The Player on the Other Side (17 page)

‘Oh, God! Anything.'

Quietly Ellery let the three words rise in the dim room, ballooning and expanding until they filled the whole breathable space. He watched Archer take note of the silence, then listen to it, then study it, and finally — ‘Oh,
no!
' Archer cried. ‘When I said “anything,” Mr. Queen, I didn't mean
that
. I'm no killer,' he said urgently. ‘Do I look like a killer to you?'

‘Few killers do,' Ellery remarked sadly.

‘But why would I do a thing like that? If Robert had found out about those Seebecks, the worst that would have happened is that I'd have had to leave.'

‘So much for not telling
him
. But why, Archer, didn't you tell me?'

‘Put yourself in my place, Mr. Queen,' Archer pleaded. ‘Would you tell anybody you'd had a violent quarrel with your employer — shortly before someone dropped a two-hundred-pound stone on his head?'

‘A familiar argument,' Ellery said. ‘The fallacy in it is that you're in a far worse position when the quarrel is found out. Did you really think no one would find out?'

‘I certainly never dreamed it would come out through Ann.'

‘Mr. Archer,' Ellery rose. ‘I don't at the moment believe you're our man. But I also don't care for what you did about those Seebecks. It gives you a tricky character, and this is a tricky case. Take my advice; from now on keep your nose very, very well wiped.'

‘I'll remember that, Mr. Queen,' Archer said bitterly.

And I won't tell you, Ellery thought, that you have no credible motive; and that, if you'd been planning Robert's murder, your directly antecedent actions would hardly have included a heated quarrel with him; and, anyway, that your alibi stands up.

Aloud, and gently, he said, ‘And about Ann Drew — be consoled. She couldn't help telling me. To borrow a phrase, Archer: I have my methods.' He added in total afterthought, ‘And why I should be telling you this I'm blessed if I understand. I could easily fall for Ann Drew myself.'

At which Tom Archer had a smile — a smile, small but a smile — for him; and Ellery, departing, smiled a small one back.

‘I know all about it,' said Ellery coldly. He had encountered the handyman coming down the walk of Myra York's house.

Walt returned a round, mineral gaze and moved his slack full lips in a sort of windup. If he was surprised, startled, angry, fearful —
anything —
it certainly did not show.

What came out of his mouth at last was, ‘Yes.'

All right, pal, he's thrown you the ball. What are you going to do with it? ‘Mr. Archer and Robert York had a quarrel before Mr. York was killed.'

‘Yes.'

‘Mr. York sent you to find Mr. Archer.'

‘Yes.'

‘What did Mr. Archer say when you located him?'

The round eyes closed and opened — it was too slow for a blink. ‘He saw me and he said, “God.”'

‘And you said —?'

‘That Mr. Robert sent me to find him, and to say he's got a Seebeck.'

‘Why didn't you tell that to the police?'

‘They did not ask me to.'

‘Didn't you know it might be important?'

The flat-finished eyeballs were concealed again by another of those slow-motion blinks. ‘No.'

I believe you, Ellery thought. ‘What were you just doing in there?' He pointed to Myra York's house.

The handyman removed something from his side pocket and extended it. It was a five-and-dime package of screen patches. ‘The corner was rusted out on the screen porch. I had to fix it.'

‘Is that all you did in Miss Myra's house?'

‘No.' The man produced a plastic flask of a patented muriatic solution. ‘I took a stain off the second-floor bathtub.'

Ellery regarded him gravely. Walt stared patiently back. And Ellery knew then that he could ask questions and get answers from now until noon of St Swithin's Day and learn never a thing.

‘Anything might be important to the police, Walt. The smallest thing. You try to remember, won't you? — and if you think of anything you forgot to tell, come right out with it. Do you understand me?'

‘I understand.'

Namelessly dissatisfied, Ellery went on up to the house and rang the bell; and so preoccupied was he with his dissatisfaction that, when Mrs. Schriver opened the door, he forgot his magic goad and said at once, ‘What was
he
doing here?'

‘A hole in the screen he fixes,' said the housekeeper, ‘and from the bathroom upstairs a stain he takes out.' She looked at him reprovingly. ‘Gut afternoon, Mr. Queen.'

