They stayed out. Anyone from the outside would have said they were finished with Roger Priam and all his works. Daily Lieutenant Keats might have been seen going about his business; daily Ellery might have been seen staring at his — a blank sheet of paper in a still typewriter — or at night dining alone, with an ear cocked, or afterwards hovering above the telephone. He rarely left the cottage during the day; at night, never. His consumption of cigarets, pipe tobacco, coffee, and alcohol gave Mrs. Williams a second subject for her interminable monologues; she alternated between predictions of sudden death for the world and creeping ulcers for Ellery.
At one time or another Laurel, Crowe Macgowan, Alfred Wallace, Collier ― even Delia Priam ― phoned or called in person, either unsolicited or by invitation. But each hung up or went away as worried or perplexed or thoughtful as he had been; and if Ellery unburdened himself to any of them, or vice versa, nothing seemed to come of it.
And Ellery lit another cigaret, or tormented another pipe, or gulped more hot coffee, or punished another highball, and Mrs. Williams’s wails kept assailing the kitchen ceiling.
Then, one humid night at the beginning of the fourth week in July, just after midnight, the call came for which Ellery was waiting.
He listened, he said a few words, he broke the connection, and he called the number of Keats’s house.
Keats answered on the first ring.
“Queen?”
“Yes. As fast as you can.”
Ellery immediately hung up and ran out to his car. He had parked the Kaiser at the front door every night for a week.
He left it on the road near the Priam mailbox. Keats’s car was already there. Ellery made his way along the bordering grass to the side of the house. He used no flashlight. In the shadow of the terrace a hand touched his arm.
“Quick.” Keats’s whisper was an inch from his ear.
The house was dark, but a faint night light was burning in Roger Priam’s room off the terrace. The French door was open, and the terrace was in darkness.
They got down on their knees, peered through the screening of the inner door.
Priam’s wheelchair was in its bed position, made up for the night. He lay on his back, motionless, beard jutting obliquely to the ceiling.
Nothing happened for several minutes.
Then there was the slightest metallic sound.
The night light was in an electric outlet in the wainscoting near the door which led into the hall. They saw the doorknob clearly; it was in motion. When it stopped, the door began to open. It creaked. Came to rest.
Priam did not move.
The door opened swiftly.
But the night light was beyond the doorway and when the door swung back to the farther wall it cut off most of the slight glow. All they could make out from the terrace was a formless blackness deeper than the darkness at the rear of the room. This gap in the void moved steadily from the doorway to Roger Priam’s chair-bed. A tentacular something projected before it. The projection swam into the outermost edge of the night light’s orbit and they saw that it was a revolver.
Beside Priam’s chair the moving blackness halted.
The revolver came up a little.
Keats stirred. It was more a tightening of his muscles than a true movement; still, Ellery’s fingers clamped on the detective’s arm.
Keats froze.
And then the whole room exploded, motion gone wild.
Priam’s arm flashed upward and his great hand closed like the jaws of a reptile on the wrist of the hand that held the revolver. The crippled man heaved his bulk upright, bellowing. There was the blurriest of struggles; they looked like two squids locked in battle at the bottom of the sea.
Then there was a soggy report, a smart thud, and quiet.
When Ellery snapped the wall switch Keats was already on his knees by the figure on the floor. It lay in a curl, almost comfortably, one arm hidden and the other outstretched. At the end of the outstretched arm lay the revolver.
“Chest,” Keats muttered.
Roger Priam was glaring at the two men.
“It’s Adam,” he said hoarsely. “Where did you two come from? He came to kill me. It’s Adam. I told you I could handle him!” He laughed with his teeth, but at once he began to shake, and he squinted at the fallen figure and rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. “Who is he? Let me see him!”
“It’s Alfred.”
“Alfred?” The beard drooped.
Keats rose to go around Priam’s chair. He plucked one of Priam’s telephones from its hook and dialed a number.
“Alfred is Adam?” Priam sounded dazed, stupid. He recoiled quickly, but it was only Ellery removing his top blanket.
Ellery dropped the blanket over the thing on the floor.
“He’s...?” Priam’s tongue came out. “Is he dead?”
