The Shattered Raven

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Except,” Barney reminded them, “that if he is a member of our group, if he is one of those people that was on Skinny Simon’s radio show last week, I feel we have to get to the bottom of it ourselves.”

  The office door opened hesitantly, and they saw Detective George peeking around the corner.

  “Come in,” Barney said. “We’re just finishing up here. I was giving the fellows a report on our progress so far, and I’ll give the same report to you.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it,” George told him.

  The meeting broke up, and the members of the board drifted into small, chatty groups. Barney took George aside and spent the next twenty minutes filling him in on what he’d learned. The detective was interested, but beneath his interest, there seemed to be a twinge of annoyance at Barney’s efforts.

  “We could have found this all out,” George said, when he’d finished. “It might have taken us a little time, but we are equipped for investigations outside the city, you know.”

  “I know. Sometimes you get lucky in these things.”

  “Like back in the old private detective days, huh?”

  He left the detective and walked over to Susan. “How’s it going today?”

  “Fine. I told my boss that this was my last week on the big MWA murder case.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “I guess I’ve gotten too close to the thing. Something like that. I can’t look at it objectively any more. I guess I see you, and some of these other people I’ve gotten to know, and I wish you luck. I don’t just hang around for a story any more, like I did in those first days.”

  “Glad to hear that,” he said, leaning down to squeeze her hand. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

  “Barney, could I see you a minute?”

  He turned at Harry Fox’s voice, and walked over to the bookcase. Most of the others were drifting out He waved to Max Winters and called to Betty Rafferty. “I’ll lock up, Betty. You can take off for dinner if you want.”

  “Thanks, Barney.”

  “How’s it going?” Harry asked.

  “Good, good. Like I said before, we don’t have anything on the Raven business yet. We’re still hoping.”

  As he talked, his eyes were scanning the titles behind Harry’s head. They were in more or less alphabetical order, but occasionally one slipped out. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Eighth Circle by Stanley Ellin. A few Ian Fleming books, although he’d never been a member. Lots of Erie Stanley Gardner. Seconds by David Ely, badly out of order. He flipped it off the shelf and stuck it up above.

  “What was it, Harry? What did you want to see me about?”

  “I thought I should tell you before you found out somewhere else. I’m a graduate of the University of Texas.”

  Dusty jackets and shelves. He’d have to speak to Betty about it

  “Oh?”

  “I went there after the war. Just about the period you would have been talking about.”

  Barney blinked. “Ever know a fellow named Victor Jones?”

  “No. Never did. Of course, we had a big enrolment.”

  “Or Ross Craig?”

  “No. Didn’t know him, either.”

  “Coincidence, I guess,” Barney said. “I’m glad you told me about it, though. I might have gotten a little suspicious if I’d come across it somewhere.”

  He glanced across the room, toward where Susan was still waiting, then back at the books. Anthony Gilbert, Michael Gilbert, Winston Graham. All English authors.

  “Did you get much of a look at the fellow who shot at you?” Harry asked.

  “Just someone with a beard … Funny …”

  “What?”

  “Funny. I just happened to think who he reminded me of.”

  “Who was that?”

  “At the dinner, I was up on the speakers’ rostrum, getting ready to introduce Craigthorn, and there was a fellow with a beard near the back of the room. I remember noticing him, not thinking much about it. I really think it might have been the same person.”

  Barney’s eyes stopped at another title. The Third Man by Graham Greene. A slim book. It had originally been a short story and was expanded to novella length to tie in with the motion picture version. A very popular movie in its day. It had been a television series, too. Barney reached out and touched the shelf. “My God! The third man! The third man!”

  “What … what is it, Barney? What third man? I thought you just got through telling us there were only two of them.”

  “What do you know about Graham Greene?” Barney asked. “About the names of his characters?”

  Harry scratched his greying temple. “Well, I’m not much on modern authors.”

