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

by Doug Allyn

  He heard a woman leaving the auditorium say to her husband, “My watch is a half-hour slower than yours.” Gloria immediately moved in and insisted it was nine o’clock, right on the dot. The woman asked someone else and received the same answer. She shrugged and reset it. “I’ve never known it to lose time like that before.”

  Nick moved among the players in the casino, watching the blackjack tables and the roulette wheels, looking for something, somewhere. About an hour later, Charlie Weston joined him. “How’d you do that trick with the watches? I had my eyes on those bags every minute. They never left the stage.”

  “It’s a trade secret,” Nick answered with a smile.

  “The clock out by the reception area is a half-hour fast.”

  “Twenty-nine minutes fast, to be exact.”

  “How’d you manage it, Nick?”

  “For what you’re paying, you get results. Explanations cost extra.”

  “I thought your show was an audition for Abe Roster, but he didn’t come in to watch it.”

  “We had a talk earlier.”

  That seemed to surprise the detective. “You did? What about?”

  “Stick around till midnight and I’ll tell you.”

  Weston glanced at his watch. “It’s not even ten yet.”

  “You’re slow, Lieutenant. It’s ten twenty-four to be exact. You’d better reset your watch.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” But he did it.

  “What about the rest of my money?”

  “Meet me on the dock at midnight, when the place closes. You’ll have it then. I’ll be in a red Olds at this end of the parking lot.”

  Nick spent the next ninety minutes searching through the ship, but it was a useless task. There were too many places to hide something, and too many security guards likely to pounce on him if they found him outside the public areas. He would have to confront Charlie Weston, even if it meant losing the balance of his money.

  He made sure Gloria and the girls were off the Cajan Queen by eleven forty-five. “Pay them off,” he told Gloria, “but make sure they don’t go back on board. You either. Go over to the rental car and wait for me there. If for some reason I don’t join you by twelve-fifteen, drive back to the hotel and I’ll meet you there later.”

  “Nicky, what is all this? What’s going to happen to the ship?”

  “Later,” he told her.

  Nick strolled along the front row of cars until he spotted the red Olds. Lieutenant Weston was already inside behind the wheel and he motioned for Nick to get in next to him. It was just before midnight by Nick’s new improved time, and people were starting to leave the ship. He didn’t worry about what they’d think when the clocks in their cars revealed a discrepancy of twenty-nine minutes.

  “All right,” Weston said when Nick was in the car. “Here’s the rest of your money.” People were streaming down the gangplank now.

  “I need some information from you,” Nick said, starting to reach for the envelope.

  “What information?”

  “Where is the bomb hidden?”

  Charlie Weston snorted, then squinted at Nick through half-closed eyes, the lights from the riverboat playing across his face. “What bomb? What’re you talking about?”

  “Do I have to explain it, Charlie? You had money to spend on luring me down here, money to pay me to steal those twenty-nine minutes. That’s more money than any police lieutenant earns, if he’s honest. I’ve heard how Billy Burdeck controls gambling along the Gulf Coast. You don’t get that big unless you pay people off, including cops. You’re on Burdeck’s payroll, aren’t you? But tonight he’s trying something that even you couldn’t stomach. You couldn’t go to your superiors without admitting your own involvement so you got the idea of luring me to New Orleans and hiring me.”

  Weston scratched his nose. “Keep talking,” he said grimly.

  “You hired me to steal twenty-nine minutes from the customers and employees of the Cajan Queen. I had to ask myself why. What would it accomplish? Well, I was told that the management allows fifteen minutes after closing to empty the ship of passengers, and another ten minutes for the employees to depart after delivering the money to the cashiers. Naturally I was thinking about a robbery, but why would that upset you so much and get you to put up your own money to safeguard these people? Certainly a robbery, even a violent one, wouldn’t be likely to harm more than a handful of people. Yet by emptying the ship twenty-nine minutes early you seemed to be worried about almost everyone on board. That’s when it dawned on me. It wasn’t going to be a midnight robbery but a midnight bomb — something strong enough to destroy the Cajan Queen and most of the people on it. I asked myself if that made sense. Was there any reason why Billy Burdeck would want the bomb to go off at midnight rather than four in the morning or two in the afternoon? Yes, a very good reason. Abe Roster was always on board at midnight to total up the night’s receipts.”

