Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  It was time to go. He felt an unaccustomed tensing of his muscles as he opened the door into the hallway. He didn’t camouflage his gun. He held it at the ready. Sunlight streamed through a window at the far end of the hall. There was no dark place for someone to hide at this time of day.

  He walked to the end of the hallway where there was a right-angle turn to the one flight of stairs that led down to the street. He edged around the corner. No one was in sight. At the foot of the stairs was a narrow hallway that went to a cellar door. If he walked straight down, there might be someone at his back when he reached the front door. He went halfway, then turned, and went the rest of the way backward, facing the cellar entrance.

  No one. Nothing.

  Coming out onto the street was like emerging from a dark underground tunnel into warm spring sunshine. People came and went through the Mews. They smiled at him. He was a familiar figure. A world of witnesses. The Birthday Killer wouldn’t strike out here in the open. It wouldn’t be in keeping with his pattern.

  A taxi parked at the mouth of the Mews didn’t appeal to Jericho. Alone in a vehicle with a driver who might be—? You’re acting like a nervous old maid, he told himself. And yet the killer had struck four times without leaving a trace. No reason to think he might be less efficient on his fifth venture. Safety lay in crowds. Jericho decided to walk the two miles uptown to the Cleaves Gallery.

  Kreevich was there ahead of him, slim, almost elegant, less like a cop than anyone he could imagine. The gallery was already well filled with painting enthusiasts. A little murmur of interest could be heard as the giant redbearded artist swept onto the scene. A hundred witnesses here.

  Kreevich looked grim. He handed Jericho a brochure that the gallery had prepared for the show, listing the paintings by number and with a biography of Jericho.

  “Here’s the mistake in your birthdate,” the detective said.

  It was there: John Jericho, born 3/10/38, Lakeview, Connecticut.

  Jericho located Tom Cleaves, the gallery’s proprietor. “How come this error, Tom?” he asked.

  Cleaves scowled at the brochure. “It’s from your handwritten copy, Johnny,” he said.

  “I’d know my own birthday.”

  “Copy’s in my office. Let me get it,” Cleaves said, and departed for an inner room.

  “What took you so long?” Kreevich asked. “I was beginning to worry about you.”

  “I walked. Crowds seemed safer,” Jericho said. From his pocket he took the threatening note and handed it to Kreevich.

  Kreevich frowned. “Same damned handwriting,” he said. “It looks like the McCoy.”

  Cleaves came back from his office with a piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. “Just as you wrote it, Johnny,” he said.

  It was there—3/10/38. Jericho saw what had happened. He’d written it in a hurry with a ballpoint pen. The first stroke of the pen had been dry and the first 8 looked like a 3.

  “It’s not so serious, is it?” Cleaves asked. He was a cheerful, moonfaced man. The Jericho show was going to be a huge success. “We’ve already sold three paintings and we’ve only been open half an hour. The two things you did in Washington when those Muslims held those hostages in three office buildings. And the acrobats on the beach. You’re twelve thousand five hundred dollars richer than when you got up this morning.”

  “You’ve just given these brochures out this morning?” Kreevich asked.

  “By hand, yes,” Cleaves said. “But hundreds of them were mailed out to potential customers two weeks ago.”

  Plenty of time for The Birthday Killer to have seen the incorrect birthdate and sent his warning.

  They moved around, surrounded by Jericho’s canvases in bright colors. They came to one titled Beach Acrobats. There was a sold sticker on the frame of the painting. Kreevich’s hand closed on Jericho’s wrist like a painful vise.

  “My God!” Kreevich said.

  “What’s the matter?” Jericho asked.

  Kreevich pointed with his free hand at the painting. It was a beach scene, with colored umbrellas, swimmers in the distant surf, sunbathers wearing dark glasses. In the foreground were two men involved in an acrobatic feat. One man was doing a headstand, arms spread out to steady himself. Balanced above him, actually standing on the soles of the headstander’s feet, was a second man, grinning out at the world.

