by Ellery Queen
Facts. What were the facts. Dodge was an incompetent who’d murdered four people to become President. He was a threat to Ward & Armstrong. And to me. If I could overpower him and call the police, the Company would be grateful. I might even get a raise.
A tapping from behind me. Intruding on my thoughts. I turned around to see a man on a scaffold, outside the window peering in at me. A window washer. He tapped again, waved, smiled stupidly.
Another drunk on the day before Christmas. I motioned for him to leave me alone. I had to think. He tapped again. Enough. I went to the window and threw the curtains shut. The tapping ceased.
Back at my desk. I might get a promotion or a raise. Perhaps both. I had to catch Dodge by surprise. Somehow. Then I knew how.
I entered his office without knocking. He had his head on his arms, slumped over the desk, as if asleep. He jerked as the door closed behind me.
“I didn’t call for you, Eddie!”
“I’ve had an idea, sir. I wanted to show initiative.”
He didn’t seem pleased. “I see, yes.”
I sat down in my customary chair. In front of me was the cheap nameplate. Malcolm A. Dodge. Malcolm. Male. “Mr. Dodge, who is the Chairman of the Board of Ward and Armstrong?”
He considered a moment. “Why, I suppose Mr. Ward is still the Chairman. He held that position, as well as being President.”
“But that’s not right, sir.” Male. “You have shown decisive leadership. You should hold the highest place in the Company.”
Annoyance became a beaming grin. “You know, Eddie, I absolutely agree. There is no place in this company for the likes of Ward.” He clapped his hands in delight.
“Everyone is in the Board Room, Mr. Dodge.” Male. “We should go tell them.”
Dodge sat back in the chair and chuckled to himself. “Chairman. Imagine the look on Ward’s face. Very good, Eddie. You keep up the good work and I will make you my Senior Vice-President.”
How dare he! I deserved at least Executive Vice-President! But I was in control now. Calm. “Why don’t we go tell him right away?”
Dodge was already halfway to the door. “Yes, yes, they must be told immediately.”
I followed him down the hall to the Board Room. He was still in the lead. For the moment. I nearly laughed aloud at this President—this incompetent—this incompetent President about to be deposed. A brief struggle, tie him up with my belt, call the police. Gratitude.
We entered the Board Room.
“Mr. Dodge, look. Mr. Ward is still at the head of the table. This can’t continue.”
I made myself speak to the corpse, trying not to see the crimson hole in his forehead. “Mr. Ward, you are no longer Chairman of the Board. You have been replaced. Mr. Dodge must sit in that chair.”
Mr. Ward didn’t budge. How could he? Being dead.
I stepped over the body of Miss Collins, gesturing for Dodge to follow me. “We’ll have to move him forcibly.”
“You are right, Eddie. We will move him together.” He walked to the other side of Mr. Ward and bent over him.
My chance. I picked up one of the heavy crystal ashtrays. As he took Ward’s arm, started to lift Ward by the arm, I hit Dodge on the back of the skull. Hard. He moaned, pitching forward onto Ward’s body. Again the ashtray in my hand flashed. Dodge slid to the floor, moaning louder.
I pulled the pistol out of his coat pocket just as Dodge began to scream.
“Traitor! You would rise against me? You—”
“Incompetent! Not fit to be President!”
He was desperately trying to stand. I pointed the gun between his eyes and squeezed the trigger again and again. The pistol was empty. He was on his knees, shrieking.
“I made you Vice-President!”
“Incompetent!”
“After all your failures!”
“Shut up!”
“Judas! Arnold!”
“Male, Male, Male, Male!”
I threw the useless gun at him and it knocked him back to the floor. He pleaded with me then.
“Eddie, for God’s sake, don’t—”
But the heavy ashtray was in my hand once more and I was hitting him with it on the head of that fraudulent incompetent presidential head the crystal burning red my hands slipping on the blood and sweat from his dying presidential head until he stops screaming no danger to anyone ever again ever.
