Alexander Agis - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 2. Whole No. 363, February 1974

But Harry wasn’t at home. I knocked on the door of the frame cottage and got no answer. I turned the knob, and found that the door was unlocked. There was a light behind it. The other cottages in the court were dark. It was long past midnight, and the street was deserted. I went into the cottage, preceded by my gun.

A ceiling bulb glared down on sparse and threadbare furniture, a time-eaten rug. Besides the living room, the house contained a cubbyhole of a bedroom and a closet kitchenette. Everything in the poverty-stricken place was pathetically clean. There were moral mottoes on the walls, and one picture. It was a photograph of a towheaded girl in a teen-age party dress, Jeannine, before she learned that a pretty face and a sleek body could buy her the things she wanted. The things she thought she wanted.

For some reason I felt sick. I went outside. Somewhere out of sight an old car engine muttered. Its muttering grew on the night. Harry Nemo’s rented Chevrolet turned the corner under the streetlight. Its front wheels were weaving. One of the wheels climbed the curb in front of the cottage. The Chevrolet came to a halt at a drunken angle.

I crossed the. sidewalk and opened the car door. Harry was at the wheel, clinging to it desperately as if he needed it to hold him up. His chest was bloody. His mouth was bright with blood. He spoke through it thickly:

“She got me.”

“Who got you, Harry? Jeannine?”

“No. Not her. She was the reason for it, though. We had it coming.”

Those were his final words. I caught his body as it fell sideways out of the seat. Laid it out on the sidewalk and left it for the cop on the beat to find.

I drove across town to the trailer court. Jeannine’s trailer still had light in it, filtered through the curtains over the windows. I pushed the door open.

The girl was packing a suitcase on the bunk bed. She looked at me over her shoulder, and froze. Her blonde head was cocked like a frightened bird’s, hypnotized by my gun.

“Where are you off to, kid?”

“Out of this town. I’m getting out.”

“You have some talking to do first.”

She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”

“I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.”

She half turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”

“I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”

“Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naiveté, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean Harry got killed on account of me?”

“Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”

“God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.

The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:

“That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”

“You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see her shoot him?”

“No. I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”

“Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”

“Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”

Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.

Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the door frame and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.

The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.

“This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”

“No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”

“To use on Harry?”

“To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”

“Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”

“My only daughter.” She said to the girl, “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much — the awful things that can happen.”

The girl didn’t answer.

“I can understand why you shot Nick,” I said, “but why did Harry have to die?”

“Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”

“You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”

“No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”

She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love.

The girl said in a stunned voice, “Mother. You’re hurt. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s go, Mrs. Nemo,” I said.

The first story by Harold Q. Masur to be published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was “The $2,000,000 Defense,” in our May 1958 issue, more than 15 years ago. Would you like to know the subsequent publishing history of that one short story? The day after the story’s appearance on newsstands television rights were purchased for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and the show has been rerun at least twice. The story appeared in more than a dozen foreign magazines, even behind the Iron Curtain (in Hungary), and has been anthologized in three hardcover collections. What does all this mean in coin of the realm? We paid Mr. Masur $250 for the first magazine serial rights in 1958, and since then the story has earned about $4000, and all this supplementary income went directly to Mr. Masur. (Who says short stories don’t pay?)

Now we give you Mr. Masur’s first story to appear in EQMM since his “ Squealer’s Reward,” in our June 1962 issue, nearly 12 years ago. This new story is the first Scott Jordan case to be published in EQMM — a hard-hitting, fast-moving, fast-reading story of a lawyer-detective...

What Maury Faber did was inexcusable. Perhaps even illegal. At 7:15 A.M. he used a passkey and invaded my hotel room. He clamped his fingers around my shoulder and unceremoniously shook me awake.

Three days ago I had checked into the Everglades Hotel on Florida’s west coast for a week of rest and recreation, which meant sleeping until noon. Ordinarily I am not a slugabed, but I had just finished a long and complicated trial, working around the clock, in court during the day and studying transcripts at night.

So I bitterly resented the intrusion. Prying open a grainy eye, I gave the man a hard look. Almost any sight on God’s green footstool would be more pleasing than Faber’s kisser first thing in the morning. It was pale and meaty, dominated by a heavy nose, and well matched to the short barrel-shaped body he invariably kept garbed in the latest most fashionable resort style. Acquiring a passkey had been no problem for Maury Faber. He was president and managing director of the joint.