Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

The Rasputin Fabergé by James Powell

© 1995 by James Powell

The sleuthing duo of Polly and Wallis MacDougal have been solving mysteries in EQMM since 1982, hut their creator, James Powell, seems never to run out of zany ideas for their off-beat cases. Mr. Powell is one of the short story’s best and most prolific humorists, and one of a very few writers able to add to the humorous short story a dash of mystery.

As Officers Arugula and Raditch led the murderer away in handcuffs, Inspector Crenshaw Malone of the Gardenville Police stood in the driveway of the Sydney Greenbean residence, pondering the gruesome discovery in the refrigerator crisper. Yes, a wig and a change of wardrobe were all the murderer needed to assume his mother’s identity. (The Greenbeans were famous look-alikes. Almost like peas in a pod, people said.) When anyone asked about her missing son Stringfellow, Greenbean imitated his mother’s fragile contralto and told them he’d gone to Casablanca to take the waters.

But Peter Parsnip, the prying next-door neighbor, was skeptical and took his suspicions to the police. “There are no waters in Casablanca,” he told Crenshaw Malone.

“So he was misinformed,” the bored inspector replied.

“Listen,” Parsnip persisted. “The same day she said Stringfellow left for Morocco I saw him at Hardware City buying a Phleggomatic Chopper II.”

Now Malone watched the coroner’s van pull into the driveway and shook his head. Yes indeed, it had been one sad day for Gardenville when Lyndon Phlegg invented the food processor that bore his name which, like the infamous Rat-a-tat-touille Gun before it, was too powerful a weapon of mass vegetable destruction to be put into the hands of a psychopathic young legume bent on destroying his own mother, who stood between him and his inheritance.

When she’d proofread the final page of her latest mystery story for children, Polly MacDougal slipped the manuscript into the manila envelope addressed to Hardboiled Humpty magazine. Then she hoisted her large frame from the desk chair and went out to the kitchen in search of the old silver cigarette case where they kept their stamps. But she left the computer on. Another deadline was approaching fast. She had promised a short story about her private investigatrix M. M. Q. Contreras for the upcoming anthology by the Hawkshaw Sisterhood, the association of women writers of children’s mysteries.

Through the kitchen window she saw her husband Wallis at the picnic table under the Norway maple. Since his retirement from Simon Cameron University, he often spent a part of Sunday afternoon down there doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. But today he wasn’t alone. Their old friend Owen Pellat was with him. Polly was surprised. She’d have thought the curator of the Hardy Dawes Memorial Museum of the Early American Clock would have his hands full with the details of the museum’s formal opening tonight.

Pellat had the perfect build for his over-dramatic nature. He was tall and thin, with long arms made for flying about in abundant gesture. Now Pellat flourished a sheet of paper in one hand and slapped it with the other. Now he raised his arms imploringly to heaven, paced a short distance, turned, marched back, and sat down at the picnic table. Now he was on his feet again, pretending to pull handfuls of hair from his bald head. Then, with a sudden farewell wave to Wallis, Pellat strode away, disappearing around the comer of the house.

When Polly reached the picnic table her husband was staring off into the darkest shadows beneath the tree with his arms folded, deep in thought. Judging her husband to be in one of his cryptic moods, she sat down without asking about the bee in Pellat’s bonnet. Instead she picked up the crossword at his elbow. This week’s puzzle topic was “Gods and Goddesses?” Polly knew the question mark meant some kind of joke or fanciful play on words. At lunch he had been working on the clue “English goddess of incredulity?” She found the seven spaces of the answer filled in. “ ‘Shirley’?” She frowned and then asked, “ ‘Shirley’ is the English goddess of incredulity?”

Wallis nodded. “Now I’m working on ‘Egyptian god of seepage.’ Blank, blank, M, blank, S, blank, blank.”

Polly mouthed his words silently and shook her head. “Hell, I don’t even get the other one.”

