Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Hugh Pentecost Jericho and the Studio Murders

It was said of J. C. Cordell that he owned half of the world — oil, electronics, airlines, shipping, hotels, you name it. In an article about him Cordell was quoted as saying that he had the only three things in the world that could matter to any man. “I have my son, my health, and the wealth and power to live and do exactly as I please,” he told his interviewer.

On a warm lovely summer day J. C. Cordell was deprived of one of those assets. His son lay dead in a small studio apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, with three bullet holes in his head. “The police suspect gangland revenge,” an early radio report informed the world.

It revived an old waterfront story — old by at least two years. Special guards in the employ of J. C. Cordell had trapped some men trying to steal a cargo of expensive watch mechanisms from the hold of one of Cordell’s ships. The guards had opened fire and one of the thieves was killed. The dead man turned out to be Mike Roberts, son of the reputed czar of the waterfront underworld, Reno Roberts. The word was out at the time that Reno Roberts would even that score with J. C. Cordell, but two years had gone by without reprisals, and Roberts’ threats were forgotten.

Now J. C.’s only child, Paul Cordell, was dead, and the waterfront and the Village were alive with police trying to pin a Murder One rap on Reno Roberts and his men.

It was almost overlooked in the heat of that climate that a second man had died in the Village studio, also of gunshot wounds. He was the artist who lived there. Richard Sheridan was considered to have been an innocent and unfortunate bystander. It turned out that J. C. Cordell indulged himself in the buying of paintings and sculpture. He had come across the work of Richard Sheridan in a Madison Avenue gallery, been impressed, and had commissioned Sheridan to paint a portrait of his son.

Paul Cordell had gone to Sheridan’s studio in the Village for a series of sittings. Ever since the shooting of Reno Roberts’ son on the waterfront and Roberts’ threats, Paul Cordell had been accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard.

One had to assume that the tensions had relaxed after two years. The bodyguard, a private eye named Jake Martin, had grown fat and careless on his assignment. He had waited outside dozens of places where Paul was gambling or involved in one kind of party or another. Jake Martin’s life was almost entirely made up of waiting for Paul Cordell to satisfy his various appetites.

On that particular summer day Paul had told Martin that his sitting for Sheridan would last a couple of hours. Certain that no one had followed them to Sheridan’s studio, Martin had gone across the street to a bar to have himself a few beers. It was a hot day. While Martin was away from his post a killer had struck, wasting Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan, the innocent bystander.

Telephone lines were busy with the story. J. C. Cordell was in touch with the Mayor, the Waterfront Commission, the F.B.I. Reno Roberts was going to have to pay for this. The Mayor, in turn, was in touch with the Police Commissioner. Unless a cap was put on this case, fast, bloody waterfront violence was facing them. A girl who had been with Paul Cordell only the night before called her friends. My God, did you hear what happened to Paul Cordell? And the news had spread like wildfire...

John Jericho was not in the habit of listening to the radio. He didn’t own a television set. He had been working with a kind of burning concentration on a painting in his studio in Jefferson Mews at the exact moment when Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan had been wiped out only a few houses down the block. When Jericho, six feet four inches of solid muscle, his red hair and red beard giving him the look of an old Viking warrior, got absorbed in a painting, the sky could have fallen in on Chicken Little and he wouldn’t have been remotely aware of it.

Exhausted after the last brilliant strokes on his canvas, Jericho had thrown himself down on his bed and slept. An unfamiliar creak in a floorboard would have awakened him instantly. He heard the telephone ring, but it was a nuisance, so he ignored it. But the caller was persistent, dialing the number every five minutes over a long stretch of time. Finally, outraged, Jericho reached for the instrument on his bedside table and shouted an angry hello.

“Mr. Jericho?” It was an unsteady female voice. “This is Amanda Kent.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Jericho glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s after one o’clock in the morning!”

“Did you hear what happened to Rick Sheridan?” the girl asked.

It was, perhaps, a notable question because all the people who had made all the phone calls during the evening had always asked: “What happened to Paul Cordell?”

Amanda Kent, Jericho had heard, had been desperately in love with Rick Sheridan. To her Paul Cordell was a nobody, a zero.

