Ellery Queen - Cop Out

When he fell asleep Ellen got out of bed and shuffled to Barbara’s room. She spent the rest of the night sitting in Barbara’s little rocker with Miss Twitchit in her lap. Once she sang the soft song she had made up before Bibby could even crawl, not the tune really, it was let’s face it the Brahms Lullaby , I couldn’t make up a tune Ellen used to say with a laugh I’m practically tone-deaf. But the words were her own, hush and baby and love, words that came from her womb.

She woke up in a nasty dawn and found that she was crying. When she was over it she put Miss Twitchit back in her doll cradle that Loney had made from a broken-down rocker of his mother’s and only then did she go back to the big bedroom and stretch out beside her husband. She lay on the edge of the bed so as not to disturb him. When she heard him grunt and sit up she made sure to have her eyes shut.

Thank God she’s getting a decent sleep.

At first Goldie was all for lighting out, even before they came back for the kid.

“It’s getting more and more risky, Fure. I don’t like this hanging around New Bradford.”

“The payroll,” Furia said.

“I know, but what’s the sense being mules about it when we’re hot for a murder rap? There are plenty other payrolls around. So we take our lumps on this one. I say let’s scramble and lose ourselves in the scenery. We ought to get out of the state. Maybe hit for Kansas or Indiana, those farmers out there are sitting ducks.”

“I ain’t leaving here without the bread,” Furia said, and from the way he said it Goldie knew that she had better clam up, her skin was starting to itch again.

She picked the emergency holeup after they got the kid back. The shack they had rented at Balsam Lake was out of the question, they agreed on that, but Furia wanted to bust into one of the other cabins, maybe at the other end of the Lake, he was in a rotten mood and it took special methods to work him out of it. Goldie worked him out of it on the bed in the shack they were abandoning after she did what he liked best, which Hinch had watched through a good crack in the door, it was his favorite. Hinch was supposed to be guarding the kid, Furia had told him to, but he enjoyed their wrestling holds when he could do a Peeping Tom without getting caught. Anyways the kid was too scared to try anything, she was right there with him in the kitchen shivering on a chair, he could hear her teeth going clackety-clack without turning around.

“The Lake is the first place he’ll look, Fure, believe me,” Goldie said, “as soon as he gets the message we grabbed the kid again. He’ll tear up these woods. So it figures like we get out of here fast and settle in where he can look all year long and he won’t find us. We oughtn’t to have come back to this shack at all. What’s the sense having to cool him before you get the money back?”

“Okay, okay,” Furia said dreamily, “I buy it.”

Hinch was making faces at the kid for kicks when they came out of the bedroom.

They spotted the Saab with Malone at the wheel hellbent for the Lake, he was hunched over blind, he passed the Chrysler without a look.

“What did I tell you?” Goldie said with a laugh. “Drive on, Stinkfoot.”

The house she had picked was at the other side of town, near the town line of Tonekeneke Falls but well away from both centers, standing by itself on a back road a good hundred yards in and hidden by shade trees taller than the house. You could pass it a thousand times and never know it was here, Goldie said. Which is a fact, Furia said with satisfaction.

There was even a flagstoned patio out back and an outdoor pool with a heater attachment, but the pool was drained for the winter, too bad, Furia said, we could have had ourselves a dunk like the richbitches.

The place was owned by a New York family who used it for summers and long holiday weekends the rest of the year. Goldie knew about it because her sister Nanette had mentioned the Thatchers in her letters, she was their regular summer baby-sitter, they went out a lot. They had three impossible children but Nanette said they paid her twice the going rate so who’s kicking. There was no chance of the Thatchers showing up all of a sudden because they had traipsed off to Europe till after the Christmas holidays, that’s how the other half lives.

Furia approved. Aside from the money he was feeling great after Goldie’s special treatment and when Hinch broke through the back door and Goldie locked Barbara in the downstairs maid’s room he didn’t even get mad at the furnace, it wouldn’t go on, the tanks must need oil. Maybe they don’t pay their bills, he cracked.

He went around admiring. The country furniture was king-size and handfinished, white pine treated with just linseed oil, all dowels, not a nail in them. The fieldstone fireplace in the living room was almost tall enough for Hinch to walk into and there were genuine oil paintings on the walls. Though Furia took a dim view of the paintings. They look like cripples did them a skillion years ago, he said, and look how they’re all browned up and full of cracks. There was even a big-screen color TV set in a special white pine cabinet which right away Goldie turned on, but Furia said, “The hell with that, we got to listen to what’s going on around here,” and he turned off the TV and turned on the radio, a kingsize transistor, standing on the mantelpiece. He tuned in the station at Tonekeneke Falls, there was a rock combo on, and he left it on while he went exploring.

The country kitchen made him do a little dance like Hitler. It was all of pine and brick with a regular Rockette lineup of gleamy copper pots and skillets on wrought iron racks hanging from the beams, like a color spread in House Beautiful or something. “Would this ‘a’ bugged my old lady’s eyes out! What she had to cook in shouldn’t happen to a dog. When she had something to cook.” The refrigerator was empty, but there was a twenty-cubic-foot freezer loaded with steaks and roasts and other great stuff and a for-real cooking fireplace with a black iron door at the back that opened into something Goldie said they called a Dutch oven big enough to do a whole lamb in and a black iron pot hanging on a black iron dohinky that swung out in the damnedest way. “Man, that pot’s bigger than my old lady’s washtub,” Furia said, practically smiling, “you sure can pick ‘em, Goldie.”

He felt so good that when Hinch found a room lousy with books from floor to ceiling and a white pine bar full of bottles of the best stuff and poured himself a waterglass of Black Label, Furia let him. “Live it up, Hinch, have yourself a grin.” But then he had to show what a big man he was, he said, “What the hell is the kid bawling for? I’ll give her something to bawl,” and he unlocked the door to the maid’s room and slapped the little girl around some, not much, he pulled his punches, he had nothing against kids, but it only made her bawl louder. “What’s with this little punk?” Furia said disgustedly. “You’d think being her old man is fuzz she’d be used to getting banged around, give her some booze, Goldie, and shut her up.” So Goldie got a couple slugs of Jack Daniels into Barbara and after a while she stopped crying and fell asleep on the bed with her mouth open, snoring like a little lush. Furia got a charge out of that and when he locked her back in he was smiling again.

He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the pine-and-cowhide sofa in the living room like the little king. “Think I’ll have me a couple filly minyons for supper tonight, Goldie,” Furia said. “Can you make ‘em like the fat cats do, in that kitchen fireplace?”

“Don’t see why not,” Goldie said, “though I can’t barbecue them, I don’t see any charcoal.”