Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  Muldoon straightened up, removed the pillow, and gazed down. He had been right: he was sure he detected a grateful expression on the dead face. He fluffed the pillow up again, placed it in its accustomed location, and went to call the undertaker.

  It was only after all decent arrangements had been made, all hard bargaining concluded, and all the proper papers signed, that Muldoon called the insurance company—and got more than a slight shock. His mother-in-law’s insurance was for $400, doubtless a princely sum when her doting parents had taken it out a matter of sixty years before, but rather inadequate in this inflationary age. Muldoon tried to cancel the funeral, but the undertaker threatened suit, not to mention a visit from his nephew, acknowledged dirty-fight champion of all South Boston. The additional amount of money Muldoon had to get up to finally get Vera Callahan underground completely wiped out his meager savings.

  So that, obviously, was not what old Miss Gilhooley had been hinting at, Muldoon figured. He was not bitter, nor was his faith impaired; the fault had to be his own. So there he was with the numbers again. 74—74—Could they refer to the mathematical possibilities? Four from seven left three—but three what? Three little pigs? Three blind mice? Three blind pigs? He gave it up. On the other hand, four plus seven equaled—

  He smote himself on the head for his previous stupidity and quickly rubbed the injured spot, for Muldoon was a strong man with a hand like the bumper on a gravel truck. Of course! Seven and four added up to eleven. ELEVEN! And—Muldoon told himself with authority—if that wasn’t a hint to get into the floating crap game that took place daily, then his grandfather came from Warsaw.

  So Muldoon took out a second mortgage on his small house, which netted him eight hundred dollars plus change, added to that the two hundred he got for his three-and-a-half-year-old, secondhand-to-be-gin-with car, and with $1,000 in big bills in his pocket made his way to Casey’s Bar & Grill.

  “Casey,” he asked in his ringing voice, “where’s the floating game today?”

  “Callahan Hotel,” Casey said, rinsing glasses. “Been there all week. Room Seventy-four.”

  Muldoon barely refrained from smiting himself on the head again. How dumb could one guy be? If only he’d asked before, he wouldn’t have had to deal with that thief of an undertaker, not to mention the savings he’d squandered—although in truth he had to admit the small house was less crowded with the old lady gone. “Thanks,” he said to Casey, and hurried from the bar.

  The group standing around the large dismountable regulation crap table in Room 74 of the Callahan Hotel was big and tough, but Muldoon was far from intimidated. With $1,000 in his pocket and his fortune about to be made, Muldoon felt confidence flowing through him like a fourth beer. He nodded to one of the gamblers he knew and turned to the man next to him, tapping him on the shoulder.

  “Got room for one more?” he asked.

  “Hunnert dollars minimum,” the man said without looking up from the table. “No credit.”

  Muldoon nodded. It was precisely the game he wanted. “Who’s the last man?” he asked.

  “Me,” the man said, and clamped his lips shut.

  Muldoon took the money from his pocket and folded the bills lengthwise, gambler-fashion, wrapping them around one finger, awaiting his turn. When at last the dice finally made their way to him, Muldoon laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table, picked up the dice and shook them next to one ear. They made a pleasant ivory sound. A large smile appeared on Muldoon’s face.

  “Seven and four are me lucky numbers,” he announced. “Same as them that’s on the door of this room here. Now, if a guy could only roll an eleven that way—”

  “He’d end up in a ditch,” the back man said expressionlessly. “You’re faded—roll them dice. Don’t wear ’em out.”

  Muldoon did not wear out the dice. In fact, he had his hands on them exactly ten times, managing to throw ten consecutive craps, equally divided between snake-eyes and boxcars. They still speak of it at the floating crap game; it seems the previous record was only five and the man who held it took the elevator to the roof—they were playing at some hotel up in Copley Square that day—and jumped off. Muldoon turned the dice over to the man to his right and wandered disconsolately out of the hotel.

  Out in the street Muldoon ambled along a bit aimlessly, scuffing his heavy work brogans against anything that managed to get in his way—a tin can, a broken piece of brick he considered with affectionate memory before he kicked it violently, a crushed cigarette pack. He tried for an empty candy wrapper but with his luck missed.

