A Fine and Private Place (22 page)

“Where you went wrong, son,” the Inspector said later that night, over Ellery's favorite pastrami sandwiches and celery tonic from the kosher delicatessen around the corner, “was in not spotting the big hole in your argument.”

“Hole?” He was chewing away at the Rumanian delicacy, but only out of respect for tradition. “What hole?”

“If Peter Ennis had been the killer, then he sent that final anonymous letter, number 10. But if he was the guilty party that's the last thing he'd have done. The message instructed us to find out who'd had lunch with Virginia on that certain date … the date that, according to you, began the 9-month waiting period till Virginia could come into Importuna's estate. Well, that's the one thing the killer couldn't possibly have wanted us to find out—the one thing he was trying his damnedest to hide by throwing all those 9s at us! You didn't think it through far enough, Ellery. As I said, about the only one in the world who
wouldn't
have sent that 10th message was Peter Ennis, if he'd been guilty.”

“You're right, you're right,” Ellery muttered. “How could I have made a slip like that? It's ridiculous.… But dad, there's something Virginia recorded Peter as having said to her that afternoon—I think while he was putting her into a cab right after lunch—something that's stuck in my craw ever since she let me read her diary.”

“What was that?”

“She wrote that he said, ‘There's only one thing for me to do and, by God, when the time is ripe I'm going to do it.' Certainly Virginia made no bones about what she thought Peter meant. And I interpreted it the same way: That when the 9 months were up and Virginia's inheritance was safely hers by will or however, Peter was going to put Importuna out of the way.”

“Son, all that young fellow probably meant was that one of those days he was going to screw up his courage and have a talk with the old guy—stand up like a man to the hubby of the woman he loved and admit what had been going on, and try to convince him to give Virginia her freedom. She let her imagination run away with her, and so did you.”

Ellery made a face, as if he had found a German roach scuttling across his plate. It was not impossible, even the best of New York apartments being what they were, although in this case it happened not to be so.

He set the unfinished pastrami sandwich on the plate and said, “I don't know what I'm eating this for. I'm not hungry. I'll clean up, dad.”

The sandwich, like his theory, wound up in the garbage.

DECEMBER 9, 1967

Whether Virginia Importuna's predicted “one of these days”—when it came to pass and turned out to be the 9th day of the following month—was a satire of circumstance or a sly choice of Ellery's unconscious is a mystery he did not solve and never felt the urge to. However it came about, that Saturday was December 9. He tried very hard to forget the date the moment he became aware of it.

The intervening month since the debacle in Nino Importuna's bedroom had been a test, if not a positive trial, of his character. He could recall other failures among the happier memories of his past, one or two at least as painful; but this one seemed blended of a curious emotional mishmash of shame, self-disgust, and apprehension about his possibly waning faculties that, he suspected, derived as much from the fool it had made him appear in the eyes of a beautiful and delectable woman as from its own ingredients.

But he had survived it; he had even managed to leave it behind him by plunging into an 18-hour-a-day regimen on his neglected novel and, to his absolute amazement (and that of his publisher and agent), finishing it. Along the way, by a mysterious process which he could only view as alchemical, he solved the Importuna-Importunato case.

At first, not unnaturally under the circumstances, he sniffed about the edges of his new solution like a suspicious cat; he could still taste the bitterness of the old one. But at last he was satisfied; and he made a telephone call, identified himself, and arranged an appointment for that afternoon with the murderer.

Who admitted him with the equanimity Ellery had expected.

“Will you have a drink, Mr. Queen?”

“Hardly,” Ellery said. “For all I know you have a bottle of everything prepoisoned in anticipation of just such an occasion.”

“In case you have a tape recorder hidden on you,” the murderer responded with a smile—“sit down, Mr. Queen, my chairs at least are perfectly safe—I've never poisoned anyone in my life.”

“With people like you there's always a first time,” Ellery said, not smiling back. “You're sure this chair isn't electrified? Well, I suppose that would be pretty far out even for you.”

