EQMM, September-October 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "They're going ahead with rehearsals? Even after what happened?” Ellery asked incredulously.

  "This isn't like the old days, Ellery. We're not doing a movie that can just be postponed. This is TV. The episode has to air."

  "But how can they film without actors playing the parts of the Lockridges?"

  "Simple,” replied Butcher. “Universal re-cast the parts yesterday evening. Edward Andrews is playing Spencer Lockridge and they got Rhonda Fleming to play Laura. Walkthrough is at noon.” Butcher paused and then eyed Ellery. “Oh, and Ellery, did you also miss the other news from NBC?"

  "What other news?"

  "Well, the good news is that NBC has ordered a full season for your show. But the bad news is that they're moving it to Sunday night and you're going to be opposite not only The Six Million Dollar Man but also Sonny and Cher."

  Now, it was Ellery's turn to be puzzled. “Sonny and Cher? I thought they were divorced."

  "They are,” Butcher moped. “But CBS talked them into resuming their show anyway. The novelty of bringing back the two of them is going to send the ratings through the roof, just watch. And it will all be at the expense of your show."

  At this, Ellery Queen burst into laughter. “So, Jack, we live by the sword and we die by the sword. NBC wanted to spike the ratings of the Ellery Queen show by reuniting a famous and divorced twosome for the ‘Mad Tea Party’ episode, and now CBS has beaten us to the same punch!"

  The two rose from their chairs and headed toward the door, but in mid stride Jacques Butcher grabbed Ellery's arm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I completely forgot. The poem—what was that all about?"

  Ellery smiled back at his old friend. “It's funny,” he observed, “but over the years there have always been red herrings. They are a part of life. And rarely, not often but rarely, the red herrings themselves end up being almost as interesting as the mystery."

  Jacques Butcher looked exasperated. “So, again, what did the poem mean?"

  Ellery laughed. “Well, Jack, you should be able to figure this out on your own, you have all of the clues."

  Jacques Butcher's countenance darkened. “Well, of all the ... You're turning this into one of your damned ‘challenges to the reader,’ aren't you?"

  * * * *

  It was some days afterwards that Ellery walked into the room, darkened by shades, pulled to blot out the morning sun, and sat down at the table, piled high with work papers and correspondence, surrounding an IBM Selectric typewriter. Ellery cleared a space and laid out the paper containing the poem. Only then did he look into the eyes of the shadowed figure sitting across the table.

  "This was all very cleverly done,” he began. “Actually, I could kick myself for being so obtuse. About all that I can say in my own defense is that the poem arrived just shortly before Ty's murder, and I first saw it only in the context of the murder. It alluded to the writings of Lewis Carroll, which provided the foundation for the television episode we were working on. And at the same time, the poem also referenced the advantages of a reunion, of again having ‘two on the throne,’ which seemed an obvious reference to reuniting Bonnie Stuart and Ty Royle—whose names denoted royalty and who in any event were royalty in fact in Hollywood thirty years ago. That message was, of course, underscored by the clever acrostic—the fact that the first letter of each line spelled out this—” and from his jacket pocket Ellery removed a handful of white wooden Scrabble pieces. He took some seconds and neatly arranged them to read “TRIP REQUIRED NO CHANCES."

  "But what puzzled me was that while the clues in the poem were all decipherable, and while they all gave the appearance of relating to Bonnie, Ty, and the filming of the ‘Mad Tea Party’ episode, they didn't otherwise seem to mean anything. They were like the Mad Hatter's riddle in Alice in Wonderland—they were both a part of, but unrelated to, the underlying story. It was the detective working the case who finally said something that shocked me out of my complacency, who made me, in fact, realize that there were other contexts in which the poem could be viewed."

  Ellery gazed across the table, but the shadowed figure remained silent.

