The Origin of Evil (19 page)

‘You're sure this thing is a warning.'

Ellery nodded absently.

‘Me, I'm not,' Keats complained. ‘I can't seem to get the feel of this case. It's like trying to catch guppies with your bare hands. Now the arsenic, that I could hold on to, even though I couldn't go anywhere with it. But all the rest of it …'

‘You can't deny the existence of all the rest of it, Keats. The dead dog was real enough. The first box Priam got was real, and whatever was in it. There was nothing vapoury about those dead frogs and toads, either. Or about the contents of this box. Or, for that matter,' Ellery shrugged, ‘about the thing that started all this, the note to Hill.'

‘Oh, yes,' growled the detective.

‘Oh yes what?'

‘The note. What do we know about it? Not a thing. It's not a note, it's a copy of a note. Or is it even that? That might be only what it
seems
. Maybe the whole business was dreamed up by Hill.'

‘The arsenic, froglets, and wallet weren't dreamed up by Hill,' said Ellery dryly, ‘not in the light of his current condition and location. No, Keats, you're falling for the temptation to be a reasonable man. You're not dealing with a reasonable thing. It's a fantasy, and it calls for faith.' He stared ahead. ‘There's something that links these four “warnings,” as the composer of the note calls them, links them in a series. They constitute a group.'

‘How?' Bits of tobacco flew. ‘Poisoned food, dead frogs, a seventy-five-dollar wallet! And God knows what was in that first box to Priam — judging by what followed, it might have been a size three Hopalong Cassidy suit, or a Bock Beer calendar of the year 1897. Mr. Queen, you
can't
connect those things. They're not connectable.' Keats waved his arms, and the car swerved. ‘The most I can see in this is that each one stands on its own feet. The arsenic? That means: Remember how you tried to poison
me
? — this is a little reminder. The frogs? That means … Well, you get the idea.'

But Ellery shook his head. ‘If there's one thing in this case I'm sure of, it's that the warnings have related meanings. And the over-all meaning ties up with Priam's past and Hill's past and their enemy's past. What's more, Priam knows its significance, and it's killing him.

‘What we've got to do, Lieutenant, is crack Priam, or the riddle, before it's too late.'

‘I'd like to crack Priam,' remarked Keats. ‘On the nut.'

They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Keats phoned just before midnight.

‘I thought you'd like to know what the Lab found out from examination of the wallet and box.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing. The only prints on the box were Mrs. Priam's. There were no prints on the wallet at all. Now I'm going home and see if I'm still married. How do you like California?'

11

Outside her garage, Laurel looked around. Her look was furtive. He hadn't been in the walnut tree this morning, thank goodness, and there was no sign of him now. Laurel slipped into the garage, blinking as she came out of the sun, and ran to her Austin.

‘Morning, Little Beaver.'

‘Mac! Damn you.'

Crowe Macgowan came around the big Packard, grinning. ‘I had a hunch you had a little something under your arm-pit last night when you told me how late you were going to sleep this morning. Official business, hm?' He was dressed. Mac looked very well when he was dressed, almost as well as when he wasn't. He even wore a hat, a Swiss yodeller sort of thing with a little feather. ‘Shove over.'

‘I don't want you along today.'

‘Why not?'

‘Mac, I just don't.'

‘You'll have to give me a better reason than that.'

‘You … don't take this seriously enough.'

‘I thought I was plenty serious on the frog safari.'

‘Well … Oh! all right. Get in.'

Laurel drove the Austin down to Franklin and turned west, her chin northerly. Macgowan studied her profile in peace.

‘La Brea to Third,' he said, ‘and west on Third to Fairfax. Aye, aye, Skipper?'

‘Mac! You've looked it up.'

‘There's only one Leatherland, Inc. of Hollywood, California, and it's in Farmers' Market.'

‘I wish you'd let me drop you!'

‘Nothing doing. Suppose you found yourself in an opium den?'

‘There are no opium dens around Fairfax and Third.'

‘Then maybe a gangster. All the gangsters are coming west, and you know how tourists flock to Farmers' Market.'

