Ellery Queen - Cop Out

“It’s up to you, Ellen,” Malone said. “What do you say?”

“Oh, God.”

Secco got up and went to the window. He took out his pipe again and sucked on it emptily. His back said he wasn’t there.

“Loney, help me, help me,” Ellen moaned.

“Do you want me to make the decision?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You’ve got to know. There’s no time for this, Ellen. Do I decide for both of us, or do you, or what?”

“They’ll murder her, Loney.”

“They may murder her anyway.”

She stiffened as if he had struck her.

Ellen, Ellen, how else do you prepare yourself?

“Well?”

He could just hear her. “Whatever you say.”

“John,” Malone said.

Secco turned around.

“We go for broke.”

It turned out that the chief had Harvey Rudd waiting in the wagon. “I brought Harvey along in case you said yes,” Secco said. “He’ll have to be briefed, Wes. I told him nothing.”

Harvey Rudd was The Voice of Taugus Valley. He was an ex-Maine news broadcaster who had passed up a top job with a New York network to start an independent radio station, WRUD, in Tonekeneke Falls. He owned it, programed it, edited its news, sometimes took its mike, and he had been known to sweep it out. He was a fortyish Down Easter with a long Yank nose and a short Yank tongue.

Ellen said one thing in Rudd’s presence. She said it to Chief Secco. “Can this man be trusted?”

When the chief said, “Yes,” Ellen nodded and went upstairs, not to be seen again during the afternoon.

Rudd didn’t say anything, not even with his eyes, which were northern ocean blue and looked as if they belonged in a four-master’s crow’s-nest. They did not even express anything at the sight of the plaster on Malone’s hair and the welt on his jaw. He set his surprising Texas-style white Stetson on the sofa beside him and waited.

Malone told the story leaving out nothing. The radio man listened without a word. When Malone was finished Chief Secco told about using WRUD to get to Hinch. “Will you do it, Harvey?”

For the first time Malone heard Rudd’s voice.

“I have two children of my own.” Malone had expected a voice like a cheap guitar, like fellow-officer Sherm Hamlin’s, Sherm had been born in Boothbay Harbor and had served as a guard at the prison in Thomaston before following his married daughter down to New Bradford, he had never lost his whangy accent. But this voice was more like one of Lawrence Welk’s baritone saxes. “What exactly did you have in mind, John?”

“Well, I got an idea while Wes was filling you in. You could put on the air a series of those now-what d’ye call ‘em?-like trailers, teasers, of a, say, radio drama. You know, like you were working up advance interest in a show you were going to run next week or month, give pieces of the plot. Like that. What we’d do is use the actual facts of this case, except we’d make out like the head man of the gang was double-crossing the other two. The idea is to get Hinch to worrying… No, Harvey?”

Rudd was shaking his head. “In the first place, John, WRUD doesn’t run dramatic shows, they went out a long time ago on radio, so it would sound phony straight off to anybody who does any listening at all. Second, if this Hinch is as stupid as you say he is you’re not going to get anything through his skull with subtlety. Third, from what Mr. Malone says, there’s no time to prepare anything elaborate. What-ever’s done has to be started right away-today, if possible.”

“Then how would you handle it?”

“I’d do it on a straight news basis. It’s something even a halfwit would understand and it would have the added advantage of sounding legitimate.”

“You can’t do that, Mr. Rudd,” Malone said.

“Why not?”

“Because Furia would hear it, too. And he’d know that the only way such information could have gotten out was through me or my wife shooting our mouths off. That would spell curtains for my little girl. He warned us to keep quiet or else. He’s dangerous, Mr. Rudd, maybe even psycho. He means it. At least I can’t take the chance that he doesn’t.”

“We can handle it so you and Mrs. Malone are put absolutely in the clear.”

“How?”

“You leave that to me.”

Malone’s chin flattened. There was a pulse beating in the bruise. “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”

“Will you let me work on it, Mr. Malone? I promise not a word will go out over the air without your okay. Have you got a typewriter here?”

“No.”

“Then just some paper,” Rudd said easily, “I can’t type worth a damn, anyway.”

Malone went hunting for paper while he listened for a sign of life from upstairs and heard it, the creak-creak of the rocker in Barbara’s room.

The kid was acting up again and Furia said give the little puke some more juice but Goldie said any more and she might get poisoned you want her alive don’t you. She came up with a bottle of Sleep-Tite tablets she found in one of the upstairs bathrooms, so that problem was solved.

Furia ordered a top sirloin roast for his Saturday night dinner and Goldie had it thawing all day. The Thatchers had obliged by installing an electric spit in the old kitchen fireplace and Goldie built just the right fire, a slow one, to do the roast over. Furia spent a good twenty minutes watching it go round and round. I picked me a real cool broad, he said, fondly pinching her behind, I ought to set you up in the chow business, Goldie, I’ll have that banana ripple ice cream for dessert they got in the freezer. Then he went back to the living room where Hinch was nursing an Old Crow on the rocks like a grudge, Furia had put him on short rations after the broken mirror, Hinch wasn’t taking it as well as usual. Furia turned on the radio, which was set at WRUD, and stretched out on the sofa while Hinch brooded over at him.

There was the national news, then the news from the state capital, and Furia said to the radio come on, come on. Finally the announcer, who had a voice like a saxophone, said: “And now for the Taugus Valley news.

“First Selectman Russ Fairhouse urged residents of New Bradford today to support the Jaycee cleanup campaign, Operation Civic Pride. ‘Please join your neighbors,’ Mr. Fair-house pleaded, ‘in picking up gum wrappers and such and ridding our town of unsightly junk like abandoned old cars and washing machines and any other thrown-out items that may be laying around your property causing eyesores. Your administration is doing its part repairing the highway signs defaced mostly by teenagers the past summer, please do yours and impress on your children that in the end the cost of such vandalism is borne by you, the taxpayer.’

“A two-car accident on The Pike one mile north of Tonekeneke Falls today took the life of nineteen-year-old Alison Springer of Southville and sent three other teenagers to the New Bradford Hospital with critical injuries. State police say that the cars were engaged in a drag race.

“There has been no progress in the statewide hunt for the two holdup men who shot Thomas F. Howland to death and stole the Aztec Paper Products Company’s payroll Wednesday night, according to Colonel Doug Pearce of the state police. ‘It’s my belief,’ Colonel Pearce told WRUD today, ‘that they made it out of the state. An All Points went out to authorities in adjoining states yesterday.’ “