A Fine and Private Place

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 Maxco 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?”

“As a matter of principle,” the murderer murmured, “I admit nothing. Except that this performance of yours is better than anything playing Broadway, Queen, and it’s a lot cheaper.”

“The ultimate price to you,” Ellery retorted, “will make the scalpers look like philanthropists. At least I hope so.

“But to get back to your study of my character: The minute you found out that I was taking a hand in Julio’s murder-you weren’t on the scene when I was, but you did keep pumping poor old Peter, didn’t you?-you decided that you had to get to know me inside and out. You read my books, I don’t doubt; studied some typical cases I’d worked on. You came to the conclusion, correctly, that I’m lured like a fish by the colorful as opposed to the drab and routine; that I’m drawn to the subtle rather than the straightforward; that by temperament I lean toward the complicated in preference to the simple; in the language of the vulgate, I’m a pushover for the fancy stuff. So… you plotted your course to go through a complex maze, knowing I’d follow it nose down with a whoop and a holler, and that I’d arrive ultimately at the prize you’d planted for me.

“You took the obligatory-9-months-until-inheritance clue and deliberately tied it in to Nino Importuna’s 9-supersti-tion. You’ve been responsible for obfuscating everything with those illusory 9s. And that was ‘a fearful sin,’ as Father Brown called it. You know Father Brown? My favorite clergyman of fact or fiction. ‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf?’ he wants to know. And he answers himself: ‘In the forest. But what does he do when there is no forest?… He grows a forest to hide it in. A fearful sin.’ And that’s what you did. You grew a forest.

“You sent Inspector Queen those anonymous messages. Your purpose, however, was different from the one I ascribed to Peter Ennis. What you were really after was to bamboozle me. You knew that if you showered me with all those lovely, fantastic 9-clues, sooner or later I’d come up with the leaf-in-the-forest, or pebble-on-the-beach, theory. I can’t say I didn’t dance dutifully to your tune! I was truly the puppet in the hands of the puppet master. When I’d eliminated every last sham 9, as you planned I should, and still hadn’t by my own efforts learned about Peter’s lunch with Virginia on December 9, 1966, you made sure the information came into my possession. You sent the 10th and last anonymous message to my father, through him tipping me off.

“This,” Ellery went on in his even-tempered drawl, “led to the genuine 9-clue you’d programmed me to base my solution on. I was to expound the theory that Peter Ennis, as the murderer, wanted above all to hide the 9-month gestation period from me, and that to accomplish this end he’d bombarded me with 9s… so many 9s that I’d be completely confused and baffled and helpless to reach a solution. This was to be my conclusion about Peter’s thinking.

“But your ultimate purpose was even subtler than that. You took the leaf-in-the-forest concept one step further. You not only concealed the crucial leaf, you used the very fact of its concealment to provide me with the wrong answer to the problem. You maneuvered me into eliminating all the 9s but one, so that on the basis of that remaining one I’d come up at long last with the patsy murderer you’d planned for me to choose from the start.”

And now they were locked eye to eye, and there was no longer any amusement on the murderer’s face, only an advanced alertness, the immobility of an animal at the approach of danger.

The trouble was,” Ellery said in a stripped, clean way, “you grew too big a forest. The last anonymous message did more than you meant it to. It gave me your sham setup solution, yes; but unhappily for you it didn’t stop there, as it was supposed to. You didn’t know, as I remarked a few minutes ago, that Peter and Virginia had inadvertently provided themselves with an unbreakable alibi for the time of Nino’s murder. That their alibi forced me to face the falsity of the solution you’d led me to. Forced me, from the very logic of that fact, to go to you.

“Because,” Ellery said, and his pace was swifter now, /if Peter-not to mention Virginia-was innocent, as his alibi incontestably proved, then the murderer not only had to be someone else, but someone who possessed the same two qualifications: One, the murderer had to know that Virginia and Peter met for lunch on December 9, 1966; two, he had to satisfy cui bono, in the same sense that Peter would have satisfied it by marrying Virginia.

“First qualification: How did the murderer know about that lunch? The answer was embedded like a pearl in Virginia’s diary account, toward the end. She had noticed you come into the restaurant; she was afraid that if you spotted her with Peter you’d guess their relationship, and she got Peter to hustle her out through the kitchen. A beautiful fit, isn’t it? Because if Virginia and Peter could have seen you, by exactly the same token you could have seen them. And see them you did, otherwise the 10th anonymous message could not have been sent.

“Second qualification: Who benefits? Could you? You certainly could, in the same way Peter would benefit: through Virginia. And you were the only other person in the world in that enviable position. What’s more, if anything were to interfere with your control of Virginia’s half billion dollars-if Peter, say, were to prove an obstacle, or Virginia herself-I’m quite certain you’d be prepared to get rid of either or both. In fact, that may have been your ultimate plan, since the deaths of Virginia and Peter-assuming their marriage-would give you in your own right, as Virginia’s only surviving relative, the entire Importuna fortune.

“And then what an orgy of gambling and women and power would be yours at the snap of a finger! Who knows what schemes you’ve blueprinted for the further glory of yourself, the despised object of Nino Importuna’s contempt and charity? Was it to become the Monte Cristo of the 20th century?”

And Ellery uncoiled his length and got to his feet and looked down into the handsome saddle-leather face of Virginia’s father.

“Well, was it?” Ellery repeated.

“Something like that,” said Wallace Ryerson Whyte.