The Scarlet Letters

X· Y·

Nikki had seesawed through so many crises that, by the close of that first week in September, she was conscious of nothing more vital than a dizziness and a roaring in her ears. She could not have said what she was typing or even what day it was. Her life these days had the shimmer of a half-remembered dream.

Martha and Dirk floated in and out of a jumble of disconnected sequences. In all that week Nikki could recall no word or look between them. What went on in their bedroom at night she did not know, but in the waking hours their paths crisscrossed without touching, like the orbits of distant stars. Nikki was vaguely grateful. A collision would have sent her screaming into the night.

Remotely, she thought she knew what was happening. Dirk was ignoring Martha in order to control the direction of his life. He could not attend her and survive. And Martha... About Martha, Nikki was in total darkness. Martha got up early and bathed and dressed and fled. She came home, usually after midnight, and crept into bed.

Dirk drove hard toward the climax of his book. Nikki heard him sometimes, long after she had gone to bed, pecking at the typewriter between clinks of a bottle on a glass. It was only toward the end of the week — just before the onset of nightmare — that Nikki realized he was no longer sleeping in the bedroom but was bedding down on the living-room sofa without taking his clothes off. When Martha left in the morning, he went into the bedroom and shut the door.

So matters stood until Friday, the fourth of September — Red Friday, as Nikki ever after remembered it.

On Thursday night, when Martha had got home, she tapped on Nikki’s door.

“No, Mar, it’s all right,” said Nikki. “I wasn’t asleep.”

Martha had not crossed the threshold. “It’s Saturday night, Nikki.”

“What’s Saturday night?”

“The opening. In Bridgeport.”

“Oh! Yes.” Nikki had forgotten all about the opening in Bridgeport. She had forgotten all about the Greenspan play.

“I’m leaving some tickets for you and Ellery and anyone else you’d like to have along. They’ll be at the box office.”

“Aren’t you excited? Thanks, Mar!”

“Will you tell Dirk?”

“Tell him what?”

“About the opening. I’ll leave a ticket for him, too.”

“You mean Dirk doesn’t know—?”

But Martha was gone.

Nikki gave Dirk the message Friday morning, after Martha left. His heavy brows came together painfully, and he said, “Opening?” Then he nodded and turned away.

Martha returned to the apartment just after four.

“Martha, something wrong?” It was so long since Nikki had seen Martha at home in mid-afternoon that she could only think of trouble.

“No,” said Martha coolly. “We’re having the final dress tonight, and I’ve got to change and get up to Bridgeport.”

Martha disappeared in the bedroom and locked the door. Nikki waited until she heard the tub running, then she went back to the study.

“Who was that?” asked Dirk.

“Martha. She’s holding the final rehearsal tonight.”

“In Bridgeport?”

“Of course. The scenery’s all up there and everything, I suppose, and they’ve got to become familiar with the stage—” Nikki knew just what was going through his mind. On the road to Bridgeport lay Darien.

Dirk turned away and after a moment he resumed dictating.

At a few minutes past five the telephone rang. The extension was at her elbow and Nikki picked it up and said absently: “Lawrence residence. Hello?”

“Let me speak to Mrs. Lawrence, please.”

It was Van Harrison.

A sub-Arctic cold gripped Nikki’s throat. She swallowed frantically. “She’s... she’s gone for the day!” She hung up, keeping her hand on the phone. “Go on, Dirk.”

“Who was that?”

“Somebody for Charlotte. Let’s see, now...” As she blindly scanned the lines of typing, she gave silent thanks to the fates that had decreed Friday as Charlotte’s afternoon off. “I don’t know, Dirk, this last paragraph doesn’t seem right to me. How about looking it over while I go out and powder my nose and stuff?”

Before Dirk could say anything, Nikki went out of the study. She closed the door.

She had just reached the foyer when the telephone rang again. She sprang at it before the ring could be repeated.

“I told you—” she began in a fierce undertone.

“Hello?” said a voice.

It was Martha, on the bedroom extension.

“Martha.” Harrison sounded peevish. “Who the devil was that just told me...?”

