Chapter One

Ellery was spread over the pony-skin chair before the picture window, huarachos crossed on the typewriter table, a ten-inch frosted glass in his hand, and the corpse at his feet. He was studying the victim between sips and making not too much out of her. However, he was not concerned. It was early in the investigation, she was of unusual proportions, and the ron consoled.

He took another sip.

It was a curious case. The victim still squirmed; from where he sat he could make out signs of life. Back in New York they had warned him that these were an illusion, reflexes following the death rattle. Why, you won’t believe it, they had said, but corruption’s set in already and anyone who can tell a stinkweed from a camellia will testify to it. Ellery had been skeptical. He had known deceased in her heyday ― a tumid wench, every man’s daydream, and the laughing target of curses and longing. It was hard to believe that such vitality could be exterminated.

On the scene of the crime ― or rather above it, for the little house he had taken was high over the city, a bird’s nest perched on the twig tip of an upper branch of the hills ― Ellery still doubted. There she lay under a thin blanket of smog, stirring a little, and they said she was dead.

Fair Hollywood.

Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television.

He squinted down at the city, sipping his rum and enjoying his nakedness. It was a blue-white day. The hill ran green and flowered to the twinkled plain, simmering in the sun.

There had been no technical reason for choosing Hollywood as the setting for his new novel. Mystery stories operate under special laws of growth; their beginnings may lie in the look in a faceless woman’s eye glimpsed in a crowd for exactly the duration of one heartbeat, or in the small type on page five of a life insurance policy; generally the writer has the atlas to pick from. Ellery had had only the gauziest idea of where he was going; at that stage of the game it could as well have been Joplin, Missouri, or the kitchens of thin fact, his plot was in such a cloudy state that when he heard about the murder of Hollywood he took it as a sign from the heavens and made immediate arrangements to be present at the autopsy. His trade being violent death, a city with a knife in its back seemed just the place to take his empty sample cases.

Well, there was life in the old girl yet. Of course, theaters with MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER on their marquees had crossbars over their portals saying CLOSED; you could now get a table at the Brown Derby without waiting more than twenty minutes; that eminent haberdasher of the Strip, Mickey Cohen, was out of business; movie stars were cutting their prices for radio; radio actors were auditioning tensely for television as they redesigned their belts or put their houses up for sale; shopkeepers were complaining that how could anybody find money for yard goods or nail files when the family budget was mortgaged to Hoppy labels, the new car, and the television set; teen-age gangs, solemnly christened “wolf packs” by the Los Angeles newspapers, cruised the streets beating up strangers, high school boys were regularly caught selling marijuana, and “Chicken!” was the favorite highway sport of the hot-rodders; and you could throttle a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea any night after 10:30 and feel reasonably secure against interruption.

But out in the San Fernando Valley mobs of little cheap stuccos and redwood fronts were beginning to elbow the pained hills, paint-fresh signal lights at intersections were stopping cars which had previously known only the carefree California conscience, and a great concrete ditch labeled “Flood Control Project” was making its way across the sandy valley like an opening zipper.

On the ocean side of the Santa Monica Mountains, from Beverly Glen to Topanga Canyon, lordlier mansions were going up which called themselves “estates” ― disdaining the outmoded “ranch” or “rancho,” which more and more out-of-state ex-innocents were learning was a four-or-five-and-den on a 50X100 lot containing three callow apricot trees. Beverly Hills might be biting its perfect fingernails, but Glendale and Encino were booming, and Ellery could detect no moans from-he direction of Brentwood, Flintridge, Sunland, or Eagle Rock. v* schools were assembling; more oldsters were chugging in from Iowa and Michigan, flexing their arthritic fingers and practicing old age pension-check-taking; and to drive a car in downtown Los Angeles at noontime the four blocks from 3rd to 7th along Broadway, Spring, Hill, or Main now took thirty minutes instead of fifteen. Ellery heard tell of huge factories moving in; of thousands of migrants swarming into Southern California through Blythe and Indio on 60 and Needles and Barstow on 66 ― latter-day pioneers to whom the movies still represented Life and Love and “television” remained a highfalutin word, like “antibiotic.” The carhops were more beautiful and numerous than ever; more twenty-foot ice cream cones punctuated the skyline; Tchaikovsky under the stars continued to fill Hollywood Bowl with brave-bottomed music lovers; Grand Openings of hardware stores now used two giant searchlights instead of one; the Farmers’ Market on Fairfax and 3rd chittered and heaved like an Egyptian bazaar in the tourist season; Madman Muntz had apparently taken permanent possession of the skies, his name in mile-high letters drifting expensively away daily; and the newspapers offered an even more tempting line of cheesecake than in the old days ― Ellery actually saw one photograph of the routine well-stacked cutie in a Bikini bathing suit perched zippily on a long flower-decked box inscribed Miss National Casket Week. And in three days or so, according to the reports, the Imperial Potentate would lead a six-hour safari of thirteen thousand red-fezzed, capering, elderly Penrods, accompanied by fifty-one bands, assorted camels, clowns, and floats, along Figueroa Street to the Memorial Coliseum to convene the seventy-umpth Imperial Session of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine ― a civic event guaranteed to rouse even the dead.

It became plain in his first few days in Hollywood and environs that what the crape-hangers back East were erroneously bewailing was not the death of the angelic city but its exuberant rebirth in another shape. The old order changeth. The new organism was exciting, but it was a little out of his line; and Ellery almost packed up and flew back East. But then he thought, It’s all hassle and hurly-burly, everybody snarling or making hay; and there’s still the twitching nucleus of the old Hollywood bunch ― stick around, old boy, the atmosphere is murderous and it may well inspire a collector’s item or two for the circulating library shelves.