“Headquarters?” said Keats. “Keats, Hollywood Division, reporting a homicide. The Hill-Priam case. Roger Priam just shot Alfred Wallace, his secretary-nurse-what-have-you, shot him to death... That’s right. Through the heart. I witnessed the shooting myself, from the terrace―”
“To death,” said Priam. “To death. He’s dead!.. But it was self-defense. You witnessed it ― if you witnessed it... He pussyfooted into my room here. I heard him come in. I made believe I was sleeping. Oh, I was ready for him!” His voice cracked. “Didn’t you see him point the gun at me? I grabbed it, twisted his hand! It was self-defense―”
“We saw it all, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery in a soothing voice.
“Good, you saw it. He’s dead. Damn him, he’s deadl Wallace... Try to kill me, would he? By God, it’s over. It’s over.”
“Yes,” Keats was saying into the phone. “When? Okay, no hurry.” He hung up.
“You heard Mr. Queen,” Priam babbled. “He saw it all, Lieutenant―”
“I know.” Keats went over to the blanket and lifted one corner. Then he dropped the blanket and took out a cigaret and lit it. “We’ll have to wait.” He inhaled.
“Sure, yes, Lieutenant.” Priam fumbled with something. The upper half of his bed rose, the lower sank, to form the chair. He groped. “A drink,” he said. “You join me? Celebration.” He guffawed. “Besides, I’m a little wobbly.”
Ellery was wandering around, pulling at an ear, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a ridge between his eyes.
Keats kept smoking and watching him.
“I’ve got to hand it to him,” Priam was saying, busy with a bottle and a glass. “Alfred Wallace... Must have had his nose fixed. I never recognized him. Smooth, smooth operator. Gets right on the inside. Laughing up his sleeve all the time! But who’s laughing now? Here’s to him.” He raised the glass, grinning, but the wild animal was still in his eyes. He tossed the whisky off. When he set the glass down, his hand was no longer shaking. “But there he is, and here I am, and it’s all over.” His head came down, and he was silent.
“Mr. Priam,” said Ellery.
Priam did not reply.
“Mr. Priam?”
“Hey?” Priam looked up.
“There’s one point that still bothers me. Now that it’s over, would you straighten me out on it?”
Priam looked at him. Then, deliberately, he reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.
“Why, Mr. Queen, it all depends,” he said. “If you expect me to admit a lot of guff ― with maybe a stenographer taking it all down from my terrace ― you can save your wind. All right, this man was after me. No idea why, friends, except that he went crazy. On that voyage. Absolutely nuts.
“On the Beagle he went after me and my shipmate with a machete. We were off some dirty island and we jumped overboard, swam to the beach, and hid in the woods. Hurricane blew up that night and swept the Beagle out to sea. We never saw the ship or Adam again. Shipmate and me, we then found a treasure on that island and we finally got it off on a raft we made.
“Reason we laid low and changed our names to Hill and Priam was so Adam could never come back and claim one third of the treasure ― he’d been exploring that island. And maybe he’d still try to kill us even if he didn’t claim a third. That’s my story, friends. Not a crime in a cargo load.” He grinned and tossed off the second glassful. “And I’m sticking to it.”
Keats was regarding him with admiration. “It’s a lousy story, Priam, but if you stick to it we’re stuck with it.”
“Anything else, Mr. Queen...” Priam waved genially. “All you got to do is ask. What’s the point that’s been giving you such a bad time?”
“The letter Adam sent to Leander Hill,” said Ellery.
“The letter―?” Priam stared. “Why in hell would you be worrying about that?”
Ellery took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
“This is a copy of the note Hill found in the silver box on the beagle’s collar,” he said. “It’s been some time and perhaps I’d better refresh your memory by reading it aloud.”
“Go ahead.” Priam still stared.
“You believed me dead,” read Ellery. “ Killed, murdered. For over a score of years I have looked for you ― for you and for him. And now I have found you. Can you guess my plan? You’ll die. Quickly? No, very slowly. And so pay me back for my long years of searching and dreaming of revenge. Slow dying... unavoidable dying. For you and for him. Slow and sure ― dying in mind and in body. And for each pace forward a warning... a warning of special meaning for you ― and for him. Meanings for pondering and puzzling. Here is warning number one.”
“See?” said Priam. “Crazy as a bug.”