Nikki heard Martha’s gasp. Then Martha said in a voice so harsh Nikki was confused, “It’s for me, Nikki. Hang up.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mar.” Nikki depressed the bar of the phone. The pulse in her throat was annoying her. Very slowly, she released the bar.

“—knew damn well you were home,” Harrison was complaining. “I phoned you at the theater—”

“Van, are you crazy? Are you crazy?” The harshness was hoarseness now, an ugly sound. “I’m going to hang up—”

“Wait. I want you to come up to the house.”

“I can’t. I’ve got to be in Bridgeport. Van, for God’s sake, hang up!”

“Not till you say you’ll stop in at Darien.” Harrison sounded tender, and amused, too. “Otherwise—”

“All right!” With a whimper, Martha slammed the phone down.

Nikki hung up. She was conscious of no thoughts, just a fear of great dimensions.

She went into the living room and paused to compose herself before opening the door to the study.

While she stood there she heard the clatter of Martha’s high heels crossing the foyer, the quick door, the secretive little snick.

Martha was gone.

Nikki opened the door. “I hope I wasn’t too long—”

Dirk still had the study extension to his ear.

Nikki thought she was going to die. His features held in the rigid expressionlessness of a bronze casting; for one blank moment Nikki thought he was dead.

But then he moved. He took the receiver from his ear and turned his head to look at it. The bronze shattered as he frowned. The phone dropped and dangled over the side of the desk, bumping against a drawer.

Dirk got up, pushing himself from the heels of his hands.

“Dirk. Dirk, wait.”

Nikki heard the voice clearly. She almost turned to look behind her. But then she realized it had been her own.

He came around the desk, striking his thigh against the sharp corner but paying no attention.

“Dirk, where are you going?”

He came soberly across the study, with a sort of thoughtful purpose, as if to touch her, or say something important. When he was one step away, Nikki realized that he did not even know she was there.

“Dirk!” She seized his arm.

He simply walked through her and the doorway and the living room. Nikki hung on. The arm in her grip was swollen and quivering.

He went into the bedroom and over to the bureau and opened the top drawer. After a moment he looked puzzled and hurt.

“Oh, yes,” he said. His face cleared. “He took it.”

“I’ll phone Ellery, Dirk,” Nikki heard herself babbling. “You just wait here. Just one minute. When Ellery gets here—”

His arm moved and Nikki felt something flat and solid come up against her spine and the back of her head with a crash. Dirk wavered and became fluid and then the whole room went under water and after a while Nikki opened her eyes to find herself staring straight up at the plaster cupids around the ceiling fixture.

She scrambled to her feet, looking around wildly.

“Dirk!”

He was not in the bedroom.

“Dirk!”

Or the bathroom.

“Dirk!” Nikki scampered through the apartment, shrieking his name.

But Dirk was gone, too.

The next thing Nikki knew she was railing at the telephone operator in a haughty voice for not hurrying the Darien call, and a woman’s voice was saying in her ear far away, “But the line is busy. Shall I try the number again in a few minutes?”

“Oh, no, damn it,” Nikki heard herself sob, and then, somehow, there was Ellery’s voice, and she was sobbing. “No, Dirk’s left, he’s left, and I can’t get a connection with Darien — the line is busy, busy — I wanted to warn Harrison, head off Martha — he’s probably left the phone off the hook so he won’t be disturbed, damn his soul to hell... he’s getting ready to play the great lover, he’s setting his cheap little stage...”

“Nikki,” said Ellery, “wait, wait.”

But Nikki sobbed: “If he knows about Harrison, he knows where Harrison lives. He’s bound to have looked it up. He’s after them, Ellery, he’s gone after them. He acted so... so—”

“Nikki! Nikki, listen to me,” said Ellery. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Nikki sobbed.

“We’ll have to take the West Side Highway as the shortest route — if I came east and south to pick you up we’d waste time. Get into a cab and come right over here. I’ll be in front of the house in the car. Do you understand, Nikki? Come just as you are. This minute.”

Ellery drove up the West Side Highway at a carefully calculated pace, fast and slow by turns, weaving the car in and out of traffic like a tailor plying his needle.

“Faster, Ellery!”

“No, we don’t want to be picked up. A stop for a ticket might be fatal. Let Dirk take the chances. He’s probably racing.”

