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

“Ten percent,” I said.

“Gee,” she said. “I didn’t expect anything.”

“What do you do when somebody gives you money?”

“I say thank you,” she said, “and I put it someplace safe. This is great. You get them to tell the truth, and everybody gets paid. Do you have to go back to Syosset right away? Because Chet Baker’s at Mikell’s tonight.”

“We could go hear him,” I said, “and then we could come back here. I told Anita I’d probably have to stay over.”

“Oh, goodie,” she said. “Do you suppose he’ll sing ‘Let’s Get Lost?’ ”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “Not if you ask him nice.”

I don’t remember if he sang it or not, but I heard it again just the other day on the radio. He’d ended abruptly, that aging boy with the sweet voice and sweeter horn. He went out a hotel-room window somewhere in Europe, and most people figured he’d had help. He’d crossed up a lot of people along the way and always got away with it, but then that’s usually the way it works. You dodge all the bullets but the last one.

“Let’s Get Lost.” I heard the song, and not twenty-four hours later I picked up the Times and read an obit for a commodities trader named P. Gordon Fawcett, who’d succumbed to prostate cancer. The name rang a bell, but it took me hours to place it. He was the guy in the blazer, the man in whose apartment Phil Ryman stabbed himself.

Funny how things work out. It wasn’t too long after that poker game that another incident precipitated my departure from the NYPD, and from my marriage. Elaine and I lost track of each other, and caught up with each other some years down the line, by which time I’d found a way to live without drinking. So we get lost and found — and now we’re married. Who’d have guessed?

My life’s vastly different these days, but I can imagine being called in on just that sort of emergency — a man dead on the carpet, a knife in his chest, in the company of four poker players who only wish he’d disappear. As I said, my life’s different, and I suppose I’m different myself. So I’d almost certainly handle it differently now, and what I’d probably do is call it in immediately and let the cops deal with it.

Still, I always liked the way that one worked out. I walked in on a cover-up, and what I did was cover up the cover-up. And in the process I wound up with the truth. Or an approximation of it, at least, and isn’t that as much as you can expect to get? Isn’t that enough?

A Missunderstanding by Naomi

Detectiverse

With apologies to Longfellow

By the shining big sea water
Stood the Mighty Chieftain’s wigwam
Stood a birch tree tall and slender
Stood his trusty bow and arrow
Stood his tomahawk so shiny
Stood the chieftain’s lovely daughter
Stood his daughter Laughing Water
Stood his daughter’s little boy child
Stood his daughter softly weeping
Stood the angry Mighty Chieftain
Taking aim with bow and arrow
Felling Grandson’s fleeing father
No one blamed the Mighty Chieftain
All his people underSTOOD

Season of the Camel by Edward D. Hoch

Last month we had the pleasure of announcing the forthcoming publication of a new collection of Nick Velvet short stories (The Velvet Touch/ Crippen & Landru). We have since learned that the TV option on the character, which has been in place for several years now, is to be renewed. Velvet is generally held to be Mr. Hoch’s most popular series character, but former secret agent Jeffrey Rand, this tale’s hero, also has high ratings with EQMM.

* * *

It was on one of Rand’s occasional visits to Egypt with his wife Leila that he first encountered Omar Goncah, a designer of computer chips who traded in Oriental rugs in his spare time. He was a slender, well-spoken man who informed them early on that he’d been educated in England.

“King’s College, Cambridge,” he said smoothly, upon learning that Leila lectured in archaeology at the University of Reading. “I regret not returning to your country more frequently, but my affairs keep me in the Middle East.” They’d met at a dinner party in Alexandria, arranged by Leila’s cousin on the eve of their departure from the city.