Dear Readers,

In the fall of 1941, this magazine made its debut. Could EQMM’s founders have dreamt then that their concept for a publication would prove so on the mark that EQMM would survive seven decades of changes in American culture, education, and reading habits? I tend to think not; editor Ellery Queen was clear in his letter to readers in the first issue that this was an untested venture whose future would depend entirely on how enthusiastic reader response proved.

Word about Queen’s outstanding publication spread fast, even reaching such elite literary circles as that of Dorothy Parker, who became a regular reader and is said to have remarked that EQMM could only be improved by coming out more frequently. I imagine that there was not only pleasure but a little surprise in the editorial offices over how rapidly the new magazine caught on and continued to grow.

Over the years, with changes in society, the fortunes of American fiction magazines have waxed and waned, but EQMM is one of a very few such magazines fortunate enough to have been able to count on the extraordinary loyalty of its longtime subscribers to see it through temporary dips in the short-fiction market.

We’re in the midst now of a publishing revolution; electronic publishing is booming and EQMM is one of the magazines in the forefront of this brave new world, with high rankings for Amazon’s Kindle and the several other electronic readers on the market. Digital publishing is bringing EQMM to a whole new set of readers, whom we welcome with as much pleasure as Ellery Queen must have felt over his first subscribers. But we treasure equally those readers who’ve been with us through our many decades in print.

I’m betting that we still have at least a few readers on our rolls who received that first issue in 1941. This special September/October 70th Anniversary issue is dedicated to you, and to all of our other longtime subscribers. (Write and tell us who you are!)

Multiple Edgar nominee and Shamus Award winner Lia Matera is the author of two series of legal mysteries set in California, where she herself is a member of the bar. (See the Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma mysteries.) But for this short story she ventures far from the contemporary San Francisco of much of her work and gives readers a harrowing glimpse of Washington D.C. during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, when the very prevalence of death could serve to disguise a crime.

Ella awakened facedown on the concrete. She spat out grit that swirled in the night wind, then rolled painfully to her side. The Kingstons’ windows were dark, but the glare of arc lights on their jack frost hurt her eyes. She dropped her gaze to an iron fence that ran like a line of spears from the Corinthian porch to the next rowhouse. She struggled to free her arm from the sheet wrapped around her, but the effort made her lungs boil with coughs. Earlier, she’d come to with her nose mashed and her mouth covered, struggling to breathe through the filthy linen. She remembered twisting and slithering toward the gate, frantic to expose her face. Now, if she could pull herself through and tumble down the steps to the basement-level service entrance, the wagon wouldn’t see her when it passed. It wouldn’t matter then if she blacked out again; there the drivers wouldn’t mistake her stupor for death and toss her onto a pile of corpses stacked like cordwood. Maybe she could hang on till Cook came out for the milk. None of the servants knew that Charles, Cook’s bad-tempered husband, had dragged Ella to the curb like garbage. He’d waited till long past midnight, and if he’d wakened Cook afterward, it would have been to take his vulgar pleasure, not to tell her what he’d done.

Charles had been glad to get rid of Ella tonight, she knew that. When the Kingstons brought home baby Annie, they’d wanted the house kept warmer at night. Charles always slept through extra stokings of the furnace, so Mr. Kingston forced him out of his wife’s warm bed and onto a cot in the basement. To keep him from sneaking back to the attic room and passing out there, Mrs. Kingston sent Ella, till then on a feather mattress in the nursery, to take Charles’s place. “Problem solved.” As if the Kingstons knew anything about problems.

Most nights, Charles would slip upstairs after the two o’clock stoking and lie with his wife as if Ella weren’t in the bed at all, as if Cook didn’t weep with shame into her pillow, knowing Ella merely feigned sleep.

The men in this household were pigs. All but little John, eight years old and a master of silly limericks and botched riddles. Ella hoped he didn’t grow up to be like his father, who’d felt no compunction about accepting an “accommodation” from her in lieu of references.

The fact that this had been a good deal for Ella didn’t make his part of it right. He’d put his children into a stranger’s hands knowing nothing but what she’d told him herself. And she’d have said anything to escape a shirt factory that left women half blind and coughing up cotton dust.

The Kingstons should have let her die inside, no matter their terror (everybody’s terror) of the Spanish flu. At first, they’d put her in a comer of the basement, as far as possible from the potato bin and the new wringer washer. She didn’t know how long she’d lain on old blankets like a stray dog gasping for breath. She’d overheard Charles, his voice full of false concern, tell the Kingstons they’d best set her out for the wagon soon. She’d be dead before it arrived, and why risk having the sickness seep through the house till then? What if he should nod off and miss the moment? They couldn’t put her to the curb in the daytime. It wasn’t that sort of neighborhood — Cabinet members and Senators and a Supreme Court justice lived within a stone’s throw. But if they kept her inside, the stench would waft upstairs all day tomorrow, perhaps to baby Annie’s room, or to six-year-old Muriel’s or little John’s.

Mr. Kingston, a lawyer, had blown hot air around it. He’d said it was a shame there were no caskets for the dead anymore, nor anyplace to put them, with funeral parlors stacked floor to ceiling. “Cook says the mother’s dead and no father, that sort of family, so we’d have to bear the expense ourselves. But there’s just no possibility of a burial now.” Taking her to the hospital had been ruled out. “The Post says they’ve run out of everything — beds most of all. The sick are outside on the ground, both sides of the driveway and down the block. They can’t do a thing for them. Pity the vaccine was useless.” Mrs. Kingston wondered if taking Ella there would at least solve the problem of her disposal. “But how to get her there?” Mr. K. was slightly curt, as usual, with his wife. “It’s no use sending for the Packard, no one at the garage will fetch her. They’re not medics, can’t expect them to risk contagion.” He’d added, “And do we want our hospitals steam-shoveling holes out back, piling in thousands of bodies like they do in Philadelphia? Not that you can blame Philly — forty-six hundred dead there last week alone. But I think our method’s better, let wagons collect them off the streets and take them to rural Virginia.” They’d agreed it was a mark of excellent governance that they could toss an afflicted servant to the gutter like trash and think no more about her. As she walked out, Mrs. Kingston turned to say, “Charles, I’m terrified for the children. Is there someplace you can go for a few days after handling her... her body? I appreciate that you’ve stayed down here, away from all of us, since moving her. I’ll leave some coins for you on the washer, for lodging and food. Please don’t take the chance... don’t say goodbye to Cook. I’ll explain to her tomorrow.” Charles had said yes, missus. “And you have no guess how the disease came into the house? We kept you all inside, none of us has been out for days.” Charles said nothing. The servants knew Mr. K. slipped away once or twice a week, returning just before dawn. He’d been doing it for months. “I’ll have Maid put on gloves and a mask and send the rest of Nanny’s things down the laundry chute. You’ll get them burned before you go?”

Later Ella realized, blearily from her comer, that Charles was feeding something other than coal into the furnace. He was stuffing in her clothes and hats, in case some trace of sickness clung to them. There would be nothing left of her. Her body would melt away in a lye-covered layer of a mass grave. There would be no stone with her name on it, there would be no ceremony. Funerals, like all public gatherings, were forbidden, illegal on order of the mayor. Not that any but the very rich could afford coffins — the few that could be found cost as much as Model Ts.

She noticed a darting movement in the shadow between the arc lights. A rat. It approached in tentative sets of steps. She wanted to scream but couldn’t get enough air into or out of her lungs. She tried to unroll herself from the constricting linen, desperate to free her arms, to ward off this creature that, like her employers, couldn’t even wait till she was dead. The rat turned, its ears angling toward the sound of metal wheels, the clomp of horseshoes on cobbles. Then it dashed back into the shadows.

The death wagon had turned onto her street.

Ella knew, from nights watching through the attic window, that two men in rubber boots would climb from the wagon’s benchlike seat. As their horses stomped and fussed, they’d bend over her. From above, she’d look like a rolled carpet or bundle of bedding. Each would pick up one end, then they’d stagger to the open back of the wagon. With a practiced swing or two, they’d hoist her onto the stack. Men had been doing this since the Middle Ages.

And how was 1918 different from 1318? People were dragged away to prison for speaking against their ruler, thanks to the Sedition Act. Girls were burned alive, not at the stake but in locked shirtwaist factories. Men were tortured and lynched by mobs, not of peasants but of Klansmen. The poor fought wars so the rich could divide the spoils. And again, the streets rattled with wagons full of pestilent corpses.

They had been right, at the Anarchists’ Hall. (It was shuttered now, many of her friends deported.) Mamma had taken Ella almost every night — it was where all the immigrants went, it was their social center. They staged plays and songfests, they collected money for strikers and shingle-weavers with cedar lung, they hosted speakers and held rallies. Ella and the other children had rampaged up the halls, jumped down the stairs, played games in the kitchen, and ignored the endless blather. They didn’t care if someday humans treated each other as equals and shared their wealth. Things seemed just fine at the Hall. She couldn’t imagine why the grownups complained all the time.

That was how people like the Kingstons were. They thought all the world was like their happy piece of it. They didn’t understand the fuss — the strikes, the Free Speech Actions, the opposition to the draft. Things around them were good. Why should anyone protest?

Nicky used to say, it’s not enough to tell people things aren’t fine for others. Until trouble’s brought home to them, they can’t understand it. He was in Mexico now, because he wouldn’t fight men who’d done him no harm in a war no one could explain. Someday soon he’d come looking for her. The Kingstons wouldn’t bother pretending that they’d cared for her till the end. They’d simply refuse entry to a tattered-looking man asking after a dead servant.

Her ear on the cold sidewalk made the wagon jarringly loud, the more so because it was different from common street sounds, from the backfires and rumbles of cars, the clatter of trolleys, the staccato of women’s boots on cobbles or cement.

It stopped near the Roosevelt house. Too close. It would come for her next.

She struggled with her shroud until panic kicked her senses out from under her. When she drifted back to consciousness, she couldn’t remember why she was outdoors at night. Mrs. K. was very strict about the servants coming in before dark, she wouldn’t like it. Then Ella heard exclamations, swearing, someone’s low murmur: “Ten for the both of you.”

The sound of horses, their puffing breaths as they stood idle, brought her situation back into focus. Did it cost so much, ten dollars, to have a body hauled away like rubbish?

“And not a word about it,” the voice continued.

“We’d shut our mouths, all right,” a wagon man said, “for ten each.”

After that, for a while Ella listened to the horses shift arrhythmically on shod hooves. Could they smell the dead bodies behind them? Could they smell the disease?

Time passed, maybe only minutes but they seemed like hours. The wind whistled up her nightdress but it didn’t make her cold, she was insulated in her fever. She looked through bars (how had they come to be in her sight?) as the wagon men walked past with a bundle in a sheet. It gave a jerk, like a cocoon suddenly straining to deliver a terrible moth. Were Ella’s eyes playing tricks on her? Was she seeing herself from outside her body? She watched as the shrouded body was slung onto the cart.

Next time she became aware, there was no more champing of horses, only the shuffle of dry leaves over a dusting of snow. She hadn’t noticed snow falling, or that the sky had grown pale enough for the streetlamps to go off. She saw she’d gotten free of her sheet but didn’t recall how or when. She was on the other side of the gate to the service entrance, but she hadn’t made it down the stairs. She was lying on them, the comers cutting into her chest and torso, scraping her calves where her nightdress ended. Her hands had lost all feeling, one clinging to the dirty metal of the fence, the other hooked through the bars. And she was shivering with cold now.

A voice cried, “Oh! Oh, my dear— How did you ever? Oh, my sweet Lord.”

“Cook?” Ella whispered. What was her name? Ella wished she remembered. But the Kingstons called the female help Cook, Nanny, and Maid, as if there were no more to them.

“Come, Nanny,” Cook said. “I don’t know how you lived the night out here, and look, with snow falling, too. But try to stand up, dear, and we’ll get you inside. Cut this gown off you and put you into the bath. However could they have—? The missus said you were dead. Came just now, at this hour, to tell me. I’ve had a good cry already. But let me just tie a kerchief over my mouth and nose. Get you in here before the milkman sees you, starts in all in Russian like he does. However could you survive a freezing night like this? I suppose it cut your fever — saved your life, it may be. But oh my savior and Lord, are those bites on your arm? Rat bites? Oh help us, Joseph and Mary. Come now, we’ll get you cleaned up and into bed. We’ll put you on Charles’s cot. The missus sent him away, she said. Forbid him to tell me himself, in case he picked up the sickness when he carried you down from the attic.” She made a teary gulping sound. “Heaven knows what she’ll say now you’re back. Or who’ll stoke the furnace while my Charles is gone. Maid, poor girl, already has her back half broke from washing everything in the house, every bit of the children’s clothes and bedding yesterday, in case you touched anything. And scrubbing every surface you might have breathed upon. No help from me — missus wouldn’t let me near anything till she made sure I wasn’t coughing. But here I’m complaining when you’ve been outside in this weather all night long.” Ella saw the white cloth over Cook’s nose and mouth soaking with tears where it touched her florid cheeks.

“Someone... gave wagon men money.” Ella choked it out, her lungs tight and burning. “Twenty dollars. Take away a man. I think... alive.”

“Bad dreams, dear. You should have heard yourself yesterday. Charles says you went on about anarchists. Said if he didn’t know better, he’d suppose you were out to bomb the Palmers or the Roosevelts.” Cook’s voice was full of pity.

Ella didn’t remember going inside, but she woke up on Charles’s cot near the coal bin. Later still, again with no consciousness of having moved, she found herself in a tub of tepid water in the servants’ bathroom. Maid knelt over her with a bar of soap. Like Cook, she’d wishfully relied on a kerchief over her nose and mouth to protect herself. The poor woman looked younger with her disappointed down-turned lips hidden.

“Maid,” Ella said. “Good... to me.” Her relief at having the filth from the street, from her sick body, washed away was immense. She choked back tears of gratitude because they burned her eyes worse than the coarse soap.

Cook came in, waddling as usual, as if a stick held her knees apart. She helped Maid wash Ella’s hair. “Just look at those bites,” Cook said, “and no doctors to help us. To think Mrs. Kingston came to me and said Nanny had passed. Like you might say, ‘It’s snowing.’ With the nerve, on top of it, to complain it’s too cold in the schoolroom. I looked right at her: ‘Well, of course it’s cold, you sent my Charles away.’ And she says, all accusing, ‘Didn’t I tell you to wear a mask? I won’t have you cooking for the children without one. I can’t have them exposed, that’s why I sent Charles away, and Mr. Kingston, too. If they’re well, they’ll be back soon enough, and in the meanwhile, I’ll have no drama about it. For the children’s sake, we can do without our husbands for now.’ Always the children, though you can’t blame a mother for that. And we all love them. But then, we’re all somebody’s children, aren’t we? So I said to her, ‘Well, it may be just drama to you, to send a husband away.’ Not as if mister and missus share a room, is it? He barely even pretends to care for her, now he’s got that fancy piece at the Decatur. But I’m newly wed. And I told her, ‘You can feel how cold it is, without my Charles. Call it drama if you will, but he’s of use to us.’ I didn’t say, ‘Not like Mr. K., who does nothing for nobody.’ The Roosevelts’ maid says Mr. K.’s practice is a sham, do you know? That he keeps the office because a man can’t be seen to live on his wife’s money these days, not if he means to get ahead in politics.”

“Oh, Cook.” Maid’s eyes were wide. “What did the missus say?”

“What could she say? It’s true — whatever does Mr. K. do for us here?”

“He doesn’t really have a woman at the Decatur?”

“He does. I know it because of Mr. Roosevelt, whose little Jimmy and Elliot play with our John. It was one of the nannies who told me. Mrs. R. nearly left him, she said. It’s why she took the children away last month. Found love letters to her husband... from her very own secretary, who lives at the Decatur. Which is how I know about Mr. K.’s fancy girl, because Mr. Roosevelt sent roses there when he was in Europe inspecting the fleet. Never mind that he’s Assistant Secretary, everyone knows he runs Navy himself, and we’ll win the war because of him, I don’t doubt. But the boy at the flower shop, when he took the bouquet, he saw Mr. K. there, with his woman.”

“See if the apartment house doesn’t get a bad reputation,” Maid said.

“Serves it right. Poor Mrs. R. — they say she’s very kind to the help. And poor Mrs. K., too, if she knew. Mr. K. never could go long without— Well, just say he has an appetite for the young ones. No mystery who broke the quarantine.” Cook scowled at Ella, who was shaking in the cooling tub, suddenly self-conscious about being naked under the older women’s gaze. Did Cook know what she’d done? But to her relief, Cook’s expression softened. “Whatever else I could say about Mr. K., though, I never thought he’d be one to put poor Nanny outside like that. How I’ll ever look at him again without spitting on the floor, I don’t know.”

Ella detested Charles and burned to expose him, to say it was he who’d persuaded the Kingstons to put her on the street, he who’d dragged her up the stairs and rolled her toward the curb like a sack of moldy potatoes. But she couldn’t find it in herself to upset Cook. And she certainly felt no urge to defend Mr. K.

“You should have seen the missus’s face just now,” Cook continued, pausing malevolently, “when I told her I’d brought Nanny back in. She took it very bad, and I stood there not even pretending to be sorry. No, I smiled. I did. I said, ‘Praise God Nanny survived, and no thanks to any in this house.’ ”

“Cook!” Maid sounded shocked, but even with her mouth hidden under her apron, it was clear she was grinning.

“Not as if she can fire me,” Cook said. “Find a good cook today, with everybody dropping like flies.”

While the women finished helping Ella, they listed all the dead from the neighborhood. Ella watched Cook, her bushy brows beetling over small eyes, her nose making a too-wide bump in the kerchief tied over her face. Charles called her a hag, a sow, said he’d married her only because at her age and with her prospects, she’d do things he had to pay extra for if he went whoring. And poor Maid, a skinny woman of thirty, her back hunched from bending over laundry, had, as usual, failed to achieve an old-fashioned Gibson Girl, her rolled stocking showing beneath lank hair. But to Ella at that moment, both women seemed luminously beautiful.

“Maid, go up to my room and fetch one of my gowns.” Cook’s eyes filled with tears when she added, “God forgive us, Nanny, but they had Charles bum yours. The missus worried they’d have some sickness in them. But we’ll share clothes with you, won’t we, Maid? You’re such a tiny thing, but maybe with belts and darts? You said you were a seamstress once?”

“Shirt factory,” she managed. Since she was thirteen. Her lungs had only begun to feel completely clear of cotton dust after two years here. At first, the children often left her winded and wheezing, and it had been a challenge not to show it.

“Nasty places. Well, you weren’t there for long, at your age.” When Maid left the bathroom, Cook added, “Don’t tell me you didn’t lie to get this job. Twenty-five! Why, I doubt you’re twenty yet, as womanly as you are.”

Cook flushed scarlet then, perhaps remembering nights Charles had come upstairs to her bed while Ella was in it. Ella had a sudden wish to take little John, a boy with a streak of harmless mischief and a grin to melt her heart, away from this house full of men who were no better than beasts.

The next thing Ella was aware of, she was again on Charles’s cot near the coal bin. Nearby, Maid was sobbing. Ella struggled onto her side, her limbs twisted up in Cook’s huge gown.

“Maid?” Ella coughed, the exertion draining her so she dropped her head back onto her pillow. But the coughs were no longer like hot knives between the ribs, they were barely worse than when she’d worked at the factory.

Maid was in a wing chair that had a loose arm, making it unsuitable for upstairs. The cracked glass shade of a table lamp cast a homey glow that kept the woodpile and coal bin (and Ella) in shadow. It was nighttime now, it seemed.

“Maid, what’s wrong?”

“It’s baby Annie,” Maid said. “Cook’s taking her out.”

“Out where?”

“To the street. For the wagon.” She continued to weep. “The missus has gone half mad. Didn’t want us to do it. She said to call for the ice man, ice to keep the baby from— Oh, I can’t think of it, it’s too horrible. And not a funeral home in a hundred miles that will answer its telephone. We couldn’t convince her till she saw Muriel... The little dear’s too young to understand, she kept sneaking in to the baby to hold her. When Mrs. K. saw that... Oh, Nanny, you can’t imagine.”

Ella could hardly force herself to breathe. “Mr. K.? Knows?”

“His club says he’s not there. Never arrived at all. I suppose Cook’s right, and he’s with that woman. But how to tell Mrs. K.? We said we left a message at the club, and we did. If only we knew where to find Charles, we’d send him to the Decatur. But it wouldn’t be decent, Cook says, for one of us to go. Too much talk. If the mister didn’t fire us for it, the missus would.”

Ella watched her weep. She felt as if the news were doing to her heart what the flu had done to her lungs. Baby Annie, with her sweet little fingers and toes, her pretty new curls, the way she repeated buh-buh and puh-puh for ten minutes at a time, as serious as a professor delivering a lecture.

