The Origin of Evil

Chapter Sixteen

What no one foresaw ― including Ellery ― was how Roger Priam would react to his arrest, indictment, and trial. Yet from the moment he showed his hand it was impossible to conceive that he might have acted otherwise. Alfred Wallace was a probable sole exception, but Wallace was being understandably discreet.

Priam took the blame for everything. His contempt for Wallace’s part in the proceedings touched magnificence. Wallace, Priam said, had been the merest tool, not understanding what he was being directed to do. One would have thought, to hear Priam, that Wallace was an idiot. And Wallace acted properly idiotic. No one was fooled, but the law operates under the rules of evidence, and since there were only two witnesses, the accused and his accomplice, each ― for different motives ― minimizing Wallace and maximizing Priam, Wallace went scot-free.

As Keats said, in a growl, “Priam’s got to be boss, by God, even at his own murder trial.”

It was reported that Priam’s attorney, a prominent West Coast trial lawyer, went out on the night of the verdict and got himself thoroughly fried, missing the very best part of the show. Because that same night Roger Priam managed to kill himself by swallowing poison. The usual precautions against suicide had been taken, and those entrusted with the safety of the condemned man until his execution were chagrined and mystified. Roger Priam merely lay there with his bearded mouth open in a grin, looking as fiercely joyful as a pirate cut down on his own quarter-deck. No one could dictate to him, his grin seemed to say, not even the sovereign State of California. If he had to die, he was picking the method and the time.

He had to be dominant even over death.

To everyone’s surprise, Alfred Wallace found a new employer immediately after the trial, an Eastern writer by the name of Queen. Wallace and his suitcase moved into the little cottage on the hill, and Mrs. Williams and her two uniforms moved out, the cause leading naturally to the effect.

Ellery could not say that it was a poor exchange, for Wallace turned out a far better cook than Mrs. Williams had ever been, an accomplishment in his new employe Ellery had not bargained for, since he had hired Wallace to be his secretary. The neglected novel was still the reason for his presence in Southern California, and now that the Hill-Priam case was closed Ellery returned to it in earnest.

Keats was flabbergasted. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll put arsenic in your soup?”

“Why should he?” Ellery asked reasonably. “I’m paying him to take dictation and type my manuscript. And talking about soup, Wallace makes a mean sopa de aim en dras, a Mallorquina. From Valldemosa ― perfectly delicious. How about sampling it tomorrow night?”

Keats said thanks a lot but he didn’t go for that gourmet stuff himself, his speed was chicken noodle soup, besides his wife was having some friends in for television, and he hung up hastily.

To the press Mr. Queen was lofty. He had never been one to hound a man for past errors. Wallace needed a job, and he needed a secretary, and that was that.

Wallace merely smiled.

Delia Priam sold the hillside property and disappeared.

The usual guesses, substantiated by no more than “a friend of the family who asks that her name be withheld” or “Delia Priam is rumored,” had her variously in Las Vegas at the dice tables with a notorious under-world character; in Taos, New Mexico, under an assumed name, where she was said to be writing her memoirs for newspaper and magazine syndication; flying to Rome heavily veiled; one report insisted on placing her on a remote shelf in India as the “guest” of some wild mountain rajah well-known for his peculiar tastes in Occidental women.

That none of these pleasantly exciting stories was true everyone took for granted, but authoritative information was lacking. Delia Priam’s father was not available for comment; he had stuffed some things in a duffel bag and gone off to Canada to prospect, he said, for uranium ore.

And her son simply refused to talk to reporters.

To Ellery, privately, Crowe Macgowan confided that his mother had entered a retreat near Santa Maria; he spoke as if he never expected to see her again.

Young Macgowan was cleaning up his affairs preparatory to enlisting in the Army. “I’ve got ten days left,” he told Ellery, “and a thousand things to do, one of which is to get married. I said it was a hell of a preliminary to a trip to Korea, but Laurel’s stuck her chin out, so what can I do?”

