Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 21, No. 115, June 1953

The Numbers Man by Anthony Boucher

Anne said: “I’m so glad you can make it for dinner on Saturday. We’re having Gregor Stolz for the weekend. I think you’ll enjoy him.”

I said something noncommittal about how I was sure I would, and certainly wouldn’t think of missing one of Anne’s curries. I looked in the mirror as I hung up the phone and my face was as blank as my words. There wasn’t anything I could say — there wasn’t any way I could tell Anne that having Gregor Stolz for the weekend meant murder.

I didn’t know it officially. There wasn’t any definite evidence I could point to, and my job is supposed to be cracking murders, not preventing them — though that’s any man’s job.

The oddest thing was that I not only didn’t know who might be killed, I had no idea who’d do the killing. I only knew that Gregor Stolz meant death.

I noticed him first on the Harkness case. You may not remember that — it didn’t get much of a play in the papers because Harkness cracked up and the psychiatrists took over and it never came to trial. Maybe you remember something about a man who was devilishly jealous of his sister and she got married secretly. Since he was old-fashioned enough to use a straight razor he was all equipped when he heard about the marriage.

Stolz came into it when we were trying to learn how Harkness had found out about the marriage. He was a friend of the family, I guess you call it. He admitted seeing Harkness earlier in the evening the night it all happened, and finally he admitted that he might have let something slip which gave the brother an idea of what was going on.

Something about him was familiar and it bothered me, but it wasn’t until the Harkness case was all wrapped up that I placed him.

He’d been a witness in the Bantock business, and I’m pretty sure you’ll remember that. It was splashed all over the papers. BERKELEY BANKER RUNS AMOK. Bantock came home plastered one night, took his World War I Service .45 and finished off his wife and his mother because they hated each other and both of them had threatened to leave and he couldn’t live without either of them. He didn’t either — live, I mean — not any longer than the time consumed by the trial and appeal.

And Gregor Stolz was the casual acquaintance whom Bantock had met in an Oakland bar that night. The defense had used him to emphasize how much Bantock had been drinking, to try and get a verdict of manslaughter instead of murder for him.

The name was familiar from some place else, too. I remembered it when Captain Strudd cited the Martin case as an example of how a murderer gets what’s coming to him. Young Martin at the University fed arsenic to his uncle only to learn that all Uncle’s money went to a foundation to prove that Queen Elizabeth wrote Shakespeare. He was furious on discovering the terms of the will, and kept saying that a friend named Gregor Stolz had assured him of his first-hand knowledge that he was Uncle’s heir. Martin was so mad about being fooled that he never even tried to play innocent. The trial was a formality, and Stolz never appeared as a witness.

Gregor Stolz had come to the Bay Region about six years ago. Since that time there had been seven murders and three suicides among the people he knew. For the most part, they didn’t know each other — he seemed to have many circles of friends. He got around. So did Typhoid Mary, I guess.

At first it might look like what insurance people call a “prone.” An accident prone is a guy who’s always around when industrial accidents happen — he doesn’t cause them, he doesn’t do anything, but if he’s in a plant the insurance company’s going to lose money. What sailors call a Jonah — same thing. And Gregor Stolz was a murder prone, a carrier, if you like that comparison better.

But you look closer and you see that Gregor Stolz had let something slip to Harkness, he had talked to Bantock in the bar while the banker was drinking himself into a killer, he had given young Martin an odd idea of Uncle’s will...

I was interested, to put it mildly. I did some checking on Gregor Stolz. His record was clean enough, on the surface. Born in Austria, came to America as a child, well-educated in the East, had a little money of his own and held a half-dozen insignificant jobs before he came into a good thing — a bequest almost as screwy as Uncle Martin’s. He was assured a good income from a trust for life so long as he wrote pamphlets and gave lectures propagandizing for a duodecimal system of numerical notation, whatever that was. I did check on the death of the man who had left him his trust fund. At the age of 87, he had died peacefully in his sleep while Gregor was a thousand miles away.

