Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

The man in the gray hat looked at the Little Doctor with what Lucas had to grudgingly admit was admiration.

“Don’t tell me you’re a copper!” he interrupted.

“I’m Jean Dollent, a practicing physician at Marsilly, near La Rochelle,” his captor answered politely. “As I was saying, a few months ago Justin Galmet came across this gentleman’s ring, which doesn’t deal in peanuts. He asked for his percentage, and they couldn’t refuse him. His bank deposits increased, and he began to think of retiring to the country. Then something unexpected happened. After years of making eyes at salesgirls, simply in the line of business, he was seriously smitten with the beautiful but melancholy Alice and decided to marry her. He was on the track of a jewel thief, but found a bride instead...

“Just at this point he saw the familiar figure of this gentleman downstairs and knowing he must be up to something went to find out what it could be. For several days he returned to the same spot in order to see the job with his own eyes and stake a claim to the profits. Very soon he guessed that the cash envelope from ‘No. 89’ was the object. On a Saturday night, there might be as much as six million francs in that envelope, and his percentage would help him to buy his country house without using up all his savings. That is what kept him in Paris for a few more days. He had to wait until this gentleman actually pulled off the job. Then wedding bells, little brothers, vegetable gardening, and all the rest. He neglected to reckon with only one thing — that this gentleman might be fed up with the squeeze imposed upon him. In fact, our friend here had arranged to bump Galmet off, and the floor plan of the shop worked in his favor. A single pistol shot, and...”

The man in the gray hat was now growing excited, when at a sign from Lucas the door opened and the salesman from the toy department walked in.

“That’s the fellow,” the salesman said promptly. “I didn’t see him fire the shot, but that day he was fingering the toy guns, and I am sure...”

“Poor chap!” sighed the Little Doctor, as he sat with Lucas over his fourth drink at the station café, waiting for the train to Marsilly. “It was a devilishly clever idea — to prey on thieves and all the while to live so prosaically, cooking his own breakfast... Do you know, there’s one thing that tempts me to strew flowers on his grave, and that’s Alice and her brothers. I’m sure he really meant to marry her, and he would have made them all very happy, there on the banks of the Loire. Alice is really out of luck.”

He shook his head sadly.

“How so?”

“Because now she has a very good chance of remaining an old maid!”

And turning to the waiter, he asked: “How much do I owe you?”

Only the Guilty Run by Vin Packer

A sensitive study of an adolescent boy in love with his English teacher... a prize-winning story that will make you stop and think.

* * *

It was a few hours after dinner, that cool evening at the beginning of September. Charlie got up from the mauve stuffed chair in the living room and walked into the foyer, opened the closet and grabbed his red wool sweater from the hook. He said nothing to his parents and they said nothing to him. His mother had looked up from her sewing which was spread out in her lap, and smiled tentatively, and Charlie had winked in answer. His father had not taken his eyes from the ball game on the television screen. It was understood that they would not ask him where he was going, or what time he would return. This was his sixteenth summer, and when the new term started at school, Charlie would be a senior. If he wanted to, he could even smoke in front of his family, and he had done so once. In July he had camped out for two weeks with four of his best buddies far up into the Adirondacks. His allowance was increased from two dollars and a half a week to fifteen dollars a month, and as long as he did not run short, he did not have to account for the money. After Labor Day he would go to work from 4 until 8 in Allen’s Pharmacy, and open a savings account in the bank where his father was a teller.

Charlie stood in the hallway of the apartment building and pushed the button of the self-operating elevator. Little Billy Crandell’s mother was standing in front of 3C yelling, “C’mon now, Billy. It’s after 8. Billy, I said hurry!” Billy was trudging up the stairs slowly, dragging his coat on the cement steps, his dark eyes sad, his lips pouting. He passed Charlie, and Charlie ruffled the boy’s yellow hair and smiled to himself. He could remember when he was only eleven.