Ellery Queen - The Origin of Evil

“Doesn’t fit what?” asked Ellery mildly.

“Doesn’t fit Priam. I mean, what Priam was. Take that letter he typed on the broken machine and put in the collar of the dead beagle for delivery to Hill...”

“Something wrong with it?”

“Everything wrong with it! Priam was an uneducated man. If he ever used a fancy word, I wasn’t around to hear it. His talk was crude. But when he wrote that letter... How could a man like Priam have, made such a letter up? To avoid using the letter T, to invent roundabout ways of saying things ― that takes... a feel for words, doesn’t it? A certain amount of practice in ― in composition? And punctuation ― the note was dotted and dashed and commaed and everything perfectly.”

“What’s your conclusion?” asked Ellery.

Keats squirmed.

“Or haven’t you arrived at one?”

“Well... I have.”

“You don’t believe Priam typed that note?”

“He typed it, all right. Nothing wrong with your reasoning on that... Look.” Keats flipped his cigaret into the fire. “Call me a halfwit. But the more I think about it, the less I buy the payoff. Priam typed that letter, but somebody else dictated it. Word for word. Comma for comma.” Keats jumped out of the chair as if he felt the need of being better prepared for the attack that was sure to come. But when Ellery said nothing, merely looked thoughtful and puffed on his pipe, Keats sat down again. “You’re a kindhearted character. Now tell me what’s wrong with me.”

“No, you keep going, Keats. Is there anything else that’s bothered you?”

“Lots more. You talked about Priam’s shrewd tactics, his cleverness; you compared him to Napoleon. Shrewd? Clever? A tactician? Priam was about as shrewd as a bull steer in heat and as clever as a punch in the nose. He couldn’t have planned a menu. The only weapon Priam knew was a club.

“He figured out a series of related clues, you said, that added up ― for our benefit ― to a naturalist. Evolution. The steps in the ladder. Scientific stuff. How could a roughneck smallbrain like Priam have done that? A man who bragged he hadn’t read a book since he was in knee pants! You’d have to have a certain amount of technical knowledge even to think of that evolutionary stuff as the basis of a red herring, let alone get all the stages correct and in the right order. Then picking a fancy-pants old Greek drama to tie in birds! No, sir, I don’t purchase it. Not Priam.

“Oh, I don’t question his guilt. He murdered his partner, all right. Hell, he confessed. But he wasn’t the bird who figured out the method and thought up the details. That was the work of somebody with a lot better equipment than Roger Priam ever hoped to have.”

“In other words, if I get your thought, Keats,” murmured Ellery, “you believe Priam needed not only someone else’s legs but someone else’s gray matter, too.”

“That’s it,” snapped the detective. “And I’ll go whole hog. I say the same man who supplied the legs supplied the know-how!” He glared at Alfred Wallace, who was slumped in the chair, hands clasped loosely about the glass on his stomach, eyes gleaming Keats’s way. “I mean you, Wallace! You got a lucky break, my friend, Priam sloughing you off as a maroon who trotted around doing what you were told―”

“Lucky nothing,” said Ellery. “That was in the cards, Keats. Priam did believe Wallace was a stupid tool and that the whole brilliant plot was the product of his own genius; being Priam, he couldn’t believe anything else ― as Wallace, who knew him intimately, accurately foresaw. Wallace made his suggestions so subtly, led Priam about by his large nose so tact-fully, that Priam never once suspected that he was the tool, being used by a master craftsman.”

Keats glanced again at Wallace. But the man lay there comfortably, even looking pleased.

Keats’s head ached. “Then ― you mean―”

Ellery nodded. “The real murderer in this case, Keats, was not Priam. It’s Wallace. Always was.”

Wallace extended a lazy arm and snagged one of Ellery’s cigarets. Ellery tossed him a packet of matches, and the man nodded his thanks. He lit up, tossed the packet back, and resumed his hammocky position.

The detective was confused. He glanced at Ellery, at Wallace, at Ellery again. Ellery was puffing peacefully away at his pipe.

“You mean,” said Keats in a high voice, “Hill wasn’t murdered by Priam after all?”

“It’s a matter of emphasis, Keats. Gangster A, a shot big enough to farm out his dirty work, employs Torpedo C to kill Gangster B. Torpedo C does so. Who’s guilty of B’s murder? A and C. The big shot and the little shot. Priam and Alfred were both guilty.”

“Priam hired Wallace to do his killing for him,” said Keats foolishly.

“No.” Ellery picked up a pipe cleaner and inserted it in the stem of his pipe. “No, Keats, that would make Priam the big shot and Wallace the little. It was a whole lot subtler than that. Priam thought he was the big shot and that Wallace was a tool, but he was wrong; it was the other way around. Priam thought he was using Wallace to murder Hill, when all the time Wallace was using Priam to murder Hill. And when Priam planned the clean-up killing of Wallace ― planned it on his own ― Wallace turned Priam’s plan right around against Priam and used it to make Priam kill himself.”

“Take it easy, will you?” groaned Keats. “I’ve had a hard week. Let’s go at this in words of one syllable, the only kind I can understand.

“According to you, this monkey sitting here, this man you call a murderer ― who’s taking your pay, drinking your liquor, and smoking your cigarets, all with your permission ― this Wallace planned the murders first of Hill, then of Priam, using Priam without Priam’s realizing that he was being used ― in fact, in such a way that Priam thought he was the works. All my pea-brain wants to know is: Why? Why should Wallace want to kill Hill and Priam? What did he have against ‘em?”

“You know the answer to that, Lieutenant.”

“Me?”

“Who’s wanted to murder Hill and Priam from the start?”

“Who?”

“Yes, who’s had that double motive throughout the case?”

Keats sat up gripping the arms of his chair. He looked at Alfred Wallace in a sickly way. “You’re kidding,” he said feebly. “This whole thing is a rib.”

“No rib, Keats,” said Ellery. “The question answers itself. The only one who had motive to kill both Hill and Priam was Charles Adam. Ditto Wallace? Then why look for two? Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Wallace is Adam. Refill now?”

Keats swallowed.

Wallace got up and amiably did the honors, Keats watching as if he half-expected to catch the tall man slipping a white powder into the glass. He drank, and afterward gazed glumly into the brown liquid.

“I’m not being specially obtuse,” Keats said finally. “I’m just trying to wriggle out of this logic of yours. Let’s forget logic. You say that proves this smoothie is Charles Adam. How about coincidence? Of all the millions of nose-wipers who could have been Priam’s man Friday, it turns out to be the one man in the universe who wanted to kill him. Too neat, Queen, not to say gaudy.”

“Why do you call it coincidence? There was nothing coincidental about Charles Adam’s becoming Priam’s wet nurse. Adam planned it that way.

“For twenty-five years he looked for Priam and Hill. One day he found them. Result: He became Priam’s secretary-nurse-companion... not as Adam, of course, but as a specially created character whom he christened Alfred Wallace. My guess is that Adam had more than a little to do with the sudden resignations of several of his predecessors in the job, but it remains a guess ― Wallace, quite reasonably, is close-mouthed on the subject. My guess is also that he’s been around Los Angeles far longer than the amnesic trail to Las Vegas indicated. Maybe it’s been years ― eh, Wallace?”