Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

William O’Farrell A Paper for Mr. Wurley

A fascinating story; how George Bostwick, high school senior, discovered the terrible dangers that lurk in our everyday lives... If you were George’s English teacher, what mark would you give him?

My name is George Bostwick and next June I’m going to graduate from Santa Monica High School. Maybe. The reason I’m only maybe going to graduate is Mr. Wurley. He teaches English IV and he’s a — you know, perfectionist?

He gave the class this practically impossible assignment that has to be handed in today. The assignment is that we have to write a paper on any subject that we’re interested in, and I sat up most of last night thinking about subjects I was interested in, and they were and still are football, cars, detective stories, and girls, not necessarily in that order.

But I have a feeling that Mr. Wurley would think that I should not be interested in these things to the exclusion of, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley or Lord Byron, and when I fell asleep I was still waiting for the inspiration that had not yet come.

“Just write it in your own words,” he said, “as though you were talking to a friend.”

Okay, friend:

So, on account of having stayed up most of last night, I slept late this morning and missed the school bus. My Mom and Dad are back east visiting, so I’m staying with my cousin Freddie who has a little house up Malibu Canyon. But right now Freddie is off on this fishing trip and he didn’t wake me up. It was nine o’clock when I got down to the Pacific Coast Highway and started thumbing rides and worrying about the paper that I hadn’t written and about what would happen to me when I didn’t hand it in.

Pretty soon this lady came along in an Austin-Healey Sprite. She stopped and I saw that she was a nice-looking blonde lady but kind of old. She wore a wedding ring and must have been around thirty.

“You got a driver’s license?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, and started climbing out. “We’re headed the same way, so you can drive me home.” She got her knees jammed up against the steering wheel and had a hard time breaking free. “Like trying to get out of a sitz bath,” she said.

Well, a Sprite’s a sports car, and a little one at that, and it’s not too easy for people of a certain age to get in and out of one, but that wasn’t why she was finding it so tough. When she finally made it and walked around to climb into the other seat I saw what her trouble was. She was stoned! But stoned!

They got a thing in California called “Drunk in Auto.” You can go to jail for it. Well, it was just last week that Freddie gave me the loan of his car to take the driving tests. My license being new and all, I wasn’t sure I wanted to drive her anywhere.

“Maybe you’d like me to go over to the Mayfair Market and call a cab,” I said.

“Young man,” she said, “you leave me sitting on the highway, I’ll have your Good Samaritan card picked up. You won’t even be a Bad Samaritan. You’ll be a Lousy Philistine. I live just this side the Sea Lion. Hop in the car and drive.”

So I did what she told me to. And I’ll say this for her — that was a real sweet car she owned. A stick job with four forward shifts, a tachometer, a windshield washer — the works. She wasn’t any trouble, either. By the time we passed Malibu Pier she was asleep.

I looked in the side pocket and found her registration. Her name was Phyllis Bennett and she lived near the Sea Lion Café, like she’d said. A lot of picture people, actors and what-all live around there. I parked outside the gate in this thick wall and woke her up.

“You’re home, Mrs. Bennett,” I said. “Thanks for the lift.”

For a minute she looked as though she was wondering who I was and how I’d come into her life. Then she smiled. “Hello, kid. Give me a hand.”

I helped her out and through the gate and into a patio. Man, when I got inside was I surprised! It was real cool. Not fancy, you understand, but nice. You could hear the sound of waves down on the beach. There was a garden with flowers in it and a big white table with chairs around it and a red-and-white umbrella over it, and down at the other end of the patio there was a little swimming pool shaped like a kidney bean.

The house was nice, too. No tricked-up gingerbread — just a comfortable place to live. The beach stairs were on the right and there were three steps just ahead that led up to the door. Mrs. Bennett started for the door but, passing the table, she gave this sort of sigh and suddenly sat down.

“Got to rest a minute. Who are you, anyway?” she asked.

Well, I’m not what you might call gabby and I don’t much like talking about myself, but I answered her the best I could. I told her my name and where I lived and how I was first-string tackle on the team at Samohi. She listened politely but she couldn’t have been paying much attention because, while I was giving her a play-by-play rundown on last Saturday’s game, she got up in the middle of the second quarter.