Also, there had been the press and its agents. Ellery had thought to slip into town by dropping off at the Lockheed field in Burbank rather than the International Airport in Inglewood. But he touched Southern California soil to a bazooka fire of questions and lenses, and the next day his picture was on the front page of all the papers. They had even got his address in the hills straight, although his pal the real estate man later swore by the beard of Nature Boy that he’d had nothing to do with the leak. It had been that way for Ellery ever since the publicity explosion over the Cat case. The newspaper boys were convinced that, having saved Manhattan from a fate equivalent to death, Ellery was in Los Angeles on a mission at least equally large and torrid. When he plaintively explained that he had come to write a book they all laughed, and their printed explanations ascribed his visit to everything from a top-secret appointment by the Mayor as Special Investigator to Clean Up Greater L.A. to the turning of his peculiar talents upon the perennial problem of the Black Dahlia.

How could he run out?

At this point Ellery noticed that his glass was as empty as his typewriter.

He got up from the pony-skin chair and found himself face to face with a pretty girl.

As he jumped nudely for the bedroom doorway Ellery thought, The huarachos must look ridiculous. Then he thought, Why didn’t I put on those ten pounds Barney prescribed? Then he got angry and poked his head around the door to whine, “I told Mrs. Williams I wasn’t seeing anybody today, not even her. How did you get in?”

“Through the garden,” said the girl. “Climbed up from the road below. I tried not to trample your marigolds. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. Go away.”

“But I’ve got to see you.”

“Everybody’s got to see me. But I don’t have to see everybody. Especially when I look like this.”

“You are sort of pale, aren’t you? And your ribs stick out, Ellery.” She sounded like a debunked sister. Ellery suddenly remembered that in Hollywood dress is a matter of free enterprise. You could don a parka and drive a team of Siberian huskies from Schwab’s Drugstore at the foot of Laurel Canyon to NBC at Sunset and Vine and never turn a head. Fur stoles over slacks are acceptable if not de rigueur, the exposed navel is considered conservative, and at least one man dressed in nothing but Waikiki trunks may be found poking sullenly among the avocados at any vegetable stand. “You ought to put on some weight, Ellery. And get out in the sun.”

“Thank you,” Ellery heard himself saying.

His Garden of Eden costume meant absolutely nothing to her. And she was even prettier than he had thought. Hollywood prettiness, he thought sulkily; they all look alike. Probably Miss Universe of Pasadena. She was dressed in zebra-striped culottes and bolero over a bra-like doodad of bright green suede. Green open-toed sandals on her tiny feet. A matching suede jockey cap on her cinnamon hair. Skin toast-colored where it was showing, and no ribs. A small and slender number, but three-dimensional where it counted. About nineteen years old. For no reason at all she reminded him of Meg in Thorne Smith’s The Night Life of the Gods, and he pulled his head back and banged the door.

When he came out safe and suave in slacks, Shantung shirt, and burgundy corduroy jacket, she was curled up in his pony-skin chair smoking a cigaret.

“I’ve fixed your drink,” she said.

“Kind of you. I suppose that means I must ofter you one.” No point in being too friendly.

“Thanks. I don’t drink before five.” She was thinking of something else.

Ellery leaned against the picture window and looked down at her with hostility. “It’s not that I’m a prude, Miss―”

“Hill. Laurel Hill.”

“―Miss Laurel Hill, but when I receive strange young things au naturel in Hollywood I like to be sure no confederate with a camera and an offer to do business is skulking behind my drapes. Why do you think you have to see me?”

“Because the police are dummies.”

“Ah, the police. They won’t listen to you?”

“They listen, all right. But then they laugh. I don’t think there’s anything funny in a dead dog, do you?”

“In a what?”

“A dead dog.”

Ellery sighed, rolling the frosty glass along his brow. “Your pooch was poisoned, of course?”

“Guess again,” said the set-faced intruder. “He wasn’t my pooch, and I don’t know what caused his death. What’s more, dog-lover though I am, I don’t care a curse... They said it was somebody’s idea of a rib, and I know they’re talking through their big feet. I don’t know what it meant, but it was no rib.”

Ellery had set the glass down. She stared back. Finally he shook his head, smiling. “The tactics are primitive, Laurel. E for Effort. But no dice.”

“No tactics,” she said impatiently. “Let me tell you―”

“Who sent you to me?”

“Not a soul. You were all over the papers. It solved my problem.”

“It doesn’t solve mine, Laurel. My problem is to find the background of peaceful isolation which passeth the understanding of the mere, dear reader. I’m here to do a book, Laurel ― a poor thing in a state of arrested development, but writing is a habit writers get into and my time has come. So, you see, I can’t take any cases.”

“You won’t even listen.” Her mouth was in trouble. She got up and started across the room. He watched the brown flesh below the bolero. Not his type, but nice.

“Dogs die all the time,” Ellery said in a kindly voice.

“It wasn’t the dog, I tell you. It was the way it happened.” She did not turn at the front door.

“The way he died?” Sucker.

“The way we found him.” The girl suddenly leaned against the door, sidewise to him, staring down at her cigaret. “He was on our doorstep. Did you ever have a cat who insisted on leaving tidily dead mice on your mat to go with your breakfast eggs? He was a... gift.” She looked around for an ashtray, went over to the fireplace. “And it killed my father.”

A dead dog killing anybody struck Ellery as worth a tentative glance. And there was something about the girl ― a remote, hardened purpose ― that interested him.

“Sit down again.”

She betrayed herself by the quick way in which she came back to the pony-skin chair, by the way she folded her tense hands and waited.

“How exactly, Laurel, did a dead dog ‘kill’ your father?”

“It murdered him.”

He didn’t like the way she sat there. He said deliberately, “Don’t build it up for me. This isn’t a suspense program. A strange dead hound is left on your doorstep and your father dies. What’s the connection?”

“It frightened him to death!”

