The Oxford Book of American Det (97 page)

At last she managed the words: “Eddie, I do love you.” Fox raised his arms and held them out to her and she ran to him with utter abandon.

Presently he asked. “How long have you been afraid of me?”

“I think since the night Mort Simmons was executed,” she said, and then clinging to him again, “Oh, my dear, my beloved husband.”

He nodded and lifted her fingers to his lips. “How did you conceal it? Fear kills love.

They say like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“I never called it fear,” she said, lifting her chin—and that, she thought, that inward courage was what he mistook for pride—“not until...” She bit her lip against the confession of the final truth.

“Until the murder of one, two, three women,” Fox said evenly, “with whose lives you knew I’d have no sympathy.”

“I didn’t know that exactly,” she said. “I only knew your prejudices.”

“Pride and Prejudice,” he mused. He pushed her gently an arm’s distance from him.

“Take another look at my prejudices, Nancy, and see who suffers most by them.”

“May I come home now, Eddie?”

“Soon, darling. Very soon.” He picked up his hat from where it had fallen in their struggle. “But you must let me tell you when.”

He should have known it, really, Fox thought, closing the apartment door behind him.

He was so alert to it in others, he should have seen the fear grow in her since the night she caught him naked-souled, suffering the death of Mort Simmons. Suppose that night he had tried to explain what had happened to him? How could he have said that it was not Mort Simmons’s guilt he doubted, but his own innocence? How tell her that at the hour of his death, Mort Simmons was in a very special way the victim of Ed Fox?

Fox drove to within a block of Thomas Coyne’s boarding house. He parked the car and walked up the street to where the tail he had put on Coyne was sitting, a newspaper before him, in a nondescript Ford. Fox slipped in beside him.

“Coyne’s in there,” the other detective said. “Been there since he came home from work. Ten minutes ago he went down to the corner for a paper. Came right back.” Fox decided to talk first with Mrs. Tuttle. He approached her by way of the kitchen door, identified himself, and got a cup of warmed-over coffee at the table. A voluble, lusty, good-natured woman, she responded easily to his question—whether she was interested in the Church of the Morning. She shook her head. Fox described ‘Deacon’

Alvin Rugg and his relationship to the murdered women.

Mrs. Tuttle clucked disapproval and admitted she had heard of him, but where she could not remember. To the captain’s direct question as to whether she had ever seen the golden boy, she shook her head again. “I tell you, Mr. Fox, I like my men and my whiskey 100 proof, and my religion in a church with a stone foundation.” Fox laughed. “Anybody in the house here interested in the Revival?”

“What you want to know,” she said, looking at him sidewide, “is if it was Tom Coyne who told me about him. Isn’t that it?”

Fox admitted to the bush he had been beating around. “I’d like to know if Coyne has shown any interest in the sect.”

“I don’t know for sure. He takes sudden fancies, that one does.”

“I understand he has a very deep fancy for you,” Fox said bluntly.

Mrs. Tuttle frowned, the good nature fleeing her face. She took his cup and saucer to the sink and clattered it into the dish basin.

“I’m sorry to be clumsy about a delicate matter,” Fox said, getting up from the table and following to where he could see her face. Shame or wrath he wondered? Perhaps both. “It was very necessary to Coyne that he confide that information to the police,” he elaborated, in subtle quest of further information.

“Was it?” she said. “Then maybe it was necessary for him to come to me in the first place. Can you tell me that, mister?”

“If you tell me when it was he first came to you—in that sense, I mean,” Fox said.

“A couple of nights ago,” she said. “Till then it was just... well, we were pals, that’s all.”

Fox examined his own fingernails. “He didn’t take very long to tell about it, did he?”

“Now answer my question to you,” she said. “Did he come just so he could tell you him and me were—like that?”

Fox ventured to lay his hand on her arm. She pulled away from his touch as though it were fire. Her shame was deep, her affair shallow, he thought. “Just stay in the kitchen,” he said. She would have her answer soon enough.

He moved through the hall and alerted the detective on watch at the front. Then he went upstairs. Thomas Coyne was sitting in his room, the newspaper open on the table before him, a pencil in his hand. He had been caught in the obviously pleasurable act of marking an item in the paper, and he gathered himself up on seeing Fox—like a bather surprised in the nude.