“Oh, I hope they stop him, I hope they throw the book at him... You’re sure, Ellery? You’re sure it was still busy?”

“I kept at it until I had to go downstairs. Harrison left the receiver off the hook, all right.”

Traffic lightened after Ellery made the turnoff into the Cross County and Hutchinson River Parkways, but the Westchester police cars were numerous here and he could not step up his speed. Nikki, tearing her nails, kept wondering how he could be so calm. Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Larchmont, Mamaroneck... the signs moved by sluggishly, like a parade of old ladies.

“There he is!” Nikki screamed. A black Buick Roadmaster was drawn up on the grass; a New York State trooper was writing a ticket on the fender. But as Ellery braked past, Nikki saw that the man behind the wheel had an oystershell face and gray hair and fat fair hands with a diamond on one finger.

Then they were in Connecticut, on the Merritt Parkway.

It was interminable. Nikki closed her eyes...

She came to with a start. They were off the Parkway, careening down a narrow twisting blacktop road at high speed.

“You slept.”

“I couldn’t have,” Nikki moaned.

“We’re almost there.”

Dirk’s Buick was up on Harrison’s perfect lawn at a crazy angle, a foot from the stone steps.

The Buick was empty.

The front door of the house stood open.

Ellery sprang up the steps and into Harrison’s living room. A small wiry man in a black suit and bow tie was rattling the telephone. His slant eyes bulged. “I call police,” he said excitedly. “I call police!”

By the time Nikki scrambled in, Ellery was three quarters of the way up the stairs. He was shouting, “Dirk, stop, stop!” Furniture, glass were breaking overhead.

Ellery streaked down the hall to the master bedroom.

Martha lay at the foot of the circular bed. One skirmish in the battle had flung her there. Her dress was disordered; she kept plucking at it witlessly. Her eyes were animal with horror.

Dirk and Van Harrison were fighting up and down the bedroom with fists and knees and teeth. Harrison’s toupee had been torn from his scalp; it hung crazily over one ear. One cheek was scraped and scratched. Dirk’s nose was streaming; some of his blood was on Harrison.

Harrison was in a dressing gown. It was ripped; it kept tripping him up.

The room was a shambles. The mirrored ceiling was smashed in two places; glass was strewn all over the black fur rug. They had been hurling the nude sculptures at each other; the oval picture window beyond the ebony desk was shattered where a nymph had gone through, and fragments of broken statuary littered the room. A chair lay in pieces. Two lamps had been knocked over, and some of the photographs had fallen from the walls.

Ellery lowered his chin and charged.

For a moment the struggle was three-cornered. He had managed to get between them and they were both tearing at him, snarling like dogs. They punched and strained and lurched and clawed across the room to the desk and knocked the portable typewriter to the floor. A fist hit Ellery and he stumbled over the typewriter and staggered backwards, trying to keep his balance. His head slammed against the wall and he slid to the floor, dazed, beside the bed.

From this position, as helpless as Nikki frozen in the doorway on the other side of the bed, Ellery watched the climax of the nightmare.

The collision of the three thrashing bodies with the desk had shoved open the flat middle drawer.

When Ellery could focus, he saw Van Harrison on the rug before the desk, clutching his groin, his lips curled in agony. Dirk was prone on the desk, where he had been flung in the last savage exchange. His right arm was stretched out and lay in the open drawer. His mouth was open and the blood from his nose dripped over his bruised lips and chin and stained his teeth.

Ellery saw Dirk’s head come around and fix on something in the drawer which his hand was touching. His hand came up and his body came up after it, and he looked down at the thing he was clutching.

It was Harrison’s .22.

Harrison lurched to his feet, plunged. Dirk shot five times. Red holes appeared at Harrison’s throat, chest, abdomen. Two of the bullets dissolved the mirror over the bureau.

Martha screamed.

Dirk turned in a glassy way toward the bed. The gun went off again, and again, and again, and again. After the ninth shot there were no more explosions, but he kept squeezing the trigger.

Ellery staggered to his feet.

“You fool. You fool.”