“Cook’s gone mad with it, too, Nanny. Imagine if you had to wrap up that darling little child and put her — She and the missus both, gone mad. Why look, Nanny, what Cook gave me.” Maid dug into the pocket of her apron, then held something between her fingers. “A ten-dollar coin! Says Charles had a pocketful in his pants, left by the washer when he changed clothes to leave. If it’s what Mrs. K. gave him to get lodging, then how’s he paying for it now? I asked Cook, but she got angry, saying, is it so hard to think her husband left it for her? And I said, ‘But he wouldn’t want you giving his money away.’ And she said, ‘You’d do the same for me if you had two people’s wages to live on, and I had one. And better if there’s less for Charles when he gets back.’ Meaning he’d take it and get into trouble. They’re not supposed to serve liquor down at Murder Bay, now the District passed that law, but he always finds some, doesn’t he, if he has the extra coin?”

“If he has more... he’ll be out...” She didn’t have to say whoring.

“Oh no, he swore off it, Nanny. I heard him myself. Him and Cook one night in the kitchen, didn’t see me at the door. She had her knife right through his vest and shirt, clear to his skin. He pushed her back and pulled up his clothes to show the mark she left. Said if ever he had the means to buy it ten times a month, he’d leave her. But as long as he didn’t, she was a fool to worry. While he could get it for free, she’d be right to kill him for wasting the money.”

“Do you think... could he have stolen from Mrs. K.?” They all knew the missus kept a strongbox of coins. She doled them out to Cook and Maid to settle with the chicken man and fish man and the dressmakers, now that they all came here so no one left the house. “When Mrs. K. paid Charles to go find lodging? If he saw where she kept them?”

Neither of them said more, but it was easy to envision Charles changing his clothes in a rush, forgetting the few coins in his pocket because he had a boxful under his arm.

“Muriel and John?” Ella asked, finally.

“Asleep, Nanny, and what a chore today, keeping them away from you. It’s their instinct to come to you in need. Not that Mrs. K. doesn’t dote on them, but with you it’s not so much fuss. And now, well... poor missus is half out of her mind. I put out their color crayons and said to draw pictures of their daddy, to give him when he comes home. But Mrs. K. flew into the schoolroom, screaming at me. It scared the little ones, you can imagine, the state she was in. She said I mustn’t go near them now, after nursing you.” A flash of fear twisted her face.

Ella wanted to take Maid’s hand, squeeze it to show she understood how brave it was to care for her this way.

As if reading her thoughts, Maid said, “The newspaper says it’s moving across the country like a grass fire, and no outrunning it. They say men boarding at Union Station are dead before the train reaches Chicago. Why, you went down as fast as anything, and this morning baby Annie was so pink and bright, just a little colicky how she gets. And now... We’ll none of us survive it, Nanny. I’ll be next, I know it.”

“If you are, I’ll take care of you,” Ella vowed. “Nurse you like you nursed me.”

The next time she awakened, Ella found Maid slumped in the broken wing chair, too ill to make it to her tiny attic room. Ella sat up, her head throbbing and her chest on fire, determined to make good on her promise. But it took a Bong time to help Maid up the dark, narrow servants’ stairs. They had to pause every few steps. Ella had no strength, it felt as if her bones were hollow, as if her marrow had died away from fever. And Maid suffered wave after wave of dizziness and nausea. On the third-floor landing, she spotted another ten-dollar gold piece. She thought it Maid’s, fallen from her apron pocket, but when she went to put it back, she saw it was a second coin. It was baffling, something to puzzle over while she got Maid up to her attic cubby. She put her into bed with the last of her strength. But when she staggered toward the room she shared with Cook, she knew she’d get no rest there. She heard Cook’s wracking cough.

By midday, Cook and Maid were dead. They had bathed Ella and cared for her, and for their trouble, she had given them the influenza. She had killed them.

She went slowly down the narrow staircase to the third floor. She stood facing the door leading to the children’s rooms and Mrs. K.’s suite. She didn’t want to open it. She didn’t want to break the news. And what if she learned that she’d infected Muriel or John? No, she couldn’t go in there, not yet. She sank to the floor, back against the door. She closed her eyes, never imagining she could sleep, not with this grief, this apprehension, inside her. But when she next opened her eyes, it was dark on the landing. Pushing herself up, her hand encountered a divot in the wood, new and frayed with splinters. As she pulled one from her finger, she saw that it was smeared with something rusty brown. Dried blood?

It was silent in the Kingstons’ part of the house. She didn’t hear Muriel’s piercing voice or John’s clamor of bouncing balls and big awkward feet. She didn’t hear them pushing or squabbling as they had every day since the mayor closed the schools. She wanted to hope Mrs. K. had called the garage and sent for the car, that the family had gone to her old uncle in Savannah. But as Ella padded past the empty schoolroom, where she read aloud to the children or made them practice their reading and writing and math, she heard a snuffling, mewling sound. Her body tensed and her gait became arrhythmic, almost spastic, as in a nightmare. As she neared John’s room, she caught the sharp chamber-pot stink of sickness. Muriel, she saw, had crawled into her brother’s bed, wrapping her little arms around his neck. He lay motionless and stiff, his chin covered with Muriel’s matted strawberry curls. The little girl’s body shook as she wept and, much worse, coughed. Pins and needles prickled Ella’s spine, raised the hairs on her neck.

“Muriel?”

The child turned to her, her face streaked with tears that were pink with blood. Ella picked her up, expecting the familiar feel of arms and legs wrapped tight around her, but she was limp as Ella staggered toward Mrs. K.’s room. She stopped at the door. The missus was in her bed. She was as pale as a wax candle, a thick rind of sweat on her brow and hot rashes on her cheeks. The children’s names punctuated her delirious babble.

Ella backed away, pressing Muriel’s face to her chest so she wouldn’t see. She went down the grand staircase to Mr. K.’s room. She put Muriel into his bed and then collapsed to her hands and knees. She crawled to the adjoining room, an office with a desk where Mr. K. hid his liquor and a couch where he’d taken his “accommodation” instead of her references. One of the household’s two telephones was there. She cradled the candlestick, hoping a voice in the earhorn would restore her hope. But the nurse at the hospital said it was no use bringing child or mother. There were hundreds lying outside waiting for beds. Keep them cool, the nurse advised. Give them water or broth.

Ella asked the operator to put her through to the Decatur. After several rings, the operator said, “No answer at the desk. It’s nearly midnight, you know.”

Ella thought of walking there, maybe with Muriel in her arms, and pounding on the lobby door or ringing buzzers until somehow she found Mr. K. But when she sat on the edge of the bed, she saw that it was already too late. She pulled the sheet over Muriel’s pretty little face.

She cried till she went numb from it. She was the only person on Earth who knew the children were dead. The wrongness of that was nearly as overwhelming as the fact. She thought of phoning the old uncle in Savannah, but she remembered the sour old man too well. He would arrive with his own servants, and he would insist Mr. K. turn Ella out immediately since he had no work for a nanny. There would be gossip if he kept a young girl here when he didn’t need her. And what, Ella wondered, would Mr. K. want in exchange for a reference?

She noticed his valise sitting in an undisturbed layer of dust in the corner between the wardrobe and the wall. If he’d gone away with just the clothes on his back, it must mean he kept a closetful at the Decatur. If so, who knew when he’d be back. He was an inattentive father and a bored husband. It might be days till unanswered phone calls elevated his worries over his carnal desires.

“I can’t just leave them,” she said aloud to no one. “I can’t leave them for the blowflies and the mice.”

She crossed to the window and saw that up the block, a sheet-wrapped body waited on the street for the wagon. She pulled a robe from Mr. K.’s tallboy, threading it on as she went downstairs. She sat with her back against the front door till she heard the horseshoes and metal wheels outside, then she stepped onto the porch. It didn’t even feel strange, in the increasing unreality of these days, to be outside wearing only Mr. K.’s robe over Cook’s nightdress. While someone a few doors down was collected off the curb, Ella admired the starry sky through bare branches. It was a fine tree-lined street, a fine view from this entrance, which she’d been allowed to use only if the children were with her. When the wagon approached, she gestured for the drivers to pull over.

“I have more for you,” she said. “I need you to come inside for them.”

“Cost you.” The nearest wagon man leered down at her full chest, accentuated by unconstraining nightclothes. “You’re supposed to put them out on the—”

“I’ll pay.” She thought of the coin in Maid’s apron. “Ten dollars.”

When he said, “Ten each,” Ella knew she hadn’t imagined hearing those words, the other night.

She sat at the bottom of the grand staircase, both hands over her mouth to keep herself from screaming, while the men brought down Maid and Cook, and then (she couldn’t watch) John and little Muriel.

When the men returned for their money, she gave them Maid’s coin and the one she’d found on the landing.

“Plenty of these here, eh?” one of them said. He looked as if he might push past Ella to look around and help himself. He had the face of a prizefighter, with a much-broken nose and deformed ears.

She said, “This is the last of them.”

“You should pay us more,” he said. “More work for us, tonight.”

“But no risk.”

He chuckled. Acknowledging, it seemed, that two nights ago he’d carried out a thrashing body. Did he feel no apprehension that she knew? Never mind the morals of it — why should he care about wealthy strangers? — he showed no worry about the law.

That was how she knew the sheet-wrapped bundle had been Charles. A rich man could have a servant carted away, dead or living. A rich man could give orders, legal or not, and (for money) be obeyed without question or anxiety. That was how the world worked.

Perhaps Mr. Kingston had come upon Charles stealing from Mrs. Kingston’s strongbox. Mr. K. might not fight to protect his wife, but her assets were dear to him.

“I see you’re all right now, eh?” It was the other man speaking, a small furtive-looking person, his posture a perpetual cringe. But his smile, ugly because of missing teeth, was friendly.

“What?” She shook herself out of her distraction.

“Two, three nights ago, I took away your sheet? Nice bit of embroidered edge. From the mending pile, I guess. Too fine for a servant’s bed. I sold it to a half-blind crone makes antimacassars.”

“You didn’t tell me ’bout that,” his partner said.

“Like you never picked a rag and said nothing to me?” He ducked to avoid a slap on the back of the head. “Doesn’t hurt to unwrap the package, grab a ring or cufflink — can’t take it with them, can they?”

“Tell ’em that in Chicago,” said the other. “Collect them in trolleycars, black cloth over the windows. Rows of passenger corpses — pretty sight, eh? A guard in the trolley and no pickings for nobody.”

Ella was glad to shut the door behind them. Soon, it would be daytime, and maybe Mr. K. would return.

She wished she could lie down, curl up, and try to sleep away the acid edge of her grief. But that wagon man was right. The dead couldn’t take it with them. And this might be Ella’s only chance, ever in her life, to get away clear. She knew Mr. K. wouldn’t pay her more than he owed for this month.

Maybe he wouldn’t miss some of his wife’s jewels, not when she had so many.

Ella went upstairs and into Mrs. Kingston’s room, pulling the chain on a small lamp near the door. It cast just enough light to show the missus sunk deep into her feather bed, French sheets braided around her fever-wet limbs, her face mottled like bad meat, her red hair a tangle.

Her eyelids fluttered open and, pausing to cough, she managed to say, “The baby? Did I dream...?”

“Yes,” Ella said. “Yes, missus, you’ve been having terrible nightmares.”

“My little John... Muriel? All right?”

“Yes.” Ella felt her stomach knot. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

She felt a sudden cramp of hatred. She nearly shouted, You put me out onto the street, to die alone and bitten by rats. Why shouldn’t your last hours be hell, as you meant mine to be? Why shouldn’t I tell you your children are dead?

But she couldn’t. She could steal the woman’s things — it wasn’t as if Mrs. K. would ever again have occasion to use them. But the tranquility of her last moments, no.

She walked to Mrs. K.’s dresser, to her row of jewelry boxes. There was a large one of exotic hardwood, an inlaid music box from Germany, and a replica of her tallboy, painted with the same roses and ribbons. They were so full of jewelry it made Ella want to cry. How could one woman have so much? She picked through them, selecting pieces she thought would sell easily and for good money.

Then she opened the bombé dresser — more roses and ribbons — and slipped out of Cook’s old gown. She put on some of Mrs. K.’s silken underthings. They were lovely but the circumstances made her cringe inside them. Stifling another crying jag, she forced herself to the wardrobe, and she pulled on the first shirt and suit her hands encountered. She slipped on a pair of shoes that were too long and narrow, then returned to the dresser to pocket the jewelry she’d laid out.

She glanced at the bed, soft in the first light of day filtering through window sheers. The sick woman barely made a lump under the tangles and rumples of silk and linen and down.

Mrs. Kingston said, very feebly, “Nanny?”

Ella saw that her face had grown darker, almost purple in the thin light. An instinct of pity made her fill the nightstand basin with water from the jug. She dipped in one of a stack of cloths carefully ironed and folded beside it. As she ran it over Mrs. Kingston’s face, she thought of Maid, who’d done all the ironing. Up earlier than this every day to do a mountain of laundry — the children’s, Mr. and Mrs. Kingston’s, the other servants’. Back-breaking work even with the new wringer washer. Hours of stringing the backyard lines with sheets and towels and garments. Then the ironing, the folding. Charles would be up nearly as early to stoke the furnace, lay the fires, fetch and wash the car if an outing was planned. Cook’s list would be done by then, telling Ella what to buy at the market. Then Cook would make and knead the bread dough so it rose while the rest of the house awakened. Ella would return with the food so Cook could start on the first of the day’s four meals. Then Ella would go draw baths for the children, give the baby her bottle, comb out Muriel’s hair, fetch clean clothes for her and John, take them to the nursery table for milk and bread and fruit, and lay out the day’s lessons (if it was a weekend or holiday) while they ate. She never thought she’d want to turn the clock back to those days. She never knew how much the children meant to her. She was comfortable around them, she could almost be herself.

“Too rough... with the cloth,” Mrs. Kingston said. “Bring Maid. Charles... is he gone? I didn’t want him... near the children. Can Maid... or you... stoke furnace? Children may get... cold.”

Ella straightened, dropping the damp rag into the basin. Beside it on the nightstand was a locket with the children’s picture in it. She couldn’t resist it, she slipped it around her neck. For a moment she was lost in memories. Teaching Muriel to ice-skate last year. Laughing at John’s mangling of jokes.

Mrs. Kingston said, “You’re not... not... ill now?” Her voice was barely audible.

“No. It was very cold out on the street. I suppose it broke my fever.” In the face of all the subsequent death — even a murder, it seemed — her knot of resentment had loosened a little. She stepped closer to the bed, close enough to see Mrs. Kingston’s feverish eyes glitter beneath her liverish blue lids. “Don’t worry,” she said to the dying woman. “Everything will be fine.”

Mrs. K. shook her head, gasping with the effort. “Children? Listened for them, but... Can’t hear them. Why haven’t they...? Tell them... stand... there by the door. Please. Not inside where I could... infect. But please... need to see them.” Her tears were pink like Muriel’s had been, tinged with blood.

“I’ll go do that,” Ella said.

“Locket,” Mrs. K. barked out. Struggling against a coughing fit, she freed her hand from beneath the blankets. It shook with the effort of reaching for the gold and enamel oval.

Ella opened it up. She removed the photograph on the right side, of Mr. Kingston perhaps ten years ago looking slimmer and more agreeable. She pushed Mrs. Kingston’s hand down onto the bed to steady it, and she pressed the photo into it. The picture on the left side showed John and Muriel holding baby Annie. It was the reason she’d taken the locket.

Mrs. Kingston’s face spasmed.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Ella said. “You can see I’m taking some of your things. I won’t deny it. It’s because what little I did have, you...” But a voice inside her screamed, No, don’t hector her — let the woman die in peace. “In exchange for this locket, I’ll cry—” She took a steadying breath. I’ll cry for your children long after you can’t.

She backed away. She needed to hurry, she needed to get out of here and into the air, into something that felt like freedom, like her own life gotten back.

Mrs. Kingston was gasping, her hand clenched into a fist around the tiny photo of her husband. She shook her head like a person possessed. Like a crazed animal in a net. “Take... take picture away. He brought it. The disease.”

Ella was shocked she’d managed to say so much. She didn’t look as if she had the strength. She barely looked human anymore, with her bloodstained face and sweat-matted nest of hair.

“No, you mustn’t think that about Mr. K.” she said. Ella hated the vile pompous man. But he might come back in time to say goodbye to his wife. She imagined their last moments. It wasn’t right for them to be spoiled by this suspicion. It wasn’t right because it wasn’t true. “Mr. K. didn’t bring in the flu.”

Mrs. K. was staring in horror at her own fist, still knotted around her husband’s picture. She glared as if it were a street rat coming to bite her.

“It wasn’t him, missus. There’s someone, a man... He’s been in Mexico all the time I’ve been here. I meant no harm but I had to find out if he was all right. You don’t know this, but once or twice a month on my half-day I... I go to Union Station, to the pay telephones. It takes all I earn but I have to... I talk to people who get news of him.”

Mrs. K. would never understand what it meant to Ella to hear herself called by her given name, to be asked how she felt and how she fared, so far from home. But the missus could sympathize with Ella’s anxiety for Nicky, surely? What Mrs. K. felt about the children, everyone felt about someone, didn’t they? Well, even if Mrs. K. didn’t care about that, fair was fair. Mr. K. might come back in time, and Ella couldn’t deprive Mrs. K. of whatever solace he could offer. “And so I went there—”

“Where are... children?”

“I went to Union Station. A few days ago. I sneaked out. Because I read that the flu had reached Mexico, and I was so afraid for him. My Nicky. You’d have fired me for using the telephone here, but I just had to know. I swear I never meant to...” I never meant to bring death home with me. I never meant to kill the children. Ella felt her spine curve with the weight of it. Her hand went to the locket on her chest and lifted it, as if it were the cause.

Mrs. K. said again, “Don’t hear... my children.” She didn’t seem to grasp what Ella was telling her. “Where are... the children?”

Ella looked down at the dying woman, her face smeared pink from bloody tears, her lips nearly black, her eyes sunken and glittering. It was no use. It did no good for Ella to try to unburden herself. She’d never shed this guilt. And Mrs. K. wasn’t well enough to understand.

All Ella could struggle to achieve, with self-forgiveness far out of reach, was a bit of kindness. Maybe she could lessen the pain of a dying mother.

“Mr. Kingston came and took them,” Ella said. It was the only lie she could think of that might ease Mrs. K.’s mind. “When you got sick, Mr. K. came home and took the children. Took them someplace nice. Safe. Mr. K. has them now, that’s why you don’t hear them. So don’t worry, they’re—”

Mrs. Kingston’s cry was piercing. Ella wouldn’t have believed the sick woman could manage such a wail, could force so much air from her dying lungs. The room vibrated with her horror and despair. It ratcheted till she was choking, till she sounded like a woman drowning. And she didn’t stop, she kept screeching in short bursts, gagging and coughing in between, always in a frenzy of shaking her head.

If Ella had believed in the devil, she’d have supposed he’d entered the missus’s body. She backed up and ran to the tallboy, grabbing a coat.

Mrs. Kingston was shrieking, “My children! My children!” in between gargles and wheezes.

Ella wanted to say something, to do something, to restore the woman’s peace as she died. To make her stop screaming.

She said again, “Don’t worry, don’t worry about the children.” Backing out of the room, “Mr. Kingston came and took them. You won’t infect—”

But as she reached the door, she understood. She’d have given anything not to.

She pitched herself into the hallway and ran, though she knew she didn’t need to hurry. She knew now that Mr. Kingston wasn’t coming back.

Someone had told Mrs. Kingston that her husband had a girl at the Decatur. Mrs. K. assumed, as Cook had, that Mr. K. had sneaked out sometime this week to be with her. She thought he’d broken the quarantine she’d imposed to protect her children. She thought he’d risked — and brought back — the influenza, the contagion killing more than even a world war. He had risked all the things, the only things, his wife cared about.

And the dying woman’s screams told Ella what she’d done about it.

“Where are... the children?” Mrs. K. had asked, and she’d replied, “Mr. Kingston came and took them.”

But Mrs. K. knew her husband was dead.

She’d struck what she’d thought was a death blow to him, and then she’d fetched the wagon men, or sent Charles to do it. Ella had thought Mr. K. bribed the men to take Charles. She’d thought so because a rich man could buy any service from poor men. But it was the wealth that mattered, not the gender. The wagon men would show as little worry about taking the missus’s orders as her husband’s, so long as the price was right. Where was the risk in hauling away a body, even one that wasn’t completely dead, for a woman whose neighbors were named Roosevelt and Taft and Harding?

Ella nearly stumbled as she raced down the grand staircase.

She remembered the divot on the third-floor landing. A strongbox full of coins, dropped so its corner hit first, would cut into wood, some coins spilling out. Cook had found a few, Ella another.