It gave an ironic sequence to the pretence on which Fox had come. “I wanted to see your swim trunks,” Captain Fox said.

Coyne was still gaping. Slowly he uncoiled himself and then pointed to the dresser drawer.

“You get them,” Fox said. “I don’t like to invade your privacy.” He turned partially away, in fact, to suggest that he was unaware of the newspaper over which he had surprised the man. He waited until Coyne reached the dresser, and then moved toward the table, but even there Fox pointed to the picture on the wall beyond it, and remarked that he remembered its like from his school days. A similar print, he said, had hung in the study hall. On and on he talked, and if Coyne was aware of the detective’s quick scrutiny of his marked newspaper, it was less fearful for the man to pretend he had not seen it.

“My wife, Ellen, having left my bed and board, I am no longer responsible...” Fox had seen it. So, likely, had the husbands of Mary Philips and Jane Mullins and Elsie Troy given public notice sometime or other. The decision he needed to reach instantly was whether he had sufficient evidence to indict Tom Coyne: it was so tempting to let him now pursue the pattern once more—up to its dire culmination.

The detective stood, his arms folded, while Coyne brought the swim trunks. “Here you are, Captain,” he said.

“Haven’t worn them much,” Fox said, not touching them.

“It’s early,” Coyne said.

“So it is,” Fox said, “The fifth of June. Baker’s Beach just opened Memorial Day, didn’t it?”

There was no serenity in Coyne now. He realised the trap into which he had betrayed himself while under questioning by Fox and the chief of police. So many things he had made seem right—even an affair with Mrs. Tuttle; and now that one little thing, by Fox’s prompting, was ‘Wrong’. He would not have been allowed in the waters of Baker’s Beach before the thirtieth of May. In order to account for the sand in his room following the murder of Jane Mullins, he had said he had gone swimming at Baker’s Beach two or three weeks before.

Before midnight Coyne confessed to the three homicides, the last two premeditated.

He had not intended to kill Elsie Troy. But he had been watching her behaviour with young Alvin Rugg, and as her husband’s friend he had taken the excuse of fixing her steps to gain her company and reproach her. She had called him “a nasty little man,” and where matters had gone from that, he said, he could not clearly remember... except that he killed her. He was sure because of the wonderful exhilaration it gave him after he had done it—so wonderful it had to be repeated.

The chief had pride in his eyes, commending Captain Fox for so fine a job. They went upstairs together to see the mayor, and there the chief took major credit as his due. He announced, however, that this would be his last case before retirement, and he put his arm about Captain Fox as the reporters were invited in. Fox asked to be excused.

“Damn it, man, you’ve got to do the talking,” the chief protested.

“Yes, sir, if you say so,” Fox said. “But first I want to call my wife.”

“By all means,” the chief said. “Here, use the mayor’s phone.” Nancy answered on the first ring.

“Will you pick me up tonight, my dear, on your way home?” Fox said.

ELLERY QUEEN

Frederic Dannay (Daniel Nathan, 1905-1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (Manfred Lepofsky, 1905-1971) were cousins who together created the highly popular detective Ellery Queen. Both were born in Brooklyn, New York; attended Boys’ High School in the borough; and began their careers in Manhattan. Dannay worked as a writer and an art director for an advertising agency, while Lee wrote publicity for film studios.

When they were twenty-three, the two decided to enter a detective-fiction contest.

They collaborated on what came to be
The Roman Hat Mystery,
using a very sophisticated young man named Ellery Queen as a mystery writer and amateur sleuth.

Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department is also introduced as Ellery’s doting father. Dannay and Lee used the Ellery Queen name for themselves as well, so that it is memorable for referring to both character and co-authors. The story originally won the contest, but the prize went to another author when the magazine that held the contest changed hands. Even so,
The Roman Hat Mystery
was published the following year—and the rest is history.

The two also produced a four-book series in the early 1930’s under the pen name Barnaby Ross, but Ellery Queen was quickly and hugely popular and occupied most of their time. Queen promptly reappeared in
The French Powder Mystery
and
The Dutch
Shoe Mystery,
and in 1931 the two young men quit their jobs to write full time.