Martha lay on Harrison’s bed as if she had been flung there from a great height. A convulsion of arms and legs stilled as Ellery turned to her. Red stains were spreading swiftly over her head and dress. He bent over her. He could hear her breath.

There was a thud behind him, and he turned. The revolver had slipped from Dirk’s hand. Dirk toppled to the floor and lay quiet.

“Nikki.”

Nikki did not move.

“Nikki.” Ellery stepped over Dirk’s legs, skirted Harrison’s body, went around the bed to the doorway and slapped Nikki’s face, hard. She whimpered and put her hand to her cheek. “Go downstairs now. Get on the phone. Call the hospital — Stamford or Norwalk. Emergency. She’s still alive. Then call the police if Tama hasn’t got through.” He talked in a loud, clear voice, as if she were hard of hearing.

He spun her around and pushed.

Nikki stumbled along the hall and groped her way down the stairs.

Ellery turned to face back into the room and almost fainted.

Van Harrison, who should have been dead, was on his hands and knees, inching his way toward the wall, dyeing the black rug as he moved. He reached the wall and clawed at it. Mewing sounds were coming from his torn throat. The effort brought on a hemorrhage, and he collapsed at the baseboard, his face pressed against the white leather.

“Stop!” Ellery sprang across the room. “Harrison, don’t move again. Don’t move. They’ll be here for you soon—”

The actor raised his face a little, and Ellery saw his eyes. They were trying to express something his shattered throat could not — the certain imminence of death, perhaps, and something else Ellery could not define at all.

Harrison’s fingers fluttered to his chest, his abdomen, as if to specify his wounds and mark them clear. Blood got all over his hand. He looked down at it, surprised. Then something new came into his eyes, a look — Ellery would have sworn — of pleasure.

Harrison rolled over to face the wall.

He hemorrhaged again.

“For God’s sake, Harrison, lie still.”

The actor raised his bloody hand with the other, steering it to the wall, holding it there. His forefinger was stiffly pointed.

The finger made a shaky, downward, diagonal red stroke on the white leather, from upper right to lower left:

He was trying to write something.

His hand dropped and fumbled at his stomach.

Red ink, thought Ellery. He’s going for more red ink.

Ellery dropped to his knees, He braced Harrison at the armpits The replenished finger came slowly up and wrote again, another downward diagonal which began this time at the upper left and wobbled to the lower right, crossing the first mark en route:

Washington Market... Washington... W. The last meeting with Martha had been W in Harrison’s code.

W... X...

Again. He was struggling again.

He wanted to write more.

Ellery helped him. He helped dip the rigid finger in fresh blood. He raised the heavy arm, held it steady.

Another downward stroke. Beside the X. A stroke exactly like the first:

And still another:

As the last downward stroke reached the diagonal, Harrison’s body heaved in a great backward surge, as if he had been caught in an outgoing wave. He remained bridged in Ellery’s arms, stiffly riding the wave, for a heartbeat or two, then his breath came out in a red spume and he went under.

All through that night, and through the timeless time that followed that night, Ellery was inhabited by a ghost. The ghost had a dripping finger, and the finger kept redly writing over and over the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth letters of the alphabet. It covered every surface of the inner man with its cryptic symbols, until Ellery thought he must burst with its corruption.

And he failed to exercise it.

Afterwards, when he looked back, it seemed to him that many confusing things had happened on that night, in all of which he comported himself with gravity and dignity and no faintest grasp of the issues. He had the clear recollection that the Darien police came, and the state police, and the county people from Bridgeport; that Martha was taken to Norwalk Hospital under guard and put immediately on the operating table; that Dirk Lawrence was whisked away, his mouth fish-like, unable to utter an intelligible word; that the wrecked bedroom and the ruins of Harrison were photographed and measured and the body carted out under the eye of the County Coroner; that newspaper people from New York City and various Connecticut towns and cities gathered rapidly in swarms over the lawns, hammered at doors, popped flash bulbs, attracted great clouds of mosquitoes and millers and crunchy beetles; that he was interrogated over and over, and Nikki, and the Japanese houseman; that some time during the night his father materialized at his side and remained there, pale and wary; that at one point Leon Fields appeared and by some magic won a few minutes alone with him; that at dawn he and Nikki and Tama — and the Inspector — were seated in some office in Bridgeport talking to the State’s Attorney, who wore a jacket over his undershirt and no socks... All these things Ellery remembered, yet he could not have repeated the slightest significant detail of the night past the point when Van Harrison died in his arms. Everything was clouded over by a red fog composed of X’s and Y’s, like a sort of bloody alphabet soup vaporized and darkening the air.