“Killed, murdered said Keats. “By a hurricane, Mr. Priam?” But he was smiling.
“That was his craziness, Lieutenant. I remember when he was steaming after us on deck, waving the machete around his head, how he kept yelling we were trying to murder him. All the time he was trying to murder us. Ask your brain doctors. They’ll tell you.” Priam swung about. “Is that what’s been bothering you, Mr. Queen?”
“What? Oh! No, not that, Mr. Priam.” Ellery scowled down at the paper. “It’s the phrasing.”
“The what?”
“The way the message is worded.”
Priam was puzzled. “What’s the matter with it?”
“A great deal is the matter with it, Mr. Priam. I’ll go so far as to say that this is the most remarkable collection of words I’ve ever been privileged to read. How many words are there in this message, Mr. Priam?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“Ninety-nine, Mr. Priam.”
Priam glanced at Keats. But Keats was merely smoking with the gusto of a man who has denied himself too long, and there was nothing on Ellery’s face but concern. “So it’s got ninety-nine words. I don’t get it.”
“Ninety-nine words, Mr. Priam, comprising three hundred and ninety-seven letters of the English alphabet.”
“I still don’t get it.” A note of truculence crept into Priam’s heavy voice. “What are you trying to prove, that you can count?”
“I’m trying to prove ― and I can prove, Mr. Priam ― that there’s something wrong with this message.”
“Wrong?” Priam’s beard shot up. “What?”
“The tools of my business, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery, “are words. I not only write words of my own, but I read extensively ― and sometimes with envy ― the words of others. So I consider myself qualified to make the following observation: This is the first time I’ve ever run across a piece of English prose, deathless or otherwise, made up of as many as ninety-nine words, consisting of almost four hundred individual characters, in which the writer jailed to use a single letter T.”
“Single letter T” repeated Priam. His lips moved after he stopped speaking, so that for a moment it looked as if he were chewing something with a foreign and disagreeable taste.
“It took me a long time to spot that, Mr. Priam,” continued Ellery, walking around the body of Alfred Wallace. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t see because it’s so obvious. When we read, most of us concentrate on the sense of what we’re reading, not its physical structure. Who looks at a building and sees the individual bricks? Yet the secret of the building lies precisely there. There are twenty-six basic bricks in the English language, some of them more important than the rest. There’s no guesswork about those bricks, Mr. Priam. Their nature, their usability, their interrelation-ships, the frequency of their occurrence have been determined as scientifically as the composition of stucco.
“Let me tell you about the letter T, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery.
“The letter T is the second most frequently used letter in the English language. Only E occurs more frequently. T is the number two brick of the twenty-six.
“T, Mr. Priam, is the most frequently used initial letter in the English language.
“English uses a great many combinations of two letters representing a single speech sound. These are known as digraphs. The letter T, Mr. Priam, is part of the most frequently used digraph ― TH.
“T is also part of the most frequently used trigraph ― three letters spelling a single speech sound ― THE, as in the word BATHE.
“TT, Mr. Priam, gives ground only to SS and EE as the most frequently used double letter.
“The same letters, S and E, are the only letters which occur more frequently than T as the last letters of words.
“But that isn’t all, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery. “The letter T is part of the most frequently used three-letter word in the English language ― the word THE.
“The letter T is part of the most frequently used four-letter word ― THAT ― and also of the second most frequently used four-letter word ― WITH.
“And as if that weren’t enough, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery, “we find T in the second most frequently used two-letter word ― TO ― and in the fourth most frequently used two-letter word ― IT. Do you wonder now, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery, “why I called Charles Adam’s note to your partner remarkable?
“It’s so remarkable, Mr. Priam, that it’s impossible. No conceivable chance or coincidence could produce a communication of almost a hundred English words that was completely lacking in T’s. The only way you can get a hundred-word message without a single T is by setting out to do so. You have to make a conscious effort to avoid using it.
“Do you want confirmation, Mr. Priam?” asked Ellery, and now something new had come into his voice; it was no longer thoughtful or troubled. “The writer of this note didn’t use a single TO or IT or AT or THE or BUT or NOT or THAT or WITH or THIS. You simply can’t escape those words unless you’re trying to.