“Think I can make it now,” she said.

I helped her up the steps. The door was open. She was starting to sag again when we went into the living room.

“Maxi Hey, Maxi” she called. Then she said, “Oh, I forgot. He’s in Las Vegas with his red-headed so-called secretary. I’m talking about my husband, Max.”

She went over to a sort of cabinet near the picture window and looked inside. “Well, what do you know!” she said. “Max went off and left me high and dry. Do me a little favor, George?”

“Well, I’d like to,” I said, “but I’m already a half hour late for school. Would it take long?”

“Ten minutes, give or take a little, and I’ll make it worth your while.” She opened her handbag and handed me a bill. “Run up to the Mayfair for me and you can drive my car to school. Bring it back this afternoon.”

I saw myself pulling up at Samohi in my little old Austin-Healey Sprite. “What should I get for you at the Mayfair, Mrs. Bennett?” I said.

“A fifth of scotch.”

“What kind? Hey — this is a hundred-dollar bill!” I said.

“They can change it. Get any kind — grab the first bottle you see and make it fast,” she said.

She sat down on a couch and I went out to the Sprite. A girl was sitting in it. She was pretty. In fact, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I knew who she was, too. What’s more, she acted like she knew me.

“Hi, George. How’s about a lift to Santa Monica? Would you be kind enough?” she said.

Would I be kind enough! When Dorothy Dupree, star of screen and TV, asks for a lift she’s the one that’s being kind! “I’d be glad to, Miss Dupree,” I said, “but I got to drive up to the Mayfair first. How come you know my name?”

“I’ve seen you playing football, George. I watch you every time I get the chance, which is every time my drama coach will let me. I think you’re wonderful. Call me Dorothy,” she said.

“Okay, Dorothy.” I vaulted happily into the driver’s seat. “Want to run up to the Mayfair with me?”

“I can’t,” she said. “That’s where my drama coach has gone. She’d see me and I’d never get to Santa Monica today. I live next door” — she pointed to another gate — “and when I saw you bringing Phyllis Bennett home I thought, this is my chancel”

“To do what?”

“To get off on my own a little while,” she said. “To skip going to the studio just for once. No lines to study. No interviews. No dancing lessons. Is that too much to ask?”

I thought about it and decided that it wasn’t. “Everybody ought to have some time off once in a while,” I said. “When is this party you mentioned coming back?”

“Any minute now.”

“And she’ll make you do these things that you don’t want to do?”

“That’s her job and she’s an expert at it,” Dorothy said. “My mother’s in Reno, see, and while she’s establishing residence my drama coach is Head Disciplinarian and Chairman of the Board combined.”

I thought some more and came up with an answer. “There’s a drainpipe a short ways up the beach,” I said. “It’s a big pipe and this time of year there isn’t any water in it. If you’re not afraid of maybe getting your clothes a little dirty—”

“Sandals, shorts, and sweater? They’re expendable,” she said.

Sure enough, that turned out to be what she had on. It was funny that I hadn’t noticed them before. I must have been concentrating on her face. Her face was — you know, angelic? She had black hair, and the way the sun hit it made it look as though there was a halo perched on top.

“So you go down to the beach,” I said. “Crawl through the drainpipe and wait for me on the other side. That’s one place nobody will think to look for you. Okay?”

“Like it’s a deal,” she said.

That’s beat talk, that “like” jive. You can’t just say “okay.” You got to say “like okay,” and if you’re real beat it’s “like okay, man.” I never went for it, being a — you know, purist? — and anyway it’s sort of dated now. But coming from Dorothy I got to admit it sounded cute.

I watched her climb out and walk towards her own gate. Then I swung the Sprite in a U-turn and drove up to the market. I left it in the parking lot and went into the liquor department of the Mayfair. There were bottles of scotch lined up on the shelves on my right. I took one and carried it to the man behind the counter. I gave him Mrs. Bennett’s hundred-dollar bill.

“Got a bag to put the bottle in?” I asked.

He didn’t move, just stood there studying the bill. At last he looked at me. “I.D.” he said.

“Come again?”

“Let’s see your identification. I got to know how old you are.”

