Nancy Stillwater and the mayor’s sister lived up in the hills on Delshaw Drive. It was the kind of street where nobody cut his or her own lawn, and every other house had a swimming pool. And if you didn’t have a pool, you had a tennis court.
Wilson parked his car at the curb. Nancy’s house was white stucco. It had two floors and balconies. There was casualness to its design, as if it was something Frank Lloyd Wright might have sketched up on a sunny afternoon over coffee and witty repartee.
The front door was open — wide open. Wilson rang the bell and stepped inside.
The interior of the house was Art Deco. The floor tiles were white. There was a sweeping staircase — to the left of which stood the statue of a woman. The woman was silver, taller than Wilson, and wearing an expression of unobtainable demureness.
“Hello?” Wilson yelled. His voice echoed in the entranceway.
No one was answering the door, not even a maid.
“Nancy Stillwater?”
The house was devoid of life. The faint hum of air conditioning purred in the background.
Wilson followed a hallway leading to what looked like a living room. The walls of the hallway were lined with photographs of Nancy. Some photographer had decided Nancy was a work of art, or she had paid one to make her think that.
It was a living room. There was an acrid smell in the air. It hung. There was a palm tree in the corner of the room. A grand piano stood in another corner, an acre of framed photos stood on top of its closed lid.
At the center of the room was a wooden area large enough for a tango — of a very fine dark wood. Polished. The furniture surrounding it was all white. Plush. Seating for thirty.
The acrid smell was gunpowder. Nancy was dead on the dance floor. Someone had shot her in the head. The furniture was ruined.
Wilson looked for the telephone. The gunpowder smelled recent. He noticed there were nuts on the dark wood of the dance floor. He took a closer look. There were a handful of them. Roasted.
Wilson found the telephone. He hadn’t even put his hand to it when he heard the sirens. He figured the neighbors must have heard the gunshot. Maybe the mayor’s sister had put in the call?
Within a minute, Nancy’s living room took on the appearance of a police convention. Uniformed officers were everywhere. They were taking bets on the type of gun used. They were huddled about in groups picking over last night’s fights. They were using the dirt at the base of the palm as an ashtray. Two were playing a duet of “Chopsticks” on the grand.
Lieutenant Harden, a sour-faced dump truck of a man in possession of few facial features and dressed in a black overcoat, knew Wilson. Knew him and hated him. And when he walked in and laid eyes on him, he wished the first officers who had arrived on the scene had shot him dead.
Harden hated reporters, especially short ones who poked their noses where they shouldn’t ought to.
“How’s the wife, Harden?” Wilson inquired as the dump truck approached.
“You’re under arrest,” Harden grunted at Wilson.
“Why?”
“Why not? There’s a dead girl lying on the floor and you have no alibi.”
“You haven’t even asked for an alibi.”
“Do you have one?”
Wilson shook his head. “How about a motive? I don’t have one of those, either.”
“Book him,” Harden grunted at the nearest uniform who wasn’t preoccupied.
Wilson protested, but he was firmly escorted from the building and out to a waiting patrol car.
Before Wilson got in, he remembered he had forgotten his hat. He excused himself to retrieve it.
The officer waited.
Wilson went out the back, around the pool, and over the wall. The last time Wilson had ever worn a hat had been during the war.
Sitting in a police cell would not be working — it would be sitting. Wilson hadn’t shot Nancy, so he saw no reason for loafing on the job.
The bar was in a back street off an alley. The bar had two claims to fame: the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder, and the fact that Rudolph Valentino drank there once.
Wilson was an instinctive reporter, and his instincts told him if you want to know the story, start at the beginning. The bar was the beginning of this story. Everything began there, so there he went.
The place was empty. The jukebox still had the bullet hole in it. Behind the bar was a young redhead with her hair done up in a bun. She was smoking a cigarette and reading Time magazine — Lucy was on the cover.
“Is the owner about?” Wilson asked.
“Mr. Rutherford is on holiday,” the woman replied, glancing over the top of the magazine.
“Rutherford?” Wilson asked. “I thought the owner’s name was Merkon.”
“Mr. Rutherford became the owner after the death of Mr. Merkon.”
“Merkon died?”
The redhead nodded.
“Let me confirm, Merkon was the owner here when the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder took place?”
The redhead nodded again.
Wilson frowned.
“Mr. Merkon was shot too,” she added. “Only they didn’t give it a fancy name.”
“Merkon was shot?”
The woman behind the bar nodded. “Six months ago. Five bullets. His body was found by the city dump.”
Wilson ordered a whiskey. He climbed up onto a barstool and got to know the redhead better.
The woman’s name was Sophie. She had been working at the bar for eight months. She knew all about the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder.
Merkon had told her all about it. Merkon had told everyone all about it. But, it was what he hadn’t been telling everyone about the murder that really fascinated the redhead.
“He called it his retirement fund,” Sophie reported. “He showed it to me. He kept it hidden. It was a little candy box. It had a tartan design to it, only what was inside probably wasn’t candy, and probably not Scottish.”
“What was inside?” Wilson asked.
