by Ellery Queen
Both bodies were cold; on the dressing table was a note signed Agnes, a brief heart-cry explaining that, devoted as she was to her husband, she and Venning could no longer face life in their separate worlds and had resolved to die together.
Soustrelle muttered angrily in French; he hated waste of any sort and here were two lives thrown away, to say nothing of de Rougemont’s sorrow and, perhaps, that of Venning’s family.
But there was work to do. The room had to be examined to satisfy Soustrelle’s inborn sense of doubt and caution.
The hissing, unlighted gas-fire was turned off. The windows were checked; Soustrelle observed they were carefully sealed with wide Scotch tape. The typical pertinacity of suicides was revealed in the diligent way the crack round the door had also been completely sealed with tape. Even the keyhole was closed with a small sticky seal; the key lay on the dressing table, next to the letter.
When the doctor at last arrived and had confirmed what had happened, there was a curiously mulish expression on Soustrelle’s round face. Against the doctor’s objections that he was busy, that there was no need for it, Soustrelle insisted—which he was empowered to do—that a post-mortem should be done, and not until he was given the results of it did he visit the big white house where the Constable lived, with a brass plate on his front door which announced Connétable, a title meaning much more than its bald English translation.
The plump white-haired old man who was, as it were, the father, the councillor, the protector of his parish, listened to Soustrelle’s story without speaking.
“I understand, my good friend. Then they died of gas poisoning?”
“Of that there is no doubt.” Soustrelle’s head moved from side to side in that odd Gallic gesture which can mean anything, and his shoulders came up. “There is present a mild sleeping drug, a barbiturate, which Dr. Mathieu says is not unusual—suicides do such things that they might die painlessly without knowing they die; the tablets we find on the table beside the bed.”
“There remains a problem? Come, my good man, I recognize that stubborn look only too well.”
“I am not content, you will understand, Michel. May I continue with my investigations?”
“Such a fine word! You mean, it is not suicide in a locked room, sealed from within? Come, Jean, you are not a man of imaginative fancies. There is no harder head on this island.”
“Will you have patience with an old man, Michel? You permit?”
“Until tomorrow night. After that we must follow routine. We have enough harsh words about us from the Paid Police in St. Helier—I do not wish to give them more reason to say our antiquated system is also stupid.”
Soustrelle went home and put on his good gray suit and the trilby hat that his long-dead wife had once bought for him on a trip to Verona. He summoned Pierre-Marc, who owned the decrepit village taxi, and bade him to drive to St. Helier, “And with care and caution, my friend, for much as we like the tourists who bring us prosperity, they always forget the narrowness of our twisting little roads.”
St. Helier was packed with the hordes of holiday-makers who pour into Jersey every year for sunshine and tax-free tobacco and liquor. Through these throngs Soustrelle made his slow way, to spend an hour in a bistro near the harbor where visitors never went; but the place was popular with the native born, particularly the ancients with their remarkable knack of knowing supposedly hidden secrets which passed steadily as the small change of gossip.
Following that, Soustrelle visited several shops, finding what he wanted in the last of them. Then he returned with Pierre-Marc to St. Jerome and spent some minutes in the now-empty de Rougemont house. He delved through the rooms and peered interestedly in a broom closet where he found a portable hand vacuum-cleaner, the type used by good housewives for going over soft furniture.
Standing in the new and unused sitting room, staring through the windows at the gentle sea, Soustrelle was far away. He lighted his pipe and the rank aroma of the French tobacco he favored was all about him. His shrewd, always cynical peasant mind worried at the problem he was brooding over and gradually, piece by piece, he erected an edifice of deduction. He examined it with slow mental eyes from every conceivable angle and could find no flaw in it. He nodded at last, making a little jerking motion of one hand as if he were demonstrating the upper half of a ball.
The patient Pierre-Marc was waiting in his taxi. He was ordered to drive Soustrelle to the house of Prunier, the Constable of St. Michelet Parish where de Rougemont rented a house. There the story was told again and, eventually, Prunier sent for one of his Centeniers and they went to de Rougemont’s home.
