Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

The Maxnome Riddle[1] by Earle N. Lord

My secretary-receptionist-fiancée Beverly Wayne, leaned entrancingly against the doorjamb between my office and her waiting room, arched her eyebrows, and tossed her red tresses at me. “She is here, Michael, my boy. But before I show Miss Moneybags in, please be reminded that we are firmly engaged and that she is a murder suspect.”

“She must be very pretty,” I said.

Beverly smiled and raised one hand up to her throat. “Gorgeous she is, upstairs, but from here on down, gangbusters! Watch your step, Dr. Karlins. I shall be lurking just outside this thin door.”

Clinical psychologists deserve a little fun, and since most of my clients in my West L.A. practice are about as exciting to observe as a dish of boiled spinach, this one was bound to be interesting, gorgeous or not. I had never had a client worth several millions and suspected of murdering the source of the money.

Rising, I moved the chair by my desk out a bit when Elizabeth Anderson arrived. She was, indeed, a lovely girl, the kind who wins beauty contests. Her face, bearing, and figure would give her a sporting chance at the movies or television after winning the contests, but I’d read that she had taken a different course. After becoming Miss Nevada of 1970, she had become engaged to the young owner of several forests, lumber mills, and paper factories, and had withdrawn abruptly from the Miss America contest. He had rewritten his will to make her his sole heiress, in happy anticipation of a February wedding, but someone shot him in January and the latest tabloid word was that all the money was going to her, provided she did not get convicted of his murder.

She sat in the chair, adjusted her skirt, then gazed directly at me with the loveliest pair of violet-blue eyes that I had ever seen.

“I didn’t want to come here, Dr. Karlins,” she said with a shy smile. “My friend, Dean Ness, talked me into it. I don’t think you can do anything for me, but Dean is very persuasive. He’s hard to turn off when he gets an idea into that handsome head of his.”

I had talked to Dean the night before. He was a man I’d known at college and met several times a year at parties and S.C. football and basketball games. He’d phoned to ask if I thought I could do anything for the girl. His story was that she was completely broken up about the death of the young millionaire and refused to start living her own life again. When I asked him what his interest in the matter was, he had been blunt.

“I want to marry the girl, damn it. I asked her to marry me before she ever met David Landmaier, and I want to marry her, still. I don’t have much chance if she keeps mooning over the jerk’s death. I can’t compete with a ghost.”

I told Ness that I could usually desensitize people to freeway phobias, airplane travel fears, and to cigarette withdrawal pangs, but that desensitization to death was quite another matter. However, I agreed to see the girl out of sheer curiosity more than anything else. I’d been reading about the case in the morning papers for weeks.

“I talked to Dean Ness last night,” I said. “He thinks you grieve too much and too long.”

She frowned slightly and made a little gesture as if she were waving away a wisp of smoke in front of those incredible eyes. “Dean is confused. He thinks I’m mourning for poor David. What is really bothering me, Doctor, is the prospect of being convicted of David’s murder. The police are convinced I had something to do with it. I haven’t told Dean about that. I’m ashamed to.”

I leaned back in my chair and thought about what I had read of the case. Miss Anderson’s story was that she had been playing tennis at the time of the murder. The courts were just outside her apartment at the Westbay Club in West L.A. She claimed she suspected nothing when she first walked into her apartment, rackets in hand. Earlier, she had told David Landmaier to go in and mix himself a drink. When she did not see him in her livingroom and tried to enter the kitchenette, the swinging door pushed against his inert body. She was confused as to what happened next, but said she had not gotten a clear look at the scene in the kitchen. When she saw Landmaier’s head and upper torso and a lot of blood, she backed up and started screaming. The papers went on to say that he had been shot with a small caliber weapon and had bled to death. Some shattered glassware seemed to indicate that Landmaier had been mixing two drinks when he was murdered. No one had been seen entering or leaving the apartment’s two entrances except Elizabeth Anderson.

