“I’d consider the deal, sir,” said Markham dutifully.
“Sit down. We’ll go to the workshop in a minute.” He picked up a pencil and began to sharpen it with his pocket-knife—another Carmichael mannerism. “My mind is twice what it was at your age; but what is that without the—Damn! You see, even my fingers …”
For a moment the sunken eyes lit up. “And there’s another—make a note, Markham.”
“Of what, sir?”
But Bennington was asleep. Markham would not need to make that note, nor any other ever. The secretary smiled; it had been so gratifying of the old man to point out and remedy the one flaw in the scheme just before he succumbed to it. But this was no time for ironic reflections; there was too much to be done.
The gadget worked excellently; Bennington had justly prided himself on being a first-rate craftsman. The bullet went in at the exact angle which Bennington had determined; and the pistol dropped to the floor on the precise spot which Bennington had fixed.
The rest was equally simple. Markham had resolved to destroy nothing; that was too often a give-away. Instead he left the room with the gadget and all the notes dealing with this plot. The notes he placed in his own room in a heap of similar papers; the gadget he dismantled and left in the workshop, so scattered among other fragments that the most ingenious mechanic could not have guessed its purpose.
Then he went to the kitchen.
“Mr. Bennington,” he said, “asked me to tell you to make his eleven o’clock tea stronger this morning.” And while the cook expostulated that she always made Mr. Bennington’s tea as strong as any mortal man could drink it, Markham broke in with, “Wasn’t that a shot?”
The cook remarked that there’d been shooting all morning and she wished Mr. Bennington would write a story about daggers or poison for a change.
“Just the same,” said Markham, “I’d better see what’s going on.” And a few minutes later he put through a call to the police.
He had expected to feel nervous when the police came; but Lieutenant Herman Finch did not in the least disconcert him. All had gone so smoothly that even Dr. Carmichael could not have daunted him, much less this mild little man with his plebeian unassumingness and his corncob pipe.
His one danger, Markham reflected, lay in letting this absurd little detective see the amusement which he felt at the interrogation. Yes, Mr. Bennington had been in ill health for some time—very little enjoyment left in life for him, poor fellow. No, Mrs. Bennington was away—spending the weekend with friends at Palm Springs. (It had been a good move to persuade Loretta to accept that invitation—clear her of suspicion and possibly keep her from forming any suspicions of her own.) He and the cook were the only people in the house. Yes, they were together when the shot was fired. (The cook now obligingly remembered hearing it.) Financial worries? No, not that he knew of; but what is a satisfactory bank balance, Lieutenant, when your health—?
“Thanks,” Finch grunted. “I’ll go see what the boys have found in the study. Routine, you understand—even in an open and shut case like this.”
“Lieutenant,” Markham smiled, “if you knew how often Mr. Bennington and I have slaved over a chapter of that same routine—”
The door caught on the rug as the Lieutenant closed it. That heavy rug was absurd anyway. We’ll change that, Markham thought; bare floors and simple mats—less ostentatious but more truly impressive.
Lieutenant Finch returned with surprising quickness. “All right,” he said. “Where is it?”
Markham started to his feet, paused, then relaxed. “Where is what, Lieutenant?”
“The gadget—the frame for the gun.”
“I don’t understand you.” That was it. Blithe ignorance. Even though by some incredible chance they had guessed, there was nothing that could be proved. Nothing.
“Bennington didn’t fire that shot.”
“And how do you,” he hesitated lightly, “deduce that?”
“Cut the smart stuff, Markham. You see, there was a perfect set of fingerprints on the gun.”
Markham frowned. “But surely in that case—”
“Bennington’s pocket knife was on the desk. He was sharpening a pencil before he was shot. He cut his finger. The shot killed him instantly, but the cut was made while he was alive. It bled. And there’s no cut in the print of that finger on the gun. So come on, Markham; what did you hold the gun with?”
Suddenly Markham began to tremble violently, as the murderers always did in Bennington’s mysteries when they cracked at the end, and in that moment he knew what that last unwritten note would have been. Bennington had happened on the perfect solution to his perfect crime.
(1941)
Mystery for Christmas
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION (1955)
It’s fitting that a story dealing with teamwork between two detectives should itself have been produced by teamwork—that type of teamwork, so valuable to writers and so little known to readers, which can develop between an author and a truly creative editor. In 1942, when I’d begun selling my first detective short stories to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Queen asked me if I had any unsold shorts cluttering up my files; maybe something could be salvaged from them. Of course I did (is there any writer who doesn’t?). I sent him a batch of unpublished and (I’ll admit now) unpublishable stories; and the one in which Queen saw possibilities was this, at that time called The Mickey Mouse Mystery. Now Queen is, God bless and keep him, the kind of editor who can not only tell you what’s wrong but show you how to make it right; he indicated a completely new angle from which to approach the story—and that entailed, again fittingly, the introduction of the character of Mr. Quilter and the productive the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts teamwork between him and young Tom Smith.
