Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

50 by Josh Pachter

Fifty years ago this month, Josh Pachter appeared in EQMM’s Department of First Stories, while still a teenager! In the intervening years he’s authored more than sixty stories, many of them collaborations with other authors — making him one of the most successful literary collaborators in our genre. He’s also one of mystery’s foremost translators. To express our congratulations, we’ve posted his 1968 first story on elleryqueemnysterymagazine.com!

The leaves outside his office window had burned, almost without his notice, from green to gold to gone. There were a few stragglers, he saw now, few enough to count.

Professor Griffen found that he was counting them, realized what he was doing, and forced himself to drag his eyes away from the window and back to his computer. From the speakers on either side of the monitor, James Taylor sang about fire and rain, and the coincidence reminded him that he was supposed to be updating his lecture notes on Robert Frost for a generation of students — a giggle of girls, a bluster of boys — whose mental temperature had devolved into such lukewarmth he despaired of ever convincing them that fire and ice were momentous enough to even momentarily divert their attention from their Instagram and Twitter feeds.

There were fewer words on his screen than leaves on the trees, and he felt himself no more capable of adding to the former tally than to the latter.

“Thought I’d see you, thought I’d see you, fire and rain, now...”

James Taylor’s voice faded away, was replaced by “Fifty Years After the Fair,” and not for the first time he marveled at iTunes’s telepathic ability to follow — or lead? — his thoughts.

How, he wondered, could he possibly capture the interest of the teenagers in his freshman lit class? He’d been a teenager himself, once upon a time — but it was fifty years after that fair. Half a century ago, his widowed father and three siblings had clustered around the 19-inch television in the family room to listen to Walter Cronkite tell them about Vietnam on the evening news. Today, with their screens in their pockets and five hundred channels to choose from instead of three, all his students seemed to know or care about was which Kardashian was having sex with which football player or rapper...

“Fifty years after the fair,” Aimee Mann sang, “I drink from a different cup. But it does no good to compare, ’cause nothing ever measures up.”

He turned away again, away from both monitor and window, and let his gaze drift across the spines of his dearest friends, his books, the fat poetry anthologies and slender chap-books and single-author collections he had accumulated over the course of his career.

Perhaps it was the song that steered his fingers to the lineup of old magazines on the bookcase’s bottom shelf. There were several dozen of them, long-ignored souvenirs of his youth. He slid the left-most volume free and held it in his hands, surprised to see how well the green and red and yellow cover had withstood the passing of five decades.

“9 NEW stories,” the bold red letters beneath the yellow words that identified the publication proudly announced. He counted only six writers listed on the cover — Hugh Pentecost, Lawrence Treat, Agatha Christie, Berkely Mather, Celia Fremlin, George Harmon Coxe — then gingerly opened the old magazine and smiled to see his own name included in the table of contents.

A folded sheet of paper tucked between the pages marked the location of his contribution. He’d long since forgotten that editor Frederic Dannay — who, with his cousin Manfred B. Lee, had written those marvelous novels and short stories, beginning way back in the late 1920s — had devoted an entire page of the magazine, page 106, to an introduction.

“Department of First Stories,” he read. “This is the 325th ‘first story’ to be published by Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine... another ‘first’ by a teenager (God bless ’em!)...”

And then, on the facing page, the title and byline:

He sat there, completely absorbed, for fifteen minutes, rereading the story for the first time in — how long? — certainly thirty years, probably forty. It wasn’t bad, really, was actually rather good for the sixteen-year-old he’d been when he wrote it, especially if he compared it to the drivel produced by the majority of his current students, who were two or three years older than he’d been when he’d written it back in 1968.

The professor’s father, Ross Griffen, a homicide detective with the Tyson County Police Department, had been a lifelong fan of detective fiction, and he’d somehow convinced his wife to allow him to name their four children after the heroes — and one heroine — of his literary passion. Sherlock Holmes Griffen, Jane Marple Griffen, Ellery Queen Griffen, and Nero Wolfe Griffen. For the purposes of this, his first short story, young Ellery had expanded the family to eleven children, adding Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, Parker Pyne, Perry Mason, Augustus Van Dusen, Gideon Fell, and John Jericho to the brood.