Silence. Only the rush of air conditioning to calm my nerves as I lie next to Dodge. The dead Dodge. The dead President.
I have never felt so peaceful.
Finally I get up off the floor and wipe my hands on the front of his white shirt. I leave him there next to Mr. Ward. Two former Presidents.
Across the hall is the men’s room. Carefully I wash my hands. Very carefully.
I walk down the hall past my old office to the office of the President. I take the plastic nameplate that reads Malcolm A. Dodge and drop it into the wastebasket. My bronze nameplate looks at home on a presidential desk.
I sit in the handsome leather chair. It is even more comfortable than my old velvet one. I reach slowly for the telephone.
But I don’t dial.
Suddenly I need a cigar.
I go back to my old office and get the lacquered box of cigars, the gold clipper, and the gold lighter. I return and put them on my new desk. I light a fresh cigar and sit back. Satisfied.
Time passes, a lot of time, how much I cannot tell.
Then there was a voice. A faint voice. From the reception area.
“Is anyone there?” the voice asks.
“I am here,” I answer. “Is someone there?”
T. M. Adams
Short Week
Your Editor is going to suggest something unusual—something, to the best of our recollection, we have never suggested before. If you want to truly appreciate this gem of a short-short, read it through, then immediately read it again. The second time around (the story is only about 1500 words) you will fully appreciate its brilliant word-play. . .a tour de force. . .
For no reason other than that it was Monday morning, Parker showered, shaved, dressed, and left the house. On the way out of the driveway he nearly sideswiped Fallon’s car, still parked there after the disastrous party Friday night: one more reminder, a sort of four-wheeled hangover. It was raining, too.
Ten minutes out he thought he heard his name on the car radio and attempted a bit of fine-tuning, simultaneously contending for the express lane. He won the position but lost the station. Something washed up out of the static eventually, at first only in crests of disassociated phrases. As soon as he realized it was a newscast, the lovingly dressed-up details of an especially brutal wife-murder, he turned it off. The same old thing, he thought, and one station like another. Pulling into one of eight parking spaces reserved for junior vice-presidents at Intertool, Parker tried to imagine the far shores of the coming Friday. . .but no, even Wednesday seemed too distant.
He had skipped breakfast, not feeling like fixing it himself, and hunger always made him oversensitive to noise. Now he had to walk through a dozen open offices to the privacy of his own, somehow enduring the hammering of typewriters and keypunch machines, the unrelenting ringing of the telephones, and the not-quite-random talk talk talk of 300 tongues. Without civil service training, he reflected, it’s almost impossible to totally ignore the human voice, even just a snatch of gossip by the coffee machine (“. . .had a little thing going while her husband was out of town—”) or a complaint from behind a sports page (“. . .really murdered them Friday night. . .in the cellar now for sure—”). And now there came a fragment more lethal than these, louder in its phony bonhomie and right behind him: “Caught you!”
Parker felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to greet Dave Evans, a tall booming man given to a kind of forced double-entendre that Parker didn’t feel up to handling this morning. “Grim homecoming for you, boy!” he was saying, or shouting. “Shouldn’t have to tell you, never cut a vacation short.”
“What do you mean?” Parker asked unwillingly.
“I mean Fallon! Seems to have decided to take a long weekend, with you still off. Leaves a hole; now you’re back, you’ll probably have to fill in. Man’s gone too far! Someone’ll have to keep hitting him over the head until he straightens out. Know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Parker said, ears ringing, nausea rising. “Look, I’ve got to run.
“Course you do! Catch you later. Take care of Louisa for us”—a dig in the ribs here, and a stage wink—“if you haven’t already!”
Safe in his own office, Parker told his secretary to hold all but essential calls, and lost himself for a while in paperwork. But eventually the telephone rang.
It was a bad connection, a hollow unplaceable voice: “Are you going to have that breakdown today?”
Parker stopped breathing. He found himself looking around the office, as though expecting to surprise someone hiding there.
