Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 4, October 1977

A Word from Willie by Charles Peterson

“Weedy Willy” was not going to be missed. But it was up to the police to run down his killer from a crazy clue.

Wilfred Weede, better known as “Weedy Willy” to police and acquaintances, was not a particularly attractive specimen in life. In death he was even less so, for whoever had engineered Willy’s departure had attempted a wholesale rearrangement of his ferret-like features prior to dispatching him with a kitchen knife.

The knife lay some inches from Willy’s outstretched right hand, near the overturned kitchen table. The kitchen itself was a mess — even the wall phone had been tom away and lay in a corner amid shards of chinaware, indicating that Willy had not gone gentle into that good night, but had scattered blood about with a lavish abandon in his going.

He had, however, retailed enough to write one word on the light grey asphalt tile with a finger.

“ ‘KWXOTE’?” said Dan Herndon in puzzled tone. He was the younger of the two Homicide Division detectives on hand, a tall, solidly-constructed, carefully dressed man in his thirties, with coppery hair which he wore longer than regulations, strictly interpreted, would allow. “What the hell kind of a dying message is that?”

“The kind you write when you have a knife in your gut, very little time, and no stationery handy,” replied Carey McKay. McKay, fortyish but still whippet-lean and a couple of inches taller than Herndon, had deep-etched lines from cheek to jaw in an angular face, out of which peered eyes of a startling ice-blue.

“I suppose he was trying to give us a line on his killer?”

“A guy doesn’t go to that kind of trouble to leave a note for the milkman.” McKay directed the police photographer on a couple of angle shots, then he and Herndon picked their way out of the shambles and walked toward the front of the house. Already registered was the fact that the bloodstains were thoroughly dry, indicating Willy had been dead for many hours. In passing, McKay cocked an eyebrow at the fingerprint crew, one of whom replied with a shake of his head.

“Somebody either wore gloves or wiped the place afterwards,” the man reported. “Haven’t found anything but him so far.” He jerked a thumb toward the corpse in the kitchen.

McKay and Herndon proceeded to the room that Weedy Willy would probably have called his library — a small corner room perhaps twelve feet square, with a couple of windows. It was crowded with a reclining lounge, end tables, a color television set, and a small kneehole desk with a princess phone on it. Floor to ceiling bookshelves covered one entire wall.

From the lounge, a small dark-haired girl looked up at them with frightened brown eyes and the appealing vulnerability of a kitten caught in a thunderstorm.

McKay made a show of consulting his notebook. “You are Miss Nicky Preston,” he said, without preamble. “Would you mind telling us how you happened to find the body?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Just once more, please.”

The girl sighed. “I had some — business to talk over with wi... with Mr. Weede. I got here at about nine-thirty and rang the front doorbell but no one answered, so I walked around and rang the bell at the back door. Then I noticed the door hadn’t latched. I pushed it open and called inside.

“Then I saw... I saw—” She swallowed and shuddered, fighting for control. “The next thing I knew, I was running toward the street, and just then a patrol car happened by and the officer stopped and asked what was wrong. And — that’s all there is. How long are you going to keep me here?”

McKay ignored the question. “What was your business with Willy?”

Nicky Preston’s lips shut in a tight line. “I can’t tell you that. It — was a personal matter.”

“Personal enough to kill for?” asked Herndon.

She turned stricken eyes on him. “Yes! Yes! But I didn’t — he was dead when I got here, I tell you!”

McKay regarded her thoughtfully and allowed the silence to deepen as he scrutinized the room. There were a couple of crossword puzzle books on the end table, together with a canister full of lead pencils. One entire shelf of the bookcase was devoted to dictionaries and puzzle books, including collections of the Double Crostic variety.

A slim book titled Scrabble Word List jutted out from the others, and McKay picked it out to page through it curiously. It was a selection of unusual words arranged in groups of three to seven letters and someone — doubtless Willy himself — had written additional words on the book’s blank end pages.

“Miss Preston,” he said at last, “we know a good deal about our friend in the other room, including the fact that he served time for blackmail. He was released seven or eight years ago and has supported himself more than adequately since without any visible employment. The inference is that he was doing business at the same old stand. So I’ll ask you, Miss Preston, was Willy blackmailing you?”