“The note refers to you and Leander Hill; that is, to two people. He says: I have looked for you and for him. Why didn’t he write: I have looked for the two of you, or I have looked for both of you? ― either of which would have been a more natural expression than for you and for him? The fact that in the word TWO and in the word BOTH the letter T occurs can hardly escape us. He just happened to express it that way? Perhaps once; even possibly twice; but he wrote for you and for him three times in the same message!
“He writes: Slow dying... unavoidable dying. And again: dying in mind and in body. He’s no novelist or poet looking for a different way of saying things. And this is a note, not an essay for publication. Why didn’t he use the common phrases: Slow death... inevitable death... death mentally and physically? Even though the whole message concerns death, the word itself ― in that form ― does not occur even once. If he was deliberately avoiding the letter T, the question is answered.
“You believed me dead... Had he expressed this in a normal, natural way he would have written: You thought I was dead. But thought contains two T’s. We find the word pondering, for to think over, for obviously the same reason.
“And surely Here is warning number one is a circumlocution to avoid writing the more natural This is the first warning.
“Am I quibbling? Can this still have been a coincidence, dictated by an eccentric style? The odds against this mount astronomically when you consider two other examples from the note.
“And for each pace forward a warning, he writes. He’s not talking about physical progress, where a pace might have a specialized meaning in the context. There is no reason on earth why he shouldn’t have written And far each step forward, except that step contains a T.
“My last example is equally significant. He writes: For over a score of years. Why use the fancy word score? Why didn’t he write: For over twenty years, or whatever the actual number of years was? Because the word twenty, or any combination including the word twenty ― from twenty-one through twenty-nine ― gets him involved in T’s.”
Roger Priam was baffled. He was trying to capture something, or recapture it. All his furrows were deeper with the effort, and his eyes rolled a little. But he said nothing.
And, in the background, Keats smoked; and, in the foreground, Alfred Wallace lay under the blanket.
“The question is, of course,” said Ellery, “why the writer of the note avoided using the letter T.
“Let’s see if we can’t reconstruct something useful here.
“How was the original of Leander Hill’s copy written? By hand, or by mechanical means? We have no direct evidence; the note has disappeared. Laurel caught a glimpse of the original when Hill took it from the little silver box, but Hill half-turned away as he read it and Laurel couldn’t specify the character of the writing.
“But the simplest analysis shows the form in which it must have appeared. The letter could not have been handwritten. It is just as easy to write the letter T as any other letter of the alphabet. The writer, considering the theme of his message, could hardly have been playing word games; and no other test but ease or difficulty makes sense.
“If the note wasn’t handwritten, then it was typewritten. You saw that note, Mr. Priam ― Hill showed it to you the morning after his heart attack. Wasn’t it typewritten?”
Priam looked up, frowning in a peculiar way. But he did not answer.
“It was typewritten,” said Ellery. “But the moment you assume a typewritten note, the answer suggests itself. The writer was composing his message on a typewriter. He used no T’s. Why look for complicated reasons? If he used no T’s, it’s simply because T’s were not available to him. He couldn’t use T’s. The T key on the machine he was using wouldn’t function. It was broken.”
Surprisingly, Priam lifted his head and said, “You’re guessing.”
Ellery looked pained. “I’m not trying to prove how clever I am, Mr. Priam, but I must object to your verb. Guessing is as obnoxious to me as swearing is to a bishop. I submit that I worked this out; I’ve had little enough fun in this case! But let’s assume it’s a guess. It’s a very sound guess, Mr. Priam, and it has the additional virtue of being susceptible to confirmation.
“I theorize a typewriter with a broken key. Do we know of a typewriter ― in this case ― which wasn’t in perfect working order?
“Strangely enough, Mr. Priam, we do.
“On my way to your house for the first time, in Laurel Hill’s car, I asked Laurel some questions about you. She told me how self-sufficient you’ve made yourself, how as a reaction to your disability you dislike help of the most ordinary kind. As an example, Laurel said that when she was at your house ‘the day before’ you were in a foul mood over having to dictate business memoranda to Wallace instead of doing them yourself ― your typewriter had just been sent into Hollywood to be repaired.”
Priam twisted. Keats stood by his wheelchair, lifting the attached typewriter shelf.
Priam choked a splutter, glancing painfully down at the shelf as Keats swung it up and around.
