Robert Alter - 101 Mystery Stories

“Now it’s a 3!”

“Does 3 mean anything to you or the project, General?”

“No more than the others.”

“Visitor number 3...? Let me see that check-in book of his.” Ellery seized the duplicate visitors’ book on the dead man’s desk. “Agon’s third visitor this week was...”

“Who?” General Carter rasped. “I’ll have him picked up right away!”

“It was you, General,” Ellery said. “Of course, I assume—”

“Of course,” the General said, reddening. “Now what the deuce are you doing?”

Ellery was giving the memo sheet still another clockwise quarter turn. And now, astonishingly, it read:

“W?”

“No,” Ellery said slowly. “I don’t think it’s a W... General, wasn’t Agon of Greek extraction?”

“So what?”

“So Agon might well have intended this to stand for the Greek letter omega. The omega looks very like an English small script w. ”

“Omega. The end.” The General snorted. “This was certainly Agon’s end. Poetry yet!”

“I doubt if a scientist in extremis would be likely to think in poetic terms. Numbers would be more in character. And omega is the last letter of the twenty-four letter Greek alphabet. Number twenty-four, General. Doesn’t something strike you?”

General Carter threw up his hands. “No! What?”

“Twenty-four’s proximity to the number of visitors Agon actually received up here this week — which was twenty-three, you’ll recall, Dr. Dunwoody tonight being the twenty-third. Surely that suggests that Agon meant to indicate a twenty-fourth visitor — someone who came after Dunwoody? And if that’s true, Agon’s killer was his twenty-fourth visitor. That’s what Agon was trying to tell us!”

“It doesn’t tell me a thing.”

“It tells us why Agon didn’t write his killer’s name or initials. He denoted his visitor by number, not because he was afraid the killer might return and destroy the clue — a pretty far-fetched thought process for a man nine-tenths dead! — but because he simply didn’t know his murderer s name. ”

General Carter’s eyes narrowed. “But that would mean it was someone Agon knew only by sight!”

“Exactly,” Ellery said. “And if you’ll do a security recheck on the skunk, General, you’ll find it’s his loyalty to the United States, not Mrs. Agon’s or Dunwoody’s, that’s been subverted.”

“ What skunk?” the General bellowed.

“The only skunk who could have got up here without signing in. That worried-looking night guard on duty in the lobby.”

You say you’ve been reading the series of articles in the Baker City Journal about how Mayor Willison cleaned up the city?

Brother, those articles are written for the sucker trade — meaning no offense, you understand.

Oh, I’ll admit that the city is clean now — but not because of Willison. Willison is a cloth-head. He doesn’t even know how Baker City got cleaned up. Being a politician, he’s glad to jump in and take credit, naturally.

That’s right. I know exactly how it happened, and it isn’t going to be printed in any newspapers, even if I am a reporter. You spring for a few rounds of bourbon and I’ll give it to you — just the way it happened.

You know about Johnny Howard. I don’t pretend to understand him, or the guys like him. Maybe something happens when they’re little kids, and by the time they get grown up, they have to run everything.

Nice-looking guy, in a way. Lean and dark and tall. But those gray eyes of his could look right through you and come out the other side. He came into town five, six years ago. Just discharged after three months in the Army. Heart or something. Twenty-six, he was then. Nice dresser. Sam Jorio and Buddy Winski were running the town between them. Anyway, Johnny Howard went to work for Sam Jorio. Two months later I hear talk that they’re having some kind of trouble and that is ten days before Sam Jorio, all alone in his car, goes off that cliff just south of town. Burned to nothing. Nobody can prove it isn’t an accident, but there’s lots of guessing.

With the boss gone, Buddy Winski tried to move in and take over Sam’s boys. But he didn’t figure on Johnny. He met Johnny at the bar of the Kit Club on Greentree Road and Johnny busted his beer bottle on the edge of the bar and turned Buddy Winski’s face into hamburg. When Buddy got out of the hospital, he left town. There wasn’t anything else to do. All his boys had teamed up with Johnny Howard.

Inside of a year Johnny not only had everything working smooth as glass in town, but he had things organized that Sam Jorio and Buddy Winski hadn’t even thought of. Take a little thing like treasury pools. Syndicates are always trying to move in on a town this size. Buddy and Sam used to each have their own. Not Johnny. He folded up Sam’s pool and Buddy’s pool and let the syndicate come in. He gave them protection in return for two cents on every two-bit ticket. He made more out of it than Winski and Jorio ever thought of.

Another thing. No flashy cars for Johnny. No, sir. A little old black sedan with special plates in the body and special glass in the windows. That was Johnny. No going into the clubs, even the two that belonged to him, with a big gang and a batch of fancy women. Johnny had all his parties in the suite on the top floor of the Baker Hotel. All kinds of wine. Good musicians.

And, of course, Bonny was always with him. Always the same girl. Bonny Gerlacher is the right name. Bonny Powers, she called herself.

Five-foot-two on tiptoe with ocean-color eyes, dark red hair, and a build you wanted to tack on the wall over your bed.

Twenty-three or so, and looked sixteen.

Nobody messed with Bonny. And kept on living. Not with Johnny Howard around.

Well, things went along for a few years, and I guess Johnny was filling up safe-deposit boxes all over this part of the country with that green stuff. Johnny and Bonny. He was smart. Nobody could touch him. Estimates on his personal take went as high as a million and a half a year. He paid taxes on the net from the two clubs. Nothing else. The Feds smelled around for a long time, but they couldn’t find anything.

The way he kept on top was by cracking down on anybody who stepped out of line so hard and so fast that it gave you the shivers.

Then Satch Connel got sick and the doc told him to retire and go to Florida if he wanted to live more than another half-hour.

Satch Connel ran a store next to the big high school. And he gave his regular payoff to Johnny Howard. Howard’s boys kept Satch supplied with slot machines for the back room, reefers for the kids, dirty pictures and books. Stuff like that. I don’t think Johnny Howard’s end of the high school trade ran to more than three hundred a week. Peanuts to a guy like Johnny Howard.

So Satch sold out and a fellow named Walter Maybree bought it. This Maybree is from out of town and he had the cash in his pants and he buys it.

The same week he takes over, he tosses out the pinball machines and the punch boards and the other special items for the high school kids. You see, this Maybree has two kids in the high school. It gave him a different point of view from what Satch had. With Satch, nothing counted.

This Maybree paints the place inside and out and puts in a juke box and a lot of special sticky items at the soda bar and pretty soon it is like a recreation room you can maybe find run by a church.