  “Impossible!” Kreevich said.

  “Difficult, but they did it,” Jericho said.

  “I’m not talking about the stunt,” Kreevich said. “The man on top—the smiler—you know him?”

  “No. I just saw him the day I made the original sketch.”

  Kreevich released his hold on Jericho’s wrist. A little nerve twitched high up on his cheek. “His name is Fred Miller—or was Fred Miller,” the detective said in a flat cold voice. “He killed a woman cop in a drug stakeout in Times Square. He later hanged himself in his jail cell. You didn’t know who you were painting?”

  “No idea. He was just a man on the beach.”

  “It’s an extraordinary likeness.”

  “I have a photographic eye,” Jericho said.

  Kreevich looked straight at his friend. “He was prosecuted for Murder One by Lou Ducillo and the jury convicted. Judge Kelleher sentenced him to life. He was a heroin addict. He bought something from what he thought was a lady pusher in Times Square. She turned out to be a cop and he shot her dead. There was some outcry about police methods at the time, and George Armstrong wrote an article defending the police.”

  “So three of them were connected with this Fred Miller,” Jericho said.

  “And you painted his picture,” Kreevich said. “What about the man on the bottom, the man standing on his head?”

  Jericho tried to recall. “It’s difficult to remember a face that’s upside down.”

  “But they didn’t stay there all day in that position. What about when they broke it up?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jericho said, frowning.

  Kreevich found Tom Cleaves and asked him who had bought the painting. The gallery proprietor shrugged. “An old man. It was rather odd, because he paid cash and wanted to take the picture with him. I told him he’d have to leave it here for the run of the show—two weeks. He didn’t like it, but he finally agreed.”

  “He didn’t give you his name?”

  “No. But I gave him a receipt for his money so he could claim the painting later.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Old, frail-looking, thick white hair. He somehow didn’t look like a man who could afford $2,500 for a painting. But he had it in cash.”

  Kreevich turned to Jericho. “One itch has been scratched, anyway,” he said. “This birthday jazz. No reason for it until now.”

  “You know something I don’t know?” Jericho asked.

  “Fred Miller hanged himself in his jail cell—on his birthday!” Kreevich said. “Press made something of it. Now some psycho avenger is making everyone else pay at birthday time. Let’s take a walk.”

  Half an hour later Jericho found himself in the office of a young lawyer named Herbert Goldsteyn. On the way there in a taxi Kreevich had explained that Goldsteyn had been Fred Miller’s lawyer and had fought a brilliant if losing battle for his client. Goldsteyn was a dark, wiry little man with suppressed energy that kept him wriggling in his desk chair while he chain-smoked cigarettes.

  Kreevich had talked to him before because of Fred Miller’s connection with three of The Birthday Killer’s victims. Now he handed Goldsteyn the threatening note Jericho had received and a copy of the gallery brochure which contained a black-and-white reproduction of Beach Acrobats.

  “Tell Johnny what you told me about your financial arrangements with Fred Miller,” Kreevich said.

  Goldsteyn exhaled a cloud of smoke. “People thought I was some sort of legal-aid freak,” he said. “As a matter of fact I was hired and paid a substantial fee for defending him.”

  “By Miller?” Kreevich asked,
obviously knowing the answer.

  “I don’t know who paid the bills,” Goldsteyn said. “I would present an accounting to Miller every couple of weeks—over the months of the trial and the appeal. A couple of days after each presenting I would get payment through the mail, in cash. A thousand dollars or more in nice new bills each time. No letter, no nothing. The money came in an ordinary stamped envelope, with an extra stamp or two added according to weight.”

  “Do you happen to have one of those envelopes?” Kreevich asked him.

  Goldsteyn grinned. “Since you called me to tell me you were coming, Lieutenant, it just happens I do.” From the drawer of his desk he produced an envelope.

  Kreevich placed Jericho’s note beside the envelope.

