Ellery Queen - A Fine and Private Place

“Hole?” He was chewing away at the Rumanian delicacy, but only out of respect for tradition. “What hole?”

“If Peter Ennis had been the killer, then he sent that final anonymous letter, number 10. But if he was the guilty party that’s the last thing he’d have done. The message instructed us to find out who’d had lunch with Virginia on that certain date… the date that, according to you, began the 9-month waiting period till Virginia could come into Importuna’s estate. Well, that’s the one thing the killer couldn’t possibly have wanted us to find out-the one thing he was trying his damnedest to hide by throwing all those 9s at us! You didn’t think it through far enough, Ellery. As I said, about the only one in the world who wouldn ’t have sent that 10th message was Peter Ennis, if he’d been guilty.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Ellery muttered. “How could I have made a slip like that? It’s ridiculous… But dad, there’s something Virginia recorded Peter as having said to her that afternoon-I think while he was putting her into a cab right after lunch-something that’s stuck in my craw ever since she let me read her diary.”

“What was that?”

“She wrote that he said, ‘There’s only one thing for me to do and, by God, when the time is ripe I’m going to do it.’ Certainly Virginia made no bones about what she thought Peter meant. And I interpreted it the same way: That when the 9 months were up and Virginia’s inheritance was safely hers by will or however, Peter was going to put Importuna out of the way.”

“Son, all that young fellow probably meant was that one of those days he was going to screw up his courage and have a talk with the old guy-stand up like a man to the hubby of the woman he loved and admit what had been going on, and try to convince him to give Virginia her freedom. She let her imagination run away with her, and so did you.”

Ellery made a face, as if he had found a German roach scuttling across his plate. It was not impossible, even the best of New York apartments being what they were, although in this case it happened not to be so.

He set the unfinished pastrami sandwich on the plate and said, “I don’t know what I’m eating this for. I’m not hungry. I’ll clean up, dad.”

The sandwich, like his theory, wound up in the garbage.

Whether Virginia Importuna’s predicted “one of these days”-when it came to pass and turned out to be the 9th day of the following month-was a satire of circumstance or a sly choice of Ellery’s unconscious is a mystery he did not solve and never felt the urge to. However it came about, that Saturday was December 9. He tried very hard to forget the date the moment he became aware of it.

The intervening month since the debacle in Nino Importuna’s bedroom had been a test, if not a positive trial, of his character. He could recall other failures among the happier memories of his past, one or two at least as painful; but this one seemed blended of a curious emotional mishmash of shame, self-disgust, and apprehension about his possibly waning faculties that, he suspected, derived as much from the fool it had made him appear in the eyes of a beautiful and delectable woman as from its own ingredients.

But he had survived it; he had even managed to leave it behind him by plunging into an 18-hour-a-day regimen on his neglected novel and, to his absolute amazement (and that of his publisher and agent), finishing it. Along the way, by a mysterious process which he could only view as alchemical, he solved the Importuna-Importunato case.

At first, not unnaturally under the circumstances, he sniffed about the edges of his new solution like a suspicious cat; he could still taste the bitterness of the old one. But at last he was satisfied; and he made a telephone call, identified himself, and arranged an appointment for that afternoon with the murderer.

Who admitted him with the equanimity Ellery had expected.

“Will you have a drink, Mr. Queen?”

“Hardly,” Ellery said. “For all I know you have a bottle of everything prepoisoned in anticipation of just such an occasion.”

“In case you have a tape recorder hidden on you,” the murderer responded with a smile-”sit down, Mr. Queen, my chairs at least are perfectly safe-I’ve never poisoned anyone in my life.”

“With people like you there’s always a first time,” Ellery said, not smiling back. “You’re sure this chair isn’t electrified? Well, I suppose that would be pretty far out even for you.”

He sat down, and rather to his relief nothing happened.

“What am I supposed to have done, Mr. Queen? Not that I give a damn what you have to say; it can only be theory, not proof. But I confess-no, no, Queen, don’t look so pathetically hopeful-I confess I’m curious.”

“Oh, I imagine once the police know whom and what to look for,” Ellery said, “the proof may come more easily than you think. Anyway, Sam Johnson once said that conjecture as to things useful is good, and could anything be of greater use to this world than putting you out of it?”

“You’ll pardon me if I register a vigorous dissent. You won’t think me rude if I drink alone, will you?” the murderer said, and poured a generous portion of Scotch over some ice cubes. “Now proceed, Queen. Amuse me.”

“I can’t promise to keep you in stitches,” Ellery said, “although I hope to give you a tremor or two.” And he related the theory he had expounded a month before in Nino Importuna’s bedroom, and how the New Milford motel alibi had cleared Peter Ennis and Virginia Importuna and destroyed his lovely solution. “On the other hand, I wasn’t going to let it drop there,” Ellery continued. “I carry the invincible stubbornness of the Irish in my genes. My mind kept worrying it, and finally I got it.”

“Got what?”

“The clue I’d missed.”

“Nonsense,” the murderer said. “There was no clue.”

“Oh, but there was. It was there, plain as anything. So obvious, in fact, that I missed it the first time round. It was in Virginia’s diary, in the account of her lunch with Peter that 9th of December a year ago-by the way, a year ago to the day. There’s prophetic justice for you. You knew Virginia kept a diary, of course?”

“Of course.”

“But she never allowed anyone to read it, and if you were ever tempted to do so without her permission you couldn’t find it--she assured me that she kept her many volumes securely hidden. So you couldn’t have known what Virginia noted in her long entry for that day, I mean the details, among which was the clue I mentioned. In that sense you were guilty of no blunder-I can’t fault you for something you weren’t aware of and couldn’t have foreseen. You’re a clever adversary indeed. One of the cleverest in my experience.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Queen,” the murderer said. “Gallop along on your fairy tale.”

“If it is, it’s a good deal grimmer than Grimm. Everything that I argued Peter had done was actually done by you. You, not Peter, were the one who had to wait 9 months for Virginia to become her husband’s heir. You, not Peter, were the one who saw that by eliminating Nino’s two brothers the fortune Virginia would be coming into would be tripled. So it was you, not Peter, who killed Julio and framed Marco for it.

“I can’t prove evidentially that you planted that gold button from Marco’s yachting jacket on the floor of Julio’s study-it could conceivably have slipped through the hole in his pocket by sheer chance, but I’m always leery of happy accidents that just happen to coincide with a killer’s interests, and I’m perfectly certain you did plant the button. And the shoeprint. And carefully arranged the signs of a struggle in the study. And yes, shifted Julio’s desk about for the reasons I gave at the time of the original investigation, which I shan’t bother to repeat.