Wallis turned to look at her. “ ‘Shirley,’ as in ‘Shirley you jest,’ ” he explained. “As in ‘Shirley we can’t just stand by and watch poor Pellat lose his curator’s job.’ ”

Polly and Owen Pellat went way back. They’d gone to school together. Polly had taken Wallis to Pellat’s shop to buy their wedding rings, although by that time the jewelry and watch repair shop he inherited from his father was only a sideline to his main interest, Early American clocks. Over the years Pellat had guided Hardy Dawes, a local land developer, as the man put together one of the finest collections of clocks on the East Coast. In the process Pellat had neglected his business, gone bankrupt, and been forced to move in with his widowed sister Millicent, a domineering woman who rejoiced in having her older brother under her thumb. Three years later, when Hardy Dawes died, he left a good part of his fortune to set up the clock museum as a repository for his collection and, some said, to provide an independent living for his friend and advisor Owen Pellat. In recent months, as Pellat labored toward the opening of the museum, he’d become a regular visitor at the MacDougals’. They seldom dealt in clocks in their small antiques business, and perhaps Pellat found their company a relief from the Byzantine politics and rivalries of the clock world.

“What’s going on?” asked Polly.

“Pellat’s been letting his mail pile up,” explained Wallis. “He came by to show me this letter he just found. New York City postmark. Woven paper with an odd blue fleck in it. The typed message read, ‘Opening night they’ll steal the Rasputin Fabergé.’ ”

The year before he died, and over Pellat’s objections, Hardy Dawes paid twenty-five thousand dollars for a clock called the Rasputin Fabergé just for the pleasure of owning something that might have come from the famed Fabergé workshop. The clock stood eight inches tall, its egg-shaped silver case decorated with seed pearls and semiprecious stones of blue and yellow. The clock face was a portrait of Alexandra’s beloved holy man. Some said the Emperor Nicholas ordered it made as an Easter gift to his empress. Most experts considered the clock a forgery.

“Wait a minute,” said Polly. “Didn’t Pellat say the damn thing wasn’t Early and it wasn’t American so he wasn’t even going to display it in a museum of Early American clocks?”

“That was before he got this brainstorm to show it just this once, a kind of farewell appearance before he sold it. Norman Syme’s coming down to cover the opening for Timepiece magazine. Pellat hoped the publicity would pump up the price.”

“So what’s the problem?” asked Polly. “I thought everything is either bolted down or too heavy to walk off with.”

“That’s the permanent collection,” said Wallis. “But with the Rasputin Fabergé, Pellat thought he could get away with just putting it out there. I mean, after all, the guests are by invitation only. Then...”

“Then suddenly this letter puts his job on the line,” said Polly. “Boy, Angelica Herbert would sure scream bloody murder.” Hardy Dawes’s daughter, who was on the museum board, had fought hard and unsuccessfully to get her father’s will broken. She blamed Pellat for her father’s interest in clocks, which had cost her so much of her inheritance.

“Anyway,” added Wallis, “Pellat borrowed Officer Darnley from the borough to stand guard. And I’m supposed to be on hand just in case. You know, to point the finger of guilt if the clock does get stolen.” He spread his hands helplessly.

“Indeed, O Great Solver of Crimes,” said Polly, for he had gotten a lot of swagger out of his detecting reputation.

“Crimes of a local sort, yes,” insisted Wallis. “Things in the small potatoes line. Not something with Pellat’s future riding on it.”

Polly stood up and went back to the house to work on her M. M. Q. Contreras story. She was concerned for her old friend. But Wallis didn’t like her mixing in his cases except in the fetch-and-carry line.

That evening each MacDougal brought a thoughtful load of silence to the dinner table and carried it with them afterwards on their walk to the museum opening. The June night was warm and the fireflies active. They went by way of the post office so that Polly could drop her short story in the mail.

“That the one about Hubbard Squash and the murderous green bean?” asked Wallis as the envelope dropped from sight. Polly nodded and did not correct him on the inspector’s name. Crenshaw Malone wasn’t his favorite among her detective heroes.

The Old Meeting House, among the first brick buildings in White Swan, had been erected by the townspeople for religious services until the various denominations could build their own churches. The last arrivals occupied the building until recently, when shrinking numbers necessitated their being absorbed by a similar denomination in a town nearby. Several other empty buildings were considered to be the home of the Dawes Museum of the Early American Clock — White Swan was something of a graveyard of commerce — but the Old Meeting House was chosen, mainly for its off-street parking in the rear.

