Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

The Long Way Down by Edward D. Hoch

“One of Ed’s finest stories,” says Douglas Greene of Crippen and Landru, the publisher of several Hoch collections, “is ‘A Long Way Down,’ an impossible crime tale — man jumps out of skyscraper window but dis-appears on the way down.” The story first appeared in AHMM in February 1965, three years after the author’s first sale to EQMM but eight years prior to his beginning his 36-year streak of unbroken EQMM publication. It’s been reprinted several times, but never before in this magazine.

Many men have disappeared under unusual circumstances, but perhaps none more unusual than those which befell Billy Calm.

The day began in a routine way for McLove. He left his apartment in midtown Manhattan and walked through the foggy March morning just as he did on every working day of the year. When he was still several blocks away, he could make out the bottom floors of the great glass slab that was the home office of the Jupiter Steel & Brass Corporation. But above the tenth floor the fog had taken over, shrouding everything in a dense coat of moisture that could have been the roof of the world.

Underfoot, the going was slushy. The same warm air mass that had caused the fog was making short work of the previous day’s two-inch snowfall. McLove, who didn’t really mind Manhattan winters, was thankful that spring was only days away. Finally he turned into the massive marble lobby of the Jupiter Steel Building, thinking for the hundredth time that only the garish little newsstand in one corner kept it from being an exact replica of the interior of an Egyptian tomb. Anyway, it was dry inside, without slush underfoot.

McLove’s office on the twenty-first floor had been a point of creeping controversy from the very beginning. It was the executive floor, bulging with the vice-presidents and others who formed the inner core of Billy Calm’s little family. The very idea of sharing this exclusive office space with the firm’s security chief had repelled many of them, but when Billy Calm spoke, there were few who openly dared challenge his mandates.

McLove had moved to the executive floor soon after the forty-year-old boy genius of Wall Street had seized control of Jupiter Steel in a proxy battle that had split stockholders into armed camps. On the day Billy Calm first walked through the marble lobby to take command of his newest acquisition, a disgruntled shareholder named Raimey had shot his hat off, and actually managed to get a second shot before being overpowered. From that day on, Billy Calm used the private elevator at the rear of the building, and McLove supervised security from the twenty-first floor.

It was a thankless task that amounted to little more than being a sometime bodyguard for Calm. His duties, in the main, consisted of keeping Calm’s private elevator in working order, attending directors’ meetings with the air of a reluctant outsider, supervising the security forces at the far-flung Jupiter mills, and helping with arrangements for Calm’s numerous public appearances. For this he was paid fifteen thousand dollars a year, which was the principal reason he did it.

On the twenty-first floor, this morning, Margaret Mason was already at her desk outside the directors’ room. She looked up as McLove stepped into the office and flashed him their private smile. “How are you, McLove?”

“Morning, Margaret. Billy in yet?”

“Mr. Calm? Not yet. He’s flying in from Pittsburgh. Should be here anytime now.”

McLove glanced at his watch. He knew the directors’ meeting was scheduled for ten, and that was only twenty minutes away. “Heard anything?” he asked, knowing that Margaret Mason was the best source of information on the entire floor. She knew everything and would tell you most of it, provided it didn’t concern herself.

Now she nodded, and bent forward a bit across the desk. “Mr. Calm phoned from his plane and talked with Jason Greene. The merger is going through. He’ll announce it officially at the meeting this morning.”

“That’ll make some people around here mighty sad.” McLove was thinking of W.T. Knox and Sam Hamilton, two directors who had opposed the merger from the very beginning. Only twenty-four hours earlier, before Billy Calm’s rush flight to Pittsburgh in his private plane, it had appeared that their efforts would be successful.

“They should know better than to buck Mr. Calm,” Margaret said.

“I suppose so.” McLove glanced at his watch again. For some reason, he was getting nervous. “Say, how about lunch, if we get out of the meeting in time?”

“Fine.” She gave him the small smile again. “You’re the only one I feel safe drinking with at noon.”

“Be back in a few minutes.”

“I’ll buzz you if Mr. Calm gets in.”

He glanced at the closed doors of the private elevator and nodded. Then he walked down the hall to his own office once more. He got a pack of cigarettes from his desk and went across the hall to W.T. Knox’s office.

