Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

My mother moved forward then, put her arm around Sarah Garney, said, “You and your children come home with us until your husband has taken his things and left. The elders will see to him. Marie, Alma, you bring Jessie and the twins along.” So she had noticed them, too.

Before we could turn away, he came back out, a rifle cradled in one arm.

“You’ll not tell me what to do or where to go, you self-righteous sons of whores,” he shouted, and lifted the gun to his shoulder, the barrel swaying back and forth, but always pointed into the crowd.

Two shots rang out, one after another, and he fell back, his shot wild and harming none of us.

Sarah seemed to collapse against my mother, but my mother was strong from lifting clothes heavy with water, so she bore Sarah and the small ones quickly along, and Alma and I followed, Jessie in the center, me beside Micah — I could feel him shaking — and Alma next to Stephen.

My mother forced cup after cup of tea into them all, and then food, and that night they slept in our beds. By the morning, the body was gone, the blood scrubbed from the porch, and the family returned to their house. But a sort of friendship had begun out of the smoke and secrets of that night.

The elders found Mrs. Garney a place at the laundry where my mother worked. Jessie stayed home to care for her little sisters. At her house after school, we would take out our books and homework and teach her what we had learned that day. Stephen and Micah were given jobs at the grocer’s, measuring out grain, washing and trimming vegetables, cleaning up after the butcher. They would come home with their hands nicked and clothes stained, but they would also bring the beets or potatoes or green apples that had not been good enough to sell, and the marbled trimmings the butcher gave to them. The twins never returned to school. Micah eventually drifted off, disappearing for weeks, then months, and then we saw no more of him. As the years passed, Stephen was given increasing responsibilities and came to be manager, and then started his own store. Jessie never married. She had seen enough of the institution and had no use for it, though she would spend her life taking care of other people’s children.

When I finally realized what had come to be between Alma and Stephen, I sat Alma down at the old table and told her what he had done. Not to keep them apart, I had no expectation that was possible, or any wish for it. He was no more like his father than my own had been like his.

Stephen never asked me for silence. I don’t know if Alma told him I knew. I expect she did. They were so close they seemed to share each breath, and after she died, too young, too young, he walked through this world only out of obligation to all those who depended on him.

Copyright © 2011 by Trina Corey

“One of Ed’s finest stories,” says Douglas Greene of Crippen and Landru, the publisher of several Hoch collections, “is ‘A Long Way Down,’ an impossible crime tale — man jumps out of skyscraper window but dis-appears on the way down.” The story first appeared in AHMM in February 1965, three years after the author’s first sale to EQMM but eight years prior to his beginning his 36-year streak of unbroken EQMM publication. It’s been reprinted several times, but never before in this magazine.

Many men have disappeared under unusual circumstances, but perhaps none more unusual than those which befell Billy Calm.

The day began in a routine way for McLove. He left his apartment in midtown Manhattan and walked through the foggy March morning just as he did on every working day of the year. When he was still several blocks away, he could make out the bottom floors of the great glass slab that was the home office of the Jupiter Steel & Brass Corporation. But above the tenth floor the fog had taken over, shrouding everything in a dense coat of moisture that could have been the roof of the world.

Underfoot, the going was slushy. The same warm air mass that had caused the fog was making short work of the previous day’s two-inch snowfall. McLove, who didn’t really mind Manhattan winters, was thankful that spring was only days away. Finally he turned into the massive marble lobby of the Jupiter Steel Building, thinking for the hundredth time that only the garish little newsstand in one corner kept it from being an exact replica of the interior of an Egyptian tomb. Anyway, it was dry inside, without slush underfoot.

McLove’s office on the twenty-first floor had been a point of creeping controversy from the very beginning. It was the executive floor, bulging with the vice-presidents and others who formed the inner core of Billy Calm’s little family. The very idea of sharing this exclusive office space with the firm’s security chief had repelled many of them, but when Billy Calm spoke, there were few who openly dared challenge his mandates.

McLove had moved to the executive floor soon after the forty-year-old boy genius of Wall Street had seized control of Jupiter Steel in a proxy battle that had split stockholders into armed camps. On the day Billy Calm first walked through the marble lobby to take command of his newest acquisition, a disgruntled shareholder named Raimey had shot his hat off, and actually managed to get a second shot before being overpowered. From that day on, Billy Calm used the private elevator at the rear of the building, and McLove supervised security from the twenty-first floor.

It was a thankless task that amounted to little more than being a sometime bodyguard for Calm. His duties, in the main, consisted of keeping Calm’s private elevator in working order, attending directors’ meetings with the air of a reluctant outsider, supervising the security forces at the far-flung Jupiter mills, and helping with arrangements for Calm’s numerous public appearances. For this he was paid fifteen thousand dollars a year, which was the principal reason he did it.

On the twenty-first floor, this morning, Margaret Mason was already at her desk outside the directors’ room. She looked up as McLove stepped into the office and flashed him their private smile. “How are you, McLove?”

“Morning, Margaret. Billy in yet?”

“Mr. Calm? Not yet. He’s flying in from Pittsburgh. Should be here anytime now.”

McLove glanced at his watch. He knew the directors’ meeting was scheduled for ten, and that was only twenty minutes away. “Heard anything?” he asked, knowing that Margaret Mason was the best source of information on the entire floor. She knew everything and would tell you most of it, provided it didn’t concern herself.

Now she nodded, and bent forward a bit across the desk. “Mr. Calm phoned from his plane and talked with Jason Greene. The merger is going through. He’ll announce it officially at the meeting this morning.”

“That’ll make some people around here mighty sad.” McLove was thinking of W.T. Knox and Sam Hamilton, two directors who had opposed the merger from the very beginning. Only twenty-four hours earlier, before Billy Calm’s rush flight to Pittsburgh in his private plane, it had appeared that their efforts would be successful.

“They should know better than to buck Mr. Calm,” Margaret said.

“I suppose so.” McLove glanced at his watch again. For some reason, he was getting nervous. “Say, how about lunch, if we get out of the meeting in time?”

“Fine.” She gave him the small smile again. “You’re the only one I feel safe drinking with at noon.”

“Be back in a few minutes.”

“I’ll buzz you if Mr. Calm gets in.”

He glanced at the closed doors of the private elevator and nodded. Then he walked down the hall to his own office once more. He got a pack of cigarettes from his desk and went across the hall to W.T. Knox’s office.