The MacDougals entered through the front gate in the high iron fence. Chinese lanterns decorated the box elder on the lawn. A few men in blue blazers and women with blue hair stood about on the churchyard grass with their glasses of wine, talking and enjoying the evening. If they looked a bit uneasy it was not so much because they were standing on the dead. No grave had been dug there for over a hundred years and plot and grass had long ago become one. But in the dark it was still possible to stub a toe or twist an ankle on the tops of the modest tombstones buried so deep in the earth that they resembled gray, slightly raised eyebrows. Through the bright doorway came the sound of the Simon Cameron String Quartet from the university’s music faculty.

The church-museum interior was plain, painted wood, the windows clear glass edged in blue. Polly had always admired the building’s clean, simple, open shape. Now the pews had been replaced by a ticking congregation of machines to tell the time, shelves of shelf clocks, walls filled with looking-glass clocks and wag-on-the-walls. Case clocks of every size and wood stood like varnished sentry boxes guarding the hour.

“Pellat’s got a full house,” said Wallis, leading Polly over to the table where the local winery was giving out samples of its wares.

Polly had to agree. There was His Honor the mayor. And the president of the bank. And the director and upper-level people of Shlage Laboratories on the outskirts of town. And anyone else locally who wanted to be thought of as anyone. “But where’s Pellat hiding himself? And who are those two?” Polly nodded at the big man in the ill-fitting dark suit and the small, bright-eyed woman with gray hair puzzling over an old office clock in bird’s-eye maple, a popular wood with businessmen whose clock-watching clerks found themselves being stared back at.

“I’ll bet that’s Serge Ospenski, the Russian art expert and appraiser,” said Wallis as they armed themselves with wine. “Pellat didn’t expect him until next week some time. But this morning Ospenski called and invited himself and his wife to the opening. Pellat was on his way to the station to pick them up when he dropped by to give me the guest list.

“Speaking of which,” he continued, “after I’d studied it and excluded the local worthies, I combined logic, surmise, and a good slug of Pellat’s clock gossip to come up with a suspect list. One might be the thief. Or two. After all, the warning letter said ‘they.’ You know, one to hit the lights while the other pockets the Rasputin. So let’s make the rounds. Our first suspect’s right over there. Mrs. Angelica Herbert.”

Hardy Dawes’s daughter was scowling at the Rasputin Fabergé, which stood by itself on a fluted column of wood in the middle of the room. Officer Darnley of White Swan’s finest was on guard in full uniform beside it, looking like vigilance with a strong tincture of shyness.

“Mrs. Herbert?” said Polly incredulously. “You mean she’d steal it just to get back at Pellat?”

Wallis shrugged. “Or maybe she needs the money. I hear her son Sterling is costing her a bundle bailing him out of the scrapes he gets himself into.”

Angelica Herbert was a trim, well-dressed blonde with a Florida tan and an impatient way of smoking cigarettes. As they approached she tried to look interested. “And you are...” she began as if their name was on the tip of her tongue like a shred of tobacco.

“The MacDougals,” said Wallis. “We met at your father’s funeral.”

“Ah yes,” she said. “The professor and the writer. Mr. Pellat’s friends.”

“I hope you like the way things have turned out,” said Polly.

“What choice have I got?” asked Mrs. Herbert. She took in the museum with a toss of her head. “If this’s what Father wanted, well, he’s got it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all so much junk.”

She nodded at the Rasputin Fabergé. “And creepy junk at that.”

Polly couldn’t argue with that. The eyes of the portrait seemed to follow you when you moved. Men sure know what to give a girl for Easter.

“When’s this show going to get on the road?” demanded Mrs. Herbert. “I thought they said eight sharp. Anybody got the time? I don’t wear a watch.”

“Coals to Newcastle, right?” laughed Wallis. “Mr. Rasputin’s face says a quarter to.”

But Mrs. Herbert’s interest had moved elsewhere. She was craning her neck around the room. “Anybody seen my boy Sterling?” She looked around again. “Oh, there he is talking to one of the catering people. I wish he’d spend half the time looking for a job that he spends chasing the girls.” Mrs. Herbert strode off toward the food table, shooing her son away with her hands.

“If Mrs. Herbert and her son are suspects one and two, there’s number three,” said Wallis, nodding across the room to where Leon Briskin stood, watching the guests with the satisfied air of a fox watching over a particularly plump flock of chickens.

“But why would Briskin steal the clock?” asked Polly. “He sold it to Dawes in the first place.”

“Because he’s a crook,” said Wallis. “And because the word’s starting to get around. Maybe Briskin wants to steal it before the appraiser brands it a fake. If so, he’s in for a surprise.”