  "A good example is the title of this maddening little poem—'Eager Eye and Willing Ear.’ That is, in fact, a line from the untitled acrostic poem in Through the Looking-Glass that revealed the name of the true Alice. I surmised, as it turns out far too glibly, that the importance of that title was simply to help to point me to the Carroll poem. But this poem is playing on a whole different level, isn't it?"

  At this Ellery detected the first receptive twitch from the figure across the table: a barely discernible hint of the beginning of a smile.

  "I paid no further attention to the title,” Ellery continued, “and that's a cardinal sin in deduction—I brushed the substance of the title aside as irrelevant because ‘eager eyes and willing ears’ had nothing to do with what I thought the poem might mean. After all, filming the ‘Mad Tea Party’ episode and attempting to lure Ty and Bonnie out of retirement to play the Lockridge roles doesn't suggest anything about eager eyes and willing ears."

  Ellery pulled back the sheet of paper on which he had lined up the Scrabble tiles. He began to fiddle with the individual tiles as he spoke. “So, as I said, it was something that Detective Tramone, who was working the case, said that shook me awake.” Ellery paused, staring across the table. “He said that at least with the original Carroll poem when you figured out that it was an acrostic you knew the name of the person Carroll was referring to, the original Alice. And that made me realize that I needed to rethink everything.

  "Could there be another matter to which the poem referred? Someone who was actually anxious to offer eager eyes and willing ears? Could it, in fact, point not to the possible reunion of Ty and Bonnie, but to a different desired reunion? And the acrostic, which clearly announced that the ‘trip required no chances,’ and which was so obviously incorrect when applied to Ty and Bonnie—who, in fact, lost their lives because they separately decided to embark on the trip to Hollywood—could it in fact have been intended to refer to a completely different trip?"

  Ellery stifled a yawn. The damned transcontinental flight had gotten to him again, and it was even worse when you flew east. “In any event, when Detective Tramone reminded me that the original Carroll poem revealed a name, I saw what a pure fool I had been, because this poem does also. The poem not only gives us an acrostic, it also—and here it both betters and, again, mimics Carroll—gives us something else, as well."

  Ellery smiled and pushed the now rearranged Scrabble tiles across the table towards the shadowed figure, who was toying with his moustache.

  "The acrostic is also an anagram."

  The ancient man across the table smiled down at the tiles, now rearranged to spell “INSPECTOR RICHARD QUEEN."

  Ellery's own smile broadened as he reached across and grasped the gnarled and folded old hands. “You were right. I should have taken you with me to the Coast, Dad."

  Copyright © 2009 Dale C. Andrews ©2009

  Ellery Queen characters copyright ©2009 by the Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee Literary

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  Passport to Crime: SLEEPERS by Radhika Jha

  "Perhaps no Indian since Ruskin Bond has used the English language so beautifully,” The Statesman said of Radhika Jha. In publishing the Delhi-born author in Passport to Crime we are breaking a convention that this department is reserved for stories in translation. But despite its having been written in English, the following tale is so thoroughly steeped in the culture of India that it seemed to us to find a natural home in our Passport series. Ms. Jha studied at Amherst College and the University of Chicago, and worked in Paris. She now lives in Tokyo with her husband and two children.

  My first posting as a servant of the state was to Mangladi. It was a peaceful little place, lying half forgotten on the border of Karnataka and Kerala. No VIPs ever passed through it. But VIPs mattered little to me. My interest lay in making sure that th
ings were done in the proper way and order was maintained. The key to maintaining order was good governance. And that is what I concentrated on.

  I had few illusions about my job. My fellow citizens were a ramshackle, superstitious bunch. But I believed that a rational, enlightened state could eventually wean them away from their dark and chaotic ways. Then India would become the great country it was meant to be and take its rightful place as a leader of nations.

  Mangladi taught me otherwise.

  On the thirteenth of May, nineteen seventy-eight, I was on a routine inspection of flood-control systems and irrigation canals in the coastal part of the district, in preparation for the rains. It was the last day of the tour and I was looking forward to my return to civilization. It had been a long, hot day. A complicated land dispute in a neighbouring village forced me to decide on an unscheduled night halt in a village I had previously never visited. The name of the village was Purandaru.

