Эллери Куин - The Devil To Pay

I am informed that certain persons of high ego or low conscience spend all their waking hours in the soul-searching effort to find resemblances between themselves and the multifarious offspring of the literary imagination.

Consequently I feel constrained to assert the self-evident fact that what follows in these pages is a work of fiction; and that, if any character in it resembles any real person whatsoever in name, physique, idiosyncrasy, mental equipment, cultural or professional background, or general morality, such deplorable resemblance should be construed as an act of God with which the author had nothing consciously to do.

E. Q.

Hollywood, like the Land of Oz, possesses a quaint and fluty flavor: it is the place where tin Christmas trees suddenly sprout around lamp-posts in December under a ninety-degree sun, where restaurants take the shape of lighthouses and hats, ladies on Saturday nights stroll the boulevards in trousers and mink coats leading baby leopards on a leash, where morning newspapers cost five cents and evening newspapers two, and people wait in queues for unexhausting hours to witness other people pressing their hands into juicy cement.

A trivial happening in Hollywood, therefore, is hugely less trivial than if the identical event occurs in Cincinnati or Jersey City, and an important one incalculably more important.

So when Ohippi Bubble burst, even people who were not stockholders devoured the Los Angeles dispatches, and overnight “Ohippi” became as familiar a catchword as “quintuplets” and “the nine old men.”

This is not to belittle the event itself. In collapsing Ohippi paradoxically stood on its own feet as a major calamity. And while the issue was not fought in the courts, owing to little Attorney Anatole Ruhig’s foresight, a veritable battle-royal raged in print and on the streets. A wonderfully martial time it was, with Solly Spaeth’s lanky son firing long-range bursts from the editorial offices of the Los Angeles Independent and unhappy stockholders alternately howling and scowling at the iron gate of Sans Souci , behind which Solly sat imperturbably counting up his millions.

It was really the Eastern diagnostician’s fault, for Solly would never have settled in California had the doctor not recommended its climate, its golf, and its sunbaths. Imagine Solomon Spaeth being content to do nothing but squint along the mountain-range of his belly as he lolled in the sun! It was fated that Solly should begin restlessly ruminating his capital, which was lying as idly as he in various impregnable but unexciting banks.

So Solly rose, covered his nakedness, looked hopefully about, and found Rhys Jardin and little Anatole Ruhig. And it was from their happy fusion that the celebrated and subsequently notorious Ohippi Hydro-Electric Development emerged.

(Solly met Winni Moon at the same time, but his interest in Winni was esthetic rather than commercial, so that is a different part of the story. Solly was never a man to neglect the arts. Winni became his protégée, and it is fascinating to recall that her career dated from that sensitive juxtaposition of souls.)

The organization and development of Ohippi Hydro-Electric took genius in those days, when heavy industry was prostrate and premonitory rumblings of holding-company legislation were audible in Washington; but Solly had genius. Nevertheless, he could not have succeeded without Rhys Jardin, who played the rôle of industrial angel with superb technique. Rhys, that sterling yachtsman, golfer, gymnast, and collector of objets de sport , was indispensable to Solly for entirely different reasons: he possessed the necessary supplemental capital, he carried the magic Jardin name, and he knew nothing whatever about big business.

When Ohippi moved from the financial pages into the offices of the Homicide Detail of the Los Angeles Central Detective Bureau the case, already precious, became a managing editor’s dream; and Fitzgerald went slightly mad. Fitz had been a classmate of Rhys Jardin’s (Harvard ’08) and he was also technically Walter Spaeth’s employer. But the setup was so alluring — the floods, Winni Moon and her scented chimpanzee, that provocative little detail of the molasses, the old Italian rapier, the scores of thousands of potential murderers — that Fitz shut his eyes to the ethical questions involved and let fly with both presses.

Of course, every newspaperman in Los Angeles became wall-eyed with civic pride and professional joy, and the items that flooded the papers dealt with everything from Winni’s dainty bathing habits to an old still-picture of Pink, bow in hand, as Chief Yellow Pony, from that forgotten epic of the plains, Red Indian . They even dug out of the morgue a photograph of Rhys Jardin winning the 1928 Southern California amateur golf championship.

One feature writer, running out of material, fell back upon statistics. He pointed out that, as usual, nearly every one in the case came from anywhere but Hollywood.

Rhys Jardin was originally a Virginian, the Jardins having been one of the few first families of that great commonwealth with traditional riches as well as rich traditions.

Solly Spaeth had been spawned in New York.

Walter Spaeth — who as a result of his father’s migratory instincts might have been born on mountain, plain, or sea — happened to see his first sunbeam in a Chicago hospital, where his mother saw her last.

Winni Moon had been christened Freda Möndegarde in a cold little Swedish church in the South Dakota wheatfields. (Her unavoidable destination had been Hollywood, since she was blonde and swivel-hipped, had been the star of her high-school dramatic society, had once waited on table in an eatery run by a Greek named Nick, and had then won a State-fair beauty contest, sharing honors with the prize milch-cow.)

Anatole Ruhig had been born in Vienna, an error he quickly rectified; he passed the bar in Kansas City and was drawn to Hollywood by magnetic attraction, like an iron filing.

Pink came from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The reporter even included Fitzgerald, to that gentleman’s wrath. Fitz, it seemed, was a Boston Irishman with a weakness for truth and whisky who had been called to California by chronic sinusitis and the plight of Tom Mooney.

And so it went. Mr. Ellery Queen, himself a native of West Eighty-seventh Street, Manhattan, amused himself once, during the darker hours of the puzzle, by studying these interesting but futile data.

The only indigenous Californian involved in the case was Rhys Jardin’s unpredictable daughter, Valerie.

“I didn’t think,” said Walter Spaeth the first time he met her, which was at a private polo game in Beverly Hills, “that any one’s actually born here, Miss Jardin.”

“Is that the smallest talk you have?” sighed Val, peeling an orange.

“But why Hollywood?” insisted Walter, eying her up and down. He wondered how the felt bowler stuck on the side of her head managed to defy the law of gravity, but that great problem was soon forgotten in a consideration of her mouth.

“I wasn’t consulted,” said Miss Jardin with annoyance. “Go away, you’re spoiling the—” She began to dance. “Good boy, pop! At it, Pink!” she screamed, waving the orange. “Watch that roan!”

Presumably Pink did so, for out of the mêlée shot two horsemen, the ball preceding them in a beautiful arc.

“That’s the end of that,” said Miss Jardin with satisfaction. “Oh, are you still here, Mr. Spaeth?”

The first horseman, a youngish fellow with longish legs clamped about a brownish pony, thundered up the field smacking the ball toward the goal with dismaying accuracy. Between him and his pursuers raced another youngish fellow with freckles, red hair, and preposterously broad shoulders. The ball bounced between the goal-posts, the first rider brought up his mallet in salute, and his red-haired guard completed the amenities by grinning and putting his thumb to his nose. Then they cantered back to mid-field.