Above the dull roar of wind and tires Mitch heard the crash. He had a sick, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he hoped nobody else was involved in the smash-up. He slowed up, and he was doing a modest thirty when he sighted the smoldering wreckage where Jackson had rammed almost head-on into a retaining wall...
Mitch got home around seven. Amy was giving the kids supper, and the hallway of the apartment was jammed with suitcases and bundles. Amy came flying into his arms as he opened the door.
“Mitchell,” she said, holding on tight, “I was getting worried. I couldn’t imagine what kept you so late.”
“We got that bank robber,” he said. “Jub found the loot in an old car in the junk yard, and the guy killed himself trying to get away.”
“Rogan?” she said.
Mitch shook his head. “Naah. That’s what we thought at first. But this bank teller had Rogan on the brain, like lots of other people did. I don’t want to blame the guy for making a mistake.”
“Of course not,” Amy said.
“Well, when somebody held up that bank, the teller thought he recognized Rogan. Only Rogan had nothing to do with it. We just got word they nabbed him out west.”
“Then who did it?”
“Guy named Jackson. We caught up with him this afternoon. He got rattled when he was followed and when he saw Jub searching cars for the money. He knew we were closing in, so he tried a getaway and ran into a stone wall.”
“Well, you can tell me all about it later. Do you know you forgot to write that note to Joey’s school? The one the PTA wants everybody to send, asking for better lunches. I promised you’d write. As a policeman, what you say carries weight.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll take care of it right away. Amy, does Joey look like me?”
She laughed at the question. “Sometimes,” she said. “Some people think so and others don’t. Why?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I better go write that note. Only... look, Amy, what’s the name of the school? I mean, what’s the number?”
Stanley Ellin
The Crime of Ezechiele Coen
A yearly event for readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine — Stanley Ellin’s newest story — and this year there are interesting differences...
“The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” is unmistakably Ellinesque — in mystery and suspense; but it is also (a departure for Mr. Ellin) a “pure” detective story — a modern procedural tale of detection set among the ancient ruins of Rome.
And there are other differences: “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” is a novelet — also a departure for Mr. Ellin; and the approach, background, characters, mood, even the special tenderness of this story, are new and shining facets of Stanley Ellin’s impressive talent.
Mystery Writers of America judged Stanley Ellin’s “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” to be one of the three best mystery short stories published during 1963. Since two of the three stories were not tales of detection, it follows that MWA considered “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” the best detective short story of the year.
Before the disenchantment set in, Noah Freeman lived in a whirl of impressions. The chaotic traffic. The muddy Tiber. The Via Veneto out of Italian movies about la dolce vita. The Fountain of Trevi out of Hollywood. Castel Sant’ Angelo out of Tosca, Rome.
“Rome?” Pop had said. “But why Rome? Such a foreign place. And so far away.”
True. But to old Pop Freeman, even Rockland County, an hour from New York, was far away, and his two weeks of vacation there every summer an adventure. And, in fact, it was unlikely that Pop had been too much surprised at his son’s decision to go journeying afar. After all, this was the son who was going to be a doctor — at the very least a teacher — and who had become, of all things, a policeman.
“A policeman in the family,” Pop would muse aloud now and then. “A detective with a gun in the family like on TV. My own son. What would Mama say if she ever knew, may she rest in peace?”
But, Noah had to admit, the old man had been right about one thing, Rome was far, far away, not only from New York, but also from the blood-quickening image of it instilled in young Noah Freeman when he was a schoolboy soaking himself in gaudy literature about Spartacus and Caesar and Nero. And the Pensione Alfiara, hidden away in an alley off Via Arenula, was hardly a place to quicken anyone’s blood. It took an ill wind to blow an occasional American tourist there. In Noah’s case, the ill wind was the cab driver who had picked him up at Fiumicino airport and who happened to be Signora Alfiara’s brother-in-law.
It was made to order for disenchantment, the Pensione Alfiara. Granting that it offered bargain rates, its cuisine was monotonous, its service indifferent, its plumbing capricious, and its clientele, at least in early March, seemed to consist entirely of elderly, sad-eyed Italian villagers come to Rome to attend the deathbed of a dear friend. Aside from Signora Alfiara herself and the girl at the portiere’s desk, no one on the scene spoke English, so communication between Noah and his fellow boarders was restricted to nods and shrugs, well meant, but useless in relieving loneliness.
Its one marked asset was the girl at the portiere’s desk. She was tall and exquisite, one of the few really beautiful women Noah had yet encountered in Rome, because among other disillusionments was the discovery that Roman women are not the women one sees in Italian movies. And she lived behind her desk from early morning to late at night as if in a sad, self-contained world of her own, skillful at her accounts, polite, but remote and disinterested.
She intrigued him for more than the obvious reasons. The English she spoke was almost unaccented. If anything, it was of the clipped British variety, which led him to wonder whether she might not be a Briton somehow washed up on this Roman shore. And at her throat on a fine gold chain was a Mogen David, a Star of David, announcing plainly enough that she was Jewish. The sight of that small, familiar ornament had startled him at first, then had emboldened him to make a friendly overture.
“As a fellow Jew,” he had said smilingly, “I was wondering if you—” And she had cut in with chilling politeness, “Yes, you’ll find the synagogue on Lungotevere dei Cenci, a few blocks south. One of the landmarks of this part of Rome. Most interesting, of course” — which was enough to send him off defeated.
After that, he regretfully put aside hopes of making her acquaintance and dutifully went his tourist way alone, the guide book to Rome in his hand, the Italian phrase book in his pocket, trying to work up a sense of excitement at what he saw, and failing dismally at it. Partly, the weather was to blame — the damp, gray March weather which promised no break in the clouds overhead. And partly, he knew, it was loneliness — the kind of feeling that made him painfully envious of the few groups of tourists he saw here and there, shepherded by an officious guide, but, at least, chattering happily to each other.
But most of all — and this was something he had to force himself to acknowledge — he was not a tourist, but a fugitive. And what he was trying to flee was Detective Noah Freeman, who, unfortunately, was always with him and always would be. To be one of those plump, self-satisfied, retired businessmen gaping at the dome of St. Peters, that was one thing; to be Noah Freeman was quite another.
It was possible that Signora Alfiara, who had a pair of bright, knowing eyes buried in her pudding face, comprehended his state of mind and decided with maternal spirit to do something about it. Or it was possible that having learned his occupation she was honestly curious about him. Whatever the reason, Noah was deeply grateful the morning she sat down at the table where he was having the usual breakfast of hard roll, acid coffee, and watery marmalade, and explained that she had seen at the cinema stories about American detectives, but that he was the first she had ever met. Very interesting. And was life in America as the cinema showed it? So much shooting and beating and danger? Had he ever been shot at? Wounded, perhaps? What a way of life! It made her blood run cold to think of it.