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Who Spies, Who Kills?
By Ellery Queen MysteriousPress.com
Copyright © 1966 Ellery Queen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1995-8
CHAPTER 1
The man who called himself Walter Ingram wriggled out of the Manhattan afternoon rush hour like a fish bucking the current.
He insinuated himself into the revolving door at the Fifty-Second Street side entrance of the Hotel Amernational with relief. In the air-conditioned sanctuary of the lobby, Ingram paused to dry his forehead and neck with a damp handkerchief.
Berliners, Londoners, Parisians: Ingram had rubbed elbows with them all. But New Yorkers held the record in his experience for sheer hurly-burly.
Ingram glanced across the Amernational's lobby to the cocktail lounge. The thought of a frosty beer made him drool. But then he defeated temptation. There were too many people in the lounge, and more were trying to wedge their way inside. He did not like crowds.
He was a neat, average-looking man, and he went unnoticed as he carefully made his way toward the desk. He carried himself like a man who had made of walking a special sort of exercise — spine straighter than straight, chest far out, head far back, knees at the ready, toes turned in very slightly. If anyone had bothered to look at him, the observer would have said that here was a man walking on the edge of a cliff, trying to ignore it and not quite succeeding.
Ingram patiently waited his turn at the busy desk. A clerk checked in a harried-looking man who wore a 20-year company pin in his lapel. As the man walked off trailing a bellhop, Ingram slipped forward. "I am Mr. Ingram. Nineteen-nought-four. You have a communication for me?"
The desk clerk looked up and at Ingram for the first time, his trained ear catching the stilted phraseology. Ingram looked like an Englishman, one of those modest sandy chaps who usually come with a pipe, lunch on fish and chips during an occasional outing at Brighton, and risk half a quid once a year on a nag in the derby. He wore a quiet blue suit and blue necktie.
But the accent was wrong. It was guttural northwestern Europe, and it suggested two chins and the belly of a kidney-pie-and-cabbage eater.
The clerk looked in the 1904 pigeonhole. "I'm sorry, sir."
The damp handkerchief made quick jabs at Ingram's lean jawline. "Are you sure?"
"You can see for yourself, sir. The box is empty."
"Perhaps a misplacement ..."
The clerk looked at the people crowding behind Ingram. "Are you going to your room, sir?"
"Yes."
"We'll ring you immediately anything comes in."
Ingram's eyes seemed about to pop. Then he slipped the handkerchief into the breast pocket of his jacket. The quick gesture left a precise show of white over the pocket. His body inclined in a short, stiff bow. "Danke schön."
He turned toward the elevators.
On the nineteenth floor he inserted a key, unlocked the door of his room, and stepped inside.
In midstep, as the door clicked shut, Ingram knew he was not alone. He had caught a rustle of movement, a breath. Someone was flattened against the wall. His flesh went icy. He felt his muscles twist and turn, and he glimpsed a face like stone, the blur of a down-coming arm, the glint of a clubbing gun.
Too late Ingram's hands flew up as the barrel of the gun made contact and his scalp ruptured in a two-inch gash. A detonation behind his eyeballs blinded him. Blood burst from his head and spurted down the side of his face. His lungs collapsed, throwing out an animal gasp.
The blow reduced him to a mindless mass. But the will to survive was strong. Ingram did the impossible. He remained on his feet, reeling away from his attacker. Clawing at the air for support, he staggered across the room, bumping into one piece of furniture after another.
A battering ram struck him from behind and sent him crashing to the floor.
Ingram's hands fluttered.
"Nein ... Nein ..."
He felt the impact of the gun barrel against his jaw. Dimly, he heard a bone break. Further shock had no time to reach him. He was enfolded in a soft blackness.
Pete Muscari spotted a break and squeezed his cab into the traffic on Fifty-Second Street. A pedestrian, racing the traffic light, sprang out of the way, and a cop screamed a warning with his whistle.
Pete meekly braked. The cop shouted, "Get that hack out of here!" Pete grinned and stepped on the gas. If he had ignored the whistle, the cop would have taken his license number and there would have been a ticket to pay, maybe a trip to traffic court.
His grin became a smile as he glanced at his rear-view mirror. He had picked up the young couple at Kennedy. A pretty blonde girl and a clean-cut young man who looked a little like Pete's oldest boy, the one in the Navy. The girl's corsage was wilted after the plane ride, but the shine in her eyes was still bright. They were holding hands. Pete thought of Bertrina in her kitchen and the shine in her eyes when he came home.
Just ahead loomed the green canopy with the white lettering that spelled Hotel Amernational. Pete cut toward the curb. An impulse to share in the happiness of the young honeymooners made him feel warm. I won't take the tip, he decided.
He let the cab creep forward toward the doorman. Something struck the hood of the cab. It made a sound like no sound Pete had heard since Korea. The taxi shuddered under the impact. Glass sprayed from the windshield and some structure of flesh and bone came flying through. It showered the interior of the cab with blood and bits of tissue. Fingers dangled from the remains of a human arm, dripping onto the seat beside him.