It was not her emphatic “No!” that surprised McKay so much as the fact that the answer sounded absolutely genuine. He was still considering it when sounds of controversy came from the hallway and a policeman appeared with a volubly angry young man in hand.

“This one,” the officer explained, “was giving Harrison a hard time. Said he had to see whoever was in charge here. Harrison said to bring him in to you.”

“But the young man ignored McKay. Staring in consternation at the girl,” he cried, “Nicky, you little idiot! What are you doing here?”

“Oh, Jim!” The girl threw herself into his arms and burst into sobs. The young man glowered over her shoulder at McKay, dark eyes smoldering, dark hair falling over his brow. McKay put him in his late twenties, noting the big, capable hands and broad shoulders — and the truculence that probably masked a real sense of fear.

“And who’re you?” The detective finally asked.

“My name’s Sanders — Jim Sanders.” He released the girl long enough to toss McKay a wallet with driver’s license and company identification card. “I’m a chemist with Northridge Laboratories here in town. What have you been doing to Nicky?”

“Just trying to find out why she was calling on Weedy Willy.”

“I can tell you that,” Sanders said, ignoring an exclamation of protest from the girl. “It’s no use, honey. I told you not to come — that they’d find out sooner or later. It’s because she wanted to try to buy Willy off. She knew he was into me — though she doesn’t know why, thank God — and, well, we want to get married and knew we couldn’t swing it with his blood-sucking and his threats hanging over us, and... oh, hell!”

Dan Herndon, who had followed the policeman out of the room in response to the latter’s gesture, now returned, bearing a slip of paper. “This isn’t your first visit here, is it, Sanders?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Herndon tapped the paper. “Willy has neighbors who seem very much interested in his doings. One of them gave us the license numbers of three cars that stopped here for short periods last night. The third is the one you just drove up in and parked below.”

Anders gave Nicky Preston a despairing look. “I was here about eleven-thirty,” he admitted in a low voice. “I’d called Willy earlier.”

“When?”

“About ten-fifteen. Said I had to talk to him. He never liked to see his ‘clients’ face to face — always talked to ’em by phone unless he couldn’t get out of it — but I refused to be put off and he finally agreed. I pulled up here at exactly eleven-thirty by my car radio. I remember there was another car pulling away ahead of me, going pretty fast, and I wondered if someone else had been calling on him. Well, I rang the bell but no one answered, so I went in.”

“The door was open?” McKay interjected.

“Ajar,” said Sanders. “All the lights were on, but there was no sign of Willy — until I got to the kitchen. He was already dead, but only just. He was still warm. I tore out.”

“Did you notice that word he wrote on the floor?” Herndon asked.

“Yes.”

“Mean anything to you?”

“Nothing.” Sanders looked puzzled. “That is — at first I had some crazy idea he might’ve been referring to me.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’m in an amateur theater group that recently put on Man of La Mancha, and for a minute I thought perhaps Willy’d got wind of this somehow and was trying to write something about Don Quixote. But I couldn’t imagine why he’d spell it that way, and besides that wasn’t my part anyway. But I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I just got out of there — fast!”

“You said there were two other visitors last night,” Nicky burst out. “Why don’t you ask them? Obviously one of them did it before Jim got here.”

“We intend to, Miss Preston.” McKay gave her a somber smile. “In fact, we’re picking up the owners of those cars right now. But meanwhile, since Mr. Sanders is the last person who admits seeing Willy last night, and since you were the first to see him this morning — and have evidently spent some time looking through his papers, to judge from the placement of this word-list book — we’ll have to hold you both for the time being.”

He signalled to a policeman, who led them away, hands locked tightly. “What do you think, Dan?”

Herndon grinned. “Well, Captain Shelby always used to say that a suspect in the hand was worth two in the bush, but if you ask me, those are a couple of bush-league suspects.”

McKay nodded. “I gather they haven’t had time to get together and compare notes, and right now he thinks she may have done it. That’s why he’s so willing to climb onto the platter and hand himself over to us, complete with motive and opportunity. But we can’t assume that the obvious answer isn’t the answer, either.”

Herndon’s expression was thoughtful. “They look like nice kids. Wonder how they got mixed up with Willy? And I wonder how quickly she’d have reported the murder if a prowl car hadn’t come by as she was leaving?” He looked again at McKay. “And what’s in that word book that you’ve been hanging onto like grim death ever since you took it from the shelf?”