My favorite bar in San Francisco is the Tosca. The drinks are good and cheap, the customers are mostly elderly Italian businessmen who are good Joes, the walls live up to the name with paintings of Puccini and scenes from the story, and the jukebox is quiet and stocks a lot of opera.

I was drinking a caffé expresso, a strong, bitter, steamed coffee, with brandy in it, and listening to the juke-box when I recognized the voice from the next stool talking with the barkeep.

I turned around to Gregor Stolz and said: “Hi! How’s the witness?”

His face smiled politely. He said: “You remember me, Lieutenant?”

“Harkness,” I said, meaningfully.

He looked mournful and said: “A dreadful thing.”

I couldn’t contradict him. I just added: “Bantock.”

“That poor man,” he said sorrowfully.

I said: “Martin.”

His eyes got smaller and he looked at me carefully. I went on. I went down the list of seven murders and threw in the three suicides for good measure. When I was through, he said: “You are a good policeman, Lieutenant. You notice things and you collect data. Will you have another drink?”

I said, “Thanks” and he ordered. Then he sighed, said: “Yes. I have encountered more than my share of human tragedy.”

I said that was too bad, indeed it was, and just how did he explain it?

“I don’t know, Lieutenant.” His voice was soft and low. “Of course, as a mathematician and lecturer, I do have a theory...”

“Yes?”

The drinks came and he sipped his thoughtfully. “I think that every life has a possible murder in it. Or, rather let me express it a trifle more exactly — every domestic situation contains an inherent motive for murder. You are a married man, Lieutenant?”

“No.”

He smiled and said: “How fortunate. But marriage is not the only domestic situation. Everywhere there is murder, lurking, dormant. Most of these murders never happen — at least on the physical plane, which is perhaps the kindest way. But now and then something happens to stir the sleeping dogs. As for me, you may simply say that I bear a peculiar scent which arouses dogs from sleep.”

The coffee tasted more bitter than usual. I said: “How unfortunate.”

“Or if you prefer a chemical metaphor — you know how two chemicals may lie side by side inactive until a third is placed with them. The third takes no part in the resulting reaction, but it is essential to it.”

“I’ve been to high school,” I said. “A catalyst.”

He nodded. “I assure you, Lieutenant, that I am almost afraid to meet new people. Too often have I seen this catalytic explosion. And yet my work — my writing and lecturing — makes contacts for me. I can hardly avoid it.”

I finished my drink. “I’m weeping,” I said. “It’s just too pathetic about your fatal scent. But let me tell you something.”

“Yes?” he asked warily.

“The next time I run into any reactions with you as catalyst, you’re going to see how you like indefinite confinement as a material witness.”

He smiled and his voice had a light lilt to it. “That is the best you can do, Lieutenant, isn’t it?”

“You know what I ought to do.”

“And you know there isn’t a jury on earth that would pay attention. Especially since the peculiarities of legal purity would insist on the trial of one case at a time.” He slid easily off the chair. “Goodbye, Lieutenant. We shall probably meet again some day.”

I didn’t see Gregor Stolz again until Anne’s dinner party, when I saw him next to Anne helping her pour the sherry. He liked to help people.

Anne was dressed in something long and white that made her look fresh and floating, the way she had looked that night after her graduation when we decided rookie policemen shouldn’t think about marriage. The men wore tuxes, which I’m not used to, but it was the least you could do to justify that enormous house and grounds up on Queen’s Road.

I told Otis I was glad to see him and I meant it. He was the husband Anne deserved and I don’t mean his money. He’d have done all right without that. He was a research chemist at Conch Oil and you know the kind of mind that means — sharp and precise and just a little nervous and erratic. His eyes grinned at me through the thick glasses, but there were some fine new wrinkles around them that hadn’t been there last time, and I didn’t think they came from grinning. He took me over and introduced me to a good-looking young Navy officer, his cousin, Lieutenant Commander Quentin Lyons.

Then Anne brought Gregor Stolz up to us — he was being helpful, carrying the tray of sherry glasses — and said: “I don’t know if you’ve met the lieutenant? Mr. Stolz.”

I said: “We’ve met.”

“Under most distressing circumstances,” Stolz added gravely.