  Barney checked the copyright date of the book. “But it wasn’t published, even in its short version, till 1949. I need something earlier …”

  “What’s all this thing with names?”

  Barney was pawing through the bookcase, but the volume he wanted was not there. He was almost certain—almost—that his memory wasn’t playing tricks on him. He looked around for George, but the detective had already gone.

  “Susan, are you waiting for me?”

  “I was, Barney.”

  “Come with me, then. I have to make a stop at the public library.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to check on something. Something I should have seen a long time ago.”

  “But what?”

  “Craigthorn’s dying message. We were fooling around with ravens—Poe’s raven and Dickens’ raven. But all the time we had the wrong raven.” It didn’t take him long at the library. The book he wanted was in, and he only had to glance at page one to know the answer. It could have been one of the other books, but his memory had served him well. He’d reread them not too long ago, and he’d always been a fan of Graham Greene. “Come on,” he said to Susan. “I think I’ve got it. It’s fantastic and improbable, but I think I’ve got it.”

  “You know who the killer is?”

  “I know,” he said. “I know the identity of Victor Jones. I know all there is to know.”

  “Barney …” She stood very close to him. “Barney, I promised Mr. Rowe something. I promised that he could have the information if I learned anything today. I’d like to keep that promise if I could.”

  Barney thought about it “This thing belongs to the police. But if you want your boss in on it, I won’t stop you. I’d like to meet him, in fact.”

  He went to a pay phone and called Detective George. “Look, I hate to get you out again. I know you’re probably going home.”

  “Right. Home to supper.”

  “Give me an hour, and I think I can wrap this thing up. It’s not quite five yet. We’re on our way down to the offices of Manhattan magazine. Susan promised her boss a news break on the story.”

  “We don’t give breaks to anyone. Not till the murderer is apprehended,” George barked over the telephone. “If you’ve got something, you tell me first!”

  “Play along with me. You won’t be sorry.”

  “You mystery writers! You think this is all a game, don’t you? Two people have been killed. You were shot at, yourself.”

  Barney sighed, and spoke a few words into the telephone. He didn’t know if they were convincing words, but at least they quieted the detective down. He agreed to meet them.

  “Do you really think you’ve got it, Barney?” Susan asked in the cab. “Who is Victor Jones?”

  “I think I’ve got it. The more I think about it, the surer I am. The pieces all fit together, like a neat, neat jigsaw puzzle, and there’s no other answer for it. The rest of it is just up to the police. I’m not apprehending anybody. Not these days.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “What?”

  “Who is it? Who is Victor Jones? I’ll admit I have my own ideas.”

  “Oh? Let’s hear them.”

  “I know you’re not going to like this, Barney, but I th
ink it’s Harry. Harry Fox.”

  “Oh?” he said again.

  “I heard him tell you he attended the University of Texas. And the rest of it just fits in too well. Victor Jones made his appearance out in June the night after you phoned Harry. It was Harry who was at all the Board meetings, knew what was going on every minute. And even his name—Fox. The only animal name, the only name anything like Raven.”

  Barney only stared out the window, saying nothing.

  “Well? Am I right?”

  He smiled at her. “You’ll know soon enough. Here’s your office.”

  Detective George was waiting for them in the downstairs lobby. They fought the tide of five o’clock traffic and caught an elevator to the Manhattan offices.

  “This way,” Susan said as they left the elevator. Barney and the detective followed her through the plain brown reception area, then back along a lengthy corridor.

  Arthur Rowe looked up as they entered, then set his pipe down carefully in the ash tray. “Susan! What’s this?”

  “I promised you a story, Chief. Here it is. Barney Hamet, Detective George, this is Arthur Rowe, editor and publisher of Manhattan magazine.”

  They shook hands all around. “Does this mean a break in the case?” Rowe asked.

  “The last break,” Barney told him. “It’s a pleasure to meet you after all this time. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

  Rowe nodded. “And I about you. We seem to share the affections of this young lady, in a purely literary sense of course.”

