Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

While I was standing there, feeling numb and not thinking clear but sort of hazy, I heard this car pull up. There was a hole in the gate with a little cover to it that you could push aside. Like a spy-hole? I took a quick look through it and reacted automatically to what I saw. Before those same two disillusioned deputies had time even to start knocking on the gate, I was down on the beach and the drainpipe was rapidly coming up. This pipe is maybe a hundred yards long. It runs underneath the highway and the other end is inland from the beach. I was out of breath when I got to the other end.

It was pretty there. I came out in a gully that had trees on both sides and even a little grass and such. I couldn’t see any houses, which was fine. But I couldn’t see Dorothy either, and that wasn’t. I looked all around and she wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“Dorothy?” I called.

The answer came from above me on the south side of the gully. “Here.” I looked up but all I could see was this eucalyptus tree.

“Where?”

“In the tree.”

That’s where she was, too. Ordinarily a eucalyptus is one of the hardest trees there is to climb, but this one happened to have a branch that was only about ten feet above the ground. She was sitting on it. I climbed the side of the gully and shinnied up the tree and sat beside her.

“Jane climb tree good,” I said when my breath finally came back.

“Jane learn climb tree in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer jungle. Jane climb up, see when Tarzan come back in Sprite.”

I looked where she was looking and, sure enough, I could see the Sprite parked outside Mrs. Bennett’s gate across the highway. The Sheriff’s car was right behind it. Just seeing that black-and-white job gave me the shivers. It came to me all of a sudden — everything I’d done wrong. I hadn’t exactly been a moron. I’d been a stupid moron, which is worse. Instead of explaining things to that liquor department man I’d turned his suspicions to super-suspicions by walking out on him. And of course he’d unloaded on the cops.

A kid drives up in a cool sports car, tries to buy liquor and to pay for it with a C-note, and the lady he says he’s doing it for doesn’t answer the telephone — well, that’d make anybody give the kid a second look. Brother! I could just see those two deputies over in Mrs. Bennett’s house. I knew what they were thinking. One of them was probably making a phone call right this minute.

“It was the Bostwick boy, all right,” I could hear him saying. “He murdered her and took off with a hundred bucks. Send out an all-points bulletin. Advise caution when approaching. This criminal is desperate and probably he’s armed.”

And right there on the phone that he was holding, life-size and in living color, I could see my fingerprints!

“I’m in a jam, Dorothy,” I said.

“So brief me.”

I filled her in on the details.

Naturally she was shocked. But after a while she accepted the fact that Mrs. Bennett had been murdered and stopped talking about her and started thinking about me. “They can’t pin it on you, George. You didn’t kill her,” she said.

“I know that, but the cops don’t. You ever hear of circumstantial evidence? It’s the only really reliable evidence there is.”

“Cops may rely on it. I don’t.”

“I’m afraid that’s — you know, immaterial?” I said.

“It won’t be when I tell them what I know. Her husband did it — Max,” she said. “I’d been sitting in this tree, oh, maybe three, four minutes, when I saw him coming through the drainpipe. He buried something just this side of it. Then he sort of slunk over to the highway and a woman came along and picked him up.”

I said, “Max Bennett’s in Las Vegas. With his so-called secretary. His wife — his late wife, that is — told me.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute. Maybe that’s what he told Phyllis, but I know better. He’s not the kind of man would take his secretary to Vegas. And I tell you I just saw him, George!”

“Was the woman who picked him up a redhead?”

“I couldn’t tell. She was inside the car. But Max was right down there.” She pointed. “I couldn’t have made a mistake!”

“What’s he look like?”

“Well,” she said, “he’s tall and real distinguished. He’s only thirty-three but he’s got this hair like graying at the temples. Like, you know, worldly?”

I said, “I just can’t see it. Such a distinguished type and all, why would he want to murder his own wife?”

“If you’d known Phyllis, really known her, you wouldn’t have to ask. She was a succubus,” Dorothy said.

“A which?”

“Like in a dream there’s this evil woman?”

“Well, it takes all kinds,” I said. “What did Mr. Bennett bury?”

“Let’s go see,” she said.

We unclimbed the tree and slid down into the gully. Sure enough, the ground was loose in a spot near the drainpipe that Dorothy pointed out. I could dig into it with my hands. I scooped it out and, only a few inches down, I felt something cold and hard. It was an automatic, a Smith & Wesson .38. I gave it the standard procedure, miffing the muzzle, counting the cartridges in the clip. One bullet had recently been fired.

“You called it right, Dorothy. This is what killed her,” I said.

“I’ve seen that gun before. It’s Max’s. You realize what this means, George? You’re in the clear. Hot-diggity!” she said.

“Hot what?”

“Like it’s the most,” she said.

I didn’t say anything for a while. I was thinking. I guess I was thinking harder than I’d ever thought in my whole life. “I wish you’d got the license number of that car,” I said at last. “We’d have a pretty good case if you’d remembered to do that.”

“I did get it! Wait a minute—” She concentrated. “It was a California license — SHM 578. Isn’t that enough for you to take to the police?”

“Well, not quite,” I said. “They’d have to check a lot of things, and all the time they were doing it I’d be in jail. I’m supposed to be in Mr. Wurley’s class at one o’clock.”

“Who’s Mr. Wurley?”

I told her, and about the paper I hadn’t even started writing yet “But if you’ll help me,” I said, “I got an idea that ought to make the cops and Mr. Wurley happy, both.”

“I’ll be glad to help you, George. Just tell me what to do.” she said.

So that’s how come we’re sitting in this booth in The Top o’ the Sea Café on Malibu Pier. We got here the easy way — just walked along the highway until we came to it. Nobody stopped us. Lots of people looked at us, but it was only Dorothy they saw.

Jack Levin runs this place. He’s a friend of Freddie’s, and he let us have some coffee and gave me this writing paper and loaned me his fountain pen. I’d have offered to pay for the coffee but the only money I have is this hundred-dollar bill, and I’m holding that as evidence.

So, Mr. Wurley, here’s the paper I was supposed to do plus my alibi for not showing up today. I don’t dare go anywhere until the cops arrest the murderer. Dorothy has promised to bring this to you, but I don’t think she’ll read it. Who reads the literary efforts of a high school senior unless, like you do, they get paid for it? I’m pretty sure she’ll give it to you. It’s what the innocent juvenile non-delinquent she’s playing today would do.

But don’t forget that lovable young innocence is only one of a lot of parts she’s played in her time. Remember her in Teen-Age Terrorist? She’s versatile. And old, Mr. Wurley. She’s been a sub-ingenue for lo, these many years, and she must be twenty-five if she’s a minute.

It’s what she said when I found the murder weapon that finally blasted off my brain and sent it into orbit. Nobody’s said “Hot-diggity!” since I grew up. So, after that, when she told me that the license number of the car that picked up Mr. Bennett was SHM 578, it was all daylight and champagne, like Shakespeare says.