Anne said simply, “I’m sorry” and didn’t ask any questions. It showed a nice tact, but it might have been better if she’d pried a little.

The commander took over with a story he’d evidently started on earlier, about action he had seen in the South Pacific before being transferred to shore duty. I watched Anne while he talked and she reminded me of something but I couldn’t place it. Something from a play, I thought.

When we went into the diningroom, my eyes popped the way they always do when I see one of Anne’s curries. I said: “Whew! What a spread! And just what,” I pointed to one of the twenty-odd small dishes, “is this?”

Anne laughed. “That’s a new idea. Specialty of the house. It’s rendered lamb fat — you know, like pork cracklings, only lamb.”

Otis put his arm around her. “She looks like this and she can cook. What did I ever do to deserve her?”

“What indeed?” said Gregor Stolz.

It was a harmless remark, you’d think. Just a natural follow-up to Otis’s line — banal echo-effect. But Otis’s eyes met Stolz and something shot along his glance through his spectacles. Anne looked at the commander and for a second I would say her face showed terror.

Then she said: “Take whatever suits your taste and pile your plates very full — it’s unrationed lamb.” And it was just another dinner party, only better cooked than usual.

For a little while I didn’t pay much attention to the talk. I let my mouth glow with a blend of flavors and textures that was like good music. When I paid attention again, Gregor Stolz was talking.

“The logic of it is so absolute,” he said, “that it is doomed to failure. Some things are too cleverly true ever to be accepted.”

Such as, I thought, the pattern of murder prones. But I went on listening.

“Place yourself,” he said, “back at the point when arithmetic was made possible — the invention of the zero. And then ask yourself why the numeral one followed by the zero should mean ten.”

“But what else could it mean?” Anne asked.

Gregor sighed with humorous patience, and Otis and the commander seemed to agree with him.

“My dear lady,” Gregor went on, “take any number — let us say the succession of figures one-two-three-four. Now what does that mean, not in the decimal system, but in a system of any base?”

“I guess,” Anne ventured, “it just means 1 times a 1000 and 2 times a 100 and—”

Her husband interrupted her. “My dearest sweet, what Mr. Stolz obviously means is that, whatever number is the base of your system, one-two-three-four means one times the third power of that number, two times the second power, three times the first power, and four times the zero power — which, of any number, is one.”

“Of course,” Stolz agreed. “That is all the meaning of the numerals themselves. It is simply a convention of our civilization that one-two-three-four means 1234. In the duodecimal system, it means one great gross, two gross, three twelves and four — in other words, what you would call 2056.”

“And is that good?” I asked.

He laughed. “There is nothing miraculous in that special example, it is true. But the conveniences of the duodecimal system are great, so great that certain army supply depots have unofficially adopted it for such problems as figuring cubic content. And I use it myself for all my private calculations. Once one is trained to think in it, it is so much simpler.”

“Why?” I asked.

He told me why at great length. And I found myself listening intently, partly because the subject was interesting, which I hadn’t expected, and partly because I realized that Gregor Stolz was very much in earnest. He intensely believed in this duodecimal business. It was alive inside him.

Otis had his pencil out and was figuring on the tablecloth. Anne didn’t notice him — not because she was absorbed in the numbers, but because she was talking to Commander Lyons. I wasn’t happy when I saw her look at him, nor once when I saw Gregor Stolz steal a side glance at them both.

Otis looked up from his scrawls. “This is swell,” he said. “It’s a cinch once you twist your mind the right way. Bet I could work out a table of logs if I had time.”

“It’s been done,” Stolz said, “and they’re rather more helpful than—”

I looked at my watch. I said: “I’m sorry, Anne, but I’ve got to be on duty tonight, and first I’ll have to change out of this monkey-suit.”

They made all the polite noises and Otis and Anne went with me to get my coat.

When I came out of the house, Gregor Stolz was waiting for me. He didn’t have anything to say. I think he just wanted to smile at my futility.

I said: “Not here. You get that, Stolz? These are my people. Not here!”

