Thomas Aldrich - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 68, July 1949

I don’t know how I did it. I bet I couldn’t do it over again now if I tried. The cord was hanging in a loop that rested against my chest. “Gee, it’s pretty,” I said, and turned a little to look up one way. “It’s tough to leave it,” I said, and turned again to look down the other way. I couldn’t get a full loop into it, but I got it snagged around the button, which was the size of a silver dollar. He did the rest.

“C’mon, that’s enough,” Buck said, and he jerked me back and started to swing me around on my way to the door. The button took the cord with it and pulled it tight over my shoulder. Whirr! and the shade came all the way down to the bottom, so fast and hard it tore partly off the roller, creased, and wouldn’t go up again.

It looked so much like an accident they didn’t even tumble. He just gave me a clip on the head, and freed the cord by wrenching the button off. Then we went on out of the place and down to the street, him and me first and Louie behind us with the two bags.

If I had expected the shade stunt to get me anything, I was out of luck. The street was dead, there wasn’t a soul in sight up or down the whole length of it. Buck’s car was standing a few yards down from the door, where there were a couple of big fat leafy trees. He had a habit of parking it under them, to keep the sun from heating up the inside of it too much.

We went down to it and he shoved me into the back seat, climbed in next to me and pinned me into the comer with his shoulder. Louie dumped the bags in the trunk, got in and took the wheel. “So he had a look-out posted, did he?” I thought bitterly. “Where — over in the next county?”

We started off with kind of a thud, that didn’t come from the engine. “What was that?” asked Buck.

Louie looked out and behind us. “One of the branches of that tree musta grazed t he roof. I see it kind of wobbling up and down.”

We rounded the corner and started out for the express highway that later on turned into the upstate road we wanted. Buck had his gun on me the whole time, through the pocket, of course. I just sat there in the corner resignedly. It was too late for anyone to horn in now. Temple’s look-out had muffed it. Must have gone off to phone in the alarm just as we came out of the building.

There was more life on the avenue we were on now than on the street we lived on. Louie said suddenly, “Everybody walking along the sidewalk turns and rubbernecks after us. What’s she doing?”

“Nothing,” Buck told him. “I got her covered. You’re just jittery, that’s all.” Then he glanced back through the rear insert. “Yeah, their heads are all turned staring after us!”

His face worked savagely and he brought the gun out into the open, then reburied it in my side without any pocket over it. “I don’t know what ya been doin’, but you’re through doin’ it now! Step it up,” he told Louie, “and let your exhaust out, I’m going to give it to her right here in the car, ahead of the accident. She’ll never come up from the river bottom again anyway, so it don’t make no difference if she’s got a slug in her.”

He crowded me back into the corner of the seat, sort of leaned over me, to muffle it between our two bodies. My eyes got big, but I didn’t let out a sound.

Over his shoulder I saw something that I knew I couldn’t be seeing. A pair of legs swung down off the car roof, then a man’s waist and shoulders and face came down after them, and he was hanging to the roof with both arms. He hung there like that for a minute, jockeying to find the running-board with his feet. Then he let go, went down almost out of sight, came up again, hanging onto the door handle with one hand, drawing a gun with the other.

Buck had his back turned to that side, didn’t see him in time. But the man had darkened the inside of the car a little by being there like that, and Buck pulled his gun out of ray side and started turning. He never had time to fire.

The guy fired once, straight into his face, and then Louie swerved, and the car threw the guy who’d shot off the running-board and he lay there behind us in the street.

Buck’s head fell back into my lap, and it never moved again, just got a little blood on me. I saw Louie reaching with one hand, so I freed the gun that was still in Buck’s hand, pointed it at the back of his neck, and said:

“Pull over!”

The jolting of the car to a stop threw Buck’s dead head off my lap to the floor where it belonged.

I was holding Louie there like that, hands up in the clear off the wheel, when Temple’s look-out came limping after us. He was pretty badly banged up by his fall but not out of commission. He took over.

“They ought to be here any minute,” he said. “I tipped off Temple as soon as I caught the shade signal, but I figured he wouldn’t make it in time. That tree was a natural, for stowing myself away on the roof.”

Temple and the rest caught up with us five or ten minutes later, in a screaming police car. On the way back in it with him, safely out of earshot of the handcuffed Louie, I said: “Well, what luck did you have with that collar?”

“The lab just sent in its report before I came away. It checks all right. It’s just as well we got him this way, though, because we couldn’t have used it anyway. Frank Rogers’ testimony on the way he was tricked into handling that gun can take care of Louie as an accessory, and we’ll sweat the rest of it out of Louie himself, so you can still stay out of it like you wanted to all along.” He chuckled. “Pretty neat, the way you worked it. Our fellows have waded through more dirty wash since Tuesday morning...”

“But wait a minute,” I said, puzzled. “How’d you know I was the one worked it? How’d you know that the collar was planted?”

He winked at me good-naturedly. “You held it to her mouth upside down. The cleft of the upper lip was at the bottom.” He chuckled. “What was he supposed to be doing while she was kissing him — standing on his head?”

Copyright, 1933, by Frank A. Munsey Co.

Copyright, 1936, by Hector Bolitho.

Copyright, 1924, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

Copyright, 1937, by Raoul Whitfield

From Mystery Magazine, copyright, 1935, by Tower Magazines, Inc.

Original version of “Queen’s Quorum” from Twentieth Century Detective Stories, edited by Ellery Queen. Copyright, 1948, by The World Publishing Company.

Conan Doyle considered The Pavilion on the Links “the very model of dramatic narrative.”

This statement is no longer true. Jack Moffitt submitted a short story called The Lady and the Tiger to the Third Annual Detective Short Story Contest sponsored by “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,” and won a Special Prize for the Best Tour de Force. Mr. Moffitt’s solution to the most famous of literary riddles is positively brilliant; it appeared in the September 1948 issue of EQMM , and later in THE QUEEN’S AWARDS, 1948 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).

Copyright, 1939, by Cornell Woolrich