“Why do the police suspect you, Miss Anderson?” I asked. “From what I read, you have an excellent alibi. The girl you were playing tennis with—”

“Is an excellent friend of mine,” she snapped. “David was a strange, eccentric, weird young man. He was worried that someone was going to marry him for his money, so he settled over a million dollars on me when we became engaged, against my wishes. He also insisted on making a new will leaving me all of his money. It’s at least ten million after taxes. The police seem to think that can buy a lot of alibis.”

“Suspicion is not enough. They have to have concrete evidence.”

“They have some evidence which convinces them that I am guilty, and it’s making them work around the clock to prove it. I was followed to your office. They follow me wherever I go.”

I waited for several seconds while she stared angrily at a ceramic ash tray on my desk, then she went on.

“When I found they suspected me of shooting David, I volunteered for a lie detector test, even before I consulted a lawyer. It made me furious to think that anyone would suspect me of murdering for money so I went down to Parker Center under my own power and took the test. It just made things worse.”

Elizabeth Anderson turned that high-voltage glance on me again, but this time those incredible eyes were full of tears.

“When I got finished with the test, they said I had displayed guilty knowledge of the murder, and really began to crowd me. I could tell they were convinced that I had either done it myself or had it done, but they would not tell me what I had said that made them feel I was guilty.”

“Do you have any idea what it could have been? You must have reacted to something they feel only the murderer or an accomplice could have known.”

She glared at the ash tray again and began to clench and unclench her hands. “I’ve spent the last five days trying to figure out what I could have said. There were several odd words. The operator asked me if they meant anything to me, and they didn’t. I’d never heard of any of them.”

“Try to remember the words,” I said softly.

“They were nonsense words like in Carroll’s Jabberwocky, words like frabjious, calloo, callay, and maxnome. Then he asked me if I knew a lot of men and he rattled off about ten or fifteen names; names like Henry Mow, Randy Rome, and Max Tone. Funny thing! They all had single-syllable last names. But I didn’t know any of them.”

“You might have known one of them and forgotten. That would cause a reaction on the polygraph.”

Elizabeth Anderson shrugged her shoulders and turned to me. “I don’t see how you can possibly help me, Doctor, unless you could go to the police and find out what I did on that test that convinced them I’m guilty of David’s murder. As my doctor, could you do that? Would they talk to you?”

“I could try, Miss Anderson. I don’t think I can talk to the police directly, but I have a brother who knows the lieutenant in charge of the West L.A. area. They rode a patrol car together twenty years ago. I’ll see if he can do anything for you.”

We left it at that, and I went on with my practice for the rest of the afternoon. When we closed up for the day I drove over to my brother’s bungalow in Mar Vista and had dinner with him and his family, then tossed the whole business into his ample lap.

Danny raised his bushy, gray eyebrows about a foot when I finished my pitch to him. “You mean to say that you want me to ask Lieutenant William Steele how his boys are conducting a murder investigation. Mike, old buddies or not, I’d bounce twice and land in the Pacific, at least halfway to Hawaii. You know how he feels about private detectives interfering in police matters, and you, especially, know how he feels about you.”

“I’m not asking you to inquire about the case, Danny. I want you to ask Steele if he would be willing to discuss those lie detector findings with me. As a clinical psychologist, I may be able to help the police. If the girl has guilty knowledge, I may be able to find out why for him. I have her permission to do this. He cannot ask her the questions that I can under therapeutic conditions.”

“And he can’t ask you to tell him or the court anything that will incriminate your patient.”

“True enough, but if I can prove or show that there is an innocent cause for her so-called guilty reactions, wouldn’t that help the case for him? He may be chasing the wrong fox.”

Andy thought the matter over, then agreed to try.

Next morning, I was granted an interview with Steele at headquarters and went in to see him with profoundly mixed feelings. We had, it might be delicately put, a strained relationship. While going to college, I had done some work for my brother’s private agency, and while in the army I had spent nearly a year in military intelligence doing investigative work. Steele had the false notion that I was now operating a clandestine, unlicensed detective agency in the middle of his district behind the facade of a clinical psychologist’s office, so I was positive that if I had approached him directly about the Anderson girl, he would have blown a fuse.