“Look.” I set the bottle on the counter. “It’s not for me. I’m buying it for a lady, Mrs. Bennett. She—”

He broke in. “Mrs. Phyllis Bennett?”

“That’s right,” I said. “She lives—”

“I know where she lives. Sorry, but I can’t sell you liquor. If you’ll wait a minute I’ll call Mrs. Bennett and explain.”

He got a phone book and started looking for the number. The bill was lying in front of me where he’d put it down. I put it in my pocket. It was Mrs. Bennett’s money and I had to see that it got back to her intact. He dialed the number he had found.

I got restless, waiting. Mr. Wurley’s class was the first period after the lunch hour. I might be able to alibi not having any paper finished enough to hand in, but at least I had to make the class on time. And there was Dorothy waiting for me in the drainpipe—

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t she answer?”

“No,” he said. “You sure she’s at home?”

“She was a few minutes ago, and she didn’t look as if she was going anywhere,” I said.

He shrugged and kept on listening to nothing on the phone. I said, “Forget the whole deal, please,” and started to leave. He said something about holding on a minute because there was a question or two he’d like to ask, but I made out as if I didn’t hear.

I went out to the parking lot and got into the Sprite. I put the stick in what I thought was low-low, let in the clutch, and backed into a black-and-white job just behind me.

It turned out to be a Sheriff’s car. Two deputies got out and walked towards me, both wearing that sort of sad, disillusioned look that deputy sheriffs seem to cultivate.

“Operator’s license, kid,” one of them said.

I handed it to him. He read it. “This your car?” he asked.

“No, sir. It belongs to Mrs. Phyllis Bennett. I was running an errand—”

“Registration.”

I fished it out of the side pocket. He looked it over, gave it back. He looked at the front license tag and called out the number to the other deputy.

“Ring any sort of bell?”

“Not on the list.” The other deputy stopped staring at me long enough to shake his head.

The first deputy wrote me out a ticket. “Next time you’ll be more careful, won’t you, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Couldn’t you just—?”

I was going to point out that, after all, I hadn’t hurt his car and ask him to go easy on me, my driver’s license being practically virginal and all, but as he handed me the ticket I saw a complication headed in our direction and I changed my mind. The complication was the man from the liquor department. He was coming straight towards us and I foresaw a whole career ahead of me just answering questions. I put the ticket in my pocket and got out of the parking lot.

I drove straight back to Mrs. Bennett’s and left the Sprite where I had parked before. I went through the gate, and the three steps, and through the door. Mrs. Bennett was lying on the couch. “So that’s why she didn’t answer the phone,” I thought. “She passed out.”

Then I saw the hole in her head where the bullet had gone in and knew that this particular pass-out was going to be permanent. She was dead.

My heart started banging and my knees got rubbery, and there was a time — I don’t know how long it lasted — when I went here and there and back and forward, expending a lot of energy but not getting much of anything constructive done. I started for Mrs. Bennett. I thought I’d better feel her pulse or maybe hold a mirror over her face to see if she was breathing, but it didn’t take a mirror to tell me that she wasn’t and to know she didn’t even have a pulse.

So I stumbled over to the telephone. I picked it up, and then I put it down because I didn’t know whether to call the Emergency Hospital or the Sheriff’s office first So I ran into the patio intending to find one of the neighbors and pass the buck to him, but thinking about the neighbors reminded me that Dorothy was one of them and that she was waiting in the drainpipe. So I stopped again, just inside the gate.

While I was standing there, feeling numb and not thinking clear but sort of hazy, I heard this car pull up. There was a hole in the gate with a little cover to it that you could push aside. Like a spy-hole? I took a quick look through it and reacted automatically to what I saw. Before those same two disillusioned deputies had time even to start knocking on the gate, I was down on the beach and the drainpipe was rapidly coming up. This pipe is maybe a hundred yards long. It runs underneath the highway and the other end is inland from the beach. I was out of breath when I got to the other end.

It was pretty there. I came out in a gully that had trees on both sides and even a little grass and such. I couldn’t see any houses, which was fine. But I couldn’t see Dorothy either, and that wasn’t. I looked all around and she wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“Dorothy?” I called.

The answer came from above me on the south side of the gully. “Here.” I looked up but all I could see was this eucalyptus tree.

