The First Mystery Novel

by Howard Mason

  But it was at the third man, who now stood almost embarrassedly off in front of Parradine, the while the other two took swift positions at Gilbert’s either side, which caused Parradine’s mouth to fall open, almost ludicrously. For that third man was—himself! In all, that is, but clothing—since the man was poorly dressed in a cheap grey cottonlike suit. But in facial features, hair, build, even general age, he was Parradine himself!

  And now, realizing for the first time that he was to be beaten—beaten probably within an inch of his life—though for reasons as yet utterly unknown to himself—bitterness flooded through Parradine’s soul. He felt no fear—only bitterness. Bitterness mixed with mystification. To think that amongst these people who were now about to pay back somebody’s grudge—Rocco’s, evidently—was one whom he, Parradine, had once befriended. At least to the extent of—

  “You!” he cried accusingly to the man in question. “Albert Magwire! Of Webb Crossing, Vermont. What—what are you doing here, in this private vendetta or—or whatever in God’s name it is? What are you—”

  But at this juncture Parradine felt—or else was conscious of for the first time—something pressing in the small of his back. Something small but very hard! And suggesting that it was being thrust over the top of the back of the very chair he had been occupying—except, alas, Parradine was to learn, in but a few more seconds, that that chair had been quietly withdrawn during the excitement, and that now close behind him stood—

  “Take it easy, Parradine,” now came warning words, sounding at the very back of Parradine’s ears, and in Rocco’s voice. “Don’t make a move!”

  Parradine had started automatically to twist his head about at the words. But he stopped short, as the significance of the order penetrated his brain. But nevertheless replied to the words.

  “What the hell is this, Rocco? A beating-up? If so, what on earth have I ever done to—”

  “This,” interrupted the Sicilian in back of him coolly, and drilling even harder into Parradine’s spine with that small hard object, “is a snatch, Parradine. No beat up, but a snatch. A hundred-grand snatch! And don’t bother to set up any yodeling, because you know as well as me that there’s two heavy doors—no, three—shutting this room off from even the floor where the elevator stops. Yeah, Parradine, it’s a hundred-grand snatch, and with 6 people in it. So you see we mean business! All 6 of us. Just how that hundred grand is to be cut up ain’t none of your concern. Excepting perhaps that it’s your estate who’s gonna kick in with it.”

  The three men ringed in front of Parradine all drew a bit closer to him. As an indication, perhaps, that he had best make no move whatsoever. Which he did not—with the single door of the room some distance off, and bolted as well—and with that gun pressing in his back. But he was answering, and scornfully.

  “A—a snatch?” he said. “Why, you poor idiot—why, you can’t get away with that, Rocco. All New York will be combed for me, when I vanish. Where—where in 7 hells do you think you can hide me—in New York?”

  “You’d be s’rprised!” retorted Rocco cryptically, though ever so assuredly. Then added, almost defiantly: “In fact, we’re gonna snake you right out o’ here to—”

  “You mean,” corrected Parradine, with supreme dignity, but making not the slightest overt move, realizing that nothing but logic—the cold logic of inescapable facts—could abort what was happening, “you mean you’re going to hold me in here, tied and gagged, till midnight, and the last elevator has stopped running—and the building has all cleared out. Yes, of course. But once you have gotten me out, Rocco, and your helpers here as well, so that—that those bulbs can be brought through here tomorrow and upstairs, and the police, making inquiries of you, as probably the last man who saw me before I—I vanished, can come up here, too—well, where in 7 hells, I ask you again, do you think you can hide me—in New York City? Where somebody—somebody won’t cross you up for the huge rewards that are sure to be offered? Come, Rocco, you can’t get away with all thi—”