Laurel looked as if she were recuperating from a serious illness. She was pale and thin but at peace. She held on to Macgowan’s massive arm with authority. “I won’t lose you, Mac.”

“What are you afraid of, the Korean women?” jeered Crowe. “I’m told their favorite perfume is garlic.”

“I’m joining the WACs,” said Laurel, “if they’ll ship me overseas. I suppose it’s not very patriotic to put a condition to it, but if my husband is in Asia I want to be in the same part of the world.”

“You’ll probably wind up in West Germany,” growled the large young man. “Why don’t you just stay home and write me long and loving letters?”

Laurel patted his arm.

“Why don’t you just stay home,” Ellery asked Crowe, “and stick to your tree?”

“Oh, that.” Crowe reddened. “My tree is sold.”

“Find another.”

“Listen, Queen,” snarled Delia’s son, “you tend to your crocheting and I’ll tend to mine. I’m no hero, but there’s a war on ― beg pardon, a United Nations police action. Besides, they’ll get me anyway.”

“I understand that,” said Ellery with gravity, “but your attitude seems so different these days, Mac. What’s happened to the Atomic Age Tree Boy? Have you decided, now that you’ve found a mate, that you’re not worth preserving for the Post-Atomic Era? That’s hardly complimentary to Laurel.”

Mac mumbled, “You let me alone... Laurel, no!”

“Laurel yes,” said Laurel. “After all, Mac, you owe it to Ellery. Ellery, about that Tree Boy foolishness...”

“Yes,” said Ellery hopefully. “I’ve been rather looking forward to a solution of that mystery.”

“I finally worried it out of him,” said Laurel. “Mac, you’re fidgeting. Mac was trying to break into the movies. He’d heard that a certain producer was planning a series of Jungle Man pictures to compete with the Tarzan series, and he got the brilliant idea of becoming a jungle man in real life, right here in Hollywood. The Atomic Age silliness was bait for the papers. It worked, too. He got so much publicity that the producer approached him, and he was actually negotiating a secret contract when Daddy Hill died and I began to yell murder. The murder talk, and the newspaper stories involving Mac’s stepfather ― which I suppose Roger planted himself, or had Alfred plant for him ― scared the producer and he called off the negotiations. Crowe was awfully sore at me, weren’t you, darling?”

“Not as sore as I am right now. For Pete’s sake, Laur, do you have to expose my moral underwear to the whole world?”

“I’m only a very small part of it, Mac,” grinned Ellery. “So that’s why you tried to hire me to solve the case. You thought if I could clear it up pronto, you could still have the deal with the movie producer.”

“I did, too,” said young Macgowan forlornly. “He came back at me only last week, asking questions about my draft status. I offered him the services of my grandfather, who’d have loved to be a jungle man, but the ungrateful guy told me to go to hell. And here I am, en route. Confidentially, Queen, does Korea smell as bad as they say it does?”

Laurel and Crowe were married by a Superior Court judge in Santa Monica, with Ellery and Lieutenant Keats as witnesses, and the wedding supper was ingested and imbibed at a drive-in near Oxnard, the newly weds thereafter scooting off in Laurel’s Austin in the general direction of San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Driving back south on the Coast Highway, Ellery and Keats speculated as to their destination.

“I’d say Monterey,” said Keats emotionally. “That’s where I spent my honeymoon.”

“I’d say, knowing Mac,” said Ellery, “San Juan Capistrano or La Jolla, seeing that they lie in the opposite direction.”

They were both misty-eyed on the New York State champagne which Ellery had traitorously provided for the California nuptials, and they wound up on a deserted beach at Malibu with their arms around each other, harmonizing “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” to the silver-teared Pacific.

After dinner one night in late September, just as Alfred Wallace was touching off the fire he had laid in the living room, Keats dropped in. He apologized for not having phoned before coming, saying that only five minutes before he had had no idea of visiting Ellery; he was passing by on his way home and he had stopped on impulse.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t apologize for an act of Christian mercy,” exclaimed Ellery. “I haven’t seen any face but Wallace’s now for more than a week. The lieutenant takes water in his Scotch, Wallace.”