XY...

The scarlet letters.

He had a vague inverted view of himself standing before the leather wall like a professor at a fancy whiteboard, pointing to the bloody XY and explaining patiently Harrison’s code, up to and including the brief meeting at Washington Market; but even that had no real existence, because he had been unable to tell them why Harrison had fought death back in order to paint those symbols on his wall.

There was another memory, of Nikki and the Inspector and himself standing inside the screening curtains surrounding a bed in the emergency room of the Norwalk Hospital, watching Martha breathe. There was very little of her to see, because of the bandages on her face and the tight hospital precision of the sheets, with other bandages beneath. It seemed to Ellery that Nikki had kept saying over and over, above the noisy engine behind the bandages, that Martha needed a specialist, a specialist, and that he had kept assuring Nikki the specialist was there, at the other side of the bed, and a number of other very competent medical men, too. And that somebody told them it was touch and go, but while there was life there was hope. And that now they really must go.

But that memory was all mixed up with Nikki’s eyes turning over as her knees buckled. And then there was the long drive home... Nikki curled up in his own bed... the reporters... and, much later, the inquest...

The next day Nikki went back to Norwalk, where she took a room. Martha was still alive; the hospital people said this as if it were very good news. She could not be seen. Nikki camped in the corridor.

The only reality of that time was Van Harrison, who was dead. XY...

Yes, the next meeting place was to have been code X — a Mexican restaurant on West 46th Street. And after that, code Y — the great playing field of the New York Yankees.

But why should the next two meeting places have seized and held Harrison’s dying attention? Was something to have taken place as a result of those meetings — something unprecedented which Harrison wanted Ellery to learn?

Ellery went down to West 46th Street and he stood outside the Xochitl Restaurant, with its green neon sign and its kneeling Indian figure and its front window surrounded by creamy green tile. And he shook his head, and went in, and made inquiries, and came away in the same red-toned darkness. Van Harrison was not known there. Martha Lawrence was not known there.

And Yankee Stadium? He went to Yankee Stadium, and he talked with club officials, and he went away still shaking his head. No one there knew anything about Van Harrison or Martha Lawrence beyond the outpourings of the newspapers.

XY...

The papers were calling it “the Scarlet Letters Murder,” with that affinity of the press for the elegantly mysterious. It was a rich case for the newspapers. A cameraman for one of the tabloids had put a ladder against the terrace wall and taken a flash shot through the shattered oval window at a dramatic moment. The ambulance men were just raising Martha onto the stretcher, and Harrison’s riddled corpse was in focus to one side. The Scarlet Letters Murder... They called it other names, too, not so literary.

And some of them, jumping the gun, pluralized “Murder.”

XY...

When the trial began, Ellery knew no more of the meaning of Harrison’s dying message than he had known at the moment Harrison wrote it.

And for all the tons of newsprint which had been dedicated to the subject, not one word — and Ellery read all the words — suggested a single plausible line of speculation.

It was going to be a short trial. Everyone agreed on that — Darrell Irons, the famous trial lawyer who had been retained to defend Dirk Lawrence, the State’s Attorney’s office, Judge Levy, the newspapers, and — somewhat to their disappointment — the jury. There was no question about the nature of the crime; the only question was of the social advisability of the punishment. It was not a “lawyer’s case,” but a jury’s.

Should a man be convicted of murder who has caught his wife and her lover in an adulterous relationship?

Darrell Irons’s defense was the Unwritten Law.

“The Unwritten Law,” Irons told the jury in his opening, “assumes that a measure of immunity shall be granted those guilty of certain criminal acts, especially of those acts arising out of the natural and even noble desire of a man to avenge his honor when it is besmirched by seduction or adultery.