In his debut outing, the actual E.Q. Griffen had provided his fictional namesake with two invented mysteries to solve, a trivial neighborhood case of some stolen apple pies and a dying-message murder brought home to the dinner table by the Griffens’ paterfamilias. And the fictional E.Q. Griffen had solved the murder by employing an Ellery Queen-like combination of deductive reasoning and a flash of inspiration — thus “earning his name,” in the parlance of the make-believe family he had based on his actual family — while completely failing to solve the case of the missing pies.

Cute. Of course, his first and middle names and age had been what had caught Fred Dannay’s eye. But the story itself had a certain charm, the professor thought now. He wondered why he’d added only seven extra siblings to the family, when one more would have resulted in an even dozen, which ought to have been much more satisfying to his mathematically inclined brain. He wondered also why neither he nor Fred Dannay had noticed the anachronism of naming one of the invented children after Hugh Pentecost’s John Jericho, a character who hadn’t been created until the middle sixties and thus couldn’t possibly have been a favorite from Ross Griffen’s childhood.

According to Fred Dannay’s introduction, Ellery had already “roughed out” plots for Gideon Fell Griffen and Augie Van Dusen Griffen stories by the time this first one appeared in print. He couldn’t remember ever having actually written those, though perhaps he had and Mr. Dannay had rejected them. There had in fact been a couple of sequels — “E.Q. Griffen’s Second Case” in 1970, and “Sam Buried Caesar,” featuring Nero Wolfe Griffen, in ’71 — but after that he’d moved on to creating fiction not about his imaginary self and siblings, one or two stories a year until the birth of his daughter in 1986, then fewer until she was grown and flown, then more again thereafter.

The professor noted that, in yet another instance of iTunes mind meld, his speakers had segued into Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”

“I’m ten years burning down the road. Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go...”

No, he wasn’t ready to think another decade into the future. In ten years, he would be seventy-six, an old man, his roads, his bridges burned. Now, at “only” sixty-six, he could still delude himself into thinking of himself as middle-aged.

He sighed, absently retrieved the folded bookmark from his desk, and began to return it to its place, but found his curiosity piqued and unfolded it.

It was a photocopy of a sheet of ordinary lined notebook paper, and in the center of the page was the number 50 in large sprawling numerals.

He blinked at the odd coincidence, then suddenly recalled what that faded piece of paper was, and the walls of his office and the leaves on the trees and the last half century of his life dissolved into nothingness, leaving him immersed in a memory he had long since left behind...

“Of course, not all mysteries are crimes,” Ross Griffen said, reaching for another slice of pizza. Contributor’s copies of the December 1968 issue of EQMM had arrived in that afternoon’s mail, and the inspector had taken the family out for everyone’s favorite dinner to celebrate. “Examples, please?”

“Stonehenge,” said Sherlock, whose knowledge of the geography of the British Isles was as sharp as his namesake’s, if not sharper.

“How the Egyptians built the pyramids,” Nero added, studiously picking pepperoni off his own second slice.

“The disappearance of Amelia Ear hart,” said Jane.

“That one might have been a crime,” Ellery pointed out. “Someone might have sabotaged her plane, or her navigator — Ed Noonan? — might have—”

“Fred Noonan,” their father put in.

“—Fred Noonan,” Ellery went on, “might have killed her.”

“Possible,” the inspector conceded. “But the point I want to make is that not all crimes are mysteries either — and I have an example from right here in Tyson County.”

The four kids scooched their chairs closer to the round table and fixed their attention on their father, who they knew was about to share a new case with them — something the four of them loved even more than they loved pizza.