“Go easy on it,” Keats said to Wallace. “I mean the water. May I use your phone to call my wife?”

“Wonderful. You’re going to stay.” Ellery studied Keats. The detective looked harassed.

“Well, for a while.” Keats went to the phone.

When he came back, a glass was waiting for him on the coffee table before the fire, and Ellery and Wallace were stretching their legs in two of the three armchairs around it. Keats dropped between them and took a long sip. Ellery offered him a cigaret and Wallace held a match to it, and for a few moments Keats frowned into the fire.

“Something wrong, Keats?” Ellery asked finally.

“I don’t know.” Keats picked up his glass. “I’m an old lady, I guess.

I’ve wanted to chin with you for a long time now. I kept resisting the temptation, feeling stupid. Tonight...” He raised his glass and gulped.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Well... the Priam case. Of course, it’s all over―”

“What about the Priam case?”

Keats made a face. Then he set the glass down with a bang. “Queen, I’ve been over that spiel of yours ― to me at the Hollywood Division, to Priam that night in his room ― it must be a hundred times. I don’t know, I can’t explain it...”

“You mean my solution to the case?”

“It never seems to comp out as pat when I go over it as it did when you...” Keats stopped and rather deliberately turned to look at Alfred Wallace. Wallace looked back politely.

“It’s not necessary for Wallace to leave, Keats,” said Ellery with a grin. “When I said that night at Priam’s that I’d taken Wallace into my confidence, I meant just that. I took him into my confidence completely. He knows everything I know, including the answers to the questions that I take it have been giving you a bad time.”

The detective shook his head and finished what was left in his glass. When Wallace rose to refill it, Keats said, “No more now,” and Wallace sat down again.

“It’s not the kind of thing I can put my mitt on,” said the detective uncomfortably. “No mistakes. I mean mistakes that you can...” He drew on his cigaret for support, started over. “For instance, Queen, a lot of the hoopla you attributed to Priam just doesn’t fit.”

“Doesn’t fit what?” asked Ellery mildly.

“Doesn’t fit Priam. I mean, what Priam was. Take that letter he typed on the broken machine and put in the collar of the dead beagle for delivery to Hill...”

“Something wrong with it?”

“Everything wrong with it! Priam was an uneducated man. If he ever used a fancy word, I wasn’t around to hear it. His talk was crude. But when he wrote that letter... How could a man like Priam have, made such a letter up? To avoid using the letter T, to invent roundabout ways of saying things ― that takes... a feel for words, doesn’t it? A certain amount of practice in ― in composition? And punctuation ― the note was dotted and dashed and commaed and everything perfectly.”

“What’s your conclusion?” asked Ellery.

Keats squirmed.

“Or haven’t you arrived at one?”

“Well... I have.”

“You don’t believe Priam typed that note?”

“He typed it, all right. Nothing wrong with your reasoning on that... Look.” Keats flipped his cigaret into the fire. “Call me a halfwit. But the more I think about it, the less I buy the payoff. Priam typed that letter, but somebody else dictated it. Word for word. Comma for comma.” Keats jumped out of the chair as if he felt the need of being better prepared for the attack that was sure to come. But when Ellery said nothing, merely looked thoughtful and puffed on his pipe, Keats sat down again. “You’re a kindhearted character. Now tell me what’s wrong with me.”

“No, you keep going, Keats. Is there anything else that’s bothered you?”

“Lots more. You talked about Priam’s shrewd tactics, his cleverness; you compared him to Napoleon. Shrewd? Clever? A tactician? Priam was about as shrewd as a bull steer in heat and as clever as a punch in the nose. He couldn’t have planned a menu. The only weapon Priam knew was a club.