“And what did the death certificate say?” He now understood the official hilarity.

“Coronary something. I don’t care what it said. Getting the dog did it.

“Let’s go back.” Ellery offered her one of his cigarets, but she shook her head and took a pack of Dunhills from her green pouch bag. He held a match for her; the cigaret between her lips was shaking. “Your name is Laurel Hill. You had a father. Who was he? Where do you live? What did he do for a living? And so on.” She looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to her that such trivia could be of any interest to him. “I’m not necessarily taking it, Laurel. But I promise not to laugh.”

“Thank you... Leander Hill. Hill & Priam, Wholesale Jewelers.”

“Yes.” He had never heard of the firm. “Los Angeles?”

“The main office is here, though Dad and Roger have ― I mean had...” She laughed. “What tense do I use?... branch offices in New York, Amsterdam, South Africa.”

“Who is Roger?”

“Roger Priam. Dad’s partner. We live off Outpost, not far from here. Twelve acres of lopsided woods. Formal gardens, with mathematical eucalyptus and royal palms, and plenty of bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, poinsettia ― all the stuff that curls up and dies at a touch of frost, which we get regularly every winter and which everybody says can’t possibly happen again, not in Southern California. But Dad liked it. Made him feel like a Caribbean pirate, he used to say. Three in help in the house, a gardener who comes in every day, and the Priams have the adjoining property.” From the carefully scrubbed way in which she produced the name Priam it might have been Hatfield. “Daddy had a bad heart, and we should have lived on level ground. But he liked hills and wouldn’t hear of moving.”

“Mother alive?” He knew she was not. Laurel had the motherless look. The self-made female. A man’s girl, and there were times when she would insist on being a man’s man. Not Miss Universe of Pasadena or anywhere else, he thought. He began to like her. “She isn’t?” he said, when Laurel was silent.

“I don’t know.” A sore spot. “If I ever knew my mother, I’ve forgotten.”

“Foster mother, then?”

“He never married. I was brought up by a nurse, who died when I was fifteen ― four years ago. I never liked her, and I think she got pneumonia just to make me feel guilty. I’m ― I was his daughter by adoption.” She looked around for an ashtray, and Ellery brought her one. She said steadily as she crushed the cigaret, “But really his daughter. None of that fake pal stuff, you understand, that covers contempt on one side and being unsure on the other. I loved and respected him, and ― as he used to say ― I was the only woman in his life. Dad was a little on the old-school side. Held my chair for me. That sort of thing. He was... solid.” And now, Ellery thought, it’s jelly and you’re hanging on to the stuff with your hard little fingers.

“It happened,” Laurel Hill went on in the same toneless way, “two weeks ago. June third. We were just finishing breakfast. Simeon, our chauffeur, came in to tell Daddy he’d just brought the car around and there was something ‘funny’ at the front door. We all went out, and there it was ― a dead dog lying on the doorstep with an ordinary shipping tag attached to its collar. Dad’s name was printed on it in black crayon: Leander Hill.”

“Any address?”

“Just the name.”

“Did the printing look familiar? Did you recognize it?”

“I didn’t really look at it. I just saw one line of crayon marks as Dad bent over the dog. He said in a surprised way, ‘Why, it’s addressed to me.’

Then he opened the little casket.”

“Casket?”

“There was a tiny silver box ― about the size of a pillbox ― attached to the collar. Dad opened it and found a wad of thin paper inside, folded over enough times so it would fit into the box. He unfolded it and it was covered with writing or printing ― it might have been typewriting; I couldn’t really see because he half turned away as he read it.

“By the time he’d finished reading his face was the color of bread dough, and his lips looked bluish. I started to ask him who’d sent it to him and what was wrong, when he crushed the paper in a sort of spasm and gave a choked cry and fell. I’d seen it happen before. It was a heart attack.”

She stared out the picture window at Hollywood.

“How about a drink, Laurel?”

“No. Thanks. Simeon and―”

“What kind of dog was it?”

“Some sort of hunting dog, I think.”

“Was there a license tag on his collar?”

“I don’t remember seeing any.”

“An anti-rabies tag?”

“I saw no tag except the paper one with Dad’s name on it.”

“Anything special about the dog collar?”

“It couldn’t have cost more than seventy-five cents.”

“Just a collar.” Ellery dragged over a chartreuse latticed blond chair and straddled it. “Go on, Laurel.”

“Simeon and Ichiro, our houseman, carried him up to his bedroom while I ran for the brandy and Mrs. Monk, our housekeeper, phoned the doctor. He lives on Castilian Drive and he was over in a few minutes. Daddy didn’t die ― that time.”

“Oh, I see,” said Ellery. “And what did the paper in the silver box on the dead dog’s collar say, Laurel?”

“That’s what I don’t know.”

“Oh, come.”

“When he fell unconscious the paper was still in his hand, crumpled into a ball. I was too busy to try to open his fist, and by the time Dr. Voluta came, I’d forgotten it. But I remembered it that night, and the first chance I got ― the next morning ― I asked Dad about it. The minute I mentioned it he got pale, mumbled, ‘It was nothing, nothing,’ and I changed the subject fast. But when Dr. Voluta dropped in, I took him aside and asked him if he’d seen the note. He said he had opened Daddy’s hand and put the wad of paper on the night table beside the bed without reading it. I asked Simeon, Ichiro, and the housekeeper if they had taken the paper, but none of them had seen it. Daddy must have spotted it when he came to, and when he was alone he took it back.”

“Have you looked for it since?”

“Yes, but I haven’t found it. I assume he destroyed it.” Ellery did not comment on such assumptions. “Well, then, the dog, the collar, the little box. Have you done anything about them?”

“I was too excited over whether Daddy was going to live or die to think about the dog. I recall telling Itchie or Sim to get it out of the way. I only meant for them to get it off the doorstep, but the next day when I went looking for it, Mrs. Monk told me she had called the Pound Department or some place and it had been picked up and carted away.”