  An assiduous reader of files, I knew that the village had not been visited in the last ten years. As far as the state was concerned, the village didn't exist except as a part of the larger theoretical village, Daaru, which was itself not a real village but a group of ten hamlets housing different castes. I found out the name of the village by asking a man chopping coconuts on its outskirts that evening. Luckily the files had thought fit to mention that the village possessed a disused forest bungalow at its edge and I decided to put up there for the night.

  It was close to sunset when I entered the village. There was a great deal of activity on the streets. The villagers, it seemed, were out in full force. That in itself was unusual for that time of day. And they all seemed very busy. They hurried past without acknowledging me, barely suppressed excitement visible on their faces. Even the little children of the village hardly blinked when they realised there was a sahib in their midst. The women were out, too, flocks of them, all wearing their finest saris with flowers in their freshly oiled hair. I assumed the reason for it was a visiting theatre party that would perform the Mah-abh-arata or Ramayana, interspersed with film songs and bawdy skits through the night.

  So the sahib's arrival had been eclipsed by a two-bit traveling theatre! I smiled to myself. Then I noticed that the women were all wearing their mangalsutras and bangles, had sindoor in their hair, and were carrying trays laden with coconuts, fruits, and flowers and topped with freshly made garlands. And I realised that more likely, there was a community function that night—a puja to honour the local deity. But unlike their menfolk, there was nothing joyous in the way the women moved, and I saw in their faces none of the eager anticipation that heralds a night of celebrating the Goddess. Instead their faces were curiously blank. And their shining finery was dimmed by neglect. Dust streaked the clothes that the women and children were wearing, and some even had bits of food clinging to the brightly coloured cloth.

  The village bore signs of dreadful neglect, too. The thatch of the houses was untidily repaired and certainly not capable of facing the onslaught of the coming monsoon. And I was ready to bet that the flood tanks and irrigation canals were in a similar state. I had already noticed with disapproval that half the fields surrounding the village were lying fallow. The remainder, including the fields to which the rice seedlings would be transplanted, were badly prepared, the furrows crooked and ending abruptly, with bald bits of land like islands in an unruly sea. Leaves had not been swept off the state highway into the village, many of the drains were choked, and garbage lay everywhere. Even inside the courtyards of the houses, it lay piled in unsightly heaps or was just left where it had fallen to decompose at leisure.

  At last, a dirty little girl noticed me and began to tug at her mother's hand. The mother stopped, twisted the poor child's arm, and began to hit her. There wasn't much strength in the blows, but the arm must have hurt. The child looked up at its mother dully, not a single cry escaping its lips. The mother continued to hit the child, unable to stop, while the others either stood around or continued on their way.

  For a few moments I watched the little tableau in horror. Then I acted. I strode up to the woman and caught hold of her hand. “Get ahold of yourself. Can't you see you'll hurt her?” I shouted. Immediately her hand went slack and she stared up at me wearily, her eyes ringed in darkness. I let go. Then she took her daughter's hand and went on her way as if nothing had happened. Mystified, I caught hold of a villager.

  "What is happening here?” I asked. He shied away from me like a startled horse. I grabbed him before he could run away and repeated the question. He looked down at his feet and muttered something incomprehensible, then literally tore himself out of my grasp and dashed away.

  I wondered whether I had chanced upon the local madman. But when the next two men I asked behaved in much the same way I decided that there was something seriously wrong with Purandaru and that I would have to stay put for as long as it took to unravel. Next I noticed a man sitting before his house chewing a piece of sugarcane. He seemed to be deliberately ignoring the bustle around him. I walked up to him and asked for the forest bungalow. He turned swollen, bloodshot eyes on me and gave me precise directions on how to get there. Encouraged by the normality of the man, though he had the eyes of an alcoholic, I ventured another question.

