“How about that snuff business, Mr. Queen?” asked Peters.
“Yes. The conclusion is plain from the fact that Planck apparently indulged only once during the days he worked with Mr. Beninson. Since snuff addicts partake freely and often, Planck wasn’t a snuff addict. Then it wasn’t snuff he inhaled that day. What else is sniffed in a similar manner? Well — drugs in powder form — heroin! What are the characteristics of a heroin addict? Nervous drawn appearance; gauntness, almost emaciation; and most important, tell-tale eyes, the pupils of which contract under influence of the drug. Then here was another explanation for the tinted glasses Planck wore. They served a double purpose — as an easily recognizable disguise, and also to conceal his eyes, which would give his vice-addiction away! But when I observed that Mr. Albert Ulm—” Ellery went over to the cowering man and ripped the green eyeshade away, revealing two stark, pin-point pupils — “wore this shade, it was a psychological confirmation of his identity as Planck.”
“Yes, but that business of stealing all those books,” said Hazlitt.
“Part of a very pretty and rather far-fetched plot,” said Ellery. “With Albert Ulm the disguised thief, Friederich Ulm, who exhibited the wound on his cheek, must have been an accomplice. Then with the Ulm brothers the thieves, the entire business of the books was a blind. The attack on Friederich, the ruse of the bookstore escape, the trail of the minor robberies of copies of Europe in Chaos — a cleverly planned series of incidents to authenticate the fact that there was an outside thief, to convince the police and the insurance company that the stamp actually was stolen when it was not. Object, of course, to collect the insurance without parting with the stamp. These men are fanatical collectors.”
Heffley wriggled his fat little body uncomfortably. “That’s all very nice, Mr. Queen, but where the deuce is that stamp they stole from themselves? Where’d they hide it?”
“I thought long and earnestly about that, Heffley. For while my trio of deductions were psychological indications of guilt, the discovery of the stolen stamp in the Ulms’ possession would be evidential proof—” The inspector was turning the second stamp over mechanically. “I said to myself” Ellery went on, “in a reconsideration of the problem: What would be the most likely hiding place for the stamp? And then I remembered that the two stamps were identical, even the initials of the good queen being in the same place. So I said to myself: If I were Messrs. Ulm, I should hide that stamp — like the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale — in the most obvious place. And what is the most obvious place?”
Ellery sighed and returned the unused revolver to Sergeant Velie. “Dad,” he remarked to the inspector, who started guiltily, “I think that if you allow one of the philatelists in our company to examine the second one-penny black in your fingers, you’ll find that the first has been pasted with non-injurious rubber cement precisely over the second!”
Waiting for Rusty
by William Cole
As part of our 70th-anniversary celebration, we offer, tins month, a reprint from the original Black Mask magazine, with which EQMM has decades-old ties. “Waiting for Rusty” is one of the shortest stories ever published in Black Mask, but it remains, according to conservator Keith Alan Deutsch, the one that has generated the most reader letters. It was William Cole’s only Black Mask story, and was bought by Fanny Ellsworth, who took over editorship of the magazine from Joseph Shaw in 1936. Ellsworth favored emotional tales over hard-boiled narration and under her, writers such as Cornell Woolrich emerged at Black Mask.
One of these days I’m going to tell the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to blow his mouth off once too often and I’m going to take him out there and show him. I may get on the wrong side of him, but it’ll be worth it...
I’m just closing up my little roadside place for the night when they come in. Dotty and three guys. One of the men has a sawed-off shotgun and he stands by the window. Dotty and the others come up to the bar.
“Evenin’, Professor,” Dotty says, looking around. “You here alone?”
“Yeah,” I says, when I’m able to talk. “Yeah, but—”
“Good,” Dotty says. “Lock that back door and then start pourin’ rye.”
She’s wearing a blue slicker turned up at the neck and no hat. Her light hair is a little fluffed from the wind. She looks about the same as I remember she did when she went to the high school at Milbrook, only now you can’t look long at her eyes.
“Listen, miss,” I says, “listen, you don’t want to stay here. They’re surrounding the whole county. I just got it over the radio.”
“He’s right,” the man at the window says. “We gotta keep movin’, Dot. We gotta keep movin’ — and fast, or we’ll wake up in the morgue.”
“Get outside,” Dotty tells him, “and keep your eyes open or you’ll wake up there anyway.”
She goes over and turns on the radio. The other two men keep walking around. They’re all smoking cigarettes, one right after the other.
I know enough to do what I’m told.
There’s nothing on the radio but some dance music. The two men look at each other; then the shorter one goes over to Dotty.
“I know how you feel, Dot,” he says. “But they’re right on our tail. We gotta—”
“I told you boys once,” Dot says, “and I’m not tellin’ you again. We wait here for Rusty.”
“But supposin’ he don’t come?” the man says. He has a way of rubbing his wrist. “Supposin’... supposin’ he can’t make it? Supposin’—”
“Supposin’ you dry up,” Dotty says. “Rusty said he’ll be here and when Rusty says something...”
The music breaks off and she whirls to listen to the press-radio flash. It’s about the same as the last. The police have thrown a dragnet around the entire northern part of the state and are confident of capturing Rusty Nelson and his mob at any hour. Dotty don’t think much of this, but when she is called Rusty’s girl and Gun Moll No. 1, she smiles and takes a bow.
“After the bank holdup yesterday,” the announcer says, “Rusty and Dotty split up, one car going north, the other northwest. The state trooper who tried to stop Dotty at Preston this afternoon died on the way to the hospital.”
“Too bad,” Dotty says. “He had the nicest blue eyes.”
A car goes by on the highway outside and they all stand still for a second. Then the music comes back loud and the men jump to turn it down low. The taller one is swearing under his breath.
“Canada ain’t big enough,” he says sarcastic-like. “We gotta meet here.”
Dotty don’t say anything.
In no time at all, they finish the bottle of rye. I open another.
“Maybe he couldn’t get through,” the shorter man says. “Maybe he tried to but couldn’t.”
There’s another radio flash. The cops have traced Rusty to Gatesville.
This makes Dotty feel a lot better. She laughs. “He’s near Gatesville,” she says, “like we’re near Siberia.”
She gets feeling pretty good, thinking of Rusty. She don’t mind the music now, the way the men do. She asks me if it comes from the Pavilion and I tell her yes.
“I was there once,” she says. “I went there with Rusty. They were havin’ a dance and he took me.” The men aren’t interested and she tells it to me. “I had to wear an old dress because that’s all I had, but Rusty, he sees me and says, ‘Gee, kid, where’d you get the new dress?’ and we hop in his boiler and roll down there.”
She has stopped walking around now and her eyes are all different.