“Up the flue,” said Ellery, tapping his teeth with a fingernail. “Although the collar and box... You’re sure your father didn’t react to the mere sight of the dead dog? He wasn’t afraid of dogs? Or,” he added suddenly, “of dying?”

“He adored dogs. So much so that when Sarah, our Chesapeake bitch, died of old age last year he refused to get another dog. He said it was too hard losing them. As far as dying is concerned, I don’t think the prospect of death as such bothered Daddy very much. Certainly not so much as the suffering. He hated the idea of a lingering illness with a lot of pain, and he always hoped that when his time came he’d pass away in his sleep. But that’s all. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” said Ellery, “and no. Was he superstitious?”

“Not especially. Why?”

“You said he was frightened to death. I’m groping.”

Laurel was silent. Then she said, “But he was. I mean frightened to death. It wasn’t the dog ― at first.” She gripped her ankles, staring ahead. “I got the feeling that the dog didn’t mean anything till he read the note. Maybe it didn’t mean anything to him even then. But whatever was in that note terrified him. It came as a tremendous shock to him. I’d never seen him look afraid before. I mean the real thing. And I could have sworn he died on the way down. He looked really dead lying there... That note did something devastating.” She turned to Ellery. Her eyes were greenish, with brown flecks in them; they were a little bulgy. “Something he’d forgotten, maybe. Something so important it made Roger come out of his shell for the first time in fifteen years.”

“What?” said Ellery. “What was that again?”

“I told you ― Roger Priam, Dad’s business partner. His oldest friend.

Roger left his house.”

“For the first time in fifteen years?” exclaimed Ellery.

“Fifteen years ago Roger became partly paralyzed. He’s lived in a wheelchair ever since, and ever since he’s refused to leave the Priam premises. All vanity; he was a large hunk of man in his day, I understand, proud of his build, his physical strength; he can’t stand the thought of having people see him helpless, and it’s turned him into something pretty unpleasant.

“Through it all Roger pretends he’s as good as ever and he brags that running the biggest jewelry business on the West Coast from a wheelchair in the hills proves it. Of course, he doesn’t do any such thing. Daddy ran it all, though to keep peace he played along with Roger and pretended with him ― gave Roger special jobs to do that he could handle over the phone, never took an important step without consulting him, and so on. Why, some of the people at the office and showrooms downtown have been with the firm for years and have never even laid eyes on Roger. The employes hate him. They call him ‘the invisible God,’ ” Laurel said with a smile. Ellery did not care for the smile. “Of course ― being employes ― they’re scared to death of him.”

“A fear which you don’t share?”

“I can’t stand him.” It came out calmly enough, but when Ellery kept looking at her she glanced elsewhere.

“You’re afraid of him, too.”

“I just dislike him.”

“Go on.”

“I’d notified the Priams of Dad’s heart attack the first chance I got, which was the evening of the day it happened. I spoke to Roger myself on the phone. He seemed very curious about the circumstances and kept insisting he had to talk to Daddy. I refused ― Dr. Voluta had forbidden excitement of any kind. The next morning Roger phoned twice, and Dad seemed just as anxious to talk to him. In fact, he was getting so upset I let him phone. There’s a private line between his bedroom and the Priam house. But after I got Roger on the phone Dad asked me to leave the room.”

Laurel jumped up, but immediately she sat down again, fumbling for another Dunhill. Ellery let her strike her own match; she failed to notice.

She puffed rapidly. “Nobody knows what he said to Roger. Whatever it was, it took only a few minutes, and it brought Roger right over. He’d been lifted, wheelchair and all, into the back of the Priams’ station wagon, and Delia ― Roger’s wife ― drove him over herself.” And Laurel’s voice stabbed at the name of Mrs. Priam. So another Hatfield went with this McCoy. “When he was carried up to Dad’s bedroom in his chair, Roger locked the door. They talked for three hours.”

“Discussing the dead dog and the note?”

“There’s no other possibility. It couldn’t have been business ― Roger had never felt the necessity of coming over before on business, and Daddy had had two previous heart attacks. It was about the dog and note, all right. And if I had any doubts, the look on Roger Priam’s face when he wheeled himself out of the bedroom killed them. He was as frightened as Daddy had been the day before, and for the same reason.

“And that was something to see,” said Laurel softly. “If you were to meet Roger Priam, you’d know what I mean. Frightened looks don’t go with his face. If there’s any fright around, he’s usually dishing it out... He even talked to me, something he rarely bothers to do. ‘You take good care of your father,’ he said to me. I pleaded with him to tell me what was wrong, and he pretended not to have heard me. Simeon and Itchie lifted him into the station wagon, and Delia drove off with him.

“A week ago ― during the night of June tenth ― Daddy got his wish. He died in his sleep. Dr. Voluta says that last shock to his heart did it. He was cremated, and his ashes are in a bronze drawer fifteen feet from the floor at Forest Lawn. But that’s what he wanted, and that’s where he is. The sixty-four dollar question, Ellery, is: Who murdered him? And I want it answered.”

Ellery rang for Mrs. Williams. When she did not appear, he excused himself and went downstairs to the miniature lower level to find a note from his housekeeper describing minutely her plan to shop at the supermarket on North Highland. A pot of fresh coffee on the range and a deep dish of whipped avocado and bacon bits surrounded by crackers told him that Mrs. Williams had overheard all, so he took them upstairs.

Laurel said, surprised, “How nice of you,” as if niceness these days were a quality that called for surprise. She refused the crackers just as nicely, but then she changed her mind and ate ten of them without pausing, and she drank three cups of coffee. “I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything today.”

“That’s what I thought.”