In that fractured instant when none of it could be happening, Pete saw that there was a face also. Not a face, actually, but what had once been a face. One side had been smashed in. An eye stuck to the cobwebbed windshield.
Beyond the face was a mess of broken body. It lay in the well it had made in the hood of the cab.
Pete did not know he was out of the cab until he tripped and fell. He got to his knees, feeling the curb against his toes. Then he was knocked over by a rush of fleeing people. A woman's heel slashed the back of his hand. He yelped in pain, scrambled to one side, banged against a standard, grabbed it, pulled himself to his feet.
He discovered that he was across the street from his taxi. People seemed to be running in all directions. There was a great deal of meaningless shouting. A woman had fainted in the middle of the street. A car had swerved, run into another, and had itself been hit in the rear. Through the chaos cut the thin cry of a siren.
Pete forced himself to look again toward his cab. He wondered if one of the screaming voices had been the young bride's. First stop on her honeymoon, and somebody jumps out of a hotel window.
He was sick all over the sidewalk.
Inspector Macelyn, ramrod of the Main Office Squad, was having a brought-in breakfast of ham and eggs when Captain Tim Corrigan entered his office.
Macelyn was in his sixties. He looked forty-five. He always struck Corrigan as ageless.
The inspector raised his fork from the tray in a small salute.
"How are tricks, Inspector?" Corrigan said.
"As usual," Macelyn grumbled. "Cold eggs and cold ham. About as tasty as the inside of an abandoned refrigerator. Sit down, Tim. Have some of my coffee?"
"No, thanks, Inspector. I like my coffee without wax."
"So do I, but I never get it."
Corrigan sat down, folding his 5-foot 10-inch frame into the heavy leather chair beside Macelyn's desk. He was on the dapper side, Madison Avenue style, and looked more like a younger edition of the model for the Hathaway shirt ads than a member of the New York City police force. He was the only man in the department to wear an eye-patch, by special dispensation of some brass who preferred him with one eye over a great many men with the usual complement. He had lost the eye — his left — in Korea, where he had not only been in combat but served a hitch in the OSS as well. Inspector Macelyn found him invaluable for all sorts of assignments, particularly the ones that called for insight on odd cases. But Corrigan was not merely a brain. The obvious disadvantages in a police detective who had to wear a piratical patch over his eye had forced him to toughen up. Everybody knew Corrigan; and those who knew him best — in line of duty — often wound up in a hospital.
The captain had arrived at headquarters less than ten minutes before. He had not reached the Main Office Squad-room or his own dingy little office, because the desk sergeant had said, "Inspector Macelyn wants to see you right away, Captain, if you can make it." Such messages were requests, not orders. If a man had to be ordered about, there was no place for him on the MOS.
Macelyn tossed his napkin on the tray and lit up his first cigar of the day. Over the puffs he studied Corrigan with eyes that were usually cold as an accountant's heart. Macelyn and Tim Corrigan's father had begun their careers pounding adjacent beats, and later they had ridden the prowl cars as partners.
"What have you got on at the moment, Tim?"
"No pressure. We put the collar on the Wilkerson brothers last night. They made the mistake of crawling out of their holes and going to a joint on Eighth Avenue where the barman knew my phone number."
"Any trouble?"
Corrigan shrugged. "Rocky is in the hospital with a gunshot wound, not important. Raymond had breakfast in jail. After the way they raped and murdered that teenage girl, I hope he choked on it."
Macelyn rocked forward and picked up a sheaf of paper from his desk. "See the morning report?"
"Not yet. I came directly here."
"We've got a probable that I want you to look into," the inspector said. "His name as it appeared on the hotel register was Walter Ingram. The boys in the precinct at first figured it suicide. Ingram apparently stepped out of a room on the nineteenth floor of the Amernational Hotel. He used the window instead of the door, and he forgot his parachute. He landed on the hood and windshield of a taxicab."
Corrigan narrowed his brown eye. "Sounds messy." It was normally an amiable eye.
The inspector grimaced. "Pair of newlyweds hired the hack at Kennedy. In the big city for a glamorous honeymoon. The girl suffered such a case of shock she wound up at Bellevue."
"The precinct men didn't peg Ingram a suicide without a reason," Corrigan said. "What was it?"
"A note was found in his room. Usual stuff, good-bye-cruel-world-I-can't-take-it-any-longer. The note was hand-printed on a piece of hotel stationery. Plenty more of the stationery on the small desk in the room."
"Hand-printed. That sounds fishy."
"It doesn't mean much by itself. You know what they'll do in their mental state when they want to kill themselves. We've seen plenty of it — the guy who dresses right up to his hat and then blows his brains out; the woman who gets her kids off to school on time before she swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. So maybe this Ingram was a scribbler who couldn't decipher his own handwriting and wanted to make sure the note was legible." But he did not sound as if he believed it.
"What else, Inspector?"