“Morning, W.T. What’s new?”

The tall man looked up from a file folder he’d been studying. Thirty-seven, a man who had retained most of his youthful good looks and all of his charm, Knox was popular with the girls on 21. He’d probably have been more popular if he hadn’t had a pregnant wife and five children of varying ages.

“McLove, look at this weather!” He gestured toward the window, where a curtain of fog still hung. “Every winter I say I’ll move to Florida, and every winter the wife talks me into staying.”

Jason Greene, balding and ultra-efficient, joined them with a sheaf of reports. “Billy should be in at any moment. He phoned me to say the merger had gone through.”

Knox dropped his eyes. “I heard.”

“When the word gets out, Jupiter stock will jump another ten points.”

McLove could almost feel the tension between the two men; one gloating, and the other bitter. He walked to the window and stared out at the fog, trying to see the invisible building across the street. Below, he could not even make out the setback of their own building, though it was only two floors lower. Fog... well, at least it meant that spring was on the way.

Then there was a third voice behind him, and he knew without turning that it belonged to Shirley Taggert, the president’s personal secretary. “It’s almost time for the board meeting,” she said, with that hint of a Southern drawl that either attracted or repelled but left no middle ground. “You people ready?”

Shirley was grim-faced but far from ugly. She was a bit younger than Margaret Mason’s mid thirties, a bit sharper of dress and mind. But she paid the penalty for being Billy Calm’s secretary every time she walked down the halls. Conversations ceased, suspicious glances followed her, and there was always a half-hidden air of tension at her arrival. She ate lunch alone, and one or two fellows who had been brave enough to ask her for a date hadn’t bothered to ask a second time.

“We’re ready,” Jason Greene told her. “Is he here yet?”

She shook her head and glanced at the clock. “He should be in any minute.”

McLove left them grouped around Knox’s desk and walked back down the hall. Sam Hamilton, the joker, passed him on the way and stopped to tell him a quick gag. He, at least, didn’t seem awfully upset about the impending merger, although he had opposed it. McLove liked Sam better than any of the other directors, probably because at the age of fifty he was still a big kid at heart. You could meet him on even ground and, at times, feel like he was letting you outdo him.

“Anything yet?” McLove asked Margaret, returning to her desk outside the director’s room.

“No sign of Mr. Calm, but he shouldn’t be long now. It’s just about ten.”

McLove glanced at the closed door of Billy Calm’s office, next to the directors’ room, and entered the latter. The room was quite plain, with only one door through which he had entered, and unbroken walls of dull oak paneling on either wall. The far end of the room, with two wide windows looking out at the fog, was only twenty feet away, and the conference table that was the room’s only piece of furniture had just the eight necessary chairs grouped around it. Some had been heard to complain that the room lacked the stature of Jupiter Steel, but Billy Calm contended he liked the forced intimacy of it.

Now, as McLove stood looking out the windows, the whole place seemed to reflect the cold mechanization of the modern office building. The windows could not be opened. Even their cleaning had to be done from the outside, on a gondola-like platform that climbed up and down the sheer glass walls. There were no window sills, and McLove’s fingers ran unconsciously along the bottom of the window frame as he stood staring out. The fog might be lifting a little, but he couldn’t be certain.

McLove went out to Margaret Mason’s desk, saw that she was gathering together her copy books and pencils for the meeting, and decided to take a glance into Billy Calm’s office. It was the same size as the directors’ room, and almost as plain in its furnishings. Only the desk, cluttered with the trivia of a businessman’s lifetime, gave proof of human occupancy. On the left wall still hung the faded portrait of the firm’s founder, and on the right, a more recent photograph of Israel Black, former president of Jupiter and still a director though he never came to the meetings. This was Billy Calm’s domain. From here he ruled a vast empire of holdings, and a word from him could send men to their financial ruin.

McLove straightened suddenly on hearing a man’s muffled voice at Margaret’s desk outside. He heard her ask, “What’s the matter?” and then heard the door of the directors’ room open. Hurrying back to her desk, he was just in time to see the door closing again.

“Is he finally here?”

Margaret, unaccountably white-faced, opened her mouth to answer, just as there came the tinkling crash of a breaking window from the inner room. They both heard it clearly, and she dropped the cigarette she’d been in the act of lighting. “Billy!” she screamed out. “No, Billy!”