By the early 1980’s, other writers—including Avram Davidson, Richard Deming, Paul W. Fairman, Edward D. Hoch, Stephen Marlowe, Talmadge Powell, Theodore Sturgeon, and John Holbrook Vance—using plots created by Dannay, had been pulled into the Ellery Queen persona, turning out books under the supervision of the cousins.

By the time of Dannay’s death, at least 150 million Ellery Queen books had been sold worldwide, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine was maintaining some semblance of a market for short fiction. The two helped found the Mystery Writers of America, and their peers gave them four Edgar awards and the Grand Master award.

The Adventure of Abraham Lincoln’s Clue
illustrates the typical Queen technique. It is solidly in the classical tradition, with the plot revolving around a clever puzzle whose solution requires the sleuth to make brilliant deductions from clues that are displayed to the reader, who is challenged to outwit the detective. The mere hint of romantic interest is also typical of both the form and the times.

The Adventure of Abraham Lincoln’s Clue

The case began on the outskirts of an upstate New York city with the dreadful name of Eulalia, behind the flaking shutters of a fat and curlicued house with architectural dandruff, recalling for all the world some blowsy ex-Bloomer Girl from the Gay Nineties of its origin.

The owner, a formerly wealthy man named DiCampo, possessed a grandeur not shared by his property, although it was no less fallen into ruin. His falcon’s face, more Florentine than Victorian, was—like the house—ravaged by time and the inclemencies of fortune; but haughtily so, and indeed DiCampo wore his scurfy purple velvet house jacket like the prince he was entitled to call himself, but did not. He was proud, and stubborn, and useless; and he had a lovely daughter named Bianca, who taught at a Eulalia grade school and, through marvels of economy, supported them both.

How Lorenzo San Marco Borghese-Ruffo DiCampo came to this decayed estate is no concern of ours. The presence there this day of a man named Harbidger and a man named Tungston, however, is to the point: they had come, Harbidger from Chicago, Tungston from Philadelphia, to buy something each wanted very much, and DiCampo had summoned them in order to sell it. The two visitors were collectors, Harbidger’s passion being Lincoln, Tungsten’s Poe.

The Lincoln collector, an elderly man who looked like a migrant fruit picker, had plucked his fruits well: Harbidger was worth about $40,000,000, every dollar of which was at the beck of his mania for Lincolniana. Tungston, who was almost as rich, had the aging body of a poet and the eyes of a starving panther, armament that had served him well in the wars of Poeana.

“I must say, Mr. DiCampo,” remarked Harbidger, “that your letter surprised me.” He paused to savour the wine his host had poured from an ancient and honourable bottle (DiCampo had filled it with California claret before their arrival). “May I ask what has finally induced you to offer the book and document for sale?”

“To quote Lincoln in another context, Mr. Harbidger,” said DiCampo with a shrug of his wasted shoulders, “ ‘the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.’ In short, a hungry man sells his blood.”

“Only if it’s of the right type,” said old Tungston, unmoved. “You’ve made that book and document less accessible to collectors and historians, DiCampo, than the gold in Fort Knox. Have you got them here? I’d like to examine them.”

“No other hand will ever touch them except by right of ownership,” Lorenzo DiCampo replied bitterly. He had taken a miser’s glee in his lucky finds, vowing never to part with them; now forced by his need to sell them, he was like a suspicion-caked old prospector who, stumbling at last on pay dirt, draws cryptic maps to keep the world from stealing the secret of its location. “As I informed you gentlemen, I represent the book as bearing the signatures of Poe and Lincoln, and the document as being in Lincoln’s hand; I am offering them with the customary proviso that they are returnable if they should prove to be not as represented; and if this does not satisfy you,” and the old prince actually rose, “let us terminate our business here and now.”

“Sit down, sit down, Mr. DiCarripo,” Harbidger said.

“No one is questioning your integrity,” snapped old Tungston. “It’s just that I’m not used to buying sight unseen. If there’s a money-back guarantee, we’ll do it your way.” Lorenzo DiCampo reseated himself stiffly. “Very well, gentlemen. Then I take it you are both prepared to buy?”

“Oh, yes!” said Harbidger. “What is your price?”

“Oh, no,” said DiCampo. “What is your bid?”

The Lincoln collector cleared his throat, which was full of slaver. “If the book and document are as represented, Mr. DiCampo, you might hope to get from a dealer or realize at auction—oh—$50,000. I offer you $55,000.”