Just to balance things a little, this story also brought about the one occasion on which I’ve been able to catch Queen with his editorial slip showing. He wanted to run it in the issue of EQMM appearing just before Christmas in 1942, and said we should therefore retitle it Murder for Christmas. I wrote back that this was fine (aside from the fact that the title had, like almost anything a mystery writer can think of, been already used by Agatha Christie); there was only one small point against it—the story contains no murder.
So, Mystery for Christmas, starring Quilter & Smith, plotted by Queen & Boucher.
That was why the Benson jewel robbery was solved—because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.
His almost invisible eyebrows soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said Mr. Quilter, and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”
Aram Melekian tilted his hat a trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this untrammeled opus any more, Metropolis Pictures is going to be suing its youngest genius for breach of contract.”
Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine, molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”
“Go play with your blue pencil,” Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”
“Because I have never produced anything myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was aquiver.
“Then what do you need us for?”
“What—Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!” said Mr. Quilter loudly. “I’ll show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me he’ll turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”
�
��Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian. “And I’ve no doubt you will.”
Mr. Quilter stalked out of the studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F.X. He saw a discomfited Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the significant part of writing.
He felt a bumping shock and the squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.
Mr. Quilter rose to his feet undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.
“I’m awfully sorry,” the young man blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine, I guess.” His left arm was in a sling.
“Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I was preoccupied …”
They stood awkwardly for a moment, each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke at once.
“You came out of that studio,” the young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you work there?”
And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket. “Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”
The young man shuffled and came near blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me—But are you a writer? In there?”
Mr, Quilter’s eyes were aglow under their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers tick. Are you interested?”
He was also, he might have added, what makes detectives tick. But he did not know that yet.
The Christmas trees were lighting up in front yards and in windows as Officer Tom Smith turned his rickety Model A onto the side street where Mr. Quilter lived. Hollywood is full of these quiet streets, where ordinary people live and move and have their being, and are happy or unhappy as chance wills, but both in a normal and unspectacular way. This is really Hollywood—the Hollywood that patronizes the twenty-cent fourth-run houses and crowds the stores on the Boulevard on Dollar Day.
To Mr. Quilter, saturated at the studio with the other Hollywood, this was always a relief. Kids were playing hall in the evening sun, radios were tuning in to Amos and Andy, and from the small houses came either the smell of cooking or the clatter of dishwashing.
And the Christmas trees, he knew, had been decorated not for the benefit of the photographers from the fan magazines, but because the children liked them and they looked warm and friendly from the street.
“Gosh, Mr. Quilter,” Tom Smith was saying, “this is sure a swell break for me. You know, I’m a good copper. But to be honest I don’t know as I’m very bright. And that’s why I want to write, because maybe that way I can train myself to be and then I won’t be a plain patrolman all my life. And besides, this writing, it kind of itches-like inside you.”
“Cacoëthes scribendi,” observed Mr. Quilter, not unkindly. “You see, sir, you have hit, in your fumbling way, on one of the classic expressions for your condition.”
“Now that’s what I mean. You know what I mean even when I don’t say it. Between us, Mr. Quilter …”
Mr. Quilter, his long thin legs outdistancing even the policeman’s, led the way into his bungalow and on down the hall to a room which at first glance contained nothing but thousands of books. Mr. Quilter waved at them. “Here, sir, is assembled every helpful fact that mortal need know. But I cannot breathe life into these dry bones. Books are not written from books. But I can provide bones, and correctly articulated, for the life which you, sir—But here is a chair. And a reading lamp. Now, sir, let me hear your story.”
Tom Smith shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “The trouble is,” he confessed, “it hasn’t got an ending.”
Mr. Quilter beamed. “When I have heard it, I shall demonstrate to you, sir, the one ending it inevitably must have.”
“I sure hope you will, because it’s got to have and I promised her it would have and—You know Beverly Benson?”
“Why, yes. I entered the industry at the beginning of talkies. She was still somewhat in evidence. But why …?”
“I was only a kid when she made Sable Sin and Orchids at Breakfast and all the rest, and I thought she was something pretty marvelous. There was a girl in our high school was supposed to look like her, and I used to think, ‘Gee, if I could ever see the real Beverly Benson!’ And last night I did.”
“Hm. And this story, sir, is the result?”