Steele seated me carefully in a hard chair facing a battery of bright windows and tossed me his normal wintry glare.

“Andy tells me you have a legitimate interest in the Landmaier murder. You know how I feel about your playing Sam Spade in this district.”

I set myself to hold onto my temper. “I’m a Philip Marlowe man, myself, Lieutenant. Miss Elizabeth Anderson is my patient. I am concerned with her as a doctor, only. I no longer work for my brother as an operative. I have risen far above that. I now clear about four dollars an hour instead of $3.75.”

Steele smiled, which is usually the sign that he is going to wither someone.

“I would imagine that you would be making a fortune with all the crackpots we have in West L.A. We not only grow our own, but we attract them in droves from all over the continent.”

“My problem is that most of the crackpots don’t know they are crackpots, Lieutenant, and don’t ask me for psychological help.”

“Except when they get into serious trouble with the law.” Steele wiped off the smile and reverted to his normal, cool, flat glare. “Your client doesn’t need a psychologist, Karlins. She needs an excellent lawyer. Her emotional problem is that she is guilty as hell.”

“She claims to be innocent, Steele, but realizes she fouled up that lie detector test. That is why I’m here. I want to talk with your psychometrist and inspect the tapes on the polygraph run. If the girl is innocent, I can save you trouble.”

Steele surprised me then. He didn’t get mad. He just frowned.

“Suppose she is guilty, as part of her test indicates? Will you help us then, Mr. Clinical Psychologist?” he asked softly.

“If she’s guilty, you will have lost nothing. You can’t use any of that polygraphic material in court. With the money she has behind her and the legal protection she can hire, you won’t be able to pressure her into any confessions. If she’s guilty, I’ll drop out of the case and you will have lost nothing.”

Steele swiveled his chair around and looked out the window for several seconds, then swung the chair back again to face me.

“Fair enough. I’ll cooperate with you on these conditions. What you get from me and the polygraph technician does not go to the press. We’re keeping a lid on some details of the case. Agreed?”

I nodded and he went right on. “I can give you what you are looking for. I don’t think you will get anything more from the technician but you are welcome to try. Your patient actually did fairly well on the test. She apparently does not know how the murder was committed or when it was committed. She did react, however, to something that the victim did as he was dying.”

Steele swiveled the chair around to face his view of City Hall again and continued. “Here’s the picture. The girl shoved the kitchen door open a few inches, saw the upper part of his body and some of the blood, let go of the swinging door, backed up and started yelling for help. She claims she never went all the way into the kitchen. When the neighbor went into it, Elizabeth Anderson says she was lying down on her livingroom couch with a friend patting her on the head. Her claim, therefore, is that she never saw what had happened on the other side of that door.

“The neighbor who went into the kitchen — he’s one of those tennis bums who live in places like that — swears he never told her anything about what he saw in there. He was afraid it would further upset her. As for the two officers that arrived a few minutes later, they used their heads and didn’t say anything to her either. When the detectives got there, they buttoned up the room. Elizabeth Anderson never got into that kitchen until a week later, after it had been cleaned up. Then she moved out.

“Now, here’s what I don’t want the press to get. Landmaier was not shot, as those reporters printed in their stories. He was stabbed several times with a large kitchen knife. Before he died, he dipped his right index finger into a pool of his own blood and wrote a word on the asphalt tile alongside of him, a name or a word that isn’t in any English dictionary. He printed it in all caps, M-A-X-N-O-M-E, then he died.”

Steele paused a few seconds, then went on. “Your client apparently does not know that Landmaier was stabbed rather than shot. She is apparently telling the truth when she says she did not kill Landmaier, did not hire him killed, and does not know anything about how or why he was killed.”

“But she responds to the word MAXNOME,” I said to Steele’s back.