  They settled into chairs in a semi-circle around the desk, and Barney began. Three pairs of eyes were on him, but he couldn’t meet any of them. He looked out the window at the side of Rowe’s desk, studying the view up Fifth Avenue.

  “This won’t take too long,” he said.

  Rowe thumbed through some galleys. “I have the rough copy for next week’s article here, based mainly on the things that Miss Veldt wrote. We’d like a nice lead, naming the murderer.”

  “And I’ll oblige,” Barney told him. “The murderer is a man named Victor Jones, who was known to himself, and one or two others, as Raven. This was during a short period of his career, when he robbed a bank.”

  “And?” Arthur Rowe said. “That much I gather from Susan’s reports. Are you prepared now to put a name to this Victor Jones or Raven character?”

  “I am,” Barney said. “For you, and for Miss Veldt, and for Detective George here.”

  The detective stirred in his chair, and Susan’s eyes widened, as if at last sensing the final act.

  Barney cleared his throat, and continued. “Victor Jones became Raven, and after that, he came to New York. He was quite successful there, under the name he uses now. Under the name of Arthur Rowe.”

  There was a gasp of disbelief from Susan, and Barney hurried on. “No fast moves please, Mr. Rowe. I think Detective George has a gun on you.”

  23 Victor Jones

  HE HAD NOT MOVED his hand toward the drawer, because he kept no gun there. He had not moved toward anything, really. It was just a start. A startled, sudden beating of his heart. They were here, facing him with the truth. A truth they could not possibly know. And yet, they had named him, and it had all been for nothing. He heard his voice answering. “That’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever heard!” he said. “You two gentlemen had better get out of my office at once. And, Sue, if you value your job, you’ll see that they leave right away!”

  “We have evidence,” Barney Hamet said. “And we can get a great deal more. It’s one thing trying to trace some three hundred-odd people back to Victor Jones and June, Nebraska. But it’ll be a lot easier digging into your past.”

  “You are really serious about this?”

  “I’m really serious,” Barney said. He sat there across the desk, intense, sure of himself, and Victor Jones knew he should have killed him that night in the parking lot in June. “If you don’t think so, just listen. Once I got onto it, everything fell in place. It was just like a row of dominoes toppling over. You see, one of the things that bothered me all along was Irma Black’s murder. I was convinced one of the people on the programme must have done it. Skinny Simon, or one of us panelists. Because who else would have known that she sent me the telegram? And asked me to come see her? But then I began to puzzle about that, too, and it didn’t make sense. Because certainly anybody in the studio, fearing Irma Black would tell all, would not have waited until after the noon appointment that I had with her. They would have gone to her place at once that morning, or certainly before noon. They would have made some effort to contact her—to kill her, to buy her off, to silence her in some manner.

  “But what did the killer do? He came later. After Susan and I had been there. What could possibly be the reason for this? I can think of only one—he did not learn about Irma Black until some time late that morning. Too late to get down there before the noon meeting. And who was the only person that learned about the telegram late Monday morning? You, Mr. Rowe.”

  Victor’s hands were sweating now, but this was a long way from proof. Let them try to prove something. “I had this knowledge?” he asked.

  “You had this knowledge—because Susan told me on countless occasions that she typed up rough drafts of what took place in our investigation and left them in your In box each morning. It was for the continuing article she was writing about the killing. What it amounted to was that each morning, on your desk, was a transcript of what had happened, what had gone before, what I’d been doing. No wonder you were so anxious for her to stick close to me and write this series! That morning, Monday morning, you read her report and learned about Irma Black.”

  Susan interrupted here. “He was in a meeting, and I left it on his desk! He was still in the meeting when I went down to meet you. It would have been some time later, probably about noon, before he read it.”