“Where?”

“In the tree.”

That’s where she was, too. Ordinarily a eucalyptus is one of the hardest trees there is to climb, but this one happened to have a branch that was only about ten feet above the ground. She was sitting on it. I climbed the side of the gully and shinnied up the tree and sat beside her.

“Jane climb tree good,” I said when my breath finally came back.

“Jane learn climb tree in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer jungle. Jane climb up, see when Tarzan come back in Sprite.”

I looked where she was looking and, sure enough, I could see the Sprite parked outside Mrs. Bennett’s gate across the highway. The Sheriff’s car was right behind it. Just seeing that black-and-white job gave me the shivers. It came to me all of a sudden — everything I’d done wrong. I hadn’t exactly been a moron. I’d been a stupid moron, which is worse. Instead of explaining things to that liquor department man I’d turned his suspicions to super-suspicions by walking out on him. And of course he’d unloaded on the cops.

A kid drives up in a cool sports car, tries to buy liquor and to pay for it with a C-note, and the lady he says he’s doing it for doesn’t answer the telephone — well, that’d make anybody give the kid a second look. Brother! I could just see those two deputies over in Mrs. Bennett’s house. I knew what they were thinking. One of them was probably making a phone call right this minute.

“It was the Bostwick boy, all right,” I could hear him saying. “He murdered her and took off with a hundred bucks. Send out an all-points bulletin. Advise caution when approaching. This criminal is desperate and probably he’s armed.”

And right there on the phone that he was holding, life-size and in living color, I could see my fingerprints!

“I’m in a jam, Dorothy,” I said.

“So brief me.”

I filled her in on the details.

Naturally she was shocked. But after a while she accepted the fact that Mrs. Bennett had been murdered and stopped talking about her and started thinking about me. “They can’t pin it on you, George. You didn’t kill her,” she said.

“I know that, but the cops don’t. You ever hear of circumstantial evidence? It’s the only really reliable evidence there is.”

“Cops may rely on it. I don’t.”

“I’m afraid that’s — you know, immaterial?” I said.

“It won’t be when I tell them what I know. Her husband did it — Max,” she said. “I’d been sitting in this tree, oh, maybe three, four minutes, when I saw him coming through the drainpipe. He buried something just this side of it. Then he sort of slunk over to the highway and a woman came along and picked him up.”

I said, “Max Bennett’s in Las Vegas. With his so-called secretary. His wife — his late wife, that is — told me.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute. Maybe that’s what he told Phyllis, but I know better. He’s not the kind of man would take his secretary to Vegas. And I tell you I just saw him, George!”

“Was the woman who picked him up a redhead?”

“I couldn’t tell. She was inside the car. But Max was right down there.” She pointed. “I couldn’t have made a mistake!”

“What’s he look like?”

“Well,” she said, “he’s tall and real distinguished. He’s only thirty-three but he’s got this hair like graying at the temples. Like, you know, worldly?”

I said, “I just can’t see it. Such a distinguished type and all, why would he want to murder his own wife?”

“If you’d known Phyllis, really known her, you wouldn’t have to ask. She was a succubus,” Dorothy said.

“A which?”

“Like in a dream there’s this evil woman?”

“Well, it takes all kinds,” I said. “What did Mr. Bennett bury?”

“Let’s go see,” she said.

We unclimbed the tree and slid down into the gully. Sure enough, the ground was loose in a spot near the drainpipe that Dorothy pointed out. I could dig into it with my hands. I scooped it out and, only a few inches down, I felt something cold and hard. It was an automatic, a Smith & Wesson .38. I gave it the standard procedure, miffing the muzzle, counting the cartridges in the clip. One bullet had recently been fired.

“You called it right, Dorothy. This is what killed her,” I said.

“I’ve seen that gun before. It’s Max’s. You realize what this means, George? You’re in the clear. Hot-diggity!” she said.

“Hot what?”

“Like it’s the most,” she said.

I didn’t say anything for a while. I was thinking. I guess I was thinking harder than I’d ever thought in my whole life. “I wish you’d got the license number of that car,” I said at last. “We’d have a pretty good case if you’d remembered to do that.”

“I did get it! Wait a minute—” She concentrated. “It was a California license — SHM 578. Isn’t that enough for you to take to the police?”