Leon Briskin turned toward them as they approached. He had a round face in the middle of which he wore a screwed-up smile like a monocle. “MacDougal?” he asked, when Polly and Wallis introduced themselves. “Oh yes, the nice people Porter took to the cleaners.”

Polly saw her husband blush. They’d recently sold Denton Porter an eighteenth century clock with a japanned case for much less than it was worth because a Pennsylvania Dutch clothes cupboard they had long coveted had come on the market. Porter’s boast about the killing he made became the talk of the MacDougals’ comer of the antiques business.

Bridling, Wallis said, “Not to change the subject, but I hear your Rasputin Fabergé has something of a hazy past.”

Briskin shrugged. “When I heard Pellat meant to sell I offered him ten thousand more than Dawes paid me for it. That’s how hazy I think its past is. But he wanted it appraised first. So in a few days everyone will see that Briskin only deals in top-grade, A-number-1 stuff.” Here Briskin started to go.

“Oh, you won’t have to wait that long,” said Wallis with obvious satisfaction. “The appraiser’s here tonight.”

Polly saw the smile drop from Briskin’s face like a monocle from an astonished Prussian eye. Then she and her husband moved on to Denton Porter, the next suspect.

“I hope the hell it is Porter,” said Wallis. “God, I’d love to point the finger of guilt in his smirking face. But why would he do it? The best I can come up with is that story of how Mrs. Herbert got him to give testimony about Pellat’s competency as a curator by promising him the lucrative job of selling her father’s clock collection if the will was overturned. Maybe Porter feels she still owes him something.”

“Like what?”

“Like the curatorship, if he gets rid of Pellat.”

They found Denton Porter in one of the darker corners, from which his ghostly pale face peered somewhat, Polly thought, like a worn knee in a denim trouser leg.

“Ah, the MacDougals,” he said.

“Ah, Porter,” said Wallis, “I’m surprised Pellat invited you after the things you said about him in court.”

“I’m glad he didn’t take it personally,” said Porter. “Pellat loves clocks and knows a great deal about them. But he’s no museum curator. As disorganized as he is, frankly I’m surprised he got this place open at all.” He paused and looked around the church. “Such as it is.”

“Well,” said Wallis, “maybe one of these days the museum will need a new curator and you’ll get a chance to put your own ideas into practice.”

“Fat chance,” laughted Porter. But his attention had wandered. Polly saw that he was looking across the room to where Briskin was holding forth to a very bored Sterling Herbert on some fine point of a miniature case clock.

“No,” insisted Porter, “I’m a dealer. I buy and sell clocks. I hear Pellat’s selling his fake Rasputin Faberge.”

“The appraiser’s here tonight,” said Wallis.

“Is he now?” replied Porter in a pleased voice. He smiled over at Briskin. “Well well well.” Turning back to Wallis he said, “Fake or not, people snap that kind of stuff up. It should give Pellat’s acquisition budget a good shot in the arm.” He pulled two sheets of folded paper from his pocket and offered them to Wallis. “I’m glad I thought to bring along a description of some choice items in my current inventory.”

Wallis handed the papers back. “I’m hardly an expert on clocks,” he said, adding, “as you well know.”

Here there was a small disturbance in the crowd, which parted to reveal a harried-looking Pellat carrying a shotgun. “Here, Roy. Take this,” said the museum curator, handing Officer Darnley the weapon. “Like I said, I’d feel better if you had more firepower.”

Wallis led Polly out of earshot and said, “Try this on for size. Suppose Angelica Herbert wants Pellat out of the picture so she can name her son curator.”

“But he doesn’t know anything about clocks.”

“Or anything else,” said Wallis. “But he is Hardy Dawes’s grandson. With Mrs. Herbert pushing for him that should have some weight with the other board members.”

“Nice,” said Polly, nodding in admiration. “She unloads the son who’s a major drain on her finances by getting him a job as curator of the museum that cost her a healthy chunk of her inheritance.”

Just then a loud flourish of strings from the quartet signaled the start of the formal ceremony to open the Hardy Dawes Memorial Museum of the Early American Clock. As guests drifted in from the lawn, Owen Pellat welcomed everyone to the occasion, adding, “But before we begin I’ve some exciting news. A few minutes ago Mr. Ospenski, the celebrated appraiser of things Russian, pronounced our so-called Rasputin Fabergé genuine and with a value of close to a million dollars.”