She was frowning now, which he regarded as an improvement over the stone face she had been wearing. “I’ve tried to talk to Roger Priam half a dozen times since then, but he won’t even admit he and Dad discussed anything unusual. I told him in words of one syllable where I thought his obligations lay ― certainly his debt to their lifelong friendship and partner-ship ― and I explained my belief that Daddy was murdered by somebody who knew how bad his heart was and deliberately shocked him into a heart attack. And I asked for the letter. He said innocently, ‘What letter?’ and I realized I’d never get a thing out of him. Roger’s either over his scare or he’s being his usual Napoleonic self. There’s a big secret behind all this and he means to keep it.”

“Do you think,” asked Ellery, “that he’s confided in Mrs. Priam?”

“Roger doesn’t confide in anybody,” replied Laurel grimly. “And if he did, the last person in the world he’d tell anything to would be Delia.”

“Oh, the Priams don’t get along?”

“I didn’t say they don’t get along.”

“They do get along?”

“Let’s change the subject, shall we?”

“Why, Laurel?”

“Because Roger’s relationship with Delia has nothing to do with any of this.” Laurel sounded earnest. But she was hiding something just the same. “I’m interested in only one thing ― finding out who wrote that note to my father.”

“Still,” said Ellery, “what was your father’s relationship with Delia Priam?”

“Oh!” Laurel laughed. “Of course you couldn’t know. No, they weren’t having an affair. Not possibly. Besides, I told you Daddy said I was the only woman in his life.”

“Then they were hostile to each other?”

“Why do you keep on the subject of Delia?” she asked, a snap in her voice.

“Why do you keep off it?”

“Dad got along with Delia fine. He got along with everybody.”

“Not everybody, Laurel,” said Ellery.

She looked at him sharply.

“That is, if your theory that someone deliberately scared him to death is sound. You can’t blame the police, Laurel, for being fright-shy. Fright is a dangerous weapon that doesn’t show up under the microscope. It takes no fingerprints and it’s the most unsatisfactory kind of legal evidence. Now the letter... if you had the letter, that would be different. But you don’t have it.”

“You’re laughing at me.” Laurel prepared to rise.

“Not at all. The smooth stories are usually as slick as their surface. I like a good rough story. You can scrape away at the uneven places, and the dust tells you things. Now I know there’s something about Delia and Roger Priam. What is it?”

“Why must you know?”

“Because you’re so reluctant to tell me.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to waste any time, and to talk about Delia and Roger is wasting time. Their relationship has nothing to do with my father.”

Their eyes locked.

Finally, with a smile, Ellery waved.

“No, I don’t have the letter. And that’s what the police said. Without the letter, or some evidence to go on, they can’t come into it. I’ve asked Roger to tell them what he knows ― knowing that what he knows would be enough for them to go on ― and he laughed and recommended Arrowhead or Palm Springs as a cure for my ‘pipe dream,’ as he called it. The police point to the autopsy report and Dad’s cardiac history and send me politely away. Are you going to do the same?”

Ellery turned to the window. To get into a live murder case was the last thing in the world he had bargained for. But the dead dog fascinated him. Why a dead dog as a messenger of bad news? It smacked of symbolism. And murderers with metaphoric minds he had never been able to resist. If, of course, there was a murder. Hollywood was a playful place. People produced practical jokes on the colossal scale. A dead dog was nothing compared with some of the elaborations of record. One he knew of personally involved a race horse in a bathroom, another the employment for two days of seventy-six extras. Some wit had sent a cardiac jeweler a recently deceased canine and a fake Mafia note, and before common sense could set in the victim of the dogplay had a heart attack. Learning the unexpected snapper of his joke, the joker would not unnaturally turn shy. The victim, ill and shaken, summoned his oldest friend and business partner to a conference. Perhaps the note threatened Sicilian tortures unless the crown jewels were deposited in the oily crypt of the pterodactyl pit in Hancock Park by midnight of the following day. For three hours the partners discussed the note, Hill nervously insisting it might be legitimate, Priam reasonably poohing and boshing the very notion. In the end Priam came away, and what Laurel Hill had taken to be fear was probably annoyance at Hill’s womanish obduracy. Hill was immobilized by his partner’s irritation, and before he could rouse himself his heart gave out altogether. End of mystery. Of course, there were a few dangling ends... But you could sympathize with the police. It was a lot likelier than a wild detective-story theory dreamed up by deceased’s daughter. They had undoubtedly dismissed her as either a neurotic girl tipped over by grief or a publicity hound with a yen for a starlet contract. She was determined enough to be either.

Ellery turned about. She was leaning forward, the forgotten cigaret sending up question marks.

“I suppose,” said Ellery, “your father had a closetful of bony enemies?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

This astonished him. To run true to form she should have come prepared with names, dates, and vital statistics.

“He was an easy, comfortable sort of man. He liked people, and people liked him. Dad’s personality was one of the big assets of Hill & Priam. He’d have his moments like everybody else, but I never knew anyone who could stay mad at him. Not even Roger.”

“Then you haven’t the smoggiest notion who could be behind this... fright murder?”

“Now you are laughing.” Laurel Hill got to her feet and dropped her cigaret definitely into the ashtray. “Sorry I’ve taken up so much of your time.”

“You might try a reliable agency. I’ll be glad to―”

“I’ve decided,” she smiled at him, “to go into the racket personally. Thanks for the avocado―”

“Why, Laurel.” Laurel turned quickly. A tall woman stood in the doorway. “Hello, Delia,” said Laurel.

Chapter Two

Nothing in Laurel Hill’s carefully edited remarks had prepared him for Delia Priam. Through his only available windows — the narrow eyes of Laurel’s youth — he had seen Delia’s husband as a pompous and tyrannical old cock, crippled but rampant, ruling his roost with a beak of iron; and from this it followed that the wife must be a gray-feathered hennypenny, preening herself emptily in corners, one of Bullock’s elderly barnyard trade... a dumpy, nervous, insignificant old biddy.