  Seventy-four! What in the bleary name of Eustace Q. Peabody could the blaggety numbers mean? (The Sisters had raised Muldoon strictly; no obscenity passed his lips.) He tried to consider the matter logically, forcing his temper under control. Old Miss Gilhooley had never failed him, nor would she this time. He was simply missing the boat.

  Seventy-four? Seventy-four? The figures began to take on a certain rhythm, like the Punch, brother, punch with care of Mark Twain. Muldoon found himself trying to march to it. Seventy-four-zero! Seventy-four-zero-hup! Almost it but not quite. Seventy-four-zero-hup! Seventy-four-zero, hup! Got it! Muldoon said to himself, deriving what little satisfaction he could from the cadence, and marched along swinging. Seventy-four-zero, hup!

  And found himself in front of Casey’s Bar & Grill, so he went inside and pulled a stool up to the deserted bar. “Beer,” he said.

  “How’d you do in the game?” Casey asked.

  “Better give me a shot with that beer,” Muldoon said by way of an answer. He slugged the shot down, took about half of his beer for a chaser, and considered Casey as he wiped his mouth. “Casey,” he said earnestly, really wanting to know, “what do the numbers seven and four mean to you?”

  “Nothing,” Casey said.

  “How about seven, four, and zero?”

  “Nothing,” Casey said. “Maybe even less.”

  “How about backwards?” Muldoon asked in desperation, but Casey had gone to the small kitchen in the rear to make himself a sandwich during the slack time and Muldoon found himself addressing thin air. He tossed the proper amount of change on the counter and started for the door. Where he ran into a small man named O’Leary, who ran numbers for the mob. It wasn’t what he preferred, but it was a living.

  “Wanna number today, Mr. Muldoon?” O’Leary asked.

  Muldoon was about to pass on with a shake of his head when he suddenly stopped. A thrill went through him from head to foot. Had he been in a cartoon a light bulb would have lit up in a small circle over his head. Not being in a cartoon, he kicked himself, his heavy brogan leaving a bruise that caused him to limp painfully for the next three weeks.

  Good Geoffrey T. Soppingham! He must have been blind! Blind? Insane! What possible meaning could numbers have if not that they were numbers? Just thinking about it made Muldoon groan. If he hadn’t killed the old lady and gotten into that stupid crap game, at this moment he could be putting down roughly fifteen hundred bucks on Seven-Four-Zero. $1,500 at five-hundred-to-one odds! Still, if he hadn’t smothered the old lady, he’d never have come up with the zero, so it wasn’t a total loss. But the floating crap game had been completely unnecessary.

  Because now Muldoon didn’t have the slightest doubt as to what the numbers meant.

  “Somethin’ wrong, Mr. Muldoon?” O’Leary asked, concerned with the expression on Muldoon’s face.

  “No!” Muldoon said, and grasped the runner by the arm, drawing him back into Casey’s Bar & Grill, his hand like the clamshell bucket of a steam shovel on the smaller man’s bicep. He raised his voice, bellowing. “Casey!”

  Casey appeared from the kitchen, wiping mayonnaise from his chin. “Don’t shout,” he said. “What do you want?”

  Muldoon was prying his wedding ring from his finger. He laid it down on the bar. “What’ll you give me for this?”

  Casey looked at Muldoon as if the other man had suddenly gone mad. “This ain’t no hockshop, Muldoon,” h
e said.

  But Muldoon was paying no attention. He was slipping his wrist-watch and its accompanying stretch band over his thick fingers. He placed the watch down on the bar next to the ring.

  “One hundred bucks for the lot,” he said simply. “A loan is all. I’ll pay it back tonight.” As Casey continued to look at him with fishy eyes, Muldoon added in a quiet, desperate voice, “I paid sixty bucks each for them rings; me and Kathleen had matching ones. And that watch set me back better than a bill-and-a-half all by itself, not to mention the band, which is pure Speidel. How about it?” A touch of pleading entered his voice. “Come on—we been friends a long time.”

  “Acquaintances,” Casey said, differentiating, and continued to eye Muldoon coldly. “I ain’t got that much cash in the register right now.”