“He never told me. But it had something to do with that murder, and he said it was going to make him a rich man.”
“Where’s the box now?”
Sophie shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve looked for it, but I’ve never found it.”
Wilson would have left the matter there, finished his drink and gone on his way, were it not for Sophie’s next remark: “You know, there was a guy in here just last week asking the same questions as you.”
“What guy?”
“A middle-aged guy. He smoked cheroots. I don’t know I would trust him if I had to. I told him about the candy box, too. He took a great interest in it.”
Wilson stared at the redhead. She had blue eyes. Sophie was a nice name for a redhead with blue eyes. Wilson could sit in that bar a whole long time, he imagined.
“Did I say something?” Sophie asked. She noticed a sparkle in the short man’s eyes.
Right around then, a police cruiser pulled up outside the bar. Within seconds, two thickset police officers came into the bar with their guns drawn.
Wilson went out the back door — it was next to the jukebox. He slipped through the doorway like a rabbit down a hole. A hail of gunfire went after him. Half of the bullets went into the jukebox, and the other half went through the doorway and narrowly missed him. One didn’t — it nicked his cheek.
So, Merkon had been shot dead — six months ago. Merkon’s passing had passed Wilson by unnoticed, so he headed to the morgue to catch up.
The morgue was in the basement of the City Daily Herald. Every issue the newspaper had ever printed was archived there, along with every report file, photograph, mimeograph, memorandum, and shopping list anyone in the building had ever written, filed, or sneezed upon.
Wilson had to wait until well after dark before he went in, and only then entering through a seldom-used back door. If the police had followed him to the bar with such apparent ease, then they’d have certainly staked out his office up on the fourth floor.
Once downstairs in the morgue, Wilson waded his way through the dusty back editions, rolling back the days about six months.
It was dark and damp down in the basement. The morgue was really no better than a rat-infested warren of corridors and shelves, lit by two five-watt light bulbs. The word “dank” had been coined there.
Merkon’s death barely got more than a paragraph and was buried toward the back of a late edition under a story about combine harvesters.
Wilson read about Merkon by the light of his cigarette lighter. It was pithy: Merkon was a man, he was found dead at the dump, and police had no leads in the investigation.
Wilson went for the back files — maybe there was more in the reporter’s notes. But there was no file on Merkon. Nary a slip of paper.
Wilson dug deeper. There weren’t any files on Merkon’s bar, and none for the shooting there, either. The reporter’s notes on that alone surely would have been an inch thick — Wilson knew this, he wrote much of it.
And there were no files whatsoever on Nancy Stillwater. Not even confetti.
Wilson lit a cigarette and pondered. Files were what a news-paper was built on. Documentation was the lifeblood of journalism.
Wilson could hear footsteps — slow, deliberate steps. They drew near.
“What are you doing?” asked a voice in the darkness. The voice had an English accent.
In the dim wattage of the lighting, Wilson could make out the peering eyes of a man with a Victorian moustache.
“I’m looking for back files,” Wilson explained. “Marvin Merkon and Nancy Stillwater.”
The man came further into the light. He was a polite-looking man, with a touch of gray about his hair. He looked like the type of man who’d wear a smoking jacket of an evening.
He looked like the type of man who, at this time of night, should be at home in his parlor poring over a copy of Dickens rather than hauling around a bunch of dusty documents in the basement of the Herald.
“I have all those files here,” the man reported, tapping the papers he was holding. “And you shouldn’t smoke down here. It’s rather dangerous with all this paperwork around.”
“Who are you?” Wilson asked.
“James Filbert, copyeditor. Who are you?”
“Wilson Hills, reporter.”
Filbert led Wilson back to the morgue’s entrance — at the foot of the stairs by the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Filbert explained to Wilson that the police had asked to see all the files pertaining to the Merkon murder and Nancy Stillwater. Filbert had spent two hours rounding up all the files, and no, Wilson could not look at them. They were to be handed to the police forthwith.
Wilson stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. Something dawned on him. “Are you Filbert? I mean, are you the Filbert?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the copyeditor who came up with the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder headline?”
Filbert looked a bit miffed. “That was my headline, what of it?”
“We’re still laughing about it on the fourth floor, that’s what of it.” Wilson’s grin suggested the laughter on the fourth floor wasn’t because they thought it was funny.
“Writing headlines is hardly writing Shakespeare,” Filbert sniffed. He spied blood on Wilson’s cheek. “Why are you bleeding?”
“Something wicked my way came. Nice to meet you, Filbert.”
Wilson made his way up the stairs back to the street. When he got to the top, he turned around and stepped back down to the basement. Since when was the newspaper handing over its archives to the police for their perusal?
When Wilson got back to the foot of the stairs he could hear Filbert before he could see him. Filbert was talking on the basement telephone. He was talking to the police. He was telling them that the fugitive they had been looking for was leaving the building, and if they wanted to catch him, they’d better hurry.
Wilson was about to get the hell out of there when Filbert did a curious thing. After he hung up the telephone, he put a cheroot to his lips, struck a match, and lit it up. After seeing this, Wilson got the hell out of there.
