Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

by Doug Allyn

“Oh, we tried. Had three miscarriages before our doctor advised against it.”

  “My dear, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”

  “Nothing to forgive.” Helen patted the old woman’s hand. “It used to upset me, but not now.” She said harshly, “There’s no guaranteeing it would have been a sweet little girl, and I don’t think I could have coped with another one like Jason.”

  “I don’t want to tell tales,” Mrs. Clayton said, pointing to the reclamation, “but there he goes again.”

  That night at dinner Jason contrived to upset his food on the floor. Helen had wanted to lock him in his room without dinner as punishment for going out on the reclamation and for teasing and abusing Cookie and Amah as they prepared the meal; but the effort of disciplining him threatened to bring on more tantrums, and she knew she was beyond coping with them. This ruined meal was her reward for leniency.

  “You did that on purpose!” she shouted as he looked with satisfaction at the mess of food and broken china on the tiles and carpet. “Clean it up.”

  “Oh, Mother, don’t be such an idiot,” he drawled. “Why do you think they have servants in this country?”

  Cookie returned from the kitchen, where he had gone to summon Amah to bring a bucket and cloth.

  “Please leave it,” Helen said. “I’ll do it. Or Jason will.”

  But Cookie held out her chair until she sat down again. This weak-willed woman could never make her child obey her, and it was beneath his dignity to allow an employer to do work that should be done only by his wife.

  Jason grinned as Amah cleaned up the mess and Cookie served him with more food.

  “Stop that!” Helen wanted to slap him, but had a dreadful feeling that he might slap her back. “Go to your room.”

  “Oh, Mother, really,” her son said, staying put.

  Later, shouting to make himself heard over the heavy rain, Cookie told his wife, “Either that little bastard goes or we do.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Amah said, looking up from ironing one of the little bastard’s shirts. “He stays. Australians don’t like sending their children home to boarding school, not at that age.”

  “Ah.” Cookie could still be surprised by the range of information that his wife had picked up from gossiping with other servants over the years. “Then we must go.”

  “Where? There are too many servants looking for work as it is, and younger than us.”

  “Taking care of that drunk Preston was bad enough, but otherwise it was an easy berth, and there weren’t the insults, day by day, and from a child. Perhaps...” Cookie went on to explain how his cousin had a friend who knew someone in one of the tongs who for a fee would commit unmentionable crimes. “He could fix the little demon, permanently.”

  “Oh, stop dreaming,” Amah said. “We couldn’t afford it, for one thing. And if anything happened to him, who would be the first suspected? Chinese may be running this silly little country now, but it’s always people like us who are blamed for everything.”

  “I still think—”

  “If you have nothing sensible to say, keep quiet and let me get on with my work.”

  After school the next day, Jason agreed without fuss to stay inside. “I’ve got a book I’m supposed to read for homework,” he said, and went to his room. He was still there when Helen looked in, before going out for drinks on the padang with Mrs. Clayton.

  An hour later she asked Cookie to tell Jason to have his shower. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with him. He seems to have turned over a new leaf.”

  Cookie was not sure what this meant, but he felt no reason to share the optimism he detected in her voice. Five minutes later he was back, coughing discreetly.

  “Yes, Cookie?”

  “Jason gone, mem.”

  “The little horror. On his bike, I suppose? I knew I should have got rid of it.”

  “Bike not gone, mem.”

  “Oh, not the reclamation!” Helen moaned at the nuisance of having to go hunting out there for him again. Then she remembered the previous night’s rain. “It’ll be a swamp!”

  “Now don’t fret,” Mrs. Clayton said. “I’m sure he’s perfectly all right.”

  “You take that side,” Helen pushed Cookie in the direction of the far end of the sea wall. “I’ll go this way.” She started to run, then turned back to Mrs. Clayton. “The police? Do you think we should call the police?”

  “Leave it to me,” Mrs. Clayton said, having no idea what she was supposed to tell the police. “I’m sure there’s no need to panic.”

