Ellery Queen: Cop Out

“An outside job, I make it. I didn’t tell Mrs. Howland, but I think Howland was in on it and got crossed. That’s why I asked you if he seemed nervous this afternoon. Now get out, will you?”

“You can’t leave me hanging, John! What’s the indication of that?”

“Ed Taylor says Howland all of a sudden sent him into town for coffee. Ed thought nothing of it at the time, but after he got slugged and came to it struck him funny. Howland never did that before. Looks to me like a setup: Howland got Ed out of the way so he could let the robbers into the plant. He’d probably dickered for a cut of the loot, and after making the deal they shot him down. Go home.”

“Any hard evidence?”

“Not yet.”

“Mrs. Howland have any ideas?”

“She can’t see two inches past her own miseries. Go home.”

“Who’s at the plant?”

“Trooper Miller. He’s waiting for the state lab men and the coroner. Go home, Wes!”

Malone left on dragging feet, not all from fatigue.

He walked east to the corner, turned right, did the one block past the Ford agency to Three Corners, and started up Lovers Hill.

How did a man get to the point of kicking his whole life away? Even a life as rotten as Howland’s? Or maybe that was the answer. Howland’s wife was a drag and a drain, his job was a lot of nothing, he was going nowhere, he was in his upper fifties, and he handled a lot of other people’s money. It made some sort of cockeyed sense if you were in Howland’s shoes. He had never seen a happy look on Howland’s face, even at the times when he dropped into Elwood’s for a coffee on a cold night and caught the guy playing up to Marie Briggs.

He wondered if the Briggs girl was involved. No, Marie was too smart. Besides, she had a thing going with Jimmy Wyckoff and it looked serious. Jimmy was a good-looking kid who pulled down a good salary as a machinist at Compo Copper and Brass. If there was anything between Marie and Rowland it had all been in Howland’s head.

Malone felt a rush of affection for his own girls.

Suppose I didn’t have them? Suppose Ellen had turned out i nag and a spender like Sherrie-Ann? And as lousy in bed as ihe must be? Suppose Ellen had miscarried with Bibby, as;he had done twice before and once since Bibby was born, vhen Dr. Levitt advised her not to get pregnant any more? There would be no little girl with copper curls and a valen-ine for a face and those big honey eyes full of love for the lero in her life. (And hadn’t Ellen been floored when, at the ige of six, Bibby had climbed into his lap and clutched him around the neck and looked deep into his eyes and asked, “Daddy, do you love mommy more than you love me?” He could still see the expression on Ellen’s face.)

Malone turned up into Old Bradford Road.

No, life would be as big a zero as Howland’s without his girls. Until he had met Ellen, with her snapping Irish eyes and tongue, he had never been serious about a girl. He had never had a girl. Only girls, and most of those had been the kind who drifted in and out of Rosie’s over on Lower Freight, and they didn’t count. He had never had any close friends of either sex before Ellen. It was Ellen, with her insight into people, who had quickly seen him for what he was and dubbed him The Malone Ranger, from which he became “Loney” to her and to her alone.

He found himself smiling as he trudged around the curves of the S. In bed sometimes he called her Tonto, just to get her mad. (“If you haven’t found out the difference between Tonto and me yet, Wesley Malone, you need a course in sex education!”)

He had always had to make out. His father, a cold and silent man, had worked on the roads for the state, and Malone’s memories of him were colored by the black oil he could never seem to clean off his hands and face. He had died when Malone was thirteen, a stranger, leaving a bed-fond widow who chainsmoked and never combed her hair, and four younger children. They were girls, and he became the man of the house before he had to shave. It still made him mad when he thought of the monthly check from the town welfare fund. It provided just enough to keep them from starving, and an inexhaustible supply of ammunition for the town kids. He had hunted up work for after school, swearing to himself that the first time he could make enough to turn down the town handout he would kick somebody’s teeth in. He did his studying at night-his mother insisted, with a stubbornness he now recognized as the source of his own, that he go through high school. During the summers he mowed lawns, bagged groceries at the supermarket, farmed out for the haying season, painted divider lines on the roads. Anything to earn a dollar. He turned it all over to his mother. Money meant little to him except as it kept her from complaining.

By the time she died of lung cancer in New Bradford Hospital, his sister Kathleen was old enough to cope with the household and the younger girls. He began bringing his earnings to Kathleen. He had supported his sisters through high school, he had seen them safely married, he had kissed them goodbye as one by one they left town with their husbands and kids, wondering whether he would ever see them again. Most of them he never had seen again, although he got a letter once in a blue moon, usually griping, they came by their complaining ways honestly. And his favorite, Kathleen, was living in San Diego on the base, her husband was career Navy, and he did not hear from her at all.

He had never played Little League ball, he had never joined 4-H or a club at high school, he had never prowled the town with a gang on Halloween, he had never gone dragging on The Pike with other teenagers when the car bug hit. Instead, when he had been able to slip off into the woods with his.22, a hand-me-down from his father which he had kept fiercely cleaned and oiled, he pretended to be a Marine-wriggling through the brush on his belly, drawing a bead on the snapping turtles that infested Balsam Lake (and never shooting except at the empty gin and whisky bottles with which the Lake woods abounded)-always by himself. Somewhere along the road he had lost or strangled the need for group enjoyment. By the time he was free and on his own, the boys he had grown up with avoided him and the girls laughed at him as a square. That was when he had spent so much time at Rosie’s.

One of his recurring regrets was that he had been too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. He had enlisted in the Marines instead of waiting to be drafted and spent two of his four years on sea duty in the Med, all drill and mock-landings and spit-and-polish and the whorehouses of Barcelona, Marseilles, Kavala, Istanbul; the rest of his hitch he sulked at Parris Island handing out fatigues and skivvies to frightened recruits. He was not, his C.O. told him, a good Marine, too much rugged individualism and not enough esprit de corps. He was a lance corporal twice and a corporal once; he wound up a Pfc. His only achievement of record was the Expert Medal he earned on the firing range. He formed no lasting friendships in the Corps, either.

It was John Secco who had talked him into joining the New Bradford force. He had always looked up to Chief Secco as a fair man, his standard of goodness. Secco had an understanding of boys. His policies had kept the juvenile delinquency rate in New Bradford among the lowest in the state.

“I won’t kid you, Wes,” Secco had said. “You’ll never get fat being a town cop. You’ll have to learn how to handle selectmen, sorehead taxpayers, bitching storekeepers, Saturday night drunks, husband-and-wife fights, kids out to raise Cain, and all the rest. A good smalltown policeman has to be a politician, a squareshooter, a hardnose, and a father confessor rolled into one. It’s almost as tough as being a good bartender. And all for a starting pay of eighty-some bucks. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, Wes. You’re just the kind of man I want in my department. There’s only thing that bothers me.”