He smiled. “ ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villian?’ ”

I spotted the quote. Berkeley cops surprise people that way. I said: “Iago? Don’t overrate yourself.”

“Overrate? When that poor fool was... catalyst to only four deaths?”

I said: “Three. He wasn’t catalyst to Emilia.”

“Such erudition, Lieutenant!”

“I like Shakespeare. He knew what makes people tick. And I’m beginning to catch your tickings, Stolz. You like numbers. You like things you can shove around and make jump through hoops. It feels good. So you try it on a living scale and that feels good, too. But not here.”

I turned around and walked off. I wished we hadn’t talked about Othello. Now I knew what Anne had reminded me of when she was listening to the commander.

I had the jumps at the desk that night. I kept going over it in my mind. It was a situation for a catalyst. Otis was overbrained and nervous, and his wife was looking dewy-eyed at a cousin that had come home from the South Pacific with all the glamor of heroism. There was something I’d heard once about Otis’s grandfather...

I gnawed at myself so long over it that I almost wasn’t surprised when the call came. The voice on the phone was incoherent. I didn’t even know who was talking, or who was dead.

The surprise came after I got out there.

But now I was standing in Otis’s study. The body was lying in the center of the room. There was a purple bruise on the jaw, and the face looked hurt and surprised. There was plenty of blood, and when will people learn not to leave sharp paper cutters on their desks? There was something by the corpse’s hand, too, something that looked familiar and didn’t belong there.

The doctor was saying: “Just missed the heart by the looks of things. Bled to death. Nasty, slow way of dying.”

I said: “Good.” The doctor gave me a funny look, but that was all right. I meant it. It was good that Gregor Stolz had had a slow nasty death.

It’s hell to grill people you know, and the questioning didn’t bring out very much.

The party had broken up after I left and for a while Otis had continued to talk numbers to Gregor Stolz here in the study — I didn’t ask what Anne and the commander were doing at the time. Then Otis had gone down to the basement to look up some science fiction mags he had stored away that contained some stories about extraterrestrial non-decimal notation (it says in the transcript). Both Anne and the commander had been in the study (separately) to talk to Gregor but they had both left him alive (they said).

It was a family front and nobody was saying anything.

I picked up what was by the corpse’s hand. “This is my notebook,” I said.

Otis explained: “I found it by your place after dinner. Brought it in here, meaning to ring you up and forgot it.”

“Stolz knew it was mine?”

“I think we talked about it.”

Otis had found him when he came up from the basement. There weren’t any science fiction mags in the room.

I talked to Anne last. When we finished her transcript, I asked Macready to go get her a drink. Alone, we sat looking at each other.

She said: “It isn’t possible.”

I said: “It happened.”

“But he must have... done it himself?”

“The doc says no.”

When she spoke again, she said a funny thing. She said: “And now of all times...”

I looked at her. She caught herself and shook her head. “No. Not even you.”

“I’m not me,” I said. “I wear a badge.”

“That isn’t why. It’s you I can’t tell. Not the badge. Some time soon. Oh, soon. I want to, but it isn’t fair...”

She didn’t say anything more for a while. When Macready brought the drink I spilled a little on the shoulder of my suit. Willful destruction of evidence, they call it.

When she was gone Macready said: “And your own notebook is Exhibit A, huh, Loot?”

I looked at the notebook. There was blood on its pages — inside pages where it couldn’t have dripped. And the blood made signs, intelligible marks — the way a finger might make, before it ran out of blood.

I said: “He knew this was my book. He left a message for me.”

Macready said: “Jeez, Loot. What’s it say?”

I worked on the marks. I said: “It’s a big help. It says Over Seven-Down Ten. And under that it says Fifteen-Ten.”

Macready looked blank and then he snapped his fingers. “I got it, Loot. It’s a crossword clue like in a story I read once. Over and down, see? You find the crossword and those words are gonna be the murderer’s name.”

I said: “You keep an eye on things here. I’ll be back in an half hour or so.”

Gregor Stolz had a small house up in Strawberry Canyon east of the campus and south of the hills. It was modern, I guess. Anyway, it had a lot of flat planes and seemed to grow right out of where it was, and I liked it.