He sat down, and rather to his relief nothing happened.

“What am I supposed to have done, Mr. Queen? Not that I give a damn what you have to say; it can only be theory, not proof. But I confess—no, no, Queen, don't look so pathetically hopeful—I confess I'm curious.”

“Oh, I imagine once the police know whom and what to look for,” Ellery said, “the proof may come more easily than you think. Anyway, Sam Johnson once said that conjecture as to things useful is good, and could anything be of greater use to this world than putting you out of it?”

“You'll pardon me if I register a vigorous dissent. You won't think me rude if I drink alone, will you?” the murderer said, and poured a generous portion of Scotch over some ice cubes. “Now proceed, Queen. Amuse me.”

“I can't promise to keep you in stitches,” Ellery said. “although I hope to give you a tremor or two.” And he related the theory he had expounded a month before in Nino Importuna's bedroom, and how the New Milford motel alibi had cleared Peter Ennis and Virginia Importuna and destroyed his lovely solution. “On the other hand, I wasn't going to let it drop there,” Ellery continued. “I carry the invincible stubbornness of the Irish in my genes. My mind kept worrying it, and finally I got it.”

“Got what?”

“The clue I'd missed.”

“Nonsense,” the murderer said. “There was no clue.”

“Oh, but there was. It was there, plain as anything. So obvious, in fact, that I missed it the first time round. It was in Virginia's diary, in the account of her lunch with Peter that 9th of December a year ago—by the way, a year ago to the day. There's prophetic justice for you. You knew Virginia kept a diary, of course?”

“Of course.”

“But she never allowed anyone to read it, and if you were ever tempted to do so without her permission you couldn't find it—she assured me that she kept her many volumes securely hidden. So you couldn't have known what Virginia noted in her long entry for that day, I mean the details, among which was the clue I mentioned. In that sense you were guilty of no blunder—I can't fault you for something you weren't aware of and couldn't have foreseen. You're a clever adversary indeed. One of the cleverest in my experience.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Queen,” the murderer said. “Gallop along on your fairy tale.”

“If it is, it's a good deal grimmer than Grimm. Everything that I argued Peter had done was actually done by you. You, not Peter, were the one who had to wait 9 months for Virginia to become her husband's heir. You, not Peter, were the one who saw that by eliminating Nino's two brothers the fortune Virginia would be coming into would be tripled. So it was you, not Peter, who killed Julio and framed Marco for it.

“I can't prove evidentially that you planted that gold button from Marco's yachting jacket on the floor of Julio's study—it could conceivably have slipped through the hole in his pocket by sheer chance, but I'm always leery of happy accidents that just happen to coincide with a killer's interests, and I'm perfectly certain you did plant the button. And the shoeprint. And carefully arranged the signs of a struggle in the study. And yes, shifted Julio's desk about for the reasons I gave at the time of the original investigation, which I shan't bother to repeat.

“The way it appears to me, what happened was this (I'm tempted to say, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the feeling you won't): you had the frame-up of Marco planned to the last detail—the planting of his button and his readily identifiable shoeprint in the cigar ashes from the deliberately upset ashtray; and, of course, the left-handed blow with the poker. You planned the left-handed assault on Julio frontally, across his desk, at which he was seated facing you. Unfortunately for the best-laid plans, just as you were about to bring the poker crashing down on target, Julio, in an instinctive attempt to dodge the blow, spun around in the swivel chair a full 180°, so that the
back
of his head was to you at the instant of impact, the descending poker landing on exactly the opposite side of his head from the side you'd aimed at to indicate left-handedness.

“Before you grasped the implications of what you were doing, because you were still intent on your plan, you turned Julio's body back around to the original facing position. This caused his head to fall forward on the desk and his blood to drip over the blotter. Too late you realized that you'd now made it appear—because of the turnaround, and where the blood was dripping, and so on—as if Julio's killer were right-handed. You couldn't swivel the body back, because the presence and location of the bloodstains on the desk would give away the fact that the body had been turned after the blow. What could you do to reinstate your left-handedness clue? You solved the problem by leaving Julio's body as it then was—that is, head resting forward on the desk—but moving both the desk and the swivel chair-cum-body from its original catercornered position to the position from which a left-handed blow could have been delivered.”

