Ellery Queen - The Origin of Evil

Ellery turned about. She was leaning forward, the forgotten cigaret sending up question marks.

“I suppose,” said Ellery, “your father had a closetful of bony enemies?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

This astonished him. To run true to form she should have come prepared with names, dates, and vital statistics.

“He was an easy, comfortable sort of man. He liked people, and people liked him. Dad’s personality was one of the big assets of Hill & Priam. He’d have his moments like everybody else, but I never knew anyone who could stay mad at him. Not even Roger.”

“Then you haven’t the smoggiest notion who could be behind this... fright murder?”

“Now you are laughing.” Laurel Hill got to her feet and dropped her cigaret definitely into the ashtray. “Sorry I’ve taken up so much of your time.”

“You might try a reliable agency. I’ll be glad to―”

“I’ve decided,” she smiled at him, “to go into the racket personally. Thanks for the avocado―”

“Why, Laurel.” Laurel turned quickly. A tall woman stood in the doorway. “Hello, Delia,” said Laurel.

Nothing in Laurel Hill’s carefully edited remarks had prepared him for Delia Priam. Through his only available windows — the narrow eyes of Laurel’s youth — he had seen Delia’s husband as a pompous and tyrannical old cock, crippled but rampant, ruling his roost with a beak of iron; and from this it followed that the wife must be a gray-feathered hennypenny, preening herself emptily in corners, one of Bullock’s elderly barnyard trade... a dumpy, nervous, insignificant old biddy.

But the woman in his doorway was no helpless fowl, to be plucked, swallowed, and forgotten. Delia Priam was of a far different species, higher in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and she would linger on the palate.

She was so much younger than his mental sketch of her that only much later was Ellery to recognize this as one of her routine illusions, among the easiest of the magic tricks she performed as professionally as she carried her breasts. At that time he was to discover that she was forty-four, but the knowledge remained as physically meaningless as ― the figure leaped into his mind ― learning the chronological age of Ayesha. The romantic nonsense of this metaphor was to persist. He would even be appalled to find that he was identifying himself in his fantasy with that hero of his adolescence, Allan Quatermain, who had been privileged to witness the immortal strip-tease of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed behind her curtain of living flame. It was the most naked juvenility, and Ellery was duly amused at himself. But there she was, a glowing end in herself; it took only imagination, a commodity with which he was plentifully provided, to supply the veils.

Delia Priam was big game; one glance told him that. His doorway framed the most superbly proportioned woman he had ever seen. She was dressed in a tawny peasant blouse of some sheer material and a California print skirt of bold colors. Her heavy black hair was massed to one side of her head, sleekly, in the Polynesian fashion; she wore plain broad hoops of gold in her ears. Head, shoulders, bust, hips ― he could not decide which pleased him more. She stood there not so much in an attitude as in an atmosphere ― an atmosphere of intense repose, watchful and disquieting.

By Hollywood standards she was not beautiful: her eyes were too deep and light-tinted, her eyebrows too lush; her mouth was too full, her coloring too high, her figure too heroic. But it was this very excessiveness that excited ― a tropical quality, humid, brilliant, still, and overpowering. Seeing her for the first time was like stepping into a jungle. She seized and held the senses; everything was leashed, lovely, and dangerous. He found his ears trying to recapture her voice, the sleepy growl of something heard from a thicket.

Ellery’s first sensible thought was, Roger, old cock, you can have her . His second was, But how do you keep her? He was on his third when he saw the chilly smile on Laurel Hill’s lips.

Ellery pulled himself together. This was evidently an old story to Laurel.

“Then Laurel’s... mentioned me.” A dot-dot-dot talker. It had always annoyed him. But it prolonged the sound of that bitch-in-a-thicket voice.

“I answered Mr. Queen’s questions,” said Laurel in a warm, friendly voice. “Delia, you don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“I left my surprise outside with your car.” Those lazy throat tones were warm and friendly, too. “I could say... the same to you, Laurel.”

“Darling, you never surprise me.”

They smiled at each other.

Laurel turned suddenly and reached for another cigaret.

“Don’t bother, Ellery. Delia always makes a man forget there’s another woman in the room.”

“Now, Laurel.” She was indulgent. Laurel slashed the match across the packet.

“Won’t you come in and sit down, Mrs. Priam?”

“If I’d had any idea Laurel was coming here...”

Laurel said abruptly, “I came to see the man about the dog, Delia. And the note. Did you follow me?”

“What a ridiculous thing to say.”

“Did you?”

“Certainly not, dear. I read about Mr. Queen in the papers and it coincided with something that’s been bothering me.”

“I’m sorry, Delia. I’ve been upset.”

“I’ll come back, Mr. Queen.”

“Mrs. Priam, does it concern Miss Hill’s father’s death?”

“I don’t know. It may.”

“Then Miss Hill won’t mind your sitting in. I repeat my invitation.

She had a trick of moving slowly, as if she were pushing against something. As he brought the chartreuse chair around he watched her obliquely. When she sat down she was close enough so that he could have touched her bare back with a very slight movement of his finger. He almost moved it.

She did not seem to have taken him in at all. And yet she had looked him over; up and down, as if he had been a gown in a dress shop. Perhaps he didn’t interest her. As a gown, that is.

“Drink, Mrs. Priam?”

“Delia doesn’t drink,” said Laurel in the same warm, friendly voice. Two jets spurted from her nostrils.

“Thank you, darling. It goes to my head, Mr. Queen.”

And you wouldn’t let anything go to your head, wherefore it stands to reason, thought Ellery, that one way to get at you is to pour a few extra-dry Martinis down that red gullet... He was surprised at himself. A married woman, obviously a lady, and her husband was a cripple. But that wading walk was something to see.

“Laurel was about to leave. The facts interest me, but I’m in Hollywood to do a book...”

The shirring of her blouse rose and fell. He moved off to the picture window, making her turn her head.

“If, however, you have something to contribute, Mrs. Priam...” He suspected there would be no book for some time.

Delia Priam’s story penetrated imperfectly. Ellery found it hard to concentrate. He tended to lose himself in details. The curves of her blouse. The promise of her skirt, which molded her strongly below the waist. Her large, shapely hands rested precisely in the middle of her lap, like compass points. “ Mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs ...” Right out of Browning’s Renaissance. She would have brought joy to the dying Bishop of Saint Praxed’s.

“Mr. Queen?”

Ellery said guiltily, “You mean, Mrs. Priam, the same day Leander Hill received the dead dog?”

“The same morning. It was a sort of gift. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

Laurel’s cigaret hung in the air. “Delia, you didn’t tell me Roger had got something, too!”

“He told me not to say anything, Laurel. But you’ve forced my hand, dear. Kicking up such a fuss about that poor dog. First the police, now Mr. Queen.”