As his guests murmured with pleasure and surprise, Pellat continued, “And I can assure the friends of the museum that from the sale of our new-found treasure we will be able to purchase timepieces to make our collection the finest in the world.” Then with a look at his watch he said, “And now the clocks of our collection would like to welcome you to their new home themselves.” Pellat waited with a nervous smile.

The silence deepened. Suddenly, with a great clamor of clicking and whirring, one clock willfully struck the hour ahead of the rest. Then the first of several versions of Big Ben chimed in. Now the church was vibrating with bongs, clunks, bings, and, here and there, the call of the mechanical cuckoo. The Rasputin egg announced the hour with a ring no louder than a bicycle bell. Turning to her husband to remark on this, Polly saw his expression brighten with discovery.

The din subsided and then, after one or two more bongs for good measure, ceased completely. The string quartet struck up a two-step and the guests crowded in around the million-dollar clock for a closer look or returned to wine and conversation.

Polly asked, “You’re on to something.”

“Osmosis,” smiled Wallis. Then he explained, “The Egyptian God of seepage. O-S-M-O-S-I-S.” But Polly suspected more lay behind his smile than that.

“Our final suspect’s talking to the Ospenskis,” said Wallis, nodding at Norman Syme, the editor of Timepiece magazine, a thin, balding young man with a nervous eye who affected a journalistic raincoat. “Word is he has a cocaine habit that keeps him strapped for cash.”

As the MacDougals approached, their path converged with Leon Briskin’s. “Didn’t I tell you Briskin only deals in top-notch stuff?” the man insisted from behind a screwed-up smile of swaggering Cyclopean proportions.

When Briskin and the MacDougals had introduced themselves to the Russian couple, Wallis said, “You’ve added a real luster to the evening, Mr. Ospenski.”

“As for luster,” said Ospenski, “Mr. Pellat’s photographs were so intriguing I had to rearrange my schedule. And here I am.”

Mrs. Ospenski smiled. “Intriguing? Serge, you were positively excited out of your mind.”

Briskin said, “I knew it was a Fabergé the moment I set eyes on it.”

“Then you’ve better eyes than mine,” said Ospenski. “As I told Mr. Syme here, I always doubted such a clock existed. It isn’t in the Imperial inventory. But recently, in the Fabergé atelier records, my wife found references to a prototype with a portrait of the holy man built at the emperor’s command.”

Mrs. Ospenski nodded. “After Rasputin’s assassination the emperor ordered the clock destroyed. But before he could be obeyed, the doom Rasputin predicted befell the emperor and his family and they were murdered, too.”

“And the clock — like so many of my country’s artistic treasures — vanished into the chaos that followed,” added her husband.

“A great story,” said Syme. “A clock that sold for twenty-five thousand turns out to be worth a million. Mr. Briskin here’s probably kicking himself.”

“I made my profit,” replied Briskin. “A deal’s a deal.”

“All I mean is, if you could renegotiate things and share in this windfall, you would.”

“Okay,” conceded Briskin. “Who wouldn’t? But I’m not greedy. The trick’s not to get greedy.”

During this exchange Wallis caught Polly’s eye and fingered his lapel. Polly recognized Ospenski’s unusual lapel pin from an emblem collection of European turn-of-the-century reactionary groups that had once passed through their hands. The drawn bow with an arrow pointing backwards was the badge of The Defenders of Yesterday, a secret society pledged to return Europe to pre-World War I days. It looked to Polly like Wallis had two more suspects.

“Hey, this calls for pictures,” said Syme. “My camera’s out in the car.”

As the editor hurried for the door Ospenski said, “I confess I had hoped Mr. Pellat would let us take the clock back to Russia.” Ospenski shrugged his large shoulders. “Well, as you people say, there is more than one way to skin a rat.”

“You mean ‘cat.’ Serge,” laughed his wife.

As Polly and her husband started to go, Wallis turned back, held up his wrist, and said, “My watch has stopped. Anybody got the correct time?”

“It’s eight-twenty,” said Ospenski.

His wife laughed again. “No, Serge,” she said, “it’s eight twenty-three.”

Wallis waited to reset his watch.

“You’re both wrong,” said Briskin. “It’s exactly eight twenty-one.”

