Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

If the plan proposed in this new story by Donald Olson seems an “absurd caprice” to its participants, we should point out that it is not too dissimilar to a program we know to have been part of the course work of at least one university’s Sociology department during the 1970s, though fiction in this case is still wonderfully stranger than truth...

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“You do know,” said Nobbs, “how risky this could be.”

“In what way?” Bair’s coolly superior tone mocked his colleague’s timidity. They’d never been close, and now, having said their goodbyes to the director, they waited in an atmosphere of mutual disapproval for the car that would take them and three other junior staffers from the Center to the station.

Nobbs fingered the sealed envelope identical to the one Bair had been given shortly after donning the clothes they now wore and which added to their discomfiture, castoffs donated to one of the Center’s charities, but too shabby for even the neediest of the poof.

Nobbs leaned closer. “Suppose one had an accident. Got run over or hit on the head and lost one’s memory. One might never be identified. Didn’t you say you’d never been fingerprinted either? God, I feel positively naked without a wallet. No credit cards, no driver’s license, nothing.”

“But that’s the whole idea,” said Bair drily, although personally he’d rather be seen naked than in these disgraceful rags. It seemed to him an absurd caprice, this brainchild of the director’s which required each of the staff members to live anonymously and without funds (except for the five dollars each had been given) for a month, among the lowest strata of society, in a strange town, the director’s theory being that without firsthand experience of how the deprived lived, one couldn’t fully appreciate the importance of one’s work at the Center for Advanced Humanitarian Studies.

Bair had lived and worked at the Center for six months, recruited by the director himself, who had been deeply impressed by Bair’s discovery, of a formula for the processing of a vital nutrient derived from the soybean.

Bair and Nobbs didn’t exchange another word. In truth, Bair was ashamed to be seen talking to Nobbs, whose skinny physique added a note of authenticity to his rags. Bair felt confident that he himself didn’t look half so seedy to others as Nobbs looked to him. He wondered where Nobbs was being sent; they’d all been sworn to keep their individual destinations a secret. When Bair opened his own envelope, the name inside meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of Grimley, Ohio.

Not until he changed buses at Cleveland did anyone choose to share a seat with Bair, and the looks of the young man who did made a disagreeable impression on him; he wore a white leather jacket and a falsely disarming smile; his raggedy black hair reeked of oil. The bus was no sooner on the road than he asked Bair for a light, and when Bair couldn’t oblige him, he pulled a book of matches from his own pocket and, wholly unabashed, asked Bair where he was headed.

“Grimley,” said Bair.

“Same here.”

This unlikely coincidence left Bair faintly uneasy, coupled as it was with a sense of his own self drifting away. His eyes grabbed at signs and streetlights and trees as they flashed by, each seeming to pluck away a tiny particle of himself.

“So why you goin’ there, man?”

Bair’s emotions were too confused for him to project a proper show of indignation. “I have business there.”

“Me too.” He gave Bair a more intense look, squinting his dark, liquid eyes and spitting a feather of smoke into the blue-rinsed hair of the woman in front of him. “A stranger, y’know, he ain’t gonna know where the action is, y’know what I mean, pal?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Bair noncommittally.

“Well, buddy, I’m the boy can tell ya where the action is.”

Bair, in his innocence, preserved through forty years of a solitary, sheltered life, discerned something so authentically evil about his seat companion he was thrilled to his toes and madly eager to learn precisely what sort of “action” the youth was hinting at. He giggled nervously.

At this, the young man once more whipped out the book of matches, ripped the cover in two, and with a stubby pencil wrote on the back of one piece: Call 488-0898. Ask for Deuce. With a sly wink he handed this to Bair. Before slipping it into his pocket, Bair noticed the matchbook came from a place called the Wing-Ding Club and showed pink bubbles tumbling over the rim of a cocktail glass.

“Deuce,” said Bair. “A nickname?”

“Yeah, ’cause my last name’s Wilde. This Deuce is wild, man.”