Her skin crawled when she realized the reddish stain in the divot must be Mr. Kingston’s blood. Had Mrs. K. struck him with the metal box, thrown it at him? Given it to Charles afterward to buy his silence? Charles would have dashed from her third-floor suite to the servants’ stair. In a hurry to leave with his blood money — enough to buy whores ten nights a month — he must have let the box slip.

Before Ella reached the front door, she caught sight of herself in the entryway mirror. She had never seen herself in an expensive suit before, in a blouse with Belgian lace at the collar. She had never carried a fine wool coat over her arm. But she hated every stitch of it. Every perfect seam and fine designer flourish seemed to cry, “Where are... the children?”

“I sneaked out and brought back the flu,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. She looked like any young Italian girl, curly haired and dark-eyed, not like somebody who’d killed nearly everyone in her household. “The children. Cook and Maid. I brought the plague through the gate, and it killed them.” She’d killed Mr. K., too, in a way. Mrs. K. wouldn’t have lost her reason, wouldn’t have attacked him, if she’d known the truth. If she’d known it was Ella, not he, who’d brought home the infection.

And now, Ella had compounded this terrible thing. She had let the sick woman know her babies were dead. “Where are... the children?” “Mr. Kingston came and took them.”

She heard more wailing upstairs, crazed and tortured. It was the sound of a woman who’d killed someone close to her. It was all Ella could do not to scream, too, and for the same reason.

With shaking hands, she reached up and undid the clasp of the locket that held the children’s picture. She had killed John and Muriel and Annie’s parents. She didn’t deserve to wear their image around her neck.

Ella kissed the locket before leaving it on the table under the mirror.

Since Brendan DuBois debuted in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 1986 with the story “Dark Corridor,” he has gone on to write just over 100 published stories. That’s about four per year, one of them, the EQMM story “The Necessary Brother,” a Shamus Award winner, and another a Barry winner. But the New Hampshire author doesn’t only write short stories. He’s also a well-known novelist whose latest entry in his Lewis Cole series was released in July by Minotaur books. See “Deadly Cove.”

The sniper rested underneath a thick stand of rhododendron on the top of a slight rise, keeping a view on the rows of gravestones below him, stretching out for hundreds of yards in every direction. He had gotten here four hours earlier, to pick a spot that would give him a good target-view of this portion of St. Michael’s Cemetery in Porter, New Hampshire. He was on his belly, resting on a mottled green tarpaulin. It was early September and the ground and air were cool. Fall was coming soon, and all of the leaves and such giving him cover would be thinning.

He shifted his weight. That would be all right. Today was a one-shot deal — hah, he had just made a joke — and he knew he would never come back to this place. To his right was his Remington Model 700P.308 bolt-action rifle, with a mounted Enfield telescopic sight. At his left was a small water bladder, with a hose running out whose end was clipped near his left shoulder. Whenever he got thirsty, he just had to move his head a bit and suck some fluid to keep him alert. There was also a small open green canvas equipment bag for later.

He wore a ghillie suit, a camouflaged suit invented years ago by Scottish gamesmen. It had a base of mesh, and carefully threaded through the mesh were leaves, grass, small branches, and bits of camouflage fabric. The sniper was quite confident that he could only be discovered if somebody decided to trim the rhododendron bush and tripped over him. In training exercises with a variety of police forces in this part of the state, not once had he ever been found while wearing the ghillie suit.

Movement, off to the right. A line of traffic was coming down one of the narrow cemetery lanes, and it slowed and stopped in good view before him. He noted a Porter police cruiser, a state police cruiser, a cruiser from the Wentworth County Sheriff’s Department, followed by two dark-blue Ford LTDs, an unmarked blue van, and, bringing up the rear, a light brown van belonging to the sheriff’s department as well.

He took a deep, calming breath. Relax. Picked up his rifle. Doors flew open and a number of cops and sheriff’s deputies came out from the cruisers, and then, from the large van, fourteen men and women. Some wore suits and fine dresses, others made do with sweatpants and jeans. An older man came out from the rear of one of the Ford LTDs, and two men and two women came out of the other.

He waited.

The van from the sheriff’s department hadn’t moved.

The cops and the civilians moved to one side, walking up to a large tombstone flanked by small pine trees. The group waited.

The doors finally opened at the van. Two sheriff’s deputies came out, and then opened the rear door. They stood in a way that blocked the view of the people by the large tombstone. There was a motion of arms and hands, and then the two deputies started walking, a grinning man striding between them. He had on a dark gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie. The shoes were polished black loafers. His hands and arms and legs were free. He looked happy to be walking out in the fresh air of this fine September day.

The sniper was happy, too. He looked through the telescopic sight and placed the crosshairs upon the man’s forehead.

To be a successful historical mystery writer one must be, above all, a good researcher. British author Marilyn Todd told EQMM that she so enjoyed her research for “Showtime” that it has inspired her to plan a month-long trip through America’s West, visiting San Francisco, Bryce Canyon, and Colorado, then following the Snake and Columbia rivers through Utah, Idaho, and Oregon.

With a crack of the whip, the horses hurtled through the parted curtains into the vast oval arena. In a previous incarnation, when it carried payrolls and mail from El Paso to Fort Yuma, there were at least four horses pulling the stagecoach, usually six. But for thrills and spills, and especially romance, nothing beats two gold palaminos. Emblazoned in gilt lettering above the coach’s scarlet-painted doors were the words BRODIE MCLINTOCK’S WILD WEST EXTRAVAGANZA. Before that, it had read WELLS FARGO. Debonair in fringed buckskins, and every inch the showman with his swirling moustache, goatee beard, and shoulder-length hair, McLintock himself rode shotgun beside the driver.

Edwardian London was gripped.

The crowd whistled and cheered as wheels and hooves kicked up the sawdust, the horses’ manes streaming behind them. Inside the coach, paying handsomely for the privilege, two barristers and their wives, one field marshal, and an earl waved enthusiastically through the unglazed windows.

What they hadn’t bargained for, of course, was being scalped.

With bloodcurdling cries, eight Sioux in full war bonnets galloped into the arena and chased after the coach. The barristers’ wives screamed. So did their husbands. Arrows flew through the air, twanging into the woodwork, as the vehicle tried to outmanoeuvre them. Abandoning arrows in favour of spears adorned with genuine scalps, the war party closed in, snarling under their face paint. McLintock raised his rifle and fired. An Indian fell; he reloaded, took aim. Another attacker dead on the ground! To whoops of encouragement, he dropped a third, a fourth, then a fifth, but the braves came on undeterred. Then McLintock’s rifle unaccountably jammed. A gasp of horror filled the arena. People tilted to the edge of their seats.

Sensing victory, a bare-chested warrior broke into a gallop, aiming to take Brodie himself. As he raised his throwing spear, McLintock whipped his pistol out of its holster. Six down, two to go! But before he could reach his backup rifle, the braves had leapt onto each side of the coach. McLintock sprang out of his seat and hauled one onto the luggage rack, but even as they grappled, the other was wrestling open the door. The Sioux on the roof knocked McLintock’s pistol out of his hand. It landed with a thunk in the dust.

“Pa-ha-ska!”

With a triumphant yell, he grabbed Brodie’s long hair, and, heedless of the screams that filled the arena, was on the verge of taking his scalp when McLintock drew his Bowie knife and struck a fatal blow to his heart. As he rolled away, he realized the last brave had his tomahawk raised and was about to cut down the earl. Grabbing the Sioux’s wrist, he scrabbled for the palm-pistol he kept in his boot. With that shot, the stagecoach was saved.

“Bravo!”

“Hurrah!”

“Encore!”

Since EQMM no longer has a “Fall” issue, the closest we can get to an issue that marks the precise 70th anniversary of the magazine is the one you hold in your hand. And this celebratory Septemher/Octoher EQMM would not be complete without a reprint of an Ellery Queen story. Not only was “Ellery Queen” the official founder and first editor of EQMM, stories by Ellery Queen were among the many reprints included in the magazine during its first years. This tale was written and published before EQMM existed, in The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

“ACH!” said old Uneker. “It iss a terrible t’ing Mr. Quveen — a terrible t’ing, like I vass saying. Vat iss New York coming to? Dey come into my store — polizei, undt bleedings, undt whackings on de headt... Diss iss vunuff my oldest customers, Mr. Quveen. He too hass hadt exberiences... Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Quveen... Mr. Quveen iss dot famous detectiff feller you read aboudt in de papers, Mr. Hazlitt. Inspector Richardt Quveen’s son.”

Ellery Queen laughed, uncoiled his length from old Uneker’s counter, and shook the man’s hand. “Another victim of our crime wave, Mr. Hazlitt? Unky’s been regaling me with a feast of a whopping bloody tale.”

“So you’re Ellery Queen,” said the frail little fellow; he wore a pair of thick-lensed goggles and there was a smell of suburbs about him. “This is luck! Yes, I’ve been robbed.”

Ellery looked incredulously about old Uneker’s bookshop. “Not here?” Uneker was tucked away on a side street in mid Manhattan, squeezed between the British Bootery and Mme. Carolyne’s, and it was just about the last place in the world you would have expected thieves to choose as the scene of a crime.

“Nah,” said Hazlitt. “Might have saved the price of a book if it had. No, it happened last night about ten o’clock. I’d just left my office on Forty-fifth Street — I’d worked late — and I was walking crosstown. Chap stopped me on the street and asked for a light. The street was pretty dark and deserted, and I didn’t like the fellow’s manner, but I saw no harm in lending him a packet of matches. While I was digging it out, though, I noticed he was eyeing the book under my arm. Sort of trying to read the title.”

“What book was it?” asked Ellery eagerly. Books were his private passion.

Hazlitt shrugged. “Nothing remarkable. That best-selling nonfiction thing, Europe in Chaos; I’m in the export line and I like to keep up-to-date on international conditions. Anyway, this chap lit his cigaret, returning the matches, mumbled his thanks, and I began to walk on. Next thing I knew something walloped me on the back of my head and everything went black. I seem to remember falling. When I came to, I was lying in the gutter, my hat and glasses were on the stones, and my head felt like a baked potato. Naturally I thought I’d been robbed; I had a lot of cash about me, and I was wearing a pair of diamond cuff links. But—”

“But, of course,” said Ellery with a grin, “the only thing that was taken was Europe in Chaos. Perfect, Mr. Hazlitt! A fascinating little problem. Can you describe your assailant?”

“He had a heavy moustache and dark-tinted glasses of some kind. That’s all. I—”

“He? He can describe not’ing,” said old Uneker sourly. “He iss like all you Americans — blindt, a dummkopf. But de book, Mr. Quveen — de book! Vhy should any von vant to steal a book like dot?”

“And that isn’t all,” said Hazlitt. “When I got home last night — I live in East Orange, New Jersey — I found my house broken into! And what do you think had been stolen, Mr. Queen?”

Ellery’s lean face beamed. “I’m no crystal-gazer; but if there’s any consistency in crime, I should imagine another book had been stolen.”

“Right! And it was my second copy of Europe in Chaos!”

“Now you do interest me,” said Ellery, in quite a different tone. “How did you come to have two, Mr. Hazlitt?”

“I bought another copy from Uneker two days ago to give to a friend of mine. I’d left it on top of my bookcase. It was gone. Window was open — it had been forced; and there were smudges of hands on the sill. Plain case of housebreaking. And although there’s plenty of valuable stuff in my place — silver and things — nothing else had been taken. I reported it at once to the East Orange police, but they just tramped about the place, gave me funny looks, and finally went away. I suppose they thought I was crazy.”

“Were any other books missing?”

“No, just that one.”

“I really don’t see...” Ellery took off his pince-nez eyeglasses and began to polish the lenses thoughtfully. “Could it have been the same man? Would he have had time to get out to East Orange and burglarize your house before you got there last night?”

“Yes. When I picked myself out of the gutter I reported the assault to a cop, and he took me down to a nearby station house, and they asked me a lot of questions. He would have had plenty of time — I didn’t get home until one o’clock in the morning.”

“I think, Unky,” said Ellery, “that the story you told me begins to have a point. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Hazlitt, I’ll be on my way. Auf wiedersehen!”

Ellery left old Uneker’s little shop and went downtown to Centre Street. He climbed the steps of Police Headquarters, nodded amiably to a desk lieutenant, and made for his father’s office. The inspector was out. Ellery twiddled with an ebony figurine of Bertillon on his father’s desk, mused deeply, then went out and began to hunt for Sergeant Velie, the inspector’s chief-of-operations. He found the mammoth in the press room, bawling curses at a reporter.

“Velie,” said Ellery, “stop playing bad man and get me some information. Two days ago there was an unsuccessful man-hunt on Forty-ninth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The chase ended in a little bookshop owned by a friend of mine named Uneker. Local officer was in on it. Uneker told me the story, but I want less colored details. Get me the precinct report like a good fellow, will you?”

Sergeant Velie waggled his big black jaws, glared at the reporter, and thundered off. Ten minutes later he came back with a sheet of paper, and Ellery read it with absorption.

The facts seemed bald enough. Two days before, at the noon hour, a hatless, coatless man with a bloody face had rushed out of the office building three doors from old Uneker’s bookshop, shouting: “Help! Police!” Patrolman McCallum had run up, and the man yelled that he had been robbed of a valuable postage stamp — “My one-penny black!” he kept shouting. “My one-penny black!” — and that the thief, black-mustached and wearing heavy blue-tinted spectacles, had just escaped. McCallum had noticed a man of this description a few minutes before, acting peculiarly, enter the nearby bookshop. Followed by the screaming stamp dealer, he dashed into old Uneker’s place with drawn revolver. Had a man with black mustaches and blue-tinted spectacles come into the shop within the past few minutes? “Ja — he?” said old Uneker. “Sure, he iss still here.” Where? In the back room looking at some books. McCallum and the bleeding man rushed into Uneker’s back room; it was empty. A door leading to the alley from the back room was open; the man had escaped, apparently having been scared off by the noisy entrance of the policeman and the victim a moment before. McCallum had immediately searched the neighborhood; the thief had vanished.

The officer then took the complainant’s statement. He was, he said, Friederich Ulm, dealer in rare postage stamps. His office was in a tenth-floor room in the building three doors away — the office of his brother Albert, his partner, and himself. He had been exhibiting some valuable items to an invited group of three stamp collectors. Two of them had gone away. Ulm happened to turn his back; and the third, the man with the black mustache and blue-tinted glasses, who had introduced himself as Avery Beninson, had swooped on him swiftly from behind and struck at his head with a short iron bar as Ulm twisted back. The blow had cut open Ulm’s cheekbone and felled him, half-stunned; and then with the utmost coolness the thief had used the same iron bar (which, said the report, from its description was probably a “jimmy”) to pry open the lid of a glass-topped cabinet in which a choice collection of stamps was kept. He had snatched from a leather box in the cabinet an extremely high-priced item — “the Queen Victoria one-penny black” — and had then dashed out, locking the door behind him. It had taken the assaulted dealer several minutes to open the door and follow. McCallum went with Ulm to the office, examined the rifled cabinet, took the names and addresses of the three collectors who had been present that morning — with particular note of “Avery Beninson” — scribbled his report, and departed.

The names of the other two collectors were John Hinchman and J. S. Peters. A detective attached to the precinct had visited each in turn, and had then gone to the address of Beninson. Beninson, who presumably had been the man with black mustaches and blue-tinted spectacles, was ignorant of the entire affair; and his physical appearance did not tally with the description of Ulm’s assailant. He had received no invitation from the Ulm brothers, he said, to attend the private sale. Yes, he had had an employee, a man with black mustaches and tinted glasses, for two weeks — this man had answered Beninson’s advertisement for an assistant to take charge of the collector’s private stamp albums, had proved satisfactory, and had suddenly, without explanation or notice, disappeared after two weeks’ service. He had disappeared, the detective noted, on the morning of the Ulms’ sale.

All attempts to trace this mysterious assistant, who had called himself William Planck, were unsuccessful. The man had vanished among New York City’s millions.

Nor was this the end of the story. For the day after the theft old Uneker himself had reported to the precinct detective a queer tale. The previous night — the night of the Ulm theft — said Uneker, he had left his shop for a late dinner; his night clerk had remained on duty. A man had entered the shop, had asked to see Europe in Chaos, and had then to the night clerk’s astonishment purchased all copies of the book in stock — seven. The man who had made this extraordinary purchase wore black mustaches and blue-tinted spectacles!

“Sort of nuts, ain’t it?” growled Sergeant Velie.

“Not at all,” smiled Ellery. “In fact, I believe it has a very simple explanation.”

“And that ain’t the half of it. One of the boys told me just now of a new angle on the case. Two minor robberies were reported from local precincts last night. One was uptown in the Bronx; a man named Hornell said his apartment was broken into during the night, and what do you think? Copy of Europe in Chaos which Hornell had bought in this guy Uneker’s store was stolen! Nothin’ else. Bought it two days ago. Then a dame named Janet Meakins from Greenwich Village had her flat robbed the same night. Thief had taken her copy of Europe in Chaos — she’d bought it from Uneker the afternoon before. Screwy, hey?”

“Not at all, Velie. Use your wits.” Ellery clapped his hat on his head. “Come along, you Colossus; I want to speak to old Unky again.”

They left headquarters and went uptown.

“Unky,” said Ellery, patting the little old bookseller’s bald pate affectionately, “how many copies of Europe in Chaos did you have in stock at the time the thief escaped from your back room?”

“Eleffen.”

“Yet only seven were in stock that same evening when the thief returned to buy them,” murmured Ellery. “Therefore, four copies had been sold between the noon hour two days ago and the dinner hour. So! Unky, do you keep a record of your customers?”

“Ach, yes! De few who buy,” said old Uneker sadly. “I addt to my mailing lisdt. You vant to see?”

“There is nothing I crave more ardently at the moment.”

Uneker led them to the rear of the shop and through a door into the musty back room from whose alley door the thief had escaped two days before. Off this room there was a partitioned cubicle littered with papers, files, and old books. The old bookseller opened a ponderous ledger and, wetting his ancient forefinger, began to slap pages over. “You vant to know de four who boughdt Europe in Chaos dot afternoon?”

“Ja.”

Uneker hooked a pair of greenish-silver spectacles over his ears and began to read in a singsong voice. “Mr. Hazlitt — dot’s the gentleman you met, Mr. Quveen. He boughdt his second copy, de vim dot vass robbed from his house... Den dere vass Mr. Hornell, an oldt customer. Den a Miss Janet Meakins — ach! dese Anglo-Saxon names. Schrecklich! Undt de fourt’ vim vass Mr. Chester Singermann, uff t’ree-tvelf East Siggsty-fift’ Street. Und dot’s all.”

“Bless your orderly old Teutonic soul,” said Ellery. “Velie, cast those Cyclopean peepers of yours this way.” There was a door from the cubicle which, from its location, led out into the alley at the rear, like the door in the back room. Ellery bent over the lock; it was splintered away from the wood.

He opened the door; the outer piece was scratched and mutilated. Velie nodded. “Forced,” he growled. “This guy’s a regular Houdini.”

Old Uneker was goggle-eyed. “Broken!” he shrilled. “But dot door iss neffer usedt. I didn’t notice no’ting, undt de detectiff—”

“Shocking work, Velie, on the part of the local man,” said Ellery. “Unky, has anything been stolen?” Old Uneker flew to an antiquated bookcase; it was neatly tiered with volumes. He unlocked the case with anguished fingers, rummaging like an aged terrier. Then he heaved a vast sigh. “Nein,” he said. “Dose rare vons... Not’ing stole.”

“I congratulate you. One thing more,” said Ellery briskly. “Your mailing list — does it have the business as well as private addresses of your customers?” Uneker nodded. “Better and better. Ta-ta, Unky. You may have a finished story to relate to your other customers after all. Come along, Velie; we’re going to visit Mr. Chester Singermann.”

They left the bookshop, walked over to Fifth Avenue, and turned north heading uptown. “Plain as the nose on your face,” said Ellery, stretching his long stride to match Velie’s. “And that’s pretty plain, Sergeant.”

“Still looks nutty to me, Mr. Queen.”

