Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Taking in the scene with a glance, Celery had immediately called Sentry Street to summon Inspector Breen and the boys from Homicide. While awaiting their arrival, he had examined the body, with two unexpected results: First, he had gotten his hands and trousers unpleasantly sticky, and second, he had discovered a pair of ordinary dice clutched firmly between the dead man’s right thumb and forefinger. Held with a single black dot visible on the exposed face of each die, the two small cubes resembled nothing so much as a pair of eyes staring blindly at the ceiling.

“A strange one, son,” observed Inspector Breen. “But with that mysterious dying message and all, it’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is, Dad, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave it in your capable hands for the time being. I’ve got another appointment in a couple of minutes, and I don’t want to be late for it. If I miss you at breakfast, I’ll come down to Sentry Street as soon as I can, all right?” Pausing at the door on his way out of the room, Celery added casually, “By the way, Dad, Carlos Nacionale was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” the wiry old inspector protested. “But, Cel, what about all this blood?”

It was too late for an answer. The younger Breen was already gone. The inspector was surprised to see his son leave the scene of a bizarre murder so abruptly.

But he knew from experience that Celery would come through in the crunch.

As promised, the gifted sleuth strolled into his father’s office early the following morning, his face bandaged from one of his chronic shaving cuts but otherwise looking fresher than he had the night before.

Velvet Nacionale was already there, and she rushed up to Celery with her sad black eyes wide. “Have you learned anything, Mr. Breen?” she urged, her voice low and pleading.

“I’ve just been talking with Doc Probably,” Celery told her. “He’s our medical examiner here in the city, and he’s just completed an autopsy on your father.”

“And was he—?”

“Dead? Yes, certainly.”

“I mean, was he poisoned, like you said last night?”

“Oh. Oh yes. I’m afraid he was.”

“By what?” asked the inspector.

“I don’t know.”

“Probably didn’t tell you?”

“Probably doesn’t think he was poisoned at all. He thinks Nacionale’s throat was slit, the irascible old quack. But all the classic symptoms of poisoning are there.”

“What symptoms?” Inspector Breen demanded.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? No heartbeat, no pulse, no nothing. He was poisoned, Dad. Q.E.D.”

“C.O.D.?” Velvet wondered.

“Never mind that,” said the inspector. “What about the stab wound on his neck?”

Celery fingered the bandage on his own throat reflectively and murmured, “Cut himself shaving, Dad. Happens to the best of us.”

“Do you have any idea what those dice he was holding are supposed to mean?” Velvet Nacionale breathed eagerly.

“That’s the key point of this entire case, Ms. Nacionale,” Celery congratulated her. “Obviously your father wanted to leave behind a message of some sort, perhaps a clue to the identity of his killer. There were no writing materials in the room, so he had to use the only thing available to him at the time: that pair of dice. Once I can figure out what he meant by holding them as he did, I’ll know who killed him. But so far, I’m stumped.”

The telephone trilled, and Inspector Breen scooped up the receiver. He listened intently for several minutes, then scowled and shouted a series of instructions in a birdlike bark before hanging up.

“What was that all about, Dad?”

“Bank robbery late last night,” the inspector frowned, “over on Lexington. They think they’ve got the guy who pulled the job downstairs, but they can’t get anything out of him. Forget about that, though, Cel, and tell me what you’ve got on those dratted dice.”

Celery shook his head. “It’s a dead end, Dad. I’ve wracked my brain, but I can’t come up with a connection that makes any sense. I’ve considered every possibility, but it’s just no good. Two dots held side by side — it doesn’t add up. Unless...”

“Unless what, son?”

“Unless Nacionale wasn’t holding them side by side, after all,” Celery said slowly.

“Cel, I don’t—”

“Dad, that’s it! I’ve been a blundering, incompetent nincompoop not to have seen it sooner! I don’t know how I can have been so utterly, insufferably stupid! My failure to grasp such a simple point rivals the great intellectual disasters of human history. Not even the shortsighted fools who assured Columbus that the world was flat were as hopelessly, fatuously misguided as—”

“Celery!” the inspector intervened. He had to: During one recent case, he had sat through half an hour’s worth of his only offspring’s self-flagellation to discover at the end of the tirade that Celery in his fury had completely forgotten the sudden insight that had set it off in the first place. Now, two months later, that case was still in the open file. “Put a cork in it and tell me what the heck you’re talking about!”

“Yes, of course. Thanks, Dad. But you see, it’s so elementary! In fact, it’s even simpler than elementary. It’s positively preschool. Why, the very idea that I can have taken so long to—”

“Celery!”

“What? Oh yes, Dad. Nacionale was trying to get across two dots, all right. But not side-by-side dots. The message he intended us to see was two dots, one on top of the other!”

“Yes, Mr. Breen, go on,” Velvet whispered.

“No time for that now,” exclaimed Celery. “You wait here, Velvet. Let’s go, Dad. I only hope we’re not already too late!”

Celery swung open the mirrored door and rummaged through the medicine cabinet impatiently. “Aspirin... mouthwash... toothpaste... ah, here it is!”

He held aloft an ornate cut-glass bottle and waved it triumphantly.

“What is it, son?”

“Dad, Dad, Dad! Don’t you see it yet? It’s all so wonderfully simple. Two dots. One on top of the other. What does that mean to you?”

“Gosh, Cel, I don’t—”

“Punctuation, pater! Simple punctuation!”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a colon, Dad, just a silly little colon!”

“So what?” the inspector muttered darkly.

“I’ll show you so what, you lovable old ignoramus,” Celery said affectionately. “Look, what is it I’m holding here?”

“A bottle of fancy aftershave. Like I said, so what?”

“It’s not aftershave, Dad. It’s cologne. Expensive cologne.”

“It’s no good, Cel. I still don’t get it.”

Celery slapped his forehead impatiently. “But it’s all so obvious, Dad. Nacionale, poisoned, dying, wanted to tell us where to locate the deadly stuff that was doing him in. If he’d had a pen or a pencil he could have written ‘in the cologne.’ But he didn’t. All he had at hand was those dice. So he made a crude representation of a colon, hoping someone would draw the connection between colon and cologne. It was a gamble, but it paid off.”

“Son, are you trying to tell me Carlos Nacionale drank a bottle of aftershave lotion?”

“Of course not,” the younger Breen said indulgently. “Nacionale was in the bathroom shaving. He cut himself, which explains the blood we saw. Then, when he was finished, he splashed cologne on his face. Either the stuff contained some sort of contact poison, or else it was the noxious fumes that killed him. Either way, it didn’t finish him off until he’d had time to set up that message with the dice.”

“I don’t know, Cel. I mean, it doesn’t even say ‘cologne’ on the bottle...”

“Doesn’t it, Dad? Look at the label. ‘Made in Germany,’ it says. Once you check it out, I’m betting you’ll find that this Borgian brew was cooked up in Koeln — or, to give it its Americanized name, Cologne — in western Germany, and that whoever gave it to Carlos Nacionale was his killer.”