by Ellery Queen
“From her window—” I heard Mrs. Fattier say, dragging out her vowels as women often do when discussing a tragedy.
I edged closer. “Mr. Cryptic,” Mrs. Fattier said in greeting, and Gates gave his ridiculous little salute. I joined the conversation.
Mrs. Vixton had committed suicide, I was told, by leaping from the south window of her apartment while the horrified Mr. Vixton looked on. A typewritten signed note was found later, expressing Mrs. Vixton’s despondency and her desire to leave this world. I did not mention that I had seen Mrs. Vixton resplendent in mid-air the morning of her death. I did not think it wise in light of the fact that the Vixtons lived on the fourteenth floor, in the apartment below mine.
The matter of Mrs. Vixton’s gravity-assisted death kept creeping into my mind that afternoon as I sat through an advance showing of Life’s Slender Thread, a French import about, believe it or not, a man who pushes his mistress from a high window rather than turn her over to a gangland czar. It was a happy-ending film of unlikely gimmickry, small consequence, and incoherent subtitles.
Yet the movie did create a certain mood. When I left the theater I decided to call on Mr. Vixton before writing my copy.
Mr. Vixton was of medium-height, a pear-shaped man in his fifties with a sleek set to his neck and shoulders that suggested that once he might have been lean and muscular. We shook hands and he invited me into his apartment, a twin to my own but for Vixton’s tasteless and mismatched furniture on a riotous green-and-black carpet. The carpet alone might have driven Mrs. Vixton to suicide. But I knew that it wasn’t suicide.
“Sit down, Cryptic,” Mr. Vixton invited, waving a compact arm toward a low sofa with clear lucite arms.
I sat, glancing at the south window. “I’m sorry about your wife,” I said. “Are you?”
Vixton stood with his arms crossed; he cocked his head, then laughed. There was something froglike in his broad bespectacled features, his wide downturned mouth.
“I thought you might have seen me leaning out to water my geraniums,” I said. “At any rate, I could never be sure you hadn’t.”
“And I could never be sure you didn’t see my wife pass by you, Cryptic. Yours was the only window she had to pass above this fourteenth floor, after which it didn’t matter. But as it happened, I did see your hand holding the watering can, some few seconds after Gloria’s fall.”
I leaned back in the gauche sofa and crossed my outstretched legs at the ankles. “I surmise that you pushed her from the roof.”
“You surmise correctly. That way there would be no window frame for her to clamp onto, and no sign of a struggle in our apartment. I tricked her into signing the note I had typed, lured her onto the roof, then pushed her. None of it was difficult—certainly it was easier and more profitable for me than a divorce. What I’m curious about, Cryptic, is why you came down here and brought out in the open what both of us could only suspect—I that you did see Gloria pass your window, and you that I was aware that you had.”
“I could never be sure you wouldn’t kill me,” I said candidly, “and if I went to the police with my story, they might not have believed me and you might have killed me out of revenge or to protect yourself, or possibly even sued me for libel.”
“Truthfully,” Mr. Vixton said, “I was considering the first alternative—to kill you. It was that glimpse of the watering can—” He frowned slightly, a toadlike contraction of his features. “But how does this visit improve the situation?”
“The situation, as I see it, is that we can’t trust one another. You’ll always feel I might go to the authorities, and I’ll always feel you might do something drastic to preclude that eventuality. Now, what needs to be done is for circumstances to be arranged so that we can trust one another. Suppose you had something on me?”
Vixton puffed his cheeks and seemed to deliberate. “Something like murder?”
“There is a young woman named Alicia whom I often escort.”
“I’ve seen her,” Vixton said. “A charmer.”
“Suppose I do away with Alicia in your presence, even let you photograph the event? That would make us even, so to speak, and we could be confident of each other’s silence.”
“It would be a standoff,” Vixton said slowly, brightening to the idea. “Better than a standoff, actually, as I’d have absolute proof of your guilt. But what do you have against Alicia?”
