Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 1. Whole No. 368, July 1974

Designated Murderer by Jon L. Breen[6]

Ed Gorgon, you will remember, is a major-league umpire with a flair for solving crimes on and off the baseball diamond. This time murder follows him to a hunting and fishing lodge in Canada, far from the ball parks where Ed Gorgon officiates. But this big-league umpire doesn’t need his professional locale to call a quick decision on a close play...

By the time this new designated-hitter rule went into effect in the American League — the one that says a club cam use a batter in place of the pitcher throughout the game — Cal Meadows’s playing career was long over. But anybody who ever saw Cal play, or try to play, first base will realize how old Cal would have loved the opportunity to hit in a game and not field.

As a hitter, Cal had a picture swing and devastating power. As a fielder, he had bad hands and slow reflexes, sometimes no reflexes. His hitting kept him in the majors — and in the lineup — for ten years, but his fielding had him out of most games by the seventh inning. Compared to Cal Meadows, old Dick Stuart was a Golden Glove.

Now you may remember, friends, that sometime back I told you — I’m Ed Gorgon, cursed and booed major-league ump these last 25 years — about a murder case in which there was a dying message that the policeman in charge couldn’t interpret because he didn’t know baseball. This story is different — this time the officer of the law running things knew too much about baseball.

Cal Meadows and I became pretty good friends after his retirement from baseball, and I sometimes go up in the off season to a little hunting and fishing lodge he runs near Lake Dubois, up in Canada. I’ve got no taste for the hunting, but I do like a little fishing — why there should be any difference between the two I can’t say, but to me there is. And I like the peace and quiet.

One night it’s not so quiet. I’m lying in my cabin at about ten in the evening and I hear a shot — loud. Hunters don’t generally go out at night, preferring to shoot each other in the daytime, and anyway they never shoot so near the cabins and the lodge, so I jump out of bed in some alarm. I see a shadowy figure ducking out of the cabin next door. He vanishes between two other cabins and I don’t feel like giving chase, judging from the indicated presence of a deadly weapon.

Instead I rush into the cabin next door, and I find what I fear most. My neighbor, Joe Conlin, is lying there twitching, the whole front of him a bloody mess. He stares up at me, his face white, and with a big effort he manages to get out, quite clearly, “E3.”

Then he loses consciousness, for good. By now there are others at the cabin door, including Cal Meadows and Dr. Fleming, a vacationing GP, who takes charge quickly, but of course it’s too late.

I don’t know anything about this Joe Conlin, though I learned his name and passed the time of day with him the day before. He was a pleasant enough though taciturn fellow with very close-cropped blond hair and an air of wanting to escape. Now, one way or another, he has.

“Did you know him, Cal?” I ask Cal Meadows.

“No, just his name, You’re the only guest I know personally, Ed, except the judge. Who could have killed this guy? Who knew him?”

He looks around at the faces of the other guests, who all look fairly blank. Most are wearing bathrobes over pajamas, as Cal and I are, and look cold. There is only one married couple, the Spandlers, who apparently are having a second honeymoon. He’s a slight mild-looking guy; she’s a red-haired beauty, better than you’d expect him to do. There’s a kid of about 22 whose name I don’t know — I saw him arriving the previous day with an Army duffel bag for luggage. We had talked briefly, and when he found out I was an umpire he showed me a baseball he got autographed by Willy Mays once years ago — Mays had hit a hard foul ball right into the kid’s glove. The kid had an Army PFC’s uniform with him, in a transparent cleaner’s bag.

Then there’s Judge Warbleton, a regular at the lodge. The old gent looks magisterial even in a bathrobe — he’s stopped to put his teeth in on the way, though. “Have the police been notified, Cal?” he asks.

Cal groans. “Oh, yeah. I’ll probably have Bosworth to deal with.” He means Sergeant Bozzy Bosworth of the local RCMP, an old fishing companion of mine whom Cal has never gotten along with. He starts back toward the main building, calling over his shoulder, “I wish this place had a designated manager tonight.”

The judge suggests to the other gaping guests that they return to their cabins, but not to go back to bed because the police will want to question them. They start drifting back, and it occurs to me that if one of them is the killer he’ll probably have some track-covering to do.

The judge asks, “Did he say anything before he died, Ed?”

“He said, ‘E3,’ just before he died.”

“E3? Means nothing to me,” the judge says.

“Cal would be grateful,” I say under my breath.