To Jericho, Greenwich Village was a small town in which he lived, not a geographical segment of a huge metropolis. He knew the shopkeepers, the bartenders and restaurant people, the artists and writers. He knew the cops. He knew the waterfront people who lived on the fringes of his “village.” The ships and the men who worked on the docks had been the subject matter of many of his paintings. He ignored the new drug culture. He walked the streets at any time of day or night without any fear of muggers. He was too formidable a figure to invite violence.

A little before two o’clock on the morning of Amanda Kent’s phone call Jericho walked into the neighborhood police station and into the office of Lieutenant Pat Carmody. Carmody, a ruddy Irishman with a bawdy wit when he wasn’t troubled, was an old friend. On this morning he was troubled. He was frowning at a sheaf of reports, a patrolman at his elbow. He waved at Jericho, gave the patrolman some orders, and leaned back in his chair.

“I expected you’d be showing up sooner or later, Johnny,” he said. “Young Sheridan was a friend of yours, I know.”

“More than a friend,” Jericho said. “A protégé, you might say. He mattered to me, Pat. What exactly happened?”

“He was painting a portrait of Paul Cordell. J. C. Cordell’s son,” Carmody said. “Damn good from what’s there left to see. You remember the rumble between J. C. Cordell and Reno Roberts?”

Jericho nodded.

“Ever since Roberts’ son was shot by Cordell’s watchmen, Paul Cordell has had a bodyguard — followed him everywhere, like Mary’s little lamb. He was a lamb this afternoon, all right, while Paul sat for his portrait. Wandered off to pour a couple. Hell, there hadn’t been any trouble for two years. Anyway, someone persuaded Sheridan to open his studio door and whoever it was blasted Paul Cordell and him. No witnesses, nobody saw anyone. No one admits hearing the shots. Lot of neighbors at work that time of day. Clean hit and run.”

“And you think it was Roberts’ man?”

“Who else?” Carmody shrugged. “Roberts bided his time, then ordered a kill. Like always, when there’s trouble on the waterfront, Reno was at his house on the Jersey coast with a dozen people to alibi him. Not that he would pull the trigger himself. He probably imported a hit-man from someplace out of the city, somebody who’s long gone by now.”

“No solid leads?”

“You mean something like fingerprints?” Carmody made a wry face. “Nothing. No gun. Meanwhile the town is starting to boil. J. C. Cordell isn’t going to wait for us to solve the case. There’s going to be a war, Cordell versus Roberts. There’s going to be a lot of blood spilled unless we can come up with the killer in the next few hours.”

Jericho pounded on the door of Amanda Kent’s apartment on Jane Street. He could see a little streak of light under the door. Amanda, he told himself, would not be sleeping this night.

She opened the door for him eventually and stood facing him, wearing some sort of flimsy negligee that revealed her magnificent body. Amanda was a model, and stacked away in Jericho’s studio were dozens of sketches of her body, drawn when she had posed for him professionally.

Amanda’s physical perfection was marred now by the fact that she was sporting a magnificent black eye.

“Mr. Jericho!” she cried, her voice muffled, and hurled herself into his arms.

He cased her back into the apartment, her blonde head buried against his chest. The small living room was something of a shambles — liquor glasses and bottles upturned on a small coffee table, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, sketchpad drawings scattered everywhere. Looking down over the girl’s shoulder Jericho recognized Rick Sheridan’s distinctive technique. Rick had evidently made dozens of drawings of Amanda’s perfections.

Jericho settled Amanda on the couch and passed her the box of tissues on the coffee table.

“What happened to your eye?” he asked.

She gave him a twisted little-girl smile. “I bumped into a door,” she said.

Her face crinkled into grief again. “Oh, God, Mr. Jericho, he was so young, so great, he was going so far!”

“I haven’t come here to join you in a wake,” Jericho said. He was remembering that after you had savored Amanda’s physical perfection you were confronted with a very dull girl who delighted in cliché and hyperbole. “Why did you call me, Amanda?”

“Because I thought Rick’s friends ought to know what happened to him,” she said. “The radio and television are only talking about this gangster who was killed — as if Rick hadn’t even been there. I thought his friends—”

“You’ve got it wrong,” Jericho said. “It wasn’t a gangster who was killed, it was a gangster they think did the killing.”

