Аврам Дэвидсон: Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“I’m at Blackford because I had a girl call Price to find out if he placed any long-distance calls after I was run out of town. She pretended to be a long-distance operator. And Price did make a long-distance call this afternoon. To Eaton, Illinois, which is twelve miles from Blackford.”

“It’s probably a waste of time.”

“Maybe. The girl couldn’t get the Eaton number that Price called. But Price has a brother, William, who lives in Eaton. I learned that from some social notes about him in the Canfield Gazette morgue. It will only take a day to check the brother out and see if he has any connection with the Gibraltar Fund.”

“Since you’re there anyhow, go ahead. I’ll hold up on that other agent. Come to think of it, Price called that Chief of Police so fast when he heard you were in town it’s like someone pushed a button. He must have known you were coming. I got a hunch that by this time tomorrow we’ll both have arrived at the same conclusion.”

In the morning Bennett drove to Eaton and parked on a side street. He walked a block to the business district, entered a drug store, bought a Wall Street Journal , and stepped into a telephone booth. He flipped through the book to PRICE, WILLIAM J. and dialed the number.

A woman answered.

“Good morning,” Bennett said. “Is your husband there?”

“He’s asleep. He’s always sleeping at this hour. He doesn’t get in until three.”

“When can I reach him?”

“Who is this?”

“I represent a firm doing market research for an advertising agency in Peoria. We’re surveying all property owners in Eaton.”

“Well,” she said irritably, “why don’t you get him at work, then? He doesn’t like to be bothered at home. Call him at the restaurant this afternoon.”

“What restaurant is that?”

“Why, Betty’s, of course,” she said, hanging up.

Bennett hung up and opened the book to the yellow pages. Under “Restaurants” he found a display ad for BETTY’S — Steaks, Chops, Chicken, Cocktails, Open 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Bill Price, Prop.

He left the booth and walked back to the car. He drove to the address listed in the telephone book for the restaurant, getting directions from a small boy on a bicycle. The restaurant would be as good a place to begin an investigation of William J. Price as any.

The restaurant, a roadhouse, had been converted from an old farm building on the outskirts of town. Bennett pulled into the parking lot but didn’t get out of his car. He didn’t have to. Because a foot-high sign in the window proclaimed: BETTY’S — HOME OF THE ORIGINAL 25-CENT MARTINI.

Michael Dane James handed the report to Allen — he, Allen, and Bennett were sitting in James’s office.

James explained: “Sam, the owner of that comfortable two-bit cocktail-hour martini joint across from your building, wired your reserved booth for sound. The mike was hooked to a tape recorder in his office. Barney found the mike in ten minutes when he joined us for a drink yesterday. A restaurant or bar owner bugging tables isn’t unheard of, you know. Usually they say they’re just checking customer reaction to food and service and whatnot. In this case it’s obvious one of Sam’s motives was to get tips on stocks. His location in the financial district would be a natural for that His twenty-five-cent martini between five and six would be a lure to bring people in. And when he got the right people — like top decision-makers for one of the nation’s big mutual funds — he reserved a booth for you regularly, to make sure he could hear everything you had to say.”

“As I get it,” Allen said, “Sam’s connection with The Happy Days Club was through his brother-in-law.”

“That’s right,” Bennett said. “Sam came from Eaton originally. He and his sister, Betty, ran a roadhouse there. After Sam left for New York, Betty married William J. Price, and he took over the roadhouse. As time went on, and Sam got established here, he started relaying some of his inside stock information to his sister and her husband, William Price. And William, in turn, passed it on to his own brother, Frank, who lived in Canfield. Frank belonged to The Happy Days Club and got on the selection committee. Once on it, it wasn’t much of a trick to control it. If necessary, he could take one of the other two committee members into his confidence, and the two of them could always outvote the third member. I’m sure most members of the club had no idea they were using information stolen from the Gibraltar Fund.”

“Sam taped our conversation the day we were in his place and you gave us the assignment,” James said. “He knew, then, that Bennett was going to Canfield in one role or another. And he had a brief look at Bennett when you ordered martinis for us. When Sam heard the tape he must have panicked. No doubt he called his brother-in-law, William, who in turn called Frank and warned him Bennett was on the way. So the minute Frank Price learned Bennett was in Canfield, he asked the police to check Bennett, hoping Bennett would be run out of town.”

“The mystery is solved,” Allen admitted, “but it does leave me with a dilemma.”

“I don’t think,” James smiled, “that The Happy Days Club will follow the Gibraltar Fund’s lead any more. This probably scared the daylights out of William and Frank Price.”

“Nevertheless,” Allen said, “the problem remains: What do we do about Sam? If we expose him, we may still get all the publicity we’ve been trying to avoid. And if we say nothing, he’ll go on eavesdropping on his patrons.”

“If it were up to me,” James suggested, “I’d pass the word discreetly to your employees never to go into that place again because it’s bugged. The news will get around the financial district fast enough, and Sam’s will die a slow but certain death.”

“Why,” Bennett offered, “don’t you just sit there, drink his martinis, and pass along tips on stocks you think will go down instead of up?”

“I like that,” Allen grinned. “Between all of us, we could give Sam enough bad advice to bankrupt him in thirty days. But we don’t want to hurt any innocent investors — even in Canfield, Iowa. No, I think we’ll adopt Mr. James’s suggestion.”

In the August 1962 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, we published Mrs. Behney’s “first story” — “On the Road to Jericho.” It was, you may recall, an impressive “first,” with sharply delineated characters and subtle, emotional overtones. Now we bring you a group of stories by this new author — and to the best of our recollection, this is the first time in the twenty-three-year history of EQMM that we have included three stories by the same author in a single issue or in a single anthology...

The author tells us that everything she writes “deals of necessity with everyday people.” She claims to know nothing about “society people, or wealthy people, or highly cultured people.” She was raised on a small farm, and has always lived in the country. When she was a child, “even staying overnight at a friend’s house in a nearby, sleepy, one-horse town was a great adventure.”

So now you know what to expect. You will find the three stories entirely different from one another — and yet they are interrelated and intertwined in a curious way, and as homogeneous as if they were cut from the same bolt of cloth — as indeed they were, the bolt of cloth being Mrs. Behney’s mind, her remembrance of things past.

We think you will find both sensitivity and texture in these three short stories — a moving and perceptive quality, rich in detail, that has the pulse and bitterness and impact of realism. And you will find all three stories intensely American — yet the people are as universal as the sun and the earth. In the first story, for example, you will observe the daily mosaic, piece by piece, of the work and chores of an American farm woman — but couldn’t Marcy Bayliss be any farm woman in any land, or for that matter, in any time?