The Origin of Evil (15 page)

‘Oh,
yes
.'

‘You'd think it would be easy,' the giant went on, waving his glass. ‘How many people buy frogs? Practically nobody. Hardly one of the pet shops even handles 'em. Canaries, yes. Finches, definitely. Parakeets, by the carload. Parakeets, macaws, dogs, cats, tropical fish, monkeys, turkeys, turtles, even snakes. And I know now where you can buy an elephant, cheap. But no frogs to speak of. And toads — they just look at you as if you were balmy.'

‘Where did we go wrong?' asked Laurel, perching on the arm of Crowe's chair.

‘In not analyzing the problem before you dashed off. You're not dealing with an idiot. Yes, you could get frogs through the ordinary channels, but they'd be special orders, and special orders leave a trail. Our friend is not leaving any trails for your convenience. Did either of you think to call the State Fish and Game Commission?'

They stared.

‘If you had,' said Ellery with a smile, ‘you'd have learned that most of the little fellows we found in Priam's room are a small tree frog or tree toad —
Hyla regilla
is the scientific name — commonly called spring peepers, which are found in great numbers in this part of the country in streams and trees, especially in the foothills. You can even find bullfrogs here, though they're not native to this part of the country — they've all been introduced from the East. So if you wanted a lot of frogs and toads, and you didn't want to leave a trail, you'd go out hunting for them.'

‘Two whole days,' groaned Macgowan. He gulped what was left in his glass.

‘It's my fault, Mac,' said Laurel miserably. But then she perked up. ‘Well, it's all experience. Next time we'll know better.'

‘Next time he won't use frogs!'

‘Mac.' Ellery was tapping his teeth with the bit of his pipe. ‘I've been thinking about your grandfather.'

‘Is that good?' Mac immediately looked bellicose.

‘Interesting man.'

‘You said it. And a swell egg. Keeps pretty much to himself, but that's because he doesn't want to get in anybody's way.'

‘How long has he been living with you people?'

‘A few years. He knocked around all his life, and when he got too old for it he came back to live with Delia. Why this interest in my grandfather?'

‘Is he very much attached to your mother?'

‘Well, I'll put it this way,' said Crowe, squinting through his empty glass. ‘If Delia was God, Gramp would go to church. He's gone on her and she's the only reason he stays in Roger's vicinity. And I'm not gone on these questions,' said Crowe, looking at Ellery, ‘so let's talk about somebody else, shall we?'

‘Don't you like your grandfather, Mac?'

‘I love him! Will you change the subject?'

‘He collects stamps,' Ellery went on reflectively. ‘And he's just taken to hunting and mounting butterflies. A man of Mr. Collier's age, who has no business or profession and takes up hobbies, Mac, usually doesn't stop at one or two. What other interests has he?'

Crowe set his glass down with a smack. ‘Damned if I'm going to say another word about him. Laurel, you coming?'

‘Why the heat, Mac?' asked Ellery mildly.

‘Why the questions about Gramp!'

‘Because all I do is sit here and think, and my thoughts have been covering a lot of territory. Mac, I'm feeling around.'

‘Feel in some other direction!'

‘No,' said Ellery, ‘you feel in all directions. That's the first lesson you learn in this business. Your grandfather knew the scientific name of those spring peepers. It suggests that he may have gone into the subject. So I'd like to know: In those long tramps he takes in the foot-hill woods, has he been collecting tree frogs?'

Macgowan had gone rather pale and his handsome face looked pained and baffled. ‘I don't know.'

‘He has a rabbit-hutch somewhere near the house, Mac,' said Laurel in a low voice. ‘We could look.'

‘We could, but we're not going to!
I'm
not going to! What do you think I am?' His fists were whistling over their heads. ‘Anyway, suppose he did? It's a free country, and you said yourself there's lots of these peepers around!'

‘True, true,' Ellery soothed him. ‘Have another drink. I've fallen in love with the old gent myself. Oh, by the way, Laurel.'

‘Do I brace myself?' murmured Laurel.

‘Well,' grinned Ellery, ‘I'll admit my thoughts have sauntered in your direction, too, Laurel. The first day you came to me you said you were Leander Hill's daughter by adoption.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you said something about not remembering your mother. Don't you know anything at all about your real parents, where you came from?'

‘No.'

‘I'm sorry if this distresses you —'

‘You know what you are?' yelled Macgowan from the sideboard. ‘You're equally divided between a bottom and a nose!'

‘It doesn't distress me, Ellery,' said Laurel with a rather unsuccessful smile. ‘I don't know a thing about where I came from. I was one of those story-book babies — really left on a doorstep. Of course, Daddy had no right to keep me — a bachelor and all. But he hired a reliable woman and kept me for about a year before he even reported me. Then he had a lot of trouble. They took me away from him and there was a long court squabble. But in the end they couldn't find out a thing about me, nobody claimed me, and he won out in court and was allowed to make it a legal adoption. I don't remember any of that, of course. He tried for years afterwards to trace my parents, because he was always afraid somebody would pop up and want me back, and he wanted to settle the matter once and for all. But,' Laurel made a face, ‘he never got anywhere and nobody ever did pop up.'

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 worth little or nothing. But Laurel,' he said, ‘whether that's a cock-eyed 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 over-intense, 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 blonde 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 mid-air. 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 shoulder-blades 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.

9

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 cigarette, 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 cigarettes 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.

‘They came here in ‘27,' said Keats bitterly, ‘started a wholesale jewellery business as partners, and made a fortune before the crash of '29. They weren't committed to the market and they rode out the depression by smart manipulation and original merchandising methods. Today the firm of Hill & Priam is rated one of the big outfits in its line. They're said to own one of the largest stocks of precious stones in the United States. And that's a lot of help, isn't it?'