But the woman in his doorway was no helpless fowl, to be plucked, swallowed, and forgotten. Delia Priam was of a far different species, higher in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and she would linger on the palate.

She was so much younger than his mental sketch of her that only much later was Ellery to recognize this as one of her routine illusions, among the easiest of the magic tricks she performed as professionally as she carried her breasts. At that time he was to discover that she was forty-four, but the knowledge remained as physically meaningless as ― the figure leaped into his mind ― learning the chronological age of Ayesha. The romantic nonsense of this metaphor was to persist. He would even be appalled to find that he was identifying himself in his fantasy with that hero of his adolescence, Allan Quatermain, who had been privileged to witness the immortal strip-tease of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed behind her curtain of living flame. It was the most naked juvenility, and Ellery was duly amused at himself. But there she was, a glowing end in herself; it took only imagination, a commodity with which he was plentifully provided, to supply the veils.

Delia Priam was big game; one glance told him that. His doorway framed the most superbly proportioned woman he had ever seen. She was dressed in a tawny peasant blouse of some sheer material and a California print skirt of bold colors. Her heavy black hair was massed to one side of her head, sleekly, in the Polynesian fashion; she wore plain broad hoops of gold in her ears. Head, shoulders, bust, hips ― he could not decide which pleased him more. She stood there not so much in an attitude as in an atmosphere ― an atmosphere of intense repose, watchful and disquieting.

By Hollywood standards she was not beautiful: her eyes were too deep and light-tinted, her eyebrows too lush; her mouth was too full, her coloring too high, her figure too heroic. But it was this very excessiveness that excited ― a tropical quality, humid, brilliant, still, and overpowering. Seeing her for the first time was like stepping into a jungle. She seized and held the senses; everything was leashed, lovely, and dangerous. He found his ears trying to recapture her voice, the sleepy growl of something heard from a thicket.

Ellery’s first sensible thought was, Roger, old cock, you can have her. His second was, But how do you keep her? He was on his third when he saw the chilly smile on Laurel Hill’s lips.

Ellery pulled himself together. This was evidently an old story to Laurel.

“Then Laurel’s... mentioned me.” A dot-dot-dot talker. It had always annoyed him. But it prolonged the sound of that bitch-in-a-thicket voice.

“I answered Mr. Queen’s questions,” said Laurel in a warm, friendly voice. “Delia, you don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“I left my surprise outside with your car.” Those lazy throat tones were warm and friendly, too. “I could say... the same to you, Laurel.”

“Darling, you never surprise me.”

They smiled at each other.

Laurel turned suddenly and reached for another cigaret.

“Don’t bother, Ellery. Delia always makes a man forget there’s another woman in the room.”

“Now, Laurel.” She was indulgent. Laurel slashed the match across the packet.

“Won’t you come in and sit down, Mrs. Priam?”

“If I’d had any idea Laurel was coming here...”

Laurel said abruptly, “I came to see the man about the dog, Delia. And the note. Did you follow me?”

“What a ridiculous thing to say.”

“Did you?”

“Certainly not, dear. I read about Mr. Queen in the papers and it coincided with something that’s been bothering me.”

“I’m sorry, Delia. I’ve been upset.”

“I’ll come back, Mr. Queen.”

“Mrs. Priam, does it concern Miss Hill’s father’s death?”

“I don’t know. It may.”

“Then Miss Hill won’t mind your sitting in. I repeat my invitation.

She had a trick of moving slowly, as if she were pushing against something. As he brought the chartreuse chair around he watched her obliquely. When she sat down she was close enough so that he could have touched her bare back with a very slight movement of his finger. He almost moved it.

She did not seem to have taken him in at all. And yet she had looked him over; up and down, as if he had been a gown in a dress shop. Perhaps he didn’t interest her. As a gown, that is.

“Drink, Mrs. Priam?”

“Delia doesn’t drink,” said Laurel in the same warm, friendly voice. Two jets spurted from her nostrils.

“Thank you, darling. It goes to my head, Mr. Queen.”

And you wouldn’t let anything go to your head, wherefore it stands to reason, thought Ellery, that one way to get at you is to pour a few extra-dry Martinis down that red gullet... He was surprised at himself. A married woman, obviously a lady, and her husband was a cripple. But that wading walk was something to see.

“Laurel was about to leave. The facts interest me, but I’m in Hollywood to do a book...”

The shirring of her blouse rose and fell. He moved off to the picture window, making her turn her head.

“If, however, you have something to contribute, Mrs. Priam...” He suspected there would be no book for some time.

Delia Priam’s story penetrated imperfectly. Ellery found it hard to concentrate. He tended to lose himself in details. The curves of her blouse. The promise of her skirt, which molded her strongly below the waist. Her large, shapely hands rested precisely in the middle of her lap, like compass points. “ Mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs...” Right out of Browning’s Renaissance. She would have brought joy to the dying Bishop of Saint Praxed’s.

“Mr. Queen?”

Ellery said guiltily, “You mean, Mrs. Priam, the same day Leander Hill received the dead dog?”

“The same morning. It was a sort of gift. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

Laurel’s cigaret hung in the air. “Delia, you didn’t tell me Roger had got something, too!”

“He told me not to say anything, Laurel. But you’ve forced my hand, dear. Kicking up such a fuss about that poor dog. First the police, now Mr. Queen.”

“Then you did follow me.”

“I didn’t have to.” The woman smiled. “I saw you looking at Mr. Queen’s photo in the paper.”

“Delia, you’re wonderful.”

“Thank you, darling.” She sat peaceful as a lady tiger, smiling over secrets... Here, Brother Q!

