Ellery Queen - A Fine and Private Place

“Oh, come on, now,” Inspector Queen said. “That makes the guy a nut.”

“Of course. Who but a magnificent nut could make that much money? Do you know that he wouldn’t buy a set of books unless it consisted of 9 volumes, or 18, or 27, or some other multiple of 9? In his apartment you can find everything from Extinct Birds of the New Hebrides to History of Gynecology. Apparently to Importuna the important thing in his books was not their subject or contents, but their number.”

“Look,” his father said. “He was a nut about 9s. So all right. What I still want to know is, How are 9s going to help us poor flatfeet find his killer? How do the 9s enter into his murder?”

“Ah,” Ellery said, as if he had caught the old man by a debating point. “I don’t know how they’re going to help us find his killer, but that they enter into his murder is a fact. Is several facts, in fact.”

“Say, that’s right, isn’t it?” the Inspector muttered. “I didn’t put 2 and 2, I mean 4 and 5, or 6 and 3-ah, forget it!-together. The time of the murder-”

“That’s one of them, yes. The blow that struck Importuna’s wristwatch during the attack stopped the watch at 9 minutes past 9 o’clock. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen the watch myself. And by the way, it’s no accident that when Nino ordered that watch made for him he stipulated, as I’m sure he did, the use of rubies. Rubies, along with garnets and bloodstones, are considered lucky stones by people who are influenced by that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, you garner the luck when you wear the lucky gems next to your skin. Nothing can get closer to your skin than a wristwatch.”

The Inspector was not so much silent as speechless. But finally he managed to say, “And the number of blows.”

“Right, 9 distinct and separate skull fractures, from 9 blows. And Doc Prouty says he had to have been dead well before the 9th blow was delivered.”

“But that’s all the 9s in the murder.”

“That’s not all the 9s in the murder, dad. The weapon, that abstraction in cast iron. With that graceful loopy curve? Didn’t you notice it has the general appearance of a number 9?

“So that’s three 9-elements in the murder itself,” Ellery declaimed to his feet as he blundered about pulling his nose, “and I refuse to accept even the mathematical possibility that they were coincidences. Death at 9:09 p.m., caused by a weapon in the shape of a 9, a weapon moreover that struck Importuna’s head 9 times… “ Ellery shook his own head so vigorously it made his father’s neck ache. “There’s only one explanation that satisfies me: The killer, fully informed of Importuna’s all-inclusive faith in the mystic qualities of 9, went out of his way to surround Importuna’s murder-to infuse it, identify it, call attention to it-with 9s. I’m almost tempted to say, although I don’t quite know why, to bury it under a pile of them. Note that he didn’t have to hit his victim’s head 9 times-Importuna was dead well before, according to the M.E.

“Was he satisfying his own passion for fantasy, for grotesquerie, some bizarre sense of the fitness of things, even things like murder? Nino having lived by the 9, so to speak, the murderer thought he ought to die by the 9 as well?”

“I don’t believe it,” the Inspector snorted. “That would make Importuna’s killer as cracked as Importuna. Two nuts in one case is one too much for me to swallow, Ellery.”

“I’m with you.”

“You are?” his father said, astounded.

“Certainly. Whatever else he is, the man who planned and executed that cock-eyed murder of Julio and then, after Marco hanged himself, pulled this 9 murder of Nino is a brain-a twisted brain, maybe, but a mighty sharp one. By killing Nino in the way he did, he threw those 9s in our faces. I can almost hear him laughing. Still, I get the queasy feeling that… “

“He’s crazy!”

“You just said he can’t be.”

“So I’ve changed my mind,” the old man exclaimed. “You know, a case like this could drive a whole police force nutty?”

Little did he know that the nuttiness had barely got off the ground.

And-in the stately language of the Inspector’s youth-had he but known, he might have turned in his shield on the spot, dragging Ellery with him into the blessed crimelessness of some unsuspected isle of the poet’s, in far-off seas.

The first of the anonymous messages (they could not be classified as anonymous letters since some were not written communications) arrived by first-class mail on the morning of Tuesday, September 19. It had been posted the previous day-the date on the envelope was September 18-somewhere in the area served by the Grand Central postal station. The envelope was the ordinary medium-sized stamped type purchasable at any United States post office from Maine to Hawaii. It was addressed to Inspector Richard Queen, New York Police Department, Centre Street, New York, N.Y. 10013. The address had been inscribed, the experts said, by one of the hundreds of millions of blue-ink ball-point pens in daily use throughout the civilized world, and for that matter in some places not civilized. The writing was not script, which might have given them something to work on, but block-printed capital letters so meticulously featureless that they had no distinguishable character whatever and consequently provided nothing at all to work on.

The first comment Inspector Queen made when he saw the contents of the envelope was, “Why me?” The question was not altogether Joblike, in spite of the “0 Lord” he was tempted to tack onto it. There were numerous other department brass involved in the Importuna investigation, some considerably more elevated in the hierarchy of command than Richard Queen. “Why me?” indeed? It seemed to portend fine deductions if only its inner meaning could be penetrated. But no one was to answer it until Ellery answered the other questions, too.

Curiously, there was not the smallest hesitation on the part of the Inspector in connecting the September 18th communication, cryptic as it appeared to the uninitiated, with the Importuna murder. He linked them instantly, without benefit of Ellery, so well had he been briefed in the 9-ness of the case.

The Grand Central Station point of origin led nowhere (although later-after Ellery pointed out that its zip code was 10017, and that in all likelihood future messages from the anonymous sender would come through post offices whose zip codes also added up to 9-there were hopes that stakeouts at such stations might result in a lucky grab. Succeeding messages from Anonymous did indeed come through the Triborough station, 10035, the Church Street station, 10008, and the Morningside station, 10026, but Anonymous remained ungrabbed).

No fingerprints or other identifiable marks were found on the contents of any of the envelopes. As for the envelopes themselves, what latents the print men developed could not be matched with the finger impressions of anyone directly or indirectly connected with Importuna, the Importunatos, or Importuna Industries. They were eventually proved to have got on the envelopes through routine handling by specific postmen and postal clerks. An automatic check-out of the civil service employees involved turned up none with even a remote link to the Importuna family or organization.

When it was generally acknowledged that the first communication (“If you can call it that!” Inspector Queen groused to one of his superiors) was from the murderer they were massively seeking, the order came down from on high to keep its arrival and contents, indeed its very existence, confidential within the department, and even there only on a restricted need-to-know basis. Word was passed along from the office of the First Deputy Commissioner himself that any violation of this order resulting in a leak to the press or broadcast media would immediately be turned over to the Deputy Commissioner-Trials for severe disciplinary action. When other messages in the vein of the first were received, the injunction was repeated in even stronger terms.