Ellery and Keats bent over the machine, ignoring the man in the chair.
They glanced at each other.
Keats tapped the T key with a fingernail. “Mr. Priam,” he said, “there’s only one key on this machine that’s new. It’s the T. The note to Hill was typed right here.” He spread his fingers over the carriage of Priam’s typewriter, almost with affection.
A sound, formless and a little beastly, came out of Priam’s throat. Keats stood by him, very close.
“And who could have typed a note on your machine, Mr. Priam?” asked Ellery in the friendliest of voices. “There’s no guesswork here. If I’d never seen this typewriter shelf I’d have known the machine is screwed on.
It would have to be, to keep it from falling off when the shelf is swung aside and dropped. Besides, Laurel Hill told me so.
“So, except for those times when the typewriter needs a major repair, it’s a permanent fixture of your wheelchair. Was the original of the note to Hill typed on your machine after it was removed for repair but before the broken T key was replaced? No, because the note was delivered to Hill two weeks before you sent the machine into Hollywood. Did someone type the note on your machine while you were out of your wheelchair? No, Mr. Priam, because you’re never out of your chair; you haven’t left it for fifteen years. Was the note typed on your machine while you were ― say ― asleep? Impossible; when the chair is a bed the shelf obviously can’t come up.
“So I’m very much afraid, Mr. Priam, there’s only one conclusion we can reach,” said Ellery. “ You typed that warning note yourself.
“It’s you who threatened your partner with death.
“The only active enemy out of your past and Hill’s, Mr. Priam, is Roger Priam.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Ellery. “Charles Adam is not imaginary. He was an actual person, as our investigation uncovered. Adam disappeared in West Indian waters ‘over a score of years ago,’ as you wrote in the note, and he hasn’t been seen or heard of since. It was only the note that made us believe Adam was still alive. Knowing now that you wrote the note, we can only conclude that Adam didn’t survive the Beagle’s voyage twenty-five years ago after all, that you and Hill did succeed in killing him, and that his reappearance here in Southern California this summer was an illusion you deliberately engineered.
“Priam,” said Ellery, “you knew what a shock it would be to your partner Hill to learn that Adam was apparently alive after so many years of thinking he was dead. Not only alive but explicitly out for revenge. You knew that Hill would be particularly susceptible to such news. He had built a new life for himself. He was bound up emotionally with Laurel, his adopted daughter, who worshiped the man he seemed to be.
“So Adam’s ‘reappearance’ threatened not only Hill’s life but, what was possibly even more important to him, the whole structure of Laurel’s love for him. There was a good chance, you felt, that Hill’s bad heart ― he had had two attacks before ― could not survive such a shock. And you were right ― your note killed him.
“If Hill had any doubts about the authenticity of the note, you dispelled them the morning after the heart attack, when for the first time in fifteen years you took the trouble of having yourself carted over to Hill’s house. The cause could only have been a telephone agreement with Hill to have a confidential, urgent talk about the note. You had, I imagine, another and equally pressing reason for that unprecedented visit: You wanted to be sure the note was destroyed so that it couldn’t be traced back to your typewriter. Either Hill gave it to you and you destroyed it then or later, or he destroyed it before your eyes. What you didn’t know, Priam, and what he didn’t tell you, was that he had already made a copy of the note in his own handwriting and hidden it in his mattress. Why? Maybe after the first shock, when Hill thought it over, he hadn’t been quite convinced. Maybe a sixth sense told him before you got to him that something was wrong. Whether you convinced him during that visit or not, the note was probably already copied and in his mattress, and a native caution ― despite all your arguments ― made him leave it there and say nothing about it. We can’t know and won’t ever know just what went on in Hill’s mind.
“But the damage was done by the sheer impact of the shock, Priam.
Murder by fright,” said Ellery. “Far colder-blooded and more deliberate than killing by gun or knife, or even poison. A murder calling for great pains of premeditation. One wonders why. Not merely why you wanted to kill Hill, but why you splashed your crime so carefully with that elaborate camouflage of ‘the enemy out of the past.’