“Cal? What do you mean? Is he involved in this somehow?”

“I doubt it, Judge, I doubt it.”

But would Bozzy Bosworth doubt it? He and Cal are not just friendly enemies. They really don’t care for each other. Bad chemistry, I guess, because I like them both.

Before he even questions anybody else, Bosworth is regaling me with his theory. Bozzy is a baseball fan from way back, and he seems delighted it’s finally come in handy in his work.

“Tell me, Ed,” he says, “what do you think of that E3?”

“I don’t know,” I say. Let him have his fun.

“Come on. What do you think it could mean?”

“Sounds like a code name. For a secret agent maybe.”

Bozzy chortles. “Yeah? What else?”

“It could be somebody’s license number. In some states you can pay extra, pick your own, and make it short if you want or—”

“Yeah, sure, Ed. Hear any cars driving up here or driving away the last few hours?”

“No. I’m just telling you some of the possibilities that occur to—”

“Yeah, okay. Anything else?”

“Could be map coordinates. Some kind of location for something.”

“Like buried treasure?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Ed, I know you and Cal Meadows are buddies. But surely you’ve seen the most obvious thing it can mean.”

“What’s that?”

“E3, in baseball scoring, means error on the first baseman. And what first baseman ever made more errors than Cal Meadows? Huh? Answer me that.”

“It doesn’t figure, Bozzy.” Time to spoil his fun.

“Why not?”

“The man’s dying. He doesn’t have time to be clever or devious. If he wants to implicate Cal Meadows, he’d just say Meadows or Cal, not come up with something like E3.”

“Maybe he knows him as E3. Maybe it was a nickname.”

I shake my head. “Doesn’t wash. Nobody ever called Cal E3 as a nickname. I don’t think he’d like it.”

“You’ve got a better idea, I suppose? Map coordinates! Where’s the map then? License plate! Secret agent! This amateur detective reputation must be doing funny things to your head, Ed.”

I laugh a little at that. “Maybe. I’ve got a simpler explanation, though. What do we know about Joe Conlin?”

“Not a thing yet.”

“He had very short hair. Could he have been an Army officer?”

“Lots of people have short hair, Ed,” Bosworth says. “We ain’t all hippies and weirdos. I myself am not eligible for a job in a rock band. I mean, just ’cause he had short hair—”

“Okay, okay. The little I saw of him, though, he struck me as the type. Now there’s a young fellow here with an Army uniform in his closet—”

“Canadian Army?”

“U.S. Army.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s a fine young man, serving his country.”

“Perhaps so. But you better see if he’s still in the Army — check his discharge record if any.”

“Why would he have his uniform with him if he’s discharged?”

“Why would he have it with him anyway if he’s on leave, discharged or hot? Nobody in the Army wears his uniform off duty any more. They always wear civvies.”

“So I can ask about his status. But what’s the point?”

“The kid’s a PFC. The Army pay grade for PFC is E3, Bozzy. If Conlin, an Army man, sees a kid in a PFC uniform he doesn’t recognize or know by name that’s just the way he would identify him! E3 — straight and to the point.”

“Wait a second, Ed, we don’t even know Conlin was ever in the Army. And why would the kid kill him? And why in the world would he wear the uniform?”

The kid answers those for us a little later. He’s just sitting in his cabin waiting to be arrested. Hasn’t even tried to hide the gun.

“I wanted Major Conlin to know who killed him — not me as an individual, but as an enlisted man. It wouldn’t be enough just to let him know somebody hated him, wanted him dead — he had to know it was a non-lifer PFC. You get it? That’s why I brought the uniform with me when I followed him here.

“After I killed him, I raced back to the cabin, took off the uniform, and came back to join the crowd investigating the. shot. I had some idea about not letting people know it was me, but when I got back here, I found I just didn’t care any more.”

The kid’s name was Bill Lake. He’d been in Major Joseph Conlin’s company in Vietnam. A recent discharge for psychiatric reasons. It turned out Conlin had been asked to resign his commission for making a pile of money out of the Saigon black market. An officer but not a gentleman. According to Lake, Conlin was responsible for the death of a Vietnamese girl whom Lake had fallen in love with and wanted to bring back to the states.

Cal Meadows still has the lodge and still looks longingly at the paper at the exploits of Orlando Cepeda, Tony Oliva, Deron Johnson, and the other designated hitters, a position he’d rather play than first base or designated murderer.