“Oh. Oh, yes, Mrs. Priam. Mr. Priam’s been frightened―”

“Ever since the day he got the box. He won’t admit it, but when a man keeps roaring that he won’t be intimidated it’s pretty clear that he is. He’s broken things, too, some of his own things. That’s not like Roger. Usually they’re mine.”

Delightful. What a pity.

“What was in the box, Mrs. Priam?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“A dead dog,” said Laurel. “Another dead dog!” Laurel looked something like a little dog herself, nose up, testing the air. It was remarkable how meaningless she was across from Delia Priam. As sexless as a child.

“It would have to have been an awfully small one, Laurel. The box wasn’t more than a foot square, of cardboard.”

“Unmarked?” asked Ellery.

“Yes. But there was a shipping tag attached to the string that was tied around the box. ‘Roger Priam’ was printed on it in crayon.” The beautiful woman paused. “Mr. Queen, are you listening?”

“In crayon. Yes, certainly, Mrs. Priam. Color?” What the devil difference did the color make?

“Black, I think.”

“No address?”

“No. Nothing but the name.”

“And you don’t know what was in it. No idea.”

“No. But whatever it was, it hit Roger hard. One of the servants found the box at the front door and gave it to Alfred―”

“Alfred.”

“Roger’s... secretary.”

“Wouldn’t you call him more of a... companion, Delia?’ asked Laurel, blowing a smoke ring.

“I suppose so, dear. Companion, nurse, handyman, secretary ― what-have-you. My husband, you know, Mr. Queen, is an invalid.”

“Laurel’s told me. All things to one man, eh, Mrs. Priam? I mean Alfred. We now have the versatile Alfred with the mysterious box. He takes it to Mr. Priam’s room. And then?” Why was Laurel laughing? Not outwardly. But she was. Delia Priam seemed not to notice.

“I happened to be in Roger’s room when Alfred came in. We didn’t know then about... Leander and his gift, of course. Alfred gave Roger the box, and Roger lifted a corner of the lid and looked inside. He looked angry, then puzzled. He slammed the lid down and told me to get out. Alfred went out with me, and I heard Roger lock his door. And that’s the last... I’ve seen of the box or its contents. Roger won’t tell me what was in it or what he’s done with it. Won’t talk about it at all.”

“When did your husband begin to show fear, Mrs. Priam?”

“After he talked to Leander in the Hill house the next day. On the way back home he didn’t say a word, just stared out the window of the station wagon. Shaking. He’s been shaking... ever since. It was especially bad a week later when Leander died...”

Then what was in Roger Priam’s box had little significance for him until he compared gifts with Leander Hill, perhaps until he read the note Hill had found in the collar of the dog. Unless there had been a note in Priam’s box as well. But then...

Ellery fidgeted before the picture window, sending up a smoke screen. It was ridiculous, at his age... pretending to be interested in a case because a respectable married woman had the misfortune to evoke the jungle. Still, he thought, what a waste.

He became conscious of the two women’s eyes and expelled a mouthful of smoke, trying to appear professional. “Leander Hill received a queer gift, and he died. Are you afraid, Mrs. Priam, that your husband’s life is in danger, too?”

Now he was more than a piece of merchandise; he was a piece of merchandise that interested her. Her eyes were so empty of color that in the sunlight coming through the window she looked eyeless; it was like being looked over by a statue. He felt himself reddening and it seemed to him she was amused. He immediately bristled. She could take her precious husband and her fears elsewhere.

“Laurel darling,” Delia Priam was saying with an apologetic glance, “would you mind terribly if I spoke to Mr. Queen... alone?”

Laurel got up. “I’ll wait in the garden,” she said, and she tossed her cigaret into the tray and walked out.

Roger Priam’s wife waited until Laurel’s slim figure appeared beyond the picture window, among the shaggy asters. Laurel’s head was turned away. She was switching her thigh with her cap.

“Laurel’s sweet,” said Delia Priam. “But so young, don’t you think? Right now she’s on a crusade and she’s feeling ever so knightly. She’ll get over it... Why, about your question, Mr. Queen. I’m going to be perfectly frank with you. I haven’t the slightest interest in my husband. I’m not afraid that he may die. If anything, it’s the other way around.”

Ellery stared. For a moment her eyes slanted to the sun and they sparkled in a mineral way. But her features were without guile. The next instant she was eyeless again.

“You’re honest, Mrs. Priam. Brutally so.”

“I’ve had a rather broad education in brutality, Mr. Queen.”

So there was that, too. Ellery sighed.

“I’ll be even franker,” she went on. “I don’t know whether Laurel told you specifically... Did she say what kind of invalid my husband is?”

“She said he’s partly paralyzed.”

“She didn’t say what part?”

“What part?” said Ellery.

“Then she didn’t. Why, Mr. Queen, my husband is paralyzed,” said Delia Priam with a smile, “from the waist down.”

You had to admire the way she said that. The brave smile. The smile that said Don’t pity me.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

“I’ve had fifteen years of it.”

Ellery was silent. She rested her head against the back of the chair. Her eyes were almost closed and her throat was strong and defenseless.

“You’re wondering why I told you that.”

Ellery nodded.

“I told you because you can’t understand why I’ve come to you unless you understand that first. Weren’t you wondering?”

“All right. Why have you come to me?”

“For appearance’s sake.”

Ellery stared. “You ask me to investigate a possible threat against your husband’s life, Mrs. Priam, for appearance’s sake?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I do believe you. Nobody would invent such a reason!” Seating himself beside her, he took one of her hands. It was cool and secretive, and it remained perfectly lax in his. “You haven’t had much of a life.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve never done any work with these hands.”

“Is that bad?”

“It could be.” Ellery put her hand back in her lap. “A woman like you has no right to remain tied to a man who’s half-dead. If he were some saintly character, if there were love between you, I’d understand it. But I gather he’s a brute and that you loathe him. Then why haven’t you done something with your life? Why haven’t you divorced him? Is there a religious reason?”

