Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 4, No. 1. Whole No. 8, January 1943
--Mystery for Christmas
by Anthony Boucher
That was why the Benson jewel robbery was solved — because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.
His almost invisible eyebrows soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said Mr. Quilter, and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”
Aram Melekian tilted his hat a trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this untrammeled opus any more, Metropolis Pictures is going to be sueing its youngest genius for breach of contract.”
Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine, molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”
“Go play with your blue pencil,” Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”
“Because I have never produced anything myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was aquiver.
“Then what do you need us for?”
“What — Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!” said Mr. Quilter loudly. “I’ll show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me he’ll turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”
“Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian. “And I’ve no doubt you will.”
Mr. Quilter stalked out of the studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F. X. He saw a discomfited Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the significant part of writing.
He felt a bumping shock and the squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.
Mr. Quilter rose to his feet undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.
“I’m awfully sorry,” the young man blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine, I guess.” His left arm was in a sling.
“Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I was preoccupied…”
They stood awkwardly for a moment, each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke at once.
“You came out of that studio,” the young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you work there?”
And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket. “Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”
The young man shuffled and came near blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me— But are you a writer? In there?”
Mr. Quilter’s eyes were aglow under their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers tick. Are you interested?”
He was also, he might have added, what makes detectives tick. But he did not know that yet.
The Christmas trees were lighting up in front yards and in windows as Officer Tom Smith turned his rickety Model A onto the side street where Mr. Quilter lived. Hollywood is full of these quiet streets, where ordinary people live and move and have their being, and are happy or unhappy as chance wills, but both in a normal and unspectacular way. This is really Hollywood — the Hollywood that patronizes the twenty-cent fourth-run houses and crowds the stores on the Boulevard on Dollar Day.
To Mr. Quilter, saturated at the studio with the other Hollywood, this was always a relief. Kids were playing ball in the evening sun, radios were tuning in to Amos and Andy, and from the small houses came either the smell of cooking or the clatter of dish-washing.
And the Christmas trees, he knew, had been decorated not for the benefit of the photographers from the fan magazines, but because the children liked them and they looked warm and friendly from the street.
“Gosh, Mr. Quilter,” Tom Smith was saying, “this is sure a swell break for me. You know, I’m a good copper. But to be honest I don’t know as I’m very bright. And that’s why I want to write, because maybe that way I can train myself to be and then I won’t be a plain patrolman all my life. And besides, this writing, it kind of itches-like inside you.”
“Cacoëthes scribendi,” observed Mr. Quilter, not unkindly. “You see, sir, you have hit, in your fumbling way, on one of the classic expressions for your condition.”
“Now that’s what I mean. You know what I mean even when I don’t say it. Between us, Mr. Quilter…”
Mr. Quilter, his long thin legs outdistancing even the policeman’s, led the way into his bungalow and on down the hall to a room which at first glance contained nothing but thousands of books. Mr. Quilter waved at them. “Here, sir, is assembled every helpful fact that mortal need know. But I cannot breathe life into these dry bones. Books are not written from books. But I can provide bones, and correctly articulated, for the life which you, sir— But here is a chair. And a reading lamp. Now, sir, let me hear your story.”
Tom Smith shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “The trouble is,” he confessed, “it hasn’t got an ending.”
Mr. Quilter beamed. “When I have heard it, I shall demonstrate to you, sir, the one ending it inevitably must have.”
“I sure hope you will, because it’s got to have and I promised her it would have and— You know Beverly Benson?”
“Why, yes. I entered the industry at the beginning of talkies. She was still somewhat in evidence. But why…?”
“I was only a kid when she made Sable Sin and Orchids at Breakfast and all the rest, and I thought she was something pretty marvelous. There was a girl in our high school was supposed to look like her, and I used to think, ‘Gee, if I could ever see the real Beverly Benson!’ And last night I did.”
“Hm. And this story, sir, is the result?”
“Yeah. And this too.” He smiled wryly and indicated his wounded arm. “But I better read you the story.” He cleared his throat loudly. “The Red and Green Mystery” he declaimed. “By Arden Van Arden.”
“A pseudonym, sir?”
“Well, I sort of thought… Tom Smith — that doesn’t sound like a writer.”
“Arden Van Arden, sir, doesn’t sound like anything. But go on.”
And Officer Tom Smith began his narrative:
It was a screwy party for the police to bust in on. Not that it was a raid or anything like that. God knows I’ve run into some bughouse parties that way, but I’m assigned to the jewelry squad now under Lieutenant Michaels, and when this call came in he took three other guys and me and we shot out to the big house in Laurel Canyon.
I wasn’t paying much attention to where we were going and I wouldn’t have known the place anyway, but I knew her, all right. She was standing in the doorway waiting for us. For just a minute it stumped me who she was, but then I knew. It was the eyes mostly. She’d changed a lot since Sable Sin, but you still couldn’t miss the Beverly Benson eyes. The rest of her had got older (not older exactly either — you might maybe say richer) but the eyes were still the same. She had red hair. They didn’t have technicolor when she was in pictures and I hadn’t ever known what color her hair was. It struck me funny seeing her like that — the way I’d been nuts about her when I was a kid and not even knowing what color her hair was.