Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

I knelt down next to the corpse and patted him down. Cards in his wallet identified him as Philip I. Ryman, with an address in Teaneck.

“Lived in Jersey,” I said. “And you say he worked on Wall Street?”

“Somewhere downtown.”

I picked up his left hand. His watch was Rolex, and I suppose it must have been a real one; this was before the profusion of fakes. He had what looked like a wedding band on the appropriate finger, but I saw that it was in fact a large silver or white-gold ring that had gotten turned around, so that the large part was on the palm side of his hand. It looked like an unfinished signet ring, waiting for an initial to be carved into its gleaming surface.

I straightened up. “Well,” I said, “I’d say it’s a good thing you called me.”

“There are a couple of problems,” I told them. “A couple of things that could pop up like a red flag for a responding officer or a medical examiner.”

“Like...”

“Like the knife,” I said. “Phil opened the door and the killer stabbed him once and left, was out the door and down the stairs before the body hit the carpet.”

“Maybe not that fast,” one of them said, “but it was pretty quick. Before we knew what had happened, certainly.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, “but the thing is, it’s an unusual MO. The killer didn’t take time to make sure his victim was dead, and you can’t take that for granted when you stick a knife in someone. And he left the knife in the wound.”

“He wouldn’t do that?”

“Well, it might be traced to him. All he has to do to avoid that chance is take it away with him. Besides, it’s a weapon. Suppose someone comes chasing after him? He might need that knife again.”

“Maybe he panicked.”

“Maybe he did,” I agreed. “There’s another thing, and a medical examiner would notice this if a reporting officer didn’t. The body’s been moved.”

Interesting the way their eyes jumped all over the place. They looked at each other, they looked at me, they looked at Phil on the floor.

“Blood pools in a corpse,” I said. “Lividity’s the word they use for it. It looks to me as though Phil fell forward and wound up face downward. He probably fell against the door as it was closing, and slid down and wound up on his face. So you couldn’t get the door open, and you needed to, so eventually you moved him.”

Eyes darted. The host, the one in the blazer, said, “We knew you’d have to come in.”

“Right.”

“And we couldn’t have him lying against the door.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But all of that’s going to be hard to explain. You didn’t call the cops right away, and you did move the body. They’ll have some questions for you.”

“Maybe you could give us an idea what questions to expect.”

“I might be able to do better than that,” I said. “It’s irregular, and I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to suggest an action we can take.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going to suggest we stage something,” I said. “As it stands, Phil was stabbed to death by an unknown person who escaped without anybody getting a look at him. He may never turn up, and if he doesn’t, the cops are going to look hard at the four of you.”

“Jesus,” somebody said.

“It would be a lot easier on everybody,” I said, “if Phil’s death was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“I don’t know if Phil has a sheet or not,” I said. “He looks vaguely familiar to me, but lots of people do. He’s got a gambler’s face, even in death, the kind of face you expect to see in an OTB parlor. He may have worked on Wall Street, it’s possible, because cheating at cards isn’t necessarily a full-time job.”

“Cheating at cards?”

“That would be my guess. His ring’s a mirror; turned around, it gives him a peek at what’s coming off the bottom of the deck. It’s just one way to cheat, and he probably had thirty or forty others. You think of this as a social event, a once-a-week friendly game, a five-dollar limit and, what, three raises maximum? The wins and losses pretty much average out over the course of a year, and nobody ever gets hurt too bad. Is that about right?”

“Yes.”

“So you wouldn’t expect to attract a mechanic, a card cheat, but he’s not looking for the high rollers, he’s looking for a game just like yours, where it’s all good friends and nobody’s got reason to get suspicious, and he can pick up two or three hundred dollars in a couple of hours without running any risks. I’m sure you’re all decent poker players, but would you think to look for bottom dealing or a cold deck? Would you know if somebody was dealing seconds, even if you saw it in slow motion?”

“Probably not.”

“Phil was probably doing a little cheating,” I went on, “and that’s probably what he did two weeks ago, and nobody spotted him. But he evidently crossed someone else somewhere along the line. Maybe he pulled the same tricks in a bigger game, or maybe he was just sleeping in the wrong bed, but someone knew he was coming here, turned up after the game was going, and rang the bell. He would have come in and called Phil out, but he didn’t have to, because Phil answered the door.”

“And the guy had a knife.”