“Solomon Kaine,” the inspector began, “was a nationally known military historian specializing in the armies of the Roman Empire and a full professor and chair of the history department at an Ivy League university. About five years ago, though, when his wife Abby died of cancer in her early forties, Kaine gave up his tenure and moved here with their two children — Solomon Junior and Romy — to take a much less visible job teaching Western civ at Tyson County Community College. He’s been here ever since, and you probably know his kids, they both go to your school. Solomon Junior’s a senior—”

“He’s president of the student council,” Sherlock cut in, “and a really cool guy, always ready to help you with your homework, if you’re having trouble understanding how to do it.”

“Everybody calls him Solo, because he sings in the choir,” added Jane dreamily. “He has a gorgeous voice. Tenor, clear as a bell.”

“—and Romy’s a junior,” the inspector went on, “a year ahead of you, Ellery. Do you know her?”

“Not well. She’s pretty quiet, keeps to herself, mostly. If she’s got friends, I don’t know who they are.”

“I’ve heard people say,” said Jane, all seriousness now, “that her father’s been, well, molesting her. I don’t know if there’s any truth to it or not, it’s just rumors.”

Inspector Griffen leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Apparently it is true,” he said, “or at least it was, but Professor Kaine will never molest his daughter — or anyone else — again. He’s dead.”

Nero, the youngest, looked up sharply. “Dead?”

The inspector nodded. “Solomon Junior called the station about eleven-fifteen last night. His sister had finally told him about their father’s... well, let’s say ‘actions,’ and Solo confronted him. Solomon Senior basically told him to mind his own business, and Solo said he just lost it, picked up a letter opener from his father’s desk, and stabbed him in the chest with it.”

“No,” Jane whispered, horrified.

“I’m afraid so. Solo ran off, but then he realized that he had to take responsibility for what he’d done, and he found a pay phone and called that new nine-one-one number. He was waiting outside the house when the squad cars got there, and he let us in and took us back to his father’s study.”

“Where you found Solomon Senior, dead,” said Nero flatly.

“Correct, slumped over his desk. As it turns out, though, Senior hadn’t died right away. After Solo stabbed him and ran, he lived long enough to pick up a pen and begin to write his son’s name.”

The inspector took a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and shoved the metal pizza tray aside to make room for it in the center of the table. It was a photocopy of a sheet of ordinary lined notebook paper, and in the center of the page were the letters S-O in large sprawling capitals.

“Solo,” Ellery said slowly.

“Or Solomon,” his father amended. “Or Solomon Junior. In any case, he was identifying his son as his killer, but he died before he could finish writing. Which turns out to be irrelevant, since Solo freely confessed to the crime.”

“Where is he now?” asked Sherlock.

The inspector sighed. “In a holding cell at headquarters. He’ll sit there until his trial.”

“They won’t let him out on bail?” said Jane.

“Probably not, honey. He’ll be charged with second-degree murder, and I think the judge is unlikely to agree to bail. Even if he does, he’ll set it so high that there’s no way Solo will be able to bond out. I’m afraid he’ll stay in jail until — well, until he goes to prison.”

“A crime but not a mystery,” Ellery said slowly. “Q.E.D.”

The professor blinked his eyes and returned to the present.

His father’s prediction, he remembered, had been correct. Solo Kaine had been charged with murder in the second degree, the district attorney had agreed to let him plead down to manslaughter, and the teenager had been sentenced to ten years.

Which meant, he realized, that in principle Solo had been back out in the world for the last four decades.

He found himself wondering what had happened to the boy — now, of course, a boy no longer but a man of almost seventy. Had he put his incarceration behind him and managed to make something of the rest of his life, or had prison destroyed his future, as it destroyed the futures of so many young men, not just the career criminals but also those whose otherwise quiet lives had been ruined by a single error in judgment, a single momentary loss of reason and control?

He swiveled decisively back to his monitor, poised his fingers above his keyboard for a moment, and began to type.

A search on “Solomon Kaine” (without the quotation marks) produced almost half a million hits in 0.86 seconds, and Ellery was confused by what showed up on his screen until he realized — after considerably longer than eight-tenths of a second — that Google had autocorrected his accurate spelling to the in-this-case-inaccurate “Solomon Kane,” which turned out to be the title of a 2009 fantasy film, based on a comic-book hero and starring a roster of people he’d never heard of... along with, oddly, Max von Sydow, who he’d thought was long dead.