He spun around to face me, his ice-blue eyes narrowed. “When that word was thrown at her, she had a mild positive reaction to it. When she was asked if she’d ever heard of it, and denied it, she had a bigger reaction. When she was asked if she knew him or knew what the word meant, she had another positive response, a strong one. She knows what that damn set of seven letters means, Dr. Karlins. David Landmaier was trying to tell us something, and she knows what it is. You tell her from me that if she doesn’t tell us what it means that she is an accessory to the crime of murder.”

“She may not know what it means on a conscious level.”

“Then you start excavating vigorously into her unconscious levels and help her find out, Karlins.”

I cleared my throat. “Before I do that, Lieutenant, can you tell me if there is a Max Nome? Does this person exist?”

“Not locally there isn’t,” Steele growled. “Nor in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Seattle, New York, or Chicago. We found one in the Philadelphia phone directory, but he turned out to be an eighty-year-old retired steelworker. We have quizzed every one of Landmaier’s friends and relatives. None of them ever heard of Max Nome. He’s the biggest spook I ever chased.”

Steele passed me on to the polygraph technician, but he was right. I found nothing more. The test had been administered properly. She had been given all kinds of neutral names and nonsense phrases to which to react. Only to that strange name had she responded.

I decided I needed some background information on David Landmaier and went to the morgue files of the L.A. Times. One of my S.C. chums got me in. I found they had very little on him other than the bare facts that he had inherited his fortune at the age of twenty-five and had quit his job as an anthropology lecturer in a state college to devote full time to his hobbies. These were listed as the raising of quarter horses in Nevada, giving benefit performances as a zany amateur magician, drag racing modified sports cars in the L.A. area, and chasing girls all over the country.

I called Dean Ness and asked if I could talk to him about Landmaier and Elizabeth Anderson. He had just gotten home from his stockbroker’s job in the Wilshire area. A few minutes later, I had a tall one in my hand and was sitting in an ultra-modern chair in his sumptuous livingroom, the kind of chair that I didn’t think I’d be able to get out of without help.

Dean Ness sat cross-legged in the middle of the upholstered floor and frowned thoughtfully at me.

“How are things going for Elizabeth?” he asked gently. He spoke her name in the reverential tones that bankers usually reserve for discussing very large sums of money.

“Elizabeth is not quite ready to marry you, Dean. She is still grieving for David. Tell me, what do you know about him? I’ve got to learn more about him if I’m going to be able to help her. From what I’ve read and heard about him, so far, he doesn’t seem to be a real person. He’s more like something out of a comic strip.”

“David was not a real person, Mike. He was a mystical lost soul with more money than he knew what to do with. He was haunted by the fact that it came in faster than he could spend it. David was a tall, good-looking idiot with a gift for gab, who thought the planet Earth was a gigantic fun house full of pretty, willing girls, magic shows, and bright and shining race cars. I wouldn’t have minded his good fortune and his foolish antics and so on, but...”

“He took Elizabeth away from you,” I said when he trailed off. “She seems to be a levelheaded girl. Was it all fun and games with her? Or was it the money?”

Dean smiled a twisted smile at me. “When he met Elizabeth, David professed to change. On the surface, he changed or he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with her. She thinks people should do constructive work, so he gave benefit performances of his magic show, using Elizabeth as a pretty stage prop and attention diverter. He contributed his racing purses to her favorite charities. He stopped chasing the local talent here in Hollywood, flew to Vegas for that, instead. He even talked about establishing a foundation for medical research at U.S.C. But someone killed him first.”

“Did you know many of his friends?”

“Elizabeth was kind to her ex-fiancé. I was invited to most of their parties. Sure, I knew a lot of David’s friends. Why?”

“Ever meet one called Max?” I asked softly.

The effect was electric. Dean Ness almost dropped his pink daiquiri. His eyebrows rose half an inch and his mouth fell even more.

“The police asked me that. They inquired about a Max Rome or Nome or Mone, something like that. Who in hell is he? Did Elizabeth mention him to you?”