“He figured out a series of related clues, you said, that added up ― for our benefit ― to a naturalist. Evolution. The steps in the ladder. Scientific stuff. How could a roughneck smallbrain like Priam have done that? A man who bragged he hadn’t read a book since he was in knee pants! You’d have to have a certain amount of technical knowledge even to think of that evolutionary stuff as the basis of a red herring, let alone get all the stages correct and in the right order. Then picking a fancy-pants old Greek drama to tie in birds! No, sir, I don’t purchase it. Not Priam.

“Oh, I don’t question his guilt. He murdered his partner, all right. Hell, he confessed. But he wasn’t the bird who figured out the method and thought up the details. That was the work of somebody with a lot better equipment than Roger Priam ever hoped to have.”

“In other words, if I get your thought, Keats,” murmured Ellery, “you believe Priam needed not only someone else’s legs but someone else’s gray matter, too.”

“That’s it,” snapped the detective. “And I’ll go whole hog. I say the same man who supplied the legs supplied the know-how!” He glared at Alfred Wallace, who was slumped in the chair, hands clasped loosely about the glass on his stomach, eyes gleaming Keats’s way. “I mean you, Wallace! You got a lucky break, my friend, Priam sloughing you off as a maroon who trotted around doing what you were told―”

“Lucky nothing,” said Ellery. “That was in the cards, Keats. Priam did believe Wallace was a stupid tool and that the whole brilliant plot was the product of his own genius; being Priam, he couldn’t believe anything else ― as Wallace, who knew him intimately, accurately foresaw. Wallace made his suggestions so subtly, led Priam about by his large nose so tact-fully, that Priam never once suspected that he was the tool, being used by a master craftsman.”

Keats glanced again at Wallace. But the man lay there comfortably, even looking pleased.

Keats’s head ached. “Then ― you mean―”

Ellery nodded. “The real murderer in this case, Keats, was not Priam. It’s Wallace. Always was.”

Wallace extended a lazy arm and snagged one of Ellery’s cigarets. Ellery tossed him a packet of matches, and the man nodded his thanks. He lit up, tossed the packet back, and resumed his hammocky position.

The detective was confused. He glanced at Ellery, at Wallace, at Ellery again. Ellery was puffing peacefully away at his pipe.

“You mean,” said Keats in a high voice, “Hill wasn’t murdered by Priam after all?”

“It’s a matter of emphasis, Keats. Gangster A, a shot big enough to farm out his dirty work, employs Torpedo C to kill Gangster B. Torpedo C does so. Who’s guilty of B’s murder? A and C. The big shot and the little shot. Priam and Alfred were both guilty.”

“Priam hired Wallace to do his killing for him,” said Keats foolishly.

“No.” Ellery picked up a pipe cleaner and inserted it in the stem of his pipe. “No, Keats, that would make Priam the big shot and Wallace the little. It was a whole lot subtler than that. Priam thought he was the big shot and that Wallace was a tool, but he was wrong; it was the other way around. Priam thought he was using Wallace to murder Hill, when all the time Wallace was using Priam to murder Hill. And when Priam planned the clean-up killing of Wallace ― planned it on his own ― Wallace turned Priam’s plan right around against Priam and used it to make Priam kill himself.”

“Take it easy, will you?” groaned Keats. “I’ve had a hard week. Let’s go at this in words of one syllable, the only kind I can understand.

“According to you, this monkey sitting here, this man you call a murderer ― who’s taking your pay, drinking your liquor, and smoking your cigarets, all with your permission ― this Wallace planned the murders first of Hill, then of Priam, using Priam without Priam’s realizing that he was being used ― in fact, in such a way that Priam thought he was the works. All my pea-brain wants to know is: Why? Why should Wallace want to kill Hill and Priam? What did he have against ‘em?”

“You know the answer to that, Lieutenant.”

“Me?”

“Who’s wanted to murder Hill and Priam from the start?”

“Who?”

“Yes, who’s had that double motive throughout the case?”

Keats sat up gripping the arms of his chair. He looked at Alfred Wallace in a sickly way. “You’re kidding,” he said feebly. “This whole thing is a rib.”

