The Player on the Other Side (16 page)

‘Oh,' said Ellery; and he began to pace swiftly back and forth, head bent, torso forward-inclined.

‘Aside from the fact that right now you look like Groucho Marx,' said his father, ‘I don't know what you're talking about. Whatever it is, I hope it makes sense.' The old man's sigh turned to a growl. ‘Three times now I've had search warrants for those four cookie-box castles. Today I didn't split the squad up. This time we
all
went to
all
the rooms of
all
the houses. If there's a child's printing set in York Square I'll eat it. What have
you
got?'

‘What?'

The Inspector, squinting up, repeated himself.

‘Oh!' said Ellery. ‘Why, Dad, I don't know. I mean I
know
, but not what it means. I've found a lowest common denominator for four people in York Square.'

‘Oh?' said his father, slowly reaching for one of Ellery's cigarettes; he almost never smoked cigarettes. ‘Who? —
whom?
'

‘Ann Drew. Tom Archer. Mrs. Schriver. Walt.'

The Inspector said, ‘Really?' He lit the cigarette with slightly trembling fingers, puffed and sat back. ‘And what would that be? Your whachamacallit — common denominator.'

‘
Every one of those four came to York Square out of, or by way of, your Miss Sullivan's — Emily York's settlement house.
'

The old man stopped smoking. Finally he resumed. ‘And what's that supposed to mean, Ellery?'

‘Just what I was asking myself,' Ellery muttered, ‘when you came in. Dad …' He sat down suddenly on the point of his desk, like a flagellant. ‘Take Archer. A sort of parchment prodigy. First heard of as runner-up in a Science Search. Disqualified as under age, but given a special certificate. After that, some scholarship award or other every year.

‘Archer has a small inheritance,' Ellery continued, staring into his father's smoke. ‘Ten, eleven hundred a year. Two years in the Army interrupted his doctorate. Straight academic Ph.D. No utilitarian specializations. Never went back to school. Wound up hinging stamps in Robert York's albums.'

‘Where does the settlement house come in?'

‘After his Army discharge he walked in there one day and announced to Emily York that he was a displaced person. Strictly a pleasantry, by the way. He wasn't trying to put anything over.'

‘Never mind that,' said the old man impatiently. ‘What did he say?'

‘Well, he wanted some sort of work he'd never done before — said he was tired of being a schoolboy. Said he wanted to dig a ditch or something, and a settlement house seemed a good place to begin. Emily York replied that there were too many people needing ditches to dig who couldn't do anything else, but there was her cousin Robert and his stamps, and she sent Archer over for an interview. Robert hired him.'

‘How'd you find out all this? Archer talks a blue streak, but I never caught him
saying
anything.'

‘I got it from Miss Sullivan.'

‘Did you!' said the Inspector, and he sighed. ‘And how is she?'

‘As remarkable as you implied, Dad. And carrying on in spite of everything.'

The Inspector nodded in a pleased way, reaching over to tamp out his cigarette. ‘What about the Drew girl?'

‘The Drew girl.' Ellery hesitated. His father glanced up at him sharply, and Ellery said in a casual voice, ‘She spent most of her motherless young life taking care of a despondent father. He died, and Emily York got hold of her some way or other and passed her along to Myra. Would you hand me the cigarettes, Dad?'

‘Sure,' said his father. ‘My,' said his father, ‘you told that one fast. That's it on Ann Drew, hmm?'

‘Well, there's more, but nothing that has any bearing on the case.' Ellery used two matches. His parent refrained from comment. ‘Who's next? Oh, Mrs. Schriver. Mrs. Schriver is a widow from Bucks County whose late husband was swindled by some New York sharpie. She came charging up here with fire in her eye — the swindle and the funeral expenses left her almost destitute — and wound up finding neither the con man nor a job. Emily picked her up, put her back together again and got her started at York Square.'

‘Leaving Walt.'

‘Leaving Walt. Walt,' said Ellery slowly, ‘is a considerable mystery. He was an amnesiac. His fingerprints are not on file anywhere, for any purpose. No background, then, and — you know him — no foreground, either. I'm interested.'

