Night My Friend Read online

  LIBBY KNOWLES, ex-cop and professional bodyguard, debuted in “Five-Day Forecast,” a Hoch story first published in Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes, edited by Eleanor Sullivan (Davis, 1984). With her second case, published in EQMM later that year, she became an affirmative action recruit in Hoch’s small army of series characters.

  MATTHEW PRIZE, criminology professor and ex-private eye, is the detective in a pair of paperback mystery puzzles inspired by Thomas Chastain’s best-selling Who Killed the Robins Family? (1983). Hoch created the plot outlines for these books, just as Fred Dannay did for the Ellery Queen novels, and the writing was done by Ron Goulart. Prize Meets Murder (Pocket Books, 1984) and This Prize Is Dangerous (London: Star Books, 1985) were published as by R. T. Edwards.

  MICHAEL VLADO, farmer, horse trainer, and leader of a gypsy community in Romania, is the latest and perhaps most unlikely of the amateur sleuths in the Hoch gallery. His first appearance was in “The Luck of a Gypsy” (in The Ethnic Detectives, ed. Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, 1985), and within a few days after the publication of that anthology he became a series character with “Odds on a Gypsy” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1985). Since then he has starred in a handful of EQMM tales with East European settings.

  That in twenty-four nutshells is the Ed Hoch everyone knows, the master of clues and puzzles whom we encounter in every issue of EQMM and almost every mystery anthology of the past twenty years. The Night My Friend celebrates the unfamiliar side of his output, bringing together some of the best of his two hundred-odd non-series stories.

  Many of Hoch’s earliest published stories featured the occult character Simon Ark, but even in his first few years as a writer he diversified quickly and widely. In 1956 and 1957, when his name began popping up regularly in magazines, he published not only Simon Ark exploits but PI stories, westerns, science fiction, horror, and a total of eight non-series crime tales. He first made his presence felt in a major way in the early 1960s when large numbers of his stories were published in the mystery field’s top magazines, Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, and The Saint. All of the tales collected in The Night My Friend date from this decade and all but the last few from its early and middle years, before he gave up his job in advertising to write full time.

  If the distinction of almost every Hoch story about a continuing character is its fair-play detective element, no common thread connects his finest non-series tales. There may be an abundance of detection—as in that supreme impossible-crime puzzler “The Long Way Down”—or none at all. There may be a main character who might easily have been put into a series—like songwriter Johnny Nocturne of “The Night My Friend”—or a protagonist who could never return, or no central figure whatever. An occasional touch, such as the use of a picnic or amusement-park setting or of beer as everyone’s beverage of choice, may remind the Hoch fan of some of his better-known series work, but most of the building blocks of the tales collected here have no counterparts in his stories about recurring characters. In The Night My Friend you will find a boxing story; a juvenile delinquency story; a prep school reunion story; more than one tale about the aftermath of World War II, including “To Slay an Eagle,” which is as bleak as the espionage fiction of Greene or Le Carré; a fable about a wandering minstrel and his harmonica; and several thrillers with a noir ambience reminiscent of one of the classic TV series of the years when these tales were written, The Fugitive. You will find unusually vivid and visual writing, off-trail settings, complex characterizations, emotions that run deep—in short, a side of Ed Hoch’s literary personality that has escaped most readers’ attention since the early and middle 1960s when he was writing mysteries only as a moonlighter.

  Those were the years when I was in my late teens and discovered him. We’ve known each other for going on a quarter century now, and our collected correspondence would fill a book the size of War and Peace. It’s been a pleasure to savor these stories again for myself and it’s even more of a pleasure to bring them together and share them with Ed Hoch’s legion of readers.

  FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.

  Twilight Thunder

  DALE FIELDING HEARD THE phone ringing from his inner office, and remembered that the girl had gone out to the bank. He pressed the proper button on his phone and picked it up. “Fielding Insurance Agency, Dale Fielding speaking.”

  “Fielding, this is an old buddy of yours. Harvey Stout.” The phone turned to ice in Dale’s grip. “I just got in town and thought I’d look you up.”

  “Hello, Harvey.” His mind was racing, tearing through a thousand possibilities.

  “That all you’ve got to say to an old buddy?”

  “What’s up, Harvey? What do you want?”

  “Just to see you again, Fielding. That’s all.” The voice still had the same bitter edge to it, the same deadly friendliness he remembered.

  “I’m pretty busy, Harvey. If you’re just passing through town…”

  “No, boy. I got lots of time. Suppose I run out to your house tonight—meet the wife and kiddies. There are kiddies, aren’t there?”

  Dale ignored the question with a sigh. “Look, where are you now? Maybe I can meet you for a quick drink or something.”

  “Fine, fine! That’s more like it. I’m over at the hotel. The Riverview. I’ll meet you at the bar in ten minutes.”

  “All right,” Dale managed, and hung up. Harvey Stout, after all these years. He lit a cigarette and tried to calm his jumping nerves and thought about calling his wife. No, that would do no good. The police? What would he tell them? What would he tell anybody? Certainly not the truth.