Wallis left Polly under the wag-on-the-walls. “There’s Jesse Williams,” he said, rushing off. “Got to speak to him. I don’t know how much time’s left.”

As Polly watched her husband lead the White Swan high-school wrestling coach outside, she pondered what the hell was going on. After a minute or two Mrs. Ospenski passed by heading for the door and fanning herself with a museum brochure. Yes, the place had become stuffy and guests were drifting outside into the fresh air. A young catering woman passed by followed by Sterling Herbert.

Polly looked around and made a count of the suspects who were still inside. Then Wallis rejoined her and she could demand, “What’s going on?”

“Tempus omnia relevat,” said Wallis. “Time will reveal all things.”

“A quote from another of your dead white European males?”

“Long, long dead,” said Wallis. “But remember, even a clock that stopped centuries ago is still right twice a day.”

Something exploded outside. Heads turned toward the sound. The string quartet faltered. A moment later the mayor appeared in the doorway. “Roy,” he called, “your damn patrol car just went bang and now it’s smoking like a chimney.”

“Holy hell!” shouted Officer Darnley and sprinted outside followed by a crowd of the curious.

“Come on,” said Wallis. “This is it.” He led Polly outside. But she stopped him at the top of the steps. “You’ve got a load of suspects back in there,” she said. “Briskin, Mrs. Herbert, Porter, Ospenski.”

“Let me put it this way,” said Wallis. “You can’t put a person in jail for wanting to steal something.”

“For Pellat’s sake I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“For Pellat’s sake, so do I,” said Wallis.

Polly would’ve preferred more confidence in his voice.

As they came down the steps, Officer Darnley was dancing excitedly on the edge of the dense cloud of smoke tumbling from the windows of the police car at the curb. The light from the Chinese lanterns painted the scene in hellish colors. Museum guests crowded up to the high iron fence, watching through the bars. The more cautious stood back on the path or in the churchyard. The residents of the nearby houses stood on their porches. In the distance a siren sounded, summoning the members of the White Swan volunteer fire company. More guests were coming out of the museum now, but Polly hadn’t seen any of the suspects yet. Suddenly a light flashed within the smoke, followed by a second, louder bang whose echo bounced off walls for blocks around. As the billows of smoke grew less and then abruptly stopped, the last of the museum guests, including Wallis’s suspects hurried down the museum steps and mingled with the crowd.

Pellat came rushing by all adither. “If Darnley’s over there and you’re here,” he demanded of Wallis over his shoulder as he took the steps two at a time, “who’s watching the clock?”

Pellat was back outside quickly, his face ashen. “It’s gone,” he said. “The Rasputin Fabergé’s been stolen.”

Mrs. Herbert appeared from nowhere. “You incompetent fool,” she shouted.

Ospenski stepped out of the crowd and opened his jacket. “Considering my words back there about skinning the rat, I insist you search me.”

“That goes double for me,” said Briskin.

The museum guests had turned away from the police car to watch the scene at the bottom of the steps. Even the Shlage Laboratories people, who prided themselves on being more worldly than the locals, were caught up in the drama of the moment.

“Then search me, too,” said Porter. Then he turned to Pellat. “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

Polly thought she heard a sigh of disappointment from the crowd when Wallis said, “It’s too late for searches. Our thief’s handed off the clock to an accomplice by now. And speak of the devil...” There was the sound of footsteps on the gravel path to the parking lot. Jesse Williams came around the corner of the Old Meeting House holding Norman Syme in a half nelson with one hand and the Rasputin Fabergé in the other.

“He came sprinting to his car just like you said he would, Mr. MacDougal,” said Williams.

“What kind of frame-up is this?” demanded Syme defiantly. “Some bastard must’ve slipped that damn clock in my raincoat pocket in all the excitement.”

“All the carefully timed excitement,” noted Wallis. “That first bang pretty much emptied out the museum. The second gave the thief an instant to steal the clock. Yes, someone had to know just when to activate the timing device with smoke canisters and concussion grenades in Officer Darnley’s car.

“But timepieces can be variable things,” continued Wallis. “Earlier tonight we had a good demonstration of that. Right now I suspect if I asked everyone here for the exact time you’d all give a different answer. But two watches would have to be synchronized down to the second, the thief’s and the accomplice’s. Mr. Williams, what does your friend’s watch say?”

