fifties while Winnie jitterbugged with the female teapots. Peg leg or not, Bullock had to admit the bear danced better than he did.

At intermission, there was a great crush at the pop counter. Then, soft drinks in hand, everyone took seats around the bandstand for the halftime entertainment. A table was brought out with ten thick candles on it. Later the commissioner would say a few words and light them to commemorate the Tenth Teapot Mountie Ball.

But first, Constable Riddles, the Force’s standup comic, slick show-business smile and all, came out, “hello-helloing” all the way, to tell from his store of humorous puzzlers like: “What do little Eskimo boys and girls shout when they go from igloo to igloo on Halloween? Answer: ‘Blubber or blubber!’” Most of his jokes went back to 1885 and the second Riel Rebellion. “Why’s a man like a three-pull telescope? Answer: Because a woman picks him up, draws him out, sees through him, and shuts him up.”

When Riddles got to “Why’s a woman like a hinge? Answer: Because she’s something to a door,” Bullock turned the counter over to Armstrong and stepped out through the fire doors for a smoke. He’d heard the man’s material many times over and knew the next one would be: “Why are women like telegraphs? Answer: Because they’re faster than the mails in intelligence.”

The large harvest moon now stood above the trees. Bullock lit his pipe, uncrossed his eyes, leaned back against the pavilion wall, and pondered women being like telegraphs. No, he just didn’t get it. He’d told the joke to good old Mavis and she’d laughed loudly but wouldn’t explain why.

Bats staggered across the night sky. Years before, stones from the nearby quarry were used to build the Rideau Canal, leaving a natural amphitheater in whose crevasses the bats lived.

Now an owl hooted. Bullock thought he smelled the faint odor of skunk. Or was it the animal’s only predator, the great horned owl? He’d read somewhere how many of these stuffed birds in museums still reeked of skunk after a hundred years on display.

Applause from inside signaled the end of Riddles’ routine. In a moment the standup comic came out through the fire doors and strode off purposefully down a path through the trees in the direction of the highway.

From behind the window curtains Bullock now heard the commissioner welcome the teapots, describing them as the stout red line in Canada’s war against crime. Wasn’t this the same speech he’d delivered the year before? When Bullock heard enough to determine it was, he decided to follow Riddles and get him to explain the telegraph joke.

As he walked down the path, Bullock suddenly smiled to himself. “No, I was a liar back there,” he thought. “The great horned owl isn’t the skunk’s only predator. We mustn’t forget Arthur McAdoo.”

Many predicted a great future on the Force for the young, articulate, and personable Constable McAdoo. But as the years went by and he was passed over for promotion he turned bitter and made himself the first and only Grand Skunk Master of the Retro Lodge. The members were said to dine on a favorite dish of the NWMPs, skunk simmered in three changes of water and then roasted over a campfire. One of the Skunk Master’s jobs was to catch the creatures. He was good at it and wore a cape made of their fur.

As it happened, Bullock had been court bailiff for the trial of McAdoo and the Retro ringleaders after the buffalo-head incident, meaning when the guilty verdict was pronounced his job was to take each man’s Stetson and break its brim over his knee. The others didn’t care. Their hearts were with the pillbox. But when Bullock broke McAdoo’s Stetson he saw hatred in the man’s eyes, hatred for him and for the Force. As a boy, bet on it, McAdoo had dreamed of being a Mountie, too. A sad ending to a sad story.