Ellery Queen - A Fine and Private Place

“The way it appears to me, what happened was this (I’m tempted to say, Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the feeling you won’t): you had the frame-up of Marco planned to the last detail-the planting of his button and his readily identifiable shoeprint in the cigar ashes from the deliberately upset ashtray; and, of course, the left-handed blow with the poker. You planned the left-handed assault on Julio frontally, across his desk, at which he was seated facing you. Unfortunately for the best-laid plans, just as you were about to bring the poker crashing down on target, Julio, in an instinctive attempt to dodge the blow, spun around in the swivel chair a full 180°, so that the back of his head was to you at the instant of impact, the descending poker landing on exactly the opposite side of his head from the side you’d aimed at to indicate left-handedness.

“Before you grasped the implications of what you were doing, because you were still intent on your plan, you turned Julio’s body back around to the original facing position. This caused his head to fall forward on the desk and his blood to drip over the blotter. Too late you realized that you’d now made it appear-because of the turnaround, and where the blood was dripping, and so on-as if Julio’s killer were right-handed. You couldn’t swivel the body back, because the presence and location of the bloodstains on the desk would give away the fact that the body had been turned after the blow. What could you do to reinstate your left-handedness clue? You solved the problem by leaving Julio’s body as it then was-that is, head resting forward on the desk-but moving both the desk and the swivel chair-cum-body from its original catercornered position to the position from which a left-handed blow could have been delivered.”

“That’s all pretty devious,” the murderer said, smiling again.

“You’ve a devious mind,” Ellery said. “Very much like mine, in fact. Oh, another feature of your frame-up of Marco: those signs of a struggle you left for us. There’d been, of course, no struggle at all, as Marco truthfully assured us. But you had to dress your set in such a way as to justify the overturning of the ashtray in order to plant the • shoeprint clue, and an apparent struggle between Julio and Marco provided the obvious justification. You knew of the bad feeling then existing between Nino’s two brothers because of Julio’s failure to agree on the Canadian oil-lands proposal, and from bad feeling to hand-to-hand combat appeared to you-as you were confident it would appear to the police-a logical next step.

“The truth is,” Ellery went on, stretching his long legs so far that his shoe tips almost touched the murderer’s, “the truth is your frame-up of Marco was by far the clumsiest thing you’ve done. Well, it was your maiden crime. But even in your clumsiness you were lucky. Marco was the weak sister-so to speak-of the brothers; he wasn’t strong or stable enough to stand up under the pressures you thoughtfully exerted, especially when he was so drunk. So he did a better job of it than you did: he obligingly hanged himself, giving the police the perfect straw to grasp: that Maxco killed Julio and committed suicide in drunken remorse. This was precisely what you wanted the police to think in the first place.

“As for how you got into 99 East for the murder of Julio without being reported,” Ellery continued in the same amiable way, “I can only conjecture. But with your peculiar relationship to the principals, I imagine you had pretty much the run of the premises, so that your comings and goings would hardly be noticed. In any event, before you murdered Julio no crimes had been committed at 99 East, so there was no particular reason for anyone to keep a sharp eye out. Apparently you weren’t seen either on your way in or your way out; you managed to slip by the guard.

“To get into 99 East for the Nino Importuna murder you had a different problem. The building had been the scene of a murder and suicide by that time; everyone was security conscious. It’s possible, of course, that in spite of that you managed to get by the guard unseen, but I’m inclined to think there’s a handier explanation, in which your lucky star played a prominent role. Earlier that evening-how odd! it was 9 o’clock or thereabouts-Virginia had lowered the ladder from the penthouse roof to the roof of the adjoining apartment house one story below in order to slip out for a rendezvous with Peter Ennis. She necessarily left the ladder in the lowered position for her return. You knew nothing about her tryst with Peter; what you were after was a way to get past Gallegher up into the penthouse without being spotted. So you did the logical thing and made for the roof of the adjoining building, too. This was, of course, hours after Virginia had left; just before midnight. To your surprise, there was the ladder, ready to be climbed; whatever device you had brought along to scale that one-story difference now wasn’t needed. You climbed the ladder, murdered Nino, and used the same route for your escape, which took place long before the 3:30 a.m. of Virginia’s return from Connecticut. You wouldn’t have thought it such good luck, I’m afraid, if you’d had any inkling that Virginia had used that ladder earlier in the evening to go off with Peter, as I’ll demonstrate in a moment.”

The murderer was very sober now.

“Access to the two Importunato apartments and the Importuna penthouse apartment was almost certainly attained by the use of duplicate keys; your affiliation with the principals made it easy for you to procure them. I postulate duplicate keys rather than an inside confederate because you’re far too smart an operator to place yourself in some underling’s power to blackmail you later, especially with such munificence at stake.”

“No wonder you’ve made your living as a detective-story writer,” the murderer remarked. “You have an imagination that’s not only agile but double-jointed.”

“Thanks for bringing me to the essential point,” Ellery said graciously. “You’ve just confirmed a conclusion I reached before I set up this meeting: You’re an A student of character, and you took a graduate course in mine. Now come, you can admit that, can’t you?”

“As a matter of principle,” the murderer murmured, “I admit nothing. Except that this performance of yours is better than anything playing Broadway, Queen, and it’s a lot cheaper.”

“The ultimate price to you,” Ellery retorted, “will make the scalpers look like philanthropists. At least I hope so.

“But to get back to your study of my character: The minute you found out that I was taking a hand in Julio’s murder-you weren’t on the scene when I was, but you did keep pumping poor old Peter, didn’t you?-you decided that you had to get to know me inside and out. You read my books, I don’t doubt; studied some typical cases I’d worked on. You came to the conclusion, correctly, that I’m lured like a fish by the colorful as opposed to the drab and routine; that I’m drawn to the subtle rather than the straightforward; that by temperament I lean toward the complicated in preference to the simple; in the language of the vulgate, I’m a pushover for the fancy stuff. So… you plotted your course to go through a complex maze, knowing I’d follow it nose down with a whoop and a holler, and that I’d arrive ultimately at the prize you’d planted for me.

“You took the obligatory-9-months-until-inheritance clue and deliberately tied it in to Nino Importuna’s 9-supersti-tion. You’ve been responsible for obfuscating everything with those illusory 9s. And that was ‘a fearful sin,’ as Father Brown called it. You know Father Brown? My favorite clergyman of fact or fiction. ‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf?’ he wants to know. And he answers himself: ‘In the forest. But what does he do when there is no forest?… He grows a forest to hide it in. A fearful sin.’ And that’s what you did. You grew a forest.