Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Charles Green A Mouse Called Emily

Do you have a fondness for those curious, offbeat conversations that sometimes happen at a bar? Well, this one sure was bizarre!

So I was standing at the bar, just kind of doodling in my mind, when the man next to me announced that he guessed he’d go home and see what Emily was up to. I glanced around. He was looking at me. And smiling. A middle-aged, plump little man. Mild blue eyes, friendly and blinking behind rimless glasses. An old-fashioned stiff collar pinching off a round, pink-jowled face. The kind of a meek little guy you’d expect to see clutching an umbrella.

“Emily is a mouse,” he explained brightly. “Don’t know why I called her Emily. But she’s been in my apartment quite a long time now. Quite a long time, sir. I’d like to tell you about her. By the way, my name is Edwin Hoffman. I’m a bookkeeper. Work for Halpert and Brown. A dress house. Splendid people to work for, too.”

He paused, his head cocked to one side, evidently waiting for data on me. Against my better judgment, I told him my name was Farrell, and he immediately insisted on shaking hands. Yes, apparently it was going to be one of those things. A garrulous bore.

It was rather unpleasant, I learned, to shake hands with Mr. Edwin Hoffman. His palm was moist, clammy, and somehow you couldn’t feel the bones in his pudgy little hand. Just to say something, since this little screwball was standing there beaming at me, I told him that I, too, once owned a pet mouse.

“Oh, Emily isn’t a pet mouse,” he said. “Good Heavens, no! Far from it, Mr. Farrell, She just moved into my apartment one day, and at first I didn’t mind, but after a while I became quite unhappy about Emily. You see, sir, I’ve always lived alone. I enjoy living alone. Emily is terribly — well, distracting. She scratches. Practically all the time, you can hear her scratch, scratch, scratch. And she squeaks, too. Come to think of it, I don’t know which is more maddening, her scratching or her squeaking.”

I could swear that he wasn’t drunk.

“What’s wrong,” I said, “with permanently stopping Emily’s scratching and squeaking? There are certain efficient gadgets made for that purpose, you know.”

You could see that he was just delighted to explain. “Oh, I know all about them,” he replied with an amused flutter of his hands. “Right this moment, sir, I’ve many traps in my apartment. All different kinds. But I haven’t set them yet, you see. I don’t want Emily to have the least suspicion that they are traps. So I’ve been putting food where you’re supposed to bait the traps. And she’s been eating it. Yes, Emily has been getting fat eating the food right off — well, you might say right off the bait hooks. Of course, they aren’t really hooks.”

I glanced around to check how the other people were taking this. There were only two other men at the bar of that dingy Third Avenue bar. One was making a crystal ball of his glass of beer, and obviously didn’t like what he was seeing in it. The other man, farther over, was a more optimistic and energetic crystal gazer; he was in a huddle with a racing form. And the baldheaded bartender had his nose in a newspaper. I might have been alone with Mr. Edwin Hoffman.

“Look, if it’s a gag, I don’t get it,” I said. “Why haven’t you set those traps?”

He looked surprised. “The reason is obvious, I should think. The first time that Emily saw a trap she’d be wary, wouldn’t she? Be cautious about taking the bait. Well, supposing she sprung the trap — and it didn’t get her? Which, you must admit, does happen sometimes. I know that Emily is quite clever. Once her suspicions were aroused, once- she found out that I was determined to get rid of her — well, it’d be much more difficult then, wouldn’t it? But, Mr. Farrell, the time is drawing near.”

“To set the traps?”

“Yes. Maybe I’ll do it tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or possibly next week. Now Emily is used to the traps. Thinks nothing of them. She’ll take the bait confidently. And then it’ll happen. Bang!” He brought the side of his hand down on the bar. “So! Down will come the spring. And I’ll be rid of Emily forever. Won’t I, Mr. Farrell?”

“Yes, I guess you would.”

“But perhaps I won’t use the spring traps,” he went on, a moist glitter now in his eyes. “I’ve got those others, too, you know. The cages with the trap doors. Once Emily is squeaking helplessly inside of one, I could attach a string to it, and then I’d fill the bathtub and lower the cage with Emily inside right down into the tub.” His arm went up, descended slowly, went up again. “Ah, Emily is still wriggling a bit, is she? Very well, we’ll just submerge her again. So!... And then, of course, Mr. Farrell, there’s always poison, eh? We mustn’t forget that. I’ve made quite a study of—”

I jerked up from the bar stool, and he backed away a bit, his eyes puzzled as he peered at me through his glasses.

“Why, what’s wrong, Mr. Farrell?”

I said, “I think I’ve heard just about all I want to hear about Emily.”

He smiled, then nodded. “Yes, I do get to be a bit of a bore when I start talking about Emily. Well, I’ve got to be running along. Good night, Mr. Farrell.”

He nodded again and walked out. I pushed aside my glass of beer and ordered whiskey. When the bartender served it, I asked him if he knew the little guy who’d just left.

“No,” he replied. “Like you, it’s his first time here. What were you two talking about? A mouse?”

“Yes, a mouse called Emily.”

“My nephew’s got some white mice,” the bartender said. “They stink.”

After that succinct contribution he went back to his newspaper.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was easy enough to play amateur psychiatrist and figure out what was motivating Edwin Hoffman. He had a streak of sadism in him. He delayed killing the mouse because, once it was dead, the anticipatory thrill of killing it would be gone. Got a perverted kick out of talking about it. I would have let it go at that — if it weren’t for just one thing that he had said. The business about filling a bathtub in order to drown the trapped mouse in the cage.

Maybe my reasoning was screwy, but it seemed to me that Hoffman should not have had the mental image of a bathtub. Not for a little thing like a mouse. A bucket, yes. Wouldn’t one almost automatically be guided by the cliché of drowning like a rat in a bucket? Perhaps not. Perhaps Hoffman didn’t own a bucket. All right, so he saw a bathtub — and now let’s drop it, for God’s sake!

I made the mistake of trying to anesthetize with more drinks the memory of that Charles Addams version of Walter Mitty. It had, of course, just the opposite effect. After a while, I found myself looking him up in the phone book. Yes, there was an Edwin Hoffman listed. Two-hundred block on East Thirty-eighth Street. Maybe a three-minute walk from here.

I was angry with myself when I returned to the bar. And determined to stop behaving like a fool. I was going to finish my drink, go home, and forget about it. But the bartender decided that it was time for me to get a drink on the house. And there’s a certain delicate point of ethics that prohibits you from leaving after getting a free drink. So I had another Bourbon and soda.

And that was why, when I walked out of the place, I turned right instead of left. Two blocks north to Thirty-eighth Street, a half block east — and there was the trim little apartment building where Hoffman lived. I rang his bell, and there was a buzzing sound in the lock of the vestibule door. I went up to the third floor in the self-service elevator without the faintest idea of what I would do or say when Hoffman opened the door.

Edwin Hoffman did not open his door when I rang the apartment bell. A woman did. A plump, powdery woman, with an aging little-girl face.

“Mrs. Thompson?” I said, remembering one of the names on the bells in the vestibule.

From farther back in the apartment, Hoffman’s voice called out, “Who is it, Emily?”

“Just someone who has the wrong apartment, dear,” the woman said. And added to me, “The Thompsons live on the floor below.”

There was a squeak in her voice. She shut the door, and I was glad that the cage of the self-service elevator was still on that landing...

Well, I’ve been watching the papers. Nothing has happened yet. And nothing probably will happen. Hoffman just liked to think about it, to talk about it. He’d never have the nerve to do it. Just the same, I’ve been watching the papers.