“No, but the police think she knows who he is. I don’t think she does. But I hoped you would.”

“Never heard of the silly weirdo, except from the police and you.”

A phone rang in another room and while Ness answered it, I studied a silver-framed photograph of Elizabeth Anderson prominently displayed on an end table. It was inscribed, “Ever my love, Liz.”

“Ever is a relative term,” Dean Ness said over my shoulder when he returned. “That was my eternal-love-until-she-met-something-better on the phone. Elizabeth wants you to come to dinner at her apartment at eight o’clock sharp, tonight. I was not invited. I told her you’d be there, chum.”

“I might have had something else planned.”

“When ten million dollars invites you, you couldn’t possibly,” Dean Ness said with a sour little smile. People persist in seeing the world through their own eyes, I reflected, as I left him brooding in a corner of his elegant apartment.

I phoned Beverly and gave her my apologies for the dinner we had planned to have together, then called Elizabeth Anderson at the unlisted number she had given me and asked her where she lived. She hadn’t had the ten million long, but already was assuming that everyone knew where she was. It turned out to be a quiet little floor of a large apartment building, where she prepared me a simple meal of corned beef hash topped with a poached egg, then launched into a series of probing questions about my visit to the police. She apologized profusely for the size of the spread she was living in, saying that David had insisted that she start living in style before they were married. They had leased it before his death.

“You really don’t know anything about Max Nome,” I said, and she shook her head and started weeping again. “Maybe you don’t, girl, but your body knows him. I saw the readings from you polygraph test. Your blood pressure, pulse rate, and galvanic skin response all react to that crazy name. Don’t worry about it. If it’s as close to the surface as those readings indicate, I’m sure we can find it’s meaning.”

She mixed me a double margarita and we walked down into a sunken conversation pit that had been dug out of the huge expanse of her livingroom floor.

“Tell me about the relationship between Dean and David and you. Were the two of them close friends at one time?”

“Very close. They worked together at Cal State as lecturers, shared an apartment in Santa Monica. Dean was the well-to-do one, then, and David the poor relation from the boondocks. They’re second cousins, you know. They had no idea that David was going to inherit all of that money. When David had his shower of gold from a forgotten uncle in Washington, he moved out and started being the international playboy and jet-setter. Dean quit his job as an economics instructor and went to work instead as a stockbroker. I came into the picture then, met Dean at a party, almost got engaged, then ran into David a few months later. It may sound very corny, but it’s true. I was swept off my feet by David. He was Sir Galahad and Lancelot and James Bond and the Count of Monte Cristo all rolled into one.”

“What was he like? I never met him, you know, but I’ve heard strange tales about him.”

“They’re probably all true. David delighted in surprising and startling people. I don’t know exactly how he did everything, how he gathered the information, but he made it a point to find out little things about people before he met them, their birthdays, high schools, phone numbers, anniversaries, everything he could, then he’d spring these little isolated facts on them in casual conversation or while doing an impromptu magic display, and surprise everybody. I went to a party in Westwood with him and he told all the people in the room what their mother’s maiden names were. He told me later he got the information from a credit bureau at a few dollars a head. Another time, he had a dinner in his apartment and served each one of his guests, all fourteen of them, his favorite entrée and dessert. He wouldn’t tell me at first how he managed to do things like that, but I found out later it was just hard work and drudgery. He would get the information and memorize it. When I became his stage assistant, I helped him with the lists and it was pure rote memory. But to the uninitiated, it was a miraculous thing. It really surprised and mystified them.”

When she offered me another drink, I declined for two reasons. One was, I wanted to be able to climb out of that conversation pit. The first margarita had been that strong, and my head was buzzing. Secondly, I felt I had been given a clue to the mysterious Max Nome, and I wanted to break away from this beautiful, distracting girl and try to sort out our conversation mentally before the clue faded away. I left her abruptly and drove directly home, trying furiously to concentrate on what had been said, to review it so it would not die in my memory. All I managed to do at first was to give myself a headache.

