Ellery Queen - The Origin of Evil

“With Wallace guarding him. I offered a cop, and I nearly got beaned with the Examiner. It was all I could do to make Priam promise he’d keep his doors locked from now on. At that, he didn’t promise.”

“How about that background stuff? On the partners?”

The detective crushed the stained butt in his fist and flipped it in the fireplace. “It’s like pulling teeth,” he said slowly. “I don’t get it. I put two more men on it yesterday.” He snapped a fresh cigaret into his mouth. “The way I see it, Mr. Queen, we’re doing this like a couple of country constables. We’ve got to go right to the horse’s mouth. Priam’s got to talk. He knows the whole story, every answer. Who his enemy is. Why the guy’s nursed a grudge for so many years. Why the fancy stuff―”

“And what was in the box,” murmured Ellery.

“Correct. I promised Dr. Voluta I’d lay off Priam today.” Keats clapped his hat on his head. “But tomorrow I think I’m going to get tough.”

When the detective had left, Ellery wandered out into the hall. The house was moody with silence. Crowe Macgowan had gone loping over to the Hill house to tell Laurel all about the amphibian invasion. The door to Priam’s quarters was shut.

There was no sign or sound of Delia. She was going to her room to lock herself in, she had said, and lie down. She had seemed to have no further interest in her husband’s condition. She had looked quite ill.

Ellery turned disconsolately to go, but then ― or perhaps he was looking for an excuse to linger ― he remembered the library, and he went back up the hall to the doorway opposite Priam’s.

Delia’s father sat at the library desk intently examining a postage stamp for its watermark.

“Oh, Mr. Collier.”

The old man looked up. Immediately he rose, smiling. “Come in, come in, Mr. Queen. Everything all right now?”

“Well,” said Ellery, “the frogs are no longer with us.”

Collier shook his head. “Man’s inhumanity to everything. You’d think we’d restrict our murderous impulses to our own kind. But no, somebody had to take his misery out on some harmless little specimens of Hyla regilla, not to mention―”

“Of what?” asked Ellery.

“Hyla regilla. Tree toads, Mr. Queen, or tree frogs. That’s what most of those little fellows were.” He brightened. “Well, let’s not talk about that any more. Although why a grown man like Roger Priam should be afraid of them ― with their necks wrung, too! ― I simply don’t understand.”

“Mr. Collier,” said Ellery quietly, “have you any idea what this is all about?”

“Oh, yes,” said the old man. “I’ll tell you what this is all about, Mr. Queen.” He waved his stamp tongs earnestly. “It’s about corruption and wickedness. It’s about greed and selfishness and guilt and violence and hatred and lack of self-control. It’s about black secrets and black hearts, cruelty, confusion, fear. It’s about not making the best of things, not being satisfied with what you have, and always wanting what you haven’t. It’s about envy and suspicion and malice and lust and nosiness and drunkenness and unholy excitement and a thirst for hot running blood. It’s about man, Mr. Queen.”

“Thank you,” said Ellery humbly, and he went home.

And the next morning Lieutenant Keats of the Hollywood Division put on his tough suit and went at Roger Priam as if the fate of the city of Los Angeles hung on Priam’s answers. And nothing happened except that Keats lost his temper and used some expressions not recommended in the police manual and had to retreat under a counterattack of even harder words, not to mention objects, which flew at him and Ellery like mortar fire. Priam quite stripped his wheelchair of its accessories in his furious search for ammunition.

Overnight the bearded man had bounced back. Perhaps not all the way: his eyes looked shaft-sunken and he had a case of the trembles. But the old fires were in the depths and the shaking affected only his aim, not his strength ― he made a bloodless shambles of his quarters.

Keats had tried everything in ascending order ― reason, cajolery, jokes, appeals to personal pride and social responsibility, derision, sarcasm, threats, curses, and finally sheer volume of sound. Nothing moved Priam but the threats and curses, and then he responded in kind. Even the detective, who was left livid with fury, had to admit that he had been out-threatened, out-cursed, and out-shouted.

Through it all Alfred Wallace stood impeccably by his employer’s wheelchair, a slight smile on his lips. Mr. Wallace, too, had ricocheted. It occurred to Ellery that in Wallace’s make-up there was a great deal of old Collier’s Hyla regilla ― a chameleon quality, changing color to suit his immediate background. Yesterday Priam had been unnerved, Wallace had been unnerved. Today Priam was strong, Wallace was strong. It was a minor puzzle, but it annoyed him.

Then Ellery saw that he might be wrong and that the phenomenon might have a different explanation altogether. As he crossed the threshold to the echo of Priam’s last blast, with Wallace already shutting the door, Ellery glimpsed for one second a grotesquely different Priam. No belligerent now. No man of wrath. His beard had fallen to his chest. He was holding on to the arms of his wheelchair as if for the reassurance of contact with reality. And his eyes were tightly closed. Ellery saw his lips moving; and if the thought had not been blasphemous, Ellery would have said Priam was praying. Then Wallace slammed the door.

“That was all right, Keats.” Ellery was staring at the door. “That got somewhere.”

“Where?” snarled the detective. “You heard him. He wouldn’t say what was in the cardboard box, he wouldn’t say who’s after him, he wouldn’t say why ― he wouldn’t say anything but that he’ll handle this thing himself and let the blanking so-and-so come get him if he’s man enough. So where did we get, Mr. Queen?”

“Closer to the crackup.”

“What crackup?”

“Priam’s. Keats, all that was the bellowing of a frightened steer in the dark. He’s even more demoralized than I thought. He played a big scene just now for our benefit ― a very good one, considering the turmoil he’s in.

“Maybe one more, Keats,” murmured Ellery. “One more.”

Laurel said the frogs were very important. The enemy had slipped. So many hundreds of the warty beasts must have left a trail. All they had to do was pick it up.

“What trail? Pick it up where?” demanded Macgowan.

“Mac, where would you go if you wanted some frogs?”

“I wouldn’t want some frogs.”

“To a pet shop, of course!”

The giant looked genuinely admiring. “Why can’t I think of things like that?” he complained. “To a pet shop let us go.”

But as the day wore on young Macgowan lost his air of levity. He began to look stubborn. And when even Laurel was ready to give up, Macgowan jeered, “Chicken!” and drove on to the next shop on their list. As there are a great many pet emporia in Greater Los Angeles, and as Greater Los Angeles includes one hundred towns and thirty-six incorporated cities, from Burbank north to Long Beach south and Santa Monica west to Monrovia east, it became apparent by the end of an endless day that the detective team of Hill and Macgowan had assigned themselves an investigation worthy of their high purpose, if not their talents.

“At this rate we’ll be at it till Christmas,” said Laurel in despair as they munched De Luxe Steerburgers at a drive-in in Beverly Hills.

“You can give up,” growled Crowe, reaching for his Double-Dip Giant Malted. “Me, I’m not letting a couple of hundred frogs throw me. I’ll go it alone tomorrow.”