  For a moment Weston said nothing. He seemed to be watching two couples who’d left the Cajan Queen together and were chatting on the dock by a moored powerboat. One couple apparently had come by water and now they were parting. “You’re a smart guy, Velvet. You always were. Maybe we should have switched jobs back about twenty years ago. You’d probably have made a better cop than I did.” He paused and asked, “Is Abe still on board?”

  “No,” Nick told him. “I needed to have him change the ship’s clocks and have the employees change their watches. I told him it was my best trick — I was going to save his life.”

  The detective glanced at the car’s clock. “It’s almost a quarter to twelve, real time.”

  “Where’s the bomb hidden, Charlie? Abe Roster’s safe. What good will it do you or Burdeck to kill the innocent people still on board?”

  “Tell me how you did the trick with the watches,” Weston countered.

  Nick sighed. “My assistants left the real bags behind the last row of seats and picked up duplicate bags full of junk to bring on stage. While everyone was watching me go to work with the sledgehammer Gloria sneaked out behind the audience and picked up the real bags. She and the girls changed the times backstage. Now where’s the bomb?”

  “There isn’t any bomb on the ship.”

  “Then why were you so anxious to get the people off early?”

  “Burdeck is launching a radio-controlled motorboat from across the lake. It’s filled with explosives. It’ll hit the Cajan Queen at midnight or just before.”

  Nick heard the words even as his eyes caught sight of a familiar figure running back up the gangplank. It was Clair, one of his four assistants, and Gloria was running about twenty feet behind her.

  Nick was out of the car in an instant, shouting to Gloria as she ran up the gangplank after the girl. “Gloria! Come back! It’s ten to twelve!”

  Weston was out of the car too. “She’s a fool to go back on board.”

  Nick turned and grabbed him by the shirt. “You’ve got to stop Burdeck’s boat!”

  “Can’t be done. I think it’s already started. He must have seen that everyone was leaving early.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Out there,” the detective pointed. “See the running lights? That’s the direction it would be coming from.”

  Nick couldn’t see it for a moment. Then he spotted it, moving moderately fast and definitely headed toward them. He glanced quickly around, his options fading. He took a deep breath and plunged forward toward the couple just getting into their little boat. “Police!” he shouted. “I’m commandeering your boat!” He shoved the man back into the woman’s arms, grabbing the key already in his hand. Then he was into the powerboat, casting off the line as the man shouted after him.

  He gunned the engine and shot straight forward, swerving just in time to avoid his own collision with the riverboat. He felt comfortable on the water, remembering his sailing days on Long Island Sound, and headed straight out onto the lake. For a moment he couldn’t see the running lights on the other craft, but th
en he picked them up, a hundred yards away and closing fast. He turned on his boat’s spotlight and targeted the other craft. There was no one visible aboard it.

  Nick took a deep breath and turned the wheel slightly, setting a course to intercept it. The explosion, when it came, lit up the shoreline like a sudden midnight sun.

  When Gloria unlocked the door of their hotel room Nick was just stepping out of the shower. “My God, Nicky, I thought you were—!”

  “Dead?” he asked with a grin. “Only a bit messy from swimming around in that scummy water. I feel better now. I swam in a bit up the shoreline and didn’t want to bother explaining it all to the police. I found a cab to bring me back. Sorry to give you a fright.”

  She hugged him, close to tears. “Lieutenant Weston thought you were dead for sure. When I left he was telling them all about it, about Billy Burdeck wanting to blow up the Cajan Queen and kill Abe Roster.”

  “When I saw you run back after Clair I knew I had to save that boat somehow. What happened? What went wrong?”