McKay flipped to the end pages and handed the book to Herndon, who found himself staring at a list of seven-letter words:

“There’s Kwixote again,” he concluded, frowning. “Must be some kind of code.”

“Or else Willy was just working out another of his puzzles.” McKay glanced up as a policeman came to the doorway and said, “The first of those two license numbers is here, Lieutenant. Name of Roberson Garrick.”

Robertson Garrick was a large man with the heavy shoulders and forearms and the weathered face and neck of a golf pro. His blond hair was thinning on top and he had the look of an athlete gradually growing soft with self-indulgence. Still, his eyes seemed guileless and his manner candid as he responded to questions from Herndon and McKay.

He was in real estate — general sales manager of one of the city’s leading firms which, coincidentally, happened to belong to his father-in-law. Yes, he’d had business dealings with Willy. No, he wasn’t about to reveal any details of them. Yes, he’d had an appointment with Willy the night before...

“It was only the second time I’d ever met the man,” Garrick declared. “The rest of the time he was only a damned unpleasant voice on the phone, demanding money a couple of times a year. He called me ten days ago and... well, I couldn’t raise what he wanted this time. You know how it’s been in the real estate game this year. But the little leech wouldn’t let me off the hook and, to make a long story short, the only way I could shut him up was to promise, to bring him a necklace belonging to my wife.”

“There was another way,” McKay observed, “and it occured to somebody.”

Garrick looked startled. “Well, it wasn’t me. He was alive when I left at about ten-forty-five. And kicking about not having had any dinner. Said he was going to fix himself a sandwich or something.” The big man fell into a brooding silence momentarily, then added with a worried frown, “Look, Lieutenant, is all this going to get out — into the papers, I mean? If my wife ever learns about—”

“We usually try to cooperate with blackmail victims,” McKay said.

“Provided they cooperate with us,” Herndon added.

The living room phone rang at that point, and he scooped it up for a brief monosyllabic conversation. “Our second license number is on the way,” he told McKay, who was giving Garrick a questioning look.

“What did you do to your hands?” he asked.

Garrick looked at the adhesive strips across his knuckles as if he’d never seen them before. “Those? I was doing some pruning in the yard yesterday. Picked up some scratches. Should’ve worn gloves, I suppose.”

“I see.”

Garrick had little more to add and could produce nothing approaching an alibi for the pre-midnight hours, so McKay convoyed him to the bedroom, where Nicky Preston and Jim Sanders already waited. Garrick was perfectly agreeable, even relieved, asking only if he could call his office on the bedroom extension, to which McKay made no objection.

When the detective returned, the second of the missing drivers was just arriving — a heavy, florid-faced man of perhaps fifty-five, with short-clipped grey hair and heavy-framed eyeglasses. His name was Dr. Arthur Sonntag, and he was angrier than a popbottle full of hornets at having been abstracted from the campus of the university where he dispensed political science. Dr. Sonntag fizzed out abruptly when he learned that he had been placed on the murder scene by a witness, and became almost ludicrously tractable.

Unfortunately, his story turned out to be almost identical to Robertson Garrick’s — even to the time at which he was supposed to have arrived, ten-forty-five.

“Perhaps it was later,” he admitted cautiously, rubbing his close-cropped head as though to stimulate thought. “I was, you understand, upset. I paid not much attention to the time.”

Like Garrick, Dr. Sonntag had no alibi prior to midnight, claiming that he left Willy alive and well, and returned directly to his apartment. Also like Garrick, he was soon relegated to the bedroom and asked to wait.

McKay took the following few minutes to hear such reports as the technical crews could make from their preliminary investigations, reports that added little of substance to the information already known, then returned to the library to find Herndon seated at the desk, a small red-covered journal in his hands and a look of satisfaction on his face.

“Found this in a false-bottomed drawer,” he said. “Looks like a record of Willy’s business deals since he got sprung.”

“Names?”

“Sure. All of them seven letters long — and most of ’em unpronounceable. I’ve been trying a letter frequency check, but there’s no particular pattern of letter repetition. The only real peculiarity is that Q and Z never show up at all.”

“A twenty-four letter code?” McKay mused. “Odd. I knew of a word-square code that used twenty-five letters — dropped the J and I recall — but I can’t see — I imagine the guys in Cryptanalysis should take a crack at it.”