Laurel said no more, but her heart felt soggy. Between her and the traffic hung a green alligator.

She parked in the area nearest Gilmore Stadium. Early as they were, the paved acres were jammed with cars.

‘How are you going to work this?' asked Crowe, shortening his stride as she hurried along.

‘There's nothing much to it. Their designs are exclusive, they make everything on the premises, and they have no other outlets. I'll simply ask to see some men's wallets, work my way around to alligator, then to green alligator —'

‘And then what?' he asked dryly.

‘Why … I'll find out who's bought one recently. They certainly can't sell many green alligator wallets with gold trimming. Mac, what's the idea? Let go!'

They were outside The Button Box. Leatherland, Inc. was nearby, a double-windowed shop with a ranch-house and corral fence décor, bannered with multi-coloured hides and served by a bevy of well-developed cowgirls.

‘And how are
you
going to get one of those babes to open up?' asked Crowe, keeping Laurel's arm twisted behind her back with his forefinger. ‘In the first place, they don't carry their customers' names around in their heads; they don't have that kind of head. In the second place, they're not going to go through their sales slips — for you, that is. In the third place, what's the matter with me?'

‘I might have known.'

‘All I have to do is flash my genuine Red Ryder sheriff's badge, turn on the charm, and we're in. Laurel, I'm typecasting.'

‘Take off your clothes,' said Laurel bitterly, ‘and you'll get more parts than you can handle.'

‘Watch me — fully dressed and lounging-like.'

He went into the shop confidently.

Laurel pretended to be interested in a hand-tooled, silver-studded saddle in the window.

Although the shop was crowded, one of the cowgirls spotted Crowe immediately and cantered up to him. Everything bouncing, Laurel observed, hoping one of the falsies would slip down. But it was well-anchored, and she could see him admiring it. So could the cowgirl.

They engaged in a dimpled conversation for fully two minutes. Then they moved over to the rear of the shop. He pushed his hat back on his head the way they did in the movies and leaned one elbow on the showcase. The rodeo Venus began to show him wallets, bending and sunfishing like a bronc. This went on for some time, the sheriff's man leaning farther and farther over the case until he was practically breathing down her sternum. Suddenly he straightened, looked around, put his hand in his pocket, and withdrew it cupped about something. The range-type siren dilated her eyes …

When Crowe strolled out of the shop he passed Laurel with a wink.

She followed him, furious and relieved. The poor goop still didn't catch on, she thought. But then men never noticed anything but women; men like Mac, that is. She turned a corner and ran into his arms.

‘Come to popsy,' he grinned. ‘I've got all the dope.'

‘Are you sure that's all you've got?' Laurel coldly swept past him.

‘And I thought you'd give me a gold star!'

‘It's no make-up off my skin, but as your spiritual adviser — if you're lining up future mothers of the race for the radioactive new world, pick specimens who look as if they can climb a tree. You'd have to send that one up on a breeches-buoy.'

‘What do you mean, is that all I've got? You saw me through the window. Could anything have been more antiseptic?'

‘I saw you take down her phone number!'

‘Shucks, gal. That was professional data. Here.' He picked Laurel up, dropped her into the Austin, and got in beside her. ‘They made up a line of men's wallets in alligator leather last year, dyed three or four different colours. All the other colours sold but the green — they only unloaded three of those. Two of the three greens were bought before Christmas, almost seven months ago, as gifts. One by a Broadway actor to be sent to his agent back in New York, the other by a studio executive for some big-shot French producer — the shop mailed that one to Paris. The third and only other one they've sold is unaccounted for.'

‘It would be,' said Laurel morosely, ‘seeing that that's the one we're interested in. How unaccounted for, Mac?'

‘My cowgirl dug out the duplicate sales slip. It was a cash-and-carry and didn't have the purchaser's name on it.'

‘What was the date?'

‘This year. But what month this year, or what day of what month this year, sales slip showeth not. The carbon slipped or something and the date was smudged.'

‘Well, didn't she remember what the purchaser looked like? That might tell us something.'