“In this case you will in your humane wisdom be deliberating whether a young husband may not be forgiven for blindly lashing out, in a moment of agonized revelation, at the betrayer of his good name and at the conscienceless love-bandit who seduced her into a sordid bedroom romance and with whom she committed repeated acts of adultery. There is no greater affront to a husband’s manhood than to find his wife in the arms of another man. You will not, I think, punish this husband for doing what any man or woman of you might have done in his place under similar circumstances. Let the husbands among you, ladies and gentlemen, imagine finding their wives in the bedroom of another man; let the wives imagine finding their husbands in the bedroom of another woman...

“As a law-abiding citizen as well as a member of the bar I hold with the State that human life may not be taken with impunity. But while laws are just, men are understanding and merciful; and in this case I say to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look into yourselves, study the evidence as to the provocation, consider the damning circumstances, and you will surely find this betrayed and unhappy young man not guilty.”

Irons then briefly stated the facts that the defense would prove, and he sat down with the indulgent air of an adult who has just been assigned an exercise in child’s play.

The State opened its case by presenting the testimony of various law officers, putting into evidence official photographs of the victims and the scene, identification of the murder weapon, ballistics testimony linking the identified murder weapon with the bullets found in the victims’ bodies, the Coroner’s findings, the testimony of the Eye Witnesses — one Ellery Queen and one Nikki Porter, both of New York City — as to the actual events of the shooting... all the details necessary to prove what everyone in the courtroom granted in advance: That on the night of Friday, September the fourth, at or about seven-forty-five P.M., the defendant, Dirk Lawrence, thirty-three years old, by profession writer, of such-and-such a number Beekman Place in New York City, and husband of Martha Lawrence, had shot and killed one Van Harrison, actor, and seriously wounded said Martha Lawrence, his wife — so that her death also might ensue at any hour — in the master bedroom of said Harrison’s home in the Town of Darien, County of Fairfield, State of Connecticut.

Irons’s cross-examination was restricted to the testimony of Ellery and Nikki.

Part of Ellery’s direct testimony had included the incident of Dirk’s Army .45 automatic — a transparent attempt on the part of the State to lay the groundwork for premeditation. On cross-examination Irons went carefully to work on this point, eliciting from Ellery the ultimate fate of the .45, and stressing again the fact that the accused had followed the guilty wife to the fatal rendezvous carrying no weapon except his two bare hands.

Irons’s case was in two parts. The first presented the jury with the clear and overwhelming facts of Martha’s infidelity. This Irons did largely through Ellery and Nikki, who found themselves in the curious position of being witnesses for both sides. Into the record went the numerous details of Ellery’s black notebook, naming dates and places of meeting he had witnessed between the wounded woman and her dead lover, beginning with the rendezvous in Room 632 of the A—Hotel; identification and reading of the bundle of love letters signed by Martha and discovered in the bottom drawer of Harrison’s bedroom desk; identification of certain feminine garments found in one of the two closets of Harrison’s bedroom as having been the property of Martha Lawrence — it was a long recital, and through it all Ellery carefully avoided looking at Dirk, who sat catatonically in his chair hour after hour, staring at the flag behind the judge’s chair. Nikki testified to the code letters and the marked guidebook (which had never been found); she also identified the clothing found in Harrison’s bedroom closet. And, under Irons’s surgical questions, Nikki went over the preliminaries of the afternoon and evening of September fourth — the rash telephone call from Harrison, Martha’s panic and hasty departure, Dirk’s overhearing and reaction, the SOS call to Ellery, their futile chase to Connecticut.

Irons also called Tama Mayuko, who testified to at least five separate occasions on which he had admitted Martha Lawrence to Harrison’s house and witnessed her retirement with the actor to his bedroom.

The second part of Darrell Irons’s defense was devoted lovingly to Harrison. The lawyer called a parade of witnesses — in some cases the courtroom was cleared of spectators, in others testimony was given in chambers — who testified to Harrison’s numerous amours with married women preceding his affair with Mrs. Lawrence. Irons put into evidence the figures of Harrison’s meager earnings from his profession during recent years; he put into evidence Harrison’s savings bank accounts and the contents of several safedeposit boxes, showing large accumulations of cash unaccounted for by his legitimate earnings and unreported in his income tax returns. And the lawyer connected Martha’s withdrawals of cash with identical sums deposited in Harrison’s numerous accounts...