“No rib, Keats,” said Ellery. “The question answers itself. The only one who had motive to kill both Hill and Priam was Charles Adam. Ditto Wallace? Then why look for two? Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Wallace is Adam. Refill now?”

Keats swallowed.

Wallace got up and amiably did the honors, Keats watching as if he half-expected to catch the tall man slipping a white powder into the glass. He drank, and afterward gazed glumly into the brown liquid.

“I’m not being specially obtuse,” Keats said finally. “I’m just trying to wriggle out of this logic of yours. Let’s forget logic. You say that proves this smoothie is Charles Adam. How about coincidence? Of all the millions of nose-wipers who could have been Priam’s man Friday, it turns out to be the one man in the universe who wanted to kill him. Too neat, Queen, not to say gaudy.”

“Why do you call it coincidence? There was nothing coincidental about Charles Adam’s becoming Priam’s wet nurse. Adam planned it that way.

“For twenty-five years he looked for Priam and Hill. One day he found them. Result: He became Priam’s secretary-nurse-companion... not as Adam, of course, but as a specially created character whom he christened Alfred Wallace. My guess is that Adam had more than a little to do with the sudden resignations of several of his predecessors in the job, but it remains a guess ― Wallace, quite reasonably, is close-mouthed on the subject. My guess is also that he’s been around Los Angeles far longer than the amnesic trail to Las Vegas indicated. Maybe it’s been years ― eh, Wallace?”

Wallace raised his brows quizzically.

“In any event, he managed finally to land the job and to fool Roger Priam absolutely. Priam went to his death completely unaware that Wallace was actually Adam rather than the spurious substitute for Adam Priam thought he was palming off on the authorities. Priam never doubted for a moment that Adam’s bones were still lying in the coral sand of that deserted West Indian island.”

Ellery stared reflectively at Wallace, who was sipping his Scotch like a gentleman in his club. “I wonder what you really look like, Adam. The newspaper photos we dug up weren’t much use... Of course, twenty-five years have made a big difference. But you wouldn’t have trusted to that. Plastic work, almost certainly, and of the highest order; there isn’t a sign of it. Maybe a little something to your vocal cords. And lots of practice with such things as gait, tricks of speech, ‘characteristic’ gestures, and so on. It was probably all done years ago, so that you had plenty of time to obliterate all trace of ― forgive me ― of the old Adam. Priam never had a chance. Or Hill. And you had the virility Priam demanded in a secretary. You’d undoubtedly found out about that in your preliminary reconnaissance. A glimpse of Delia Priam, and you must have been absolutely delighted. Plum pudding to go with your roast beef.”

Wallace smiled appreciatively.

“I don’t know when ― or how ― Priam first let on that he wanted to be rid of Leander Hill. Maybe he never said so at all, in so many words. At least in the beginning. You were with him night and day, and you were studying him. You could hardly have remained blind to Priam’s hatred. I think, Wallace,” said Ellery, setting his feet on the coffee table, “yes, I think you got hold of Priam’s proboscis very early with your magnetic grip, and steered it this way and that. It would be a technique that appealed to you, feeling your victim’s desires and directing them, unsuspected, according to your own. Sensing that Priam wanted Hill dead, you led him around to becoming actively conscious of it. Then you let him chew on it. It took months, probably. But you had plenty of time, and you’d proved your patience.

“In the end, it became a passion with him.

“Of course, to do anything at all along that line he needed an accomplice. There couldn’t be any question as to who the accomplice might be. It wouldn’t surprise me if you dropped a few hints that you weren’t altogether unfamiliar with violence... you had vague ‘memories,’ perhaps, that came and went conveniently through the curtain of your ‘amnesia’... It was all very gradual, but one day you got there. It was out. And you were to do the ‘legwork.’ ”

Wallace surveyed the flames dreamily. Keats, watching him, listening to Ellery, had the most childish sense that all this was happening elsewhere, to other people.