“Are you going to have that breakdown today?” Again, more patient this time. Of course, of course, it would be Chadwick, who never said hello or identified himself. He apparently still wanted a breakdown on the Finetron figures. Parker didn’t point out that he had just returned from vacation, or that he wasn’t even due back until the next day, or that the SEC ruling had rendered Finetron’s position academic. He merely said yes, he’d keep working on it.
“Okay,” Chadwick said. “Now, Fallon’s gone, so you’re going to have to talk to the detectives. . .Hello, Parker? Oh, right, you’ve been out, haven’t you? Well, I’ve decided to see what the detective agency can dig up on this seller.”
“In the cellar?” Parker asked faintly. This connection—
“Yeah, somebody was dumping Intertool in thousand-share blocks last week, as though they had advance knowledge that the Finetron merger would go sour. I told Fallon to sic the detectives on the seller; get some use out of our retainer—”
“Of course, of course,” Parker said.
“Can’t have one of our people involved in a killing like that, can we?”
Parker closed his eyes tightly. “No,” he said.
“Catch you later,” Chadwick said, and hung up.
Parker took an antacid and went back to work. For the next few hours he managed to restrict his thoughts to familiar routines. Consciousness surfaced only once. His eyes strayed from a confidential assessment of Finetron inventories to the photograph of his wife that stood on the corner of his desk. “With all my love, until you come home, Lou.” Curious, that “until you come home” part; he didn’t remember having ever seen it before, much less seeing it every workday for seven years. For a moment it didn’t even make sense to him. But of course, of course: she had sent it to him when he was in the service. . .and the Finetron stockholder’s report had overstated their assets by some 23 per cent. . .
The next time he was fully aware of his surroundings, he was at lunch with Evans, George MacKenzie from Merchandising, and someone else, who didn’t seem to count for much. He had the vague feeling that he had been keeping up his end of the conversation, but he could no longer remember what they were discussing, could no longer pay attention to anything except a voice emanating from two tables away. “Everybody knows about them,” the woman was saying, with nerve-dicing incisiveness. “Who does he think he’s fooling? I even know where he’s keeping her—”
Dish-clatter, or conspiracy, prevented him from hearing more. Somebody was tugging at his sleeve. He turned and caught the end of MacKenzie’s question: “—bury her?”
“What?” Parker said.
Impatiently MacKenzie repeated: “Do you think that cost-effectiveness is the only barrier?” Parker just stared at him. Mercifully Evans jumped in, saying, “Well, of course, there’s the licensing too. All the new regulations! Sheer murder.” And this last sentiment was echoed around the table, even Parker finding himself saying the words. . .
As they reapproached Parker’s office, Evans commiserated with him about how hard it was to come back after a vacation, concluding: “Looks like prison, doesn’t it? No escaping it, though!” Parker pretended he hadn’t heard.
His secretary looked up at him sympathetically—he probably appeared as ill as he felt—but she said, “The detectives are waiting for you, Mr. Parker.”
He froze; and slowly, with a rising inflection, he repeated her words.
“Yes,” she said. “You know: Mr. Fallon’s gone, so you’ll have to tell them everything.” He had been watching her lips very carefully this time; that was definitely what she had said.
And indeed they were waiting for him in his office, two of them. He seated himself gingerly, cleared his throat, and tried to remember what he should say. Lou’s picture caught his eye. “Come home,” yes. “I just came home from vacation Friday night,” he began, then faltered.
“Yes, your secretary told us,” one of the detectives said finally. “Uh, if you’re not ready for us yet, Mr. Parker, we can—”
“I’m ready, I’m ready,” Parker said. Starting over: “Look, you know Mr. Fallon, don’t you? A junior vice-president here?”
“Sure, he’s the one we usually report to,” the detective said. “His main thing is public relations, though, isn’t that right?”
Parker smiled sourly. “Et tu, Brute? Yes, the more public the better. So I gather.