“Your motive must have been compelling. It couldn’t have been gain, because Hill’s death brought you no material benefits; his share of the business went to Laurel. It couldn’t have been to avoid exposure as the murderer of Adam twenty-five years ago, for Hill was neck-deep in that crime with you and had benefited from it equally ― he was hardly in a position to hold it over you. In fact, he was in a poorer position than you were to hold it over him, because Hill had the additional reason to want to keep it from Laurel. Nor is it likely that you killed him to avoid exposure for any other crime of which he might have gained knowledge, such as ― I take the obvious theory ― embezzlement of the firm’s funds. Because the truth is you have had very little to do with the running of Hill & Priam; it was Hill who ran it, while you merely put up a show of being an equal partner in work and responsibility. Never leaving your house, you could hardly have been so in control of daily events as to have been able to steal funds, or falsify accounts, or anything like that. Nor was it trouble over your wife. Hill’s relationship with Mrs. Priam was friendly and correct; besides,” said Ellery rather dryly, “he was getting past the age for that sort of thing.
“There’s only one thing you accomplished, Priam, by killing Leander Hill. So, in the absence of a positive indication in any other direction, I’m forced to conclude that that’s why you wanted Hill out of the way.
“And it’s confirmed by your character, Priam, the whole drive of your personality.
“By killing Hill you got rid of your business partner. That is one of the facts that emerge from his death. Is it the key fact? I think it is.
“Priam, you have an obsessive need to dominate, to dominate your immediate background and everyone in it. The one thing above all others that you can’t stand is dependence on others. With you the alternative is not so much independence of others as making others dependent on you. Because physically you’re helpless, you want power. You must be master ― even if, as in the case of your wife, you have to use another man to do it.
“You hated Hill because he, not you, was master of Hill & Priam. He ran it and he had run it for fifteen years with no more than token help from you. The firm’s employes looked up to him and loathed you. He made policy, purchases, sales; to accounts, big and small, Leander Hill was Hill & Priam and Roger Priam was a forgotten and useless invalid stuck away in a house somewhere. The fact that to Hill you owe your material security and the sound condition of Hill & Priam has festered inside of you for fifteen years. Even while you enjoyed the fruits of Hill’s efforts, they left a bitter taste in your mouth that eventually poisoned you.
“You planned his death.
“With Hill out of the way, you would be undisputed master of the business. That you might run it into the ground probably never occurred to you. But if it did, I’m sure the danger didn’t even make you hesitate. The big thing was to make everyone involved in or with Hill & Priam come crawling to you. The big thing was to be boss.”
Roger Priam said nothing. This time he did not even make the beastly sound. But his little eyes roved.
Keats moved even closer.
“Once you saw what you had to do,” continued Ellery, “you realized that you were seriously handicapped. You couldn’t come and go as you pleased; you had no mobility. An ordinary murder was out of the question. Of course, you could have disposed of Hill right in this room during a business conference by a shot. But Hill’s death wasn’t the primary objective. He had to die and leave you free to run the business.
“You had to be able to kill him in such a way that you wouldn’t be even suspected.
“It occurred to you, as it’s occurred to murderers before, that the most effective way of diverting suspicion from yourself was to create the illusion that you were equally in danger of losing your life, and from the same source. In other words, you had to create a fictitious outside threat directed not merely at Hill but at both of you.
“Your and Hill’s connection with Charles Lyell Adam twenty-five years ago provided a suitable, if daring and dangerous, means for creating such an illusion. If Adam were ‘alive,’ he could have a believable motive to seek the death of both of you. Adam’s background could be traced by the authorities; the dramatic voyage of the Beagle was traceable to the point of its disappearance with all hands; the facts of your and Hill’s existence and present situation in life, plus the hints you could let drop in ‘Adam’s’ note, would lead any competent investigator to the conclusion you wanted him to reach.
“You were very clever, Priam. You avoided the psychological error of making things too obvious. You deliberately told not quite enough in ‘Adam’s’ note. You repeatedly refused on demand to give any information that would help the police or make the investigation easier, although an examination of your ‘refusals’ show that you actually helped us consider-ably. But on the surface you made us work for what we got.
“You made us work hard, because you laid a fantastic trail for us to follow.
