Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

“It was his death that identified Kurzbic as the killer. Shortly before the murder I saw him toss his wristwatch aside because it had stopped. Yet when we found his body the battery-operated watch was running perfectly. Conrad left the apartment with a watch that wasn’t running and had it fixed within a few minutes. The only possible conclusion was that he visited a watch shop and purchased a new battery. Kurzbic’s shop is across Furtuna Street and just around the corner on Grivitei, and Sigmund told me he was an occasional customer there. There’d have been no time for him to go anywhere else, according to the autopsy report. During those important minutes I’d taken Sigmund down the street for coffee, and old Kurzbic was alone in the shop.”

“That’s the trouble. He was alone! If he killed Conrad, how did he get his body around the corner to 117 and into the basement?”

“You’re forgetting that the basements in that block all connect. Conrad must have indicated he knew the truth about Jarie’s death. After Kurzbic replaced the battery he stabbed Conrad and pushed his body into the basement, waiting until later to move it over to where I found it.”

“Hundreds of people must have known Kurzbic ran this gambling game.”

“Of course! They bought numbers from him every day, and if they couldn’t wait to hear the winner they went at midnight to watch the angel’s wheels spin. I should have guessed a gambling involvement from the beginning. The first thing Jennifer told me about Jarie Miawa was that he liked to gamble. When I finally made the connection in my mind between those three-digit numbers and the three eyes of this fabled iron angel, I suspected an antique gambling device of some sort. That pointed me toward Kurzbic and his collection of clockwork automatons. When he saw me tonight he knew it was over and drew his gun, probably the one he mentioned keeping behind his counter.”

Captain Segar sighed and signaled that Michael’s statement was at an end. He looked tired himself. “I must thank you again, old friend. I could never have concluded this case without you.”

Michael Vlado shook his hand. Without them, Jennifer Beatty might still be alive, but neither spoke those words. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference. Perhaps her number had simply come up, on the face of another iron angel somewhere.

Howler

by Jo Bannister

It didn’t look like a haunted house. It looked like a 1950s seaside bungalow, with bow windows and pebble-dash walls. Before the garden ran riot it would have been indistinguishable from all the other seaside bungalows in the area: prim, square, gazing out over the Channel with an air of cosy smugness.

But something happened at Mon Repose which, having no echo at Sans Souci up the lane or Dun Roamin on the corner, lifted it forever out of the seaside bungalow main sequence — for seaside bungalows, like stars, have their natural paths and life spans. The only difference is that stars grow to greatness while bungalows are at their brightest soon after construction and slip slowly down the scale of magnitude until they become weekend cottages for art teachers from Birmingham, the seaside bungalow equivalent of white dwarfdom.

What happened at Mon Repose was, in truth, a common enough little tragedy. A man discovered that his wife loved someone else. His reaction was swift and extreme. When it was learned that Arthur Smith had murdered his wife Amanda, dismembered her, buried her in a series of small holes along the garden perimeter and planted a fast-growing cypress hedge on top of her, a quiver of delicious shock ran through the bungalow community; coupled with relief that they had not after all asked him to be chairman of the Residents’ Association.

He might have got away with it, except for the dog. Everyone in Channel Vista knew about Amanda. Arthur may have been the last person on the south coast to learn about her and Reginald Spink, and when he put it about that she had left him there was much pensive nodding, exchanging of significant glances, and offers of tea.

But the dog kept digging up the cypresses. There was divided opinion afterwards as to whether it was looking for Amanda, accusing her murderer, or just digging for bones. Whatever, its persistence seemed finally to drive Arthur mad. When he pursued it at a dead run down Channel Vista one Sunday morning, swinging a shovel and shouting, “I can dig another hole for you, you bastard!” suspicions were aroused.

The police talked to Arthur, dug in the garden and took away what they found there in plastic bags. They took Arthur as well. But there was no trial. Arthur Smith hanged himself from the bars of his remand cell, using the dog’s lead which he had somehow secreted about his person.

That should have been the end of the matter. There was a brief flurry of publicity in the newspapers, then a member of the government was caught in a bed he should not have been in and Mon Repose dropped out of the news as if it had never been.