  “All that you say, Parradine,” admitted Rocco coolly, but pressing even a little harder with his gun tip, “is the McCoy. About, I mean, holding you here tied and gagged till midnight. And the last eleva— But as t’ where we can hide you, in all N’York? Well, you will be s’rprised! In fact,” he added, as a man about to give vent to a surprising bit of confidence, “they ain’t ever even gonna search for you here in N’York. Even though the cops do maybe stroll up here to ask a question or two. For your snatch, Parradine, is gonna be staged in Chi—cago! T’morrow night! And prat’cally before the eyes of the Chi—cago cops. Since it’ll be staged right in the Palmer House, where you’re known so well, and where you’ll be registered in, less’n 24 hours before, by means of some certain little presbydigytatin’ to be done this evening with a certain little signed Palmer House reg’stration card that you’re gonna sign right here in this room—or get your goddam’ feet burned off with a hot iron. And all of which is poss’ble thanks to our muchual friend, Al Magwire here—am’chure magician, and spittin’ image of yourself. Who you dug up, don’t forget!—and not us. Magwire, plus, o’ course, the two buddy-boys what’re already in Chi now, waiting.”

  Rocco paused as though to let all this sink fully into his hearer’s brain, then went implacably on.

  “And so it’s Chi, y’ see, Parradine, what’ll be combed, from rooftops to sewers. And not—N’York. Nor—all right, Heinz. Wind them gorilla wings of yours around his stems, till Blinky can strip his clothes off, from belly up; then do the same with his wings, till Blinky can get his kicks and pants off. And you, Magwire, start peeling off your duds, and slithering into his as they come off; and see to it, as you do, that his plane ticket, ident’f’cation stuff, mazuma, and all, are right where you can set your mitts on ’em. For that plane leaves in about one hour now, and when it does, you gotta be on it. And—but all right, boys, get going—all three of you! And let’s see you a-a-all do your stuff—in the Perfec’ Snatch!”

  Chapter XVIII

  HOW SOME BEANS WERE PLANTED—

  The sun was setting low in New York’s west as Boyce Barkstone, inheritor of 16 beans, for the second time that day strode through the door of Oliver Tydings’ office. The attorney, his white mustache drooping a bit as from a hard day’s work, his round tortoise-shell eyeglasses tipped forward almost wearily on his nose, but with gloves on hands, and derby hat on head, was just taking up his cane. He gazed in surprise through the now vacated anteroom, visible from the open door, through which Boyce had passed unhampered—then at Boyce.

  “Well, well, Boyce, did you plant your beans on your grandfather’s grave, where you said you were going to?”

  “No, Mr. Tydings,” returned the younger man, calmly, shoving away the lock of brown hair that seemed to try to fall over one of his steel-grey eyes. “I planted ’em where Grandfather had expected—at least hoped—for me to plant ’em: which was in my Barkstonian mind, such as it was! For I got information after I left you today—yes, from no other than black Josiah—that I hadn’t insulted Grandfather at all, that famous day of June first when I saw him last; that he’d understood the whole incident—the incident about the ‘Nuts to you,’ et cetera; and at once everything became clear. He wasn’t, in his bequest, condemning me, nor chiding me, nor ribbing me. And the soil he was referring to, in his will, where all those beans could grow ‘simultaneously,’ was my mind. That was the right soil—yes; but—” He dropped down into a chair, placing, upon the half-open slide of the lawyer’s desk, a scarlet-bound book he carried, as Tydings curiously set aside his stick, doffed his own hat, and sat down, withdrawing one glove, anyway. “But,” Boyce went on, with a grimace, “I—I had to use Chinese wisdom and very ancient Chinese wisdom, to boot, to fertilize and irrigate that soil; for, to be frank, it wasn’t half as good soil as Grandfather considered it to be.”

  Tydings was plainly hopelessly bewildered. “Well, when it co
mes to that, his estimate of the Barkstonian mind would, of course, be based on his knowledge of his own, and it has to be kept in mind that each generation dilutes the—the quality of a mind by one half. Now don’t get me wrong, Boyce; I mean that any particular qualities of mind that might be under consideration by a grandparent would—would be plenty much diluted by the time it got to a grandchi—but damned if I know what you have reference to, Boyce.”