Clicking on “Did you mean: solomon kaine” took another half a second and delivered just over a hundred thousand hits. He scrolled down the first page and found links to reviews of several of Kaine Senior’s books — most of which were long out of print, but one, a text on the Punic Wars, was still available on Amazon and apparently in use at a number of universities — and, near the bottom of the page, an obituary from the Tyson Times, dated November 21, 1968.

Rather than read the obit, the professor launched a new search, this time on “Solomon Kaine Junior” (with the quotation marks). In an even smaller fraction of a second, he was presented with under a thousand hits, beginning with news stories about the murder and Solo’s subsequent plea bargain and sentencing... and then this headline jumped out at him: “Youth, 20, killed in prison attack.”

Ellery’s heart stopped.

Dreading what he would find, he clicked on the link and read the story.

And yes, poor Solo, in the second year of his ten-year sentence, had tried to intervene when a group of older convicts ganged up on a newly incarcerated felon at the state penitentiary, and had himself been stabbed in the stomach with a shank that had been filed down from the grip end of a plastic toothbrush. He had died of his wounds in the prison hospital, without regaining consciousness. The inmate he had been trying to save had also been killed in the incident.

Dead at twenty. What a tragic end to a tragic story.

Or was it the end of the story?

Once upon a time, criminal investigation had meant legwork, had meant visiting newspaper morgues and libraries and police departments and victims’ and witnesses’ and suspects’ homes and offices in person. But now, in 2018, the phrase “armchair detective” had taken on new meaning, and there was practically no limit to what you could learn, simply by letting your fingers do the walking.

Ellery did a search on “Romy Kaine” and came up completely empty. Of course, the girl had probably gotten married and taken her husband’s last name — and he recalled vaguely that “Romy” was a nickname, anyway, short for something else, like “Solo” was short for “Solomon.”

Romany? Romanette? He couldn’t recall. It was an unusual name, he thought, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Had he ever even known what it was?

Romanov? Romula? Romaine?

The only other Romy he’d ever heard of was Romy Schneider, the actress, so he looked her up and found that she’d been bom Rosemarie Magdalena Albach.

He tried “Rosemarie Magdalena Kaine” and then “Rosemarie Kaine,” thinking Solomon Senior or his wife might perhaps have been a fan.

Nothing.

And then — cursing himself for resorting to the notorious user-editable website he constantly cautioned his students to avoid — he backtracked to Romy Schneider’s Wikipedia page and learned that she hadn’t made her film debut until 1953, when, at the tender age of fifteen, she’d appeared in a German picture titled Wenn der Weisse Flieder wieder blüht.

So Romy Kaine — who was a year older than Ellery, who had himself been born in 1951 — couldn’t possibly have been named after the actress.

And then he cursed himself again for his slowness on the uptake and went back to the very first search page he’d consulted and clicked on Solomon Senior’s obituary.

And there it was: “Survived by his son, Solomon Kaine, Jr., and daughter, Romanelle Kaine.”

Romanelle.

Now that he saw the name in black and white on the screen, he felt certain he had not ever heard it before. To him, she had always been just Romy.

He searched on “Romanelle Kaine,” and there she was, almost instantly: Romanelle Kaine Washington. So she had married, after all, and had indeed taken her husband’s name.

And she — like her mother and father and brother before her — was also dead. She had died on February 23, 2015, according to her obituary, just before her sixty-fifth birthday, of lung cancer, leaving behind a devoted husband, Richard Washington, three grown children — two daughters and a son — and five loving grandchildren.

Lung cancer. Ellery wondered if she had been a smoker.

He picked up his faded bookmark and refolded it and reached for the magazine in which he’d rediscovered it to put it back where, after all this time, it seemed to belong.

And then he froze.

He unfolded the sheet of paper and stared at it — and asked himself a question he ought to have asked fifty years ago, a question he hadn’t asked, a question no one had thought to ask at the time.