I had the dead man’s keys. I tried the study first with no luck, and then the bedroom. The bed was narrow even for a single and maybe that explained a little more about the way Gregor Stolz ticked before somebody stuck a papercutter in the works.

The bedroom had paneled walls. The part above the head of the bed was all fancy, with an inlaid diamond motif running around it.

I said: “Over Seven-Down Ten.” I knelt on the bed and pressed my right hand on the seventh diamond in the top row and my left in the tenth at the side. Nothing happened. I felt around a little. My left hand moved down two diamonds.

The panel that opened was plumb in the middle of the wall, but I hadn’t spotted so much as a crack. I looked in and I didn’t see any rare East Indian snakes. I reached in and took out a leather-bound book. It was lying all by itself in front, but toward the back I could see a row like it.

I opened it and read a while. Then I reached in and read a little of one of the back volumes, just enough to be sure.

A man in my business ought to have a stronger stomach.

When I got back to the Queen’s Road house Macready said: “All quiet. They’re all three in the music room.”

I heard voices and I went in without knocking. Anne was whiter than her dress and her mouth was open, not making a sound. Commander Quentin Lyons had his fists up defensive-like. Otis Jordan had his right in the air and he was staring at it as though he’d never seen it before and never wanted to see it again.

You’d think they had been living statues. I said: “O.K. Otis, I think it’s time we had another talk.”

He looked dazed, said: “Not... in there?”

I said: “Yeah. The study. Come on.”

We left Anne with the commander. When Otis was seated in the study, trying to keep his eyes away from the stains, I said: “You socked him.”

“I was going to. I was going to and then—”

“Not your cousin. Gregor Stolz. That bruise on his chin.”

Otis’s head nodded a weak yes.

I said: “Maybe you were honest before. Maybe you didn’t remember.

That’d be why you were so horrified when you started to slug the commander and all of a sudden remembered the other time.”

Otis nodded again. Then he started to talk. He wasn’t being articulate now. “He said things. Not Quentin — Gregor. Terrible things. That Anne... I couldn’t stand it. Then the next thing I knew I was down in Grandpa’s library. I didn’t know why I was there. That’s where I keep the science fiction, so I thought maybe... But I was worried because I didn’t remember and I came back upstairs and...”

“Found him.”

“And I still don’t know. Just now when Quentin... I remember the hitting but nothing more. How much more have I got to remember?”

It isn’t a good thing to see an industrial chemist with tears in his eyes.

I said: “Anne and the commander both saw him alive afterwards.”

He waved them aside. “They’re my family.”

I said: “You were in a mental jam, so you went to Grandpa’s library. Grandpa was a little... Well, wasn’t he? I seem to remember—”

He twisted a smile. “Grandpa was nuts, if you want the truth. That’s what makes me feel so... He was a great scholar, you know — the money came from his brother. He spent all his life working on Elizabethan manuscript material. There’s damned little of it and he spent a fortune and all his energy amassing stuff — this was before photostats. He was all ready to publish his book. It would have proved new things about collaborative methods in the Elizabethan drama. And then came the great Berkeley fire. That was just twenty years ago. It all went. Every scrap of it. Only he didn’t think so. When that was Grandpa’s library it had empty shelves. He used to take visitors around it and show them all his treasures and give them autographed copies of the book that was never published.”

I said: “Hell!”

“You see we crack under strain, we Jordans, I’ve been overworking. I’ve felt like hell. And the things Gregor said... They were poison, you know. I wouldn’t say them even to you. I didn’t believe them and still they made me take a sock at Quent just because he paid Anne a compliment.”

I stood up. I said: “Come on back to the music room. I want to read you something. A little message from Gregor.”

I tried not to look at Anne while I talked.

I said: “Gregor Stolz knew he was dying. He also knew that this was my notebook. He scrawled something in it for me. He didn’t dare write his killer’s name because if the killer saw it first he’d destroy it. Instead he left scrawls that looked meaningless. If the killer saw them he might worry, but he’d be a little hesitant about destroying the book I’d remember I left. It was up to me to figure them out.