They were at the door together after only an instant’s hesitation, pushing it open before them, hurrying into the directors’ room. “No,” McLove said softly, staring straight ahead at the empty room and the long table and the shattered window in the opposite wall. “He jumped.” Already the fog seemed to be filling the room with its damp mists as they hurried to the window and peered out at nothing.

“Billy jumped,” Margaret said dully, as if unable to comprehend the fact. “He killed himself.”

McLove turned and saw Knox standing in the doorway. Behind him, Greene and Hamilton and Shirley Taggert were coming up fast. “Billy Calm just jumped out of the window,” McLove told them.

“No,” Margaret Mason said, turning from the window. “No, no, no, no...” Then, suddenly overcome with the shock of it, she tumbled to the floor in a dead faint.

“Take care of her,” McLove shouted to the others. “I’ve got to get downstairs.”

Knox bent to lift the girl in his arms, while Sam Hamilton hurried to the telephone. Shirley had settled into one of the padded directors’ chairs, her face devoid of all expression. And Jason Greene, loyal to the end, actually seemed to be crying.

In the hallway, McLove pushed the button of Billy Calm’s private elevator and waited for it to rise from the depths of the building. The little man would have no further use for it now. He rode it down alone, leaning against its padded walls, listening to, but hardly hearing, the dreary hum of its descent. In another two minutes he was on the street, looking for the crowd that would surely be gathered, listening for the sound of rising sirens.

But there was nothing. Nothing but the usual mid-morning traffic. Nothing but hurrying pedestrians and a gang of workmen drilling at the concrete and a policeman dully directing traffic.

There was no body.

McLove hurried over to the police officer. “A man just jumped out of the Jupiter Steel Building,” he said. “What happened to him?”

The policeman wrinkled his brow. “Jumped? From where?”

“Twenty-first floor. Right above us.”

They both gazed upward into the gradually lifting fog. The police officer shrugged his shoulders. “Mister, I been standing in this very spot for more than an hour. Nobody jumped from up there.”

“But...” McLove continued staring into the fog. “But he did jump. I practically saw him do it. And if he’s not down here, where is he?”

Back on 21, McLove found the place in a state somewhere between sheer shock and calm confusion. People were hurrying without purpose in every direction, bent on their own little useless errands. Sam Hamilton was on the phone to his broker, trying to get the latest quotation on Jupiter stock. “The bottom’ll drop out of it when this news hits,” he confided to McLove. “With Billy gone, the merger won’t go through.”

McLove lit a cigarette. “Billy Calm is gone, all right, but he’s not down there. He vanished somewhere between the twenty-first floor and the street.”

“What?”

W.T. Knox joined them, helping a pale but steady Margaret Mason by the arm. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “It was the shock.”

McLove reached out his hand to her. “Tell us exactly what happened. Every word of it.”

“Well...” she hesitated and then sat down. Behind her, Hamilton and Shirley Taggert were deep in animated conversation, and Jason Greene had appeared from somewhere with a policeman in tow.

“You were at the desk,” McLove began, helping her. “And I came out of the directors’ room and went into Billy’s office. Then what?”

“Well, Mr. Calm came in, and as he passed my desk he mumbled something. I didn’t catch it, and I asked him what was the matter. He seemed awfully upset about something. Anyway, he passed my desk and went into the directors’ room. He was just closing the door when you came out, and you know the rest.”

McLove nodded. He knew the rest, which was nothing but the shattered window and the vanished man. “Well, the body’s not down there,” he told them again. “It’s not anywhere. Billy Calm dived through that window and flew away.”

Shirley passed Hamilton a telephone she had just answered. “Yes?” He listened a moment and then hung up. “The news about Billy went out over the stock ticker. Jupiter Steel is selling off fast. It’s already down three points.”

“Goodbye merger,” Knox said, and though his face was grim his voice was not.

A detective arrived on the scene to join the police officer. Quickly summoned workmen were tacking cardboard over the smashed windows, carefully removing some of the jagged splinters of glass from the bottom of the frame. Things were settling down a little, and the police were beginning to ask questions.

“Mr. McLove, you’re in charge of security for the company?”