  The truth was an island in the Pacific called le Shima, a tiny hunk of rock just barely large enough for the airfield that made it so important. It was some three miles off Okinawa, and perhaps was destined to be remembered only as the place where a burst of Japanese machine-gun fire cut through the body of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Certainly no one but his family would remember that Captain Mason died there, in the final bitter moments of a bloody battle.

  Mason, Charles F., Captain, U.S.M.C. Age: thirty-one at the time of his death. Married, no children. Born in Dallas, Texas, of an oil-rich family.

  Dale Fielding knew all the statistics. He could have written a fairly lengthy biography of Captain Mason, because he’d spent a week in Dallas after the war learning more about this man he’d watched die before his eyes. Mason had been a good man back home, good to his mother and good to his wife, and the news had come as a shock to Dale, bent on justifying one evil with another. But he more than anyone should have known that men change in the service, especially during wartime. The kind, generous, loving man who had been Charles Mason had become the bitter, driving, ruthless officer Captain Mason. Just as Dale Fielding, who’d always hated the bloodshed of a mere hunting trip, had crossed a dozen Pacific islands with flame-thrower and rifle without ever a single doubt.

  It had been Harvey Stout who’d first put the thought into words, of course, while they crouched in the bloodied sand of the le Shima beach. “Let’s kill that so-and-so Mason.” Just like that, “let’s kill that so-and-so Mason.” And Dale’s eyes had followed his pointing finger. Further up the beach, in the midst of a fallen forest of young bodies, Captain Mason was indulging in his favorite pastime, slapping the muddy face of a sobbing young private who could go no further. The incident had decided them, after all those months.

  Toward twilight on the same day Captain Mason had asked for three men to go with him on a scouting trip. Dale and Harvey had fallen out immediately, along with the third man who’d seen the beach episode, a dark-haired youth named Travello. Mason, suspecting nothing, had led them up the beach a bit, then signaled them to spread out with their rifles and follow him into the underbrush. They knew the Japanese could not be far away, but not one of the three men was thinking of that enemy now.

  When Mason was some fifty feet ahead, perfectly outlined in the fading daylight, Dale saw Harvey Stout raise his rifle. Dale and Travell
o did likewise. The first bullet spun the captain around and perhaps he never knew what hit him but only thought it was a bit of twilight thunder over the water. Stout and Travello kept firing until he went down, his body ripped and violated, the surprise bloodied from his face. At that last instant, for some reason, Dale hadn’t squeezed his trigger. And in the noise and flame that followed, the other two never realized it. But that did not make him less a murderer, as he well understood, standing there above the captain’s body.

  They carried the body back to camp, with a story to go with the blood and the bullets. Luckily they didn’t run ballistics tests on le Shima.

  “Hello, Fielding. You’re looking good for a fellow of thirty-five.”

  “Hello, Harvey.” Yes, he still looked the same. Even those long fifteen years hadn’t changed him much. A bit heavier, perhaps, with hair that tended just a shade more toward the gray, but he was still the same Harvey Stout. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Did I ever refuse one, boy? Scotch and water.”

  “What have you been doing with yourself all these years, Harvey?”

  The leer he remembered so well. “Little of this, little of that. You know. Selling, mostly. Always on the road.”

  “Oh?”

  “Gave it up, though. Decided—this is good Scotch, damn good—decided to settle down. Right here in Riverview, maybe.”

  The chill was back. What did he want? What twisted thoughts were going around that dark mind of his? “Why here, Harvey?”

  “Well, my old buddy Fielding is here, for one thing. Thought you might help me get started, with a little money to set up a business.”

  Dale glanced down the bar to make certain the bartender wasn’t listening. “Listen, Harvey, I’ll say this once and make it clear. I don’t intend to be blackmailed by you!”

  “Blackmail! Fielding, I’m your buddy, remember? Don’t you think back occasionally to those Pacific days when the three of us were…”

  “Travello’s dead.” He’d stepped on a Japanese land mine two days after the murder of Captain Mason.

  “Sure, he’s dead. Does that mean you’ve forgotten him, boy? Have you forgotten me too, or what the three of us did out there?”

  Dale sighed into his drink. “I never told you this, Harvey, but I didn’t fire my rifle that day. It was just you and Travello.”

  Harvey looked at Dale with eyes both deep and curious. It seemed for a moment that he was trying to comprehend something, some great mystery of life. Then the eyes cleared, and Dale saw what he’d known all along—that this admission of his didn’t change anything.

  “I’m not trying to blackmail you, boy. Get that foolish idea out of your head. What happened to Mason was a long time ago. It’s only worth remembering because it made us buddies, and we’re just as close buddies whether you helped do it or just watched. Understand?”

  “I understand.” He felt the other’s breath on him like something unclean, sucking the air from his lungs, smothering him. “But I can’t help you. I have a family.”

  “You insurance men got a racket! You’re rolling in dough.”

  Now the bitterness was showing, the battle was joined. “Look, Harvey. If you want a handout I can give you five bucks. Anything more than that you’ve come to the wrong boy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. That’s the way it is. I’m sorry.” He slid off the bar stool and casually tossed down a five dollar bill for their two drinks, turning purposely away before he could see what became of it.

  “You’ll be hearing from me, Fielding.”