  Gloria shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it! I told the girls we’d gotten everyone off early because something would happen on board at midnight. As soon as she heard that, Clair went wild. It seems they’d started having an affair when she appeared in that other show on the ship recently. She was in love with Roster and was trying to save him.”

  Nick finished drying his hair with the bath towel. “Did Weston tell the police about my stealing twenty-nine minutes from the customers?”

  “I doubt it,” Gloria told him. “Who would ever believe that?”

  The Jury Box

  by Jon L. Breen

  © 1994 by Jon L. Breen

  The husband-and-wife detecting team has a long and mostly jolly history. A pioneering example were Agatha Christie’s Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, who first appeared unmarried in The Secret Adversary (1922), acquired a detective agency in the semi-parodic 1929 collection Partners in Crime, and made several widely spaced return engagements in Christie thrillers, ending with Postern of Fate (1973). Nick and Nora Charles of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) appeared with their dog Asta in no additional novels but became series characters in a half-dozen films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the forties, Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. and Mrs. North followed in the insouciant, heavy-drinking pattern of Nick and Nora, as did Jake and Helene Justus, secondary characters to John J. Malone in Craig Rice’s novels.

  Though Nick narrated The Thin Man and the cases of the Beresfords, Norths, and Justuses were told in the third person, the husband-and-wife mysteries have most commonly been narrated by the wife. This was true of several of the other married detecting teams of the forties, including Frances Crane’s Pat and Jean Abbott, Theodora DuBois’s Jeffrey and Anne McNeill, and my personal favorites, Kelley Roos’s Jeff and Haila Troy. The Troys, along with Patrick Quentin’s Peter and Iris Duluth, were one of the few detecting couples to have serious marital problems, actually separating at one point. One of the contemporary mystery’s favorite marriages has also had its ups and downs.

  *** Nancy Pickard: Confession, Pocket Books, $20. Pickard’s novels are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, since narrator Jenny Cain, Massachusetts foundation director and detecting amateur, is consistently identified as series star and cop husband Geof Bushfield is offstage in many of her adventures. But in this case, involving a teenage boy who appears on their doorstep claiming to be Geof s biological son and seeking a true solution to the alleged murder-suicide of his mother and legal father, they are clearly in co-sleuthing harness. Though the plot and a heavily portentous opening chapter lead the reader to expect tough emotional going, the book proves to be in a lighter vein than some of Pickard’s recent, particularly the Edgar-nominated I.O.U., at least until the dramatic final chapter. I’m not sure the conclusion really works, but a Pickard novel is never less than readable and involving.

  *** Gar Anthony Haywood: Going Nowhere Fast, Putnam, $19.95. Dottie and Joe Loudermilk, an African-American couple in their fifties, are a likable variation on the traditional married sleuthing team. Touring the country in happy retirement while evading their worrisome children, they become embroiled in a crime problem at the Grand Canyon when their shiftless son Bad Dog turns up just in time to find a sitting dead man in the bathroom of their Airstream trailer. Husband Joe is the ex-cop, but narrator Dottie does most of the detecting, assisted by Bad Dog. Haywood observes what should be the first rule of a comic mystery: he keeps it short. The plot is slight, but the telling is charming — to my admittedly masculine ear, Haywood does the feminine viewpoint flawlessly — and I look forward to repeat visits by the Loudermilk family.

  *** Aaron Elkins: Dead Men’s Hearts, Mysterious, $18.95. Like the Jenny Cains, the cases of Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, but spouse Julie is always on the scene to help demonstrate one of mystery fiction’s happiest marriages. This time the couple travel to Egypt for the filming of a documentary on an institute called Horizon House and wind up looking into the murder of its overbearing director. As usual in this series, a strong sense of background combines with solid classical puzzlespinning. Then there’s the fun of toting up the food references.