‘Oh! Good afternoon, Mrs. Schriver. How's everything?'

‘Resting,' said Mrs. Schriver. ‘Unless with the bell you are unresting her.'

‘I'm
sorry
,' said Ellery. ‘Could I see Miss Drew?' He knew that the policewoman was also on duty upstairs.

‘She is with Miss Myra sitting.' She did not mention the policewoman.

Ellery appealed to the determined little chub-face. ‘Do you think you could get her down here without disturbing Miss Myra?'

‘For what?'

‘Something very important, Mrs. Schriver. Honest,' he added. She invariably made him feel like an unwanted small boy.

‘You better,' sniffed the housekeeper; and she went noiselessly up the stairs, managing to leave him with the impression that she was stamping with indignation.

A thousand years later Ann Drew appeared; and it seemed to Ellery that she drifted down to him like Peter Pan's Wendy, the time the Lost Boys shot her out of the sky with an arrow; her hair, undone, was floating hurriedly behind her like a bit of cloud trying to catch up. And when — wafting by him into the cluttered parlor — she touched her lips for silence, he realized on the instant that to touch her lips was something he had wanted to do all his life.

She told him in sign language to shut the sliding doors. He did this, and when he turned back he found her looking at him with a smile on her amazing mouth, altogether trustful. And he did something then at which he would ever after wince in memory — something which had to be done. He said quietly, ‘I know all about it.'

Once he had seen a convulsed virago strike her child, a little girl; this was the same. At the impact there was no pain, only astonishment; then pleading eyes denied the blow; then, the blow being undeniable, came the search for some explanation:
It was an accident
or
I'm dreaming this —
anything to make it bearable before the pain closed down and terror blotted everything.

He could only loathe himself, and wonder what was coming next.

Ann Drew whispered to the walls, to the wind: ‘I was sixteen and my daddy was all — oh, he was coming unglued, his kidneys, his liver, his stomach, most of all his brain — the base; it affected his balance. He worked in a library; he loved books, the things of the mind; he could see himself becoming a mindless blob, and it terrified him. Some of the medicine was no good, and some of it they just tried out on him, and some helped, and all of it cost — oh, terribly. And after a while he had to quit working and stay home, a slowly dying man. I couldn't even finish high school — I had to go to work to support us both. I got a job in a store; the salary wasn't nearly enough, but it was the best I could do, because the store was close to where we lived and I had to be able to run home to tend to Daddy. And I found that I needed more and more money, and I had no way to get more except … except —'

‘By dipping into the till?'

‘For almost two years.'

Ellery looked at Ann Drew; this time he looked deeply. Lovely, lovely girl. ‘Virtue may not always make a face handsome, but vice will certainly make it ugly.' Poor Richard had never met an Ann. She was untouched.

‘But it never touched me!' she cried, and startled him. ‘Miss Emily understood that. When she dug into me, she looked me in the eye and said I didn't need saving because I'd never been lost. It sounds like — like soap opera, but the truth is that the money I stole was first, to save my father's life, and then — when I knew it was a hopeless cause — to pay for the narcotics he needed so that he could die without too much pain.'

He had a dozen questions to ask and asked none of them. Instead he said gently, ‘I take it you were caught.'

‘In the act.' The hardened tone was armor, he knew, against that assault from the past. ‘I spent almost two days and nights in a cell before Emily York — I don't know how she found out — got me off in her custody. But for just that forty-two hours, when I couldn't get to him, or even communicate, Daddy had to do without the two things he needed to keep living — his morphine and me. He cut his wrists.' It was no longer a lovely face she turned up to him; it had no blood in it, almost no bone. ‘No one's known about this, Mr. Queen. Now, I suppose, it will become public property.'

‘Ann,' Ellery said. ‘Stop being afraid.'

Her head came up in a flash. ‘I'm
not
afraid!'

‘You're scared witless that Tom Archer will find out.'

After a moment her head went down. ‘Well,' she said lifelessly, ‘won't he?'

He cupped her chin, and she was forced to look at him. ‘Ann, has this back-history of yours anything to do with the York murders? I ask you not to lie to me. Has it? Anything at all? Even remotely?'