“There might have been when I was young. Now...” She shook her head. “Now it’s the way it would look. You see, I’m stripping myself quite bare.”

Ellery looked pained.

“You’re very gallant to an old woman.” She laughed. “No, I’m serious, Mr. Queen. I come from one of the old California families. Formal upbringing. Convent-trained. Duennas in the old fashion. A pride of caste and tradition. I could never take it as seriously as they did...

“My mother had married a heretic from New England. They ostracized her and it killed her when I was a little girl. I’d have got away from them completely, except that when my mother died they talked my father into giving me into their custody. I was brought up by an aunt who wore a mantilla. I married the first man who came along just to get away from them. He wasn’t their choice ― he was an ‘American,’ like my father. I didn’t love him, but he had money, we were very poor, and I wanted to escape. It cut me off from my family, my church, and my world. I have a ninety-year-old grandmother who lives only three miles from this spot. I haven’t seen her for eighteen years. She considers me dead.”

Her head rolled. “Harvey died when we’d been married three years, leaving me with a child. Then I met Roger Priam. I couldn’t go back to my mother’s family, my father was off on one of his jaunts, and Roger attracted me. I would have followed him to hell.” She laughed again. “And that’s exactly where he led me.

“When I found out what Roger really was, and then when he became crippled and I lost even that, there was nothing left. I’ve filled the vacuum by trying to go back where I came from.

“It hasn’t been easy,” murmured Delia Priam. “They don’t forget such things, and they never forgive. But the younger generation is softer-bottomed and corrupted by modern ways. Their men, of course, have helped... Now it’s the only thing 1 have to hang on to.” Her face showed a passion not to be shared or relished. Ellery was glad when the moment passed. “The life I lead in Roger Priam’s house isn’t even suspected by these people. If they knew the truth, I’d be dropped and there’d be no return. And if I left Roger, they’d say I deserted my husband. Upper caste women of the old California society don’t do that sort of thing, Mr. Queen; it doesn’t matter what the husband is. So... I don’t do it.

“Now something is happening, I don’t know what. If Laurel had kept her mouth shut, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger. But by going about insisting that Leander Hill was murdered, Laurel’s created an atmosphere of suspicion that threatens my position. Sooner or later the papers will get hold of it ― it’s a wonder they haven’t already ― and the fact that Roger is apparently in the same danger might come out. I can’t sit by and wait for that. My people will expect me to be the loyal wife. So that’s what I’m being. Mr. Queen, I ask you to proceed as if I’m terribly concerned about my husband’s safety.” Delia Priam shrugged. “Or is this all too involved for you?”

“It would seem to me far simpler,” said Ellery, “to clear out and start over again somewhere else.”

“This is where I was born.” She looked out at Hollywood. Laurel had moved over to a corner of the garden. “I don’t mean all that popcorn and false front down there. I mean the hills, the orchards, the old missions. But there’s another reason, and it has nothing to do with me, or my people, or Southern California.”

“What’s that, Mrs. Priam?”

“Roger wouldn’t let me go. He’s a man of violence, Mr. Queen. You don’t ― you can’t ― know his furious possessiveness, his pride, his compulsion to dominate, his... depravity. Sometimes I think I’m married to a maniac.”

She closed her eyes. The room was still. From below Ellery heard Mrs. Williams’s Louisiana-bred tones complaining to the gold parakeet she kept in a cage above the kitchen sink about the scandalous price of coffee. An invisible finger was writing in the sky above the Wilshire district: MUNTZ TV. The empty typewriter nudged his elbow.

But there she sat, the jungle in batiste and colored cotton. His slick and characterless Hollywood house would never be the same again. It was exciting just to be able to look at her lying in the silly chair. It was dismaying to imagine the chair empty.

“Mrs. Priam.”

“Yes?”

“Why,” asked Ellery, trying not to think of Roger Priam, “didn’t you want Laurel Hill to hear what you just told me?”

The woman opened her eyes. “I don’t mind undressing before a man,” she said, “but I do draw the line at a woman.”

She said it lightly, but something ran up Ellery’s spine.

He jumped to his feet. “Take me to your husband.”

Chapter Three

When they came out of Ellery’s house Laurel said pleasantly, “Has a contract been drawn up, Ellery? And if so, with which one of us? Or is the question incompetent and none of my business?”

“No contract,” said Ellery testily. “No contract, Laurel. I’m just going to take a look around.”

“Starting at the Priam house, of course.”

“Yes.”

“In that case, since we’re all in this together ― aren’t we, Delia? ― I suppose there’s no objection if I trail along?”

“Of course not, darling,” said Delia. “But do try not to antagonize Roger. He always takes it out on me afterwards.”

“What do you think he’s going to say when he finds out you’ve brought a detective around?”

“Oh, dear,” said Delia. Then she brightened. “Why, darling, you’re bringing Mr. Queen around, don’t you see? Do you mind very much? I know it’s yellow, but I have to live with him. And you did get to Mr. Queen first.”

“All right,” said Laurel with a shrug. “We’ll give you a head start, Delia. You take Franklin and Outpost, and I’ll go around the long way, over Cahuenga and Mulholland. Where have you been, shop-ping?”

Delia Priam laughed. She got into her car, a new cream Cadillac convertible, and drove off down the hill.

“Hardly a substitute,” said Laurel after a moment. Ellery started. Laurel was holding open the door of her car, a tiny green Austin.

“Either car or driver. Can you see Delia in an Austin? Like the Queen of Sheba in a rowboat. Get in.”

“Unusual type,” remarked Ellery absently, as the little car shot off.

“The adjective, yes. But as to the noun,” said Laurel, “there is only one Delia Priam.”

“She seems remarkably frank and honest.”

“Does she?”