Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“Advertising Enforcement Police.” His voice had changed. It was no longer the lazy, confidence-inspiring drawl of a man weak enough to indulge himself in bootleg steak. It was now the stem voice of a dedicated moralist. Even his eyes had changed, and he made no effort to hide the deep contempt in them.

“I’m an Inspector of the A.E.P.” In his hand she saw the identity card — signature, photograph, government seal. “I’ve been following you for some time.”

“So that’s why your face was so familiar!”

“Tonight I recorded your conversation with me in the speakeasy. My ring is a microphone.”

“But it has no wire connection!”

“You little fool! As long ago as 1963, they had microphones without wire connections. You’re under arrest.”

“But... you led me on! You’re a member of the secret police—”

“Of course. How else could we ever make an arrest?”

“And the charge?”

“Subversion of the whole economy by failure to perform your duty as a consumer of synthetics willingly, cheerfully, and patriotically. Conviction is certain. With Full Automation and computers on the Bench, a miscarriage of justice has become impossible.”

“And the penalty?”

“A deep-freeze cell for life. We can’t have people like you around. This sort of thing might become contagious.”

“May I call my husband? Please!”

“No.”

Ella screamed as he shoved her into the car. She was still screaming as the A.E.P. car drove away in the moonlight.

An ingenious and amusing adventure of two college seniors, with an old wrinkle on smuggling but an exceedingly new wrinkle on detecting ...

“Are we ready?” said Jerry Runkle.

Mort Lisky made a fast examination of his circuits. Ready-lights glowed on both tape recorders. Microphones were in place, amplifiers plugged in, his monitor earphones “hot.” His long sensitive fingers caressed the switches lovingly. “I guess so, but I wish I could test the filter on an incoming call.”

“No time,” said Jerry. “They’re not going to horse around about contacting us. They’ve got a lot of heavy scratch riding on this caper.”

Mort gave him a pained look. “You were in that workshop original about gangsters, weren’t you? Kid, you gotta stop letting freshmen write your lines!”

“Corny or not,” said Jerry, “it’s true. And if you didn’t try to make friends with everybody after two beers, we wouldn’t be in this fix. You’re the genius who picked up those two characters!”

“But you’re the one who loaned Fox your camera, and that’s where we found the jewels,” said Mort. “I still think we ought to call the cops, or the customs agents, or somebody with badges and guns.”

Jerry shivered. “Not yet. Face it, Mort — until we can prove the jewels aren’t ours, we are the smugglers. We did bring them in, don’t forget that!”

“Forget it? How can I?” Mort said hollowly. “All right, maestro, we’ll do it your way. The script gets off to a fast start — I’ll say that for it. But are you sure you know what your third-act curtain’s going to be?”

No answer came from Jerry, who was a serious, blond youth of twenty-one, a senior majoring in theater arts at San Diego State College. Jerry did not yearn to be an actor himself. Once he had, but all that had been discarded with other purposeless yearnings of his callow years. Now Jerry wanted to write, direct, and produce, manipulating players as well as lines, to the greater glory of the modem theater.

Mort Lisky towered over him by six indies, being a swarthy six feet four of bones, chin, nose, and ungentle sarcasm. He too was a senior, but if Jerry felt himself ready for life, Mort knew his education was no more than started. True, he could make a living, and a good one, in any branch of electronics.

But next year Mort would begin postgraduate work at the University of California, one of a picked group of seniors from all over the nation, on something called Interplanetary Communications Project 9-D. Since time immemorial, men have projected their souls to the distant stars, seeking to draw from their constancy some inkling of their own fickle fates. To Mort, the stars talked back.

Jerry and Mort had shared an apartment for three years. They were totally unlike in ambitions, attitudes toward life, and politics — wherefore they were close friends. They had just returned from Mazatlán, Mexico, along with a hundred other San Diego Staters, where they had enjoyed the surf-bathing of Easter Week. They were tanned by the winter sun, exercised to healthy exhaustion, and exceedingly well nourished on the cheap but delicious Mexican beer. They should have felt very fit indeed.

They did not, and all because of a discovery Jerry had made just after crossing the border in the cab that took them from the Tijuana airport to their San Diego apartment. Jerry had decided, at the last minute, to have the cab stop so that he could leave the films of his Mazatlán outing at a photo shop. He remembered having loaned his fine, German-made reflex camera to Mr. Wilfred “Bill” Fox, attorney for that nice American investor, Mr. Barney Cupp. It was hardly likely that Mr. Fox would leave any film in the camera, but if he had, Jerry figured he might as well have that developed too.

So he opened his suitcase which, like all students’ baggage, had been given a once-over-lightly by the U.S. customs guards. There was no film in the camera, but it didn’t feel right to Jerry somehow. He opened its back, and a small cloth bag fell out. Call it a hunch, but at the same time Jerry’s heart fell so many millions of light-years that the most sensitive interplanetary radio could never have made contact with it.

“Ai! Ai! Ai!” said Jerry.

“You sound like a puppy that had its tail rocked on,” said Mort. “What’s wrong? Speak, boy!”

“Look what I found in my c-c-camera,” Jerry gurgled. “It f-f-f-feels like beads inside.”

Mort took the small cloth bag and opened it. His father was a jeweler and Mort had grown up in the shop, so his was no amateurish guess. “Nine diamonds, seven emeralds, and two of the finest rubies I have ever seen,” he said. “Uncut stones come in duty-free, but these have been cut, and are subject to duty. I’d say they’ll wholesale for around a hundred thousand dollars. Where did you pick up these baubles?”

“I loaned Mr. Fox the camera to shoot those girls water-skiing off Olas Atlas,” Jerry quavered. “They... they must be his.”

“And we’re not going to be a bit surprised when he comes after them, are we?” Mort said softly. “Because he got our address and phone number from me, and he and Mr. Cupp were on the same plane with us!”

“They’re smugglers!” Jerry moaned.

“Wrong,” said Mort. “We’re the smugglers. They are just a nice Beverly Hills investor and his nice attorney, who have been having a nice vacation while inspecting the very nice investment opportunities in Mazatlan. Jerry, we’re in trouble! What are we going to do about it?”

“I think I’ll swallow poison,” said Jerry.

Mort hefted the pouch of jewels. “There’s enough here to keep us for life, most of it in Leavenworth,” he said. “Let’s hunt up the nearest gendarme and cop out, as our fellow criminals put it.”

That expression, “cop out,” must have triggered the creative detonation in Jerry. To throw themselves on official mercy was too simple, also too risky. Because they were, after all, smugglers until they proved otherwise. In Jerry, self-preservation and the creative impulse both pointed to something more dramatic. Mort went along mostly because he had access to the electronic gear, and because, as he said, he was a born schmoe.