But there they learned he had left to stay at a hotel in St. Helier. This irritated Soustrelle because it meant complications, and more work. He thanked Prunier and went back to St. Jerome, where he carefully wrote out in his round schoolboy hand in its official form a deposition which he took to his Constable for an authorizing signature. It was given reluctantly and then only because of Soustrelle’s written assurance that he knew what he was doing.
Pierre-Marc was required to journey back to town again, and there Soustrelle visited the Constable of St. Helier, then the Chief of the Paid Police; Soustrelle, two uniformed men, and the Constable of St. Helier now visited the hotel where they found de Rougemont and arrested him for murder.
The sensation was a big one, for Jersey seldom has capital crimes, and at the height of the season the States, which governed the island, did not know whether to be pleased at the inevitable influx of tourists which would follow or irritated at the necessity of working with the judicial system of Britain and its government, which would be automatic in such a crime. The sole evening paper had no doubts—its front page that evening dealt with little else.
It was a weary Soustrelle who eventually joined the Constable of St. Jerome for a verbal post-mortem.
“It is done, Michel. The wheels now turn and it is for law to proceed.”
“De Rougemont presented no difficulties?”
“I have seldom seen a man so disturbed. He was so sure of his security that when he was arrested his control was broken. He has of a certainty confessed in full.”
The Constable looked at the stolid man on the other side of his dining-room table, poured him another glass of Calvados, and waved one hand.
“Come, Jean, you are not on a stage. You shall disentangle this little mystery of yours and not behave like the dubious hero of a roman policier.”
Soustrelle’s smile was a contraction of his features rather than an exhibition of mirth.
“It was not easy, Michel. I made some inquiries of friends and, it would seem, this de Rougemont has money difficulties, and in England before he left he ran up many large bills; he was also not simpatico with Madame de Rougemont. He had, however, become intimate with a woman of great wealth and few scruples who will solve his troubles at the price of marriage. But Madame de Rougemont, as a good daughter of the Church, would never for one little moment consider divorce.”
“Ah!”
“Precisely. De Rougemont invented the story of the lover: the man Venning is simply a friend of the family. De Rougemont had them both round to the new house to drink wine to its success, a wine containing a mild sedative. When they were sleeping he carried them to the bedroom and there set the scene of the false suicide, even to the forgery of the little letter from his wife.”
“And sealed the doors and the windows from the inside, and left the key on the dressing table.” The Constable’s voice held a note of mild reproof, and he looked sharply at Soustrelle’s Calvados.
“Michel, you mock an old friend! He sealed the windows, and round the inside of the door while it was still open he placed an overlapping stretch of adhesive tape—Ecossais, is it not?”
The Constable chuckled.
“Scotch tape, my dear Jean; it is of America, a trade name that has become an ordinary descriptive term.”
“Precisely. I am of course an ignorant man. However. He also pl
aced a small square of tape on the inside of the keyhole, then closed the door. With a little vacuum cleaner moved round the crack of the door he sucked the tape, as you might say, so that it became a tight seal, securing the door. The lock? Simple! He had a duplicate key made, filed off a fraction from the nose, and locked the door from the outside—the nose of the key, being absent, thus did not break or even mark the little seal.”
“Perfection! A locked and sealed room like something from a sensational feuilleton in a boy’s magazine!”
“Just so. A clever plan, adroitly conceived.”
“You are to be congratulated, my dear Jean. But—” and the Constable wagged a cautionary finger “—in future no more guesswork. It might have turned out unsuccessfully and we of the Parish would have looked foolish.”
“Guesswork?” Soustrelle’s large smile was roguish. “I forget!” He smote his forehead. “A sealed room, an air-tight room, Michel? De Rougemont on entering the house, he informed me, smelled gas. But when I entered all I could smell was new paint. A small thing, you understand, a very small thing, but we farmers are apt to notice such small things, for are we not small men?”