  “No, of course not. But you will now.” Boyce paused. “Mr. Tydings, did it ever occur to you that—but of course it didn’t—and, frankly, it didn’t to me—I had to find a scientific specialist in beans, rather than that practical horticulturist you put me in connection with today—I had to find a beanology professor—a man named Zack—Professor Sealwell Zink, M. A., M. S., and a lot of other degrees—to aid me to clarify for myself, with absolute accuracy, the problem really lying in, and back of, Grandfather’s bequest, though ’twas the Chinese who put me smack onto what the problem itself must be. After that, of course, the whole thing resolves itself into a mere matter of trial and err— But whoa, tilley!—I’m running ’way off the track of what I started out to try to say a hundred words or so back, which was: Did it occur to you, at any time, ever so remotely, that there might be as many varieties of bean as there are—but here—if you don’t mind Josiah’s garishly pink paper of which I used up a hell of a lot today—here are all the varieties of beans, as set forth, not alphabetically, but in logical groups and families, in the new Encyclopedia Universalia—”

  “The last word, that encyclopedia,” put in Tydings, with almost enthusiastic vehemence, “on everything in the world. At least so your grandfather told me after he bought his.”

  “Well, it contains the last word, at least on beans,” agreed Boyce. “For the article on that subject in it was written by a world authority—one Sealwell Zack! Yes, Grandfather had a set all right. And—but here—lamp this last, latest, most ultimate, most official, and most final fusion of the many listings of beans that have existed, which I obtained today after calling up Uptown U for a second time, asking for Professor Zack, and learning, thereby, that if I had access to an Encyclopedia Universalia, Volume II—which I did have—by crawling on hands and knees past a flock of side windows, and—”

  “Boyce! For God’s sake, what is all this: a riddle or a charade or what?”

  “Neither,” laughed Boyce. “But here—lamp this listing of all the beans what thar is, by gum!”

  And in front of Tydings he deposited, from a sheaf of pink sheets he took from his breast pocket, that one on which he had listed all the known beans.

  He was smilingly regarding his own listing as Tydings, too, regarded it. Which listing ran:

  Yellow-Eye

  Fat White Kidney

  Ordinary Red Kidney

  Western Red Kidney

  Haricot

  Black-Eye

  Great Northern

  Indian

  Undersized White [misguidedly and erroneously called “navy”]

  Zonate

  Cranberry

  Adsuki

  Kwang-Si of China

  Pea

  “X-tra Larj” White (trade-created name for an anomalous species)

  Vulgaris

  English Dwarf

  Lima

  Narrow White Kidney

  Tonqua

  Swedish

  Dark Red Kidney

  Mexican Pinto

  Red Bean

  Quarter-red California

  “My goodness,” said Tydings, “but there sure are a lot of kinds. Probably a dozen and half?”

  “Plenty more than even that! More than two dozen, even. 25, to be exact. And if you add this fellow—who is not a bean at all—and specifically stated, in that article, not to be—yes—this fellow—”

  And Boyce wrote at the bottom of the column:

  Jumping (bean)

  “—you then have,” he continued, “26 different ‘beans.’ Now doesn’t that suggest somep’n?”

  “Oh,” said Tydings deprecatingly, “I know that 26 is the number of letters in the alphabet, but of course—”

  “Yeah—of course—what? Find, if you can, any one of those beans there that begins with the same letter as any other?”

  Tydings leaned over. Stared. “Why, Boyce, that’s—that’s so—only it’s a coincidental impossibility.”

  “Like the giraffe the farmer saw for the first time! There wasn’t, he said, ‘no sich animile’! Well, as Professor Zack explained today, in person, when I asked him about that amazing fact, the first man ever to officially classify beans was a horticulturist named Jonathan Lydge who declared—and this, you understand, long before Burbank was ever born—that if every bean that would eventually exist, in the world, due to both crossing and discovery, were given a name beginning with a new letter, there wouldn’t be enough alphabets in the English, Latin and Greek languages to take care of ’em. And bean-crossers, bean-discoverers—in short, bean-namers—have, ever since, honored Lydge’s memory—his work on the earlier known beans—by naming each bean so that it would, so to speak, eat up at least one alphabet, though thus far they haven’t quite consumed the English one. Thus, Mr. Tydings, see Old Mr. Coincidence turns out to be none other than Old Mr. Predestination!”