“That’s right.”

“Why was it necessary to have a security man sit in on directors’ meetings?”

“Some nut tried to kill Billy Calm awhile back. He was still nervous. Private elevator and all.”

“What was the nut’s name?”

“Raimey, I think. Something like that. Don’t know where he is now.”

“And who was usually present at these meetings? I see eight chairs in there.”

“Calm, and three vice-presidents: Greene, Knox, and Hamilton. Also Calm’s secretary, Miss Taggert, and Miss Mason, who kept the minutes of the meeting. The seventh chair is mine, and the eighth one is kept for Mr. Black, who never comes down for the meetings anymore.”

“There was resentment between Calm and Black?”

“A bit. You trying to make a mystery out of this?”

The detective shrugged. “Looks like pretty much of a mystery already.”

And McLove had to admit that it did.

He spent an hour with the police, both upstairs and down in the street. When they finally left just before noon, he went looking for Margaret Mason. She was back at her desk, surprisingly, looking as if nothing in the world had happened.

“How about lunch?” he said. “Maybe a martini would calm your nerves.”

“I’m all right now, thanks. The offer sounds good, but you’ve got a date.” She passed him an inter-office memo. It was signed by William T. Knox, and it requested McLove’s presence in his office at noon.

“I suppose I have to tell them what I know.”

“Which is?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. All I know is a dozen different things that couldn’t have happened to Calm. I’ll try to get out of there as soon as I can. Will you wait for me? Till one, anyway?” he asked.

“Sure. Good luck.”

He returned her smile, then went down the long hallway to Knox’s office. It wasn’t surprising to find Hamilton and Greene already there, and he settled down in the remaining chair feeling himself the center of attention.

“Well?” Knox asked. “Where is he?”

“Gentlemen, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“He’s dead, of course.” Jason Greene spoke up.

“Probably,” McLove agreed. “But where’s the body?”

Hamilton rubbed his fingers together in a nervous gesture. “That’s what we have to find out. My phone has been ringing for an hour. The brokers are going wild, to say nothing of Pittsburgh!”

McLove nodded. “I gather the merger stands or falls on Billy Calm.”

“Right! If he’s dead, it’s dead.”

Jason Greene spoke again. “Billy Calm was a great man, and I’d be the last person in the world to try to sink the merger for which he worked so hard. But he’s dead, all right. And there’s just one place the body could have gone.”

“Where’s that?” Knox asked.

“It landed on a passing truck or something like that, of course.”

Hamilton’s eyes widened. “Sure!” he remarked sarcastically.

But McLove reluctantly shook his head. “That was the first thought the police had. We checked it out and it couldn’t have happened. This building is set back from the street; it has to be, on account of this sheer glass wall. I doubt if a falling body could hit the street, and even if it did, the traffic lane on this side is torn up for repairs. And there’s been a policeman on duty there all morning. The body didn’t land on the sidewalk or the street, and no truck or car passed anywhere near enough.”

W. T. Knox blinked and ran a hand through his thinning, but still wavy, hair. “If he didn’t go down, where did he go? Up?”

“Maybe he never jumped,” Hamilton suggested. “Maybe Margaret made the whole thing up.”

McLove wondered at his words, wondered if Margaret had been objecting to some of his jokes again. “You forget that I was out there with her. I saw her face when that window smashed. The best actress in the world couldn’t have faked that expression. Besides, I saw him go in — or at least I saw the door closing after him. It couldn’t close by itself.”

“And the room was empty when you two entered it a moment later,” Knox said. “Therefore Billy must have gone through the window. We have to face the fact. He couldn’t have been hiding under the table.”

“If he didn’t go down,” Sam Hamilton said, “he went up! By a rope to the roof or another window.”

But once more McLove shook his head. “You’re forgetting that none of the windows can be opened. And it’s a long way up to the roof. The people checked it, though. They found nothing but an unmarked sea of melting snow and slush. Not a footprint, just a few pigeon tracks.”

Jason Greene frowned across the desk. “But he didn’t go down, up, or sideways, and he didn’t stay in the room.”

McLove wondered if he should tell them his idea, or wait until later. He decided now was as good a time as any. “Suppose he did jump, and something caught him on the way down. Suppose he’s hanging there now, hidden by the fog.”

