Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 75, No. 2. Whole No. 436, February 11, 1980

The Glass Slipper Murder by Betty Jochmans

© 1979 by Betty Jochmans.

This is the 541st “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... a detective debut in the classical tradition...

The author, Betty Jochmans, was born in 1924 in Illinois. She started “writing mystery stories at the age of nine, but was sidetracked for 45 years.” Her husband is a retired professor, but Mrs. Jochmans teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska and at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The Jochmans have traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and Central America, and they have “noticed while traveling on trains and planes all over the world that more people read mysteries than anything else.” Naturally!...

Funny, thought Lieutenant-Detective Alvin V. Baker, how some people look so right for their profession or line of work. Eric Moffatt, youngish owner and publisher of the country’s most successful line of children’s books — Little Folks Fiction, Inc. — was lying on a hay-colored shag rug in front of Baker, looking for all the world like an oversized Little Boy Blue, sound asleep in the barn where he was taking time out from his horn-blowing. Wavy blond hair lay charmingly disheveled across a high broad forehead. Eyes, widely set, were closed, but Baker would have given odds they were blue. The cheeks still had a touch of healthy pink, and a disturbingly sweet smile turned up the corners of the mouth.

The rest of him was a mess. A red-black hole in the middle of the chest still glistened with blood that was just beginning to coagulate. In his left hand Eric was grasping a copy of a Little Folks anthology of fairy tales titled The Glass Slipper. The picture on the dust jacket was a collage of well-known objects from fairy stories — a gleaming glass slipper surrounded by smaller versions of a gingerbread house, a spilled bucket, a frog, and some other objects that Baker decided he was too old to identify.

The fingers of Eric’s right hand were curled as though still clutching the ballpoint pen that now lay on the rug, several feet from the body. It looked as though that hand had been stabbing at the picture of the glass slipper on the jacket, trying to draw an X through it with the ballpoint. The last stroke might have been accomplished after death when the lifeless body fell forward over the book. With his last bit of strength, thought Baker, the murdered man had tried to call our attention to the glass slipper.

Moffatt’s body had been found just an hour earlier. An early riser, the young publisher was in the habit of coming in to work before the rest of the office staff. His secretary, Miss Hunzel, (who looked, thought Baker, like the Wicked Witch of the North), had found her employer lying face down on the floor. Rolling him over, she had gone into hysterics when she saw the gaping bloody wound in his chest.

Nothing, according to Miss Hunzel, had been stolen. What was missing was the murder weapon.

Someone had known that the young publisher would be alone in his office; someone had had access to the building and his office; someone had been able to walk up to him quite naturally... After nearly 30 years of investigating murder, Baker still shuddered at the sight of that wound. Death hadn’t even been mercifully quick. Moffatt had evidently reeled and fallen from the attack just a few feet from his desk and had just had the time, after his murderer left, to get his hands on the book of fairy tales, grasp the ballpoint, and make that painful, sinister X through the picture of the glass slipper.

Baker replaced the sheet over the body and sat back on his heels. Murder was such a waste...

“Seen enough?” Detective-Sergeant Gary Steig swung in through the door and plopped himself down in a blue leather chair, draping one leg over the padded arm. Steig was half of Baker’s age.

“Yes, I’ve seen it all,” Baker murmured. “You can let the picture boys in now — and get that book and the ballpoint over to the lab.”

The photographers came in to do their grisly ballet of squatting and angling for shots of the body. Baker turned to leave. He didn’t want to watch Steig wrest that book of fairy tales from the clutching hand of Little Boy Blue. But he didn’t turn quickly enough to miss seeing the younger man’s plastic-gloved hand make its last tug which freed the book from the dead hand. The hand dropped, like a lump of clay, and bounced on the rug.

Back in his office, Baker gathered together the reports of background information about Eric Moffatt. So far, nothing. Thirty-seven, he looked 21; capable head of a profitable publishing business inherited from his father; married, no children; membership in the usual clubs and charitable societies. It added up to the kind of obituary the newspapers would run if Moffatt had died in his sleep.

Baker looked up to see Steig slouching through his office door. Steig immediately slid into a chair. The man seemed incapable of standing up for even a few seconds. Inevitably he threw a sturdy leg over the arm of the chair.

“Well?” Baker almost added, “Now that you’re comfortable.”

“I checked out the will, like you said. Guy named Farquahr — funny name, eh? — of Fleetwood and Farquahr, over on—”

“Skip the details.”

“Okay, okay. All the personal property goes to the wife — but get this — only half of the business. The other half goes to Jack Paine.” He paused as if expecting some comment or reaction.

“Do you think you could just spit it out, Steig, and stop acting like a game-show host? Who the hell is Jack Paine?”

Steig shrugged. “Jack Paine is the son of old man Moffatt’s former partner, Alistair Paine. He and Moffatt started the business back in the thirties—”

“I said no details.”

Steig looked hurt. “Paine sold out to Moffatt during the war, in the mid-forties, when paper was hard to get and business wasn’t” — a look from Baker cut him off again — “uh, Paine frittered his money away and Moffatt put the business on a paying basis. Evidently Moffatt had some tender feelings for his old partner, so he fixed up some kind of a trust where if anything happened to him, then Paine’s son, Jack, would come into half of the business.” Steig unhooked his leg from the chair and leaned forward expectantly.

Baker snapped, “Find Jack Paine. What are you waiting for?”

Steig jumped up and headed back to his own desk. When a colleague caught his eye, he jerked his thumb in the direction of Baker’s office and sliced a forefinger across the front of his throat.

Coming through his doorway, Baker caught Steig’s act and felt remorse. Very little. He would have to do something about his attitude toward young Steig. Or maybe he should just tie him up and leave him in the forest for the wild beasts to devour. That’s the way they did it in the fairy tales. Fairy tales! His mind kept coming back to them. It was that book with the X-ed glass slipper...