  “And then,” Barney continued, “he wasted no time—did you, Mr. Rowe? Mr. Rowe, Mr. Jones, Mr. Raven. You went down there and killed her, before she could do any more talking to anybody. The same holds true for our trip to Nebraska, of course. You knew all about it, right from the beginning. Susan even called to keep you abreast of developments. You knew just the time when you had to make the trip. You knew where to find us. You knew which car was ours, because Susan’s flowery attaché case was in the back seat. I hadn’t seen the attaché case before that day, and none of the others had seen it, either. Not at MWA. But you saw it every day in the office, didn’t you? And you found us right away, and broke into the right car, even though there was an identical blue Ford parked right next to ours. No one but you could have identified our car from Susan’s attaché case, Mr. Rowe.”

  “I think you’ll need a lot more than that in court,” Victor Jones said, holding his hands steady now.

  “I have more,” Barney said. “I was at the MWA office today, and I happened to see a book by Graham Greene, and I remembered Ross Craigthorn’s murder, and the exact circumstances of it. You see, the gimmicky murder device with the bullet, fired by a radio signal served more than one purpose. It tended to implicate a mystery writer by its very deviousness, but it did much more. It enabled the killer to wait in perfect safety until the last possible moment before firing that bullet, maybe with the faint hope that Craigthorn would change his mind and not reveal the secret after all. You must have stood there with your finger on the switch of that radio transmitter, ready to send a signal across the room to the podium, to fire the bullet from that tube.”

  “But Mr. Rowe wasn’t even at the dinner!” Susan protested, seeming to grasp at a final straw. Her eyes had hardly left Victor’s face since they entered.

  “I’ll get to that in a moment,” Barney told her. “Right now I want to remind you of the instant that Craigthorn was shot. I’ve already shown that the radio device made it possible for the shot to be fired at any instant, and that the murderer was standing there—at the back of the ballroom, as it happens—listening to the speech. Therefore he
must have pressed that switch at a specific point in time—the point at which Ross Craigthorn started to talk about him.

  “As soon as I decided this, I tried to think back to what Craigthorn was saying just as he was shot. He was talking about a young man he’d known in his youth. Both of them had started reading mysteries. He mentioned how the young man was especially fond of novels of Graham Greene. I thought about this, and I knew, of course, that the man he referred to must have been Victor Jones, because why else would the killer strike at that single instant in the talk? Victor Jones admired Graham Greene’s novels, just as Ross Craigthorn had also admired mysteries.

  “And when it came time for them that summer to pick some names of criminals, or heroes, or what have you, they chose the names of Caesar and Raven, Although we’ll never know for sure, I feel certain that Caesar was from W. R. Burnett’s popular novel and movie, Little Caesar, the classic gangster thriller of the thirties. And Raven? Where did Raven come from? Thought up by a young man who admired Graham Greene’s novels? Not the raven of Edgar Allen Poe, nor the raven of Dickens and Barnaby Rudge. No, it could only be the Raven of Graham Greene. The hired killer who was the protagonist of This Gun For Hire, and who was known only by that name—Raven. There could be no doubt about this. And in telling me that Raven had killed him, perhaps Ross Craigthorn was trying to tell me something more. He had only an instant to live, and the Raven was the only thing handy. He felt that somehow this would be enough, and perhaps it was, in a way. You see, after Craig lengthened his name to Craigthorn and came east, Victor Jones—Raven—did the same. But he didn’t want Victor Jones for a name, and he couldn’t keep Raven for one, much as he may have wanted to. Is it too unlikely that this fan of Graham Greene’s books would search further in the novels for another name?

  “It’s not an easy thing to find a name in Graham Greene’s crime novels. The protagonist of The Confidential Agent has only an initial, D., and the protagonist of Brighton Rock only a nickname, Pinkie. And The Third Man had not yet been written in 1947, of course. But is there another Greene novel in which he might have looked? Yes, there is. A couple in fact, if you count earlier ones like Orient Express. But I think perhaps the one that attracted him was The Ministry Of Fear, in which the protagonist is a very bookish chap, with the name of Arthur Rowe.”