“Absolutely nothing. She’s merely convenient for our purpose.”
I watched Vixton consider this, then saw his eyes darken at the sudden thought behind them. “I’m even more convenient than Alicia, Cryptic. Wouldn’t it solve your problem if you”—he laughed a flat croaking laugh—“murdered me?”
“You’re too convenient,” I told him. “One: you’re in the apartment below me; the police are bound to question me and suspect. Two: however deeply buried, I do have a motive. On the other hand, I’m only one of Alicia’s many escorts, and she and I get along splendidly and always have.”
Vixton nodded slowly. “It’s crazy but it makes sense—if that makes sense.”
“It does,” I assured him. “Alicia lives in a west-side penthouse apartment on the thirtieth floor. I’ll arrange things so we can go there together tomorrow night and she can meet the same fate as your late wife.”
Vixton’s broad face widened in a smile. He chuckled, then laughed aloud and went to the bar in the corner and poured us each a drink. We toasted tall buildings.
The next night Vixton and I took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of Alicia’s building and walked down the deep-carpeted hall to the door labeled with her apartment number. She must have heard us coming, for as I raised my hand to knock, the door opened.
“Cryptic,” she said, “how good to see you!”
But it was better to see her. She was slender and tan in a long pink dress, with honey-blonde hair cascading in carefully arranged wildness to below her shoulders. She wanted to be in films, and on looks alone she had a chance.
“This is Mr. Vixton,” I told her, as Vixton and I stepped inside. “He’s a film producer from Los Angeles here to consider some outdoor locales for a movie.”
Alicia’s eyes took on a special, harder light. “Which of the studios are you from?”
“I’m an independent producer,” Vixton said smoothly. He regarded Alicia with what passed for professional interest. “According to Mr. Cryptic you’re a talented young woman.”
“All she needs,” I said with a smile, “is a little push.”
Vixton coughed as Alicia led us out onto the balcony for drinks.
The balcony was large, bounded by a low iron rail on the east side and a four-foot-high stone wall on the north and south. Along the base of the iron rail ran a trough of rich earth from which grew a dense wall of green exotic foliage, including even two small trees. Like many cliff dwellers, Alicia was addicted to what green she could squeeze into her steel-and-cement-dominated existence.
Vixton had a martini, as did I. Alicia, as usual, drank a whiskey sour. I hastened to mix the drinks, my plan being to drop several capsules of a depressant into each of Alicia’s whiskey sours. “Dangerous when mixed with alcohol,” I had said to Vixton earlier, showing him a handful of the tiny capsules. “Downers in the true sense of the word.”
In the thin cool air of the balcony I heard Vixton’s harsh voice rasp, “It’s going to be a great movie.” He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. Alicia was on him like wet clothes.
After the third whiskey sour Alicia’s eyelids seemed unable to make it more than halfway over her beautiful blue orbs, and I nodded to Vixton. While he watched, I held Alicia by the waist and guided her toward the iron railing.
“Don’ wanna dance,” she protested.
Vixton readied his pocket camera as I positioned Alicia just so before the lush green wall of foliage beyond which was star-speckled night sky. “Cryptic!” she said, suddenly alarmed.
“Sorry, love,” I said, and pushed with my right hand. There
was a quick sharp flash.
Alicia disappeared between the dense green branches, tumbling backward. One high-heeled shoe flew off as her tanned ankles flicked through the thick green leaves and disappeared. I heard a trailing scream, punctuated by Vixton’s, “Got it!”
I glanced through the branches and quickly turned my head. “Let’s go!” I said to Vixton, but he was already at the door that led inside the apartment. We took our martini glasses with us and hastily wiped our fingerprints from whatever else we might have touched.
There was no one in the hall as we walked quickly along the spongy carpet to the elevator and punched the button. Within a few minutes we were descending to street level. Perspiration had boiled to beads on Vixton’s flat forehead.