“Only Rick matters to me,” Amanda said. “Oh, God!” She looked up at him through one good eye and one badly swollen one. “There’s no reason anymore for it to be a secret, Mr. Jericho. You see, Rick and I were having a — a — thing.”

“Lucky Rick,” Jericho said. “But spare me the details, Amanda. If you were that intimate with Rick you might be able to supply some information. Who would have wanted to kill Rick?”

Her good eye widened. “Nobody! It was this Cordell man they were after, wasn’t it? Rick was shot because he could identify the killer. Isn’t that the way it was?”

“Maybe,” Jericho said. He appeared to be looking away into the distance somewhere. “But there’s a chance it may have been some other way, doll. Did Rick have a row with anyone? Was there some girl who was jealous of the — the ‘thing’ you and Rick were having?”

“I was everything to Rick,” Amanda said. “There hadn’t been any other girl for a long, long time. Rick didn’t have rows with people, either. He was the kindest, gentlest, sweetest—”

“He had the makings of a great painter,” Jericho said. “That’s the tragedy of it.”

There was the sound of a key in the front-door lock. Jericho turned and saw a huge young man carrying a small glass jar in a hamlike hand.

“Oh, gee, you got company,” the young man said. “How are you, Mr. Jericho?”

Jericho searched for the young man’s name in his memory and came up with it. Val Kramer. He had grown up in the Village and was close to being retarded. There had been moves to exploit his size and extraordinary strength. Someone had tried to make a fighter out of him, but he proved hopeless. Much smaller but faster and brighter men had cut him to ribbons.

He’d been tried as a wrestler, but he was no actor, the key to success in the wrestling game, and his only thought was to crush and possibly kill his opponents. He couldn’t get matches. He was now, Jericho remembered, a kind of handyman and bouncer for a rather disreputable saloon on Seventh Avenue.

“I couldn’t find a meat market open noplace, love,” the giant said to Amanda. He grinned shyly at Jericho. “For her eye, you know.” He advanced on the girl, holding out the glass jar. “Friend of mine runs a drug store on Hudson Street. I got him up and he gave me this.”

“What is it?” Amanda asked.

Jericho saw what it was. There was a wormlike creature in the jar. Long ago leeches had been used to bleed people — the medical fashion of the time — and particularly to suck the black blood out of bruised eyes.

“You must put this little guy on your eye,” Val explained to Amanda, “and he sucks out all the blues and purples.” He was unscrewing the lid of the glass jar, fumbling with his clumsy fingers for the slimy slug.

Jericho felt a faint shudder of revulsion run over him. He remembered hacking his way through a Korean swamp with those dreadful bloodsuckers fastened to his chest, his arms, his legs.

Somehow the giant boy-man had Amanda helpless on the couch, pinioned by the weight of his body while he held her head still with his left hand and aimed the loathsome leech at her black eye with his right. Amanda screamed at him.

“No, Val! Please! No, no!”

“It’s for your own good, Manda,” the giant crooned at her.

“No!”

Then Val Kramer did an extraordinary thing. He lowered his head and fastened his mouth on Amanda’s, smothering her scream. For a moment she resisted him, kicking and pounding at him with her fists. And then, suddenly, she was just as eagerly accepting him as she had been resisting, her arms locked around his neck. Gently Val managed to release himself and without any further outcry from Amanda placed the repulsive leech on her swollen eye.

“Have you fixed up in no time,” Val said.

He stood up. Amanda lay still, her eyes closed, the leech swelling and growing larger as it sucked her blood.

Val Kramer gave Jericho a sheepish grin. “It’s hard to convince anyone what’s good for them,” he said. “I gave Manda that black eye, so I’m responsible for fixing it up.”

“She said she bumped into something,” Jericho said.

“This,” Kramer said, grinning down at his huge fist. “She was acting crazy about this artist fellow that got shot. She was going to run over there, get mixed up with the cops and all. I had to try to stop her, and somehow, in trying, I kind of backhanded her alongside the eye. I didn’t mean to, of course.”