  “Same handwriting,” Jericho said. His eyes narrowed. “The Birthday Killer paid Miller’s legal bills?”

  “So it would appear,” Kreevich said.

  “Something in the neighborhood of $30,000,” Goldsteyn said.

  “Have you been expecting one of these threatening notes, Mr. Goldsteyn?” Jericho asked.

  The lawyer shrugged. “Why should I? I tried to save Miller. Ducillo was responsible for his conviction, the judge sentenced him, and Armstrong urged the maximum punishment in his articles. What did you do to him, Mr. Jericho?”

  “It seems I painted a picture of him,” Jericho said.

  “I don’t think so,” Kreevich said. “You painted a picture of another man—a man who was balancing Miller in that acrobatic act on the beach.”

  “No face,” Jericho said.

  “But you could be expected to remember the face, and I think you’d better remember, friend,” Kreevich said, “and fast. He thinks your birthday is tomorrow.”

  The human brain, Jericho told himself, is a computer, a memory bank. But like computers it is fed by man, and in the case of the brain, by the man whose brain it is. He had painted a picture of two men doing a balancing act on the beach. The one face had been clearly visible—Fred Miller’s—and he had caught a perfect likeness. But the other man, his face hidden, was a zero. He’d had no reason to remember anything about him, no reason to store him in his memory bank.

  He should have spent the day at the Cleaves Gallery, being charming to prospective buyers, but instead Jericho had gone back to his studio in Jefferson Mews. He had made dozens of sketches that day at the beach, the day of the balancing act. There might be a clue among them that would remind him of something that was presently lost, hidden.

  Kreevich had offered, almost insisted, on providing a bodyguard for his friend. Jericho was perversely stubborn about it. All his adult life he had been involved with violence and danger. He had determined long ago that when his time came to confront death he wanted to do it alone. Quixotic? At any rate he was not careless. He double-locked the studio door and fastened the guard chain. He checked out the bedroom, the closets, No one was waiting for him.

  He searched through file cabinets until he found the sketchbook he had used that day on the beach almost two years ago. He sat down in a big armchair opposite his easel, first taking the handgun out of his pocket and placing it on a table beside him. He was ready for any surprise. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this room was where the final confrontation would take place.

  The sketches stirred nothing in his memory. There had been brilliant sunlight, the waves foaming as they broke on the sand; scores of people were sunbathing, girls almost nude, men tanned a coffee brown—and that absurd balancing act, Fred Miller smiling his delight, and the upside-down man beneath him faceless. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing.

  The day wore on and Jericho found himself exhausted from searching for something that wasn’t there. He slept, slumped in the armchair.

  It must have been a long time because when he woke, the room was dark except for the reflected light from a street lamp at the window and the bright stars visible through the skylight. Jericho glanced at the illuminated dial of his wristwatch. It was almost eleven o’clock. He had slept for nearly seven hours.

  An odd thought occurred to him. If tomorrow had actually been his birthday there was only about one hour to go before it arrived.

  He turned on a lamp and went to the sideboard where he poured himself a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Then back to trying to put it together. There was one thing missing, he told himself. There was still no connection to Wu Sung, the Chinese restaurateur.

  It was like a flash of lightning illuminating his mind. He saw the balancing act on the beach. He saw Fred Miller finally topple down to the sand, laughing. Then the upside-down man somersaulted to his feet and for a moment his smiling face was there as he turned to Miller. The man was an Oriental!

  Jericho picked up the gun from the table and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Now he would be the hunter and not the hunted. He went out into the hall, careful as before, then down to the street. At the end of the Mews was a waiting cab.

  “There’s a place called The China Palace somewhere near Mott Street in Chinatown,” Jericho told the driver.

  “They close up about this time down there,” the driver said.

  “Just the same,” Jericho said.

  The cab drove him deep into the city and eventually stopped outside The China Palace. Jericho paid and went to the door. Some customers were emerging and Jericho stood aside for them. Then he went in and found his way blocked, just inside, by a young Chinese.