  Jason was terrified when he fell into the mud. Floundering wildly, he quickly sank up to his waist; but he had the sense to keep his hands above his head, and when the mud reached halfway up his chest he found that his feet were on firm ground. He stopped struggling. The mud felt quite pleasant as it slid inside his shirt and pants. He even moved, cautiously testing with his feet, farther away from the hard edge of the swamp, to make it more of a nuisance for those who would have to fish him out. He had no doubt that he could climb free by himself, but he preferred a dramatic rescue.

  He had been too shocked to scream at first, and he didn’t scream now. He’d probably been missed by this time, and he liked the idea of people wandering in search of him, among the maze of hillocks where the mud and sand was piled. Why let them know, by shouting, where he was, when it would be much more fun to spin things out? The sun would soon be gone, though, and he didn’t like the thought of being here alone in the dark. He decided to count up to 350, slowly, then start yelling.

  He had reached 188 when Cookie appeared from behind one of the hillocks. He smiled at Jason.

  “Help me, Cookie.”

  Cookie, summing up the situation, did not move for almost a minute. He saw that the boy was safe, not struggling or sinking. Cookie moved forward slowly and stopped when his feet began to sink. He squatted and extended his arm, leaning his whole body towards the boy.

  Something in the coldness of the man’s eyes warned Jason. He saw that the curve of his mouth was more a grimace than a smile; the angle of the hand suggested revenge, not rescue. Jason summoned his body into a violent effort, grabbing the hand with both his own. Cookie fell forward. His face hit the mud close to Jason’s head. Jason grasped the collar of Cookie’s shirt and began to climb out, using the desperately heaving body as a ladder. He did not hurry as he felt Cookie’s head and shoulders sinking under his sandals. The body, with the head and the top of the torso well down in the mud, was hardly moving by the time Jason was back on firm ground. For another minute, he watched as Cookie’s feet flopped weakly, seeking a leverage that wasn’t there. When there was no more movement, Jason, screaming for help, ran to find his mother.

  Five minutes later, on the darkening padang, Helen clutched her trembling son in her arms.

  “Oh, Mother, Mother.” Jason knew that, even dampened by false sobs, his accent was more sharply English than ever as he spoke the rehearsed words: “Oh, Mother, that brave man gave his own life to save mine.”

  The Theft of Twenty-Nine Minutes

  by Edward D. Hoch

  ©1994 by Edward D. Hoch

  A new Nick Velvet story by Edward D. Hoch

  With the explosion of gambling on Indian reservations and in states that previously disallowed it, crime associated with the gaming business is bound to be depicted more frequently in fiction through the rest of this decade. If anyone has his finger on the pulse of crime trends, it’s Edward D. Hoch, whose latest caper for Nick Velvet has the lovable thief behind the scenes of riverboat gambling — another popular new venue for the casino crowd...

  ❖

  This was the final gasp of Mardi Gras and the streets of New Orleans were jammed with costumed revelers. Nick Velvet moved among them unnoticed, even though he wore a fringed cowboy shirt and large white hat, with two guns belted to his waist. He felt a certain invincibility in the carnival crowd, where only the worst of crimes brought forth any police response.

 
; Before long he spotted his target, slipping off one of the elaborate parade floats and ducking into a hotel lobby. Nick followed along, pushing past a bottleneck of veiled harem girls. He glimpsed the man in the skeleton costume just entering the men’s room off the bar. Nick stepped inside, waited an instant while a fat man in a tuxedo departed on his way back to the hotel ballroom. Otherwise he was alone with the skeleton. The man had pushed the mask up on his forehead as he moved to the sink and began washing his hands.

  Nick drew one of his pistols and said, “Raise your hands. This is a robbery.”

  The man looked at him and laughed. “What?”

  “The gun is real. Give me your mask.”

  “Are you crazy, mister?”

