Аврам Дэвидсон: Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

James fingered the clipping. “Any of these names — the fifteen club members — strike a responsive chord?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Well,” James concluded, “I’d say the way to begin would be for Bennett, here, to go right to the source and find out how The Happy Days Club arrives at their decisions. Meanwhile, I’ll have Barney, my sound man, see if your phones are being tapped or anything. And I’ll run a check on the backgrounds of everyone involved in your stock transactions.”

“We don’t want to alarm those people in Iowa,” Allen said.

“Don’t worry,” Bennett said. “Bennett will appear in appropriate disguise.”

A day later Bennett flew to Chicago, took another plane to Davenport, and then rented a car. He drove south along the Mississippi, reaching Canfield, a river town of some 20,000 population, as dusk fell. He checked in at a motel, wolfed a paper plate of fried chicken at a drive-in, and returned to his room for a good night’s sleep.

In the morning he drove to downtown Canfield. He breakfasted on tomato juice and toast, stopped at a news agency for a Wall Street Journal, and then, Journal and an attaché case in hand, entered the offices of the Canfield Savings and Loan Association. The newspaper clipping had identified the president of The Happy Days Club as Robert Gordon, a loan officer at the institution.

Gordon, a genial, portly man in his fifties, greeted Bennett with a puzzled smile.

“You say you’re from New York? Are you buying real estate in our town, Mr. Bennett?”

“No,” Bennett said, shaking Gordon’s hand and taking a chair, “I’m a writer. Free-lance. I’m working up a magazine piece on investment clubs.”

“You’ve come a long way for that.”

“I know,” Bennett explained, “but that’s the point. I want to get away from the usual slick big-city and fancy suburban crowd — advertising men and sales executives and all that. I want a good part of my article to deal with the way an investment club works in small-town America, the folks right across the street.” He pulled a photostat of the clipping from his pocket. “I’ve had a clipping service send me everything they could find on small-town investment clubs. And as soon as I read about The Happy Days Club in the Gazette, I knew it was the club I wanted to feature in my article.”

“I’m flattered,” Gordon said. “I’m sure the whole club will be flattered. In what magazine will your story appear?”

“I have a tentative commission from the editors of View,” Bennett said, handing Gordon a faked letter written on View stationery. “But if they decide they don’t want it, I don’t expect to have much trouble selling it elsewhere.”

“Will there be pictures?”

“Of course. I have my camera at my motel.”

“Well, won’t that be nice,” Gordon said, beaming and returning the faked letter. “Tell you what. Meet me for lunch at the American Cafe around the corner. Meanwhile, I’ll phone the members and try to set up a special meeting as soon as possible.”

Bennett walked to the Canfield Gazette building. He told the managing editor the same story he had told Gordon and got permission to use the newspaper’s library for background material on the club and its members.

He spent two hours going over the Gazette’s clipping files. When at last he left the building, a police car slowly followed him around the corner and down the block to the American Café. Bennett tried without much success to pretend it wasn’t there.

“All our members have been contacted,” Gordon announced over coffee. “Most of them can make it at my house tomorrow night. They’ll be there at eight. But I wish you’d drop in tonight and have dinner with my family.”

“Delighted,” Bennett said. “By the way, who makes the buying and selling decisions for your club?”

“We have a three-man selection committee — Cromie, Hubbard, and Price. When anyone has a suggestion for a stock to buy or a reason to sell a stock we hold, it’s forwarded to the committee. When we were first organized, the whole membership used to vote on what purchases or sales to make. But recently we’ve let the committee make the actual decisions, since they say timing may be important.”

“Who’s chairman of the committee?”

“We have no chairman. Just the three men. But the selections they’ve been making lately have been doing so well that we haven’t changed members of the committee in nearly a year. Before that we had an awful lot of losers.”

Bennett had almost reached his car when the police car pulled up behind him and stopped. A tall, husky man in uniform emerged.

“Sir,” the officer said cordially, “would you mind coming with us?”

“What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble. The Chief wants a word with you.”

Bennett shrugged and climbed into the back of the police car. He flipped through his Wall Street Journal as they rode to the station in silence.

The Chief of Police, a huge, crew-cutted man of about Bennett’s age, late thirties, smiled and nodded toward a chair.

“Sit down, Mr. Bennett. I understand you’re a writer.”

“That’s correct,” Bennett said. He put his attaché case and the Journal on a radiator under the window and sat down. Inwardly, he debated whether to volunteer to show the Chief the faked View letter. Something about the Chief made him decide not to.

“What magazine do you write for?”

“I may do this story for View.”

“Would you mind naming some other magazines where your work has appeared?”

Bennett rattled off the names of several nationally circulated publications. He felt much as he had one day in 1944, when a German officer asked why a French farm laborer who stubbed a toe should know so many American obscenities. That had been a bad day too.

The Chief wrote the names on a pad. “I don’t suppose you’d mind,” the Chief asked, “if we checked these out.”

“Not at all,” Bennett replied. “And now I’d like to know why you’ve taken such a sudden interest in me.”

“Well, it’s funny,” the Chief explained, “but a lot of people from the big city think we’re kind of slow out here. They try to sell our citizens traps for mortar mice and all sorts of things. And this morning one of our citizens called me and said there was a man in town from View who wanted to meet the members of The Happy Days Club. He said he was suspicious because he’d heard of confidence men approaching investment clubs in one disguise or another, for the very good reason that people in investment clubs have money to invest. He didn’t say you were a confidence man, understand. He just asked us to check and make sure you’re a writer.”

“Who was this called?”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“You asked me in here on the basis of that?”

“Not entirely,” the Chief said. “We’ve had writers around here before, Mr. Bennett. A year ago, when a farmer outside of town chopped up two mail-order brides and buried them in an onion patch, a lot of writers came down. I called one of those boys — he works out of New York too — and he said he never heard of you. So far nobody else he’s asked ever heard of you either — including, by the way, the editor of View. And the librarian here has been going through the Reader’s Guide and she can’t find any record of where you ever had anything published. Maybe if you’d tell me the dates where some of your stuff ran, she could look it up, and we could both forget the whole thing.”

“At the moment,” Bennett said blandly, “I just don’t remember.”