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:
In the real world, though, the man would surely have grabbed a pen and begun to scrawl, without any thought whatsoever as to where he was scrawling.
But still...
The possibility nagged at him, and he felt that it connected to something else, to some nebulous factor that tickled the darkest corner of his mind.
What, he asked himself, if the letters S-O weren’t part of the victim’s final message but the entire thing, perfectly centered on the page?
S-O.
So.
So.
So what?
And then Ellery realized what it was that was bothering him.
When he had first drawn the old photocopy from its resting place and unfolded it, he had been thinking about the fiftieth anniversary of his first publication and had, thanks to the power of suggestion, seen the markings in the middle of the page as the numerals 5 and 0, and only a moment later remembered that they were instead the letters S and O.
What if, fifty years ago, the exact same thing had happened — but in reverse? When the police had been called out to the Kaine residence, had moved the dead man’s body and found his dying message beneath it, they had been thinking about Solomon Kaine, both the father who was dead and the son who had confessed to his murder. So they had quite naturally seen the markings as an S and an O, the first letters of the supposed killer’s name.
But what if the dying man had in fact written the numerals 5 and 0, after all? What if he had written exactly what he had been trying to write: the number 50?
Fifty.
What would have been the significance of that in the mind of a dying man?
Most Americans worked fifty weeks a year, devoting only two weeks to vacation.
He shook his head.
There were fifty states in the Union, had been for almost a decade by 1968, since Hawaii had become the fiftieth in 1959 — and it must have been around 1968, Ellery thought, that the television series Hawaii Five-O had debuted.
Five-O?
He snorted in irritation.
His fingers flew over his keyboard, and Google told him that there are Fifty Gates of Wisdom in the Kabbalah, that fifty is the atomic number of tin, that fifty is the smallest number that can be produced in two different ways by adding together two nonzero squares: 12 + 72 and 52 + 52.
He gritted his teeth.
Ridiculous. The same sort of incongruous foolishness the fictional Ellery Queen had so often considered and rejected in his own dying-message fiction.
Fifty.
Fifty.
“Are you reelin’ in the years,” Steely Dan asked from his speakers, “stowin’ away the time? Are you gatherin’ up the tears? Have you had enough of mine?”
Reelin’ in the years, he thought. Fifty years after the fair.
Years.
And then he remembered that Solomon Senior had been a historian, a specialist in ancient Roman military history, author of a book on the Punic Wars.
He Googled, felt momentarily hopeful when he saw that there had been three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, then swore aloud to see that the first of them had begun in 264 B.C. and the last had ended with the obliteration of Carthage in 146 B.C.
So, not the Punic Wars.
He searched on 50 B.C. and found that it was the year the Roman Republic had annexed Judea... and approximately the year in which the Asterix comic books were set.
In 50 A.D., the Dutch city of Utrecht was founded, and Cai Lun, the Chinese inventor of paper, was born. And Solomon Kaine’s message had been written on—
Ellery wished he had more hair, so he could rip it out in frustration.
Fifty.
Fifty years...
Of course, BC and AD weren’t the only years numbered 50.
In 1750, Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri was bom and Johann Sebastian Bach died.
In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter — a book he had taught his American Lit students dozens of times — was published, California became the thirty-first state, and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded.
In 1950, the year before Ellery was bom, Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison for perjury, Harry Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, and the Korean War began.
The Korean War.
And Solomon Senior was a military hist—
And then, all at once, fifty puzzle pieces fitted neatly together in that part of the professor’s brain where inspiration lurked.
Rumor had it that Solomon Kaine had been abusing his daughter Romy.
Romy Kaine had died in February of 2015, just before her sixty-fifth birthday, which meant she had been born in 1950, the year before Ellery.
Which fit, because Ellery had been born in ’51, and Romy was a year ahead of him in school.
And Solomon Senior was a historian, a specialist in the armies of Ancient Rome.
Who had named his daughter Romanelle.
Roman L.
In Roman numerals, L = 50.
And Romy Kaine was born in 1950.
Ellery drew a deep breath and let it out.
In 1968, when Solomon Senior was killed, his daughter Romy was eighteen. What if she was the one who had plunged that letter opener into her father’s chest? What if she had run off, not realizing that he was not yet dead? What if she had found her older brother and told him what she had done, and he — a really cool guy, Sherlock had called him, always ready to help, surely fiercely protective of his kid sister — had convinced her to let him take the blame for her desperate act?
What if he had gone into his father’s study, had wiped Romy’s prints from the letter opener and carefully replaced them with his own, had called the police to confess to the crime... all without realizing that his dying father had named Romy as his killer, leaving hidden beneath his body a message the police, with Solo’s confession at hand, had misunderstood?
For fifty years, the world had thought of Solo Kaine as a murderer. Now he, E.Q. Griffen, could set the record straight.
Or could he?
There was no way to prove, at this late date, what had really happened that night, half a century ago.
But at least he could offer a logical alternative explanation for the “facts” of the case that had been accepted for all these years, could show that perhaps young Solo had been nothing worse than a loving big brother who had made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his sister.
And then what?
What would the revelation of that possibility do to Richard Washington, to Romy’s children and grandchildren?
Ellery remembered a scrap of Latin he’d seen often in the Golden Age detective novels he’d been raised on.
Cui bono?
Who benefits?
Surely Solomon Senior could have taught him the original historical importance of that phrase, could have cited chapter and verse.
But Solomon Senior was dead.
And so was Solo, and so was Romy.
While Richard Washington and his descendants were — at least as of the publication of Romy’s obituary in 2015 — still alive.
Who would it benefit to tell them that their wife, their mother, their grandmother, was perhaps a murderess, no matter how understandable the horrible circumstances that had led her to her one moment of violence?
Ellery sat there at his desk for a long time, the sheet of paper in his hand, his eyes closed, his lips pursing slightly in and out — a habit he’d picked up from his brother Nero and had never lost.