Theresa Moffatt looked like a typical young society matron. Her carefully made-up eyes hardly showed signs of tears. “Little Ms. Moffatt,” thought Baker. As she crossed her slim legs, Baker blinked — she was wearing glass slippers! On second look he saw they were clear plastic. Glass slippers — he was seeing them, too.

But now Theresa Moffatt was introducing him to a distinguished-looking, middle-aged man, who was wearing a soothing look of concerned benevolence for the widow Moffatt. “Along came a spider,” thought Baker.

“This is Andrew Vair,” she said, as he sat down beside her. At her bidding Vair seemed to come to life when he leaned toward Baker, the action causing his knee to press comfortingly against hers. When he spoke, it was clear that Vair knew how to take command.

“I am — was — Eric Moffatt’s general manager at L.F.F. — er, Little Folks Fiction,” he explained unnecessarily.

Baker nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Vair. We have a few questions for Mrs. Moffatt, if you’ll excuse us.” Baker, too, knew how to take command. But Vair made no move to go.

“I’m here at Mrs. Moffatt’s request, Lieutenant, as an old friend of both Eric and Theresa.” He stopped and turned toward Theresa Moffatt.

It was obvious that there was more than friendship here. “That’s right, Lieutenant,” she said, eyeing her champion. “Anything you wish to ask me can be asked in Andrew’s presence.” She dabbed at her nose with a little white handkerchief.

Vair was quick on the uptake. “Actually, Lieutenant, I insist on standing by Mrs. Moffatt.”

Baker could see that he wouldn’t get far questioning her now. So he limited his questions for the present and soon left. Walking to the car, he found himself making up a silly rhyme in his head: “Vair, Vair — always there... Vair, where? In my hair. The name Vair made him think of something from his past...

In the car he knew Steig was going to say it before he started. “A.V., it’s got to be Paine. That’s what Moffatt was trying to tell us when he X-ed out the glass slipper. Glass-pane — get it? Of course, it’s not spelled the same, but—”

Lieutenant Baker jumped in his seat, and Steig almost hit a crosstown bus. “That’s it! Good Lord, it’s the spelling!” Baker was lost in thought for several seconds, then he looked across the seat at Steig and almost laughed. Poor Sergeant Steig, thought Baker. With that superior look on his face — he really thinks he’s cracked the case.

A few minutes later Baker entered his office and reached for the phone. At the same time Steig came flying in, clutching a piece of paper and even forgetting to flop into the nearest chair. “Lieutenant, Jack Paine’s dead! Drunk-driving accident — two years ago — cracked open his skull when his car went over a cliff.”

Baker’s puzzled eyes rose slowly to the excited face before him. “Who’s dead? Oh, yes, Jack Paine. Well, no matter.”

Steig gaped. But Baker was smiling as he said, “Pull yourself together, Sergeant. So Jack fell down and broke his crown, eh? bizarre, très piquant.” Steig found his voice. “Aw, boss, you know I can’t understand German.”

“Not German, you klutz,” said Baker. “By the way, did you know that I used to live in Quebec when I was a boy? My father was French-Canadian.” He paused and his face took on a faraway look. Steig sat waiting. He had found the chair and was now slumped in it.

The daydream ended abruptly. Baker had snapped out of his mental lapse and was barking orders at Steig. ”... and see to it now!” Steig leaped out of his chair and out of the office.

Those who knew Baker, like Chief Inspector Logan, recognized that demon light of discernment in his eyes. Logan knew well the capabilities of this man standing before him. “You can’t tell me what supports your theory, Al?”

Baker’s mouth was set. “Not now.” He knew the limited extent of the Chief’s education. Baker’s line of reasoning would go over like the little pigs’ houses against the huff and puff of the wolf, if he was pushed into explaining it now.

Logan hesitated for only a few moments, then he gave Baker the go-ahead. Nobody — including the Chief — could stand up to Baker when he really started rolling on a case.

By late afternoon Steig and an assistant had finished their leg-work. Steig’s face changed from triumph to bewilderment as he stood in the Chief’s office holding a well-sharpened letter opener. The Chief’s narrowed eyes could just make out some brownish streaks still staining the blade.

“I would never have believed it, Chief! It was stashed in Vair’s briefcase!”

The Chief smiled at Steig’s youthful enthusiasm and turned to Baker. “Ready to tell us what made you suspect Vair, Lieutenant? You said it was more than a hunch.”

“It was the name,” Baker said. “Vair. It fitted Moffatt’s dying attempt to scratch an X through the glass slipper. It’s something I remembered — from my youth and my early acquaintance with the French language. It also has to do with the first written version of fairy tales.

“Wherever the Cinderella story originated, our English version came from an old French translation, and somewhere along the line an interesting distortion occurred.” Baker warmed to his explanation. “In the original French version, Cinderella’s fairy godmother conjures up all the goodies for her, including little slippers of Makes more sense, doesn’t it? Now the Old French word for fur is vair, v-a-i-r — that’s right, just like Andrew Vair’s name. But the word vair, v-a-i-r was passing out of common use. Another word, one that sounds exactly like v-a-i-r, but which is spelled differently and means something completely different, got substituted for it. That word is verre, v-e-r-r-e. And v-e-r-r-e means—”

“Glass!” The Chief and Steig said it in unison.

“Right. And Eric Moffatt, who knew all about the history of the fairy tales he published, wanted to give us a clue to his murderer. He realized he hadn’t the time or strength to write V-a-i-r, but he could call our attention to the glass slipper on the jacket of his book — by slashing an X through it, trying to tell us, ‘Not verre — but vair — Andrew Vair!’ ”