“Priam had plans of his own. They would be Priam-like plans, crude and explosive ― a Molotov cocktail sort of thing. And you ‘admired’ them. But perhaps something a little less direct...? In discussing the possibilities you may have suggested that there might be something in the common background of Priam and Hill that would give Priam ― always Priam ― a psychologically sound springboard for a really clever plan. Eventually you got the story of Adam ― of yourself ― out of him. Because, of course, that’s what you were after all along.

“After that, it was ridiculously easy. All you had to do was put ideas into Priam’s head, so that they could come out of his mouth and, in doing so, convince him that they were original with him. In time you had the whole thing explicit. There was the plot that would give Priam the indestructible garment of innocence, Priam was convinced it was all his idea... and all the time it was the very plot you’d planned to use yourself. That must have been a great day, Wallace.”

Ellery turned to Keats.

“From that point it was a mere matter of operations. He’d mastered the technique of cuckolding Priam, psychologically as well as maritally; at every stage he made Priam think Priam was directing events and that he, Wallace, was carrying them out; but at every stage it was Priam who was ordering exactly what Wallace wanted him to order.

“It was Wallace who dictated the note to Hill, with Priam doing the typing ― just as you figured out, Keats. Wallace didn’t call it dictation ― he undoubtedly called it, humbly, ‘suggestions.’ And Priam typed away on a machine on which the T key was broken. Accident? There are no accidents where Wallace-Adam is concerned. He’d managed, somehow, and without Priam’s knowledge, to break that key; and he managed to persuade Priam that there was no danger in using the typewriter that way, since a vital part of the plan was to see to it that Hill destroyed the note after he read it. Of course, what Wallace wanted was a record of that note for us, and if Hill hadn’t secretly made a copy of it, you may be sure Wallace would have seen to it that a transcription was found ― by me or by you or by someone like Laurel who would take it to us at once. In the end, the clue of the missing T would trap Priam through the new T on Priam’s machine... just as Wallace planned.”

The man beyond Keats permitted himself a slight smile. He was looking down at his glass, modestly.

“And when he realized what was at the back of Priam’s mind,” continued Ellery, “the plan to kill him... Wallace made use of that, too. He took advantage of events so that the biter would be bitten. When I told Wallace what I ‘knew,’ it coincided perfectly with his final move. The only trouble was ― eh, Adam? ― I knew a little too much.”

Wallace raised his glass. Almost it was a salute. But then he put it to his lips and it was hard to say if the gesture had meant anything at all.

Keats stirred, shifting in the comfortable chair as if it were uncomfortable. There was a wagon track between his eyes, leaving his forehead full of ruts.

“I’m not going good tonight, Queen,” he mumbled. “So far this all sounds to me like just theory. You say this man is Charles Adam. You put a lot of arguments together and it sounds great. Okay, so he’s Charles Adam. But how could you have been sure? It’s possible that he wasn’t Charles Adam. That he was John Jones, or Stanley Brown, or Cyril St. Clair, or Patrick Silverstein. I say it’s possible. Show me that it isn’t.”

Ellery laughed. “You’re not getting me involved in a defense of what’s been, not always admiringly, called the ‘Queen method.’ Fortunately, Keats, I can show you that it’s not possible for this man to be anyone else but Charles Adam. Where did he tell us he got the name Alfred Wallace?”

“He said he picked it out of thin air when he got an amnesia attack and couldn’t remember who he was.” Keats glowered. “All of which was horse-radish.”

“All of which was horse-radish,” nodded Ellery, “except the fact that, whatever his name was, it certainly wasn’t Alfred Wallace. He did pick that when he wanted an assumed name.”

“So what? There’s nothing unusual about the name Alfred Wallace.”

“Wrong, Keats. There’s something not only unusual and remarkable about the name Alfred Wallace, but unique.