“Of course,” Jericho said. “But it was natural for her to want to go to Rick, wasn’t it? She tells me they were pretty close.”

Val Kramer looked up and the smile was gone from his face. “She belongs to me, Jericho,” he said. “I can turn her on or off. You saw that just now, didn’t you? She belongs to me.”

Jericho took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “Well, I’m sorry to have interfered with your blood-letting, Val,” he said. He looked at Amanda, lying so still on the couch, her eyes closed, the leech swelling like an obscene infection. “I came because she called me.”

“That was before I told her she could only get in trouble with Roberts’ people if she stuck her nose in,” Kramer said. “We appreciate your coming, though.”

“My pleasure,” Jericho said. “When Amanda comes to, tell her that.”

Jericho walked west from Jane Street toward the waterfront. The scene in Amanda’s apartment was something out of Grand Guignol, he thought. The girl, grief-stricken for a lost love, suddenly turned on by that giant child, submitting to his kiss, and to the disgusting creature held fixed on her eye. Jericho supposed that reactions to the physical were Amanda’s whole life.

There was a house near the abandoned West Side Highway which Jericho had visited before. During a longshoremen’s strike some years ago Jericho had done drawings and paintings of the violence, and he had met Reno Roberts and been invited to an incredible Italian dinner given by the crime boss. Reno Roberts had admired Jericho’s size, his bawdy humor, and in particular his ability to draw extraordinary caricatures of the dinner guests. Jericho had earned a pass to the gangster’s presence that night and he decided to use it now.

The security was unexpectedly tight. More than a block from the house Jericho was picked up by two of Roberts’ men who recognized him.

“Better not try to see Reno this morning,” they told him. “You heard what happened?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Jericho said. “I might be able to help him.”

“He don’t need no help,” one of the men said.

“Everybody can always use help,” Jericho said. “Ask Reno to let me see him for five minutes.”

Reno Roberts was a short squat man, bald, with burning black eyes that were hot with anger when Jericho was ushered into his presence. A large diamond ring on a stubby finger glittered in the light from a desk lamp.

“Not a time for fun and games, Johnny boy,” he said. “Pasquale says you want to help. What help? Can you turn off the cops?”

“Maybe,” Jericho said.

“Can you turn off J. C. Cordell? Because he has his own army which won’t wait for the police. A lot of us are going to die on both sides in the next forty-eight hours. I am supposed to have killed Paul Cordell.”

“But you didn’t,” Jericho said.

“What makes you think I didn’t?” Reno asked, his eyes narrowed. “J. C.’s people killed my boy Michael. We don’t let such things pass in my world.”

“But you did,” Jericho said. “You let two years pass. You didn’t strike when your anger was hot. Why? I’m guessing it was because your boy was involved in an unauthorized theft. The guards on Cordell’s pier only did their duty. They didn’t know whom they were shooting. You were filled with grief and sorrow, but there was no cause for revenge. Your boy pulled a stupid stunt and paid the price for it.”

“Not a bad guess,” Reno said.

“So why strike back now, after two years?” Jericho asked. “And why do it so stupidly? That’s not your style.”

“Why stupidly?” Reno asked, his eyes bright.

“It would have been easy to finger Paul Cordell without having a witness present,” Jericho said. “Why do it when it was also necessary to kill a completely innocent man? Why do it in broad daylight in a building where there might be other witnesses? Why choose a moment when Paul Cordell’s bodyguard might walk in on you before the job was done? All those risks, Reno, when it could have been done with no risks. Not your style. Not professional.”

“Can you convince the cops and J. C. Cordell of that?” Reno asked.

“By producing the killer,” Jericho said.

Reno leaned forward in his chair. “You know who it was?”

“A hunch, Reno. But I need your help.”

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to persuade someone to talk to me without any holding back.”

“Name him,” Reno said. “And why are you doing this for me, Johnny boy? You don’t owe me anything.”

“Rick Sheridan was my friend. I owe him,” Jericho said.

“I don’t talk about my customers,” Florio, proprietor of Florio’s Bar & Grill, said to Jericho. He was a tall, thin, dark man who looked older than his fifty years. “You come into my place with some guy’s wife and I don’t talk about it. It’s none of my business.”