At the close of Friday’s session, Dirk’s lawyer had still not finished painting the dead actor in his full gigolo colors. He promised more — much more — for Monday.

Dirk was taken back to his cell in the county jail on Bridgeport’s North Avenue, and Ellery and Nikki drove to Norwalk Hospital. Martha’s condition was unchanged; she was alive under heavy sedation, and that was all. They were allowed to peep into her room for five seconds. Her eyes were open, but she seemed not to recognize them. Her doctors had refused pointblank both Irons’s and the State’s Attorney’s formal requests to take a statement from her.

Ellery persuaded Nikki to return with him to New York for the weekend.

Saturday began badly. The phone rang, the buzzer buzzed, all morning. Ellery, who had planned a quiet day for Nikki, spirited her away from West 87th Street and they went to Central Park.

They drifted for sweltering hours with no conversation. When Nikki’s step lagged, Ellery found a place for her under a shade tree, and she dozed with her head in his lap. Occasionally she moaned.

XY...

He could not get it out of his mind.

Nothing had been made of it in court, by either side. It had been put into the record and dismissed as the irrelevant meandering of a dying brain.

But Ellery remembered the incredible effort, worthy of a meaning. It was relevant. Of this he was certain.

What could Harrison have meant to convey?

When Nikki woke up, they strolled across the park, and in late afternoon they found themselves among the beautiful little buildings of the park zoo. They found a table on the terrace overlooking the seal pool, and Ellery went into the cafeteria and came back with sandwiches and milk, and they sat there munching and sipping and watching the scampering children and the crowds about the tall monkey cages and the seals.

And finally Nikki said with a sigh, “I’m glad we came, Ellery. It’s always so restful at the zoo.”

“What?” said Ellery.

“The zoo,” Nikki repeated. “I love that word, don’t you? There’s no other word like it in the English language. It’s a fun-word, but to me a quiet fun-word. Even when I was growing up in Kansas City and Papa took me sometimes to the zoo in Swope Park, it didn’t mean racing-around-fun so much as looking-with-your-mouth-open-fun, and dreaming about zebras and monkeys for days afterward... What did you say?”

“Zoo,” Ellery muttered again. “Zoo.”

He was sitting straight.

Nikki looked at him, astonished. “Well, of course,” she began. “That’s what I just—”

“Zoo... I’d forgotten about that!”

“Forgotten about what, Ellery?”

“Z. The last code-letter indicated in Harrison’s book.”

The look of pleasure left Nikki’s face, and she turned away.

But Ellery went on, raptly. “Harrison wrote the letters X and Y. And then he died. Suppose, Nikki... suppose he hadn’t finished?”

And now Nikki frowned. “You mean he meant to add Z, but died before he could?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I guess that could be...”

“It has to be! As XY, it makes no sense.”

“XYZ... I can’t see that XYZ makes any more sense than XY.”

“It’s an ending,” said Ellery, waving his arms. “The ending. The ending of Harrison’s code... the ending of Harrison.”

“What,” sighed Nikki, “are you talking about?”

Ellery glanced at his watch. “It’s too late to get up there today—”

“Get up where today, Ellery?”

“To the zoo.”

“You’re in the zoo!”

“Not Harrison’s zoo,” said Ellery. “Harrison’s zoo in his code book was the zoo in Bronx Park. And that, Nikki, is just where I’m going first thing tomorrow morning.”

“But what on earth do you expect to find there?”

Ellery looked blank. “I haven’t any idea.”

Some friends took Nikki away to Long Island for a day’s boating, the Inspector had to be at Headquarters on a hot homicide, so on Sunday Ellery drove off alone. He was rather glad it had worked out that way.

It was a dreary day with heavy gray skies and an advance guard of thunderheads over the Palisades. It matched his mood, although he worried about Nikki. Portents seemed in the air.

He squirmed behind the wheel as he inched along the West Side Highway. His skin itched.

XYZ... It was possible. It was even likely.

But then what?

