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

He left Kennedy, closing the door, and descending the stairs he was half convinced that he had made a mistake. Charity and mercy were good things in their places. But was this such a place? Or himself the one to know? Yet he didn’t go back. Later on he told himself it had been because Mary was waiting below. He could hear her humming some tune. The light was on in the lower hall.

“You were long enough,” she said. “You manage to straighten out the troubles of the world?”

“We figured it all out, Angel. Me and your smart old man.”

“What’s the matter, Joe?”

“The matter? There’s nothing the matter.”

“For a minute you looked funny.”

“I’m screaming with laughter and I don’t look as funny as you,” he said, “with that towel around your head.”

“You dog, you,” Mary said.

He kissed her on one shiny cheek. She smelled of soap. The turbaned towel became her. She was good to look at any time, but tonight it hurt. “You look like that big Hindu — that what’s-’is-name that protects Orphan Annie,” he said. Actually, she looked beautiful, and standing in her low-heeled mules, she was no taller than himself. She made a face. “You can’t stay, Joe?”

“I’ve got things to do. So many things.”

“Like a dope, I put on the coffee.”

“I can smell it, Angel. It’s a great loss to me.”

“You fraud,” Mary said.

But her eyes were soft, as her nature was soft. She called you the wrong kind of names with the right kind of tenderness. It was a game they had. She was big and beautiful and 26, and, Joe thought sadly, looking at her, wasting on the vine. He should have married her a year ago, he knew. Or perhaps two years ago, before he’d been made a sergeant.

“What’s that?” he said.

“The fellow in the funny papers,” Mary said. “Pay attention, Apple-head. His name is Punjab.” She stood on her toes very straight and statuesque and sizeable, exactly like the mammoth funny-paper man. When she came down off her toes, with her eyes full of him, he held her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. He held on longer than he believed advisable.

“Good night, Punjab,” he said very softly.

George Kennedy, by the coroner’s estimate, had been murdered at 4:30 a.m. His body was discovered at 6:15. He had been shot and he was found face-down, concealed from passing view, in the sunken entrance to the basement of a brownstone house, not far from where he lived. It was agreed he had stumbled or fallen into this entrance and collapsed there, after he was shot.

Joe learned these details at approximately 9 o’clock when he arrived at the station house. Friends told him later that when he heard the news he had actually staggered and turned the strangest color they had ever seen take possession of a living man’s flesh.

He sat for a while in a plain wooden chair, surrounded by other cops, who were being gentle and clumsy and nice, knowing well how things had been with him and Kennedy and all the dead man’s family. Joe looked up at them. “Why didn’t you phone me when it happened?” he asked.

“Don’t know for sure, Joe; maybe nobody had the heart.”

“I was with him last night,” he heard himself say. There now, he thought, that would begin it; now with their natural questions in reasonable sequence they would draw from him what he didn’t want to tell them, and what, of course, they were entitled to know. He repeated: “I was with Kennedy last night.”

“We know that, Joe. Trouble was you left at half-past 9. We know that much from the kid.”

“What kid?” Joe asked. He followed their glances.

“Marty helped us with details,” someone explained, “up till the time the family went to sleep.”

The boy, who was Kennedy’s youngest, was sixteen. He looked like his father and he could grow even bigger. He wore a gym shirt with the name of his high school on its chest. His eyes met Joe and his firm mouth trembled. Trying to fight the tears, he had no place to turn, nowhere to run. He fell against Joe to hide his shame, grasping him and bawling aloud, holding tighter and tighter. It was awful. They sent the boy home. Inspector Needham came into the room. He had come up from downtown in fifteen minutes, they said, and been on the job since 7 o’clock. He was watching Joe, who wondered why.

Then Needham said kindly, “I think you’re too close to this case, Sergeant. I think where you belong for the next few days is with Kennedy’s family. Stay close to them and let me know if there’s anything the department can do.”

Joe said, “Yes, sir,” aware while he spoke that it was not the right thing to say. Speak now, he told himself — now! But his tongue was thick and silent in his mouth. While he was fighting it, Needham walked back into the other room.

Joe put a cigarette in his mouth. A cop named Lew Farber, of Homicide, held a match for him. Farber said, “It was a great night all around.” But Joe didn’t comment. He was thinking. “It was the first double-header we ever had in Kennedy’s precinct, far as I can remember,” Farber said.

Joe looked at him. “I don’t understand you, Lew.”