“That's all pretty devious,” the murderer said, smiling again.

“You've a devious mind,” Ellery said. “Very much like mine, in fact. Oh, another feature of your frame-up of Marco: those signs of a struggle you left for us. There'd been, of course, no struggle at all, as Marco truthfully assured us. But you had to dress your set in such a way as to justify the overturning of the ashtray in order to plant the shoeprint clue, and an apparent struggle between Julio and Marco provided the obvious justification. You knew of the bad feeling then existing between Nino's two brothers because of Julio's failure to agree on the Canadian oil-lands proposal, and from bad feeling to hand-to-hand combat appeared to you—as you were confident it would appear to the police—a logical next step.

“The truth is,” Ellery went on, stretching his long legs so far that his shoe tips almost touched the murderer's, “the truth is your frame-up of Marco was by far the clumsiest thing you've done. Well, it was your maiden crime. But even in your clumsiness you were lucky. Marco was the weak sister—so to speak—of the brothers; he wasn't strong or stable enough to stand up under the pressures you thoughtfully exerted, especially when he was so drunk. So he did a better job of it than you did: he obligingly hanged himself, giving the police the perfect straw to grasp: that Marco killed Julio and committed suicide in drunken remorse. This was precisely what you wanted the police to think in the first place.

“As for how you got into 99 East for the murder of Julio without being reported,” Ellery continued in the same amiable way, “I can only conjecture. But with your peculiar relationship to the principals, I imagine you had pretty much the run of the premises, so that your comings and goings would hardly be noticed. In any event, before you murdered Julio no crimes had been committed at 99 East, so there was no particular reason for anyone to keep a sharp eye out. Apparently you weren't seen either on your way in or your way out; you managed to slip by the guard.

“To get into 99 East for the Nino Importuna murder you had a different problem. The building had been the scene of a murder and suicide by that time; everyone was security conscious. It's possible, of course, that in spite of that you managed to get by the guard unseen, but I'm inclined to think there's a handier explanation, in which your lucky star played a prominent role. Earlier that evening—how odd! it was 9 o'clock or thereabouts—Virginia had lowered the ladder from the penthouse roof to the roof of the adjoining apartment house one story below in order to slip out for a rendezvous with Peter Ennis. She necessarily left the ladder in the lowered position for her return. You knew nothing about her tryst with Peter; what you were after was a way to get past Gallegher up into the penthouse without being spotted. So you did the logical thing and made for the roof of the adjoining building, too. This was, of course, hours after Virginia had left; just before midnight. To your surprise, there was the ladder, ready to be climbed; whatever device you had brought along to scale that one-story difference now wasn't needed. You climbed the ladder, murdered Nino, and used the same route for your escape, which took place long before the 3:30
A
.
M
. of Virginia's return from Connecticut. You wouldn't have thought it such good luck, I'm afraid, if you'd had any inkling that Virginia had used that ladder earlier in the evening to go off with Peter, as I'll demonstrate in a moment.”

The murderer was very sober now.

“Access to the two Importunato apartments and the Importuna penthouse apartment was almost certainly attained by the use of duplicate keys; your affiliation with the principals made it easy for you to procure them. I postulate duplicate keys rather than an inside confederate because you're far too smart an operator to place yourself in some underling's power to blackmail you later, especially with such munificence at stake.”

“No wonder you've made your living as a detective-story writer,” the murderer remarked. “You have an imagination that's not only agile but double-jointed.”

“Thanks for bringing me to the essential point,” Ellery said graciously. “You've just confirmed a conclusion I reached before I set up this meeting: You're an A student of character, and you took a graduate course in mine. Now come, you can admit that, can't you?”