  Jericho felt his heart jam against his ribs. It was a well remembered face now, the face of the upside-down man in the balancing act on the beach.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we are no longer serving,” the Chinese man said.

  “I do not want to be served. I want to talk to you,” Jericho said.

  “We are closing now, sir.”

  “Your name?”

  “I am Kim Sung, the proprietor.”

  “I think you know my name is Jericho.”

  Tiny beads of perspiration stood out on Kim Sung’s forehead.

  “If you care to sit down at a table while my waiters clear the place,” Sung said.

  Jericho saw that there was just one table occupied—four people preparing to leave. Sung led the way to a table some distance from the door. “You will excuse me while I arrange for someone else to stand at the door.” He crossed the floor and spoke to a waiter at some length. He bowed politely to the departing customers. He came back to Jericho and sat down opposite him. “What can I do for you, Mr. Jericho?”

  “I got tired of waiting for you,” Jericho said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do,” Jericho said. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Sung. In my jacket pocket, just under the edge of the table, is a .38 police special. It is aimed directly at your stomach. If you make a move toward me I promise to blow a hole in you big enough to drive a truck through. I got your letter, so you see I know that you are The Birthday Killer.”

  Sung moistened his thin pale lips. “Look around you, Mr. Jericho. You will see that you have no chance in the world of leaving this place.”

  Chinese waiters, doing no cleaning up, guarded every exit from the large room.

  “So we are both going to die,” Jericho said flatly. “There’s a joke about it, Sung. This isn’t my birthday.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sung said. “I could not have waited till later. Your painting at the Cleaves Gallery. Someone finally told you the face you painted was Fred Miller’s?”

  “Lieutenant Kreevich.”

  “A clever man, but not quite clever enough.”

  “You bought the painting?”

  “I had the painting bought. I hoped to have it removed from the gallery before someone asked questions and stirred your memory.”

  Jericho drew a deep breath. “Before this stalemate brings an end to both of us I’d like to know why. Why the killings? Why your own father? He was your father?”

  Sung tilted back slightly in his chair. His eyes glittered in the light from the chandelier over his
head. “Fred Miller was the best friend I’ve ever had,” he said.

  “So you embarked on a psychotic revenge scheme. I can understand your motive against the prosecutor, the judge, the crime writer. But why your father? He had no connection with the case.”

  Sung began to rock, very gently, back and forth in his chair. “Let me tell it,” he said. “Let me tell it just once, because no one knows it all.”

  Jericho nodded, his finger tight on the trigger of his gun. One wrong move and Sung would never get to tell it all.

  Nor, Jericho thought, would he ever get to hear it all if he made an overt move. The Chinese waiters seemed to have formed a kind of circle around the table, at a distance but with no effort to hide the fact that they were a trap.

  “Vietnam—the Establishment’s war, the politicians’ war,” Kim Sung said. “Fred Miller and I met there—in Vietnam. You ask what a Chinese was doing in the United States army in Vietnam?” His smile was bitter. “I am an American. Born here on Mott Street. Went to school here in the city. Graduated from the school of engineering at Columbia. This is the land of opportunity, you know. The only job a Chinese engineer could find was selling chop suey in his father’s restaurant to American Americans who think it’s a Chinese dish! But the army took me, not as an engineer but because I spoke languages that were useful in Vietnam.”

  Sung’s bitterness cut at some vein of sympathy in Jericho. He went on.

  “I met Fred Miller in Saigon. We were both on a short leave. On leave you drank and found women, and many soldiers found drugs. Fred was a sensitive, compassionate man. He had seen old men and women and children killed senselessly. He had seen crops and forests defoliated. He had seen isolated villages of no military significance bombed flat. Drugs helped him forget what he had seen. He wanted to break the habit but he couldn’t. I tried to help him. I hated what drugs did to men and particularly to Fred. I stayed with him while he sweated with terrible hungers. Sometimes I thought he was winning the fight.”