“Yeah. And this too.” He smiled wryly and indicated his wounded arm. “But I better read you the story.” He cleared his throat loudly, “The Red and Green Mystery,” he declaimed. “By Arden Van Arden.”
“A pseudonym, sir?”
“Well, I sort of thought … Tom Smith—that doesn’t sound like a writer.”
“Arden Van Arden, sir, doesn’t sound like anything. But go on.” And Officer Tom Smith began his narrative.
THE RED AND GREEN MYSTERY
by Arden Van Arden
It was a screwy party for the police to bust in on. Not that it was a raid or anything like that. God knows I’ve run into some bughouse parties that way, but I’m assigned to the jewelry squad now under Lieutenant Michaels, and when this call came in he took three other guys and me and we shot out to the big house in Laurel Canyon.
I wasn’t paying much attention to where we were going and I wouldn’t have known the place anyway, but I knew her, all right. She was standing in the doorway waiting for us. For just a minute it stumped me who she was, but then I knew. It was the eyes mostly. She’d changed a lot since Sable Sin, but you still couldn’t miss the Beverly Benson eyes. The rest of her had got older (not older exactly either—you might maybe say richer) but the eyes were still the same. She had red hair. They didn’t have technicolor when she was in pictures and I hadn’t ever known what color her hair was. It struck me funny seeing her like that—the way I’d been nuts about her when I was a kid and not even knowing what color her hair was.
She had on a funny dress—a little-girl kind of thing with a short skirt with flounces, I guess you call them. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t make it. Not until I saw the mask that was lying in the hall, and then I knew. She was dressed like Minnie Mouse. It turned out later they all were—not like Minnie Mouse, but like all the characters in the cartoons. It was that kind of a party—a Disney Christmas party. There were studio drawings all over the walls, and there were little figures of extinct animals and winged ponies holding the lights on the Christmas tree.
She came right to the point. I could see Michaels liked that; some of these women throw a big act and it’s an hour before you know what’s been stolen. “It’s my emeralds and rubies,” she said. “They’re gone. There are some other pieces missing too, but I don’t so much care about them. The emeralds and the rubies are the important thing. You’ve got to find them.”
“Necklaces?” Michaels asked.
“A necklace.”
“Of emeralds and rubies?” Michaels knows his jewelry. His old man is in the business and tried to bring him up in it, but he joined the force. He knows a thing or two just the same, and his left eyebrow does tricks when he hears or sees something that isn’t kosher. It was doing tricks now.
“I know that may sound strange, Lieutenant, but this is no time for discussing the esthetics of jewelry. It struck me once that it would be exciting to have red and green in one necklace, and I had it made. They’re perfectly cut and matched, and it could never be duplicated.”
Michaels didn’t look happy. “You could drape it on a Christmas tree,” he said. But Beverly Benson’s Christmas tree was a cold white with the little animals holding blue lights.
Those Benson eyes were generally lovely and melting. Now they flashed. “Lieut
enant, I summoned you to find my jewelry, not to criticize my taste. If I wanted a cultural opinion, I should hardly consult the police.”
“You could do worse,” Michaels said. “Now tell us all about it.”
She took us into the library. The other men Michaels sent off to guard the exits, even if there wasn’t much chance of the thief still sticking around. The Lieutenant told me once, when we were off duty, “Tom,” he said, “you’re the most useful man in my detail. Some of the others can think, and some of them can act; but there’s not a damned one of them can just stand there and look so much like the Law.” He’s a little guy himself and kind of on the smooth and dapper side; so he keeps me with him to back him up, just standing there.
There wasn’t much to what she told us. Just that she was giving this Disney Christmas party, like I said, and it was going along fine. Then late in the evening, when almost everybody had gone home, they got to talking about jewelry. She didn’t know who started the talk that way, but there they were. And she told them about the emeralds and rubies.
“Then Fig—Philip Newton, you know—the photographer who does all those marvelous sand dunes and magnolia blossoms and things—” (her voice went all sort of tender when she mentioned him, and I could see Michaels taking it all in) “Fig said he didn’t believe it. He felt the same way you do, Lieutenant, and I’m sure I can’t see why. ‘It’s unworthy of you, darling,’ he said. So I laughed and tried to tell him they were really beautiful—for they are, you know—and when he went on scoffing I said, ‘All right, then, I’ll show you.’ So I went into the little dressing room where I keep my jewel box, and they weren’t there. And that’s all I know.”
Then Michaels settled down to questions. When had she last seen the necklace? Was the lock forced? Had there been any prowlers around? What else was missing? And suchlike.
Beverly Benson answered impatiently, like she expected us to just go out there like that and grab the thief and say,
Exeunt Murderers Page 21
