A Fine and Private Place (23 page)

“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 hooks, 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-superstition. 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.

“You sent Inspector Queen those anonymous messages. Your purpose, however, was different from the one I ascribed to Peter Ennis. What you were really after was to bamboozle
me
. You knew that if you showered me with all those lovely, fantastic 9-clues, sooner or later I'd come up with the leaf-in-the-forest, or pebble-on-the-beach, theory. I can't say I didn't dance dutifully to your tune! I was truly the puppet in the hands of the puppet master. When I'd eliminated every last sham 9, as you planned I should, and still hadn't by my own efforts learned about Peter's lunch with Virginia on December 9, 1966, you made sure the information came into my possession. You sent the 10th and last anonymous message to my father, through him tipping me off.

“This,” Ellery went on in his even-tempered drawl, “led to the genuine 9-clue you'd programmed me to base my solution on. I was to expound the theory that Peter Ennis, as the murderer, wanted above all to hide the 9-month gestation period from me, and that to accomplish this end he'd bombarded me with 9s … so many 9s that I'd be completely confused and baffled and helpless to reach a solution. This was to be my conclusion about Peter's thinking.

“But your ultimate purpose was even subtler than that. You took the leaf-in-the-forest concept one step further. You not only concealed the crucial leaf, you used the very fact of its concealment to provide me with the wrong answer to the problem.
You maneuvered me into eliminating all the 9s but one, so that on the basis of that remaining one I'd come up at long last with the patsy murderer you'd planned for me to choose from the start
.”

And now they were locked eye to eye, and there was no longer any amusement on the murderer's face, only an advanced alertness, the immobility of an animal at the approach of danger.

The trouble was,” Ellery said in a stripped, clean way, “you grew too big a forest. The last anonymous message did more than you meant it to. It gave me your sham setup solution, yes; but unhappily for you it didn't stop there, as it was supposed to. You didn't know, as I remarked a few minutes ago, that Peter and Virginia had inadvertently provided themselves with an unbreakable alibi for the time of Nino's murder. That their alibi forced me to face the falsity of the solution you'd led me to. Forced me, from the very logic of that fact, to go to
you
.

“Because,” Ellery said, and his pace was swifter now, ‘if Peter—not to mention Virginia—was innocent, as his alibi incontestably proved, then the murderer not only had to be someone else, but someone who possessed the same two qualifications: One, the murderer had to know that Virginia and Peter met for lunch on December 9, 1966; two, he had to satisfy
cui bono
, in the same sense that Peter would have satisfied it by marrying Virginia.

“First qualification: How did the murderer know about that lunch? The answer was embedded like a pearl in Virginia's diary account, toward the end. She had noticed you come into the restaurant; she was afraid that if you spotted her with Peter you'd guess their relationship, and she got Peter to hustle her out through the kitchen. A beautiful fit, isn't it?
Because if Virginia and Peter could have seen you, by exactly the same token you could have seen them
. And see them you did, otherwise the 10th anonymous message could not have been sent.

“Second qualification: Who benefits? Could you? You certainly could, in the same way Peter would benefit:
through Virginia
. And you were the only other person in the world in that enviable position. What's more, if anything were to interfere with your control of Virginia's half billion dollars—if Peter, say, were to prove an obstacle, or Virginia herself—I'm quite certain you'd be prepared to get rid of either or both. In fact, that may have been your ultimate plan, since the deaths of Virginia and Peter—assuming their marriage—would give you in your own right, as Virginia's only surviving relative, the entire Importuna fortune.

“And then what an orgy of gambling and women and power would be yours at the snap of a finger! Who knows what schemes you've blueprinted for the further glory of yourself, the despised object of Nino Importuna's contempt and charity? Was it to become the Monte Cristo of the 20th century?”

And Ellery uncoiled his length and got to his feet and looked down into the handsome saddle-leather face of Virginia's father.

“Well, was it?” Ellery repeated.

“Something like that,” said Wallace Ryerson Whyte.

—EQ—

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1971 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1712-1

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