I looked at them one by one. “I think it’ll work,” I said. “To sweeten it, we’ll tell them you’re friends of mine. I play in this game now and then, although I wasn’t here when Phil was. And when the accident happened the first thing you thought of was to call me, and that’s why there was a delay reporting the incident. You’d reported it to me, and I was on my way here, and you figured that was enough.” I stopped for breath, took a moment to look each of them in the eye. “We’ll want things arranged just right,” I went on, “and it’ll be a good idea to spread a little cash around. But I think this one’ll go into the books as accidental death.”
“They must have thought you were a genius,” Elaine said.
“Or an idiot savant,” I said. “Here I was, telling them to fake exactly what had in fact happened. At the beginning I think they may have thought I was blundering into an unwitting reconstruction of the incident, but by the end they probably figured out that I knew where I was going.”
“But you never spelled it out.”
“No, we maintained the fiction that some intruder stuck the knife in Ryman, and we were tampering with the evidence.”
“When actually you were restoring it. What tipped you off?”
“The body blocking the door. The lividity pattern was wrong, but I was suspicious even before I confirmed that. It’s just too cute, a body positioned where it’ll keep a door from opening. And the table was in the wrong place, and the little rug had to be covering something, or why else would it be where it was? So I pictured the room the right way, and then everything sort of filled in. But it didn’t take a genius. Any cop would have seen some wrong things, and he’d have asked a few hard questions, and the four of them would have caved in.”
“And then what? Murder indictments?”
“Most likely, but they’re respectable businessmen and the deceased was a scumbag, so they’d have been up on manslaughter charges and probably would have pleaded to a lesser charge. Still, a verdict of accidental death saves them a lot of aggravation.”
“And that’s what really happened?”
“I can’t see any of those men packing a switch knife, or pulling it at a card table. Nor does it seem likely they could have taken it away from Ryman and killed him with it. I think he went ass over teakettle with the table coming down on top of him and maybe one or two of the guys falling on top of the table. And he was still holding the knife, and he stuck it in his own chest.”
“And the cops who responded—”
“Well, I called it in for them, so I more or less selected the responding officers. I picked guys you can work with.”
“And worked with them.”
“Everybody came out okay,” I said. “I collected a few dollars from the four players, and I laid off some of it where it would do the most good.”
“Just to smooth things out.”
“That’s right.”
“But you didn’t lay off all of it.”
“No,” I said, “not quite all of it. Give me your hand. Here.”
“What’s this?”
“A finder’s fee.”
“Three hundred dollars?”
“Ten percent,” I said.
“Gee,” she said. “I didn’t expect anything.”
“What do you do when somebody gives you money?”
“I say thank you,” she said, “and I put it someplace safe. This is great. You get them to tell the truth, and everybody gets paid. Do you have to go back to Syosset right away? Because Chet Baker’s at Mikell’s tonight.”
“We could go hear him,” I said, “and then we could come back here. I told Anita I’d probably have to stay over.”
“Oh, goodie,” she said. “Do you suppose he’ll sing ‘Let’s Get Lost?’ ”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “Not if you ask him nice.”
I don’t remember if he sang it or not, but I heard it again just the other day on the radio. He’d ended abruptly, that aging boy with the sweet voice and sweeter horn. He went out a hotel-room window somewhere in Europe, and most people figured he’d had help. He’d crossed up a lot of people along the way and always got away with it, but then that’s usually the way it works. You dodge all the bullets but the last one.
“Let’s Get Lost.” I heard the song, and not twenty-four hours later I picked up the Times and read an obit for a commodities trader named P. Gordon Fawcett, who’d succumbed to prostate cancer. The name rang a bell, but it took me hours to place it. He was the guy in the blazer, the man in whose apartment Phil Ryman stabbed himself.
Funny how things work out. It wasn’t too long after that poker game that another incident precipitated my departure from the NYPD, and from my marriage. Elaine and I lost track of each other, and caught up with each other some years down the line, by which time I’d found a way to live without drinking. So we get lost and found — and now we’re married. Who’d have guessed?
My life’s vastly different these days, but I can imagine being called in on just that sort of emergency — a man dead on the carpet, a knife in his chest, in the company of four poker players who only wish he’d disappear. As I said, my life’s different, and I suppose I’m different myself. So I’d almost certainly handle it differently now, and what I’d probably do is call it in immediately and let the cops deal with it.
Still, I always liked the way that one worked out. I walked in on a cover-up, and what I did was cover up the cover-up. And in the process I wound up with the truth. Or an approximation of it, at least, and isn’t that as much as you can expect to get? Isn’t that enough?
A Missunderstanding
by Naomi
With apologies to Longfellow
Season of the Camel
by Edward D. Hoch
Last month we had the pleasure of announcing the forthcoming publication of a new collection of Nick Velvet short stories (The Velvet Touch/ Crippen & Landru). We have since learned that the TV option on the character, which has been in place for several years now, is to be renewed. Velvet is generally held to be Mr. Hoch’s most popular series character, but former secret agent Jeffrey Rand, this tale’s hero, also has high ratings with EQMM.
It was on one of Rand’s occasional visits to Egypt with his wife Leila that he first encountered Omar Goncah, a designer of computer chips who traded in Oriental rugs in his spare time. He was a slender, well-spoken man who informed them early on that he’d been educated in England.