He turned and went back to the car. I just sat there holding it in my hand, looking after him. Gee, life was screwy.
He waited a minute by the wheel. Then he beckoned me. “Come on,” he called over genially, “get in. You don’t want to sit there on a bench in the park. We should stick together, you and me, we’ve got a lot in common.”
George Palmer went over and climbed in beside Lee Nugent, and the two of us drove off together.
The Witch of Times Square
by Ellery Queen[5]
If last year you had asked Father Bowen of All Souls-off-Tines Square whether or not he subscribed to the Deuteronomic doctrine of an eye for an eye, he would have rebuked you — being a good Anglican — and cited some St. Jamesian reminder, probably Matthew V, 38–39, on the Case of the Reversible Cheek. Put the question to him today and Father Bowen is more likely to quote that profane authority, Ellery Queen, on the Case of the False Claimant.
Father Bowen’s flock being pastured in the West Forties, it is plentifully mixed with black sheep. Until last year one of his sorriest blessings was a gay old ewe known to the touts, newspaper vendors, bartenders, carny boys, cops, and other habitués of Broadway as the Witch — a hag with lank gray-blonde locks, cheeks like bark, and runny blue eyes, who wore sidewalk-length skirts, an outrageous shawl, and a man’s fedora which came from some night-club trash can. The Witch lived alone in a basement hole over towards Tenth Avenue, and she bounded forth at night to sell violets, corsages of gardenias, and policy tickets under the marquees and neon signs. Towards morning — she was of English blood, her name being Wichingame — she could usually be found at some all-night bar before a long row of empty gin-and-tonic glasses, singing Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning in a hoarse, joyful voice. Her record of attendance at All Souls was not meritorious, although she could be depended upon in the confessional, where she went into enthusiastic detail.
Her pastor labored hard in this exasperating vineyard, but he had no cause to rejoice until one winter week, when the Witch mistook the new snowfall on her sidewalk for the coverlet of her bed and awakened in Bellevue Hospital with a case of double lobar pneumonia. She was very ill, and at some time during her sojourn in the Valley she saw the Light. She sent for Father Bowen, and when she clanged home in a jubilant ambulance she was a permanently repentant sinner.
“Then what’s the problem, Father Bowen?” asked Ellery, wincing as he tried to turn over in bed. He had been laid up for ten days by a painful attack of sciatica.
“The root of the problem, Mr. Queen,” said Father Bowen, hooking his bony arm under Ellery’s and lifting expertly, “is the love of money. See I Timothy, VI, 10. It turns out that Miss Wichingame is — as they say in my parish — loaded. She owns several immensely valuable parcels of property and a considerable amount of cash and bonds. The poor thing has been, of course, a miser. Now, in her spiritual regeneration, she insists on giving it all away.”
“To some needy bartender?”
“I almost wish that were it,” said the old clergyman with a sigh. “I know at least three whose needs are great. But no — it’s to go to her only living heir.” And he told Ellery the curious story of the Witch’s nephew.
Miss Wichingame had had a twin sister, and while they were identical in every physical respect, their tastes differed profoundly. Miss Wichingame, for example, had early shown a preference for gin and the wilder variety of oat, whereas her twin looked upon spirits as the devil’s lubricant and was as moral as a breakfast cereal.
This disparity, unfortunately for Miss Wichingame, extended to their tastes in men. Miss Wichingame fell in love with a small, handsome, dark man — a Spaniard; but her sister, whose eugenic credo was “like to like,” gave her heart to “a pure Nordic,” as Miss Wichingame told Father Bowen — one Erik Gaard, of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, a large sedate Viking who had gone over to the Anglican church and become a missionary priest. Miss Wichingame’s Spaniard left her unwed and with pleasant if not entirely respectable memories; the Reverend Gaard, no trifler, proposed holy matrimony and was triumphantly accepted.
A son was born to the Gaards, and when he was eight years old his parents sailed with him to the Orient. For a short time the missionary’s wife corresponded with her sister, but as Miss Wichingame’s address became increasingly fluid the letters from the mission in Korea took longer and longer to catch up with her, until finally they stopped altogether.
“I take it,” said Ellery, cautiously shifting his left leg, “that when your communicant repented her sins she asked you to locate her sister.”
“I instituted inquiries through our missionary branch,” nodded Father Bowen, “and discovered that Father Gaard and his wife were murdered many years ago — the Japanese made it very difficult for Christian missionaries in Korea — and their mission burned to the ground. Their son, John, was believed to have escaped to China.
“My parishioner,” continued Father Bowen, and he became agitated, “revealed at this point an unexpected firmness of character. She insisted that her nephew was alive and that he must be found and brought to the United States, so that she might embrace him before she died and give him all her money. Perhaps you recall the newspaper publicity, Mr. Queen, especially among the columnists. I shall not try your patience with the details of our search — it was expensive and hopeless... hopeless, that is, to one of little faith, like myself; for Miss Wichingame’s part, I must say she was perfectly confident through it all.”
“And Nephew John was found.”
“Yes, Mr. Queen. Two of him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He appeared at my rectory in two installments, as it were, each part of him fresh from Korea, and each part of him insisting he was John Gaard, son of Erik and Clementine Gaard, and that the other fellow was a cheeky impostor. An embarrassment of blessings. Frankly, I’m up the creek.”
“I suppose they look alike?”
“Not the least bit. While both are blond and about 35 — the correct age — there’s no resemblance at all, either to each other or to Father and Mrs. Gaard, an old photo of whom exists. But there is no authenticated photograph of John Gaard, so even their dissimilarity doesn’t help.”
“But I should think,” protested Ellery, “visas, passports, ordinary proofs of identity, background—”
“You forget, Mr. Queen,” said Father Bowen with a certain steeliness, “that Korea in recent years has not been exactly a garden of tranquillity. The two young men, it appears, had been close friends, both having worked for the same oil company in China. When the Chinese Communists closed in, they fled — quite irregularly — to Korea. The North Korean invasion caught them there, and they got out with a mob of refugees after the Communist armies took Seoul. There was a great deal of official confusion and a relaxation of the normal precautions. Each young man exhibits documents in the name of John Gaard, and each came out through a different airfield.”
“How do they explain the identical documents?”
“Each says the other stole his credentials and had them duplicated — except, of course, for the passport photographs. Each says he told the other of an aunt in the United States. No check-up can be made in Korea and, unfortunately, the oil company records in China are not accessible. All our inquiries of the Chinese Communist authorities, made through diplomatic intermediaries, have been ignored. You may take my word for it, Mr. Queen, there’s simply no way of checking back on their identities.”