by Ellery Queen
The movement that interrupted him was by Paul Hannah, but it wasn’t much of a movement. Apparently his idea was to lunge at Wolfe, but Stebbins and Leach had him pinned. They glared at each other and Hannah glared at Wolfe, and Hattie Annis’ voice came from the couch.
“You see, Falstaff? Didn’t I tell you?”
She had told him absolutely nothing.
One day three weeks later Wolfe and I were in the office disagreeing about something when the doorbell rang. It was Hattie. I escorted her in, and she sat in the red leather chair, opened her handbag, and took out a little package wrapped in brown paper. Wolfe made a face. I thought, Good Lord, she’s found another one. But she reached into the bag again and came out with an envelope that I recognized.
“This check you sent me,” she said. “You say in your letter it’s for my share of the reward, a hundred dollars. So you kept your share?”
“Yes,” Wolfe lied.
“Did you get yours, Buster?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Then that’s all right. But what about this bill? Five thousand dollars’ fee for services and $621.65 for expenses. What did I tell you that day, Buster? Didn’t I say I could pay forty-two thousand dollars?”
“You did.”
“Then here it is.” She tossed the package onto Wolfe’s desk. “A man at the bank helped me pick those bonds and he says there’s none better. These are transferred to you. This is the first time I ever let any of them go, and I hope it’s the last, but it was worth it. That was a day—the best day I’ve had since my father died. I didn’t like it when I saw in the paper that he had confessed, but that wasn’t your fault. I’ve got no use for anybody that confesses anything to the cops.
“That Paul Hannah was no good. He even told them how he stole the car and tried to kill me with it because he thought I had the package and knew who put it in my parlor, and he saw Tammy across the street and knew she saw him, and when he went back to the house she was at the phone dialing a number and he got the knife from the kitchen, and when he got near her and she stood up he stabbed her, and then he carried her in the parlor and left her there with her skirt up to her waist. He was no good. I’ll have to be more careful about people that want a room.”
Wolfe was frowning. “I can’t accept those bonds, mad—Miss Annis. Not all of them. I prefer to evaluate my services myself. I did so and sent you a bill.”
She nodded. “I tore it up. The day I told Buster that, that settled it. I hired you and I said what I could pay. Now you say you won’t accept it. That’s no way to do.”
Wolfe looked at me. I grinned. He pushed his chair back and arose. “I have a matter to attend to,” he said. “I’ll leave you with Mr. Goodwin. You understand each other.” He marched out.
It took me half an hour to talk her around, and she told me twice not to call her Hattie.
Christianna Brand
Such a Nice Man
The circumstances in Christianna Brand’s story are not at all extraordinary—it might even he true that they are not at all unusual—not these days. They could happen almost anywhere—in a big-city apartment house, in a suburban home. There are telephones almost everywhere these days. But, as the man in the story says: “remote houses, hidden-away places” are the most likely—especially when the woman is alone. . .
What a fool she’d been ever to have let him in! Why must she be always so trusting?—so stupefied by her own too-ready social instinct, never giving herself time to think. “At thirty years of age,” her husband used to say to her, “surely you might have developed some common sense.” And hadn’t there been warning enough? Suppose this were the man who—
But it couldn’t be. Such a nice man! So nice, he’d seemed, standing out there on the doorstep, so quiet and solid-looking; middle-aged, respectable, and behind him in the semi-darkness, the middle-aged, respectable-looking car. On an impulse, he’d said—just passing—so many happy holidays in this old house when he’d lived here as a boy.
“I ought not to trouble you.” He glanced round him. “I hope the gentleman’s in, is he? If not I won’t bother you. It wouldn’t be right—I’ll go away.” But he didn’t come to that till he was well into the hall with the front door closed behind him.
Of course she should have pretended to call to her husband upstairs, or said that he was just bringing in some coal. But no! “Well, he’s not in yet, actually. But he’ll—he’ll be back any minute.”
