How Goes the Murder?

By Ellery Queen

The 1-eyed detective Tim Corrigan tears New York apart in search of an assassin

Tim Corrigan was the toughest detective in the NYPD before he joined the army, and fighting in Korea didn’t make him any softer. He returned with an eye patch and a sidekick: a tough-as-nails GI named Chuck Baer, who picked up a private investigator’s license in order to keep an eye on his old foxhole buddy. In a fair fight, these 2 veterans could take down any hoodlum in New York. But the man they’re up against doesn’t fight fair.
 
Running for state senate, liberal lawyer Art Cough is halfway through a stump speech when he’s interrupted by a right-wing heckler from the anticommunist group known as PUFF. Before Cough can resume, a shot rings out. He falls dead, and the killer disappears into the crowd. To catch the sniper, Corrigan and Baer will have to go to war once more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Sep 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504019200

Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928, when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee’s death.

Book preview

1

Corrigan and Chuck Baer reached for the dinner check like a pair of well-rehearsed seals. But Corrigan was faster withdrawing his hand.

Okay, old buddy, he said. I won’t fight you.

Baer’s fingers remained an inch from the check. Suckered, he growled. As usual. But this time I’m not staying that way. We match.

He withdrew his hand, dipped into a pocket and produced a quarter. Corrigan solemnly dug one out, too. They flipped. Corrigan said, I call even.

When they uncovered the coins on the backs of their hands, both showed heads.

Poor slob, Corrigan said sympathetically. You just don’t have a talent for living off the land, Chuck. I’m afraid you pop again tonight.

How many heads has that quarter got? Baer demanded.

What difference does it make? Corrigan said in a reasonable voice. If your quarter is honest, the chances were even.

Bear looked suspicious. It sounded logical, but something told him there was a flaw in it.

Let me see that, Tim!

Don’t you trust me?

With a toss for a dinner check? Hell, no.

Corrigan showed it to him. The quarter was legitimate.

Baer picked up the check, grumbling. I don’t know how you do it. I never win a toss from you. I ought to report you to the Bunco Squad.

You won that toss near Inchon, Corrigan pointed out. The time we matched to see which of us would sneak through the lines to dynamite that bridge.

The big private detective glared. Big deal. I won the chance to get my head blown off.

It would probably have improved your appearance, Corrigan said with a grin. He pushed back his chair. Pay up and let’s get out of here, Chuck. It’s almost nine.

Baer was still grumbling as they walked from the main dining room of the Amernational into the overflowing lobby. They shouldered their way through the assorted conventioneers side by side like a couple of well-oiled gears in the same well-oiled machine.

Captain Corrigan of the Main Office Squad was a slim, trim, smooth-muscled man in a Madison Avenue type business suit. The suit covered a multitude of non-Madison Avenue type experiences. His face was all angles, but handsome in its angular way, and looking handsomely amiable at the moment (it could look remarkably unamiable on the job). He wore a black eye-patch over the left eye-socket. The eye that was intact was a mild brown, even soft (it could turn hard as a stone in the exigencies of his profession). In sum, he could have walked straight out of a cartoon, the hero in scratchline. But there was nothing scratchline about Captain Tim Corrigan. He was one of the solidest employees of the New York police department.

Chuck Baer stood scarcely an inch taller than Corrigan’s average five foot ten, but there the resemblance ended. He outweighed the MOS man’s one seventy by a good thirty-five pounds. Nature seemed to have put him together in chunks, each chunk of rock. And where Tim Corrigan was handsome, Chuck Baer was ugly. He had thick features and a mashed nose and a swarthy complexion to go with a pair of ice-blue eyes and surprising red hair, so that genetically he might have come from Slavic stock with an Irishman buried somewhere in the woodpile. For some reason women, far from being repelled by his ugliness, generally considered him attractive. He dressed expensively—a waste of his hard-earned money, as Corrigan often assured him, for he never managed to look well turned out; his clothes always seemed rumpled and not to fit him, as if he were a Yosemite bear that had got into some camper’s clothes locker.

Corrigan and Baer had seen service together with the OSS during the Korean police action. They had made a lethal team; they had saved each other’s lives a dozen times over. On their discharge Corrigan had naturally returned to the career the Korean conflict had interrupted, and Baer had followed him to New York like a dutiful Newfoundland. When, in spite of the missing eye, Corrigan got his old job back with the Department, Baer applied for a private detective’s license and opened a modest office in the Times Square area. They often worked together, each from his own angle; they saw each other constantly; and, since they were both unattached, there were no wives to complicate their relationship. Each considered the other the toughest man in a fight he had ever known. The standing speculation around Centre Street was how a fight between the two of them would come out. It was a speculation not likely to be resolved.

