Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  “She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”

  “Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”

  “A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.

  “Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”

  Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”

  “It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You ask me to believe you?”

  “I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.

  “My daughter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”

  “She must have told you where she was going.”

  “No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”

  “You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”

  He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars.

  The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel. For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.

  “Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.

  “You know me, Donny.”

  The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen, as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.

  “Anybody with you?”

  Sounds of movement in the living room answered my ques­tion. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.

  “I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”

  Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”

  “Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back

  “What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”

  “When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit, she made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on, she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”

  “What did she write in the note?”

  He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.

  She said: “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.”

  “I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the an­guished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”

  “I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

  “It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove com­partment.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I talked to Angel.”

  “Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.

  “No. I came alone.”

  “You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”

  “I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”

  “Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”

  His sneakered feet made soft, indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily: “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The gov­ernment wants you as a witness in a tax case.”

  “What kind of a case?”

  “A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”

  “Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name,” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”

  “You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”

  Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.

  “This is the turning point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evilest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”

  “A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”

  “I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”

  I waited. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny: “Let me see that note.”

  He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoul­ders drooping on the long stalk of his body.

  “What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the bor­der; the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it bad to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”

  Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”

  She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backward through the doorway, a piece of brown­ish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.

  I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.

  I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The ho
le it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.

  Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap.

  Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sigh­ing voice: “You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”

  “Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”

  “You like me better than you used to? Now?”

  “I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”

  She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.

  His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:

  Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.

  I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.

  Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.

  The President’s Half Disme

  Ellery Queen

  When the Ellerys Queen sent me this beauty, I could only say, “What a sheer delight!” Let us celebrate Queen’s fortieth anniversary with this sample of the master’s touch.

  Those few curious men who have chosen to turn off the humdrum highway to hunt for their pleasure along the back trails expect—indeed, they look confidently forward to—many strange encounters; and it is the dull stalk which does not turn up at least a hippogriff. But it remained for Ellery Queen to experience the ultimate excitement. On one of his prowls he collided with a President of the United States.

  This would have been joy enough if it had occurred as you might imagine: by chance, on a dark night, in some back street of Washington, D.C., with Secret Service men closing in on the delighted Mr. Queen to question his motives by way of his pockets while a large black bulletproof limousine rushed up to spirit the President away. But mere imagination fails in this instance. What is required is the power of fancy, for the truth is fantastic. Ellery’s encounter with the President of the United States took place, not on a dark night, but in the unromantic light of several days (although the night played its role, too). Nor was it by chance: the meeting was arranged by a farmer’s daughter. And it was not in Washington, D.C., for this President presided over the affairs of the nation from a different city altogether. Not that the meeting took place in that city, either; it did not take place in a city at all, but on a farm some miles south of Philadelphia. Oddest of all, there was no limousine to spirit the Chief Executive away, for while the President was a man of great wealth, he was still too poor to possess an auto­mobile and, what is more, not all the resources of his Govern­ment—indeed, not all the riches of the world— could have pro­vided one for him.

  There are even more curious facets to this jewel of paradox. This was an encounter in the purest sense, and yet, physically, it did not occur at all. The President in question was dead. And while there are those who would not blink at a rubbing of shoulders or a clasping of hands even though one of the parties was in his grave, and to such persons the thought might occur that the meeting took place on a psychic plane—alas, Ellery Queen is not of their company. He does not believe in ghosts, consequently he never encounters them. So he did not collide with the President’s shade, either.

  And yet their meeting was as palpable as, say, the meeting between two chess masters, one in London and the other in New York, who never leave their respective armchairs and still play a game to a decision. It is even more wonderful than that, for while the chess players merely annihilate space, Ellery and the father of his country annihilated time—a century and a half of it.

  In fine, this is the story of how Ellery Queen matched wits with George Washington.

  Those who are finicky about their fashions complain that the arms of coincidence are too long; but in this case the Designer might say that He cut to measure. Or, to put it another way, an event often brews its own mood. Whatever the cause, the fact is The Adventure of the President’s Half Disme, which was to concern itself with the events surrounding President Washington’s fifty-ninth birthday, actually first engrossed Ellery on Feb­ruary the nineteenth and culminated three days later.

  Ellery was in his study that morning, wrestling with several reluctant victims of violence, none of them quite flesh and blood, since his novel was still in the planning stage. So he was annoyed when Nikki came in with a card.

  “James Ezekiel Patch,” growled the great man; he was never in his best humor during the planning stage. “I don’t know any James Ezekiel Patch, Nikki. Toss the fellow out and get back to transcribing those notes on Possible Motives—”

  “Why, Ellery,” said Nikki. “This isn’t like you at all.”