“Well, not quite,” I said. “They’d have to check a lot of things, and all the time they were doing it I’d be in jail. I’m supposed to be in Mr. Wurley’s class at one o’clock.”

“Who’s Mr. Wurley?”

I told her, and about the paper I hadn’t even started writing yet “But if you’ll help me,” I said, “I got an idea that ought to make the cops and Mr. Wurley happy, both.”

“I’ll be glad to help you, George. Just tell me what to do.” she said.

So that’s how come we’re sitting in this booth in The Top o’ the Sea Café on Malibu Pier. We got here the easy way — just walked along the highway until we came to it. Nobody stopped us. Lots of people looked at us, but it was only Dorothy they saw.

Jack Levin runs this place. He’s a friend of Freddie’s, and he let us have some coffee and gave me this writing paper and loaned me his fountain pen. I’d have offered to pay for the coffee but the only money I have is this hundred-dollar bill, and I’m holding that as evidence.

So, Mr. Wurley, here’s the paper I was supposed to do plus my alibi for not showing up today. I don’t dare go anywhere until the cops arrest the murderer. Dorothy has promised to bring this to you, but I don’t think she’ll read it. Who reads the literary efforts of a high school senior unless, like you do, they get paid for it? I’m pretty sure she’ll give it to you. It’s what the innocent juvenile non-delinquent she’s playing today would do.

But don’t forget that lovable young innocence is only one of a lot of parts she’s played in her time. Remember her in Teen-Age Terrorist? She’s versatile. And old, Mr. Wurley. She’s been a sub-ingenue for lo, these many years, and she must be twenty-five if she’s a minute.

It’s what she said when I found the murder weapon that finally blasted off my brain and sent it into orbit. Nobody’s said “Hot-diggity!” since I grew up. So, after that, when she told me that the license number of the car that picked up Mr. Bennett was SHM 578, it was all daylight and champagne, like Shakespeare says.

You see, that’s the number of the sports car that Mrs. Bennett drives. I ought to know. The deputy wrote it on the ticket he gave me and the ticket’s in my pocket. What happened was — she’d been watching the Sprite and SHM 578 was the first number that came to her. You know, subconsciously?

So what I’d advise you to do, Mr. Wurley, is to think up some excuse to keep her waiting while you call the cops. Because she did it. You only have to listen to her talk about him to know she’s got a thing on Mr. Bennett, and that’s why she killed his wife.

She must have been outside the gate while I was telling Mrs. Bennett about my being first-string tackle and all, and inside the patio when Mrs. Bennett asked me to run up to the Mayfair Market for her. Anyway, when I came out she had her routine down pat. After I started for the market she went in the house and shot Mrs. Bennett with Mr. Bennett’s gun.

The cops will find my fingerprints on it, and probably nobody else’s — remember, I dug it out of the drainpipe. I’ll say this much for Dorothy — she’s smart. She’s pretty, too, and if you don’t look too close you’d never notice those little lines at the corners of her eyes.

One more thing. Chances are that Mr. Bennett really is in Las Vegas. Anyway, he’s certainly nowhere near Malibu. If there’d been the slightest chance of anybody thinking that he might have done it, Dorothy would never have told me that she’d seen him. Last thing she wants is to have Mr. Bennett put in jail.

And of course she never had any intention of telling the cops the same story she told me. That was going to be something I had just dreamed up. For publicity or something, to drag her name into it when all she was doing was doing me a favor, taking my paper into class.

Wherever Mr. Bennett is, I don’t know whether they’ll find his secretary with him or not. Or care. That’s his business and if the cops want to make it so, it’s theirs. My business is somehow to get off the hook. So will you get me off, sir, please?

And how’s about it, Mr. Wurley, do I pass?

IN MEMORIAM — William O’Farrell died on April 11, 1962 at the age of 57. He was a fine novelist and short-story writer — his “Over There — Darkness” was awarded the Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” as the best mystery short story published during 1958; and every story by Mr. O’Farrell that has appeared in EQMM has been distinguished. “A Paper for Mr. Wurley” is probably the last short story that William O’Farrell wrote before his death — and it is one of his finest. William O’Farrell will be missed...