“A flagpole? Something like that?”

“But there aren’t any,” Knox protested. “There’s nothing but a smooth glass wall.”

“There’s one thing,” McLove reminded them, looking at their expectant faces. “The thing they use to wash the windows.”

Jason Greene walked to the window. “We can find out easily enough. The sun has just about burned the fog away.”

They couldn’t see from that side of the building, so they rode down in the elevator to the street. As quickly as it had come, the fog seemed to have vanished, leaving a clear and sparkling sky with a brilliant sun seeking out the last remnants of the previous day’s snow. The four of them stood in the street, in the midst of digging equipment abandoned for the lunch hour, and stared up at the great glass side of the Jupiter Steel Building.

There was nothing to see. No body dangling in space, no window-washing scaffold. Nothing.

“Maybe he took it back up to the roof,” Knox suggested.

“No footprints, remember?” McLove tried to cover his disappointment. “It was a long shot, anyway. The police checked the tenants for several floors beneath the broken window, and none of them saw anything. If Calm had landed on a scaffold, someone would have noticed it.”

For a while longer they continued staring up at the building, each of them drawn to the tiny speck on the twenty-first floor where cardboard temporarily covered the shattered glass. “Why,” Jason Greene asked suddenly, “didn’t the cop down here see falling glass when it hit? Was the window broken from the outside?”

McLove smiled. “No, the glass all went out, and down. It was the drilling again; the sound covered the glass hitting. And that section of the sidewalk was blocked off. The policeman didn’t hear it hit, but we were able to find pieces of it. You can see where they were swept up.”

W.T. Knox sighed deeply. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go to lunch. Maybe we can all think better on a full stomach.”

They separated a few moments after that, and McLove went back up to 21 for Margaret Mason. He found her in Billy Calm’s office with Shirley Taggert. They were on their knees, running their hands over the oak-paneled wall.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

“Just playing detective,” Margaret said. “It was Shirley’s idea. She mentioned about how Mr. Calm always wanted the office door left exactly as it was, and with the directors’ room right next door, even though both rooms were really too small. She thought of a secret panel of some sort.”

“Margaret!” Shirley got reluctantly to her feet. “You make it sound like something out of a dime novel. Really, though, it was a possibility. It would explain how he left the room without jumping from the window.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” McLove said. “Did you find anything?”

“Nothing. And we’ve been over both sides of the wall.”

“They don’t build them like they used to in merrie old England. Let’s forget it and have lunch.”

Shirley Taggert smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt. “You two go ahead. You don’t want me along.”

She was gone before they could protest, and McLove wasn’t about to protest too loudly anyway. He didn’t mind Shirley as a coworker but, like everyone else, he was acutely conscious of her position in the office scheme of things. Even now, with Billy Calm vanished into the blue, she was still a dangerous force not to be included at social hours.

He went downstairs with Margaret and they found an empty booth at the basement restaurant across the street. It was a place they often went after work for a drink, though lately he’d seen less of her outside of office hours. Thinking back to the first time he’d become aware of Margaret, he only had fuzzy memories of the tricks Sam Hamilton used to play. He loved to walk up behind the secretaries and tickle them — or occasionally even unzip their dresses — and he had quickly discovered that Margaret Mason was a likely candidate for his attentions. She always rewarded his efforts with a lively scream, without ever really getting upset.

It had been a rainy autumn evening some months back that McLove’s path crossed hers most violently, linking them with a secret that made them drinking companions if nothing more. He’d been at loose ends that evening, and wandered into a little restaurant over by the East River. Surprisingly enough, Margaret Mason had been there, defending her honor in a back booth against a very drunk escort. McLove had moved in, flattened him with one punch, and they had left him collapsed against a booth.

After that, on different drinking occasions, she had poured out the sort of lonely story he might have expected. And he’d listened and lingered, and sometimes fruitlessly imagined that he might become one of the men in her life. He knew there was no one for a long time after the bar incident, just as he knew now, by her infrequent free evenings, that there was someone again. Their drinking dates were more often being confined to lunch hours, when even two martinis were risky, and she never talked about being lonely or bored.

This day, over the first drink, she said, “It was terrible, really terrible.”