I stayed up until one, jotting down everything I could recall, but it was no use. There was something buried in the mass of unrelated trivia, but I couldn’t pull it out through the tequila fumes. I staggered to bed in a sleepy stupor, grimly thinking that if only I could have borrowed David Landmaier’s fantastic memory, I could easily have dredged up the answer to the Maxnome riddle and then some.

Then began one hell of a night. It commenced with a lulu of a nightmare in which I was pursued down some very dark and twisting streets by a faceless, ghostly monster brandishing a bloody kitchen knife and yelling “Maxnome” at me in eldritch howls.

I awoke in a cold sweat, hoping that it would be at least six in the morning so I could get out of bed. I found it was only three fifteen. Trying desperately to go back to sleep, I was annoyed by an inane and idiotic phrase that began marching through my brain, back and forth like a huge saw. I tried to tell myself that clinical psychologists were supposed to be impervious to such nonsense, that people came to see me for help with silly problems. This line of reasoning failed to help, and the phrase continued to saw back and forth through my aching brain tissue.

Max Nome has pneumonia, that was the silly phrase. I tried to ignore it, disprove it, forget it, or destroy it, but it would not leave my poor, tortured brain. I finally sat up, turned the lights on, and tried to reason it away. I was using therapeutic technique on myself!

I told myself firmly that I was a fool to ignore the phrase. According to standard, classical doctrine, my unconscious was trying to tell me something important, and the only road back to sanity and sound sleep was to work out what it was trying to tell me. The unconscious is a devious and tricky thing, I reminded myself. Theoretically, it seldom comes out into the open and states anything directly. Instead, it persists in sneaking up on meanings in a misleading and wily manner.

The key word was pneumonia. Perhaps it was a pun, I decided after several moments of bleary-eyed pondering. What did pneumonia sound like? Like nothing on the planet Earth, I decided, and said the hell with Doctor Freud and his insane theories, turned off the lights, and tried to go back to sleep. Just as I was drifting off, a wispy little voice whispered the word mnemonic into my left ear, and that sat me back up and turned the lights on again. Mnemonic was one of those words I never spoke out loud because it raised far too many eyebrows. Still half asleep and wondering how much tequila Elizabeth Anderson had gotten into that one margarita, I wearily asked my unconscious what could the word mnemonic possibly have to do with a weird character named Landmaier and a spook named Max Nome.

The answer woke me completely. Landmaier was an amateur magician and memory expert who did complicated mind-reading acts on a professional level. Memory experts depend heavily on mnemonic devices to help them remember things. When David Landmaier lay dying on a kitchen floor and tried to write out the name of his murderer, his dying brain might have played a trick on him. Instead of the man’s name, it might have fed him one of the many mnemonic patterns that Landmaier associated with that particular name, a pattern off a list with which Elizabeth Anderson had once helped him. Maxnome could be a mnemonic device for remembering something about a man, something with seven letters in it — or seven digits.

I stared at the telephone beside my bed and picked it up gingerly, then dialed the letters M-A-X-N-O-M-E. I heard several rings, then the crisp, professional voice of an operator answered. “What number are you calling, please?”

“Just a minute,” I mumbled foolishly, not knowing what number I was calling. I worked it out from the dial. “Operator, I want 629-6663.”

Several of the longer seconds of my life dragged by, then the girl came back on. “That number has been changed to 629-4562.”

I thanked the operator, then dialed the new number carefully. The phone rang seven times before it was answered by a sleepy, angry, and familiar voice.

“This had better be damned important, fellow,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“It’s your old friend, Mike Karlins,” I said to Dean Ness. “I want to come over and see you about Elizabeth. I think I’ve worked out her problem.”

“That’s important enough.” He sounded delighted. “Come right on over, old buddy. I’ll pour you a double for that.”

I told Dean I’d be right over, hung up, and stared sadly at the phone for a few seconds. “You’d better make it a triple, Dean,” I said to the empty room, then picked up the phone again, and dialed the police.