“On the contrary, we are faced with a strictly logical set of facts. Our thief stole a valuable stamp. He dodged into Uneker’s bookshop, contrived to get into the back room. He heard the officer and Friederich Ulm enter, and got busy thinking. If he were caught with the stamp on his person... You see, Velie, the only explanation that will make consistent the business of the subsequent thefts of the same book — a book not valuable in itself — is that the thief, Planck, slipped the stamp between the pages of one of the volumes on a shelf while he was in the back room — it happened by accident to be a copy of Europe in Chaos, one of a number kept in stock on the shelf — and made his escape immediately thereafter. But he still had the problem of regaining possession of the stamp — what did Ulm call it? — the ‘one-penny black,’ whatever that may be. So that night he came back, watched for old Uneker to leave the shop, then went in and bought from the clerk all copies of Europe in Chaos in the place. He got seven. The stamp was not in any one of the seven he purchased, otherwise why did he later steal others which had been bought that afternoon? So far, so good. Not finding the stamp in any of the seven, then, he returned, broke into Unky’s little office during the night — witness the shattered lock — from the alley, and looked up in Unky’s Dickensian ledger the names and addresses of those who had bought copies of the book during that afternoon. The next night he robbed Hazlitt; Planck evidently followed him from his office. Planck saw at once that he had made a mistake; the condition of the weeks-old book would have told him that this wasn’t a book purchased only the day before. So he hurried out to East Orange, knowing Hazlitt’s private as well as business address, and stole Hazlitt’s recently purchased copy. No luck there either, so he feloniously visited Hornell and Janet Meakins, stealing their copies. Now, there is still one purchaser unaccounted for, which is why we are calling upon Singermann. For if Planck was unsuccessful in his theft of Hornell’s and Miss Meakins’ books, he will inevitably visit Singermann, and we want to beat our wily thief to it if possible.”

Chester Singermann, they found, was a young student living with his parents in a battered old apartment-house flat. Yes, he still had his copy of Europe in Chaos — needed it for supplementary reading in political economy — and he produced it. Ellery went through it carefully, page for page; there was no trace of the missing stamp.

“Mr. Singermann, did you find an old postage stamp between the leaves of this volume?” asked Ellery.

The student shook his head. “I haven’t even opened it, sir. Stamp? What issue? I’ve got a little collection of my own, you know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ellery hastily, who had heard of the maniacal enthusiasm of stamp collectors, and he and Velie beat a precipitate retreat.

“It’s quite evident,” explained Ellery to the sergeant, “that our slippery Planck found the stamp in either Hornell’s copy or Miss Meakins’. Which robbery was first in point of time, Velie?”

“Seem to remember that this Meakins woman was robbed second.”

“Then the one-penny black was in her copy... Here’s that office building. Let’s pay a little visit to Mr. Friederich Ulm.”

Number 1026 on the tenth floor of the building bore a black legend on its frosted-glass door:

Ellery and Sergeant Velie went in and found themselves in a large office. The walls were covered with glass cases in which, separately mounted, could be seen hundreds of canceled and uncanceled postage stamps. Several special cabinets on tables contained, evidently, more valuable items. The place was cluttered; it had a musty air astonishingly like that of old Uneker’s bookshop.

Three men looked up. One, from a crisscrossed plaster on his cheekbone, was apparently Friederich Ulm himself, a gaunt old German with sparse hair and the fanatic look of the confirmed collector. The second man was just as tall and gaunt and old; he wore a green eye-shade and bore a striking resemblance to Ulm, although from his nervous movements and shaky hands he must have been much older. The third man was a little fellow, quite stout, with an expressionless face.

Ellery introduced himself and Sergeant Velie; and the third man pricked up his ears. “Not the Ellery Queen?” he said, waddling forward. “I’m Heffley, investigator for the insurance people. Glad to meet you.” He pumped Ellery’s hand with vigor. “These gentlemen are the Ulm brothers, who own this place. Friederich and Albert. Mr. Albert Ulm was out of the office at the time of the sale and robbery. Too bad; might have nabbed the thief.”

Friederich Ulm broke into an excited gabble of German. Ellery listened with a smile, nodding at every fourth word. “I see, Mr. Ulm. The situation, then, was this: You sent invitations by mail to three well-known collectors to attend a special exhibition of rare stamps — object, sale. Three men called on you two mornings ago, purporting to be Messrs. Hinchman, Peters, and Beninson. Hinchman and Peters you knew by sight, but Beninson you did not. Very well. Several items were purchased by the first two collectors. The man you thought was Beninson lingered behind, struck you — yes, yes, I know all that. Let me see the rifled cabinet, please.”

The brothers led him to a table in the center of the office. On it there was a flat cabinet, with a lid of ordinary thin glass framed by a narrow rectangle of wood. Under the glass reposed a number of mounted stamps, lying nakedly on a field of black satin. In the center of the satin lay a leather case, open; its white lining had been denuded of its stamp. Where the lid of the cabinet had been wrenched open there were the unmistakable marks of a “jimmy,” four in number. The catch was snapped and broken.

“Amatchoor,” said Sergeant Velie with a snort. “You could damn’ near force that locked lid up with your Fingers.”

Ellery’s sharp eyes were absorbed in what lay before him. “Mr. Ulm,” he said, turning to the wounded dealer, “the stamp you call ‘the one-penny black’ was in this open leather box?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen. But the leather box was closed when the thief forced open the cabinet.”

“Then how did he know so unerringly what to steal?”

Friederich Ulm touched his cheek tenderly. “The stamps in this cabinet were not for sale; they’re the cream of our collection; every stamp in this case is worth hundreds. But when the three men were here we naturally talked about the rarer items, and I opened this cabinet to show them our very valuable stamps. So the thief saw the one-penny black. He was a collector, Mr. Queen, or he wouldn’t have chosen that particular stamp to steal. It has a funny history.”

“Heavens!” said Ellery. “Do these things have histories?”

Heffley, the man from the insurance company, laughed. “And how! Mr. Friederich and Mr. Albert Ulm are well known to the trade for owning two of the most unique stamps ever issued, both identical. The one-penny black, as it is called by collectors, is a British stamp first issued in 1840; there are lots of them around, and even an uncanceled one is worth only seventeen and a half dollars in American money. But the two in the possession of these gentlemen are worth thirty thousand dollars apiece, Mr. Queen — that’s what makes the theft so dog-gone serious. In fact, my company is heavily involved, since the stamps are both insured for their full value.”

“Thirty thousand dollars!” groaned Ellery. “That’s a lot of money for a little piece of dirty paper. Why are they so valuable?”

Albert Ulm nervously pulled his green shade lower over his eyes. “Because both of ours were actually initialed by Queen Victoria, that’s why. Sir Rowland Hill, the man who created and founded the standard penny-postage system in England in 1839, was responsible for the issue of the one-penny black. Her Majesty was so delighted — England, like other countries, had had a great deal of trouble working out a successful postage system — that she autographed the first two stamps off the press and gave them to the designer — I don’t recall his name. Her autograph made them immensely valuable. My brother and I were lucky to get our hands on the only two in existence.”

“Where’s the twin? I’d like to take a peep at a stamp worth a queen’s ransom.”

The brothers bustled to a large safe looming in a corner of the office. They came back, Albert carrying a leather case as if it were a consignment of golden bullion, and Friederich anxiously holding his elbow, as if he were a squad of armed guards detailed to protect the consignment. Ellery turned the thing over in his fingers; it felt thick and stiff. It was an average-sized stamp rectangle, imperforate, bordered with a black design, and containing an engraving in profile view of Queen Victoria’s head — all done in tones of black. On the lighter portion of the face appeared two tiny initials in faded black ink — V. R.

“They’re both exactly alike,” said Friederich Ulm. “Even to the initials.”

“Very interesting,” said Ellery, returning the case. The brothers scurried back, placed the stamp in a drawer of the safe, and locked the safe with painful care. “You closed the cabinet, of course, after your three visitors looked over the stamps inside?”

“Oh, yes,” said Friederich Ulm. “I closed the case of the one-penny black itself, and then I locked the cabinet.”

“And did you send the three invitations yourself? I noticed you have no typewriter here.”

“We use a public stenographer in Room 1102 for all our correspondence, Mr. Queen.”

Ellery thanked the dealers gravely, waved to the insurance man, nudged Sergeant Velie’s meaty ribs, and the two men left the office. In Room 1102 they found a sharp-featured young woman. Sergeant Velie flashed his badge, and Ellery was soon reading carbon copies of the three Ulm invitations. He took note of the names and addresses, and the two men left.

They visited the collector named John Hinchman first. Hinchman was a thick-set old man with white hair and gimlet eyes. He was brusque and uncommunicative. Yes, he had been present in the Ulms’ office two mornings before. Yes, he knew Peters. No, he’d never met Beninson before. The one-penny black? Of course. Every collector knew of the valuable twin stamps owned by the Ulm brothers; those little scraps of paper bearing the initials of a queen were famous in stampdom. The theft? Bosh! He, Hinchman, knew nothing of Beninson, or whoever it was that impersonated Beninson. He, Hinchman, had left before the thief. He, Hinchman, furthermore didn’t care two raps in Hades who stole the stamp; all he wanted was to be left strictly alone.

Sergeant Velie exhibited certain animal signs of hostility; but Ellery grinned, sank his strong fingers into the muscle of the sergeant’s arm, and herded him out of Hinchman’s house. They took the subway uptown.

J. S. Peters, they found, was a middle-aged man, tall and thin and yellow as Chinese sealing wax. He seemed anxious to be of assistance. Yes, he and Hinchman had left the Ulms’ office together, before the third man. He had never seen the third man before, although he had heard of Beninson from other collectors. Yes, he knew all about the one-penny blacks, had even tried to buy one of them from Friederich Ulm two years before; but the Ulms had refused to sell.

“Philately,” said Ellery outside to Sergeant Velie, whose honest face looked pained at the word, “is a curious hobby. It seems to afflict its victims with a species of mania. I don’t doubt these stamp-collecting fellows would murder each other for one of the things.”

The sergeant was wrinkling his nose. “How’s she look now?” he asked rather anxiously.

“Velie,” replied Ellery, “she looks swell — and different.”

They found Avery Beninson in an old brownstone house near the river; he was a mild-mannered and courteous host.

“No, I never did see that invitation,” Beninson said. “You see, I hired this man who called himself William Planck, and he took care of my collection and the bulky mail all serious collectors have. The man knew stamps, all right. For two weeks he was invaluable to me. He must have intercepted the Ulms’ invitation. He saw his chance to get into their office, went there, said he was Avery Beninson...” The collector shrugged. “It was quite simple, I suppose, for an unscrupulous man.”

“Of course, you haven’t had word from him since the morning of the theft?”

“Naturally not. He made his haul and lit out.”

“Just what did he do for you, Mr. Beninson?”

“The ordinary routine of the philatelic assistant — assorting, cataloguing, counting, answering correspondence. He lived here with me for the two weeks he was in my employ.” Beninson grinned deprecatingly. “You see, I’m a bachelor — live in this big shack all alone. I was really glad of his company, although he was a queer one.”

“A queer one?”

“Well,” said Beninson, “he was a retiring sort of creature. Had very few personal belongings, and I found those gone two days ago. He didn’t seem to like people, either. He always went to his own room when friends of mine or collectors called, as if he didn’t want to mix with company.”

“Then there isn’t anyone else who might be able to supplement your description of him?”

“Unfortunately, no. He was a fairly tall man, well advanced in age, I should say. But then his dark glasses and heavy black mustache would make him stand out anywhere.”

Ellery sprawled his long figure over the chair, slumping on his spine. “I’m most interested in the mem’s habits, Mr. Beninson. Individual idiosyncrasies are often the innocent means by which criminals are apprehended, as the good sergeant here will tell you. Please think hard. Didn’t the man exhibit any oddities of habit?”

Beninson pursed his lips with anxious concentration. His face brightened. “By George, yes! He was a snuff-taker.”

Ellery and Sergeant Velie looked at each other. “That’s interesting,” said Ellery with a smile. “So is my father — Inspector Queen, you know — and I’ve had the dubious pleasure of watching a snuff-taker’s gyrations ever since my childhood. Planck inhaled snuff regularly?”

“I shouldn’t say that exactly, Mr. Queen,” replied Beninson with a frown. “In fact, in the two weeks he was with me I saw him take snuff only once, and I invariably spent all day with him working in this room. It was last week; I happened to go out for a few moments, and when I returned I saw him holding a carved little box, sniffing from a pinch of something between his fingers. He put the box away quickly, as if he didn’t want me to see it — although I didn’t care, lord knows, so long as he didn’t smoke in here. I’ve had one fire from a careless assistant’s cigaret, and I don’t want another.”

Ellery’s face had come alive. He sat up straight and began to finger his pince-nez eyeglasses studiously. “You didn’t know the man’s address, I suppose?” he asked slowly.

“No, I did not. I’m afraid I took him on without the proper precautions.” The collector sighed. “I’m fortunate that he didn’t steal anything from me. My collection is worth a lot of money.”

“No doubt,” said Ellery in a pleasant voice. He rose. “May I use your telephone, Mr. Beninson?”

“Surely.”

Ellery consulted a telephone directory and made several calls, speaking in tones so low that neither Beninson nor Sergeant Velie could hear what he was saying. When he put down the instrument he said: “If you can spare a half-hour, Mr. Beninson, I’d like to have you take a little jaunt with us downtown.”

Beninson seemed astonished; but he smiled, said: “I’d be delighted,” and reached for his coat.

Ellery commandeered a taxicab outside, and the three men were driven to Forty-ninth Street. He excused himself when they got out before the little bookshop, hurried inside, and came out after a moment with old Uneker, who locked his door with shaking fingers.

In the Ulm brothers’ office they found Heffley, the insurance man, and Hazlitt, Uneker’s customer, waiting for them. “Glad you could come,” said Ellery cheerfully to both men. “Good afternoon, Mr. Ulm. A little conference, and I think we’ll have this business cleared up to the Queen’s taste. Ha, ha!”

Friederich Ulm scratched his head; Albert Ulm, sitting in a corner with his hatchet knees jack-knifed, his green shade over his eyes, nodded.

“We’ll have to wait,” said Ellery. “I’ve asked Mr. Peters and Mr. Hinchman to come, too. Suppose we sit down?”

They were silent for the most part, and not a little uneasy. No one spoke as Ellery strolled about the office, examining the rare stamps in their wall cases with open curiosity, whistling softly to himself. Sergeant Velie eyed him doubtfully. Then the door opened, and Hinchman and Peters appeared together. They stopped short at the threshold, looked at each other, shrugged, and walked in. Hinchman was scowling.

“What’s the idea, Mr. Queen?” he said. “I’m a busy man.”

“A not unique condition,” smiled Ellery. “Ah, Mr. Peters, good day. Introductions, I think, are not entirely called for... Sit down, gentlemen!” he said in a sharper voice, and they sat down.

The door opened and a small, gray, birdlike little man peered in at them. Sergeant Velie looked astounded, and Ellery nodded gaily. “Come in, Dad, come in! You’re just in time for the first act.”

Inspector Richard Queen cocked his little squirrel’s head, looked at the assembled company shrewdly, and closed the door behind him. “What the devil is the idea of the call, son?”

“Nothing very exciting. Not a murder, or anything in your line. But it may interest you. Gentlemen, Inspector Queen.”

The inspector grunted, sat down, took out his old brown snuff-box, and inhaled with the voluptuous gasp of long practice. Ellery stood serenely in the hub of the circle of chairs, looking down at curious faces. “The theft of the one-penny black, as you inveterate stamp-fiends call it,” he began, “presented a not uninteresting problem. I say ‘presented’ advisedly. For the case is solved.”

“Is this that business of the stamp robbery I was hearing about down at headquarters?” asked the inspector.

“Yes.”

“Solved?” asked Beninson. “I don’t think I understand, Mr. Queen. Have you found Planck?”

Ellery waved his arm negligently. “I was never too sanguine of catching Mr. William Planck, as such. You see, he wore tinted spectacles and black mustachios. Now, anyone familiar with the science of crime-detection will tell you that the average person identifies faces by superficial details. A black mustache catches the eye. Tinted glasses impress the memory. In fact, Mr. Hazlitt here, who from Uneker’s description is a man of poor observational powers, recalled even after seeing his assailant in dim streetlight that the man wore a black mustache and tinted glasses. But this is all fundamental and not even particularly smart. It was reasonable to assume that Planck wanted these special facial characteristics to be remembered. I was convinced that he had disguised himself, that the mustache was probably a false one, and that ordinarily he does not wear tinted glasses.”

They all nodded.

“This was the first and simplest of the three psychological sign posts to the culprit.” Ellery smiled and turned suddenly to the inspector. “Dad, you’re an old snuff addict. How many times a day do you stuff that unholy brown dust up your nostrils?”

The inspector blinked. “Oh, every half-hour or so. Sometimes as often as you smoke cigarets.”

“Precisely. Now, Mr. Beninson told me that in the two weeks during which Planck stayed at his house, and despite the fact that Mr. Beninson worked side by side with the man every day, he saw Planck take snuff only once. Please observe that here we have a most enlightening and suggestive fact.”

From the blankness of their faces it was apparent that, far from seeing light, their minds on this point were in total darkness. There was one exception — the inspector; he nodded, shifted in his chair, and coolly began to study the faces about him.

Ellery lit a cigaret. “Very well,” he said, expelling little puffs of smoke, “there you have the second psychological factor. The third was this: Planck, in a fairly public place, bashes Mr. Friederich Ulm over the face with the robust intention of stealing a valuable stamp. Any thief under the circumstances would desire speed above all things. Mr. Ulm was only half-stunned — he might come to and make an outcry; a customer might walk in; Mr. Albert Ulm might return unexpectedly—”

“Just a moment, son,” said the inspector. “I understand there are two of the stamp thingamajigs in existence. I’d like to see the one that’s still here.”

Ellery nodded. “Would one of you gentlemen please get the stamp?”

Friederich Ulm rose, pottered over to the safe, tinkered with the dials, opened the steel door, fussed about the interior a moment, and came back with the leather case containing the second one-penny black. The inspector examined the thick little scrap curiously; a thirty-thousand-dollar bit of old paper was as awesome to him as to Ellery.

He almost dropped it when he heard Ellery say to Sergeant Velie: “Sergeant, may I borrow your revolver?”

Velie’s massive jaw seesawed as he fumbled in his hip pocket and produced a long-barreled police revolver. Ellery took it and hefted it thoughtfully. Then his fingers closed about the butt and he walked over to the rifled cabinet in the middle of the room.

“Please observe, gentlemen — to expand my third point — that in order to open this cabinet Planck used an iron bar; and that in prying up the lid he found it necessary to insert the bar between the lid and the front wall four times, as the four marks under the lid indicate.

“Now, as you can see, the cabinet is covered with thin glass. Moreover, it was locked, and the one-penny black was in this closed leather case inside. Planck stood about here, I should judge, and mark that the iron bar was in his hand. What would you gentlemen expect a thief, working against time, to do under these circumstances?”

They stared. The inspector’s mouth tightened, and a grin began to spread over the expanse of Sergeant Velie’s face.

“But it’s so clear,” said Ellery. “Visualize it. I’m Planck. The revolver in my hand is an iron ‘jimmy.’ I’m standing over the cabinet...” His eyes gleamed behind the pince-nez, and he raised the revolver high over his head. And then, deliberately, he began to bring the steel barrel down on the thin sheeting of glass atop the cabinet. There was a scream from Albert Ulm, and Friederich Ulm half-rose, glaring. Ellery’s hand stopped a half-inch from the glass.

“Don’t break that glass, you fool!” shouted the green-shaded dealer. “You’ll only—”

He leaped forward and stood before the cabinet, trembling arms outspread as if to protect the case and its contents. Ellery grinned and prodded the man’s palpitating belly with the muzzle of the revolver. “I’m glad you stopped me, Mr. Ulm. Put your hands up. Quickly!”

“Why... why, what do you mean?” gasped Albert Ulm, raising his arms with frantic rapidity.

“I mean,” said Ellery gently, “that you’re William Planck, and that brother Friederich is your accomplice!”

The brothers Ulm sat trembling in their chairs, and Sergeant Velie stood over them with a nasty smile. Albert Ulm had gone to pieces; he was quivering like an aspen leaf in high wind.

“A very simple, almost an elementary, series of deductions,” Ellery was saying. “Point three first. Why did the thief, instead of taking the most logical course of smashing the glass with the iron bar, choose to waste precious minutes using a ‘jimmy’ four times to force open the lid? Obviously to protect the other stamps in the cabinet, which lay open to possible injury, as Mr. Albert Ulm has just graphically pointed out. And who had the greatest concern in protecting these other stamps — Hinchman, Peters, Beninson, even the mythical Planck himself? Of course not. Only the Ulm brothers, owners of the stamps.”

Old Uneker began to chuckle; he nudged the inspector. “See? Didn’t I say he vass smardt? Now me — me, I’d neffer t’ink of dot.”

“And why didn’t Planck steal these other stamps in the cabinet? You would expect a thief to do that. Planck did not. But if the Herren Ulm were the thieves, the theft of the other stamps became pointless.”

“How about that snuff business, Mr. Queen?” asked Peters.