And helpless in the toils of her own convent-bred good manners she led the way into the huge old farmhouse kitchen which to them was the center of the house—moving away from him, backing away to the Welsh dresser at the far end, leaving him standing uncertainly in the doorway. “This room you’ll remember, I expect? And the grandfather clock?” She felt that she sounded like a renting agent, nervously showing him around.
“Not too sure about the clock,” he said—cagily? “I’d have been only a little lad the last time I was here.”
“But the dresser—you remember this old dresser? They say it’s been there since the house was built.” In fact, they had brought it with them two years ago.
If he knew it was a test, that no longer disturbed him. He seemed to abandon himself to discovery. “Oh, well, yes—the dresser I remember,” he said.
So now she knew. Her heart lurched, and a sick terror seemed to rise in her throat, almost choking her. She faltered, “I think I can hear the car. My husband’s due back any minute, any second. He never leaves me here alone after dark.” And she blurted it out, “There’s a man—he rings me up.” She felt his eyes fixed on her, direct, appraising. “He says filthy things, obscene things.”
He stood very quiet, then said at last, “So you’ve rumbled it already. Well, yes, you’re right, it was me. Only, about your husband—that’s not true, is it? He won’t be back till late. I was outside the window and heard you on the phone.”
He had gone very pale and his broad, solid, pleasant face suddenly wore a gray dead look. He explained, almost apologetically, “I’ve been spying on your house, you see. Waiting for the chance.”
“The chance?” she stammered.
He stood there with that dreadful gray look, a sort of blank look as though he spoke from another world; motionless, except when now and again his thick white hands gave a sudden little twitch. “I can’t help myself,” he said. “This ringing up and all. It’s disgusting, I know, and afterwards I feel ashamed. But I can’t help it. It’s a sort of sickness, I suppose.”
He moved in a little from the doorway, came to the end of the big scrubbed wooden table, and stood there with the table between them. She protested, as though to stem his advance with words, to fend off for a little longer the horror to come: “But why me? Why me? I’m not some pretty young girl—”
“It’s not personal,” he said, almost as if that might be reassuring. “I’ve never even seen you before, except glimpses through the window now and then.” And he explained it. “I just look them up in the telephone book. Different places, different counties, even—I couldn’t do it too near home. My job takes me about a good deal, and that’s a help. But it’s more the house, first, really—”
“The house?”
“Remote houses, hidden-away places like this. I’ve got to be careful, you see, haven’t I? I wouldn’t want to be caught. I find a good house and who lives in it, and then I drive over and ring up from some local phone booth. After that it depends on how they react. Sometimes they’re cool, they just say, ‘You’re mad,’ and hang up. That kind I don’t bother with any more. But if they’re upset and disgusted, frightened even—well. I’m afraid it’s better then.”
He looked down at his hands, fisted, white and bulging, on the table before him. “Perhaps I am mad. It’s dreadful really. But when it comes on me it’s like—well, it’s like I said, like a drug or something, I can’t resist it. And that’s why I have to be so careful, why I mustn’t let myself be caught. I couldn’t stand prison. What would I do, locke
d away in there, if the fit came on me? I really would go mad then.”
She grasped at a faint hope. “The police here know about you. We told them about the calls.”
“They can’t do a thing,” he said, quite kindly, half pityingly. “Not unless they was to tap the line day and night. And you’re not the only one. I keep several going at a time, just for safety’s sake, and I give them names made up from the names of their houses usually. ‘I’ll ring Lily at Pond Farm,’ I’ll say to myself—‘lily pond,’ you see—or ‘I’ll ring Ella at Ash Tree House.’ that was a tough one—I made it up at last from Cinderella and ashes, you see, well, like cinders. But mostly I don’t go to see them; they’re just to keep the police not knowing where to watch next.”
He was silent, for a moment withdrawn, musing. Then he went on in the same kindly voice.
“If they got me now, it would be for life. I killed one of the girls, you see. Accidental, it was, of course—but I killed her.”