If Solomon Kaine, Sr., had meant to identify his son as his killer, then why had he begun to write the word SOLOMON in the center of a sheet of paper? Why hadn’t he begun writing further to the left of the page?

Stop it, he told himself. Not every crime is a mystery.

The man had been stabbed with a letter opener, for Pete’s sake. He was dying. To give him credit for having the presence of mind to pay the slightest attention to the positioning of his message on the page would be a stretch, the sort of minutiae that Ellery’s namesake might well have integrated into one of his dying-message short stories or novels.

In the real world, though, the man would surely have grabbed a pen and begun to scrawl, without any thought whatsoever as to where he was scrawling.

But still...

The possibility nagged at him, and he felt that it connected to something else, to some nebulous factor that tickled the darkest corner of his mind.

What, he asked himself, if the letters S-O weren’t part of the victim’s final message but the entire thing, perfectly centered on the page?

S-O.

So.

So.

So what?

And then Ellery realized what it was that was bothering him.

When he had first drawn the old photocopy from its resting place and unfolded it, he had been thinking about the fiftieth anniversary of his first publication and had, thanks to the power of suggestion, seen the markings in the middle of the page as the numerals 5 and 0, and only a moment later remembered that they were instead the letters S and O.

What if, fifty years ago, the exact same thing had happened — but in reverse? When the police had been called out to the Kaine residence, had moved the dead man’s body and found his dying message beneath it, they had been thinking about Solomon Kaine, both the father who was dead and the son who had confessed to his murder. So they had quite naturally seen the markings as an S and an O, the first letters of the supposed killer’s name.

But what if the dying man had in fact written the numerals 5 and 0, after all? What if he had written exactly what he had been trying to write: the number 50?

Fifty.

What would have been the significance of that in the mind of a dying man?

Most Americans worked fifty weeks a year, devoting only two weeks to vacation.

He shook his head.

There were fifty states in the Union, had been for almost a decade by 1968, since Hawaii had become the fiftieth in 1959 — and it must have been around 1968, Ellery thought, that the television series Hawaii Five-O had debuted.

Five-O?

He snorted in irritation.

His fingers flew over his keyboard, and Google told him that there are Fifty Gates of Wisdom in the Kabbalah, that fifty is the atomic number of tin, that fifty is the smallest number that can be produced in two different ways by adding together two nonzero squares: 1² + 7² and 5² + 5².

He gritted his teeth.

Ridiculous. The same sort of incongruous foolishness the fictional Ellery Queen had so often considered and rejected in his own dying-message fiction.

Fifty.

Fifty.

“Are you reelin’ in the years,” Steely Dan asked from his speakers, “stowin’ away the time? Are you gatherin’ up the tears? Have you had enough of mine?”

Reelin’ in the years, he thought. Fifty years after the fair.

Years.

And then he remembered that Solomon Senior had been a historian, a specialist in ancient Roman military history, author of a book on the Punic Wars.

He Googled, felt momentarily hopeful when he saw that there had been three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, then swore aloud to see that the first of them had begun in 264 B.C. and the last had ended with the obliteration of Carthage in 146 B.C.

So, not the Punic Wars.

He searched on 50 B.C. and found that it was the year the Roman Republic had annexed Judea... and approximately the year in which the Asterix comic books were set.

In 50 A.D., the Dutch city of Utrecht was founded, and Cai Lun, the Chinese inventor of paper, was born. And Solomon Kaine’s message had been written on—

Ellery wished he had more hair, so he could rip it out in frustration.

Fifty.

Fifty years...

Of course, BC and AD weren’t the only years numbered 50.

In 1750, Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri was bom and Johann Sebastian Bach died.

In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter — a book he had taught his American Lit students dozens of times — was published, California became the thirty-first state, and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded.

In 1950, the year before Ellery was bom, Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison for perjury, Harry Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, and the Korean War began.

The Korean War.

And Solomon Senior was a military hist—

And then, all at once, fifty puzzle pieces fitted neatly together in that part of the professor’s brain where inspiration lurked.

Rumor had it that Solomon Kaine had been abusing his daughter Romy.