“The ‘crossword’ directions sounded like the clue to a hiding place. I found a paneled wall at Gregor’s and it was what I wanted. The other message — Fifteen-Ten — well, you’ll see about that in a minute.”

I opened the book in my lap and looked at it, gagging. I said. “It’s hard to say in words of one syllable what Gregor was. I bet the psychiatrists have a name for it, but I wouldn’t know it. I’d call it a remote-control murderer. Wherever Gregor was, murders happened. And it was always because he’d just happened to say the wrong word at the wrong time. This book from inside the panel, this is his — hell, his casebook. One of ’em. They’re all written down here. Only he doesn’t use names — he uses numbers.

“I think he told himself this was for secrecy in case the wrong eyes ever read it. But I think down underneath it was because that’s all that names and the people ever were to him, numbers he could twist around the way he made three-four, one-two into two-o-five-six. The numbers are too easy to read for secrecy. For instance the last entry is: Dinner tonight with One. One’s curries are delicious, but I feel that I might add a few surprising ingredients.

“And in an earlier book his references to the banker, Charles Bantock, are Three-Two. Just numerals for initials, you see — one for A equals Anne, Three-Two for C. B.

“Now I want to read you a little about his latest game,” I said haltingly.

My throat was dry. They kept looking at me and I didn’t dare stop. I read:

I broke off. I couldn’t take any more of the reading Gregor Stolz kept by his lonely bed.

I shut the book and said: “He talked to Fifteen-Ten. He wanted to convince him, you see, that he was mad, in order to drive him to murder over — over One. He convinced him, all right.”

Otis Jordan stood up. Macready made a move but I shushed him. Otis blinked through his lenses and said: “I guess madmen can still count. O’s the fifteenth letter. J’s the tenth. I’m ready whenever you are.” Anne moved swiftly toward him. Her dress was white against him and her arms were white around his darker neck.

“It’s not that easy,” she said. “I don’t care what Gregor Stolz wrote in his wicked little book. Otis isn’t talking to you without a lawyer. And a psychiatrist if you wish.”

Commander Quentin Lyons came close to the two of them. Gently, he tried to detach her arms. “Don’t be foolish, Anne. Can’t you see it’s better this way? If you fight it, there’ll only be a scandal.”

Anne turned on him. Her eyes lightened. “Otis isn’t crazy. Even if he is, he didn’t kill anybody, and if he did, I’m not walking out on him. Do you mean you’d stand there and let this poor tired sick man talk himself into a murder confession? Why, you—”

I got up, too. This was all I was waiting for. I said: “Come along, Commander. Let Otis get his sleep. He needs it. And that isn’t a bad idea about a psychiatrist, Anne.”

Quentin Lyons said: “You mean you’re not taking him?”

“Why should I when I’ve got you?”

The surprise held him breathless for a minute and I punched the words in hard. “Remember how Gregor said he was so sold on the duodecimal system he used it even in his private figuring? When I opened his panel, I had to reach down two diamonds from ten to twelve. One-five-one-o doesn’t mean fifteen ten. It means—”

A spark came into Otis’s dull eyes. “One-five equals one times twelve plus five. One-o equals one times twelve plus zero.”

“Thanks, Otis, I figured that, but it took me time. In Gregor’s duodecimal fifteen-ten means what in decimal is seventeen-twelve. In letters, Q. L. or Quentin—”

He was on his way to the door but somehow Macready was already there.

“He was probably beginning to crack when they transferred him to shore duty. And the field psychiatrist, not knowing about the family background — funny you don’t always think of cousins having the same grandfather — didn’t see it in the same light as Gregor did.

“Lots of flaws show up under the strain of war. With proper care and good sense, most of them can be fixed. But he had the bad luck to run into Gregor, who needed to push people around...”

I stopped and looked at Otis. He was asleep. “I know a guy out at Conch Oil,” I said. “I think I can arrange a sick leave for him.”

Anne said: “You’re sweet.”

She moved on the couch so that Otis’s sleeping head was on her white shoulder. I left them like that.