She gave a little jerked-out, chopped-off scream, scrabbling with bunched-up fingers at her mouth. “Oh, no!”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said unhappily. “I didn’t want to. In fact, that part I didn’t enjoy at all—it all went too far. Poor thing!—such a pretty young girl she was; only she would try to run away. I’d been phoning her, you see—like you say, filthy, obscene. I don’t know what makes me do it, honest I don’t.”
He seemed so sincerely unhappy, so truly distressed. If she could temporize, if she could keep him talking! She had said to him that she was not a pretty young girl, but she recognized in herself, without at all consciously exerting it, a natural charm which had brought her much popularity. Now she pulled out, from under the table beside him, a wooden kitchen chair and suggested, “Why don’t you sit down? Would you like some tea or something?”
He gave her a sidelong look, making no attempt to sit down. “Are you trying to get round me? That won’t do any good, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” she said. “I just thought we could—well, talk. You seem to be in so much trouble.”
“Yes, I am,” he acknowledged. “I’m in trouble all right. You don’t think I like being this way? All the worry of it, let alone the danger. And the agony, the awfulness when it’s coming on and you’re still at the stage of trying to resist it. I’ve been to the police station before now—a police station of all places!—all on some cooked-up excuse, knowing I’d be safe from it there, that I’d have to behave myself. But the minute I left I was at it worse than ever.”
“You could get treatment. You’re not the only one—this problem is very well understood nowadays. People do get cured of it.”
“A psychiatrist, you mean?”
“You can tell a psychiatrist anything—he’s a doctor, you can tell him anything. And just trying to get help, just wanting to be cured—that’s a terrifically good sign, you know. It shows that you’re on your way to getting better already.” He stood looking at her woodenly and she gabbled on. “I mean, being able to talk about it, surely that in itself would be good?—not having to keep these terrible secrets all bottled up inside you.”
“But that’s it,” he said. “They are terrible secrets. I could have gone once, but how could I now? These psychiatrists, they can get anything out of you; you can’t keep things back, not once you’re started. And doctor or no doctor, he wouldn’t stand for me having killed that girl. He’d give me away and there’d be a murder charge against me.”
He looked at her, almost imploringly. “If only they wouldn’t struggle, then I wouldn’t hurt them. I don’t mean to hurt them but I’m—strong. And this girl, you see—I went to see her, I pretended I’d lived in the house once, I often do that if it’s an old house. But—well, she wouldn’t—you know—let me. She struggled, they all struggle, and—I suppose it’s dreadful but I’m beginning to realize that it’s the struggle I like.”
Almost as though it had reminded him of why he was there, he began to move at last, sidling toward her round the table, his thick fingers white-tipped and spatulate, pressed along the wooden edge.
She was sick and shivering. The familiar room swam round her as though she saw it through water. She started to gibber, backed up, violently trembling, against the oak dresser. “Stay over there! Don’t come near me, don’t touch me!” But the sad heavy face came closer, regretful, implacable. She sobbed and stammered, “Please don’t hurt me, please—!”
He stopped again, stood there, humbly explaining, “I don’t want to hurt you. I wouldn’t, you see, if you’d only not struggle, if you’d only be—be kind and easy. I’m just ordinary, you know, just an ordinary man. Bachelor, yes; but a lovely old mother, looks after me like a king; and I’m a good son to her too. Fine job, solid, respectable—no one ever suspects a thing. But when this comes over me. . .”
He fell silent again and into the silence, ash falling in the grate, coals resettling, sounded as loud and harsh as an avalanche. The grandfather clock struck once on a rasping note.
“If you wouldn’t all struggle,” he said. “But you do; and nowadays, like I say, it’s becoming more and more the actual struggle that—that excites me; it’s all leading up to that. It used not to be. The telephone calls—they were the thing. But now—it’s a sort of revenge, I think, wanting to get the better of women because women have always seemed to—well, not like me.”