“Yes. The conclusion is plain from the fact that Planck apparently indulged only once during the days he worked with Mr. Beninson. Since snuff addicts partake freely and often, Planck wasn’t a snuff addict. Then it wasn’t snuff he inhaled that day. What else is sniffed in a similar manner? Well — drugs in powder form — heroin! What are the characteristics of a heroin addict? Nervous drawn appearance; gauntness, almost emaciation; and most important, tell-tale eyes, the pupils of which contract under influence of the drug. Then here was another explanation for the tinted glasses Planck wore. They served a double purpose — as an easily recognizable disguise, and also to conceal his eyes, which would give his vice-addiction away! But when I observed that Mr. Albert Ulm—” Ellery went over to the cowering man and ripped the green eyeshade away, revealing two stark, pin-point pupils — “wore this shade, it was a psychological confirmation of his identity as Planck.”

“Yes, but that business of stealing all those books,” said Hazlitt.

“Part of a very pretty and rather far-fetched plot,” said Ellery. “With Albert Ulm the disguised thief, Friederich Ulm, who exhibited the wound on his cheek, must have been an accomplice. Then with the Ulm brothers the thieves, the entire business of the books was a blind. The attack on Friederich, the ruse of the bookstore escape, the trail of the minor robberies of copies of Europe in Chaos — a cleverly planned series of incidents to authenticate the fact that there was an outside thief, to convince the police and the insurance company that the stamp actually was stolen when it was not. Object, of course, to collect the insurance without parting with the stamp. These men are fanatical collectors.”

Heffley wriggled his fat little body uncomfortably. “That’s all very nice, Mr. Queen, but where the deuce is that stamp they stole from themselves? Where’d they hide it?”

“I thought long and earnestly about that, Heffley. For while my trio of deductions were psychological indications of guilt, the discovery of the stolen stamp in the Ulms’ possession would be evidential proof—” The inspector was turning the second stamp over mechanically. “I said to myself” Ellery went on, “in a reconsideration of the problem: What would be the most likely hiding place for the stamp? And then I remembered that the two stamps were identical, even the initials of the good queen being in the same place. So I said to myself: If I were Messrs. Ulm, I should hide that stamp — like the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale — in the most obvious place. And what is the most obvious place?”

Ellery sighed and returned the unused revolver to Sergeant Velie. “Dad,” he remarked to the inspector, who started guiltily, “I think that if you allow one of the philatelists in our company to examine the second one-penny black in your fingers, you’ll find that the first has been pasted with non-injurious rubber cement precisely over the second!”

As part of our 70th-anniversary celebration, we offer, tins month, a reprint from the original Black Mask magazine, with which EQMM has decades-old ties. “Waiting for Rusty” is one of the shortest stories ever published in Black Mask, but it remains, according to conservator Keith Alan Deutsch, the one that has generated the most reader letters. It was William Cole’s only Black Mask story, and was bought by Fanny Ellsworth, who took over editorship of the magazine from Joseph Shaw in 1936. Ellsworth favored emotional tales over hard-boiled narration and under her, writers such as Cornell Woolrich emerged at Black Mask.

One of these days I’m going to tell the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to blow his mouth off once too often and I’m going to take him out there and show him. I may get on the wrong side of him, but it’ll be worth it...

Bernard Lynch was born and educated in New York City, graduating from City University with a degree in history. Currently, he is living in Belford, New Jersey, where, he told EQMM, he is at work on a novel. His debut fiction is fanciful and fun, imbued with a spirit of adventure and told with suck zest that readers will, we think, readily suspend disbelief and embrace the tale’s more fantastic elements.　

Insurance investigator Mandy McHenry, standing in a secluded part of Central Park, couldn’t tell from the look on the man’s face whether he could be trusted or not. With her right hand she brushed the side of her leather jacket, warm and snug against the October chill, and felt the reassuring presence of her automatic in the holster underneath, on her hip. A small owlish-looking man with spectacles and a pious manner of clasping his little hands together while speaking, he seemed harmless enough. But still, it was the harmless-looking type that often turned out to be the most dangerous, and the more she thought about it now, the more she knew she wasn’t going to trust this little freak any further than she could kick him.

The little man smiled and peered up at her, the spectacles he wore catching the late afternoon light, and said: “You are the Huntress and he is the Hunted, but believe me when I tell you that without my help, you’ll never run this quarry to ground.” His voice had that singular nasal quality of a Parisian who spoke English only as a last resort. Mandy frowned. She was in no mood for melodrama — especially one that might require subtitles. Anxious to get this over with, she said: “Perhaps. So far, though, you haven’t told me anything about him that I don’t already know.”

And he hadn’t. Earlier, on the phone, he had introduced himself as Simon Ducroix or, “As some people call me, Brother Simon.” He told her that he was a retired INTERPOL agent and currently serving as a security consultant to a number of museums and art galleries in Paris, Rome, and London. He then told her it was greatly urgent for them to meet on a matter of mutual interest: the whereabouts of the infamous British jewel thief Jack Monsarrat, otherwise known as The One-Eyed Cat. Recently he had broken out of a Spanish prison and was rumored to be in a dozen different countries at once. Mandy had been an insurance investigator now for over ten years and whenever she spoke to someone over the phone about a lead or a tip it was always a matter of great urgency. Most of the time, it turned out to be anything but urgent; most of the time, it turned out to be nothing. But still, she had to go through the motions: It went with the job and the job was her life. Also, she had a special interest in The One-Eyed Cat — he had been responsible for the one failure in her career: the theft of the Sunburst Diamond.

Now the little man turned and pointed across the way toward a small outdoor cafe and said: “You see that beautiful woman who is sitting alone at the table there and sipping at her cappuccino? Her name is Dahlia Manning. And she just so happens to be the mistress of our Monsieur Monsarrat. Now there is something I will wager you did not know about him. Or am I being, how you say, presumptuous?”

“No, now you’ve got my attention, Mr. Ducroix.”

“Brother Simon. Please, I insist.”

“All right, Brother Simon.” And for a moment she was tempted to say, Call me Sister Mandy. But she resisted the impulse, instead saying: “That beautiful woman looks like she’s waiting for someone — someone special?”

“Yes, indeed, someone special. She is waiting for her husband, Anton Manning, who is also Monsieur Monsarrat’s best friend and partner in crime.”

At that Mandy allowed a flicker of a smile herself. “Now you’ve really got my attention.”

Translated from the Flemish by Josh Pachter

A native Torontonian, Hilary Davidson has lived in New York City since 2001. She’s the author of 18 nonfiction kooks and many articles. In September of 2010, her first novel, Damage Done, appeared to strong reviews, including PW’s, which hailed the kook as “razor sharp.” She’s also making a mark as a short-story writer, making one of 2008’s best-of-the-year anthologies and winning the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Story.

Harris Bulger was no gentleman. I knew that long before I got into bed with him. Truth be told, there was actually very little time from when we first shook hands till we slipped between the sheets together. Afterwards, he slapped my bottom and told me that I was better than an escort. Instead of smacking him back, I smiled, and we started seeing each other once or twice a week, always at his Upper East Side apartment. What Harris lacked in charm, his home made up for with its towering ceilings, open-air terrace, and breathtaking view of New York.

Three months after our first rendezvous, Harris’s manners hadn’t improved. We were in bed again, but when Harris was done, he grunted and pushed me aside. I tumbled to the edge of the bed, sliding along the Egyptian cotton sheets while Harris sat up, lit a cigarette, and started to lay out another line of cocaine.

“You should get going before Meredith comes home,” he said.

Meredith was his wife, a tall, blond trophy who, I’d heard, liked to brag about how she used to work on Wall Street, almost ten years after she’d been making coffee for the traders at Lehman Brothers.

“I was planning to stay and play with you awhile longer, darling.” I ran my fingers through the thick, matted fur on his back, while he vacuumed up the coke. “I don’t get to see you often enough.”

Harris turned toward me, making the extra flesh that padded his body and pooled in his belly wobble. “Having you here is a lot more fun, Lacey.”

“I could arrange to be here full-time, you know.”

“That would be great,” he answered, but his tone was noncommittal. I’d heard all of his complaints about Meredith: her temper, her vanity, her bouts of bulimia, her appetite for drugs, her taunting Harris about his growing bulk, and her lack of interest in him. Why he didn’t kick her bony ass out to the street was beyond me. It wasn’t as if they had kids together. Undoubtedly, Harris’s success as a hedge-fund manager was as attractive to her as it was to me, but Meredith was born into a wealthy family, so she must have had other resources. In any case, I didn’t need to understand it. I only needed to work around it.

“Tell me what you want, darling,” I cooed. “What do you want most in the world right now?”

He took a long drag. “You know what I could really go for?”

“What?”

“A burger from that Frenchie guy’s place.” He flicked ash on the bed and I shuddered at the thought of beautiful sheets with cigarette holes. Harris wouldn’t care. He’d replace them with Frette linens from Gracious Home that cost about as much as a month’s rent at my drab little shoebox in Flatbush.

“Frenchie guy? You mean Daniel Boulud?” I asked. “You want the Burger Royale? The one with shaved black truffles?”

“Yeah.” Harris’s jowls relaxed into a smile and his small, piggy eyes got a faraway look. “Get them to deliver a couple, will you?”

“Oh, I’m not going to have one.”

“They’re for me.” Harris squinted and his lower lip quivered. “What, are you going to start taunting me about my weight like Meredith does? It’s genetic, you know.” He dropped his cigarette into a glass on the night table and looked at the face of the gold watch sitting beside it. With a lumbering effort, he propelled himself off the bed. “Gotta shower.” He didn’t turn around, so I was spared the full-frontal view. “See you, Lacey.”

“ ’Bye, darling,” I called, aiming for a wistful note, as if I were going to miss him. What I really wanted to do was to wash myself with Lysol. But once I heard the water in the shower go on, that sensation faded. I was alone in the most beautiful apartment I’d ever seen. Slipping out of bed, I put on my push-up bra and stockings and pulled my dress on. My shoes were by the front door, because Harris said my stiletto heels might damage the beautiful parquet floors. Meredith was very protective of the floors, apparently.

I stood for a moment, listening to the water. Then, before I lost my nerve, I grabbed the red thong that matched my bra and marched into Meredith’s dressing room. The space was gigantic, with mirrored walls, Art Deco furniture, and a leopard-print carpet. One wall was a shrine to shoes, with Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, and Christian Louboutin all sharing space on the shelves. The urge to try them on nagged at me, but Meredith’s huge size-eleven feet were three sizes bigger than mine. Focus, I told myself. Then I tucked the thong into the edge of the chaise longue, where the back met the seat. No way was Meredith going to miss that.

I turned to her dressing table. Meredith was a neat freak who kept her hairpins lined up in a row. She was smart enough to lock up her jewelry, but she left other treasures lying around. There was a jar of Clé de Peau’s precious La Crème moisturizer sitting there, with a delicate silver spatula balanced atop it. The implement actually came with the cream, but since that cost $475 an ounce, it was a relative pittance. I wondered if Meredith collected the little spatulas when she was done with each jar. It seemed like the kind of tiling she would do. On impulse, I swiped the cream and spatula and dropped it into my bag. Would she notice that? I’d swiped her bottle of Baccarat’s Les Larmes Sacrées de Thebes perfume on my last visit to the apartment. I didn’t even like the fragrance, but I craved the pyramid-shaped crystal bottle. That was before I discovered it cost $1,700 for a quarter-ounce. I wondered what she thought was happening to her stuff.

There was a little slip of paper under the jar. I squinted at it.

Tramp, it said. Perfect for Hedge Hog.

For some reason, my lips quivered. Was that bleached-blond bag of anorexic bones calling me a tramp? Hedge Hog was her nasty nickname for her husband. When Harris had first told me about it, I’d almost laughed. That would have been a bad move, because the name almost brought Harris to tears. Still, it was wittier than I’d have given Meredith credit for. But there was nothing funny about being called a tramp.

The note was creepy, as if Meredith were speaking directly to me, something she’d never done when I’d seen her in person. She’d visited Harris’s office a couple of times, sweeping in without even a hello as I sat there at the reception desk.

For a moment, I felt an urge to flee the apartment. I backed out of the dressing room and closed the double French doors with a soft click. The shower was still running. Harris had plenty of real estate to wash, after all. No one was chasing me out, but I felt out of place. That sensation lasted until I walked into the living room. Harris’s apartment was on the twelfth floor of a Fifth Avenue building overlooking Central Park and was barely a block away from the Guggenheim. Some decorator had mixed French antiques with Southeast Asian icons throughout, and the results were serenely beautiful. I wasn’t sure how I’d change it when I finally moved in, though I knew I’d have to. A woman had to mark her territory.

Boulud Bistro was on speed dial on the kitchen phone. Harris’s craving for a $150 burger was not a new thing. No matter how much money he raked in, he still had the tastes of an adolescent boy. After I phoned the order in, I pulled a crystal tumbler from a cabinet, marked it with a red lip print, and set it on the counter. There was no way that Meredith was going to miss the evidence of my latest visit to Harris’s apartment. If she wanted to keep any dignity at all, she’d have to leave.

As I strolled out the door, I stopped for one last, lingering gaze. In my head, I was already living there. It was going to be wonderful, even if it was with Harris.

In addition to authoring three popular series of mystery novels — those starring Charles Paris, Mrs. Pargeter, and the residents of Fethering — Simon Brett has written many plays and several series for TV and radio. His TV sitcom After Henry is now available on DVD, and his character Charles Paris can be found on Britain’s Radio 4 in plays adapted from some of the Brett novels. Readers won’t want to miss the latest Brett novel in print in the U.S., Bones Under the Beach Hut.

It should have been a straightforward job. Louis had cased the joint. Milton was set up as the getaway driver. The actual burglary was to be done by Hopper, who’s the best lock-man in West London, and me, Chico. And everything would have been fine if Hopper hadn’t insisted on bringing his young nephew Terence along.

Seems it’s something they’re very keen on at schools these days. “Work Experience,” they call it. Usually the kids go along with their parents to get a taste of the workaday world, but with Terence’s dad in Parkhurst for the foreseeable, that was never going to work out, was it?

Apparently the boy done some Work Experience with his mum, who does location catering for television programmes. Terence had helped — or more likely hindered — her for a week when she was cooking for the crew on one of them reality shows — you know, hidden cameras, members of the public looking stupid. Called Danger: Men at Work. Title doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not into telly. Anyway, that Work Experience must’ve been a waste of time. Location catering isn’t going to be much use to the boy. Never going to be a career for a grown man, is it?

So Hopper, who’s always had a strong sense of family, said Terence should come along with him on this job.

Terence is at that kind of awkward age, all elbows and Adam’s apple. He wears T-shirts with meaningless slogans on them, hoodies, and, dangling off his thin backside, garments which have never quite decided whether they are shorts or trousers. And he has, like permanently grafted on his head, a baseball cap, which he’ll wear at any angle other than the natural one with the peak in front.

Hopper didn’t mention the idea of bringing Terence along until right at the end of the planning meeting. He must have known none of us would have liked the idea, and hoped to shuffle it in unnoticed when we was all getting ready to leave.

Up until that point everything had gone very smoothly. Although I say it myself, that was mostly down to me. I’d picked up the information about the place, and I’d given Louis some very good suggestions before he checked it out. I was flattered that during the planning meeting more than one of the others referred to it as “Chico’s job.” I hadn’t been with the gang as long as the rest, and it gave me the feeling they were beginning to accept — even respect — me.

I’d heard about the place from a mate of mine down the Red Cow. Blob, he’s called. And I must say, when he told me, my first reaction — like anyone’s would have been — is that the job was a total nonstarter. I mean, one thing you learn pretty early in this line of work is to keep clear of the Filth. I’ve nothing against coppers individually — I’m sure a lot of them are kind to animals and good to their mums — but as a general rule I have made it my business to avoid them. So when Blob says that the flat he’s recommending is right over a police station... well, I thought he was about ready for the old Care in the Community.

Next he come up with some proverb about the best place to hide being nearest the light, which still sounded well dodgy to me, but I kept listening. And I’m glad I did, because the more detail he gave me, the more I knew the job was a real peach. Soft, juicy, ripe for plucking.

Fact is, this police station was a redbrick Victorian block, built for times when the old cash flow wasn’t so strapped. Offices downstairs, second storey all police courts and meeting rooms. That floor hadn’t been used for some time, and during another cost-cutting round in the 1970s, some bright spark had had the idea of turning it into a residence (known waggishly round the station as “Evening Hall”) and flogging it off.

This was duly done and the flat was bought by some geezer who was an expert in antiques. Specialised in gold and silver coins, and, according to Blob, the place was full of them. Owner spent a lot of time abroad, buying from other dealers. And this was the sweet bit... place had no burglar alarms, no grilles on the windows, nothing. Geezer reckoned being sat on top of a cop shop was security enough. Apparently felt so confident the stuff’d never get nicked that he hadn’t even insured it. (Which, incidentally, is not something I’d recommend. Reason I can sleep easy at night doing the work I do is that I know in most cases anything I purloin will be covered on the old insurance. So really what I commit is victimless crimes... though, strangely, some of the people whose stuff I take don’t see it that way. Nor, for some reason, do the insurance companies. Or the police. Odd, that.)

Anyway, like I said, Louis cased the joint. We always work that way — get a place looked at by someone who’s not going to be involved in the actual thieving. Louis’s good for that kind of work. Seeing him for the first time, it’d never occur to you that he’d ever broken the law in his life. And certainly not that he’s the brains behind our outfit. We don’t have a leader as such, but Louis is the one we all refer to, check stuff out with. You’d never know it, though. He looks like a retired schoolteacher, all thick glasses and shapeless corduroy. And he’s got this bumbling way about him. No one’s surprised when he takes wrong turnings and walks into places he shouldn’t.

That’s how he played it when he was casing the police station. Told us all about it at the planning meeting. “It was my intention,” he says, “to make a cursory preliminary examination of the exterior, and to that end I wandered about in the manner of a superannuated gentleman whose mental faculties were challenged by the task of finding the main entrance.”

(Another thing about Louis, he does tend to use a lot of long words. Rest of us don’t always understand all of them, but most of us usually get his gist.)

“My scrutiny confirmed our most optimistic expectations. Though the police station itself is guarded by a plethora of CCTV cameras and other security devices, there is nothing to monitor who enters or leaves the first-floor flat”

“Except,” objected Milton, who, despite the contrary impression given by his looks, reckons he’s quite quick on the old logic, “surely anyone who gets up to the first-floor entrance is going to have to go through the police station’s surveillance system? Unless you’re suggesting we use a helicopter.”

Louis holds up a hand to quieten him, like Milton was some kid talking out of turn. The way he done it suggested the old boy really must have been a schoolteacher at some point, before he saw the light and come over to our side.

“What you say is correct. And any attempt to gain access to the upstairs flat by its main entrance would be extremely hazardous.”

“You suggesting we smash in through the windows, then?”

“Milton, Milton, if you have a fault, it is that you tend to be too precipitous. You want everything to happen immediately. Which, while an excellent and desirable quality in a getaway driver, is an instinct which must at times be curbed during normal social intercourse.”

“Er...?” says Milton, who’s never been as good at getting Louis’s gist as the rest of us.

“What I am asking is that you allow me to make my report in my own style. And at my own pace.” This was said in a way that must have made a good few fourth-formers cower over the years. It certainly had the effect of shutting Milton up.

“Having ascertained the security situation on the exterior of the building,” Louis went on, at his own pace, “I then decided I should extend my investigation to the interior. Not wishing to raise suspicions, I developed the already-assumed persona of a somewhat confused elderly gentleman. My cover story was to be that, while entrusted with the care of my grandson’s gerbil, I had inadvertently allowed it to escape through my open back door, and I was hoping to enlist the assistance of the police to secure the rodent’s recapture.

“When I entered the building, I discovered that there was a queue of other complainants and the desk sergeant was preoccupied by a large lady, bearing a more than passing resemblance to Boadicea, who was insisting that, unless her neighbour could be persuaded to clip his leylandii, blood would flow.

“After some minutes of sitting waiting, I rose and, with a mumbled explanation about ‘prostate trouble,’ asked a passing WPC to be pointed towards the gentlemen’s lavatory.

“I was directed through a door into a central area where, serendipitously, the male and female conveniences turned out to be placed either side of a substantial staircase. The space was occupied only by a few filing cabinets and some broken-down chairs. It wasn’t anyone’s office, just a glory-hole on the way to the police cells and the station’s back entrance.

“Anyway, at the top of the staircase I could see a wall not included in the building’s original design, into which was set another door. This, I felt certain, must give access to the flat upstairs. Exaggerating my assumed decrepitude — just in case anyone should come in and see me — I climbed the stairs, which were dusty with disuse, as was the small strip of landing in front of the wall. And the good news is that the lock on the door up there is of such simplicity that it would take someone of Hopper’s talents a matter of seconds to open it with his bare fingernails.”

Our lock-man accepted the compliment with a modest smile. Louis also smiled and placed his hands flat on the table to indicate that his report was finished. Milton was still cowed by the schoolmasterly reprimand he had received, so I was the one who asked the obvious question. “You’re saying we should make our way into the flat from inside the police station?”

“You have a very acute understanding, Chico. That is exactly what I meant.”

We were all silent for a moment. Then I showed I was prepared to ask another obvious question. “But won’t the Filth notice? I mean, look at us. Say it’s just Hopper and me does the job. The only way we two would look right in a cop shop is with handcuffs on.”

“Dressed like that, you would indeed, Chico. But were you to don the habiliments of a member of Her Majesty’s constabulary, you would present a much less incongruous picture.”

Okay, I’d never heard the word “habiliments” in my life before, but I was still getting Louis’s gist. “You mean we dress up as coppers?”

“Indubitably.”

Hopper and me exchanged looks. One thing neither of us likes doing is committing more than one crime at a time. A burglary of gold and silver coins is one thing, but doing it while “impersonating a police officer”... well, that’s dead iffy.

“What about me?” asks Milton. “Won’t people smell a rat when they see two coppers legging it into the getaway car?”

“No, they won’t,” Louis purred. “They will think it the most natural thing in the world.”

“How’dya mean?”

“Milton, Milton, what could be more natural than for two police officers to get into the back of a Panda car driven by another police officer?”

“You’re saying I’m going to be in fancy dress and all?”

“Yes, Milton.”

“And I’m going to hot-wire a police Panda?”

“Yes, Milton.”

There was another silence. Long one, this time. Then I says, “Come on, Louis, tell us how it’s going to work.”

So he told us. We asked a lot of questions, we pulled the plan apart, tested it for weaknesses. And at the end, not for the first time, we all agreed that Louis was a blooming genius.

It was then that Hopper shuffled in the idea of his nephew Terence coming along for Work Experience.

Michael Haskins debuted in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2007, and since then he has had two novels published; a third is on his publisher’s list for the summer of 2012. All of the novels feature the central character of his stories, Mad Mick Murphy, a sometime reporter who lives on a boat in scenic Key West. In reviewing the second novel, Free Range Institution, Booklist said, “...its generous use of the Key West setting will appeal to readers who like local color.” Such readers also won’t want to miss the up-coming Car Wash Blues (Five Star).

That was the double-decked, 48-point headline of the daily Key West Citizen and probably a few other newspapers in South Florida the following day. It was a little misleading, but it did its job because stories on vampires and murders sell newspapers.

When Monroe County sheriff’s Deputy Harry Sawyer rocked my sailboat, Fenian Bastard, and called my name, it was four in the morning and I didn’t know about the murder. When you live on a boat and someone is trying to wake you that early it usually means you’re sinking so you react fast; good news doesn’t come knocking at four A.M.

I was outside in seconds. “What?” I yelled. It took a minute in the dark to realize it was Harry, because he was out of uniform.

“Mick, you didn’t answer the phone,” he said as if that explained why he was there. “The sheriff wants you on Stock Island.”

Stock Island is the first island across the bridge when leaving Key West. Part of it is city property, but the largest section belongs to the county.

“Me?” I yawned and went below. The good news was my sailboat wasn’t sinking.

Harry followed. “Yeah, he woke me at home and told me to bring you to the old mansion at the end of Fifth Street.” He stood in the hatchway. “Right away.”

“Why?” I fumbled into a pair of cargo shorts, put on yesterday’s T-shirt, and grabbed the sun-faded Boston Red Sox cap that accented my shaggy red hair and beard.

“He hung up before saying.” Harry grinned. “But it sounded urgent.”

Bob Pearlman is the county sheriff. We have met socially, but I found it curious he’d call me out at this hour. My experiences have shown that law enforcement and journalists are as compatible as spaghetti sauce and a white shirt.

“No ideas, Harry?” I walked up the dock with him.

“It’s my day off, Mick, so I’m not even sure what they’re working on,” he said. “Ride with me, maybe something will come over the radio.”

“Can doing first-rate work as consistently as Pronzini (Betrayers, 2010, etc.) really lie as effortless as lie makes it seem?” Kirkus Reviews asks in its review of Bill Pronzini’s latest kook in the Nameless series, Camouflage (Forge, July 2011). That seeming effortlessness is the mark of a master, “one of the best in the mystery and suspense field,” as the Washington Post Book World says. Mr. Pronzini is also currently collaborating with his wife, Marcia Muller, on a historical series starring characters he created.

It was the smallest room in the house, at the rear behind the kitchen and pantry. Katie’s room until her eighteenth birthday, when she’d moved to an apartment in San Francisco. The understanding had always been, or so Wyatt had believed, that when Katie left it would become his den. But Ruth said no, insisting they keep it the way it was “in case the silly girl decides to move back home.” That would never happen; like Tom before her, Katie had suffered too long under her mother’s grinding thumb ever to return to the nest. (Laura hadn’t waited until she was eighteen to gain her freedom; she’d gotten herself pregnant and then married at sixteen. She and the boy were now living in Minneapolis with a daughter and a son Wyatt had never seen.) But it was only an excuse anyway. The truth was, Ruth didn’t want him to have a room of his own.

“You don’t need a den,” she kept saying. “Isn’t the living room enough for you?”

No, it wasn’t. The living room wasn’t his, it was hers. So were the master bedroom and the kitchen and the never-occupied guest room (Tom’s bedroom) and her sewing room (Laura’s old room). And so were the rose garden and vegetable garden in the backyard, the flower beds and lawn in front. All Ruth’s. He had been reduced to the role of tenant, and not a rent-free one: It was his pension and Social Security checks that paid the bills.

He had no one to blame but himself, of course. He’d passively allowed her to take control of the house, the kids, himself. Mild-mannered, non-confrontational, easily manipulated, easily controlled — that was Wyatt Potter in a nutshell. He knew it, chafed at it, and yet his placid nature held him powerless. If you looked in the dictionary under the word milquetoast, Ruth had said to him once, it would be his photograph you’d find to illustrate the definition.

She was the exact opposite. Iron-willed, domineering, merciless in her need to have things her way, bend everyone to her will. She had not only alienated her son and daughters with her coldness, her inflexible rules and demands, but nearly all of a dwindling succession of friends. He would have fled from her, too, if only he’d had the gumption. Now it was too late. He was sixty-two years old, not in the peak of health, had been pensioned out of his assistant manager’s job at the bank just in time to collect Social Security, and none of his children was emotionally or financially equipped to care for him. He simply had nowhere else to go.

Thirty-three years — that was how long he’d been married to Ruth. It was difficult after so many years to remember what it was that had attracted him to her in the first place. Certainly not her looks; she was as plain as he was, and stout even before her eating habits added another fifty pounds. Her willful self-assurance, probably. The type of alpha female his sort of man naturally gravitated to.

Their first year together had been good, the next four tolerable until after Laura was born, and the rest... well, nightmarish was too strong a word, but peace and harmony had been virtually nonexistent in his life for the past two and a half decades. Katie had been unplanned, the result of one of the few times Ruth had grudgingly permitted him to satisfy what she referred to as his “carnal male appetite.” And the last. She blamed him for the “accident,” of course, and had refused to allow him into her bed since. Not that he’d asked very often, or cared to in so long he could barely recall what it was like to have a carnal male appetite.

Now, at sixty-two, he had only one appetite left: for the room of his own, where he could be alone to read, listen to music, and watch old movies and TV programs that interested him. (Ruth refused to look at anything other than soap operas, sitcoms, and gory crime shows on the new forty-inch flat-screen high-definition television set she’d bought without telling him. Whenever he turned on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or an old black-and-white film, she immediately switched channels.)

“I’ve never asked you for much,” he said to her one evening, when his den-hunger had reached the critical point. “Please don’t deny me this.”

“You don’t need a den.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why? So you can hide in it, I suppose. Get away from me.”

“No,” he said. Yes, he thought. “It’s a matter of comfort. You like your TV programs, I prefer different ones. Or just to sit quietly and read.”

“Do I try to stop you from reading?”

“No, but I can’t concentrate with the TV blaring—”

“Blaring? I suppose you think I turn the sound up on purpose to annoy you. Well, I don’t. My hearing isn’t what it used to be, you know that. Don’t be so inconsiderate, Wyatt.”

It was impossible to reason with the woman. She turned everything around so that she was right and he was wrong, she made the sacrifices and he was the thoughtless one.

He kept pleading with her just the same. “You have your sewing room. Is it really too much to want a private space of my own?”

“I won’t have you turning Katie’s room into a man cave.”

“A what?”

“You heard me. Man cave. That’s what they call them now.”

“A simple den, for heaven’s sake?”

“Den. Another word for cave. Smelly places men lock themselves into to avoid their wives and responsibilities. Next thing you’ll be wanting a computer so you can look at pictures of naked women.”

“I don’t want a computer. I don’t want to look at pornographic pictures. All I want is a comfortable chair, a small TV set, a CD player—”

“We can’t afford any of that nonsense.”

“—and all my books. Yes, we can. I’ll buy everything at garage sales or Goodwill.”

“No. I won’t have it.”

“Ruth, please—”

“No!”

The next morning she vacuumed and dusted Katie’s room, closed the blinds and frilly curtains over the window that overlooked the backyard, then made him watch as she locked the door and dropped the key into her pocket — the key she had used to keep Katie locked inside as punishment for real or imagined misbehavior as often as Katie had used it for personal privacy.

“There now,” she said. “That settles it.”

Yes, it did. But not the way she thought.

He had never before gone against Ruth’s wishes, and he was well aware of what was likely to happen if he did. But he was determined to have his den. If not with her permission, then without it, through daring and guile, and damn the consequences. And once he had it, he would keep it no matter what she said or did.

It didn’t take him long to develop a plan of action. What he came to think of as an adventure, a covert one that added a small but spicy element of danger to his quest.

Ruth did all their grocery shopping alone, claiming that he slowed her down by dilly-dallying and bought too many useless food and drug items — a pair of gross exaggerations. The next time she went, he called Katie in the city and told her what he proposed to do. She had no objections to the makeover of her old room, in fact encouraged him in the project. Out of spite for her mother, he thought, not because she cared whether or not he had his den. Katie had inherited some of Ruth’s less than endearing traits, though she would have thrown a fit if this had been suggested to her.

Wyatt’s next step was a search for Katie’s room key. Ruth hadn’t bothered to pick a clever hiding place for it; it took only a few minutes to find it, in the back of a drawer in her sewing table. For the time being he left it where it was.

Saturdays from eleven until five o’clock were reserved for Ruth’s weekly visit with her widowed sister Elaine in Bayport. Wyatt made prior arrangements with a locksmith to come by at noon the following Saturday, fetched the key to unlock the door before the man arrived, and then returned it to the sewing drawer. The locksmith replaced the lock with a similar one, after which Wyatt added its key to his key ring. There was virtually no risk in this maneuver. Ruth would have no reason to try to enter the room again during the next month — one cleaning-and-dusting was always good for at least four weeks. And once she laid down the law, she expected him to obey it implicitly.

Over the next few weeks, whenever Ruth was out shopping or away at her sister’s, he began making Katie’s room over into his. He boxed up the relatively few articles of clothing and other possessions that she’d left behind, added a scattering of toilet articles from the adjacent bathroom, and stored the cartons among others in the garage in case she wanted any of it someday. The bedside lamps and the fuzzy white throw rug also went into concealed storage. With the window blinds closed tight, there was no danger of Ruth happening to look inside while she was out puttering in her rose garden.

Seven days later Wyatt elicited the aid of Charlie Ledbetter, one of his few remaining friends, and together they moved out the remaining items. The bed, nightstands, bureau, and small writing desk went to a Goodwill donation center, the mattress and frilly window curtains to a local recycler. The room was then completely empty. Or it was until he and Charlie carried in the half-dozen boxes of books — travel, Western Americana, a complete set of the classics — that Ruth had made him put in the garage because she refused to have “all those dust catchers cluttering up my house.” Charlie, who understood electrical matters, also found a way to hook up the new TV set to the house cable line.

Wyatt made the rounds of thrift shops and the local flea market the following week. A small portable TV set and roller stand were his first purchases, then a combination radio and CD player that a vendor called a “baby boom box.” He returned home just in time to lock the last of the items in his den before Ruth came back.

The next two Saturdays, again with Charlie’s help, he bought and moved in a chair, two medium-size bookcases, and a small oriental rug. The chair was a brown Naugahyde recliner with a tom but reparable arm that cost him surprisingly little at a hospice thrift store. The bookcases, a matching pair stained a light walnut color that went well with the recliner, came from a garage sale. The rug, which looked expensive but wasn’t, had been an impulse buy at another thrift shop — three by four feet in size, an exotic wine-red color with a blue, green, and yellow design and fringed edges.

When he had everything arranged to his satisfaction, he sat down in the recliner and surveyed his domain. It might not be perfect, but it was his and it pleased him — so much so that he couldn’t stop smiling.

There was nothing more to be gained in keeping it a secret from Ruth, he decided. It wouldn’t be possible anyway if he was going to spend time in there. Might as well unveil it to her as soon as she came home. When she saw how simply and inexpensively furnished it was, how happy it made him, she might not even make a fuss.

He should have known better.

As soon as Ruth stepped into the den, she let out a screech like a wounded parrot. Her heavy body went rigid; she spun around glaring, bared her teeth in a wolfish snarl, and growled, “You deceitful sneak! How could you do a thing like this!”

“Ruth, please don’t be upset—”

“Upset? Furious is more like it. Defying me, skulking around behind my back, turning Katie’s room into a man cave when I told you to leave it be. How dare you!”

“I didn’t want to go behind your back, but you just wouldn’t understand how much a room of my own means to me. Don’t you think it looks nice now that it’s finished?”

“It’s hideous! That disgusting rug... I suppose you paid a fortune for it.”

“No, it only cost—”

“What did you do with Katie’s things?”

“Stored them in the garage, all except the furniture.”

“And I suppose you gave that to Goodwill.”

“Yes. As old and worn as it was, it didn’t seem to be worth keeping...”

She made a sound like a dog’s growl. “You’ve lost your mind, Wyatt Potter. Katie will be irate when she finds out.”

“She already knows. I called her before I started the makeover. She didn’t mind, she gave me her blessing.”

“Blessing! I don’t believe it.”

“It’s the truth,” Wyatt said. “She doesn’t care about any of the things she left behind. She’s never coming home again, we both know that—”

“I know no such thing. All I know is that you’ve deceived and defied me. I want all of this... junk taken out of here immediately. I want Katie’s things, what’s left of them, put back where they were.”

The path of least resistance had always been Wyatt’s choice when Ruth threw one of her tantrums. But not this time. Worms can turn if the stakes are high enough; he had already half turned by creating his den on the sly, and without even thinking about it he went the rest of the way.

“No,” he said.

“...What did you say?”

“I said no. The room is mine now and it’s going to stay the way it is.”

Ruth stared at him as if she had never seen him before. “I won’t stand for it! I won’t have it!”

Wyatt said resolutely, “But I will,” and closed the door between them and locked himself inside.

Jonathan King was a journalist for more than two decades before he shut himself away in a cabin in North Carolina to write his first novel, the Edgar-winning The Blue Edge of Midnight. The book, which introduced P.I. Max Freeman, is set in the Everglades, a place the author knows and loves. In the years since his first appearance on the crime-fiction scene, Mr. King, a former police reporter, has produced five more books in the Freeman series and two stand-alones; but he’s never before appeared in EQMM.

He knew when it started. It was right after that song began on the juke, the one with the growly-voiced guy saying: “Yeah, everybody funny, now you funny too.”

That’s when he gripped the car key in his right hand and stuck the pointed end up into the wood under the bar and scored the letter F. The mahogany was soft under there. He could feel the key bite in without applying too much pressure. He kept his other hand wrapped around the bottle of Coors Light, drinking straight from the neck, a sip after each letter he scratched into the surface under the bar until he could feel the sentence form.

First I quit my job.

He kept his eyes up, watching the bartender’s ass when she walked down to the other end. When she turned around, he’d avert his gaze to the mirror in the back of the room, or to the glass fronts of the cabinets where the expensive booze was kept. When she came to ask if he needed another beer he looked directly into her eyes and said, “Yes. Please.” It took until the third round for him to etch in the second sentence.

But don’t tell the wife.

After the fourth beer he put cash next to the empty bottle and left. The bartender called out, “Thank you!” to his back as he made the door. He didn’t bother to turn around.

Shamus Award winner Mike Wiecek takes a new name for his novels and short stories as of this printing. The name Mike Cooper will appear on the two kooks he just sold to Viking, 2012’s Clawback, which features a shadowy but charming corporate fixer, and its sequel with the character. This time out for EQMM he contributes a story of a type we rarely see anymore: an impossible crime tale.

“He could have put the boat at the cruise terminal in Southie,” said Bobby I O’Connell, bumping their unmarked onto the Atlantic Avenue curb. TV news vans crowded the sidewalk, dish antennas pointed to the sky. “Security would’ve been easy over there.”

“The damn thing’s big as a cruise ship, that’s for sure.” Garrick got out and stood a moment, looking over Long Wharf plaza. Uniformed officers stretched a yellow-tape cordon straight across Columbus Park’s small lawn, barely holding the gawkers at bay. Above them loomed the Whiz Bang, five decks of reflective black and dazzling white. A summer breeze blew salt air and jet exhaust from the airport across Boston Harbor. “You own a seagoing colossus like this, I guess you want people to see it.”

They began to shove through the crowd. O’Connell, younger and less patient, broke their path. “What’d the commissioner have to say?” he asked.

“Nothing helpful.” Garrick had listened to a five-minute tirade on his cell phone while they drove over. “Accidental death seems to be what everyone’s hoping for.”

“Better tell the M.E., then.”

At the dock more patrolmen stood with Whiz Bang’s private guards. As they approached, a string of firecrackers went off somewhere along the harbor. Several of the officers flinched. Fourth of July weekend was always noisy, always difficult.

The yacht’s security men looked alert, even nervous. Worried about their jobs, perhaps. Garrick held up his credentials, but the senior guard shook his head.

“I remember you, Detective,” he said. “Go on in. They’re on A Deck, in the atrium.”

“We’ll find it.” Garrick walked up the gangway, running his hand along the mirror finish of its rail.

“You were here before?” said O’Connell, lagging as he squinted at the bridge windows far above them. A white radar antenna rotated slowly on the top roof.

“Courtesy call, last week. You know, VIP security liaison, before Fraxton himself arrived.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” Garrick shook his head. Nobody was happy about the dead billionaire, and furious buck-passing had already started. “The commissioner seems to think I might have missed something.”

On the main deck, a Harbor Unit sergeant waited, mirror-shades pushed up on his head and an MP5 submachine gun across his chest.

“Expecting terrorists?” asked Garrick.

Before the officer could reply, a voice from behind him broke in.

“That’s what I said!” A young woman stepped forward. She was barefoot, wearing a white beach wrap with Whiz Bang emblazoned across one breast. Her eyes were red from recent tears. “Jake is dead and these soldiers come breaking in like it’s Afghanistan or something—”

“The nine-one-one was garbled,” said the sergeant. “Sir. We did not know what to expect.”

“Detective Garrick,” said Garrick. He looked at the woman and thought, four-hundred-dollar haircut. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m Blakely.” The young woman started to hold out her hand, then pulled it back. “We were just—”

“Now, now, Blakely, you don’t have to say anything.” Another man appeared from the shadows, not much older than she was, dressed in a silk aloha shirt and perfectly faded canvas shorts. “Wait for Pop’s lawyer.”

“Jake’s dead, Harrison!” Blakely started to cry again.

“Who might you be?” Garrick noted that he was also barefoot.

“Harrison Fraxton.” He apparently didn’t get the accustomed look of recognition. “Jake Fraxton’s son.”

“Ah.” Garrick nodded. “So what happened?”

Blakely began keening, and Harrison frowned at her before gesturing Garrick forward. “Over here.”

Heavy, bronzed-glass doors swung open before them, noiseless on counterweight fittings. Garrick glanced at O’Connell, who was separating Blakely and the guard, to avoid story contamination, then followed Harrison.

Inside, the room opened up, spanning the entire width of the vessel and rising several stories. Halogen spotlights illuminated sleek leather furniture and original art. Teak gleamed on the walls, between broad windows. Overhead skylights flooded the interior with natural light. Garrick, whose duties had taken him into Boston’s most expensive hotels and residences, tried not to be impressed.

“He — in the elevator.” Harrison’s voice cracked a bit.

To their left, a glass elevator rose up the side of the atrium. Its doors were offset, toward the interior, so the passengers inside could look out and through the tall exterior windows. Now the elevator cab stood at ground level — deck level? wondered Garrick — with its doors open. Closer, he could see a body on the cab’s floor, blood pooled around it and spattered across the glass. A shape lying in the blood looked like a handgun, a semiautomatic of some sort.

Violent, messy death always seemed like an intrusion, but in such opulent surroundings Fraxton’s broken corpse was an outright insult.