  "What is the occasion? Why is everyone in such a hurry?"

  In the middle I cleverly inserted an unspoken third question: Why was he not part of it?

  His eyes flashed, hatred animating them for a moment. “The same occasion as it is every night.” he replied laconically, ignoring the important third question.

  "What do you mean?” I asked warily.

  "They have all-night prayers, these Hindus. And so the rest of us can't sleep,” he told me, generously including me in the “us."

  "The rest of you?"

  "Us Christians, of course.” He looked at me as if I were stupid. Suddenly he seemed to realise that I was a stranger. His eyes became calculating. I quickly thanked him for his trouble and continued on my way. The caretaker at the forest bungalow should be able to tell me what I needed to know. Tomorrow I would visit the headman.

  As I walked through the village, I noted the islands of silence in the midst of all that activity, darkened windows and tight-shut doors. At last I came to the center of the village and saw a tall, splendid church, pristine and stately, in the midst of a colourful chaos. Right next to the church, on what must have been a cricket field, was the hub of activity.

  People were running in every direction, fetching, carrying, and calling to each other. Children and dogs chased each other between and around the grownups’ legs, dashing away before they got a clout on the head or a kick in the side. Cows solemnly munched used banana-leaf plates and other rubbish. Loudspeakers crackled, and an insistent voice rattled off the program of events, interrupting itself every now and then to shout urgent instructions at the people running across the field. Here and there, like eyes in the night, I saw sadhus, solitary and arrogant in their orange robes.

  The crowd was thickest by the squat little temple at the other end of the field. A makeshift stage protruded from between the red and gold canvas walls of a half-erected tent. A third of the way across the field, a much larger tent in pink, blue, and yellow pastels, looking somewhere between a pastry and a castle, was being decorated with tinsel streamers and Christmas lights. Behind the tent, like abandoned weapons, enormous cauldrons lay upside down or on their sides on the fire-scarred earth. A pack of dogs clustered around them, eating the remains of a meal. All around the edge of the field were smaller tents made of bits of tin, plastic, and rags. In these sat a variety of hard-faced traders, selling everything from bindis to household implements. A Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round at one corner of the field to the right of the temple blared their own version of popular film music and drew ragged children like a magnet. Already the noise emanating from the field was cacophonous, and the bhajans hadn't even started. Knowing the noise would only grow with the advance of the night, I couldn't help pi
tying the Christians.

  Then I heard the church bells, their low, sweet sound sweeping over the field. I looked up and saw them silhouetted against the red sky. The sound transported me back to my school years with the Jesuit fathers at St. George's in Patna. There, each day was ushered in by the bells and the same sound bid the day goodnight. I wondered suddenly whether they were what had awakened my love of Western classical music. But even as I was thinking this, the bells interfered, becoming noisier and more frenzied, shedding their music with every toll.

  A white-haired old man walking beside me began to curse loudly and fluently in a rich baritone. My shocked expression made him hasten to explain as soon as the bells had grown silent, “They do it all day on the hour, sometimes on the half-hour even, just to torment us."

  I stared at him in sheer astonishment. “What do you mean?"

  But before I could make him answer, the bhajans came on from the other end of the field, so loud that all further conversation became impossible.

  I decided to add a visit to the church to my agenda for the morrow.

  * * * *

  The houses ended and the road dwindled into a simple forest track, surrounded on both sides by trees. I arrived at last at the bungalow. It looked as if it had been abandoned years ago. A huge spider's web substituted for hinges, uniting the gate to the gatepost. There was no bulb in the lamppost. Leaves and broken branches were strewn across the drive. In the fading light I could see that a carpet of dust covered the porch, making it glow palely. To my not very great surprise, my car, which I had left at the entrance to the village in order to enter its narrow mud streets on foot, was nowhere in sight. Neither was my driver or any representative of the local administration. I shouted for the chowkidar, but only silence answered.