  *** R.D. Zimmerman: Red Trance, Morrow, $20. Maddy and Alex Phillips, appearing for the third time, are another and rarer variety of male/female sleuthing team. She is a blind and paraplegic forensic hypnotist who lives in wealthy seclusion on Lake Michigan, while he is her brother, legman, and Watson. Most of the novel is in flashback as Alex, in a hypnotic trance that heightens his memory and observation, recounts to Maddy his dangerous adventures in St. Petersburg, where an old friend has been murdered. The picture of post-Soviet Russia, a locale the author knows well, is vivid and fascinating. The unusual structural technique, combined with an emotionally charged, not-quite-over-the-top first-person narrative style, places Zimmerman among the most individual voices in the genre.

  *** Nick Gaitano: Special Victims, Simon and Schuster, $21. Some of the best ironic titles (e.g. The Best Years of Our Lives, All Quiet on the Western Front) allude to war. This one, referring to a Chicago police section that, says one character, “they created for dead people who got money,” takes its resonance from the war on crime — and the probing reader can undoubtedly find multiple meanings for it. Lieutenant Tony Tulio, head of the unit, goes after a unique serial killer known as the Collector, who harvests body parts for the ailing relatives of his clients. Though the set-up seems conventional, the way it plays out is anything but, finishing with as thorough a bloodbath as any Shakespearean tragedy. Gaitano is a pseudonym of the Edgar-nominated Eugene Izzi.

  *** Paul Bishop: Kill Me Again, Avon, $4.99. The latest from one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s best-known officer-novelists has at its center a fascinating legal issue: can a man who years before was tried and convicted for killing his wife, although her body was never found, be charged with killing her again when she turns up as a fresh corpse shortly after he has been released on parole? Legal buffs may be disappointed that the matter isn’t resolved in court, but satisfying plot twists, exciting action sequences, and insider details of police work make up for the lapse. Homicide detective Fey Croaker is a strong central figure, though she shares her last initial with too many other characters: Colby, Cordell, Craven, and Cahill.

  In a field as crowded and competitive as the contemporary mystery, how does the overwhelmed reader navigate from one worthwhile author to another with similar qualities? One way is through a book like By a Woman’s Hand: A Guide to Mystery Fiction by Women (Berkley, $10), expertly written by Jean Swanson and Dean James and covering about 250 contemporary female writers. The alleged male ascendancy in secondary coverage, which has been overstated to put it mildly, is used to justify such a helpful encyclopedic reference source as this being confined to writers of one sex.

  Rarely does one renowned American mystery novelist write the life of anot
her. The late Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1978 book on Erle Stanley Gardner was one example of the phenomenon. Charlotte MacLeod gives us another in Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart (Mysterious, $21.95). MacLeod emphasizes the early life of her subject, a gifted and important writer of popular fiction who has sometimes been unfairly patronized by the mystery genre’s historians.

  Come Night, Come Silence

  by Suzanne Jones

  © 1994 by Suzanne Jones

  A new short story by Suzanne Jones

  After earning a Ph.D. in literature and discovering that her education provided no marketable skills, Suzanne Jones decided to go into the insurance business. In 1986 a company transfer from Colorado to Los Angeles gave her a chance to experience the southern California lifestyle she depicts in this new psychological thriller, in which an insurance executive confesses to the most heinous crimes...

  ❖

  Edward Brennan stands in his bare feet in the shadowy kitchen. In the night-light from the stove, the cutlery on the magnetic strip above the counter doesn’t glimmer. The immaculately clean tile beneath the palms of his hands doesn’t shine. He has just uncorked a bottle of Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon (Reserve).

  He is a man of just under average height whose broad shoulders seem to stretch the fabric of his snowy shirt although it has been expressly tailored for him by a shirtmaker in Beverly Hills. His monograms on the heavy cuffs are closely worked in a burgundy thread. In the dim light they look like spots of blood.

  He runs one of his hands over his smooth head. Every morning in the shower he shaves the stubble from his scalp. The hair surrounding the tonsure is red-gold and is as vigorous as his closely cropped beard. His lips in the nest of curly hair are as soft and full as a girl’s.