“But Reno has made it clear to you that you must talk,” Jericho said.

“I would rather cut out my tongue than betray my friends,” Florio said. “You are a friend of the cops.”

“Didn’t Reno tell you that I am also his friend?”

“The heat is on Reno. He would do anything to take it off.”

“Maybe the people I want to talk about are not friends you would cut out your tongue to keep from betraying,” Jericho said. “One of them works for you now and then. Val Kramer.”

Florio’s face relaxed.

“Poor dumb kid,” he said. “Yeah, he fills in behind the bar when I’m short-handed.”

“Yesterday?”

“From five in the afternoon till midnight. My regular bartender was home with the flu.”

“My friend Rick Sheridan was murdered at about four in the afternoon. Did you know Rick?”

“Sure, I knew him. He came in here three, four times a week. A great guy. Very bad luck for him he was there when they hit Paul Cordell.”

“If that’s what happened,” Jericho said. “Did you know Rick’s girl, Amanda Kent?”

Florio laughed. “Rick’s girl? He couldn’t stand the sight of her. He used her as a model, I guess. She fell for him. She’s a crazy kid, but he wanted no part of her. Only a couple of nights ago he told her off, right here in my place. He told her to get lost, to leave him alone.”

“What do you know about Amanda Kent and Val Kramer? Is Val one of her lovers?”

“Oh, he was gone on her. Over his head gone. He followed her around like some faithful collie dog. But she had no time for him.” Florio’s face clouded. “Funny thing. She came in here with Val yesterday — at five o’clock — when he came on the job. She stayed here all night, till he went off at midnight. She left here with him then. When they came in at five we hadn’t heard anything about the shooting. The news came over the radio a little before seven. Amanda went into a kind of hysterics, but she didn’t leave. Some of the customers sat with her, tried to console her. You want to know who they were?”

Jericho shook his head slowly.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “She had hysterics, but she waited for Val Kramer to finish his tour, some five hours after she heard the news on the radio?”

“Yeah. I suppose — well, I don’t know exactly what I suppose. Maybe she was afraid to go home. Maybe she thought Reno’s boys might be after anyone who might have been around Sheridan’s place at the time of the shooting.”

“Are you saying Amanda was around Rick’s studio at four o’clock?”

Florio shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, Mr. Jericho. When the news came on the radio she had, like I told you, hysterics. She kept saying, over and over. ‘I just saw him a little while ago!’ ”

“Did she get potted while she waited for Kramer?”

“Funny you should ask,” Florio said, “because I remember being surprised that she didn’t. She usually drank a lot. I figured she’d really go overboard when she heard about Rick Sheridan. But she didn’t. She stayed cold-sober.”

“And waited for Kramer?”

“Val would make her a perfect bodyguard,” Florio said. “He’s too stupid to be afraid of anybody or anything.”

The gray light of dawn was sifting through the city’s canyons when Jericho again knocked on the door of Amanda Kent’s Jane Street apartment. It was Val Kramer who opened the door.

“Gee, Mr. Jericho, you got some news for us?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” Jericho said. “May I come in?”

“Sure. Come in,” the childlike giant said. “Have some coffee? I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”

“I’d like that,” Jericho said, moving into the apartment. “How’s Amanda?”

“She’s fine,” Kramer said, his smile almost jubilant. “That blood-sucker really did his thing.”

“Would you believe it?” Amanda asked from the bedroom doorway. She was still wearing the see-through negligee, but the swollen and discolored eye had vanished. “That little sucker really sucked. You found out something, Mr. Jericho?”

Jericho took the mug of hot coffee Kramer brought him. “I found out who killed Rick and Paul Cordell,” he said quietly.

“Who?” they asked simultaneously.

“One of you,” Jericho said, very quietly. He took a cautious sip of the scalding-hot coffee.

The childlike giant giggled. “You gotta be kidding,” he said.

“I was never more serious in my life, Val,” Jericho said.

The room was deathly still. Kramer looked at Amanda who had suddenly braced herself against the doorframe.

“I don’t think you should say things like that, Mr. Jericho,” the girl said, her voice shaken. “Because it’s crazy!”