Ellery felt dogged. Z was the end. It completed the circle. So you hooked onto the merry-go-round and went along for the ride. Maybe there was a ring—?

He had never felt so foolish.

He left the express highway at Dyckman Street and drove north on Broadway to 207th Street. There was little traffic on the streets. He turned east on 207th and followed Fordham Road into Pelham Parkway and the Concourse Gate of the Bronx Zoo.

He left his car in the parking circle beyond the entrance and began his aimless odyssey. He felt a little more like Jurgen than Odysseus — searching for he knew not what. But Odysseus had adventured with swine; and because one objective was as good as another, Ellery set a leisurely course for the southwest corner of the park, where the wild swine rooted. He was that desperate.

On the way he paused at the Lion House to admire the big tankfuls of tropical fish in the Aquarium. He passed the Children’s Zoo and the camels and elephants and rhinos. He almost went into the Question House at the solicitation of the sign. Would they know, he wondered, what Van Harrison had meant by his X and his Y and his probable Z? He decided they would not, and he went on.

The wild swine depressed him. Pigs with tusks. They gave him nothing.

He went on, bearing east.

And there were the kangeroos and the giraffes and the cavies, the bongos and the okapi, the great apes and the wild goats and the thrilling spread of the African Plains, where lions roamed apparently free.

And he wondered what he was doing there.

And so he turned north by west, and he visited with the panting polar bears and the biggest carnivores in the entire known universe, according to the description of the Alaska brown bears. And they gave him less than nothing, unless it was a feeling of relief at the steel bars that stood between him and them. And he viewed the moose and Père David’s Deer and the Heads and Horns Museum, and the Monkey House and the sea lions and the Administration Building — and there he was, back at the parking space, having gone the great circle from nothing to nothing.

Ellery got into his car angrily and drove toward the main gate.

A line of cars waited to swing into Pelham Parkway. He crawled along, simmering as he stopped and started.

A park workman was busy at the gate, and because there was nothing else to do Ellery watched him. The workman was wielding a paint-brush on the faded lettering of the entranceway sign. NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL-something, it said. The painter was working over the first L.

Ellery sat up. But then he slumped again.

He wondered what was holding up the line, and he stuck his head out. Two cars had locked bumpers.

He settled back for another wait, and his glance returned to the sign painter.

L. O...

The painter started on the G.

And there came a stroke, as of lightning, and the heavens proclaimed alarums and excursions, and the rains came...

The painter shook his head, gathered his buckets and his brushes, and went away.

Ellery became aware of a great honking and beeping behind him. He looked up, blankly. There was nothing before him. He drove into Pelham Parkway.

Lightning again. And sweet thunder.

He drove in a daze, circling until he approached the entrance again, and driving slowly past the unfinished sign to gaze with wonder at the running paint. And he drove back to the parking circle, and he got out, and he walked reverently in the pelting rain back to the entrance — back to stare up at the sign and admire how the heavens opened and emptied.

A sign, a sign.

Ellery came to at a tap on his arm.

“You the owner of that car in the parking circle?” It was a park attendant. “It’s past closing.”

Ellery looked at his watch. It was almost seven o’clock. He had been standing at the entrance in the rain for almost two hours.

“We’ve been laying bets on you, Mister,” said the attendant, matching strides with him. “Anybody stands in the rain like he was under a shower on a hot day is either waiting for a date or he’s doping the horses for tomorrow’s races. Or is something wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Something wrong?”

“Well, yes and no. It’s wrong and it’s right.”

The attendant shook his head. He said disconsolately, “Then I guess all bets are off,” and he stared after Ellery until Ellery got into his car and drove out of the park.

It was wrong and it was right.

Exactly.

Ellery drove by habit, unconscious of direction or destination. And as he drove he went over the ground for the tenth time, from the beginning.

Yes, it was right. It was wrong, too, but now the important thing was the rightness.

All I need now, he was thinking, is evidence. Evidence that will stand up in court. Evidence to satisfy the State’s Attorney and the judge and the jury.

If it exists.

If it can be found.

If it can be found in time.

He began to feel depressed again.

The fact that he now knew what Van Harrison had meant by his bloody printing no longer seemed important.

The important thing was: Could he prove it?