We left by the building’s side exit, got in my car, and quickly, but not too quickly, drove away. As we rounded the corner and passed the front of the building we saw a knot of people and a bare tanned foot protruding from a fold of pink material on the sidewalk. I drove faster.
Two days later, I gave Vixton the details of Alicia’s funeral.
And that’s how we accomplished it—the perfect crime. I got the idea from Life’s Slender Thread, that abominable French film. Only instead of a thin nylon rope, as used in the movie, we used a net from which there was access to the open window of the vacant apartment below Alicia’s. It’s true that Alicia wants to break into movies, but as a stuntperson, as I suppose they’re now called. As promised, I might be able to arrange something for her.
After being caught in the net, Alicia quickly climbed through the window below, then ran out into the hall where she took the service elevator to ground level with Vixton and me minutes behind her. She then faked a crowd-gathering fainting spell on the sidewalk directly below her balcony.
I no longer have anything to fear from Vixton—but, just in case, I’ve moved out of the Norwood Arms and will be extremely difficult to locate. There was no way I could bear to kill Alicia, or even Vixton. Seeing that sort of thing done constantly on film is one thing, actually doing it another. I’m not a violent person; I like musicals.
My one concern is that Vixton will go to see Life’s Slender Thread. But that isn’t likely. Not after the review I gave it.
Joyce Porter
Dover Without Perks
“And this is where the body was found, sir.”
Jr. Detective Chief Inspector Dover, having with difficulty been induced to leave the shelter of the police car, stood shivering inside his overcoat. He tossed an indifferent glance at the site before transferring his disgruntled gaze to his surroundings.
’Strewth, what a dump! Like the back of the bloody moon!
He was standing on a short stretch of access road which led from the busy dual carriageway on his left to a new housing development, just beginning to spread its unloveliness over the hillside on his right. From this distance the development was a jumble of unmade roads, scaffolding, patches of raw earth, and a few demoralized houses poking up like sore thumbs into the cold sky. Beyond, as far as the eye could see, lay acres of deserted, frost-bitten fields with only the occasional windswept hedge to break the monotony.
Such desolation made it all the more surprising that the access road proudly sported a brand-new pedestrian crossing, complete with black and white stripes and flashing orange beacons. It was here, some fifty yards before the access road swung round to glide into the dual carriageway, that the dead man had been found at 5:25 that morning.
“Funnily enough, sir, it was his son-in-law who found him. He’s a milk roundsman and he was cycling down to his depot. It was still dark then, of course, but he spotted the old chap in the light of the beacon.” Even Inspector York, the local man who was doing the honors, was stamping his feet to warm them.
But Dover, who had been transported from London to the scene of the crime with what he considered unseemly haste, still hadn’t got his bearings. “Where the hell are we?” he demanded crossly while his young, handsome, and long-suffering assistant, Detective Sergeant MacGregor, turned aside to hide his blushing.
Inspector York was a little disconcerted, too. It was his first encounter with Scotland Yard’s famous Murder Squad and he didn’t know quite what to make of it. Surely they couldn’t all be like this?
“Well, this is Willow Hill Farm Housing Estate, actually, sir,” he said, indicating the miserable clutch of dwellings on the hillside.
“Part of Bridchurch’s slum-clearance scheme. Bridchurch is where you got off the train, sir. It’s three miles away.” He pointed down the dual carriageway. “Someday, sir”—this time he made a generous, encircling gesture—“all this will be covered with houses. Meantime, it’s all a bit isolated. Still, that should make our job a bit easier, shouldn’t it, sir?”
Dover’s response might have been a belch or it might have been an encouraging grunt.
Naïvely, Inspector York plumped for the encouraging grunt. “There are not likely to be many people knocking about round here on a dark November night,” he explained earnestly. “We’ve been working on the hypothesis that the murderer has some connection with the housing estate. In fact, he probably lives there. We found a lump of dried mud not far from the body and it probably came off the car that hit him. Now, we’re pretty certain that the mud came from the housing estate—it’s a proper quagmire when it rains, as you can imagine. It hasn’t, however, rained for a fortnight. Well, if our chappie was on the estate a fortnight ago, the odds are that he lives there. Or, at the very worst, he’s a frequent visitor.”