The Inspector shrugged and sighed. ‘How about making me a drink?'

Ellery went through the living room to the kitchen and busied himself getting ice and glasses; he returned to the living room, to the bar, and poured and mixed, and all the while he was thinking that his lifelong obsession with mysteries could be accounted for by the implacable fact that he hated them for
being
mysteries — which was to say, things without answers. Amnesia concealed a mystery; an amnesiac was someone with something to hide — the fact that he was hiding it from himself was a mere detail. Walt was an unanswered thing.

‘Thanks, son,' the Inspector said, accepting his drink. He drank, and then he said shrewdly, ‘You're still on this Walt kick.'

‘Dad, look,' said Ellery. ‘All Miss Sullivan could tell me about him is that he was brought into the settlement house one January night, one of a bunch of half-frozen skid-row derelicts. He was just as dirty and ragged, but he wasn't drunk; and of course he was younger than most of them. Miss Sullivan doesn't think he drinks at all, and she ought to know. He was starved, lost, he could read and write and the only name he could give was Walt. His clothes told nothing, castoffs he'd evidently picked up in some trash heap —'

‘And Emily York realized he wasn't the usual bum,' nodded the Inspector, ‘tried him out on an odd job or two, found he was a good worker and got the York Square board of directors to give him the custodial job. And there he's been for years. I know all that, son. That's all there is.'

‘All?' echoed Ellery. ‘There must be some records — military service, income tax reports —'

But Inspector Queen was shaking his head. ‘No, son. If he ever had a taxable income it was probably under a different name. He's certainly unfit mentally and overage for military service — I mean, since he went into the amnesia — and before that, well, no prints in the service files. Incidentally, Miss Sullivan got in touch with Missing Persons about him at the time he came into the settlement house; they couldn't match him up with anybody on their lists, and there's been no subsequent lead to him. He's just a blank, son. I told you the other day, whoever's behind these murders has a calculating intelligence that's just out of Walt's league. Amnesiac! It's just too … too corny.'

‘Corny it may be,' muttered Ellery, ‘but if I were you I'd have him watched all the same. Or you might find yourself losing another York.'

‘Don't worry, he's being watched along with the others. But he's not costing me much sleep. As to losing another York,' the Inspector took a long swift swallow, ‘sometimes-by-God I wish we would!'

‘What?' said Ellery.

‘If we could lose one
without
losing one, so to speak. Because look,' the Inspector said. ‘We have one murder that's certainly a murder, and one death that's probably a murder but couldn't be proved even if somebody confessed on a polygraph. Each of our prime suspects
could
have killed Robert —'

‘Or, as in the case of the women, got some sub-prime actually to push the stone —'

‘Yes, so that gives us X-number of sub-primes. Emily's death: the number of primes goes down, the number of unknown possibles goes up. We know Myra was home in the Square and that Ann Drew was with her. Archer was out, but he can probably prove where he was. Walt was uptown buying map tacks. Percival York and his whatever-she-is —'

‘Odalisque?' Ellery suggested absently.

‘Whatever
that
is! — anyway, they were being tailed. Mrs. Schriver was in Myra York's house, cleaning. And there were X- hundreds of your sub-primes on that subway platform — and besides, who's to say Emily didn't just get a dizzy spell and fall off the edge under her own steam as the train came in?'

‘So you'd like to lose another York. I'm still not clear why.'

‘A killer can get away with one kill, but when he tries it again the odds start to mount against him. You know that! Well, he's done two now — let's assume it's two — and he's still riding the odds. But this time they're way up there. So if he'd only pull one more murder we'd have him — I think. All we've got to do is figure out how we can get him to do that without its actually costing us another York.'

‘Quite a problem,' Ellery said dryly. ‘But maybe we're doing just that by having Percival and Myra under twenty-four-hour surveillance? So he's bound to be caught if he tries again. I don't see how we can miss short of stupidity or criminal carelessness. I know I wouldn't relish the chore of trying to crawl under the fences we've built, Dad. Not if I wanted to crawl out again.'