Hugh Pentecost
The Birthday Killer
The letter was quite explicit. It was handwritten in a bold script on plain white paper that could have been bought at a thousand newsstands or drugstores. The envelope was a thirteen-cent-stamped envelope attainable at any branch post office. It was addressed to John Jericho, Jefferson Mews #16, New York City. There was no salutation on the piece of plain paper, only the message.
You will not live beyond your birthday, 3/10/78.
Jericho, six feet four inches tall and 230 pounds of hard-muscled body, with thick red hair and a red beard that made him look like a Viking warrior, sat alone at the breakfast table in his Jefferson Mews studio-apartment. The letter lay open on top of other mail and the morning paper that had been in his mailbox. He was surrounded by the brilliant vital paintings that had made him famous, some finished, some still in the works. The coffee in the mug on the table beside him had turned cold. The pot-bowled pipe he had filled prior to reading his mail rested beside the coffee mug, gone out after the first lighting.
He had opened this letter first because it had no return address on it. He knew who the other mail was from. At any other time he would have thought of it as a crank letter, a bad joke. But he had already glanced at the front page of his newspaper as he brought it up from the mailbox. The headline on a follow-up story had attracted his attention.
POLICE REPORT NO LEAD TO THE BIRTHDAY KILLER
A year ago the city had been horrified by the Son of Sam, called the .44 killer, who had murdered the Lord-knows-how-many people in cold blood—young couples parked in cars after dark. Now there was The Birthday Killer.
At first there had seemed to be some sort of connection between The Birthday Killer’s victims. First, there had been Frances Kelleher, a woman judge presiding in the criminal courts. Then there had been Lou Ducillo, an Assistant D.A., a prosecutor of criminal cases. Then George Armstrong, a crime reporter for Newsview magazine. Each of them had received exactly the same letter as the one that lay on Jericho’s breakfast table except for the birthday date.
Each letter had been received about three days before the birthday date. Judge Kelleher had paid no attention to hers. She had received many threatening letters in her long and distinguished career. She was ill-advised to ignore the threat. She was shot to death in the self-service elevator in her apartment building a few hours before her birthday had passed. No clues. No witnesses.
Two months later Lou Ducillo, the Assistant D.A., got his letter just two days before his birthday. Exactly the same wording, except his birthdate, as the one Judge Kelleher had received. Same handwriting, according to the experts at the Homicide Bureau. Lieutenant Mark Kreevich of Homicide saw the glimmering of a motive, a possible connection. Someone was getting revenge for the prosecution and sentencing of a criminal But which criminal? Ducillo had prosecuted almost twenty cases in Judge Kelleher’s court.
Ducillo decided to take an unplanned vacation out of the country. He didn’t choose to wait for the Homicide detective to sort out all the possibilities. But the Assistant D.A. was shot to death in a men’s room at Kennedy Airport twenty minutes before his plane was to leave for the Virgin Islands. No clues. No witnesses.
Three months passed and Kreevich hadn’t run anything substantial to earth. Then George Armstrong, the crime reporter, got his letter, three days before his birthday. He hotfooted it to Lieutenant Kreevich. Same writing, same wording as the others except for the birthdate. Connection? Armstrong had covered thirteen of Ducillo’s prosecutions in Judge Kelleher’s court. That seemed to narrow the number of cases from twenty to thirteen.
Armstrong was offered police protection. He accepted—but he had to keep an appointment he had with a key person in a story he was covering. Kreevich’s guards would pick him up an hour later at the Yale Club. They never caught up with him. He was found shot to death in his car in a parking lot. No clues. No witnesses.
Kreevich went about the grim business of tracking down everyone connected with the thirteen cases that linked Judge Kelleher, Ducillo, and Armstrong. Nothing tangible. And then the whole structure of Kreevich’s case was jolted. There was a fourth killing.