"It was written with a ball-point pen. No such pen on the body or in the room."
Corrigan picked up a clear paperweight from Inspector Macelyn's desk. Embedded in the paperweight was a misshapen .38 slug that Macelyn had caught in the chest a dozen years before. "The pen could have fallen out with Ingram."
"Maybe. But a matched set, pen and pencil, was in his inside jacket pocket when he was scraped up and brought to the morgue. The lab says it was not the pen that wrote the suicide note."
Corrigan flicked a glance at Macelyn's face. Macelyn's face said there was more.
"The lab and tech boys have been with it all night, and they're still with it," the inspector said. "They topped the suspicious suicide note with some blood — a single faint smear on the windowsill of the hotel room. It matches Ingram's blood type."
Corrigan sat hefting the paperweight. "Gunshot or knife wound on the body?"
"No."
Corrigan looked at Macelyn again. Their faces reflected a common mental picture. Ingram slugged unconscious. A killer writing a note at the desk. The unknown returns to Ingram. Blood is seeping from Ingram's wound into his hair, onto his face, but not on the carpet. The killer's hands reach, drag the unconscious man across the room. His shoulders are hoisted to the windowsill. A few drops of blood fall from Ingram's scalp or face onto the sill. It makes a slight smear as Ingram is shoved out. Later a tech man decides to examine the windowsill with a magnifying glass. Part of the routine.
"Who was this Ingram, Inspector?"
"Include the answer in your report. He had nothing on him for purposes of ID. No credit cards, no driver's license, not even a social security number. He checked into the room with a single piece of luggage the day before yesterday. And his suitcase is missing."
"Taken by the guy who used a burglar tool or skeleton key to get inside the room and lay for him."
Macelyn nodded. "Maybe the suitcase contained whatever our man was after. In any event, we know that Ingram was in his room until four forty-five yesterday afternoon. At that time he made a phone call. He must have gone out shortly afterward. He didn't stay gone long, though, just time enough to grab a sandwich, say. He returned at five forty and asked a desk clerk if he had a message. The clerk remembers him."
"Why?" Corrigan sat up.
"Two reasons. One, Ingram insisted that there ought to be a 'communication,' as he put it, in his box. Second, the clerk says he looked British but had a thick German accent."
"Ingram. An alias. Pretty stupid with a German accent."
"Who says he had brains?"
Corrigan bounced the paperweight off his left palm and caught it with his right hand, lightning quick. "Whom did he call? The hotel switchboard have a record of it?"
Macelyn's eyes glinted. Corrigan went instantly quiet, waiting for Macelyn to pull it out of his sleeve. "Hotels like the Amernational keep good records. Ingram called Loren Donahue."
Corrigan whistled softly. "The publisher of World Events?"
"Circulation nearly sixty million monthly. In fourteen languages."
Corrigan eased back in the chair.
"That's right, Tim," Macelyn said. "It's beginning to look big enough for the Main Office Squad. That's why I called you in. As a matter of fact ..." Macelyn broke off and puffed on the cigar. It had gone dead. He took it from his mouth and frowned at the ash. "British type with a German accent ... fourteen-language mag that blows the lid off international secrets every chance it gets ... a nineteen-story fall with a blood smear left on a windowsill and a suicide note written with a pen that's no longer around ... You may be damned glad, Tim, you learned all those dirty tricks in the OSS before you came back to the department."
Corrigan nodded soberly. The case had the smell of international hanky-panky. The players in that sort of game did not fool around. There were no ethics in the game, just the rule of survival, and anything went.
Macelyn struck a match and stabbed the butt with the flame. "Damn it, Tim, you keep that one eye of yours over your shoulder in this case. Just keep remembering, too, that the MOS has the authority to use the facilities of any precinct in the city. If this hunch of mine has any basis in fact, I won't tolerate heroics. Hear?"
"I hear, Inspector."
"You need help, you yell for it."
Corrigan got out of the chair, grinning. He knew what was behind Inspector Macelyn's monologue. The old man was mother hen to every man in his department, but in Corrigan's case the feeling went a little deeper. He had often wondered how much of it stemmed from Macelyn's old-time relationship with his father, and how much was exclusively personal. If the inspector had special insight into the matter, he never revealed it.
Corrigan took out his handkerchief, wiped the paperweight, and placed it precisely on Macelyn's desk.
"I'll see what I can do, Inspector."
Macelyn chomped on his cigar. "You still here?" he growled.
CHAPTER 2
Corrigan's office was a cubicle off the Main Office Squad-room. There was nothing on the frosted glass door but his name and rank — certainly nothing to hint at his importance in the New York police scheme. The cubby lacked all frills. It was a dehumanized cell dedicated to tireless, cold-blooded work.
Chuck Baer was patiently absorbing the view from the window when Corrigan came in. Corrigan's eye lit up.
"Chuck. Hi!"
"Hi yourself and see how you like it."
They chuckled at each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who Spies, Who Kills? by Ellery Queen. Copyright © 1966 Ellery Queen. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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