“I know. It’s going to get worse, I’m afraid. He’s going to turn up somewhere.”

“Dead or alive?”

“I wish I knew.”

She lit a cigarette. “Will you be blamed for it?”

“I couldn’t be expected to guard him from himself. Besides, I wasn’t hired as a personal bodyguard. I’m chief of security, and that’s all. I’m not a bodyguard or a detective. I don’t know the first thing about fingerprints or clues. All I know is about people.”

“What do you know about the Jupiter people?”

McLove finished his drink before answering. “Very little, really. Except for you. Hamilton and Knox and Greene and the rest of them are nothing more than names and faces. I’ve never even had a drink with any of them. I sit around at those meetings and, frankly, I’m bored stiff. If anybody tries to blame me for this thing, they’ll be looking for a new security chief.”

Margaret’s glass was empty too, and he signaled the waiter for two more. It was that sort of day. When they came, he noticed that her usually relaxed face was a bit tense, and the familiar sparkle of her blue eyes was no longer in evidence. She’d been through a lot that morning, and even the drinks were failing to relax her.

“Maybe I’ll quit with you,” she said.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve talked. How have things been?”

“All right.” She said it with a little shrug.

“The new boyfriend?”

“Don’t call him that, please.”

“I hope he’s an improvement over the last one.”

“So do I. At my age, you get involved with some strange ones.”

“Do you love him?”

She thought for a moment and then answered, “I guess I do.”

He lit another cigarette. “When Billy Calm passed your desk this morning, did he seem—?” The sentence stopped in the middle, cut short by a sudden scream from the street. McLove stood up and looked toward the door, where a waiter was already running outside to see what had happened.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, but there seems to be a crowd gathering. Come on!”

Outside, they crossed the busy street and joined the crowd on the sidewalk of the Jupiter Building. “What happened?” Margaret asked somebody.

“Guy jumped, I guess.”

They fought their way through now, and McLove’s heart was pounding with anticipation of what they would see. It was Billy Calm, all right, crushed and dead and looking very small. But there was no doubt it was he.

A policeman arrived from somewhere with a blanket and threw it over the thing on the sidewalk. McLove saw Sam Hamilton fighting his way through the crowd to their side. “Who is it?” Hamilton asked, but he too must have known.

“Billy,” McLove told him. “It’s Billy Calm.”

Hamilton stared at the blanket for a moment and then looked at his watch. “Three hours and forty-five minutes since he jumped. I guess he must have taken the long way down.”

W.T. Knox was pacing the floor like a caged animal, and Shirley Taggert was sobbing silently in a corner chair. It was over. Billy Calm had been found. The reaction was only beginning to set in. The worst, they all realized, was still ahead.

Jason Greene glared at Hamilton as he came into the office. “Well, the market’s closed. Maybe you can stay off that phone for a while now.”

Sam Hamilton didn’t lose his grim smile. “Right now the price of Jupiter stock happens to be something that’s important to all of us. You may be interested to know that it fell fourteen more points before they had to suspend trading in it for the rest of the session. They still don’t have a closing price on it.”

Knox held up both hands. “All right, all right! Let’s everybody calm down and try to think. What do the police say, McLove?”

Feeling as if he were only a messenger boy between the two camps, McLove replied, “Billy was killed by the fall, and he’d been dead only a few minutes when they examined him. Body injuries would indicate that he fell from this height.”

“But where was he for nearly four hours?” Greene wanted to know. “Hanging there, invisible, outside the window?”

Shirley Taggert collected herself enough to join the conversation. “He got out of that room somehow and then came back and jumped later,” she said. “That’s how it must have been.”

But McLove shook his head. “I hate to throw cold water on logical explanations, but that’s how it couldn’t have been. Remember, the windows in this building can’t be opened. No other window has been broken, and the one on this floor is still covered by cardboard.”

“The roof!” Knox suggested.

“No. There still aren’t any footprints on the roof. We checked.”

“Didn’t anybody see him falling?”

“Apparently not till just before he hit.”

“The thing’s impossible,” Knox said.

“No.”

They were all looking at McLove. “Then what happened?” Greene asked.

“I don’t know what happened, except for one thing. Billy Calm didn’t hang in space for four hours. He didn’t fall off the roof, or out of any other window, which means he could only have fallen from the window in the directors’ room.”

