The Origin of Evil

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.