  “What isn’t like me?”

  “To renege on an appointment.”

  “Appointment? Does this Patch character claim—?”

  “He doesn’t merely claim it. He proves it.”

  “Someone’s balmy,” snarled Mr. Queen; and he strode into the living room to contend with James Ezekiel Patch. This, he perceived as soon as James Ezekiel Patch rose from the Queen fireside chair, was likely to be a heroic project. Mr. Patch, notwithstanding his mild, even studious, eyes, seemed to rise indefinitely; he was a large, a very large, man.

  “Now what’s all this, what’s all this?” demanded Ellery fiercely; for after all Nikki was there.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said the large man amiably. “What did you want with me, Mr. Queen?”

  “What did I want with you! What did you want with me?”

  “I find this very strange, Mr. Queen.”

  “Now see here, Mr. Patch, I happen to be extremely busy this morning—”

  “So am I.” Mr. Patch’s large thick neck was reddening, and his tone was no longer amiable. Ellery took a cautious step backward as his visitor lumbered forward to thrust a slip of yellow paper under his nose. “Did you send me this wire, or didn’t you?”

  Ellery considered it tactically expedient to take the telegram, although for strategic reasons he did so with a bellicose scowl.

  IMPERATIVE YOU CALL AT MY HOME TOMORROW FEBRUARY NINETEEN PROMPTLY TEN A.M. SIGNED ELLERY QUEEN

  “Well, sir?” thundered Mr. Patch. “Do you have something on Washington for me, or don’t you?”

  “Washington?” said Ellery absently, studying the telegram.

  “George Washington, Mr. Queen! I’m Patch the antiquarian. I collect Washington. I’m an authority on Washington. I have a large fortune, and I spend it all on Washington! I’d never have wasted my time this morning if your name hadn’t been signed to this wire! This is my busiest week of the year. I have engagements to speak on Washington—”

  “Desist, Mr. Patch,” said Ellery. “This is either a practical joke, or—”

  “The Baroness Tchek,” announced Nikki clearly. “With another telegram.” And then she added: “And Professor John Cecil Shaw, ditto.”

  The three telegrams were identical.

  “Of course I didn’t send them,” said Ellery thoughtfully, regarding his three visitors. Baroness Tchek was a short powerful woman, resembling a dumpling with gray hair; an angry dump­ling. Professor Shaw was lank and long-jawed, wearing a sack suit which hung in some places and failed in its purpose by inches at the extremities. Along with Mr. Patch, they consti­tuted as deliciously queer a trio as had ever congregated in the Queen apartment. Their host suddenly determined not to let go of them. “On the other hand, someone obviously did, using my name…”

  “Then there’s nothing more to be said,” snapped the Baroness, snapping her bag for emphasis.

  “I should think there’s a great deal more
to be said,” began Professor Shaw in a troubled way. ’Wasting people’s time this way—”

  “It’s not going to waste any more of my time,” growled the large Mr. Patch. “Washington’s Birthday only three days off—!”

  “Exactly,” smiled Ellery. “Won’t you sit down? There’s more in this than meets the eye... Baroness Tchek, if I’m not mis­taken, you’re the one who brought that fabulous collection of rare coins into the United States just before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia? You’re in the rare coin business in New York now?”

  “Unfortunately,” said the Baroness coldly, “one must eat.”

  “And you, sir? I seem to know you.”

  “Rare books,” said the Professor in the same troubled way.

  “Of course. John Cecil Shaw, the rare book collector. We’ve met at Mim’s and other places. I abandon my first theory. There’s a pattern here, distinctly unhumorous. An antiquarian, a coin dealer, and a collector of rare books—Nikki? Whom have you out there this time?”

  “If this one collects anything,” muttered Nikki into her employer’s ear, “I’ll bet it has two legs and hair on its chest. A darned pretty girl—”

  “Named Martha Clarke,” said a cool voice; and Ellery turned to find himself regarding one of the most satisfying sights in the world.

  “Ah. I take it, Miss Clarke, you also received one of these wires signed with my name?”

  “Oh, no,” said the pretty girl. “I’m the one who sent them.”

  There was something about the comely Miss Clarke which inspired, if not confidence, at least an openness of mind. Perhaps it was the self-possessed manner in which she sat all of them, including Ellery, down in Ellery’s living room while she waited on the hearth rug, like a conductor on the podium, for them to settle in their chairs. And it was the measure of Miss Clarke’s assurance that none of them was indignant, only curi­ous.