Romy Kaine had died in February of 2015, just before her sixty-fifth birthday, which meant she had been born in 1950, the year before Ellery.

Which fit, because Ellery had been born in ’51, and Romy was a year ahead of him in school.

And Solomon Senior was a historian, a specialist in the armies of Ancient Rome.

Who had named his daughter Romanelle.

Roman L.

In Roman numerals, L = 50.

And Romy Kaine was born in 1950.

Ellery drew a deep breath and let it out.

In 1968, when Solomon Senior was killed, his daughter Romy was eighteen. What if she was the one who had plunged that letter opener into her father’s chest? What if she had run off, not realizing that he was not yet dead? What if she had found her older brother and told him what she had done, and he — a really cool guy, Sherlock had called him, always ready to help, surely fiercely protective of his kid sister — had convinced her to let him take the blame for her desperate act?

What if he had gone into his father’s study, had wiped Romy’s prints from the letter opener and carefully replaced them with his own, had called the police to confess to the crime... all without realizing that his dying father had named Romy as his killer, leaving hidden beneath his body a message the police, with Solo’s confession at hand, had misunderstood?

For fifty years, the world had thought of Solo Kaine as a murderer. Now he, E.Q. Griffen, could set the record straight.

Or could he?

There was no way to prove, at this late date, what had really happened that night, half a century ago.

But at least he could offer a logical alternative explanation for the “facts” of the case that had been accepted for all these years, could show that perhaps young Solo had been nothing worse than a loving big brother who had made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his sister.

And then what?

What would the revelation of that possibility do to Richard Washington, to Romy’s children and grandchildren?

Ellery remembered a scrap of Latin he’d seen often in the Golden Age detective novels he’d been raised on.

Cui bono?

Who benefits?

Surely Solomon Senior could have taught him the original historical importance of that phrase, could have cited chapter and verse.

But Solomon Senior was dead.

And so was Solo, and so was Romy.

While Richard Washington and his descendants were — at least as of the publication of Romy’s obituary in 2015 — still alive.

Who would it benefit to tell them that their wife, their mother, their grandmother, was perhaps a murderess, no matter how understandable the horrible circumstances that had led her to her one moment of violence?

Ellery sat there at his desk for a long time, the sheet of paper in his hand, his eyes closed, his lips pursing slightly in and out — a habit he’d picked up from his brother Nero and had never lost.

Fifty years ago, at the ripe old age of sixteen, he’d thought of himself as an invincible crime buster, a Master Detective, all-knowing, able to leap tall mysteries in a single mental bound.

But not all crimes are mysteries, his father had cautioned him, using the case of the Solomon Kaines, père et fils, to make his point. And, he realized now, it had been that bursting of his poetic belief that law enforcement in real life was all about the unraveling of riddles, as it was in his beloved books, that had led Ellery to abandon his idea of becoming a policeman like his father and turn, like Kaine, to academia.

And now, fifty years after the fair, with the end of his journey almost visible through the mist and much closer to where he sat than its beginning, he saw himself for what he was: flawed, and limited, and every bit as capable of error as of wisdom.

But the law is the law, he told himself, even fifty years on. If not for the law, society crumbles and chaos reigns.

But which is the greater good, he asked himself, to uphold the law or to be a human being? Which is more important: being right, or being merciful?

“At the length,” Shakespeare’s Launcelot had declaimed in The Merchant of Venice, “truth will out.”

“Then you will know the truth,” said Jesus in The Gospel of John, “and the truth shall set you free.”

But what if the truth accomplished nothing of value, set no one free, and caused nothing but pain?

Was it better to tell a painful truth, or to let sleeping dogs lie?

Righteousness? Or mercy?

Ice? Or fire?

Which brought him back to Robert Frost.

The professor sighed, refolded the sheet of paper yet again, slipped it back into the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and slid the issue into its accustomed place at the far left end of the bottom shelf of his bookcase.

And then he swiveled back to his computer and resumed preparing his notes for tomorrow’s lecture.

© 2018 by Josh Pachter