“But the cardboard...”

“Somebody replaced it afterwards. And that means...”

“It means Billy was murdered,” Knox breathed. “It means he didn’t commit suicide.”

McLove nodded. “He was murdered, and by somebody on this floor. Probably by somebody in this room.” He glanced around.

Night settled cautiously over the city, with a scarlet sunset to the west that clung inordinately long to its reign over the skies. The police had returned, and the questioning went on, concurrently with the long-distance calls to Pittsburgh and five other cities where Jupiter had mills. There was confusion, somehow more so with the coming of darkness to the outer world. Secretaries and workers from the other floors gradually drifted home, but on 21 life went on.

“All right,” Knox breathed finally as it was nearing eight o’clock. “We’ll call a directors’ meeting for Monday morning, to elect a new president. That should give the market time to settle down, and let us know just how bad things really are. At the same time, we’ll issue a statement about the proposed merger. I gather we’re in agreement that it’s a dead issue for the time being.”

Sam Hamilton nodded, and Jason Greene reluctantly shrugged his assent. Shirley Taggert looked up from her pad. “What about old Israel Black? With Mr. Calm dead, he’ll be back in the picture.”

Jason Greene shrugged. “Let him come. We can keep him in line. I never thought the old guy was so bad anyway, not really.”

It went on like this, the talk, the bickering, the occasional flare of temper, until nearly midnight. Finally, McLove felt he could excuse himself and head for home. In the outer office, Margaret was straightening her desk, and he was surprised to realize that she was still around. He hadn’t seen her in the past few hours.

“I thought you went home,” he said.

“They might have needed me.”

“They’ll be going all night at this rate. How about a drink?”

“I should get home.”

“All right. Let me take you, then. The subways aren’t safe at this hour.”

She turned her face up to smile at him. “Thanks, McLove. I can use someone like you tonight.”

They went down together in the elevator, and out into a night turned decidedly coolish. He skipped the subway and hailed a cab. Settled back on the red leather, he asked, “Do you want to tell me about it, Margaret?”

He couldn’t see her face in the dark, but after a moment she asked, “Tell you what?”

“What really happened. I’ve got part of it doped out already, so you might as well tell me the whole thing.”

“I don’t know what you mean, McLove. Really,” she protested.

“All right,” he said, and was silent for twenty blocks. Then, as they stopped for a traffic light, he added, “This is murder, you know. This isn’t a kid’s game or a simple love affair.”

“There are some things you can’t talk over with anyone. I’m sorry. Here’s my place. You can drop me at the corner.”

He got out with her and paid the cab driver. “I think I’d like to come up,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry, McLove, I’m awfully tired.”

“Want me to wait for him down here?”

She sighed and led the way inside, keeping silent until they were in the little three-room apartment he’d visited only once before. Then she shrugged off her raincoat and asked, “How much do you know?”

“I know he’ll come here tonight, of all nights.”

“What was it? What told you?”

“A lot of things. The elevator, for one.”

She sat down. “What about the elevator?”

“Right after Billy Calm’s supposed arrival, and suicide, I ran to his private elevator. It wasn’t on 21. It had to come up from below. He never rode any other elevator. When I finally remembered it, I realized he hadn’t come up on that one, or it would still have been there.”

Margaret sat frozen in the chair, her head cocked a little to one side as if listening. “What does that matter to you? You told me just this noon that none of them meant anything to you.”

“They didn’t, they don’t. But I guess you do, Margaret. I can see what he’s doing to you, and I’ve got to stop it before you get in too deep.”

“I’m in about as deep as I can ever be, right now.”

“Maybe not.”

“You said you believed me. You told them all that I couldn’t have been acting when I screamed out his name.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking that he’d heard something in the hallway. Then he said, “I did believe you. But then after the elevator bit, I realized that you never called Calm by his first name. It was always Mr. Calm, not Billy, and it would have been the same even in a moment of panic. Because he was still the president of the company. The elevator and the name — I put them together, and I knew it wasn’t Billy Calm who had walked into that directors’ room.”

There was a noise at the door, the sound of a familiar key turning in the lock. “No,” she whispered, almost to herself, “no, no, no...”

