Агата Кристи - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. No. 75, April 1959, British Edition

Madame Dufour paused before the desk in the living room of her suite and observed the registration card on which Henri had written his signature. With a pen she corrected a slight clerical error and then, taking the card with her, left the suite and went to the lounge.

The lounge, with its rococo touches of grandeur, was empty and quiet. It was the doldrum hour between midnight and one o’clock.

Madame crossed to the reception desk, where the night clerk was amusing himself with the book of the month.

“Arturo, here is the registration card of Mr. Henri Pazz.”

Arturo, a man of Sicilian extraction and every fascinating bit as good-looking as the day clerk Enrico, put the card in its proper place on the rack.

“Thank you, Madame.” He emitted an impatient Sicilian sigh and said, “Will this storm never break? I believe it is a curse deposited upon our heads at long range by the jealous peasants of California.”

“Either a curse or a blessing, Arturo. One never knows.”

“And, madre mia, what imbecile have we now!” Arturo exclaimed as one of the plate-glass terrace doors flew open, letting in both a vicious blast of rain and the oilskin-swathed night watchman.

The watchman, a recent graduate from an Ivy League university, shut out the elements and then bore down on the desk.

“A man is lying outside on the terrace, Madame Dufour. He is dead. Very dead.”

Madame Dufour retained her imperturbable air of calm...

“Accident over to the Chateau Plage,” Police Sergeant Day said to his wife Ethel as he accepted a cup of the coffee she had crawled out of bed to make for him. “Young guy from Montreal. Fell out of a window. Could have been suicide, of course, but that bald red-wigged dame who owns the joint knew all about him and his folks.” He sipped noisily at his coffee.

Ethel, who was a devotee of mystery novels, suggested succinctly, “Or he might have been pushed. Those fall-out-of-a-window jobs are always open to doubt.” She looked triumphant.

“Not this one, Ethel. Brass safety chain fastened on the room door. Had to file it to get in, after what was left of the body had been identified. Absolutely impossible for a second person to have been in the room with him. Only one funny thing.”

Ethel perked up. “What, Charles?”

“I noticed it while we were fiddling with the door, getting the chain cut. There was a damp Spot on the white paint, and traces of cleaning powder dried around the spot’s edges — sort of like a thickish white paste made out of something like, say, Bon Ami. The damp spot covered the first numeral of the room’s number. A numeral figure 1.”

“What was the room number, Charles?”

“1101.”

© 1939 by McCall Corporation

The first assignment that Ellery Queen, the real-life authors, got from Hollywood was to write a screenplay about a horse race. Now, it is an absolute fact that neither half of Queen had, up to that time, ever visited a track or placed even a $2 bet!

“One moment, dear. My favorite fly’s just walked into the parlor,” cried Paula Paris into her ashes-of-roses telephone. “Oh, Ellery, do sit down!... No, dear, you’re fishing. This one’s a grim hombre with silv’ry eyes, and I have an option on him. Call me tomorrow about the Loren excitement.”

And, the serious business of her Hollywood gossip column concluded, Miss Paris hung up and turned her lips pursily toward Mr. Queen. Ellery had cured Miss Paris of homophobia, or morbid fear of crowds, by the brilliant counter-psychology of making love to her. Alas for the best-laid plans! The patient had promptly succumbed to the cure and, what was worse, in succumbing had infected the physician.

“I do believe,” murmured the lovely patient, “that I need an extended treatment, Doctor Queen.”

So the poor fellow absently gave Miss Paris an extended treatment, after which he rubbed the lipstick from his mouth.

“No oomph,” said Miss Paris critically, holding him off and surveying his gloomy countenance. “Ellery Queen, you’re in a mess again.”

“Hollywood,” mumbled Ellery. “The land God forgot. No logic. Disorderly creation. Paula, your Hollywood is driving me c-double-o-ditto!”

“You poor imposed-upon Wimpie,” crooned Miss Paris. “Tell Paula all about the nasty old place.”

So, with Miss Paris’s soft arms about him, Ellery unburdened himself. It seemed that Magna Studios, to whom his soul was chartered, had ordered him as one of its staff writers to concoct a horse-racing plot with a fresh patina. A mystery, of course, since Ellery was supposed to know something about crime.

“With fifty writers on the lot who spend all their time — and money — following the ponies,” complained Ellery bitterly, “of course they have to pick on the one serf in their thrall who doesn’t know a fetlock from a wither. Paula, I’m a sunk scrivener.”

“You don’t know anything about racing?”

“I’m not interested in racing. I’ve never even seen a horse race,” said Ellery doggedly.

“Imagine that!” said Paula, awed. And she was silent. After a while Ellery twisted in her embrace and said in accusing despair, “Paula, you’re thinking of something.”

“The wrong tense, darling, I’ve thought of something!”

Paula told him all about old John Scott as they drove out into the green and yellow ranch country.

Scott was a vast, shapeless Caledonian with a face as craggy as his native heaths and a disposition no less dour. His inner landscape was bleak except where horses breathed and browsed; and this vulnerable spot had proved his undoing, for he had made two fortunes breeding thoroughbreds and had lost both by racing and betting on them.

“Old John’s never stood for any of the crooked dodges of the racing game,” said Paula. “He fired Weed Williams, the best jockey he ever had, and had him blackballed by every decent track in the country, so that Williams became a saddle-maker or something, just because of a peccadillo another owner would have winked at. And yet — the inconsistent old coot! — a few years later he gave Williams’s son a job, and Whitey’s going to ride Danger, John’s best horse, in the Handicap next Saturday.”

“You mean the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap everybody’s in a dither about out here?”

“Yes. Anyway, old John’s got Danger and a scrunchy little ranch and his daughter Kathryn and practically nothing else except a stable of also-rans and breeding disappointments.”

“So far,” remarked Ellery, “it sounds like the beginning of a Class B movie.”

“Except,” sighed Paula, “that it’s not entertaining. John’s really on a spot. If Whitey doesn’t ride Danger to a win in the Handicap, it’s the end of the road for John Scott... Speaking about roads, here we are.”

They turned into a dirt road and plowed dustily toward a ramshackle ranch-house. The road was pitted, the fences dilapidated, the grassland patchy with neglect.

“With all his troubles,” grinned Ellery, “I fancy he won’t take kindly to this quest for Racing in Five Easy Lessons.”

“Meeting a full-grown man who knows nothing about racing may give the old gentleman a laugh. Lord knows he needs one.”

A Mexican cook directed them to Scott’s private track and they found him leaning his weight on a sagging rail, his small buried eyes puckering on a cloud of dust eddying along the track at the far turn. His thick fingers clutched a stop watch.

A man in high-heeled boots sat on the rail two yards away, a shotgun in his lap pointing carelessly at the head of a too well-dressed gentleman with a foreign air who was talking to the back of Scott’s shaggy head. The well-dressed man sat in a glistening roadster beside a hard-faced chauffeur.