‘Oh, that.' She shook her head almost impatiently. ‘No. How could it?'

He smiled and let her go. ‘Well, then.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Of course you do.'

‘You mean you won't tell him.' Her voice was stiff with certainty. For her preoccupation with her past had been so complete that its irrelevance to the York case had not occurred to her; and that his preoccupation with the York case would cause him to shrug off the irrelevance of her past was an outcome she had not even dreamed of.

And so she wept; and Ellery, his back to her, waited her weeping out. The whole thing was soundless.

‘No, I won't tell Archer,' Ellery said to the unobstructed view. ‘You will.'

That brought sound — a breathy sound of surprise and dismay. He felt her clutch, and he faced about. Ann, Ann, he thought, take your hands off me; and he touched her hands and they fell away. He had lost her. No, he had never had her.

‘Tell Tom a thing like that?' the girl cried. ‘And have him go sick inside?'

‘Emily York didn't go sick inside,' said Ellery. ‘And she wasn't even in love with you. If that fellow's feeling for you is so feeble it would collapse under the story you've told me, Ann, don't you think this is a good time to find out?'

But the girl was shaking her head and wailing, ‘Why, why did you have to rake this up?'

‘Because in my sorry business you have to rake up everything. And everything, unfortunately, tends to include a great many things that turn out not to matter. Yet it's the only way. Separate out the things that don't matter, and you're often left with the things that do.'

19

Sacrifice

Ellery, in Boston, said, ‘I know all about it.'

He looked at Mallory across the desk, which was glossy as a skating rink and very nearly as large. Mallory's big head, with its ruddy face-tones and ice-blond hair, was set off by the heavy brown velvet drapes behind him. He was one of those men who cannot avoid looking like an Old Master; light is always kind to them, and the eye of the beholder is always seized and slightly awed. And he would greet you without rising, and that would feel right to you.

It had felt right to Ellery, considerably to his surprise.

Ellery had had another session with Miss Sullivan, had flown to Boston and winnowed a great deal through certain files to which he was privy by courtesy of the New York police department; then, failing, he had found what he wanted in the Boston telephone directory. Annoyed, he had made his way to the offices of Mallory & Co., had sternly beaten down the successive blocking plays of a receptionist, a secretary and an assistant, had gained the Presence, and had mentioned the name of Myra York. And, ‘I know all about it.'

‘I can almost say,' said Mallory, ‘that I expected you.' He had the mellow boom, the oiled diction of an Edward Everett or an Everett Dirksen. ‘Not you personally, Mr. Queen, nor anyone like you, for of course there is no one like you; but someone concerned in York Square's present difficulties.'

Ellery tipped his head politely and wondered what on earth this natural candidate for someone's most unforgettable character was leading up to.

‘I knew the Yorks — some of them — of course, or you wouldn't be here. No, don't ask me any questions, Mr. Queen,' Mallory said, anticipating the nerve impulse behind the still-unmobilized muscle that was about to activate Ellery's mouth. ‘I am a man who enjoys putting myself in another man's place. It's a knack that put me in mine.' He glanced about his endless office, and smiled. ‘Let me put myself in yours. You have an important murder on your hands, perhaps two. You are making very little progress. It has consequently become necessary to run down everything about everybody, on the theory that this would elicit the — do you still call them clues? — the clues you need. You inevitably unearthed the clue that at one time, many years ago, I was engaged to marry Myra York. I said, don't ask me any questions!'

Ellery's lips closed with a snap. There was a long silence, during which Mallory kept his eyes shut. When he opened them, the effect on Ellery was much like that of the prowl car's spotlight which had smote him the other night.

‘You discovered that my engagement preceded Miss York's good fortune in the matter of old Nathaniel's will. She has remained unmarried, two of the four heirs have been sent to their less material rewards and Myra's large prospects have accordingly become very large indeed. And since I suspect — no, that's unworthy of both of us — since I
know
, because I have kept myself informed, that Myra retains a warped modification of her original interest in me, you were led to wonder whether I might not be tempted to renew my association with her in consideration of those enlarged prospects. You may even be wondering, Mr. Queen, if I may not have arranged the entire sequence of events. Please do not respond to that.'