  “Jefferson J. Billingsly the cash register,” Muldoon said, irked. “You got that much and more in your pants pocket.”

  Casey studied the other a moment longer, then casually swept the ring and the watch from the counter into his palm, and pocketed them. From another pocket he brought out a wallet that looked like it was suffering from mumps. He began counting out bills.

  “Ninety-five bucks,” he said. “Five percent off the top, just like the Morris Plan.”

  Muldoon was about to object but time was running out. “Someday we’ll discuss this transaction in greater detail, Casey,” he said. “Out in the alley,” and he turned to O’Leary, grasping both of the smaller man’s arms for emphasis. “O’Leary, I want ninety-five bucks on number seven-four-zero. Got it? Seven-Four-Zero! Today!”

  “Ninety-five bucks?” O’Leary was stunned. “I never wrote no slip bigger than a deuce in my life, Mr. Muldoon,” he said. He thought a moment. “No, a fin,” he said brightly, but then his face fell. “No, a deuce. I remember now, the fin was counterfeit.”

  “You’re wasting time,” Muldoon said in a dangerous voice. He suddenly realized he was holding the smaller man several inches from the floor and lowered him. “Will they pay off? That’s the question,” he said in a quieter voice, prepared for hesitation.

  “Sure they pay off, Mr. Muldoon,” O’Leary said, straightening his sleeves into a semblance of their former shape. “How long you figure they stay alive, they start welching?”

  “So long as they know it,” Muldoon said, and handed over the ninety-five bucks. He took his receipt in return, checked the number carefully to make sure O’Leary had made no mistake, and slipped the paper into his pocket. Then he turned to Casey.

  “A beer,” he said in a voice that indicated their friendship had suffered damage. “And that is out of that five bucks you just stole!”

  Muldoon was waiting in a booth at Casey’s Bar & Grill at seven o’clock P.M., which was the time the runners normally had the final three figures of the national treasury balance—which was the Gospel that week. Muldoon knew that straight cash in hand would not be forthcoming; after all, he was due a matter of over $47,000. Still, he’d take a check. If he hadn’t gotten into that crap game, he’d have been rich—or, more probably, in a ditch like the man had mentioned this afternoon. Who was going to pay off that kind of loot? No mob in Boston, that was sure. Better this way. Forty-seven grand was big enough to be the year’s best advertisement for the racket, but still small enough by their standards for the mob to loosen up.

  It was a nice feeling being financially secure after the problems of the past few years, and Muldoon had no intention of splurging. His honest debts would be cleared up, of course, and he’d have to buy himself some wheels—a compact, nothing fancy—but the rest would go into the bank. At five percent it wouldn’t earn no fortune, he knew, but it would still be better than a fall off a high scaffold onto a low sidewalk.

  He reached for his beer and saw old Miss Gilhooley walking through the door. Had a week passed so quickly? He supposed it must have; what with the funeral, and one thing and another, the time had flown. He waved her over and called out to Casey to bring old Miss Gilhooley anything her heart desired.

  Old Miss Gilhooley settled herself in the booth across from him and noted the expression on his face. “So you figured it out, Muldoon,” she said.

  “Not right off,” Muldoon admitted. “To be honest, it just come to me this afternoon. But better late than never; at least it come.” He leaned over the table confidentially. “It was the numbers, see? The seven and the four for her age, plus the zero at the end, because whether you heard or not, that’s what the poor soul is now.”

  Old Miss Gilhooley sipped the beer Casey had brought and nodded. “That’s what I figured,” she said, “especially after seeing O’Leary in me dreams three nights running, and me old enough to be his mother.”

  “And I can’t thank you enough—” Muldoon started to say, and then paused, for O’Leary had just burst through the door of the bar like a Roman candle and was hurrying over to them, brushing people aside. His eyes were shining.

  “Mr. Muldoon! Mr. Muldoon!” O’Leary cried excitedly. “I never seen nothin’ like it in all me born days! And on a ninety-five-dollar bet!”

  Muldoon grinned happily.

  “Only one number away!” O’Leary cried, still astounded at the closeness of his brush with fame and fortune.

  Muldoon’s world fell with a crash. “One number away?”