  Nick poked the man’s stomach with the barrel of his six-shooter. “Give me the mask or I’ll ventilate you, partner.”

  The man quickly slipped the skull mask from his head and handed it over. “Don’t shoot! Here it is.”

  “Thanks. Now finish washing your hands and take your time about it. If you come running after me it might not be so good.” Then Nick was gone, out the door and across the crowded lobby to the street.

  An hour later, in a hotel across town, he handed over the mask to the woman who’d hired him. “Here it is, one skull mask.”

  She smiled as she opened the plastic bag and checked it out. “Any trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Here’s the balance of your money. It was a pleasure to work with you, Mr. Velvet.”

  “The pleasure was mutual.”

  He left the hotel room and counted quickly through the money as he waited in the empty hallway for the elevator. It had been one of the smoothest assignments he’d ever carried out. If they were all that easy—

  A stocky man with graying hair had come out of one of the other rooms and was walking toward him down the hall. Nick felt a moment of panic as he sensed something familiar about the man, something from way in the past. “Hello, Nick,” the man said as he reached him. “Nice to see you again.”

  “I think you must be mistaken. My name’s Dave.”

  The man grinned. “Don’t recognize me, do you? Too many years since our last meeting. I’m Charlie Weston — Lieutenant Weston to you.”

  The memories came flooding back. First New York, where Weston had been with the 17th Precinct, then a slower-paced New England police force in Eastbridge, Massachusetts, near Plymouth. Nick had stolen some letters from a sign there, and tangled with Weston again after that, but he hadn’t thought about the man in years. “You’re looking older, Charlie. I didn’t recognize you.”

  “We’re all looking older, but I spotted you right off.”

  “You with the New Orleans Police Department?”

  “Yeah. Still a lieutenant, but the weather’s better down here. I’m too old for all that New England snow.”

  The elevator chimed and its doors slid open but Weston placed a restraining hand on Nick’s arm. “Come down to my room for a few minutes and we’ll talk about old times.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No,” Weston said with a chuckle. “You always were a smart boy. I won’t keep you long.”

  They went back down to the room as Nick began to wonder what a New Orleans detective lieutenant was doing with a downtown hotel room in the first place. The room was identical to the one Nick’s client occupied a few doors away. Nick settled into a chair and waited for Charlie Weston to start talking. When he did speak, his words couldn’t have surprised Nick more. “I want you to steal something for me.”

  “Come on, Charlie.” Nick tried to laugh, growing more apprehensive by the second. “I haven’t done that sort of thing in years!”

  “No? Then you can hand over the money in your pocket. Let’s stop kidding around, Nick. I arranged for you to come here, but that other business was just a blind. I need you for something important.” Nick studied the lined face opposite him, trying to read something into those half-remembered features. “All right,” he said at last, realizing he was in a trap even if he didn’t quite understand the nature of it. “What did you want stolen?”

  “Time. Twenty-nine minutes of time.”

  “Time! How does anyone steal time?”

  “That’s for you to figure out. I want twenty-nine minutes stolen from the five hundred or so customers and employees aboard a gambling ship docked on Lake Pontchartrain.”

  “It can’t be done,” Nick said immediately. “At least not by me. I only steal objects of no value. Certainly you must know that time is money, as Benjamin Franklin and others have told us.”

  Weston uttered a curse. “We’re not playing games, Velvet. If you refuse to help me, I’ll arrest you on the spot for stealing that man’s mask. The victim and the woman who hired you are both prepared to testify.”

  “So it was all set up in advance. Tell me, what’s the sentence for stealing a two-dollar Halloween mask in New Orleans?”

  “Enough to make you regret it. Our judges don’t like you Northern criminals importing your crimes into Louisiana.”

  “I can remember when you were a Northerner yourself, Lieutenant.”

  “What’s your decision?”

  “All right,” Nick said with a sigh. “How much are you paying me?”

  “You have half of twenty-five thousand in your pocket right now, and you already received the other half.”