It was approaching midnight. Wilson headed to the bus terminal. He had a key to locker 221. He had a feeling he might need the contents of locker 221.
Wilson hadn’t got but three steps inside the terminal when a tall, beefy man in a brown suit grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around, and walked him back out again.
The beefy man walked Wilson across to a car — a black sedan. Its engine was running.
The beefy man tossed Wilson into the passenger’s seat as if he were an overcoat. He then walked around the car and got in himself.
Once behind the wheel, the big guy flicked on the headlamps, put the car into gear, and drove away.
“And you would be Bruno,” Wilson said, winding down the window.
“How you know my name?” Bruno asked, negotiating the traffic.
“I’m a reporter.”
“Is that what you do?”
Wilson noticed that Bruno had lips the size and shape of a prizefighter’s fingers, and chin stubble like a porcupine.
“Yeah, that’s what I do,” Wilson said. “You’re Nancy Stillwater’s boyfriend.”
They drove across town, until there were no more oncoming car headlamps and the street lighting had faded to nonexistent.
Bruno parked the black sedan out in the back of a run-down and dilapidated building. There was a sign by the back entrance: STAGE DOOR. It was held up by one remaining hinge.
Bruno flicked a switch on the fuse box. The lights came on. He walked Wilson out onto the stage of what had once been a rather splendid old theater, but had long fallen into decline.
There were some dusty decorations strewn about which suggested the last show the room had seen was a USO party eight years back — New Year’s, 1944.
“I got this place cheap,” Bruno explained. “I’m going to get in some people and fix it up.”
“I take it you didn’t bring me here to discuss the decorating,” Wilson replied.
Bruno dug his hand into his suit pocket. He pulled his hand out again and tossed a fistful of nuts into the air above his head. When the nuts came back down again, some went into his mouth, the rest landed on the wooden floor of the stage and scattered across it.
“Why’d you shoot Nancy?” Bruno asked, chomping on a mouthful of nuts.
“I didn’t shoot Nancy,” Wilson answered. “Are you sure you didn’t?”
Bruno shook his head. “Why would I shoot Nancy? Nancy was my wife.”
Wilson smiled politely. “That might not stand up in court.”
“I went out for beer,” Bruno explained. “When I come back, I see you being led out of my house by the police. I see Nancy being carried out on a stretcher — with her head covered.”
“I didn’t shoot Nancy,” Wilson said. “I’m a reporter. I only come into the picture after something’s happened.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Yeah, that’s what I do. Anyway, what’s with you and Nancy? Two years ago you were blowing a saxophone in a strip joint and she was a waitress. Nancy now owns a house up on Delshaw and you’ve gone into property investment.”
Bruno put his hand into his other pocket — only it wasn’t roasted nuts that he kept in that one.
Wilson stared down the unforgiving barrel of an M-1911.
“Do you sing?” Bruno asked.
“Do you have a request?”
“I like to sing. People tell me I have a beautiful voice.”
“You have a beautiful voice.”
“I wanted lessons when I was a kid, but my mother made me learn an instrument.”
“You have a beautiful voice. Want to point that .45 at someone else?”
“Nancy was my brain,” Bruno explained. “She thought of everything. I just played the part.”
“What was the picture?”
Bruno blankly stared at Wilson. Analogy and met
aphor may as well have been types of pasta.
“What part did you play when you were playing your part?” Wilson asked.
“Nancy was an attractive woman,” Bruno explained. “All kind of guys was attracted to her.”
“Rich guys?”
“Yeah, rich guys. Rich guys with money.”
“How did it get to be your money?”
“They’d take Nancy out. They’d show her a good time.”
Wilson nodded knowingly. “And she’d show them an even better time.”
Bruno had that blank look again.
“We’ll put her down as a gracious hostess.”
“They had a good time,” Bruno said again, stiffly, on the verge of getting the point.
“So, how did you fit into it?” Wilson asked.
“I’d play the jealous husband.”
Wilson nodded. “Got it.”
“I’d show up, mess the guy up a bit. Pull a few buttons off his shirt.”
“And then you’d blackmail them?”
“Nancy would have them pay her money.”
“How much money?”
“A lot of money. She’d tell them I’d killed a man. She’d tell them I’d caught her fooling around once before.”
“So, why were they giving her money?”
“She told them she was going to hire a man with a gun. The man was going to take care of me.”
“Blackmail with a twist.” Wilson grinned. “And let me guess, after they’d paid her the money, something would go wrong.”
Bruno nodded. “How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Nancy would telephone them a few days later. She’d tell them I had found out all about it. She’d tell them I had killed the man with the gun. She’d then say I had shot her and she was dying, and now I was coming after them and they ought to run.”
“And they left town by sundown.”
“Yeah.”
Wilson nodded. “Okay, so why then did you shoot dead the guy with the glass eye in Merkon’s bar?”
Bruno didn’t like that question.
A gunshot rang out. It echoed inside the theater like thunder. Bruno fell to his knees and clutched his stomach. He was bleeding. He’d been shot from behind and the bullet had gone right through him. A second later he flopped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006 Page 9