“Oh, it’s crazy enough,” Jericho said. “Rick had turned you down, Amanda, and he had to be killed for that. How crazy can you get? I came here to get you to turn over the gun to me, whichever one of you had it. I can’t put it off, friends. There is about to be a war on the streets in which dozens of innocent people will die. So hand it over.”

Val Kramer made a slow hesitant move toward the pocket of his canvas jacket. He produced a small pearl-handled gun that was almost hidden in his massive hand. He pointed it at Jericho, clumsily, like a man unaccustomed to handling such a weapon.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t mind your own business, Mr. Jericho,” he said.

“Amanda called me, asked me for help,” Jericho said, not moving a muscle.

“No such thing!” Amanda protested. “You were Rick’s friend. I thought you should know what happened to him.”

“Six hours after you’d heard the news? Why didn’t you call me from Florio’s bar? You were there for five hours after you heard the news.”

“I–I was hysterical. I didn’t have my head together,” Amanda said. “After I got home I began to think of friends of Rick’s who ought to be told.”

“You wanted me to nail Val, didn’t you, Amanda? Because you were afraid of him. When he found out you’d called me he hit you. You didn’t bump into any door, did you, Amanda?”

“So I killed him,” Val said, in a strange little boy’s voice. “He couldn’t get away with what he did to Manda. I went to his studio and I told him he had to pay for what he’d done to Manda, so I killed him. And I killed the guy who was there, because he could tell on me. I didn’t know it was Paul Cordell and that it would make a lot of trouble. And now I ’m going to kill you, Mr. Jericho, because you can tell on me.”

He lifted the gun a little so that it was aimed at Jericho’s heart. Jericho threw the hot coffee full in the childlike giant’s face. There was a roar of pain and Kramer dropped the gun as he lifted his hands to his scalded face. Then he lunged at Jericho.

It was a matter of strength against strength and skill. Jericho sidestepped the rush, and a savage chopping blow to Kramer’s neck sent the giant crashing to the floor like a poled ox. He lay still, frighteningly still. Jericho bent down and picked up the little pearl-handled gun.

Then Amanda was clinging to him, weeping, “Oh, thank God, thank God!” she said. “I was so terrified of him!”

Jericho’s fingers bit into her arms and held her away from him. “You scum,” he said. It was more like a statement of fact than an angry expletive. “That poor guy would do anything on earth for you, including taking the rap for a murder you committed. Followed you around like a faithful collie dog, I was told. Followed you to Kick’s studio yesterday afternoon. It was a habit with him — the faithful collie dog.

“He was too late to stop your killing a man who simply wasn’t interested in what your body had to offer. ‘Hell hath no fury—’ He couldn’t stop your killing, but he helped you get away. He took you to Florio’s where he had to work. You stayed there for seven long hours. Why? Because you needed a bodyguard? Because you were grateful? No, because he had you cold and you knew you were going to have to do whatever he told you to do.”

“No! No!” It was only a whisper.

“But you knew how to handle him, and you had to wait till it was possible. You knew that if you gave yourself to him he was yours forever, to handle as you pleased. You knew he would take the blame for you if the going got tough, no matter what. You waited for him all those hours in Florio’s because until you could pretend that you cared for him he had you trapped. You took him home here and you offered him something he’d never really dreamed of having.”

“I–I had no choice,” Amanda said. “He killed Rick just like he said. I—”

“He hit you in the eye in some kind of struggle with you,” Jericho said. “And because he really loves you, in his simple-minded and faithful way, he went out to find a piece of beef to put on your eye and when he saw there was no butcher shop open he found you that leech. While he was gone, you called me. You were already thinking of a way out. You would have fed me bits and pieces if I hadn’t discovered them for myself. Unfortunately for you I found the right pieces and not the phony ones you’d have fed me.”

“I swear to you—”

“It won’t do, Amanda,” Jericho said. “You’re going out of here with me now, and just pray to God that your confession comes in time to stop blood from running in the gutters.” He looked down at the unconscious giant. “And just pray that I can make that poor jerk believe that your body wasn’t worth the price he was willing to pay. Get moving, Amanda.”