  “Yeah!” O’Leary said, still marveling. “You bet Seven-Four-Zero. It come out Seven-Five-Zero. Tough!” O’Leary sighed and then put the matter from his mind. After all, life had to go on. “Wanna number for tomorrow, Mr. Muldoon?”

  “No,” Muldoon said in a dazed tone, and turned to old Miss Gilhooley, who was making strange noises. But they were not lamentations for Muldoon—to Muldoon’s surprise the old lady was cackling like a fiend.

  “That Vera Callahan!” she said triumphantly. “I always knew she lied about her age!”

  Cornell Woolrich

  Death Between Dances

  Every Saturday night you’d see them together at the country-club dance. Together, and yet far apart. One sitting back against the wall, never moving from there, never once getting up to dance the whole evening long. The other swirling about the floor, passing from partner to partner, never still a moment.

  The two daughters of Walter Brainard (widower, 52, stocks and bonds, shoots 72 at golf, charter member of the country club).

  Nobody seeing them for the first time ever took them for sisters. It wasn’t only the difference in their ages, though that was great enough and seemed even greater than it actually was. There was about twelve years’ difference between them, and fifty in outlook.

  Even their names were peculiarly appropriate. Jane, as plain as her name, sitting there against the wall, dark hair drawn severely back from her forehead, watching the festivities through heavy-rimmed glasses that gave her an expression of owlish inscrutability. And Sunny, dandelion-colored hair, blue eyes, a dancing sunbeam, glinting around the floor, no one boy ever able to hold her for very long (you can’t make sunbeams stay in one place if they don’t want to). Although Tom Reed, until just recently, had had better luck at it than the rest. But the last couple of Saturday nights he seemed to be slipping or something; he’d become just one of the second-stringers again.

  Sunny was usually in pink, one shade of it or another. She favored pink; it was her color. She reminded you of pink spun-sugar candy. Because it’s so good, and so sweet, and so harmless. But it also melts so easily. . .

  One of them had a history, one hadn’t. Well, at eighteen you can’t be expected to have a history yet. You can make one for yourself if you set out to, but you haven’t got it yet. And as for the history—Jane’s—it wasn’t strictly that, either, because history is hard-and-fast facts, and this was more of a formless thing, a whispered rumor, a half forgotten legend. It had never lived, but it had never died either.

  Some sort of blasting infatuation that had come along and changed her from what she’d been then, at eighteen—the darling of the dance floors, as her sister was now—into
what she was now: a wallflower, an onlooker who didn’t take part. She’d gone away for a while around that time, and then she’d suddenly been back again.

  From the time she’d come back, she’d been as she was now. That was all that was definitely known—the rest was pure surmise. Nobody had ever found out exactly who the man was. It was generally agreed that it wasn’t anyone from around here. Some said there had been a quiet annulment. Some—more viperishly—said there hadn’t been anything to annul.

  One thing was certain. She was a wallflower by choice and not by compulsion. As far back as people could remember, anyone who had ever asked her to dance received only a shake of her head. They stopped asking, finally. She wanted to be left alone, so she was. Maybe, it was suggested, she had first met him, whoever he was, while dancing, and that was why she had no use for dancing any more. Then in that case, others wondered, why did she come so regularly to the country club? To this there were a variety of answers, none of them wholly satisfactory.

  “Maybe,” some shrugged, “it’s because her father’s a charter member of the club—she thinks it’s her duty to be present.”

  “Maybe,” others said, “she sees ghosts on the dance floor—sees someone there that the rest of us can’t see.”

  “And maybe,” still others suggested, but not very seriously, “she’s waiting for him to come back to her—thinks he’ll suddenly show up sometime in the Saturday-night crowd and come over to her and claim her. That’s why she won’t dance with anyone else.”

  But the owlish glasses gave no hint of what was lurking behind them; whether hope or resignation, love or indifference or hate.

  At exactly 9:45 this Saturday, this Washington’s Birthday Saturday, tonight, the dance is on full-blast; the band is playing an oldie, “The Object of My Affections,” Number Twenty in the leader’s book. And Jane is sitting back against the wall. Sunny is twinkling about on the floor, this time in the arms of Tom Reed, the boy who loved her all through high school, the man who still does, now, at this very moment—