‘And meanwhile we sit around sucking our thumbs,' grumbled the Inspector. ‘Damn it all, Ellery! There ought to be some way to pressure this whozit into making his play.'

Ellery rolled his cold glass along his forehead therapeutically. Inspector Queen stared across at him. But all Ellery said when he rose to freshen their drinks was: ‘Maybe there is.'

Thought Ellery: The prod, the goad, the phrase that gigs, is:
I know all about it
.

‘I know all about it,' he said ominously; and Tom Archer, hunched behind the barricade of the late Robert York's desk in the dim specklessness of the late Robert York's study, started violently.

Archer swallowed, his young Adam's apple jumping like an ambushed cat. ‘All about
what
?' it failed to come out with the scandalized virtue he was aiming for.

‘Well, let's see,' Ellery said in his most obliging drawl. ‘When Robert York sent Walt to fetch you that night, he was a very angry man.'

‘
What
night?'

‘The night,' Ellery said sonorously, ‘of the Seebecks.'

And it worked! — for Archer bit his lip, and one hand on the desk kneaded the other hand on the desk until he caught sight of what they were doing and clenched them into silence.

‘Well?' Ellery barked, when he estimated that the young man had stewed in his own juice just long enough.

‘Oh, damn,' muttered Archer, looking up at last; and he gave a wry grin. ‘What would you have done if I'd told you about it right off?'

‘Hauled you downtown,' Ellery said promptly. ‘Want to go now?'

‘No, I don't.'

‘Better give me the whole story, then.'

‘You said you knew it.'

Ellery, who had dropped into the Morris chair across from the desk, climbed to his feet. ‘Let's go, Archer.'

Archer clawed at his scalp. ‘Oh, hell! I'm sorry, Mr. Queen. I've been out of my mind with worry about this thing. I knew you'd find out sooner or later. But I just couldn't bring myself to come clean. It looks … well, I don't have to tell you how it looks.'

‘Yes, you do.'

Blindly Archer took one of Robert York's tissues from the right-hand drawer and dried his face. ‘I take it you've been to Jenks & Donahue.'

Ellery grunted the kind of grunt that universally means whatever worried people are afraid it might mean.

‘Robert York said those Seebecks were worthless reprints,' Archer muttered, ‘and I got sore. Because I was equally positive the stamps were
not
reprints. Well, as you now know, I took them down to Jenks & Donahue and had them put through the wringer, everything — black light, horizontal beam, colorimeter, watermark and gum analysis — and found out what Mr. York had been able to tell with the naked eye! He had a feel for stamps that was uncanny. Of course, he'd been right and I'd been wrong. The stamps
were
Seebeck reprints.' He looked at Ellery pleadingly. ‘What could I do? What on earth else could I do?'

‘What did you do?'

‘Went out and bought genuine ones, of course. Paid seventy per cent over list for them, too. It took every liquid centavo I had.'

Ellery said with dawning understanding, ‘So then you went back to Jenks & Donahue, this time with the genuine ones, had them run tests on
those
, they gave you expert confirmation in writing and
that
was the report you showed Robert York. And he never knew a thing about J & D's original report about the reprints. Is that it, Archer?'

‘How could I bring myself to tell him?' cried Tom Archer. ‘I'd got myself into a bind with York when I challenged his philatelic eye, and he'd said that if Jenks & Donahue proved me wrong about the Seebacks he was going to fire me. I couldn't let him do that, Mr. Queen, I just
couldn't
. It wasn't the job; I could always get a better job. The thing is, I didn't
want
a better job.'

Ellery understood perfectly, having in the near past dined with Archer's reason. But he said only, ‘Go on.'

‘I felt like such a heel,' groaned Archer. ‘Mr. York was so contrite over what he now thought had been
his
mistake that he gave me a raise and a power of attorney to act for him in the management of the four households. He couldn't do enough for me; and the more he did the less I could bring myself to tell him what I'd done.'

‘He was bound to find out eventually.'

Archer wet his lips. ‘You keep hoping not. And playing it by ear, each thing that happens. And one thing leads to another thing, and you keep getting in deeper … I'm so glad he never did find out.'

‘You'd have done a good deal to keep him from finding out?'