“But if your theory-of-evolution pattern was on the fancy side, your logic was made curiously more convincing because of it. To nurse a desire for revenge for almost a generation a man has to be a little cracked. Such a mind might easily run to the involved and the fanciful. At the same time, ‘Adam’ would naturally tend to think in terms of his own background and experience. Adam having been a naturalist, you created a trail such as an eccentric naturalist might leave ― a trail you were sure we would sooner or later recognize and follow to its conclusion, which was that Naturalist Charles Adam was ‘the enemy out of the past.’
“Your camouflage was brilliantly conceived and stroked on, Priam. You laid it so thickly on this case that, if you had not foolishly used that broken-T typewriter, we should probably have been satisfied to pin the crime on a man who’s really been dead for a quarter of a century.” Priam’s big head wavered a little, almost a nod. But it might have been a momentary trembling of the muscles of his neck. Otherwise, he gave no sign that he was even listening.
“In an odd sort of way, Priam, you were unlucky. You didn’t realize quite how bad Hill’s heart was, or you miscalculated the impact of your paper bullet. Because Hill died as a result of your very first warning. You had sent yourself a warning on the same morning, intending to divide the other warnings between you and Hill, probably, alternating them. When Hill died so immediately, it was too late to pull yourself out. You were in the position of the general who has planned a complicated battle against the enemy, finds that his very first sortie has accomplished his entire objective, but is powerless to stop his orders and preparation for the succeeding attacks. Had you stopped after sending yourself only one warning the mere stoppage would have been suspect. The warnings to yourself had to continue in order that the illusion of Adam-frightening-Hill-to-death should be completely credible.
“You sent six warnings, including the masterly one of having your tuna salad poisoned so that you could eat some, fall sick, and so call attention to your ‘fish’ clue. After six warnings you undoubtedly felt you had thoroughly fooled us as to the real source of the crime. On the other hand, you recognized the danger of stopping even at six with yourself still alive. We might begin to wonder why ― in your case ― ‘Adam’ had given up. Murderers have been caught on a great deal less.
“You saw that, for perfect safety, you had to give us a convincing end to the whole business.
“The ideal, of course, was for us to ‘catch’ ‘Adam.’
“A lesser man, Priam, wouldn’t have wasted ten seconds wrestling with the problem of producing a man dead twenty-five years and handing his living body over to the police. But you didn’t abandon the problem merely because it seemed impossible to solve. There’s a lot of Napoleon in you.
“And you solved it.
“Your solution was tied up with another unhappy necessity of the case. To carry out your elaborate plot against Hill and yourself, you needed help. You have the use of your brain unimpaired, and the use of your hands and eyes and ears in a limited area, but these weren’t enough. Your plans demanded the use of legs, too, and yours are useless. You couldn’t possibly, by yourself, procure a beagle, poison it, deliver it and the note to Hill’s doorstep; get cardboard boxes and string from the dime store, a dead lamprey from God knows where, poison, frogs, and so on. It’s true that the little silver box must have been left here, or dropped, by Laurel; that the arsenic undoubtedly came from the can of Deth-on-Ratz in your cellar; that the tree frogs were collected in these very foothills; that the green alligator wallet must have been suggested by your wife’s possession of a handbag of the same material and from the same shop; that you found the worthless stock from Mrs. Priam’s first husband’s estate in some box or trunk stored in this house; that to leave the bird clue you chose a book from your own library. Whenever possible you procured what you needed from as close by as you could manage, probably because in this way you felt you could control them better. But even for the things in and from this house, you needed a substitute for your legs.
“Who found and used these things at your direction?
“Alfred Wallace could. Secretary, nurse, companion, orderly, handyman... with you all day, on call all night... you could hardly have used anyone else. If for no other reason than that Wallace couldn’t possibly have been kept ignorant of what was going on. Using Wallace turned a liability into an asset.
“Whether Wallace was your accomplice willingly because you paid him well, or under duress because you had something on him,” said Ellery, looking down at the mound under the blanket, “is a question only you can answer now, Priam. I suppose it doesn’t really matter any more. However you managed it, you persuaded Alfred to serve as your legs and as extensions of your eyes and hands. You gave Alfred his orders and he carried them out.
“Now you no longer needed Alfred. And perhaps ― as other murderers have found out ― tools like Alfred have a way of turning two-edged. Wallace was the only one who knew you were the god of the machine, Priam. No matter what you had on him ― if anything ― Wallace alive was a continuous danger to your safety and peace of mind.
