EQMM 1948-11 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Thrill Is Gone

by Fulton Oursler and Rupert Hughes

From Colliers, copyright, 1942, by Fulton Oursler and Rupert Hughes

Fulton Oursler (alias Anthony Abbot), creator of Thatcher Colt, detective, and Rupert Hughes, creator of Dirk Memling, criminal, combine their rich talents on the strange story of Henry Dawkins, the member of a murder jury who went to extraordinary lengths to live dangerously…

The news in yesterday’s papers was not the beginning of a new life for Henry Dawkins, as many of his friends supposed, but the logical next step in a strange and long-concealed pattern that stretched from his cradle to the courtroom.

The hidden passion of Henry’s heart was a desire for excitement, a dream of adventure and danger. He was a small, freckled man with volcanic blue eyes and he worked in a piano factory in one of the distant and almost uninhabited reaches of the Bronx. He lived not far from the plant in the third floor front of a rooming house. In his room was a grand piano and a shelf filled with secondhand detective and Western novels. Henry could not play the piano and had bought his instrument merely to make the proper impression on his employer. Neither was he a detective or a cowboy, but he lived in a storybook world, always hoping that some day something would happen to him. And one day something did.

There came in Henry’s mail a summons for jury duty. As he was not acquainted with the defendant, had never been arrested, and had no prejudices against capital punishment, he was acceptable to both sides, and so became a member of the jury.

The prisoner was Wilma Bowers, a widow, and the charge was that she had willfully, and knowingly, and with malice aforethought, dropped into her husband’s beer enough cyanide of potassium to kill a horse. Mrs. Bowers admitted having bought the poison but only at her husband’s command. She admitted also that she had induced him to take out a life insurance policy for ten thousand dollars, but she felt this was no more than proper wifely prudence. Finally she asserted that her husband had suffered from chronic headaches and dosed his own beer with poison because he was tired of pain. In fact, he wrote a suicide note and left it on the table in the hall. Unfortunately, in the distraction of her grief, Wilma could not remember where she had mislaid this vital document.

“A likely story!” flared the district attorney, rolling his eyes at the jury. But Dawkins was not listening to the district attorney. He could concentrate only on the lovely prisoner. Henry thought that Wilma was a fascinating, glamorous creature. The modest dressing of her dark hair, the hope and fear in her large eyes, the curvacious figure, made the blood incandescent in his veins. In fact, he barely heard the impassioned arguments of prosecutor and counsel for defense.

The first vote in the jury room was eleven to one for a verdict of guilty. The one acquittal ballot was Henry’s.

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