  Nick Velvet smiled and shook his head. “No, we start fresh. Another twenty-five or it’s no deal.”

  “All right, but after you do it.”

  “I’ll need money for supplies in advance. The only way you can steal twenty-nine minutes from a boatload of people is to drug them, and that—”

  “No drugs.”

  “What?”

  “No drugs. When I say twenty-nine minutes I mean exactly twenty-nine minutes, not twenty-seven or thirty-one. Any sort of drug you could give to five hundred people would be too variable in its effects.”

  “I don’t know how it could be done without drugs.”

  “That’s what I’m paying you for.”

  “When is this to take place?”

  “It must be this coming Friday night, the eighteenth.”

  “That doesn’t give me much time. Seventy-two hours.”

  “I’ve seen you work. You can do it.”

  “May I ask why you need this done?”

  “No.”

  “Is it police business or something private?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “All right. Tell me about this gambling ship.”

  “It’s one of two anchored on the lake, just north of the city. The other is quite legal but there’s a question about the Cajan Queen that’s being argued in the courts right now. They claim they’re not technically a gambling ship because the gambling only follows a full evening’s entertainment including dinner and a stage show. And the ship is designed to look like an old Mississippi riverboat. But that needn’t concern you. Take a look at the place tomorrow night and figure out how you’re going to do it.”

  “By Friday.”

  Charlie Weston nodded. “It must be Friday, or I’ll have you in a jail cell before you know what’s happening to you.”

  The first thing Nick did when he reached his hotel room was to phone Gloria at home and tell her what had happened. “Nicky, you’re in trouble,” she decided when he’d finished talking. “How can we get you out of this?”

  “He’ll probably have someone tailing me, so I have to go through the motions. That’s what I’m calling about. Could you fly down here in the morning and help me out?”

  “What do you need?”

  “I want to visit the Cajan Queen tomorrow night, have dinner, take in the show, and do a little gambling. Then I’ll know better what has to be done.”

  “I’ll catch the first plane,” she promised.

  Seeing her come off the jetway shortly before noon the next day, Nick was reminded once more why he’d stayed with Gloria all those
years, even without a marriage license. Her hair was starting to gray now, and she refused to color it, but there was still the sense of ironic good humor about her. She viewed all of life as an amusement, one designed especially for her, and Nick was the greatest amusement of them all. She was probably the only sort of woman with whom he could ever have been content.

  “Have a good flight?” he asked, giving her a quick impersonal kiss.

  “It was smooth, I think. I dozed most of the way.”

  “You’re not used to getting up early.”

  “I guess not. What’s this place we’re going to tonight?”

  “A gambling ship docked on Lake Pontchartrain, just north of the city. Only they don’t advertise the gambling. They simply call it the complete experience, like a theme park or something.”

  That evening, having phoned for reservations and been told they must arrive promptly at seven, Nick and Gloria set out for the ship. It was actually on the north side of the lake, across a twenty-nine-mile-long toll causeway, and Nick entertained Gloria on the way with bits of knowledge he’d picked up during his stay. “It isn’t really a lake at all. If you look on a map you can see it’s a shallow extension of the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Is it legal to have gambling ships here?”

  “The state approved one of them, and they’re building a huge casino in New Orleans. The Cajan Queen is another matter. A man named Roster owns and operates it. He claims he’s competing with organized crime, running the only honest games in the Southeast. The state’s trying to close him down but it’s not that easy.”

  “You got all that from Lieutenant Weston?”

  “Most of it.”

  “What’s his angle with these twenty-nine minutes?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick admitted.

  He turned the rented car off the north end of the causeway and they headed for the brightly lit old-time riverboat anchored next to a large parking lot that was already almost full. Nick had to admit the whole thing was quite an operation. They were met at the top of the gangplank by an attractive young woman in a gold-braided naval uniform who delivered her welcoming lines with feeling. “Welcome aboard the Cajan Queen! Is this your first time with us?”