Garrick studied the scene, then noticed smudges of blood on the deep-pile carpet. “Who went in?”

“One of the crew — he wanted to see if Pop was really dead.” Harrison’s voice trembled. “I told him to wait in the kitchen.”

The handgun was near Fraxton’s left hand. Smears on the glass suggested he’d fallen forward, striking his head as he went down. Garrick wanted to look more closely, but they couldn’t do anything before Forensics arrived.

He led Harrison back, away from the view. “Can you tell me what you know?”

“I can’t understand why he did it.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yes. I was talking to him, Blakely and me, outside, and then he said he was going to his office, and he came in and we were going back to the outside pool...”

“Office?” said Garrick, then stopped. “Oh, you mean on the yacht. Right.”

“He was completely normal, talking about, oh, nothing, whatever. And then he goes and shoots himself? Less than a minute later?”

Harrison seemed calm, but there was an edge, a degree of agitation, in his voice. He folded his arms, then dropped them to his sides, then put one in the pocket of his shorts and one on his hip. His gaze kept moving back toward the atrium, then jerking away.

“Did you know your father well?” Garrick asked.

“What kind of question is that? Of course.”

“Why do you think he killed himself?”

“But... who else could have done it?”

“The entry wound appeared to be in his back, just below the neck.” Garrick wondered what Harrison had seen, and what he’d already blocked out. “That would be difficult to accomplish on one’s own.”

Harrison’s face opened, shocked, but he said nothing.

“What did you observe, exactly?” Garrick asked.

“Well, we said goodbye — not goodbye, you know, more like ‘see you later.’ Then he was walking toward the elevator. Blakely and I were leaving, so I didn’t see him go in, but I heard it start to go up. And then — there was a gunshot. A bang. We ran inside and there he was, halfway up, maybe twenty feet off the ground.”

“Wait a minute.” Garrick frowned. “He was in the elevator? Alone?”

“Yes.”

“At one of the other fl — decks?”

“In between. It only stops here on the bottom, and on the fourth and fifth levels.”

“Let me get this straight.” Garrick peered at the elevator’s track. “He was alone, inside a glass elevator, with no doors open or even available — and somebody shot him?”

“If he didn’t shoot himself...”

“Did you see anyone leaving the elevator?”

“No. How could they? It was still moving.”

“And there was no one inside?”

“I told you.” Harrison’s emotions finally began to crack through. Anger, grief, pain, all mixed up together — in Garrick’s long experience, the usual reaction.

But he was focused on a different problem. “How long between the gunshot and when you ran back?”

“A few seconds. No more.”

Garrick looked at the elevator. None of its glass was broken. No openings of any kind, except the doors. No place to hide.

“That’s impossible,” he said.

For forty years, Michael Z. Lewin has been a popular and prolific writer of private-eye and police series, non-series tales at both novel and short-story length, and plays for radio. A few years ago, entries in his newest series in the private-eye genre, starring the Italian Lunghi family, in Bath, England, appeared in EQMM. In December of this year, Family Way, a new Lunghi novel, is due to be published in the U.S. by Five Star Press. It’s set during Walcot Nation Day, an annual street party that used to take place on Walcot Street in Bath. An American by birth, the author makes his home in Bath.

The interrogation began conventionally enough. “Please state your name for the tape.”

“Howard Timmins.”

“And, Mr. Timmins, are you known by any other names?”

Timmins squinted up at me, a small man curled even smaller from the gravity of the situation. “You know I am.”

I waited.

“I’m Gordo the Clown,” he said.

“Gordo the Clown.”

“Mostly people just call me Gordo. I’m much better known by that name than my given one. Because of what I do, being Gordo. Well, that’s all I do now I’m not working at Whitney’s anymore.”

“What did you do at Whitney’s?” I asked. Sammonville is not a big town and most people around these parts work for the company one way or another. Originally it made aircraft engine parts but now it’s baby carriages — top-quality carriages that get shipped all over the world. The company’s long story is commemorated in the Sammonville Museum. That’s where my wife works, so I know a lot about it.

“I ran the catering department,” Gordo-Timmins said.

“Ran it? So you had a lot of responsibility?”

For the first time since he was brought into the station he seemed to perk up. “Before the downsizing we fed between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and eighty a day. Plus, the hospitality side, whenever the managers had visitors. I don’t know how many they feed now — I hear they may even close the cafeteria — but it’s a lot less.”

“How long ago were you fired?”

“Made redundant.” A flicker of steel. “I’ve never been fired. I work hard. I give quality.”

“Made redundant.”

“Twenty-seven months.”

“And that hit you hard?”

“It didn’t help. Whitney’s was perfect for me because it amounted to a halftime job and that left me the time to be Gordo. I finished in time to do after-school children’s parties and I had plenty of time to travel to evening parties for children and adults outside of Sammonville. I’ve done shows as far away as a hundred miles.”

“Adults hire clowns for parties?”

“Adults like to be entertained, too.”

“It’s just that when you think about grown-up parties, you don’t automatically think of clowns.”

“There are parties and parties.”

“You advertise?”

“Posters and fliers around the area. And on the Internet.”

“Generally speaking, what kind of clown is Gordo?”

“Today, a sad one.”

“And yesterday?”

“Happy. Excited.”

I didn’t want to get to the nub of the thing too quickly. I find that I get better information if they’ve become relaxed about talking to me. So I said, “So Gordo does slapstick?”

“Of course.”

“Magic?”

“Sure. Both tricks that went right and ones that went wrong — kids love it when a grownup screws up, and adults love it, too. It lets them feel superior.”

“And blue routines?”

“Absolutely. Gordo caters for all tastes.”

The question wasn’t a random one. I’d already interviewed Mrs. Barton. “Was it when you were doing a blue routine that you met Melanie Barton?”

He looked up at me with a wry expression. “You must know it was if you ask that question.”

“Where was the party?”

“It was a corporate event in Bedford. Well, in the entertainment industry we call them corporates but they don’t have to be anything huge. It was just a company party.”

“To mark what occasion?”

“Not going out of business yet? That’s the biggest achievement these days, isn’t it? Only they said it was the boss’s birthday party.”

“What was the company?”

“Caldicott Car Repairs.”

Bedford was less than twenty miles away from Sammonville. “And you met Melanie at the party.”

“Yes.”

“And her husband?”

“The arrogant, self-congratulatory, athletic Jack? Yes, I met Jack Barton at the Caldicott Car Repair summer party.”

“They live in Sammonville, so what was their connection to Caldicott?”

“No idea.”

“Were you the only entertainment act hired that night?”

“There was a disco. Mrs. Caldicott likes clowns, is what her husband told me.”

“Even though the routine was a dirty one?”

“We call it ‘adult,’ and women like sexual material as much as men, if it’s a bit subtle and verbal.”

“So you were subtle and verbal, as Gordo?”

“Certainly. In fact, there was a clown theme. Caldicott, the boss, made a speech to say it was because these were ‘funny’ times. Half the people there dressed up. To tell the truth, I think his wife really gets off on clowns. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had him dress up for her in private. She certainly had the look in her eye after her first half-dozen drinks.”

“What look?”

“The groupie look.” He held my gaze. “Don’t act like I’m crazy. It happens to any of us in show business.”

“And Melanie got the look in her eye, too?”

Gordo glared at me. “Don’t demean what Melanie and I had. It was nothing like what comes over a drunk fantasist.”

“Okay, what did you and Melanie have, then?”

“We were soulmates.”

This caught me by surprise. I had already interviewed the woman, after all. “You felt she was your soulmate?”

“She felt the same.”

“She said so?”

“She didn’t have to. Something just clicked between us. Really clicked.”

“When?”

“Right away. When we met at the bar after I did my routine. She came up and said I was wonderful.” He looked up at me. “Wonderful. That was the word she used. She said I was wonderful and that I’d been speaking to her innermost self. If that’s not soulmates, I don’t know what is.”

“And one thing led to another.”

“Don’t make it sound sordid or trivial.”

“Okay, what happened?”

“When we were at the bar talking, her odious and idiotic husband came in.” “He dragged her away?”

“He barely noticed us. So I slipped Melanie a business card while he was getting drinks. Two drinks. And neither of them for her.”

“Two for himself?”

“One for another woman.”

“And the card you gave Melanie was for Gordo?”

“Yes.”

“And she called you?”

“Monday.”

Today was Wednesday. “To meet up today?”

“To come to her house today. At two.”

“And how long ago was the party where you met?”

“Friday.”

“Had you spoken with her since then?”

“No.”

“But you went to her home today without hesitation?”

“Yes. I’d been dreaming day and night about her call. I knew, just knew, that we’d connected. And then the call came.”

“And when you got to her house, how was she?”

“Friendly.”

“Not surprised to see you?”

“She’d invited me over.”

“I only meant that she hadn’t seen you other than as Gordo.”

“I was still the same person.”

“But you didn’t dress up as Gordo?”

He hesitated. “Not exactly. I wore the jacket I’d worn on the night but no face paint.”

“Or red nose.”

“Or red nose.”

“And she was friendly.”

“Very friendly.”

“Not resistant to your advances?”

Gordo laughed.

His dismissal of this question confirmed what Melanie had already told me.

He said, “She practically dragged me to the bedroom.”

“And there?”

“We made love. I mean love. The real thing. Not something animals can do. We did what only human beings with a real connection can do.”

“So she enjoyed it.”

“She certainly did.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. I... I know enough to know.”

I let that go. “Okay. And what happened then?”

“At about three-thirty there were noises downstairs in the house.”

“What did Melanie say about them?”

“She said to ignore them.” He frowned. “She said they weren’t anything to worry about.”

“But...?”

“A few minutes later her bottom-drivel of a husband, Jack, came in.”

“Into the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“Without knocking?”

“Just walked right in.”

“Was he carrying anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“A weapon of some kind? A gun, a bat, a bust of Beethoven?”

“A candlestick or a lead pipe? No, nothing. He just walked in and said, ‘Whose car is that in the driveway?’ ”

“Your car was outside?”

“She hadn’t told me not to leave it there.”

“And what did Melanie do?”

“She grabbed me and said, ‘Don’t hurt him, Jack, please don’t hurt him.’ ”

“So she thought he might hurt you?”

“It seemed like it.”

“And what did Jack do?”

“He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at us. At me.”

“And?”

“Then he said, ‘This is payback for Barbara? This?’ ”

“And then?”

“Melanie said to me, ‘I think you’d better go.’ And when I hesitated she said, ‘He won’t hurt me.’ Then ‘Please, Gordo, go.’ So I rolled out of the bed to where my clothes and stuff were lying on the floor.”

“And?”

“And I dressed myself. But I didn’t run and I didn’t hurry, because I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. Melanie invited me there because we had a true connection. And Jack Barton was a grotesque and odious man. I’d seen him pawing other women at the party. Even taking their hands and moving them to touch him down there. You know. Down there. Melanie deserved so much better.”

“So you dressed. And what was Jack doing?”

“Standing there, just looking from me to her and back again. And then he said, ‘This is for Barbara?’ again. And she said, ‘For Barbara, Juanita, Yvonne, and all the others.’ And he said, ‘With a clown? A scruffy little clown?’ ”

“And?”

“And then he started laughing.”

“And then?”

“He kept laughing. And looking me in the eyes.”

“And then?”

“I killed him.”

“How?”

“My adult Gordo jacket is stocked with tricks and implements. I had throwing knives in a pocket. I used one of them.”

“You threw it?”

“I stabbed him. In the heart. Well, where a heart would be in a normal man.”

“And?”

“He died. Pretty quickly, I think. The knife went in up to the hilt.”

How he came to have the knife was important. If he only had it because he thought he might have to perform for Melanie, it wouldn’t constitute premeditation. He’d probably get off with murder two.

“You stabbed Jack and he died.”

“Yes.”

“Though he wasn’t threatening you with anything.”

“No.”

“Not even with his fists or hands or posture? He was a wrestler in college.”

“No, he wasn’t threatening me at all.”

“So he was just standing there.”

Anger rose on Gordo’s face. He sat up in his chair. “He was not just standing there.”

“So what was he doing that provoked you so much.”

“He was saying, ‘With a clown? With a clown?’ ” He glared at me. “Can’t you picture what I’m saying to you? Vile Jack Barton was repeating, ‘With a clown,’ and he was laughing at me. Laughing at me.”

So there it was. A murder that happened because the victim had laughed at a clown.

Some of the most hardboiled of writers have led quiet, uneventful lives. Not so Clark Howard, and now that his highly autobiographical novel Hard City, first published in hardcover in 1990, is available in many e-editions, including Barnes and Noble’s Nook, his fans will be able to see how some of the themes in his fiction developed. Of course, Mr. Howard is not only a fiction writer; he is also a celebrated true-crime writer who has spent a lot of time around prisons, and those experiences have found their way into stories such as this one.

A creature of habit, Martin Sloan walked the same circle every day when he arrived home from work: across the living room to the bedroom to hang up his coat and tie, back across the living room to the refrigerator in the kitchen for a bottle of beer, back into the living room to drop into his favorite chair, slip out of his shoes, plant his feet on an ottoman that matched the chair, put on his glasses, use the remote to turn on the television, and take that first long, cold swallow of beer as the early news came on.

He expected the lead story in the news to be either more service personnel killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the continued exodus of people from the Gulf Coast, where the British Petroleum oil spill had now, like a forest fire, spread for miles in every direction, contaminating hundreds of fishing communities.

To Sloan’s surprise, however, the lead story that evening was a local one.

“In a surprise move at the state prison this afternoon,” the anchorwoman announced, “convicted murderer Roger Kalb, due to be executed on Thursday, chose to be hanged rather them die by lethal injection. Kalb, convicted of killing his wife and her lover twenty-one years ago, is the last remaining death-row inmate who has the option of how to die. Sentenced to death just two months before the state adopted lethal injection as its method of capital punishment, Kalb was condemned while hanging was still the prescribed procedure. The law therefore gives him the option of choosing which way he is to die: by the old method of the rope, or the newer, supposedly more humane method of the needle. Nine other condemned killers have already been given this option, and all nine have chosen lethal injection. Kalb, because of lengthy appeals, remains the only one of death row’s eleven condemned prisoners to still have the right to choose.

“Kalb’s surprising choice was announced by his attorney after a visit with the condemned man earlier today. A formal statement from the Department of Corrections is said to be forthcoming—”

Martin Sloan sat as still as a statue, holding the open bottle of beer, lips parted in silent surprise, eyes staring unblinkingly at the sight of an old news tape of Roger Kalb being led from a courtroom after being sentenced to die for his crime. Sloan slowly shook his head.

Choosing a noose and a trapdoor over simply going to sleep with needles in both arms. What was Kalb thinking?

EQMM readers know Dave Zeltserman best as the creator of the Julius Katz series, whose entry “Archie’s Been Framed” won the 2010 Readers Award. We’ve got another Julius Katz story coming soon; meanwhile, here’s a very different kind of tale from the Boston author. A complete Katz novel is now available in e-format, for those anxious to see more of the epicurean P.I. and the humanlike computer Archie. See Julius Katz and Archie (June 1, 2011).

Lawrence Talbot lowered himself to the floor the moment he saw the three men wearing ski masks enter the bank, not waiting for the men to brandish their weapons and shout out their orders. He prayed everyone else in the bank would do the same. If they did, and none of the tellers hit their silent alarms, then this robbery would be over fast. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and if everyone cooperated and the police didn’t show up, he could still be where he needed to be by six, seven at the latest, even if the police spent hours questioning them. Today of all days this had to happen!

The men moved quickly as they pulled assault rifles out from under their trench coats and pointed their weapons towards the scattering of people in the bank, all the while yelling for everyone to get down on their stomachs with their hands on their heads, and to do so fast or they’d get their heads blown off. Lawrence was the first one to comply, but before he did he took a quick inventory. Outside of the two tellers working, as well as the bank manager, there were five bank customers: a young pregnant woman who looked like she was about to go into labor at any moment, a frail elderly man who had struggled just minutes earlier to make his way up to a teller’s window with the aid of his cane, a middle-aged woman, her teenage son, and a hard-looking square-jawed man of about thirty-five. The elderly man didn’t move fast enough for them and one of the robbers struck him across the back with the barrel of his assault rifle, sending the elderly man crashing to the floor and crying out in pain. The square-jawed man, who Lawrence would later learn was an ex-Marine named Tim Simons, was lowering himself slowly to the floor, all the while eyeing the bank robber who had hit the elderly man. His intention was obvious to Lawrence; he was going to make a run at the robber. This wasn’t good. If this man did that, shots would be fired and the robbery would become a mess, which would draw the police within minutes and make things even worse. Lawrence couldn’t allow that to happen.

“Do what they’re telling you to do,” Lawrence ordered Simons, which froze Simons and drew the attention of one of the robbers, who moved quickly over to them and poked the ex-Marine hard in the forehead with the tip of his rifle.

“You trying to be a hero?” the robber asked Simons. The ex-Marine grimaced from the blow and went down on his stomach, but not without first fixing a dead stare at Lawrence.

“You’re a coward,” he told Lawrence.

“Shut your mouth,” the robber warned Simons. Even with the ski mask covering his face, Lawrence could tell that the robber was smirking at him, as if he were agreeing with Simons that Lawrence was little more than a weakling and a coward. The elderly man was still whimpering in pain. Lawrence couldn’t see the young pregnant woman from where he was lying, but he could hear her crying softly somewhere behind him. That was okay. All of it was okay. As long as these bank robbers finished what they needed to do and left the bank before the police came. As long as this didn’t turn into some sort of hostage situation. Because Lawrence couldn’t be there that night. Not this night. Not with what he had to do. He prayed that they would finish emptying the cash drawers and be gone before the police came.

Then Lawrence heard the sirens off in the distance and felt a sickening feeling deep in his gut. From the lack of reaction from any of the others, it was clear he had heard the sirens before them, but within seconds they would be hearing them too. Soon those sirens would be screaming. There was no denying it any longer. The police were on their way and Lawrence’s worst fears were going to be realized.

The Boston Globe has said of Loren D. Estleman that he’s “a writer of a sort increasingly rare... so given to his work as to spontaneously combust to genius.” EQMM agrees; there are touches of brilliance in almost everything this extraordinarily versatile writer writes. The series to which this new story belongs is Mr. Estleman’s homage to Rex Stout, and it stands out, in part, due to its quietly witty prose. For something more in the hardboiled line by the Michigan author, see his new Amos Walker P.I. novel, Infernal Angels.

I saw it coining the minute the little boob took Too Many Cooks down from the shelf. I just didn’t know what lunatic form it would take this time.

He kept all his first-edition Nero Wolfes, bound for him in green cloth — his favorite color — within easy reach because he never made a move without consulting the Gospel According to Archie Goodwin. He’d cracked that nut ten thousand times, but always managed to pick out something fresh to nibble on.

If you’re familiar with the series, you know Wolfe is a fat eccentric genius who solves baffling mysteries (usually of the murder sort) when he isn’t busy growing orchids or eating ritzy food prepared by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Claudius Lyon — who wasn’t born with that name but picked it up because it’s Nero Wolfe inside out, more or less — is just as fat, and eccentric enough for both of them, but as to genius — well, there’s a fine line between it and goofy. He’s also a good foot shorter, a fact he failed to consider when he bought his Wolfe-ish townhouse in Brooklyn and filled it with furniture built to his idol’s scale. As a result, the big green leather chair behind the Uruguayan fruitwood desk swallows him up when he sits in it and his teeny feet swing six inches short of the floor.

Nevertheless, he sits in it four hours every weekday, two in the morning and two in the late afternoon, because that’s what Wolfe does. The rest of the day he spends with his tomatoes in the plant room on the roof and feeding his fat face with brisket and gefilte cooked by Gus, who is regarded as the finest kosher chef in the five boroughs — regarded by Gus, anyway. I can barely stomach the stuff myself, but it’s better than what they feed you in Sing Sing, and it’s part of my salary.

Lyon isn’t nearly as busy a detective as Wolfe, which is swell by me on account of the royalties he gets from an invention of his dead father’s pays the bills. He doesn’t charge for his services anyway. He can’t, without a private investigator’s license and with Captain Stoddard chomping at the bit to bust him the minute a dollar appears in his chubby little fist for a feat of detection. Stoddard’s the meanest man in the Brooklyn P.D., an institution that never recruited anyone on the basis of genteel good manners.

Me, I’m only here because my name is Arnie Woodbine. I type ten errors a minute and the best deduction I ever made put me in the joint for the second time, but when you say the name fast it sounds kind of like Archie Goodwin, who takes notes and does the heavy lifting for Wolfe and writes about his boss’s exploits for suety little bookworms like Lyon to read.

Too Many Cooks takes the fat Manhattan genius on a rare train trip to a chefs’ convention, which, of course, leads to murder or Goodwin wouldn’t have bothered to publish the account. Wolfe never leaves his brownstone on business, but will do so for recreation if it has anything to do with orchids or haute cuisine. So this time the story gave Lyon the bright idea that he needed to do the same. How could anyone take his loony masquerade seriously if he didn’t do everything his role model did, straight down the line?

