Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
“Or Solomon,” his father amended. “Or Solomon Junior. In any case, he was identifying his son as his killer, but he died before he could finish writing. Which turns out to be irrelevant, since Solo freely confessed to the crime.”
“Where is he now?” asked Sherlock.
The inspector sighed. “In a holding cell at headquarters. He’ll sit there until his trial.”
“They won’t let him out on bail?” said Jane.
“Probably not, honey. He’ll be charged with second-degree murder, and I think the judge is unlikely to agree to bail. Even if he does, he’ll set it so high that there’s no way Solo will be able to bond out. I’m afraid he’ll stay in jail until — well, until he goes to prison.”
“A crime but not a mystery,” Ellery said slowly. “Q.E.D.”
The professor blinked his eyes and returned to the present.
His father’s prediction, he remembered, had been correct. Solo Kaine had been charged with murder in the second degree, the district attorney had agreed to let him plead down to manslaughter, and the teenager had been sentenced to ten years.
Which meant, he realized, that in principle Solo had been back out in the world for the last four decades.
He found himself wondering what had happened to the boy — now, of course, a boy no longer but a man of almost seventy. Had he put his incarceration behind him and managed to make something of the rest of his life, or had prison destroyed his future, as it destroyed the futures of so many young men, not just the career criminals but also those whose otherwise quiet lives had been ruined by a single error in judgment, a single momentary loss of reason and control?
He swiveled decisively back to his monitor, poised his fingers above his keyboard for a moment, and began to type.
A search on “Solomon Kaine” (without the quotation marks) produced almost half a million hits in 0.86 seconds, and Ellery was confused by what showed up on his screen until he realized — after considerably longer than eight-tenths of a second — that Google had autocorrected his accurate spelling to the in-this-case-inaccurate “Solomon Kane,” which turned out to be the title of a 2009 fantasy film, based on a comic-book hero and starring a roster of people he’d never heard of... along with, oddly, Max von Sydow, who he’d thought was long dead.
Clicking on “Did you mean: solomon kaine” took another half a second and delivered just over a hundred thousand hits. He scrolled down the first page and found links to reviews of several of Kaine Senior’s books — most of which were long out of print, but one, a text on the Punic Wars, was still available on Amazon and apparently in use at a number of universities — and, near the bottom of the page, an obituary from the Tyson Times, dated November 21, 1968.
Rather than read the obit, the professor launched a new search, this time on “Solomon Kaine Junior” (with the quotation marks). In an even smaller fraction of a second, he was presented with under a thousand hits, beginning with news stories about the murder and Solo’s subsequent plea bargain and sentencing... and then this headline jumped out at him: “Youth, 20, killed in prison attack.”
Ellery’s heart stopped.
Dreading what he would find, he clicked on the link and read the story.
And yes, poor Solo, in the second year of his ten-year sentence, had tried to intervene when a group of older convicts ganged up on a newly incarcerated felon at the state penitentiary, and had himself been stabbed in the stomach with a shank that had been filed down from the grip end of a plastic toothbrush. He had died of his wounds in the prison hospital, without regaining consciousness. The inmate he had been trying to save had also been killed in the incident.
Dead at twenty. What a tragic end to a tragic story.
Or was it the end of the story?
Once upon a time, criminal investigation had meant legwork, had meant visiting newspaper morgues and libraries and police departments and victims’ and witnesses’ and suspects’ homes and offices in person. But now, in 2018, the phrase “armchair detective” had taken on new meaning, and there was practically no limit to what you could learn, simply by letting your fingers do the walking.
Ellery did a search on “Romy Kaine” and came up completely empty. Of course, the girl had probably gotten married and taken her husband’s last name — and he recalled vaguely that “Romy” was a nickname, anyway, short for something else, like “Solo” was short for “Solomon.”
Romany? Romanette? He couldn’t recall. It was an unusual name, he thought, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Had he ever even known what it was?
Romanov? Romula? Romaine?
The only other Romy he’d ever heard of was Romy Schneider, the actress, so he looked her up and found that she’d been bom Rosemarie Magdalena Albach.
He tried “Rosemarie Magdalena Kaine” and then “Rosemarie Kaine,” thinking Solomon Senior or his wife might perhaps have been a fan.
Nothing.
And then — cursing himself for resorting to the notorious user-editable website he constantly cautioned his students to avoid — he backtracked to Romy Schneider’s Wikipedia page and learned that she hadn’t made her film debut until 1953, when, at the tender age of fifteen, she’d appeared in a German picture titled Wenn der Weisse Flieder wieder blüht.
So Romy Kaine — who was a year older than Ellery, who had himself been born in 1951 — couldn’t possibly have been named after the actress.
And then he cursed himself again for his slowness on the uptake and went back to the very first search page he’d consulted and clicked on Solomon Senior’s obituary.
And there it was: “Survived by his son, Solomon Kaine, Jr., and daughter, Romanelle Kaine.”
Romanelle.
Now that he saw the name in black and white on the screen, he felt certain he had not ever heard it before. To him, she had always been just Romy.
He searched on “Romanelle Kaine,” and there she was, almost instantly: Romanelle Kaine Washington. So she had married, after all, and had indeed taken her husband’s name.
And she — like her mother and father and brother before her — was also dead. She had died on February 23, 2015, according to her obituary, just before her sixty-fifth birthday, of lung cancer, leaving behind a devoted husband, Richard Washington, three grown children — two daughters and a son — and five loving grandchildren.
Lung cancer. Ellery wondered if she had been a smoker.
He picked up his faded bookmark and refolded it and reached for the magazine in which he’d rediscovered it to put it back where, after all this time, it seemed to belong.
And then he froze.
He unfolded the sheet of paper and stared at it — and asked himself a question he ought to have asked fifty years ago, a question he hadn’t asked, a question no one had thought to ask at the time.
If Solomon Kaine, Sr., had meant to identify his son as his killer, then why had he begun to write the word SOLOMON in the center of a sheet of paper? Why hadn’t he begun writing further to the left of the page?
Stop it, he told himself. Not every crime is a mystery.
The man had been stabbed with a letter opener, for Pete’s sake. He was dying. To give him credit for having the presence of mind to pay the slightest attention to the positioning of his message on the page would be a stretch, the sort of minutiae that Ellery’s namesake might well have integrated into one of his dying-message short stories or novels.