“The more you mulled, the more feasible Wallace’s elimination became. His death would remove the only outside knowledge of your guilt; as your wife’s lover he ought to die to satisfy your peculiar psychological ambivalence; and, dead, he became a perfect Charles Adam. Wallace was within Adam’s age range had Adam lived; Wallace’s background was unknown because of his amnesic history; even his personality fitted with what we might have expected Adam to be.
“If you could make us flush Alfred Wallace from the mystery as Charles Adam, you’d be killing three birds with one stone.
“And so you arranged for Wallace’s death.”
Roger Priam raised his head. Color had come back into his cheekbones, and his heavy voice was almost animated.
“I’ll have to read some of your books,” Priam said. “You sure make up a good story.”
“As a reward for that compliment, Priam,” said Ellery, smiling, “I’ll tell you an even better one.
“A few months ago you ordered Alfred Wallace to go out and buy a gun. You gave Wallace the money for it, but you wanted the gun’s owner-ship traceable to him.
“Tonight you buzzed Wallace on the intercom, directly to his bedroom, and you told Wallace you heard someone prowling around outside the house. You told him to take the gun, make sure it was loaded, and come down here to your room, quietly―”
“That’s a lie,” said Roger Priam.
“That’s the truth,” said Ellery.
Priam showed his teeth. “You’re a bluffer after all. Even if it was true ― which it ain’t ― how could you know it?”
“Because Wallace told me so.”
The skin above Priam’s beard changed color again.
“You see,” said Ellery, “I took Wallace into my confidence when I saw the danger he was in. I told him just what to expect at your hands and I told him that if he wanted to save his skin he’d be wise to play ball with Lieutenant Keats and me.
“Wallace didn’t need much convincing, Priam. I imagine you’ve found him the sort of fellow who can turn on a dime; or, to change the figure, the sort who always spots the butter side of the bread. He came over to me without a struggle. And he promised to keep me informed; and he promised, when the time came, to follow not your instructions, Priam, but mine.
“When you told him on the intercom tonight to sneak down here with the loaded revolver, Wallace immediately phoned me. I told him to hold up going downstairs for just long enough to allow the lieutenant and me to get here. It didn’t take us long, Priam, did it? We’d been waiting nightly for Wallace’s phone call for some time now.
“I’m pretty sure you expected someone to be outside on guard, Priam, although of course you didn’t know it would be Keats and me in person on Wallace’s notification. You’ve put up a good show about not wanting police guards, in line with your shrewd performance all along, but you’ve known from the start that we would probably disregard your wishes in a crisis, and that was just what you wanted us to do.
“When Alfred stole into this room armed with a gun, you knew whoever was on guard ― you hoped actually watching from the terrace ― would fall for the illusion that Wallace was trying to kill you. If no one was watching, but a guard on the grounds heard the shot, within seconds he’d be in the room, and he’d find Wallace dead ― in your room, with you obviously awakened from sleep, and only your story to listen to. With the previous buildup of someone threatening your life, he’d have no reason to doubt your version of what happened. If there were no guards at all, you would phone for help immediately, and between your version of the events and the fact that the gun was bought by Wallace you had every reason to believe the matter would end there. It was a bold, even a Bonapartist plan, Priam, and it almost worked.”
Priam stirred, and with the stir a fluidity came over him, passing like a ripple. Then he said in a perfectly controlled voice, “Whatever Wallace told you was a damn lie. I didn’t tell him to buy a gun. I didn’t call him down here tonight. And you can’t prove I did. You yourself saw him sneak in here a while back with a loaded gun, you saw me fight for my life, you saw him lose, and now he’s dead.” The bearded man put the lightest stress on the last word, as if to underscore Wallace’s uselessness as a witness.
“I’m afraid you didn’t listen very closely to what I said, Priam,” said Ellery. “I said it almost worked. You don’t think I’d allow Alfred to risk death or serious injury, do you? What he brought downstairs with him tonight, on my instructions, was a gun loaded with blanks. We’ve put on a show for you, Priam.” And Ellery said, “ Get up, Wallace.”
Before Priam’s bulging eyes the blanket on the floor rose like the magic carpet, and there, under it, stood Alfred Wallace, smiling.
Roger Priam screamed.