“Well, as I said, I came home Friday night, the night before I was expected, and found Fallon with my wife. So I took the poker from the living-room fireplace, went back upstairs, and beat them both to death. Did I say that was Friday night? So on Saturday I tried to go for a walk, but already everyone was talking about it, though I couldn’t believe that at first; and the radio, too, the radio’s the worst. Now, on television they can only hint around at it, if you keep them in line by watching their lips. . .So on Sunday I just sat at home, watched television. And Monday is today. Did I say I buried them in the cellar? I buried them in the cellar. In case you hadn’t heard.”
The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” he said. “You’ll have to catch me later.” He picked up the receiver and swiveled his chair around to face the window, away from their pale staring faces.
The same hollow voice from the upper air: “We’re wondering, when are you going to have that breakdown?”
He hung up slowly. The two detectives were gone, for the moment. He stood and went to the window, adjusted the louver to let in air and sound. A news-vendor on the street below shouted something about murder, and the pigeons on the sill sang, “Lou, Lou, Lou.” Enough, Parker thought. Surely they could all knock it off now.
John F. Suter
The Oldest Law
First, about the book, Melville Davisson Post’s UNCLE ABNER: MASTER OF MYSTERIES, a cornerstone in any definitive detective-story library or collection: the book was published by D. Appleton, New York, in 1918, and remained in print in its original hardcover edition for more than 20 years. The first English edition did not appear for 54 years—Tom Stacey, London, 1972.
Second, about the quality of Post’s tales of Uncle Abner: Howard Hay craft, in his MURDER FOR PLEASURE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE DETECTIVE STORY, 1941, wrote that “posterity may well name Uncle Abner, after Dupin, the greatest American contribution to the form.”
Your Editor, in his THE DETECTIVE SHORT STORY: A BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1942, wrote that “UNCLE ABNER is the finest book of detective short stories written by an American author since Poe.”
Anthony Boucher, in his Introduction to the 1962 Collier reprint of UNCLE ABNER, wrote: “I envy anyone who here discovers UNCLE ABNER for the first time. He is about to read the best American detective short stories since Poe.”
Edmund Crispin, in his Introduction to the first English edition, in 1972, wrote: “The Uncle Abner stories remain undated to this day, chiefly because they are an early, and a very distinguished, corpus of historical detective fiction. . .Abner is a superb reasoner.”
In the light of these judgments we did not believe that anyone would h
ave the courage (or foolhardiness) to accept the challenge, to dare “take a shot” at writing a pastiche of Post’s Abner. But thinking back, we realized that some writers (notably Michael Harrison among them) have ventured to successfully imitate Poe’s Dupin, and many have rushed in to write reasonable facsimiles of Doyle’s Holmes, so why not a joust at Post’s Abner? Well, John F. Suter dared—and delivered.
Here is the first of a new series about that great champion of justice, the “protector of the innocent and righter of wrongs,” the “voice and arm of the Lord” stalwart, rugged Uncle Abner, Virginia squire of the Jeffersonian era, the first-published truly American detective, the first truly native American detective, excepting only the American Indian. . .
It was a time of change. We could not fail to reap benefit, many said. My Uncle Abner agreed, but would not say if only good would result or if troubles might come which would outweigh the good.
I tried to get him to discuss it as we rode our horses to get Thomas Harper, the County Clerk, just before dawn that morning early in spring. The railroad already passed through Wheeling, to the north. Now a spur was to be laid through our area, eventually reaching the Ohio River, to the west. This would permit cattle to be taken to the big markets without losing weight on a drive. We could ship out coal, timber, and grain. I found it exciting when I thought of it.
But when I wanted to talk of these changes that morning, Abner merely said, “Rufus depends on you now for much of his farm work. How will these things affect that?”
I had grown into this responsibility, even as my father grew older, but I had not foreseen the things which were coming. I said as much.
“We must consider each thing as it comes,” said my uncle. “We should now be considering why Randolph asked me to meet Harper very early and ride with him to the courthouse.”
I had no answer. My uncle had asked me to come with him because he knew that the soil was still too wet to turn and that my father could easily handle the other work. If Abner had not divined Squire Randolph’s purpose, I could not.