The catch was, growing orchids is beyond his abilities, and there are no tomato-growing shows because they would be as boring as his shift in the plant room, which he uses to sneak a few chapters of Trixie Belden and the Bobbsey Twins. Any quadruple amputee with the IQ of a TV weather girl can turn a tomato seed into a tomato. As for preparing food for dining, Lyon can’t make a sandwich. Those things stumped him for a while. He sat dandling his sausage-shaped legs under the big desk, pouting like a fat baby making up its mind where to throw its bowl of strained kale. Which bothered me, because without a client or a whodunit to distract him I couldn’t risk adding a zero to my pay-check with him there in the room.

This went on for an hour after he put down the book. I went out for the mail, and when I came back with his copies of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Shoots & Sprouts (“Ketchup vs. Catsup: The Controversy Escalates”), I found him foraging deep in one ear with a chunky forefinger. That gesture was his version of Wolfe pushing his lips in and out to indicate he’d untied a knotty problem after much deliberation.

“Arnie,” he said, fastidiously wiping his finger with a green silk handkerchief, “where do you stand in regard to the opera?”

“A block away. Farther if I’m driving. Why, fixing to snag a hat with horns and pigtails and waddle into the chorus?” Actually I can take the music or leave it, galloping hippos and all, but I got pinched once picking pockets in the lobby of the Met, and my mug was taped to every ticket booth in town.

“I’ve never given it much consideration myself. Goodwin hardly ever mentions the subject, so I must infer it presents no diversion to his employer.” Yeah, he talks like that. I went online so many times to figure out what he was getting at, the Internet stopped taking my calls. Goodwin, I hear, is on his third Webster’s Second. “However, one adjusts as necessary.”

I made my face discreet. He encouraged me to needle him, like you-know-who does you-know-who, but rubbing it in about botany and vittles would be doing the polka on thin ice. His pudgy kisser screwed tight and turned purple when he got sore; no sight to take to lunch.

“I’ll see what’s playing.” I sat down at my desk and turned on the monitor.

“That would be placing the conveyance in reverse order with the equine. Call my tailor.”

“You have a tailor?” He dresses good, give or take an untucked shirttail, in three-piece suits and a tie, after His Portliness, but I assumed he did his shopping in the Husky Boy section at Skinnerman’s. At the time I hadn’t been with him long enough for him to split his britches and require a replacement.

“Certainly. I’m not a cowpuncher. Krekor Messassarian, spelled the way it sounds. He’s in the Brooklyn directory.”

Again to spare me the spectacle of that angry Gerber face I refrained from pointing out that the Yellow Pages is a dandy place to look up somebody from 1993, and opened it. Messassarian wasn’t as hard to find as I’d thought; I slid my finger down that column under Clothing and Alterations until I came to a name that ran smack into the margin.

I got him right away. The heavily accented voice walked me through the pronunciation of his name and agreed to come by that evening for dinner and a first fitting.

He turned out to be an Armenian of seventy or a hundred, with bloodhound features and spectacles as thick as glass ashtrays. The badge of his profession, a length of yellow tape measure, hung around his neck. He smelled like a canvas dropcloth that had been left out on the back porch for a year. Messassarian takes too long to write, so I’ll just call him Musty.

His head bent close to his blintz to see what he was eating. I couldn’t imagine how he handled a bitty thing like a needle. Lyon said he wanted a full-dress suit with all the trimmings: white tie, silk hat, and cape with a white satin lining. If the opera scheme didn’t pan out, he could always put on the getup and argue Home Rule for Ireland with Queen Victoria. In the front room I helped out by taking Musty’s dog-eared memorandum book while he measured and recorded the dimensions, which were fantastic. The circumference was the same as the height and the inseam was my collar size. A few dozen more bagels with a shmear and a case of cream sodas and Lyon could go to the Summer Olympics as the beach volleyball.

The old tailor made miserable noises as he went about his business. I guessed it was all the kneeling and squatting and stooping and having to get back up, or maybe it was his way of humming on the job; but Lyon, who knew him better, noticed it, too, and inquired about his health.

“Fit as fiddles,” the other assured him, and that seemed to end the conversation on the subject. Then he stopped in the middle of measuring for armholes and said, “I am robbed.”

Lyon started, chins quivering. “I was under the impression my account was up to date.”

“Oh, not by you, Mister Clod.” I swear that’s what he called him. I don’t doctor these reports. “Someone in my own shop is the culprit. He — or she — has made off with the rarest coin in my collection.”

That put the kibosh on that fitting. Aida and tomatoes and even the fancy dining, look out! When a mystery reared its big black question-mark-shaped head, everything else was window dressing. As I said, I’m not convinced science would thank Lyon for willing his brain to it, but the only time he didn’t seem like just a cheap knockoff was when he had a Gordian knot to sink his fat little fingers into. We adjourned to the office, where Musty sat in the big orange leather chair reserved for the guest of honor while his host squirmed happily on the other side, gulping cream soda and burping a merry little tune.

The Armenian, we found out, liked to fool around with obsolete hard currency when he wasn’t cutting out suits. He had, he flattered himself, one of the best collections in three counties, exhibited at shows, and two years ago had been named to the Numismatists Hall of Fame by Jingle, the magazine of the trade.

“I must confess,” he confessed, with another little groan, “to carelessness on occasion. Many is the time I’ve neglected to return a coin to its case after taking it out for examination or to show to a colleague, and have panicked upon this discovery until the item resurfaced among a jumble of lesser coins on my work table. I am struggling to eliminate this fault.”

“Phooey.” Try as he had, the little poseur had never been able to duplicate the Master’s Pfui; each attempt peppered his blotter with spit, so he’d given it up as unsightly and unsanitary. “An overmeticulous man is twice as likely as a slovenly one to make a catastrophic mistake. Please continue.”

The coin that had gone astray this time was a doozy: the only known surviving shekel minted in the first century B.C. by one Axolotl II — the Great, was the moniker historians had hung on him. He was a Persian king who had ordered it to be issued to commemorate some great victory or other over a province in China.

“In gold, natch,” I interjected, and got Lyon’s peeved-baby look for the effort. I bent over my scratch pad to record the proceedings.

“Zinc, actually.” Musty kept his gaze on Lyon. “The material is not so important as the historical value. A most unusual design, no larger than a nickel, but pierced above and below and to each side of Axolotl’s embossed profile, representing the four directions of the compass. To the East, the wisdom of the Orient; to the North, the ferocity of the barbarian hordes; to the West, the might of imperial Rome; and to the South, the culture of ancient Greece. Legend says the king was going blind, and decreed the coin contain these tactile features that he might still appreciate its significance by touch. I am myself nearsighted, which may explain my interest.”

“Splendid. Our mints are more concerned with befuddling potential counterfeiters than celebrating man’s accomplishments.”

“What’s this doodad worth?” I asked.

“Thousands. It’s the biggest investment I ever made.”

I checked this notation. I had as good a chance of laying hands on it as anyone, and I knew a fence who dealt in coins.

Musty groaned again. “It is the old story. When I saw the case was empty, I naturally assumed I’d blundered again and that it would resurface. I’d had it out recently for cataloguing, so that appeared probable. Yet a number of thorough searches of the shop have failed to turn it up.”

“Have you consulted the police?” Lyon’s reedy tenor always climbs to a squeak when he refers to the authorities. They represent Captain Stoddard in his mind, and he’s even more afraid of that particular paid-up member of the barbarian hordes than I am; and I’m the expert on life in the cooler.

“I am tom as to whether I should. My people have been with me a long time, and I should not wish to subject them to the humiliation of questioning.”

I made a mental note to remember Krekor Messassarian. If my billet with Lyon ever blew up, I couldn’t think of a better sheep to fleece.

Lyon excavated his diamond-and-platinum watch from its vest pocket and folds of fat; the best dip in the state could lose fingers trying to lift it if the pigeon moved wrong. I’d had my eye on it myself, but I doubted I could fool him with a tin ringer. Anyway, he was a chicken you could pluck from here to Easy Street if you avoided flash.

“It’s late, and I have a morning appointment to show a prime specimen of Eastern Plum to an official with the Knickerbocker Tomato Council, which may name the species in my honor.” This was news to me, and therefore a bald-faced lie, as I was in charge of all communications into and out of the townhouse. Never underestimate the capacity of a little round speck in the firmament to pump himself up into a prize ass. “Please provide Mr. Woodbine with the particulars, including the names of all the members of your staff, and he will conduct a discreet inquiry in the morning.”

He hopped down from his chair and circled the desk to offer a puffy little hand. This was the supreme tribute, as in imitation of his personal deity he seldom made physical contact with others of his genus. Musty’s reaction was transparent and unappreciative; it was like kneading dough. Lyon entered his private elevator, whose gears hawked and spat and started pulling him up hand over hand to his bedroom.

I spent a quarter-hour wheedling the names and known history of the people who worked for him out of the sap — the old tailor, I mean; it doesn’t do to tip one’s mitt in front of a pumpkin ripe for the thumping — at the end of which he fingered his tape measure, adjusted the twin aquariums he wore over his eyes, and said, “You will be discreet? People think tailors are relics nowadays. The men’s store at Skinnerman’s offers better benefits, and doesn’t care whether a seam is stitched by hand or fused with glue. I wouldn’t know how to replace them if they’re offended enough to resign.”

“Trust me, Mus — Mr. Messassarian,” I said. Hadn’t I sold a venture capitalist his own boat, with his bottle of Asti Spumante still chilling in the refrigerator? “They’ll think I’m there to tell ’em they won the Irish Sweepstakes.”

He went out the front door with a puzzled expression on his long weary face. Sometimes I lay it on as thick as a thirty-dollar steak. Lyon is such an easy mark I’m in danger of losing my fine edge. A man needs a challenge if he’s going to hold his own on the pro circuit.

“The plot for ‘Cold War’,” Australian fiction writer, former journalist, and vineyard owner Cheryl Rogers told EQMM, “came to me after a discovery made by my husband in our vineyard several years ago. The... Queen of Crime competition provided the incentive to research and write the story.” That yearly competition, sponsored by Partners in Crime, Sydney, New South Wales, yielded a win for Ms. Rogers for “Cold War,” one of two suck prizes she has received from the organization.

Typical. I break all speed records, risking double demerits on a designated tourist route, only to find my favourite cop’s beaten me to the action. Detective Sergeant Rod Gudgeon’s handing out barrier tape to a couple of uniforms as I land the company hatchback beside his unmarked V8. So much for my scoop. While the weather may have been psychotic enough lately to rate as front-page news, my dear readers are over it. And I’m with them. Well, weather’s not exactly murder, is it? The suspicious death of a wine-industry patriarch is quite another story.

It’s early afternoon and a skittish, dry easterly’s teasing up the skirts along a chorus line of casuarina trees edging the drive to this vineyard estate winery. It’s in a semi-rural enclave on the outskirts of the city. A river valley bordered by a northbound arterial highway and the meandering vein I’ve just burned, just a hoot west of the trans-Australian rail link.

Picture-perfect lines of chardonnay, Verdelho, and cabernet sauvignon shimmer lime-green against a hard summer sky and even harder red loam. It’s strong soil here, in the valley where I grew up. Plant feathers and you’ll grow chickens, Stefi. That’s what my dad used to say, God rest him. Sacrilege to think of Saxon Swayne staining this honest dirt with his blood.

“Ah, the weather girl,” the DS says tiredly as I break out of the hatchback to front him. Spaniel eyes roll. Must be the heat. “If I’d known you were going to low-fly, I’d have alerted Traffic.”

The mad, hot wind combines with the roar of an inward-bound British Airways jumbo to whip away my crack about raising revenue. Just as well, maybe. Gudgeon and I have a testy relationship. Made worse by the knowledge that we need each other, professionally speaking.

He says he doesn’t trust journos. Though he’s happy enough to use hacks like me whenever he crawls out from under his rock to appeal for public help.

Not that I can claim any lack of prejudice, either. Specially towards pedants like Gudgeon. We’ve had a bit of a mutual Cold War thing going ever since he put my dad in the slammer.

We watch in silence as the jumbo crab-walks through its descent, in deference to some serious buffeting. I wait for the grit to settle, then get down to business. “I understand there’s been a suspicious death, Sergeant?”

“Nah, Stefi.” Gudgeon’s balled fist indicates the uniform crew taping off a patch of chardonnay near a headland, a couple of hundred metres south of where we’re parked. The skittering tape piques the curiosity of a pair of white Embden geese, which move in, honking slander. “The boys’re just marking out a plot for me to grow vegetables when I retire.”

There’s an afternoon deadline looming and I need to meet it to get this story in the evening edition and stay a step ahead of our morning rival. “Can you confirm the deceased is Saxon Swayne, Sergeant?”

“You know I can’t confirm anything until we’ve run a few tests, made the formal ID.” Gudgeon’s as giving as a clam. Rheumy eyes narrow. “How’d you hear about this, anyway? It hasn’t gone out yet on the scanner.”

“Anonymous tip to the news desk,” I lie. “Local knowledge. Educated guess as to the identity of the victim. Any chance of a closer look at the crime scene?”

“Sure.” Don’t you just hate it when a man’s smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes? “About the same chance as a snowball’s in hell.”

I’m waved away with the promise of a spot at the media free-for-all. That’s several hours away. The smirk on the face of the DS tells me he’s well aware the timing is too late for my deadline.

He’s still grinning as he shuffles off to greet a couple of underlings pulling up in a white Commodore. I recognise my old schoolmate and regular informant, DC Anna Swift, behind the wheel. She’s a fast-talking blonde with a penchant for motors. Got stuck with the nickname “Spanner” in sixth grade and claims to like it. Says it teams nicely with her blue boiler suit and killer heels.

The tall guy unfolding himself from the passenger seat must be her new partner in Major Crime, DC Jack Darwin. Science graduate. Botany major. We haven’t been formally introduced, but it’s another educated guess. He’s wearing a floral shirt. Geeky. Flower child. Even has Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” as the ringtone on his mobile, for Godsakes! That’s the character assassination according to Spanner. Strange she didn’t mention he’s a dead ringer for the eminently edible Rupert Penry-Jones.

I forgo the introductions and wave a brief hello. Don’t want Gudgeon sussing that Spanner’s the reason I’m here. I console myself by snapping a couple of rear shots as the investigative team marches out to the crime scene.

Then I head to the homestead, where a red-eyed Mitzi Swayne, clad in electric blue Lycra and with a sweatband spiking her red curls, confirms what I already know.

“One of the workmen thought he heard a scream early. Later, when Saxon didn’t show up for lunch, he went to investigate. Found him dead as a... what is it? Ah yes! Donut.”

Mitzi’s being comforted by one of Gudgeon’s guard dogs, who concedes to her demand to let me inside when I offer condolences and a quite plausible line about putting together an appropriate obituary.

If it wasn’t for Mitzi, I’d still be languishing on the social pages of our local rag. Then I started trailing the district’s leading socialite through the courts as she graduated from driving offences to fraud. Public opinion is that she’d be behind bars were it not for a slick-talking lawyer spurred to great heights by the size of Saxon Swayne’s wallet.

“How would you describe your late husband?” I say gently as the WPC busies herself making tea.

Mitzi dabs at her cheek with a tissue before giving her considered response. “Corpulent. Arrogant. Flatulent. Merciless. Unscrupulous. Conscienceless. Dishonest...” she says, sotto-voiced. “Shall I go on?”

My pen hovers and I glance uneasily towards the kitchen, where there’s the reassuring clatter of crockery.

“That won’t look good in print, Mitzi,” I say sympathetically, inwardly marvelling at her command of English. It’s Mitzi’s second language and she’s the fourth wife. Eyebrows shot up in the district when Swayne took off on a trade mission to the Ukraine and brought back the flirty-something redhead, half his age. That was five years back and I guess the honeymoon’s over.

“We both know my husband has... had... his share of enemies, Stefi.” She plucks at that tissue, ripping it to shreds. “Is it any wonder that he’s now lying dead in a field, his skull split open like an overripe melon?”

My heart’s sinking at about the same rate as my stomach’s pitching north. Mitzi’s giving me nothing quotable and I need to advise her to soften her delivery when she makes her statement. After all, she only has a couple of squillion reasons for wanting her husband dead.

“Can you think of anyone in particular?” I prompt.

Mitzi frowns and taps her front tooth with a pink-varnished nail extension. “I can’t think of many...” she starts, but adds “...who didn’t want Saxon eliminated, out of the picture, poof!” Pink extensions spread-eagle.

She names a neighbour prosecuted over spray damage to a patch of the estate’s vines, a couple of disgruntled former employees, a bitter ex-wife. Not to mention the dozen or so grape growers forced out of business by Swayne’s decision to terminate contracts in the face of the growing surplus of wine grapes across Australia.

I take notes as fast as my shorthand speed allows.

Then stop.

“And, of course, there was that dreadful business with your father,” she goes on, echoing my own disquiet. “You must be extremely bitter that he ended up in jail? Then such a tragic end...”

“I’m not quite bitter enough to have killed your husband,” I shoot back.

It comes out a little too loud.

My timing isn’t perfect, either. The WPC’s just coming in with the tea tray and you can bet she’ll be on her hooter to Gudgeon the moment my cup’s drained.

My hand’s shaking as I down the scalding liquid and I notice Mitzi and the Rottweiler exchanging glances.

Then I make my excuses and leave to feed Spanner a few choice facts. It’s the least I can do. She’s a reliable informant and has tossed me a steady run of front-page stories since making the leap from Traffic to Major Crime. The coroner’s van is pulling out onto the casuarina-lined drive leading from the homestead, past the winery complex and out to the main drag, as I emerge into the light. Just in time to zoom in for another pic.

Gudgeon’s V8 has gone, I note with some relief. An unusually pale Spanner and a chatty Jack Darwin are just making their way back to the Commodore.

Darwin’s prattling, something about “Vitis vinifera,” but dries up as Spanner starts the introductions.

Between gulps of air.

“Sorry. Bit queasy.” She shoots her partner a sideways glance and I’m not sure if it’s the crime scene or the conversation that’s turned her. “Jack Darwin, a.k.a. ‘Charlie’ for the obvious. Meet Stefi Flanders. Stef writes for the—”

“The Western Evening Times!” The DC steps forward and clasps my hand. His mitt’s big. And disarmingly warm. Mine tingles. Not unpleasantly, either. Spooky. “What a delight to meet the Stefany Flanders. I’ve been following your in-depth coverage of this crazy weather with avid interest.”

Jack squints skywards and I hear myself prattling like a tweenager. Freak snowfalls in the eastern ranges. Sydney enveloped in a maelstrom of red dust. Not to mention the Category Five tropical cyclone seething just off the North West Cape.

My interest in the weather has undergone a miraculous resurrection. In stark contrast to Spanner, who looks like she might throw up. I pause to consider whether to confide details of a feature I’m compiling on bushfire prediction methods, but the DCs aren’t listening.

“B737-800, Broome to Perth flight. Twin engines. Look, Spanner!” Darwin’s line of sight’s tracking an inbound Qantas flight. And here was me thinking he was squinting at stars.

“Turbofans. One of the most popular engines in commercial aviation.” The colour floods back into Spanner’s cheeks as she warms to her favourite topic. Motors. I swear that girl has engine oil coursing through her veins. “More than four thou CFM56-7B’s in operation. Swept fans. Advanced compressor parts. It’s one of the most modem and efficient—”

“Ahem.” I tap my watch face. It’s almost two. “I’m battling a deadline, okay?” I’m already scribbling names onto a spare sheet of paper. “According to Mitzi, the suspects include a disgruntled neighbour, who I know just happens to be one of a dozen grape growers upset because Swayne had tom up their contracts. Then there’s a couple of ex-employees and a former wife, all of whom wished the wine chief dead. Threats were made. Publicly. There are witnesses. Not to mention Mitzi herself.”

I pause to take in an awkward silence. That’s broken when Spanner clears her throat and speaks.

“And of course, there’s you, Stef.” Vineyard loam puffs to dust as killer heels kick in. “What with your dad and all. The Grudge’ll want us to eliminate you from our inquiries.”

Reluctantly, I admit to my whereabouts since six, when Swayne was last sighted upright. Got up, washed hair, got to work 7:30 A.M. Pity the hairy male who shares my bed can’t act as a character witness. Okay, so Alfie’s a tomcat. And neutered.

Spanner heads off towards the winery complex to check out the suspects so far. I hand Darwin my business card before hunkering down behind the steering wheel of the hatchback to head back to the office and file some copy.

“If there’s a breakthrough, anything at all, you’ll let me know, okay?”

He takes the card, but the smile’s somewhat distant. “Sure.”