In the lobby they paused near the wide-open entrance to the main ballroom. An overflow crowd listening to a speaker spilled out into the lobby through the doorway.

What’s going on in there? Baer asked.

Must be Art Cough, Corrigan said. He pronounced Cough Cow. He’s having a political rally here tonight.

Arthur Cough, a prominent city lawyer, was campaigning hard for the nomination as his party’s candidate for the State Senate. The incumbent from Cough’s Manhattan district, Maurice Bingham, had announced that he was retiring at the end of his term. Since he had held his Senate seat for twenty years, the race was for the money, and numerous political hopefuls of both parties were galloping in the primaries. Campaign rallies were as common as cocktail parties.

What do you think of this Cough, Tim? Baer asked.

Corrigan shrugged. He’s a bit too far left for my politics, but my guess is he’ll win in the primary. The only real threat to his candidacy is Barton Fenner, and I can’t see Fenner licking Cough.

Barton Fenner is too far right for my politics, Baer said innocently.

You’ve been reading Art Cough’s speeches and skipping Fenner’s, Corrigan retorted. Cough has managed to stick Fenner with the reactionary label. But if you read what Fenner has to say, Chuck, he’s really a middle-of-the-roader.

You for Fenner?

I’m not enthusiastic about either of them. I like Fenner’s political philosophy better, but for my dough he hasn’t the qualifications for the job. At least Cough has some practical background. He’s been an assistant D.A., and a good one; he’s served on the City Council; he’s been a ward committeeman. Besides, he’s a lawyer. That’s readymade background for a law-maker.

On the other hand, Baer argued, a hardheaded businessman like Fenner could help slow down these tax hikes of recent years.

Corrigan stared at him with his one eye. Businessman? Have you swallowed that hogwash about Fenner’s being a ‘property manager’?

Isn’t he?

Barton Fenner has never worked at anything in his life but clipping coupons. Sure he owns a few apartment buildings, but that ‘property manager’ label is something he dreamed up to hide from Joe Dope the fact that he’s a charter member of the idle rich set. Every one of his buildings has a full-time salaried manager.

Baer grinned. You’re beginning to sell me on him. Anyone smart enough to hold onto a fortune like his without working must have brains.

They had drifted across the lobby, gravitating toward the ballroom. The standees bulged six deep in the lobby, but the speaker was visible above the crowd; he was speaking from an elevated lectern. Behind him on the platform sat two women and two men, apparently sponsors of the movement to put Cough in the State Senate.

Arthur Cough was a tall, lean, keen-faced man in his forties, with black hair salted at the temples and an advertising air of distinction, a sort of cross between Abe Lincoln and Warren G. Harding. Corrigan had found that when they looked like senators they had half their battle won, especially in these days of TV coverage.

The candidate had apparently finished his speech, for he was conducting a question-and-answer session. When Corrigan and Baer stopped at the edge of the crowd, Cough was listening courteously to a young man who had jumped onto his chair to attract the speaker’s attention. The young questioner was wearing a sports jacket of the color and design of the vest worn by Uncle Sam in cartoons—the blue of the field of the American flag, covered with white stars.

What in hell kind of get-up is that? Chuck Baer laughed.

Corrigan shushed him. Let’s get this, Chuck.

The young man was saying in a high-pitched, excited voice, Mr. Cough, you’ve been going around promising to broaden benefits in such areas as Aid to Dependent Children and Old Age Assistance if you’re elected to the legislature. We already have a welfare state that coddles the lazy no-goods and incompetents from the cradle to the grave. What we need is fewer handouts to the deadwood of our society and more of forcing them to get off their useless butts and start working for a living, like the rest of us. We’ve already got socialism in the U.S.A. What are you trying to palm off on us—Communism?

Arthur Cough smiled. I see by that travesty of an Uncle Sam costume you wear, young man, that you’re a member of the organization popularly known as the PUFFs.

The heckler in the starred blue jacket shouted instantly, "I’m proud to wear this coat, sir! I have the honor of being National Grand Master of the Patriots United For Freedom, not what you have called us. We’re dedicated to the first principles of our great country, sir—free enterprise, individual initiative and the stamping out of creeping Communism. The Patriots United For Freedom consider you, sir, if not an actual card-carrying Communist, certainly a tool—a conscious tool—of the Communist conspiracy to undermine the American way of life!"