“And that should be our murderer now,” McLove said, leaping to his feet.

“Billy!” she screamed. “Billy, run! It’s a trap!”

But McLove was already to the door, yanking it open, staring into the startled, frightened face of W.T. Knox.

Sometimes it ends with a flourish, and sometimes with the dull thud of a collapsing dream. For Knox, the whole thing had been only an extension of some sixteen hours in his life span. The fantastic plot, which had been set in motion by his attempt at suicide that morning at the Jupiter Steel Building, came to an end when he succeeded in leaping to his death from the bathroom window of Margaret’s apartment, while they sat waiting for the police to come.

The following morning, with only two hours’ sleep behind him, McLove found himself facing Greene and Hamilton and Shirley Taggert once more, telling them the story of how it had been. There was an empty chair in the office too, and he wondered vaguely whether it had been meant for Knox or Margaret.

“He was a poor guy at the end of his rope,” McLove told them. “He was deeply involved in an affair with Margaret Mason, and he’d sunk all his money into a desperate gamble that the merger wouldn’t go through. He sold a lot of Jupiter stock short, figuring that when the merger talks collapsed the price would fall sharply. Only, Billy Calm called from the plane yesterday morning and said the merger was on. Knox thought about it for an hour or so, and did some figuring. When he realized he’d be wiped out, he went into the directors’ room to commit suicide.”

“Why? Why couldn’t he jump out his own window?”

“Because there’s a setback two stories down on his side. He couldn’t have cleared it. He wanted a smooth drop to the sidewalk. Billy Calm could hardly have taken a running jump through the window. It was far off the floor for even a tall man, and Billy was short. And remember the slivers of glass at the bottom of the pane? When I remembered them, and remembered the height of the bottom sill from the floor, I knew that no one — especially a short man — could have gone through that window without knocking them out. No, Knox passed Margaret’s desk, muttered some sort of farewell, and then entered the room just as I came out of Calm’s office. He smashed the window with a chair so he wouldn’t have to try to dive through the thick glass, head first. And then he got ready to jump.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because he heard Margaret shout his name from the outer office. And with the shouted word Billy, a sudden plan came to him in that split second. He recrossed the small office quickly, and stood behind the door as we entered, knowing I would think it was Billy Calm who had jumped. As soon as we were in the room, he simply stepped out and stood there. I thought he had entered the room with Margaret and me. I never gave it a second thought, because I was looking for Calm. But Margaret fainted when she saw he was still alive.”

“But she said it was Billy Calm who entered the office,” Greene protested.

“Not until later. She was starting to deny it, in fact, when she saw Knox and fainted. Remember, he carried her into the next room, and he was alone with her when she came to. He told her his money would be safe only if people thought Calm dead for a few hours. So she went along with her lover; I needn’t remind you he was a handsome fellow, even though he was married. She went along with what we all thought happened, not realizing it would lead to murder.”

Sam Hamilton lit a cigar. “The stock did go down.”

“But not enough. And Knox knew Calm’s arrival would reactivate the merger and ruin everything. I don’t think he planned to kill Calm in the beginning, but as the morning wore on it became the only way out. He waited in the private elevator when he knew Billy was due to arrive, slugged him, carried his small body to that window while we were all out to lunch, and threw him out, replacing the cardboard afterwards.”

“And the stock went down some more,” Hamilton said.

“That’s right.”

“She called him Billy,” Shirley reminded them.

“It was his name. We all called him W.T., but he signed his memo to me William T. Knox. I suppose the two of them thought it was a great joke, her calling him Billy when they were together.”

“Where is she now?” someone asked.

“The police are still questioning her. I’m going down there now, to be with her. She’s been through a lot.” He thought probably this would be his final day at Jupiter Steel. Somehow he was tired of these faces and their questions.

But as he got to his feet, Sam Hamilton asked, “Why wasn’t Billy here for the meeting at ten? Where was he for those missing hours? And how did Knox know when he would really arrive?”

“Knox knew because Billy phoned him, as he had earlier in the morning.”

“Phoned him? From where?”

McLove turned to stare out the window, at the clear blue of the morning sky. “From his private plane. Billy Calm was circling the city for nearly three hours. He couldn’t land because of the fog.”

Copyright ©1965 by Edward D. Hoch