The Specialty of the House
Page 65
The one time he came near bringing his desperation to the surface was at the Thanksgiving entertainment given by the student body of the school his sons attended. The entertainment was a well-deserved success, and after it, at the buffet in the school gym, Morrison was driven to corner Frank Lassman, assistant principal of the school and master of ceremonies at the entertainment, and to come out with a thought that had been encouragingly flickering through his mind during the last few insomniac sessions.
‘Great show,’ he told Lassman. ‘Fine school altogether. It showed tonight. It must be gratifying doing your kind of work.’
‘At times like this it is,’ Lassman said cheerfully. ‘But there are times—’
‘Even so. You know, I once had ideas about going into teaching.’
‘Financially,’ said Lassman, ‘I suspect you did better by not going into it. It has its rewards, but the big money isn’t one of them.’
‘Well,’ Morrison said very carefully, ‘suppose I was prepared to settle for the rewards it did offer? A man my age, say. Would there be any possibilities of getting into the school system?’
‘What’s your particular line? Your subject?’
‘Oh, numbers. Call it arithmetic and math.’
Lassman shook his head in mock reproach. ‘And where were you when we really needed you? Four or five years ago we were sending out search parties for anyone who could get math across to these kids. The last couple of years, what with the falling school population, we’re firing, not hiring. It’s the same everywhere, not that I ever thought I’d live to see the day. Empty school buildings all over the country.’
‘I see,’ said Morrison.
So the insomnia, tensions, and tics continued to worsen until suddenly one day – as if having hit bottom, there was no place for him to go but up – Morrison realized that he was coming back to normal. He began to sleep through the night, was increasingly at ease during the day, found himself cautiously looking on the bright side. He still had his job and all that went with it, that was the objective fact. He could only marvel that he had been thrown so far off balance by that chance meeting with Slade.
He had been giving himself his own bad time, letting his imagination take over as it had. The one thing he could be proud of was that where someone else might have broken down under the strain, he had battled it out all by himself and had won. He was not a man to hand himself trophies, but in this case he felt he had certainly earned one.
A few minutes before five on the first Monday in December, just when he was getting ready to pack it in for the day, Pettengill, departmental head of Sales Analysis, stopped at his desk. Pettengill, a transfer from the Cleveland office a couple of years before, was rated as a comer, slated sooner or later for the top floor. A pleasant-mannered, somewhat humorless man, he and Morrison had always got along well.
‘Just had a session with the brass upstairs,’ he confided. ‘A round table with Cobb presiding.’ Cobb was the executive vice president in charge of Planning and Structure for the Greenbush complex. ‘Looks like our department faces a little reorganization. We tie in with Service Analysis and that’ll make it Sales and Service Evaluation. What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ said Morrison.
‘Looks like you could stand some fresh air. Anyhow, probably because you’re senior man here, Cobb wants to see you in his office first thing tomorrow morning. Nine sharp. You know how he is about punctuality, Larry. Make sure you’re on time.’
‘Yes,’ said Morrison.
He didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning, a few minutes before nine, still wearing his overcoat and with dark glasses concealing his reddened and swollen eyes, he took the elevator directly to the top floor, There, out of sight on the landing of the emergency staircase, he drew the barrel and stock of his shotgun from beneath the overcoat and assembled the gun. His pockets bulged with 12-gauge shells. He loaded one into each of the gun’s twin barrels. Then concealing the assembled gun beneath the coat as well as he could, he walked across the hall into Cobb’s office.
Miss Bernstein, Cobb’s private secretary, acted out of sheer blind, unthinking instinct when she caught sight of the gun. She half rose from her desk as if to bar the way to the inner office. She took the first charge square in the chest. Cobb, at his desk, caught the next in the face. Reloading, Morrison exited through the door to the executive suite where Cobb’s assistants had been getting ready for the morning’s work and were now in a panic at the sound of the shots.
Morrison fired both barrels one after another, hitting one man in the throat and jaw, grazing another. Reloading again, he moved like an automaton out into the corridor where a couple of security men, pistols at the ready, were coming from the staircase on the run. Morrison cut down the first one, but the other, firing wildly, managed to plant one bullet in his forehead. Morrison must have been dead, the medical examiner later reported, before he even hit the floor.
The police, faced with five dead and one wounded, put in two months on the case and could come up with absolutely no answers, no explanations at all. The best they could do in their final report was record that ‘the perpetrator, for reasons unknown, etc, etc.’
Management, however, could and did take action. They learned that the Personnel Department psychologist who had put Morrison through the battery of personality-evaluation tests given every applicant for a job was still there with the company. Since he had transparently failed in those tests to sound out the potentially aberrant behavior of the subject, he was, despite sixteen years of otherwise acceptable service, terminated immediately.
Two weeks later, his place in Personnel was filled by a young fellow named McIntyre who, although the starting pay was a bit low, liked the looks of Greenbush and, with his wife in complete agreement, saw it as just the kind of quiet, pleasant community in which to settle down permanently.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for permission to reprint the following stories:
‘The Speciality of the House’, May 1948
‘The Cat’s-Paw’, June 1949
‘Death on Christmas Eve’, January 1950
‘The Orderly World of Mr Appleby’, May 1950
‘Fool’s Mate’, November 1951
‘The Best of Everything’, September 1952
‘The Betrayers’, June 1953
‘The House Party’, May 1954
‘The Moment of Decision’, March 1955
‘Broker’s Special’, January 1956
‘The Blessington Method’, June 1956
‘The Faith of Aaron Menefee’, September 1957
‘You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life’, May 1958
‘Unreasonable Doubt’, September 1958
‘The Day of the Bullet’, October 1959
‘Beidenbauer’s Flea’, February 1960
‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’, June 1960
‘The Nine-to-Five Man’, November 1961
‘The Question’ (originally published as ‘The Question My Son Asked’), November 1962
‘The Crime of Ezechiele Coen’, November 1963
‘The Great Persuader’, March 1964
‘The Day the Thaw Came to 127’, March 1965
‘Death of an Old-Fashioned Girl’, June 1966
‘The Twelth Statue’, February 1967
‘The Last Bottle in the World’, February 1968
‘Coin of the Realm’, February 1969
‘Kindly Dig Your Grave’, November 1970
‘The Payoff’, November 1971
‘The Other Side of the Wall,’ August 1972
‘The Corruption of Officer Avakadian’, December 1973
‘A Corner of Paradise’, October 1975
‘Generation Gap’, September 1976
‘The Family Circle’, December 1977
‘Reasons Unknown’, December 1978
And to Sleuth Mystery Magazine, which published ‘Robert’ in Oc
tober 1958
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Stanley Ellin
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5037-4
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