  He kept walking without looking back.

  Dale Fielding lived in a quiet house on a quiet street where trouble never visited. Even the laughter of children at play had always seemed muted to him, though it never occurred to his preoccupied mind that his very presence might have a quieting effect. At his own home, the last one on a street of nearly identical post-war houses, Marge and his two children would be waiting this evening, as they always were. The boys, eight and ten years old, could be seen from the street, playing at boyish pastimes in the back yard. That was good, because he wanted to speak to Marge alone.

  “Home so soon, dear?”

  “Yeah. Things were a little slow today, and besides, I have to make a call tonight.” He tossed his topcoat over a chair, not feeling just then like hanging it up. “Marge?”

  “Yes, dear?” She called him that always, but with the automatic inflection that comes perhaps after too many years of it.

  “A man called me at the office today. A man I was in the service with during the war.”

  “That’s nice, dear.”

  He knew what he wanted to tell her, and yet somehow the words didn’t come. Then, before the opportunity came again, the boys were in from their play, clustering about him.

  After supper the phone rang; and Marge came back to say it was for him. Somehow he knew it would be Harvey Stout, and he wasn’t surprised. “Hello, Fielding. I was wondering if you’d changed your mind.”

  “I’m… very busy. I was just on my way out. Talk to me tomorrow. At the office, not at home.”

  “Sure, Fielding. I understand.”

  He hung up, and for a long time Dale just stood there by the phone, looking down at it as if it were a thing alive. Then, in answer to Marge’s absent-minded question, he said, “Nothing important. I’ll be going out on that call now, I guess. Try to be home early…”

  The next morning he was irritable at the office, raising his voice for the first time in months to the girl who typed the fire policies. He sat dully at his desk waiting for the phone to ring, feeling his heart skip a beat every time it did. He’d been foolish to tell Harvey Stout to call today, yet in the panic of the moment it had been the only way to get rid of him. What if he ever came to the house? Or what if he ever told his story to Marge or said something in front of the children?

  Dale Fielding, murderer.

  The phone rang.

  “It’s for you, Mr. Fielding.”

  “Hello. Fielding speaking.”

  “How are you today, boy?”

  “Fine. A little busy.”

  “What about it?”

  “About what?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Money.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence, for the space of a heartbeat. Then, “I can’t fool around, boy. I need cash.”

  Dale cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll be a damn lot sorrier.”

  “Listen—stop calling me. Stop threatening me or I’ll get the police after you. Understand?”

  “Hell, I’m not threatening you.” The old friendly tone was back. “But we were buddies, remember? You and me and Travello? And Captain Mason. Remember?”

  “I remember. I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Sure. But for old times’ sake…”

  Dale hung up.

  He tried to light a cigarette and found that his hand was shaking. “Jean, I’m out if anyone else calls.”

  “Yes, Mr. Fielding.”

  He leaned back in his chair and thought about it all, about those dark days of war, and its aftermath. He remembered his trip to Dallas and the week he’d spent looking into the past of Charles F. Mason…

  The city was still caught up in the excitement of peace, year one. He’d walked among cattle-rich ranchers and oil millionaires, smiling around their thick cigars and thicker fingers. He’d stood in a grassy square and watched workmen putting up a plaque to honor the city’s war dead. Captain Charles F. Mason, U.S.M.C.

  Killed in action.

  Dale wandered about the city, managing finally to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Mason, a slimly beautiful young woman who he thought deserved better. But the more he dug, the more he asked, the deeper the picture seemed to etch itself. Charles Mason hadn’t been a really bad man. In fact, there were those who remembered him as a rising young executive, who mourned his death as that of a hero. But su
rely men changed in the service, men hardened in the face of daily death and uncertain life. Perhaps Mason had been one to crack under the strain. Stout and Travello might even have been doing their duty in some obscure manner when they pumped a dozen bullets into his unexpecting body.

  But day by day he became more certain of the facts, more aware of the guilt. On the final evening of his stay in Dallas he sat in his hotel room and thought about the alternatives open to him. He spent three hours debating between confessing everything and killing himself. In the end, because he’d never had a really strong will, he did nothing.

  That, in a way, had always been the story of his life, even to the moment in the jungle of le Shima. While others acted, he did nothing.

  He’d come back east and married Marge and let the bitter, unfriendly memories drift into the further reaches of his mind. War is never won by men who do nothing, but Dale thought that perhaps peace was won that way at times…

  On his way back from lunch, Harvey Stout crossed the street and caught up with him as he walked. “I guess we got disconnected this morning.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, Harvey.”

  “Let me tell you some more about this business I want to start.”

  “Don’t bother, Harvey. It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  He started to turn in at his office, but Harvey put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “I was out looking at your house this morning, boy.”

  “Stay away from my wife!”

  “Nobody’s going anywhere near your wife, Fielding. Don’t worry, I won’t tell her about Mason.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, anyway, I told you I didn’t do it.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  Dale was silent. Beyond Stout’s shoulder a traffic light turned red. Finally, like a man suddenly collapsing against the wind, he asked, “How much do you want?”

  “That’s better. That’s sounding more like a buddy.”