“Alfred Wallace ― Alfred Russel Wallace ― was a contemporary of Charles Darwin’s. Alfred Wallace was the naturalist who arrived at a formulation of the evolution theory almost simultaneously with Darwin, although independently. In fact, their respective announcements were first given to the world in the form of a joint essay read before the Linnaean Society in 1858, and published in the Society’s Journal the same year. Darwin had drafted the outline of his ‘Theory’ in manuscript in 1842. Wallace, ill with fever in South America, came to the same conclusions and sent his findings to Darwin, which is how they came to be published simultaneously.”

Ellery tapped his pipe against an ashtray. “And here we have a man up to his ears in the Hill-Priam case who carries the admittedly assumed name of Alfred Wallace. A case in which a naturalist named Charles Adam used the theory of evolution ― fathered by Darwin and the nineteenth century Alfred Wallace ― as the basis of a series of clues. Coincidence that the secretary of one of Adam’s victims should select as his alias one of the two names associated with evolution? Out of the billions of possible name combinations? Just as Charles Adam founded his entire murder plan on his scientific knowledge, so he drew an alias out of his science’s past. He would hardly have stooped to calling himself Darwin; the obviousness of that would have offended him. But the name Alfred Wallace is almost unknown to the general public. Perhaps the whole process was unconscious; it would be a delightful irony if this man, who prides himself on being the god of events, should be mortally tripped by his own unconscious mind.”

Keats got up so suddenly that even Wallace was startled.

But the detective was paying no attention to Wallace. In the firelight his fair skin was a pebbled red as he scowled down at Ellery, who was regarding him inquiringly.

“So when you hired him as your secretary, Queen, you knew you were hiring Adam ― a successful killer?”

“That’s right, Keats.”

“Why?”

Ellery waved his dead pipe. “Isn’t it evident?”

“Not a bit. Why didn’t you tell all this to me a long time ago?”

“You haven’t thought it out, Lieutenant.” Ellery stared into the fire, tapping his lips with the stem. “Not a word of this could have been brought out at the trial. Not a word of it constitutes legal evidence. None of it is proof as proof is construed in a court of law. Even if the story could have been spread before the court, on the record, in the absence of legal proof of any of its component parts it would certainly have resulted in a dismissal of a charge against Wallace, and it might even have so garbled things as to get Priam of? too, or sentenced to a punishment that didn’t fit his crime.

“I didn’t want to chance Priam’s squeezing out by reason of sheer complication and confusion, Keats. I preferred to let him get what was coming to him and try to deal with the gentleman in this chair later. And here he’s been for a couple of months, Keats, under my eye and thumb, and I still haven’t found the answer. Maybe you have a suggestion?”

“He’s a damn murderer,” grated Keats. “Granted he got a dirty deal twenty-five years ago... when he took the law into his own hands he became as bad as they were. And if that sounds like a Sunday school sermon, let it!”

“No, no, it’s very true,” said Ellery sadly. “There’s no doubt about that at all, Lieutenant. He’s a bad one. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. But he isn’t talking, and what can you and I prove?”

“A rubber hose―”

“I don’t believe would do it,” said Ellery. “No, Keats, Wallace-Adam is a pretty special problem. Can we prove that he broke the T key on Priam’s typewriter? Can we prove that he suggested the plan behind Priam’s murder of Hill? Can we prove that he worked out the series of death threats against Priam... threats Priam boasted in court he’d sent to himself? Can we prove anything we know this fellow did or said or suggested or planned? A single thing, Keats?”

Wallace looked up at Lieutenant Keats of the Hollywood Division with respectful interest.

Keats glared back at him for fully three minutes.

Then the Hollywood detective reached for his hat, jammed it down over his ears, and stamped out.

The front door made a loud, derisive noise.

And Keats’s car roared down the hill as if the devil were after it.

Ellery sighed. He began to refill his pipe.

“Damn you, Adam. What am I going to do with you?”

The man reached for another of Ellery’s cigarets.

Smiling his calm, secretive, slightly annoying smile, he said, “You can call me Alfred.”