Shaking Williams’s hand away, Syme looked at his watch. “I’ve got eight forty-one,” he said. “What’ve you got?”

“So do I,” said Wallis.

One of the Shlage Lab people called out in a disappointed voice, “Is this one of those stupid crimes where the detective turns out to be the crook?” The crowd looked uneasy. But then Wallis faced his circle of suspects and raised an accusing finger.

Leon Briskin broke from the others in a dash toward the front gate. When the crowd blocked his way, he turned and started around the corner of the building. But Officer Darnley and Jesse Williams were waiting for him there. Trying to run around them through the churchyard, he tripped on a disapproving eyebrow of tombstone, fell flat, and struck his forehead on another.

The MacDougals walked back home through the night. “All those clocks striking the hour gave me the idea of synchronized watches,” explained Wallis. “But that eliminated Mrs. Herbert, who didn’t carry one, and her son. As for the Ospenskis, they were about as unsynchronized as you can get.”

“So that left Porter, Briskin, and Syme,” said Polly.

“No, it wasn’t Porter,” said Wallis. “When he showed me his list of clocks for sale I saw what he wanted Pellat to see, too. That it was written on the same paper as the warning letter. Maybe Porter got wind of the impending crime. Or maybe, and more likely, it started out as his idea. Until he realized it was Sterling Herbert who’d end up as curator if Pellat got the axe. So why not warn Pellat? After all, Porter had clocks to sell and Pellat was a potential buyer. Which left Briskin and Syme.”

“But Ospenski authenticated the clock. Briskin’s reputation was saved,” said Polly.

“True,” said Wallis. “But don’t forget, Briskin’s a crook. He’d come with a plan to steal the clock. Why not use it to make himself a million dollars? All he had to do was get his accomplice to go along with him. When we were talking to the Ospenskis that little back-and-forth between him and Syme was renegotiating the deal.”

They walked in silence for the rest of the way. Polly could sense the strut in her husband’s step. But her thoughts were quickly elsewhere. Before they reached home she was well into her next short story. Polly would call it “The Neon Reproach,” and it would begin...

Perky but tough, blessed with a brash spunkiness that took her where angels feared to tread, honey-tressed M. M. Q. Contreras unlocked the door and stepped into the office darkness. Every other second, the double flash of the three letters from the neon Virbitsk School of Dance sign outside the window illuminated the room. “TSK-TSK, TSK-TSK,” went the neon as Contreras kicked off her three-inch stiletto heels with an audible sigh and padded straight for her frosted flutes and splits of champagne. As she reached for the door of the little refrigerator, she noticed a figure standing in a dark corner. Snatching the snub-nosed little Hrosko .32 from her handy décolleté holster, Contreras spun around. “All right, turkey. Out here where I can see you,” she ordered.

“Don’t shoot,” stammered a man’s voice. The intruder stepped forward. He was tall and thin and wore a gray fedora and a gray raincoat. His face was ashen and so was the big wag of hair on his chin.

“TSK-TSK, TSK-TSK,” said the neon.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded Contreras.

The man tipped his hat and handed her his card. She cracked the door and read the name out loud by refrigerator light. “William G. Groff?”

“That’s ‘Gruff,’ ” he corrected her.

“It says ‘Groff,’ ” she insisted.

“The printer made a mistake. So I got them for half price. So it’s Gruff. But you can call me Billy G., Mary-Mary.”

Contreras backhanded him hard across the bridge of his nose with her pistol hand and, gripping his chin hair, she pulled his face closer. “Who told you my name was Mary-Mary?”

“Over there on the wall,” he gasped.

Cursing herself for forgetting to take down the plaque behind her desk with “Mary-Mary” spelled out in cockle shells and decorated all about with silver bells, Contreras demanded, “What the hell’s this all about?”

“They’re going to steal the judge’s clock,” said Gruff.

“Judge who?”

“Judge Dockerty.”

“Which clock, the one in the oak case?”

“Nah,” said Billy G.

“The bird’s-eye-maple one?”

“Nah,” said Billy G.

Contreras raised her pistol. “Goddamn it, Gruff, you started this stupid business, now spit it out!”

Billy G. swallowed so hard his chin hair wagged. “The Hickory Dockerty Clock, Mary-Mary,” he admitted.

“TSK-TSK, TSK-TSK,” came the neon reproach.