  “All right,” agreed Tydings, “then in view of the coincid—my mistake—the predestined fact that every newly-listed bean caught a new initial, therefore every letter in the alphabet can be represented by a bean.”

  “Every one but J,” asseverated Boyce solemnly. “But that’s a mere technicality. Go on.”

  “Well, it means,” Tydings went on, “that that bag of beans your grandfather left you could represent a jumble of letters—a jumble that might conceivably make up a message—”

  “An even I today, after I was about two-thirds through a book of Chinese wisdom, deemed possible!”

  “Deemed possible, from a bit of Chinese wis— Well, I don’t get it, of course, since the Chinese certainly never had a strangle-hold on all the beans in history—and besides, damn it, they don’t even know alphabetical letters—they use picture wri—Anyway, Boyce, you received—let’s see—how many beans?”

  “16. Including some duplicates.”

  “Well, good God, Boyce, you know, don’t you, or perhaps you don’t, the old scientific fact about the 15 playing cards laid out in a horizontal row? The fact that if you made but one change in the order of that row every minute, it would take you, in order to rearrange it into every horizontal form possible for it, 2,487,996 years? A fact! The number’s written there on my calendar, so I can quote it, as I have just now. So how—how in hell’s bells, Boyce, would you ever be able to figure which, of all the possible orders of those beans—or letters, if they are letters—your grandfather had in mind?”

  “Maybe,” said Boyce musingly, “that was where the quality of the Barkstonian mind was supposed to enter in at that! Maybe yes, maybe. Hm?”

  He was lost a minute, really pondering over his own comment. Then he came to, catching sight of Tydings’ perplexed face.

  “Whether or no,” the younger man now said, “it would be about here, I think, that even you, with your hopeless pessimism concerning the fifty quintillion combinations of 15 playing cards, would at least have essayed to find out what letters those 16 beans could—possibly did—stand for. And which I did. For I hied me straight over hill and dale to Uptown U, saw Professor Zack, and got each bean that Grandfather left me identified under its real, correct, and accredited name. As follows:”

  He withdrew another pink sheet, and shoved it over, reflectively reading it over Tydings’ shoulder. With its additional listing of how many beans of like kind there had been, in that particular collocation of beans—plus a remark or two, here or there—it ran, of course:

  Fat White Kidney (1)


  Dark Red Kidney (1)

  Swedish (3)

  Tonqua (1)

  English Dwarf (1)

  Jumping [which is NOT a bean at all!] (1)

  Pea (meaning pea-bean and not pea!) (1)

  Ordinary Red Kidney (2)

  Haricot (1)

  Lima (1)

  Adsuki (1)

  Black-Eye (1)

  Indian (1)

  “Of course,” admitted Boyce, “it’s an even worse problem than your 15-cards-laid-out, for there’s 16 of those beans, and when you lay out their initials in a horizontal row, as listed vertically down there, you do get—” And he laid the next sheet of paper down, which was but a half-sheet. And which read:

  FDSSSTEJPOOHLABI

  “And now,” said Tydings dryly, “I presume we start in on our 2,487,996-year task? Oh, it won’t take quite that many years, for we may strike it midway, in which case—”

  “—it’ll take only 1,243,998 years,” laughed Boyce, and became quickly grave again.

  As did also the lawyer, who spoke.

  “Well, I can’t see that hitting the jackpot the way you did—discovering, I mean, that beans can stand for alphabetical letters—has gotten you very far—if those beans are a message, and you’re only one and a quarter million years from being able to juggle ’em into their right order. But since we are at an impasse, then do you mind telling me just exactly what on earth ever tipped you off that beans might stand for letters? And drove you to call up this Professor Zack and find out how many varieties of beans there were, and all that?”

  Boyce was reflectively silent a moment, then spoke. “Well, what tipped me off is, strange to say, the very thing which has given me a—a sort of procedure to be followed with that jumble of beans. Or, as it now is, letters. The very unscrambling angle to follow to—”