“I suppose you’ve noticed that each of our suspects so far has a seven-letter name?” said Herndon.

McKay gave him a surprised look. “I should say I have, but it ain’t so,” he confessed. “That’s interesting, isn’t it? And you’re including Nicky Preston as a suspect?”

“I can’t quite see her beating up on Weedy Willy,” said Herndon, “but she could have done it. Especially if she were good and mad and defending her boyfriend — or if they were working together.”

“But Garrick’s the one with marks on his hands.”

“The others might have worn gloves,” Herndon pointed out.

“Sanders says Willy was dead when he arrived. Garrick and Sonntag both say they left him alive, at least twenty minutes before Sanders got here.

“But there’s nothing says either of them couldn’t have sneaked back, maybe even on foot, in the time interval. Assuming, of course, that Sanders is telling the truth.”

McKay stretched and yawned tiredly. “What it all boils down to is, which one of those four answers to the name of kwixote?”

“Sanders?” Herndon guessed. “On account of the play?”

McKay shook his head. “Willy was using a code name he was perfectly familiar with. There’s no reason why he should know anything about Sanders’ theatricals. Hell!” he exploded. “Why did he have to be so cute with his word games? Why not simply write the name?”

“Probably afraid the murderer might still be around to see and destroy it,” said Herndon. “Willy wanted to leave a message that would ring a bell with us, but not with his killer.”

There was a long silence and Herndon, looking up, was surprised to see McKay frozen in an attitude of scowling concentration, his eyes fixed unseeing on the top of Willy’s desk. Herndon started to speak, only to be silenced by an imperative gesture from his partner.

“Damn!” breathed McKay at last. “I wonder if—”

“What?”

McKay snapped back to attention. “You just gave me an idea, Dan. Send Harrison in here and give me about fifteen minutes,” he said. “Then bring everybody into the living room. I want to try an experiment!”

A gabble of conversation, with Nicky Preston, Jim Sanders, Garrick and Dr. Sonntag all demanding information from Herndon at once, died quickly when McKay came into the living room.

“This is Willy’s account book,” he explained, as four pairs of eyes fastened on the small red book he carried. “No details in it on any of you, of course. Willy was too smart to keep his inventory so accessible. It will probably turn up in a safe deposit box somewhere. But this book does tell how much he collected, and when, and who from.

“The only trouble is, Willy used a code of his own for the names of his victims. In his last minutes he wrote the code name of his murderer in his own blood on the kitchen floor.”

McKay wrote on a sheet of paper.

“Kwixote?” said Nicky Preston, uncomprehending.

“We’re pretty sure one of you is kwixote — and if I’m right, we’ll know in a moment. You see, Willy was not only hung up on word puzzles; he was a telephone freak! It was remarked several times that he made practically all of his contacts by phone — and there are telephones in every room of this house.

“Now,” McKay continued, “there are two letters that don’t appear in any of the code names in Willy’s records — Q and Z. And it struck me a few minutes ago when I happened to be looking at a telephone dial that you find no Q or Z there, either. So I think Willy left us not a name, but a telephone number. Shall we give it a try?”

He picked up the phone, listened for a dial tone. The click of the dial sounded unnaturally loud as he sought the letters K-W-I–X-O-T-E. Relays clicked. McKay held the received slightly away from his ear so that everyone could hear.

There was a suspenseful moment or two of silence, then the ringing signal sounded. One ring. Two rings. Three...

Then there was the sound of a receiver being lifted and a man’s voice, tinny but distinct, said, “Dr. Sonntag’s residence.”

The professor leaped to his feet. “No, no!” he cried, his face ashen. “It cannot be — it’s some kind of trick! It’s... it’s...” His mouth worked soundlessly, then all at once he buried his face in his hands and collapsed back into his chair.

McKay spoke a few more words into the telephone before hanging up. “That was Sergeant Harrison in Dr. Sonntag’s apartment,” he explained. “I sent him over as soon as I figured out Willy’s code, to see if there was any corroborating evidence. He says there are some bloodstained clothes in the laundry hamper — and a necklace that could very well be Mrs. Garrick’s. Guess the doctor couldn’t resist taking things like that — maybe that’s what Willy had on him.”

He nodded to the doctor then to Herndon. “Let’s take him in. The rest of you are free to leave.”

He wondered whether Nicky Preston and Jim Sanders even heard him.