“But if you do these things—”
“I wouldn’t do them if they’d be nice to me. If only just once, one of them was kind—kind and easy and even a little bit loving—I sometimes think I’d be cured of it, give the whole thing up forever.”
“Couldn’t you get some nice girl of your own?”
“But that’s what I’m telling you,” he said. “Nice girls won’t have me. I suppose they—they sort of sense this other thing. I suppose I sort of—smell of it.”
“There are—well, you know, the girls on the street. Poor sad girls, living so dangerously, taking such terrible risks. But—they’d be easy. And I suppose kind?”
“But not loving,” he said. “And I want some love, that’s what I want. That’s what I go about looking for. If—if, even after all the muck and the filth, the telephone calls and all that—if one of them was really to understand and forgive, really not blame me, really accept that I’m just an ordinary man, only with this sickness that I can’t help—”
He thought it over, rather pathetically. “Quite a nice man I am, really, as men go. Honest, dependable, decent—well, in all other ways. And kind, you know, considerate, good to my mother like I said. There never was a better son, I don’t suppose.”
“I think you are nice,” she said. “You’re quite right, you are nice—a nice, ordinary man. Only I do think you’re ill, you need help.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I do need help. And what help can I look for now, except from a woman? I think if I found that, I could begin my life all over again. But till then—”
Till then! She began to move, edging her way almost imperceptibly along the dresser, her hands spread out behind her feeling their way along the polished ledge. It brought him sharply out of his absorption. He said, “That’s no use, my dear. If you think you’re going to get to the door and get away from me, I’m afraid that’s no use. I wouldn’t want to kill you, not like that poor girl. She tried to run away. But you—I like you, honest I do, no one else has ever been so kind as you, so understanding. But that won’t stop me. Unless—” He looked at her wistfully. “If you could be the one!” he said.
She knew now what she must do. She knew there was no other way. She had pulled herself together; the room no longer swam about her; her hands grew steady, dropping from the ledge, hanging at her sides. She said, “Well—I do understand. You’re ill. You can’t help yourself. And neither can I help myself. Neither of us can.”
And sick, shuddering, reluctant, she tore herself from the shelter of the oak dresser and went to him.
He did not stir, just stood there
waiting for her. But she saw with a sort of heartbreak that his whole face was transfigured with an incredulous, inarticulate, grateful joy.
She’d had no idea where to strike. Simply, the sharp kitchen knife had thrust itself in and to a vital spot. She found herself weeping, kneeling over him and weeping as he lay there, harmless now and, in his harmlessness, pitiful. So terrible a price to have exacted from him! She and all those other women—if they could but have been “easy and kind.” Easy and kind, understanding, forgiving, “even a little bit loving.” But they could not. And so—
And so she was leaving him, lying there on the warm red tiles of her kitchen floor, his broad white face turned up, witless, to the swinging oil lamp. Leaving him there and blundering across to the telephone in the hall. “I didn’t mean to kill him! I had to save myself—didn’t I? I had to save myself, myself and all those other women to come. And the knife was on the dresser. But I didn’t mean to kill him! He was—he was such—”
After all, apart from—all that—he had seemed such a nice man.
Josh Pachter
Invitation to a Murder
We published. Josh Pachter’s first story, “E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name,” in the December 1968 issue of EQMM—when the author was 16 years old. We published his second story, another “Adventure of Ellery in Queenland,” in the May 1970 issue—when the author was 17 years old. His third story, about Nero Wolfe Griffen, appeared in our August 1971 issue—when the author was 18 years old. And now we give you Josh Pachter’s fourth story—written when he was 19 years old, just before his 20th birthday. . .
The envelope was edged in black.
Curious, Branigan put the rest of his mail aside and reached for the jeweled souvenir dagger he used as a letter opener. He slit the envelope open carefully and slid out a square of heavy cream-colored notepaper.
It, too, was black-rimmed.
It was a formal, embossed announcement, and the raised letters read:
