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

The Final Report by Russell Martin[15]

Russell Martin’s second first story is about a bureau chief in retirement who is just vegetating — until his successor needs help...

Old Pollard had finished with the supper dishes and was sitting down to watch Walter Cronkite when somebody buzzed his apartment from downstairs. He raised his white eyebrows when he heard the caller’s voice, but asked him to come up.

Two minutes later young Knowles was doffing his coat. Knowles, with his masculine good looks and Young-Man-Succeeding-in-Business manner. Knowles, the man Pollard thought of whenever he heard the word “brash.” Knowles, Pollard’s successor as chief of a certain secret government bureau — and in the older man’s opinion, an incompetent young twerp. And just now, Knowles, with his apparently inextinguishable optimism and brisk manner completely gone, twisting his hands, in a fit of nervousness.

“Just let me put your coat in the closet,” Pollard said. “There. Have a seat on the couch. Go ahead, young man — it’s not electrified! Now, let me sit down in my chair. Aaah.

“So. Mr. Knowles. I didn’t expect ever to see you again after my retirement party. Are you here to keep an old man company? Or is there something you need?”

Knowles cleared his throat. “Mr. Pollard,” he began, “it’s six months since I took over as chief of the bureau. Since then, I — well, I like to think that I’ve had things pretty well under control. We’ve been able to handle whatever’s come up — and things have been quiet lately. But now—” He broke off.

“Let me guess,” Pollard said, trying hard to keep the delight out of his voice. “Something has happened that’s too much for you.” He let a note of sternness creep in. “And you want the old man’s advice.”

Knowles nodded unhappily. “That’s it, sir. I wouldn’t ordinarily come to you like this, because—”

“Because you’d rather die than admit that there are some things beyond you by going to your predecessor for help?”

“Oh, no, sir, not that at all. I just thought that after all your years at the bureau, you wouldn’t want us to disturb you once you’d finally retired—”

“Disturb me?” Pollard roared. “Disturb me? Let’s get something straight, Knowles. In the half year since that damned farewell party, since I holed up permanently in this tiny apartment, I have been going stir-crazy! Living on my pension, sitting here watching TV, reading books, and generally vegetating — and the only break in the monotony is a visit every Saturday from my daughter and two runny-nosed grandchildren. Disturb me? This visit tonight may just save my sanity! At least you bring back a memory of the way it used to be at the bureau, before I reached their damned retirement age...” He trailed off.

“Well, then, sir — since you seem willing to help us” — Pollard snorted — “I’ll have to warn you that what I’m about to say is to be kept absolutely, Class-A, top-secret—”

“I wish,” Pollard said acidly, “that the current chief of the bureau would realize that the former chief of the bureau is probably even more conversant with security rules than he himself.” A sudden thought leaped into Pollard’s mind. “Hey, wait a minute! You’re not violating any regulations by telling me about this, are you?”

“No, sir! I have the permission of — uh — the people upstairs to come to you. And,” he added, “I’m putting you in no danger, either. I’ve made sure that there are no tails on me tonight, so your life is in no jeopardy because I’ve come here.”

Pollard ignored this last. “Well, since everything is quite clear and understood, get on with it. Even an old man like me doesn’t have unlimited time.”

Knowles cleared his throat again, and began, “A couple of weeks ago a double agent of ours was found in his apartment, with his throat cut. The police have dismissed it as a burglary that got ugly, and we were happy to let them — but the bureau is sure that the other side found him out and killed him.

“Georg — the double agent — had reported to us several days before his death that he was on to something big — a cell of enemy agents planted here for the purpose of passing on clandestine communications. He claimed to have made contact with part of the cell, and to have learned of the existence of a list of the cell members’ names and addresses.

“A list like that would be invaluable to us, and we told Georg to get it. After some hard bargaining he agreed.

“Well, to keep the story down to essentials, Georg got careless. Or the cell members, or their superiors, found him out some other way. In any event, one morning while George was encoding a report to us, he was murdered in his apartment.

“The report he was making out at the time of his death stated that he expected to get a copy of the list from a contact in the cell the next day. The assassins took the original message, and the coded version he was writing, when they left.”

“Then how do you know what he was going to tell you?”

“His typewriter was one of those jobs that use cartridge ribbons, and the one he had in it at the time was a one-time version — that is, after you strike a letter, that space of the ribbon is used up permanently. The killers didn’t take the ribbon cartridge, so we got the message from it. We reproduced Georg’s words from the letter impressions, thus.” Knowles took a sheet of paper from his pocket. The message read:

Pollard read it over several times. “No spacing, of course — it wouldn’t show up on the ribbon... easy to make out, though.” Then he looked up. “Did Georg always use capitals?”

The younger man shrugged. “The code he was using did, so he probably felt more comfortable with them here, too.”

“L-a-n-d-s giving it to me... was Lands the name of his contact in the cell?”

Knowles looked agonized. “We don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here. You see, Georg never told us who his contact was. If he had, we’d have picked him up after we discovered the murder. But he did say that it was someone connected with the apartment building where he lived — but not a tenant.”

“So look into them all.”

“We did. We’ve managed to narrow it down to four possibilities whose pasts and recent activities make it possible for them to have been Georg’s contact in the cell.”

“All right, pick up all four and question them until the real contact breaks.”

“We can’t. There was a big fuss raised over leakage of secret material to people outside the bureau, and since then we’ve been wary of giving away things in the course of questioning an innocent suspect.”

“And that’s where I come in, eh? You need to know who Georg’s contact was, but you can’t figure it out.”

“That’s it, sir,” said Knowles with obvious reluctance. “None of the four has dropped out of sight, or made any changes in their routines, so we guess the cell people think they’re safe. But they may yet decide to play it cautious and pull the man out. Time could be of the essence.”

“All right, all right. Tell me about your four suspects.”

“Well, sir, the landlord lives in one of the apartments in the building; it’s a very luxurious place” — Knowles seemed about to add, “unlike this one,” but changed his mind — “and in some ways, he’s our prime suspect. All four had equal opportunity to carry on the activities of the group members — you’ll understand that I’m reluctant to go into details — but the ‘land’ reference in Georg’s message might be construed as pointing to him — as the landlord.”

“It says ‘lands,’ to be precise,” Pollard pointed out.

“But if it’s short for ‘land is’—”

“Then it should have an apostrophe, right? There are no other errors of English in the message. How was Georg’s English?”

“Perfect.”

“Just so.” Pollard nibbled a nail. “Perhaps he meant ‘lands’ as the plural of ‘land.’ Was the landlord the sole owner of the place?”

“Yes. And Henley — that’s his name, Marvin Henley — lives alone, too.”

“Hmm. Other suspects?”

“There’s also the day doorman, Lester Gill. He seems to be completely clean, a perfectly ordinary man, but so do the others. On the other hand, Gill is an absolute cipher — lives alone, no family, and apparently no friends—”

“Which probably isn’t important, one way or the other,” Pollard broke in. “You persist in wasting time on irrelevancies! And the other two?”

“Another man who works as a doorman, Stanley Fitch. He works evenings—”

“And?”

“Otis Avery, the building superintendent,” Knowles finished lamely.

“The landlord, the super, and two doormen,” Pollard said, and leaned back. “Excellent. And all four men had an equal opportunity to carry on whatever activities the cell member indulged in?”

“Yes, sir. We have reports on their activities since a short time after the murder of Georg, but no one has been eliminated so far.”

“I have an idea our friend won’t be fingered that way,” Pollard said. “I can’t get my mind off that word ‘lands.’ It doesn’t make sense. Maybe there’s another meaning in it somewhere. Any of the four have any connection with land, or real estate in general, apart from Henley’s obvious connection?”

“We looked into it. No, they don’t.”

“Lands. Lands. I don’t suppose a Land camera comes into the affair anywhere—”

“No.”

“Just an idea... Is there any possibility that the message was a fake?”

“Fake?”

“Yes, fake. That Georg’s killers not only stole the plain and coded versions of the message, but also the ribbon cartridge he had used, and substituted one with a message carefully designed to frustrate you because it was partly incomprehensible?”

Knowles shook his head. “We doubt that, sir. For several reasons. First of all, we have no record of the other side ever pulling that kind of stunt before. It just isn’t their style. Second, that one-time cartridge was the only cartridge Georg had in his possession, from what we’ve found by searching his apartment. If the killers did fake the message, it means that they brought another cartridge with them to the apartment. Most unlikely.

“Third, if someone did intend to fake a message, why invent such a cryptic one? All they’d have to do is accuse an innocent person of being the cell member; that would point us in exactly the wrong direction long enough to get their real man — Henley, Gill, Fitch, or Avery — into hiding. As it is, all they’ve done is keep our suspicions on all four possibilities. No, sir, we think Georg really did write the message.”

Pollard was impressed. Perhaps he’d been hasty in his judgment of Knowles. He was showing the kind of sense his job called for.

“In that case, Knowles,” Pollard said, “I’ll be happy to tell you whom to pick up for questioning.”

Knowles was speechless.

“What threw you, and me for a while,” Pollard went on, “was the ‘lands’ part of the message. It was our major stumbling block — but when you interpret it properly it’s also the solution to the problem.

“No possible meaning of the word ‘lands’ seemed to have any application here. When I learned that, I began to wonder if Georg wasn’t trying to tell us something else.”

“Something else? But—”

“Don’t interrupt! Remember, you reconstructed the message from the typewriter ribbon, imagining where the spaces — which don’t show up on the ribbon — go. When you got to l-a-n-d-s, the five letters you didn’t understand, you assumed they formed one word. But they don’t have to.

“Respace it. L-a-n-d-s. Is there a word in those five letters?”

Knowles mulled it over. “L-a-n... a-n-d... and!”

“A-n-d. And. If we assume that and is part of what Georg was trying to say, what of l and s?

“L — and — S. L and S. Has this any possible meaning? Review the names of the suspects — Lester Gill has a name beginning with L, and Stanley Fitch has one beginning with S.”

Knowles’s mouth was open. “The doormen? Both of them?”

“Why not? No reason to think that there couldn’t be two cell members where there could be one. And you’ll notice that Georg used their first initials in naming them. Don’t you usually call the doorman of your apartment building by his given name?”

The younger man’s expression had turned to one of satisfaction. “Makes sense,” he murmured. “More than any of the other ideas.” He stood up. “Mr. Pollard, I have to go now — there’s work to be done.” He held out his hand. “Thank you. I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

“I’m quite sure of that, young man,” Pollard said.