Wu Sung, the proprietor of a Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown, was found shot to death in an alley between his restaurant and the parking lot behind it. In his pocket was a letter from The Birthday Killer. As far as Kreevich could determine, there was absolutely no connection between the dead Chinese and the three others. Wu Sung’s people were certain that none of them—the Judge, Ducillo, or Armstrong—had ever been patrons of the restaurant. Wu Sung had never been involved in a criminal case, not as a witness, not even as a spectator. As far as they knew, he had never spoken of the now notorious Birthday Killer. Nor had he mentioned to anyone receiving a threatening note from the killer. The day he died was Wu Sung’s birthday.
Now, a month later, a letter lay open on Jericho’s breakfast table. Jericho had never met or had any communication with the four people who had received letters before him. The only possible connection Jericho had with the case was a long friendship with Lieutenant Mark Kreevich.
Kreevich was not a typical cop. He was a man with a law degree, a man with sophisticated tastes. He was a man dedicated to law and order, but not in the jargon sense of the phrase used by office-seeking politicians. People had a right to live without fear—crime should be prevented, not solved after the fact. Jericho, the artist, was involved in a lifelong crusade against man’s inhumanity to man. His paintings were a perpetual protest against viciousness and violence. In his lifestyle he had become a protector of the underprivileged, of the underdog, the helpless innocents trapped by ruthless men. The similarity of their aims had drawn Kreevich and Jericho together.
Jericho reached for his telephone and dialed.
“I have a letter in the mail this morning that will interest you,” he said, when Lieutenant Kreevich came on the line.
“Someone putting the arm on you for tickets to the policemen’s ball?” Kreevich asked.
“It’s one of your kind of letters,” Jericho said.
“My kind?”
“The Birthday Killer.”
There were a few seconds of silence, then Kreevich said, “You have to be kidding.”
“The wording is the same as the others, if the newspapers have reported correctly,” Jericho said. “You’ll have to see it to be certain the handwriting is the same as the others, of course.”
Kreevich’s voice had turned cold and impersonal. “When is your birthday? Tomorrow? The next day?”
“That’s an interesting variation,” Jericho said. “This letter reads: You will not live beyond your birthday, 3/10/78. That is tomorrow. But March tenth isn’t my birthday. My birthday is the tenth of August, which would make it 8/10/78, five months from now.”
“Where a
re you?”
“In my studio, but not for long. I’m having a one-man show at the Cleaves Gallery, as you know if you received your invitation. The formal opening is at eleven this morning. I have to be there ahead of time. Cleaves is on 57th Street, just east of Fifth Avenue.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Kreevich said. “Bring the letter.” Concern crept into his voice. “Watch your step, Johnny. He looked you up in Who’s Who and copied your birthdate wrong. Could be.”
It was a cold March day. Courage, Jericho told himself, is a happy commodity to own, but a man is a fool who doesn’t know fear when there’s something to be genuinely afraid of. Some kind of psycho had him on a death list, a psycho who had already struck four times without leaving a scrap of evidence.
As he dressed in his brown Harris-tweed suit to go to the opening of his show, Jericho put together what he knew about the killer. He did his work at close range where there were no witnesses: Judge Kelleher had been shot in a self-service elevator, Ducillo in a men’s room at an airport, Armstrong in his car in a parking lot, Wu Sung in a dark alley between buildings. Did this killer confront his victims at the last moment and let them know why they were to die?
There was nothing in the pattern to suggest a sniper on a rooftop. Open spaces appeared to be safe places. It occurred to Jericho that his greatest danger might lie just outside his apartment door, in the narrow hallway. The Birthday Killer obviously didn’t work in crowds—there hadn’t been a single witness to his four murders. People had seen Son of Sam run away from his victims; there had been descriptions of his getaway car. But no one had seen The Birthday Killer. He chose the precise moment when he could be alone with each victim.
Jericho took a handgun from the top drawer of his bureau and slipped it into the pocket of the sheepskin-lined topcoat he planned to wear. He had a license for the gun. He had been hunted before in his long crusade against violence, but before he had always known who was hunting him.
