Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

Courtesy Call by Russell Martin[14]

As has happened so often in the past, we are giving you two “first stories” by the same author in the same issue. Russell Martin, of Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada, submitted two stories simultaneously, and we couldn’t choose between them — so here are first stories numbers 513 and 514, back to back.

The most interesting fact in Mr. Martins dossier is his age. He was born in Montreal in 1961 — which made him only 17 when he sent in his two stories. At the time of this writing he is a student at John Abbott College in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec. His “major” hobbies include reading omnivorously, trying to perfect his command of French, and “living life to the fullest extent possible — there is nothing like it for getting ideas for stories.”

“Courtesy Call” is a dying-message detective story — “a kind of a crazy” case...

When you’re the Detective Lieutenant in charge of the Homicide Squad of a fair-sized city, and you only get a few weeks off each year, you try to make every day count toward forgetting your job. But when the town you’re passing through on the way to this year’s resort has a Chief of Police who is an old friend, you feel obliged to talk shop for a few hours more, anyway.

Art Nye’s town doesn’t have many major crimes committed in it, so I felt no qualms about disturbing him during working hours. But he wasn’t in his office when I arrived at his station house; the desk sergeant said he was in the interrogation room.

If Art was busy, I had no intention of disturbing him. I could just leave word I had called and come back some other time. But as it happened, Art came into the sergeant’s room just as I was about to leave.

“Hello there, Nye.”

It took him a few seconds. “Fall! Ev Fall, of all people!” There was some back-pounding.

“I was going to drop by to chew the fat, Art, but I’m told you’re busy, so—”

“Uh — wait a minute, Ev. I may need some help on this.”

“ ‘This’?”

“A murder case. You’re still on your city’s Homicide Squad?”

“In charge of it.”

“Oh! Congratulations! Maybe that’s even better.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first homicide we’ve had in town since that barroom brawl nine years ago, and there was no mystery in that one, just lots of gore. Maybe I need some big-city expertise on this one — it’s a nasty case, and kind of a crazy one.”

“Well, Art, if you need my help, I’ll be glad to give it.” I wasn’t sure I was so keen on this, but there I was.

“Thanks. Let’s go into my office. I’ll tell you about it there.”

When he had sat down at his desk and lit a cigar, he resumed. “Did I ever mention the Reardons to you, Ev?”

“Reardons?”

“Rich family. Live here in town. Old man owned the dye works a few miles off.”

“I don’t think you have. I presume they’re part of the town nobility—”

“Yup.”

“Look rather down on other people—”

“Right.”

“And now they’ve come a big cropper because they’ve got trouble — trouble that involves the police.”

“You know it. The trouble, to be exact, is murder. Old Julian Reardon was stabbed to death a couple of days ago. Julian was the owner of the dye works.”

“Got any idea who did it?”

“I’ve narrowed it down to three people. Julian left a will leaving all his estate — quite a sum — to be equally distributed among his three children.”

“You suspect them?”

“No, I don’t. Because they’re dead.”

“Oh. You think they were killed too?”

“No, no. They all died years ago, and the deaths were either the result of disease or accident. Point’s this: Julian had a clause in his will leaving the money that would go to each child to that child’s children, if the child predeceased him.”

“And there are three grandchildren?”

“One from each of the two sons and one daughter. Jack Reardon, Peggy Reardon, and Abby Freed. All in their early twenties. Three nicer young people you couldn’t meet. But from what I’ve found out, they could all use some spare cash about now. And nobody else with a motive was anywhere near the house when the old man was killed. And the crime looks like the work of a person Julian trusted: whoever killed him was allowed in, and had a cup of coffee with the victim before doing the dirty work. That points to one of the grandchildren — they were about the only people in town Julian could be said to trust.”

“And there are no clues?”

“Killer left no fingerprints, no suspect has an alibi. All we have is this.” Art took a Xerox copy out of his pocket with an abstracted air. “Julian was filling out a few forms when his murderer came to call. After he was stabbed, and presumably after the killer left, he managed to drag himself across the room to where he’d put down the forms, and before he died he picked up his pen and scrawled out—”

“A dying message!”

He looked a trifle displeased. “Yes. And here it is.” He gave me the copy. At the bottom of the sheet, printed crudely over a printed form, were two capital letters:

“Em ay,” I said. “In caps.”

“Which may or may not mean anything,” Chief Nye grunted. “From what we’ve seen of his papers, Julian always printed in block capitals.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “MA, eh? I suppose you’ve thought of the obvious connections.”

“I have. But maybe you can think of an interpretation that didn’t occur to me. Any suggestions?”

“Any of the suspects have a Master of Arts degree?”

“I don’t think any of ’em has cracked open a book since high school, Ev,” Art informed me.

“Any of ’em in Massachusetts lately? Or work for the phone company?”

“Phone company?” my friend asked, puzzled.

“Ma Bell?”

“Oh! No, they all work at local businesses — when they feel like working, which they don’t have to do. And they don’t travel.”

“Either female suspect have a baby lately?”

“No. And Julian’s mother,” he added, “died in ’47.”

“Thorough, aren’t you?” There was a pause. “This fancy stuff doesn’t ring true. If the old man wanted to name his killer, wouldn’t he just print the killer’s name?” I started to mutter. “Wait! What are their middle names?”

“Not that they ever use them, but Jack’s middle name is William, Peggy’s is Sharon, and Abby’s is Elizabeth.”

“Nothing there. I — hmm. Did the old man have any nicknames for them?”

“Not a formal old boy like Julian Reardon. They were about the only people he didn’t call ‘Mr.’ or ‘Miss,’ and them he called by their full names.”

“Too bad. Any of them have a hobby, or a habit, or something along those lines, beginning with MA?”

“Ev, I have gone through every word beginning with MA in the dictionary. There isn’t one that has a special relationship with any of the three suspects.”

“And yet he wrote MA...” I trailed off into muttering again. Suddenly a bomb went off inside my head — or perhaps it would be more correct to say a flare, illuminating everything in one bright flash. “Yes!” I said involuntarily.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, that’s it. That has to be it. Art, I know who killed Julian Reardon!”

Art looked at me skeptically. “Well?” he said.

“Your problem, Art,” I began pedantically, “was that you were too close to the people in the case to see things properly. I take it you knew old Reardon fairly well?”

“Fairly.”

“Well enough, at least, to call him and his grandchildren by their first names.”

“Look, Ev, I don’t know what you’re getting at, but I can assure you that I’m not letting personal feelings interfere with my role in a murder investigation.”

“That’s not my point. So close, in fact, that you call the three suspects by their nicknames.”

“Everybody does.”

“But Julian Reardon didn’t! That was a good point I made a minute ago about how Reardon wouldn’t indulge in fancy word games if he wanted to name his killer. He would just write down the killer’s name.

“So if Jack Reardon had done it, the old man would have written JA. If Abby Freed had, he would have written AB. Name or nickname, the message would start with the same letters.

“But — what about Peggy Reardon? If you wrote her nickname, you’d start with PE — but if you’d called her by her full name all her life, you would write down the first letters of her full name. And Peggy, as you know, is the diminutive of Margaret — MA.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked smugly at Art Nye. His mouth and eyes were slightly open.

“How the hell did I miss that?” he asked.

“By being too close to the target,” I answered.