‘It wasn't my babe's customer, because the initials of the sales-girl on the slip were of someone else.'

‘Who? Didn't you find out?'

‘Sure I found out.'

‘Then why didn't you speak to
her
? Or were you too wrapped up in Miss Falsies?'

‘Miss who? Say, I thought those were too good to be true. I couldn't speak to the other gal. The other gal quit last week.'

‘Didn't you get her name and address?'

‘I got her name, Lavis La Grange, but my babe says it wasn't Lavis's real name and she doesn't know what Lavis's real name is. Certainly not Lavis or La Grange. Her address is obsolete, because she decided she'd had enough of the glamorous Hollywood life and went back home. But when I asked my babe where Lavis's home is, she couldn't say. For all she knows it could be Labrador. And anyway, even if we could locate Lavis, my babe says she probably wouldn't remember. My babe says Lavis has the brain of a barley seed.'

‘So we can't even fix the buyer's sex,' said Laurel bitterly. ‘Some man-hunters we are.'

‘What do we do now, report to the Master?'

‘You report to the Master, Mac. What's there to report? He'll probably know all this before the day's out, anyway. I'm going home. You want me to drop you?'

‘You've got more sex appeal. I'll stick with you.'

Young MacGowan stuck with Laurel for the remainder of the day; technically, in fact, until the early hours of the next, for it was five minutes past two when she climbed down the rope ladder from the tree house to the floodlit clearing. He leaped after her and encircled her neck with his arm all the way to her front door.

‘Sex fiends,' he said cheerfully.

‘You're doing all right,' said Laurel, who felt black and blue; but then she put her mouth up to be kissed, and he kissed it, and that was a mistake because it took her another fifteen minutes to get rid of him.

Laurel waited behind the closed door ten minutes longer to be sure the coast was clear.

Then she slipped out of her house and down to the road.

She had her flashlight and the little automatic was in her coat pocket.

Just before she got to the Priam driveway she turned off into the woods. Here she stopped to put a handkerchief over the lens of her flash. Then, directing the feeble beam to the ground, she made her way toward the Priam house.

Laurel was not feeling adventurous. She was feeling sick. It was the sickness not of fear but of self-appraisal. How did the heroines of fiction do it? The answer was, she decided, that they were heroines of fiction. In real life when a girl had to let a man make love to her in order to steal a key from him she was nothing but a tramp. Less than a tramp, because a tramp got something out of her trampery — money, or an apartment, a few drinks, or even, although less likely, fun. It was a fairly forthright transaction. But she … she had had to pretend, all the while searching desperately for the key. The worst part of it was trying to dislike it. That damned Macgowan was so purely without guile and he made love so cheerfully — and he was such a darling — that the effort to hate him, it, and herself came off poorly. What a bitchy thing to do, Laurel moaned as her fingers tightened about the key in her pocket.

She stopped behind a French lilac-bush. The house was dark. No light anywhere. She moved along the strip of lawn below the terrace.

Even then it wouldn't have been so nasty if it hadn't concerned his
mother
. How could Mac have lived with Delia all these years and remained blind to what she was? Why did Delia have to be
his
mother?

Laurel tried the front door carefully. It was locked, sure enough. She unlocked it with the key, silently thankful that the Priams kept no dogs. She closed the door just as carefully behind her. Wielding the handkerchief-covered flashlight for a moment, she oriented herself; then she snapped it off.

She crept upstairs close to the banisters.

On the landing she used the flash again. It was almost three o'clock. The four bedroom doors were closed. There was no sound either from this floor or the floor above, where the chauffeur slept. Mrs. Guittierez and Muggs occupied two servants' rooms off the kitchen downstairs.

Laurel tiptoed across the hall and put her ear against a door. Then, quickly and noiselessly, she opened the door and went into Delia Priam's bedroom. How co-operative of Delia to go up to Santa Barbara, where she was visiting ‘some old Montecito friends' for the week-end. The cloth-of-gold tree of life spread over the bed immaculately. In whose bed was she sleeping tonight?