Dover’s habitual scowl deepened appreciably. “If it’s a local case, why the hell fetch us into it?”
Inspector York quailed before such naked fury. “Our Chief Constable thought the Yard would want to handle it themselves, sir, since the dead man was one of yours.”
“One of ours?”
“Malcolm Bailey, sir. He was an ex-Metropolitan policeman. We thought there might be—well—ramifications.”
“Ramifications? Was he Special Branch or what?”
“No, sir.” Inspector York wished the Chief Constable was there to do his own dirty work. “His last job before retirement was court usher at Ealing actually. Since then he’s had fifteen years with the Corps of Commissionaires in the West End. He was a Londoner, you see. Nothing to do with Bridchurch at all.”
But Dover’s butterfly mind had already moved on to weightier problems. The murder of obscure superannuated coppers could wait. “Here,” he said, trying to disappear into the depths of his overcoat, “where’ve you set up the Murder Headquarters? I’m getting bloody frozen out here. Got us a nice cosy pub, have you?”
To date, unfortunately, there were no pubs on the Willow Hill Farm Estate. Nor were there any shops, cinemas, or other amenities.
“We were going to use a caravan, sir, but it hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve been trying to chase it up but—”
But Dover was already stumping back to the comparative warmth and shelter of the police car. After a moment’s hesitation MacGregor and Inspector York followed him.
Once they were all in the car, MacGregor took charge of things since Dover appeared to have lost all interest and was sitting slumped in a corner with his bowler hat pulled well down over his eyes. If it hadn’t been completely unthinkable, Inspector York might have been tempted to conclude that old Mastermind was having a bit of a snooze.
“If Bailey was a Londoner,” said MacGregor, resting his notebook awkwardly on his knees, “what was he doing down here?”
“He’d come for a few days’ holiday with his daughter. He arrived only yesterday.”
“That’s the daughter who’s married to the milkman who found the body?”
“Yes. They’re named Muldoon. Apparently, last night, the dead man decided to go out for a drink. Like I said, there aren’t any pubs on the Estate, so he had to catch a bus out there on the main road and go into Bridchurch.”
“The Muldoons didn’t go with him?”
“No. They don’t
go out much at night in the middle of the week because of him having to be up so early in the morning.”
MacGregor pondered. “The Muldoons didn’t raise the alarm when Bailey failed to return home at a reasonable hour?”
“They didn’t know. It’s this milk business again. Both Muldoon and his wife go to bed early—about half past nine, they say. Last night they simply gave Bailey a key and told him to let himself in when he got back. They’d no idea, they claim, that he wasn’t fast asleep in the spare room until Muldoon himself practically fell over the dead body on the pedestrian crossing.”
Dover, roused by a crick in the back of his neck, joined in the conversation. “Damned fool place to stick a zebra crossing,” he grumbled, massaging the offending spot. “Right out here in the back of beyond.”
Inspector York risked a placatory smile. “It’s supposed to be a mistake on the part of the Highways Department, sir. It should have been erected on another housing development on the other side of town.”
“’Strewth!” said Dover and surrendered himself once more to torpidity.
Inspector York, a novice at Dover-watching, waited to see if any more pearls of wisdom were going to drop from beneath that moth-eaten little black mustache, but luckily MacGregor knew a snore when he heard one.
“What about the medical evidence? Have we got a time of death yet?”
Inspector York dragged his eyes away. “Er—oh, yes, sorry, Sergeant! Time of death? About eleven last night. That fits with the supposition that Bailey would be on the last bus from Bridchurch which would drop him out there on the main road just before eleven. He wouldn’t hang about on such a cold night and I reckon he simply walked from the bus stop to where he was found and was killed there. He wasn’t robbed, by the way.”
“And the cause of death?”