It seems to me I’ve heard that indictment leveled at other Americans far more distinguished than I, Cough said dryly. I’m delighted that your organization holds such a poor opinion of me. It is reciprocated. As I understand it—as far as it can be understood—PUFF is in favor of abolishing all social welfare programs in this country and repealing the income tax laws, among other things, is that correct?

It certainly is! The greatest country in the world wasn’t built by government confiscation of its citizens’ hard-earned profits or by handouts to a bunch of good-for-nothing bums!

Some booing began.

It wasn’t built by nuts, either, Cough said amiably. By the way, I appreciate your recent endorsement of one of my esteemed opponents in this primary campaign, Barton Fenner. With political backers like you, who needs enemies? Sit down, please, young man. I’m supposed to be answering questions, not listening to irresponsible nonsense.

There was a shout from the audience. The young man in the vivid coat attempted to say something else, but Cough had pointed to a raised hand. A young woman rose and asked with an air of triumph how the would-be candidate felt about the school-bussing program.

The National Grand Master of the Patriots United For Freedom yelled, I’m not finished with you, sir! and was promptly hooted by the audience. He stepped down, shrugging, resumed his seat, and Arthur Cough replied to the question. He was all for neighborhood schools, he said, but the issue was not clear-cut, and much patience would have to be exercised by both sides, et cetera.

Other questions followed and received equally adroit answers. Corrigan’s attention began to sharpen.

Apparently Chuck Baer had lost interest; in the middle of one of Cough’s smooth answers he asked, Did that bunch of kooks really endorse Fenner?

If it was in the papers, I missed it, Corrigan said. Young Uncle Sam didn’t deny it, though.

Cough didn’t give him the chance. He cut the guy off as soon as he threw the accusation at him. Sounded like smear tactics to me—linking Fenner with this Patriots whatever-it-is.

Patriots United For Freedom. P-U-F-F. Could be, Chuck. If Fenner gets identified in the public mind with the PUFFs, fairly or unfairly, it certainly won’t hurt Art Cough’s chances. I hope it’s true. I don’t like smears.

Baer looked over the ballroom. Uniformed policemen were stationed among the standees packed against the side walls.

Why the cops, Tim?

Cough has been receiving anonymous phone threats.

Is it that dirty a race?

Apparently they were from far right-wingers who oppose Cough’s views. This isn’t to be spread around, Chuck, because he doesn’t want to have to defend a slander suit, but Cough thinks PUFF is behind the threats.

Baer hiked his brick brows. Are they?

That’s the squad-room scuttlebutt. How many threats he received, what was said, I can’t tell you. I’m not on the case.

They lingered, held by something they could not define. There was a crackling quality to the atmosphere, felt rather than heard, like the forerunner of a thunderstorm.

I’m up a tree, Chuck Baer said after a while. Are they kooky kooks, or the plain variety?

My guess is they lack imagination, Chuck. The hardcore inner group that actually runs the outfit they call the Guards’ Action Squad. Spell the initials of that.

GAS. Baer’s lips squashed in a wider grin. You’ve got to be kidding.

It’s not a laughing matter.

It is to me.

It isn’t, Corrigan said grimly, to GAS’s victims. There have been numerous complaints of beatings and worse. So far they haven’t been nailed. They’ve got a low animal cunning that keeps them just out of reach.

I wish they’d pick on me, Baer said.

Quiet! somebody said, glaring at them.

Excuse me, sir, Baer said politely, and lapsed into silence.

Corrigan returned his attention to the speaker. Nothing interesting was being said. He rose on tiptoe to look at the patrolmen spaced along the side walls. There were two to each side that he could see, and probably two more toward the rear, where his vision was cut off.

That should be adequate coverage, he thought; and wondered why he was thinking in terms of security at all. PUFF would hardly try anything in view of an audience, with officers all around. Just the same, should anything happen down front, considering how packed in he and Baer were among the standees, they would have to fight their way to the platform.

He suddenly remembered the mezzanine balcony that ran around the rear and sides of the ballroom. He knew the layout; the last policeman’s ball had been held here, and he and his date had occupied a table on the balcony. It was not in use tonight; ordinarily the balcony was open only for dances or for the overflow of banquets, when drinks and food were served. Access to the balcony from the ballroom floor was by twin flights of stairs veeing upward from behind the speaker’s platform.

The vacant mezzanine