Ellery Queen - The Origin of Evil

Ellery nodded. “The reason I asked, Laurel, was that it occurred to me that this whole business... the circumstances surrounding your foster father’s death, the threats to Roger Priam... may somehow tie in with your past.”

Laurel stared.

“Now there,” said Macgowan, “there is a triumph of the detectival science. How would that be, Chief? Elucidate.”

“I toss it into the pot for what it’s worth,” shrugged Ellery, “admitting as I toss that it’s probably worth little or nothing. But Laurel,” he said, “whether that’s a cockeyed theory or not, your past may enter this problem. In another way. I’ve been a little bothered by you in this thing. Your drive to get to the bottom of this, your wanting revenge―”

“What’s wrong with that?” Laurel sounded sharp.

“What’s wrong with it is that it doesn’t seem altogether normal. No, wait, Laurel. The drive is overintense, the wish for revenge almost neurotic. I don’t get the feeling that it’s like you ― like the you I think you are.”

“I never lost my father before.”

“Of course, but―”

“You don’t know me.” Laurel laughed.

“No, I don’t.” Ellery tamped his pipe absently. “But one possible explanation is that the underlying motivation of your drive is not revenge on a murderer at all, but the desire to find yourself. It could be that you’re nursing a subconscious hope that finding this killer will somehow clear up the mystery of your own background.”

“I never thought of that.” Laurel cupped her chin and was silent for some time. Then she shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I’d like to find out who I am, where I came from, what kind of people and all that, but it wouldn’t mean very much to me. They’d be strangers and the background would be... not home. No, I loved him as if he were my father. He was my father. And I want to see the one who drove him into that fatal heart attack get paid back for it.”

When they had gone, Ellery opened his bedroom door and said, “All right, Delia.”

“I thought they’d never go.”

“I’m afraid it was my fault. I kept them.”

“You wanted to punish me for hiding.”

“Maybe.” He waited.

“I like it here,” she said slowly, looking around at the pedestrian blond furniture.

She was seated on his bed, hands gripping the spread. She had not taken her hat off, or her gloves.

She must have sat that way all during the time they were in the other room, Ellery thought. Hanging in midair. Like her probable excuse for leaving the Priam house. A visit somewhere in town. Among the people who wore hats and gloves.

“Why do you feel you have to hide, Delia?”

“It’s not so messy that way. No explanations to give. No lies to make up. No scenes. I hate scenes.” She seemed much more interested in the house than in him. “A man who lives alone. I can hardly imagine it.”

“Why did you come again?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to.” She laughed. “You don’t sound any more hospitable this time than you did the last. I’m not very quick, but I’m beginning to think you don’t like me.”

He said brutally, “When did you get the idea that I did?”

“Oh, the first couple of times we met.”

“That was barnyard stuff, Delia. You make every man feel like a rooster.”

“And what’s your attitude now?” She laughed again. “That you don’t feel like a rooster any more?”

“I’ll be glad to answer that question, Delia, in the living room.” Her head came up sharply.

“You don’t have to answer any questions,” she said. She got up and strolled past him. “In your living room or anywhere else.” As he shut the bedroom door and turned to her, she said, “You really don’t like me?” almost wistfully.

“I like you very much, Delia. That’s why you mustn’t come here.”

“But you just said in there―”

“That was in there.”

She nodded, but not as if she really understood. She went to his desk, ignoring the mirror above it, and picked up one of his pipes. She stroked it with her forefinger. He concentrated on her hands, the skin glowing under the sheer nylon gloves.

He made an effort. “Delia―”

“Aren’t you ever lonely?” she murmured. “I think I die a little every day, just from loneliness. Nobody who talks to you really talks. It’s just words. People listening to themselves. Women hate me, and men... At least when they talk to me!” She wheeled, crying, “Am I that stupid? You won’t talk to me, either! Am I?”

He had to make the effort over again. It was even harder this time. But he said through his teeth, “Delia, I want you to go home.”

“Why?”

“Just because you’re lonely, and have a husband who’s half-dead ― in the wrong half ― and because I’m not a skunk, Delia, and you’re not a tramp. Those are the reasons, Delia, and if you stay here much longer I’m afraid I’ll forget all four of them.”

She hit him with the heel of her hand. The top of his head flew off and he felt his shoulderblades smack against the wall.

Through a momentary mist he saw her in the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” she said in an agonized way. “You’re a fool, but I’m sorry. I mean about coming here. I won’t do it again.”

Ellery watched her go down the hill. There was fog, and she disappeared in it.

That night he finished most of a bottle of Scotch, sitting at the picture window in the dark and fingering his jaw. The fog had come higher and there was nothing to see but a chaos. Nothing made sense.

But he felt purged, and safe, and wryly noble.

June twenty-ninth was a Los Angeles special. The weather man reported a reading of ninety-one and the newspapers bragged that the city was having its warmest June twenty-ninth in forty-three years.

But Ellery, trudging down Hollywood Boulevard in a wool jacket, was hardly aware of the roasting desert heat. He was a man in a dream these days, a dream entirely filled with the pieces of the Hill-Priam problem. So far it was a meaningless dream in which he mentally chased cubist things about a crazy landscape. In that dimension temperature did not exist except on the thermometer of frustration.

Keats had phoned to say that he was ready with the results of his investigation into the past of Hill and Priam. Well, it was about time.

Ellery turned south into Wilcox, passing the post office.

You could drift about in your head for just so long recognizing nothing. There came a point at which you had to find a compass and a legible map or go mad.

This ought to be it.

He found Keats tormenting a cigaret, the knot of his tie on his sternum and his sandy hair bristling.

“I thought you’d never get here.”

“I walked down.” Ellery took a chair, settling himself. “Well, let’s have it.”

“Where do you want it,” asked the detective, “between the eyes?”

“What do you mean?” Ellery straightened.

“I mean,” said Keats, plucking shreds of tobacco from his lips―”damn it, they pack cigarets looser all the time! ― I mean we haven’t got a crumb.”

“A crumb of what?”

“Of information.”

“You haven’t found out anything ?” Ellery was incredulous.

“Nothing before 1927, which is the year Hill and Priam went into business in Los Angeles. There’s nothing that indicates they lived here before that year; in fact, there’s reason to believe they didn’t, that they came here that year from somewhere else. But from where? No data. We’ve tried everything from tax records to the Central Bureau fingerprint files. I’m pretty well convinced they had no criminal record, but that’s only a guess. They certainly had no record in the State of California.