The Player on the Other Side (26 page)

Nothing.

They waited for the technical men, and watched while the men worked.

Nothing.

‘Tillie cleans real good, all right,' said the Inspector bitterly; and they left.

In the cruiser, on the way back to York Square, Inspector Queen actually said, ‘Nothing.'

‘Something,' murmured Ellery. ‘He's cleared out. He
is
through, except for the minor detail.'

‘What minor detail?'

‘Giving it to Percival. And that's the job of his good strong, stupid right arm, Walt.'

‘And that's another thing,' muttered the old man. ‘
When?
'

‘Soon, I'd say. Probably tonight.'

‘I wish I had your crystal ball!'

‘Dad,' Ellery said, nibbling his thumb, ‘if there's anything at all we can be sure of, it's that Y knows his victims inside and out. He's got to every one of them by knowing them in the most personal sense — where they'd be, what they'd do, when they'd do it. So Y must be pretty familiar with Percival. I don't think he'd have much confidence in Percival's suddenly getting religion. Y has to figure that Perce is a cracked chalice, likely to lapse into the old unpredictable sinner at any moment. Therefore Y can't afford to wait. He's got to grasp this opportunity, when he knows just where Percival will be and exactly what he'll be doing. Tonight's the night, all right.'

‘Yeah, you listen to the Maestro, Inspector,' said Sergeant Velie. ‘Did he ever steer you wrong?'

‘
Plenty
of times,' mumbled the old man; and he sank into the lightless deeps of his misery.

28

Capture

Ann Drew invited them both to dinner. Inspector Queen smiled feebly and excused himself, pleading catch-up work at his office. But Ellery accepted; and the young couple having persuaded Percival York not to return to his house for a lonely meal, the four made a pleasant occasion of it, with Mrs. Schriver serving and the gargantuan Velie helping out between the kitchen and the dining room, having his own troubles with the housekeeper's sharp tongue and the German shepherd puppy, which growled big-doggishly every time the sergeant came near. The very size of Velie and the proximity of Ellery, not to mention Archer, seemed to stimulate Percival; he exuded friendship and good will, as he had exuded fear at his first sight of the small white card in the shape of his castle plot.

He was pathetically anxious to learn all about stamps, his new-born interest; and Ellery and Archer found themselves taking turns in feeding his philatelic hunger: how to tell the difference between flatbed and rotary-printed postal paper; how it was that a stamp could be immersed in benzine for watermark examination and dry again in minutes with no damage to the ink, the paper or the adhesive — the simplest things. Percival kept asking greedy questions, unappeasable; until it occurred to Ellery that this was his way of keeping his mind off the dreadful situation developing about him.

It grew dark outside.

After dinner they went into the study. Here they chatted for a few minutes, while Percival York seated himself at his late cousin Robert's desk, his back to the terrace doors, and Tom Archer retreated to the library table piled high with albums. Mrs. Schriver finished the dishes and departed; Sergeant Velie disappeared; and, finally, Ann Drew said good night and went upstairs.

Ellery stepped into the hall, retrieved his hat, returned to the study and stood for another moment by the desk. For a long time afterwards he was to remember his goodnight conversation with Percival York.

‘This is so nice,' the last of the Yorks said. ‘I could take a lot of it, Mr. Queen. Sometimes …'

‘Yes?' Ellery encouraged him, curious.

Percival laughed with embarrassment. ‘Sometimes I think I have the Sadim touch.'

‘What's
that?
'

‘Midas spelled backwards. It means every bit of gold I touch turns to dlog.'

‘Gold spelled backwards?' Ellery afterward recalled saying with a smile.

‘That's it, and you know what
that
means. I'd explain it, but I don't want to corrupt young Archer there.'

But young Archer looked up and defined it precisely; whereupon Ellery shook hands all around, laughing, and left.

On the dot, Walt paused in the black shadow of the garage to peer behind, to the side and then straight ahead to the illuminated terrace. The only light came streaming through the French doors of the study.

Above him, prone and motionless on the garage roof, Detective Zilgitt touched the
Press to Talk
button on the tiny Citizen's Band transceiver he carried and tapped gently and rapidly on the speaker grille with his thumbnail.

Inside Robert York's house in the dark hallway, the rasping crackle sounded in the soft rubber earphone in Sergeant Velie's ear. He pulled the pen-sized flashlight out of his breast pocket and flashed it; Ellery Queen, standing in the study, saw it. The same faint crackle sounded in the ears of two detectives concealed at one side of the terrace, a third at the other, in some bushes. None of the three moved.

Clinging to the shadows, Walt oozed from the corner of the garage to a point directly across the rear lawn from the terrace. The black oval of Percival York's sports jacket, its frazzled pale topping of head and hair, were perfectly visible to him.

Walt felt for the flat object in his pocket.

Overhead, a pink thumbnail tapped again. Cars rolled noiselessly across the mouths of the alleys and stopped. A darker shadow, man-shaped, appeared at the garage corner where Walt had first paused. It made no sound at all.

Suddenly Walt melted and hardened, like a flow of lava.

Ellery Queen, hat in hand, had approached the desk in the study and he was talking to Percival York.

Walt waited. Far off, a car rushed by, blatting. Nearer, a boyish voice yelled an obscenity. There was a tinkle somewhere, as if a rock had gone through a window, and the thudding retreat of derisive feet. None of this moved Walt in the slightest. He waited.

Ellery laughed, waved, was gone.

Immediately Walt slid to his left and to the blackly looming bushes. His hand went again to the flat object in his pocket.

And just as he reached the protection of the bushes, the lights went off. Everything blacked out — the study, the terrace, the dim sheen on the lawn.

From the study Walt could hear Percival's hoarse shout: ‘The lights are out! The lights are out!' and Tom Archer's ‘Just a fuse, Perce. Hang on a minute. Don't go banging around in the dark — sit still.'

Sit still
.

Walt leaped across the lawn, its imprint perfectly clear in his brain. He vaulted surely the low margin of the terrace, sprang to the left-hand jamb of the French doors. He waited.

He was crouched there, the little flat cold gun in his hand, when the lights blazed back on like a nova.

Walt fired five shots. Three grouped themselves in the middle of Percival York's sports jacket. The fourth splintered the top right-hand desk drawer. The fifth plowed a long clean furrow along the top of the desk and knocked a stamp album off the table beyond. He managed to squeeze off the fourth shot and the fifth even though his legs were snatched from under him, even though he was struck from above and both sides and grabbed and held and buried under the mass of men diving in over the terrace edges and from the study itself.

Ellery, lunging for breath, stood over the squirming mound.

The detectives slowly disentangled themselves, panting; but even as they separated, at least one hand of each man was tightly pinned to some part of John Henry Walt — flat on his back on the brick-red tiles, smiling like a seraph.

Looking down at that unafraid, relaxed, coldly smiling countenance, Ellery felt his skin crawl.

‘For the love of heaven,' he said in an unsteady voice, ‘take it — him — away.'

Ellery sat on his shoulder blades and through bloodied eyes stared at the Eleventh Edition. He thought: Suppose they'd climbed Everest and, pulling themselves up on the last crag, had found themselves standing at the bottom? Suppose a man ran what he knew was a three-minute mile and then found they'd forgotten to wind the watches?

He thought: Come on now, don't wallow in all the things that don't suit you. When feeling low, take an inventory of the good. What have we got that's good?

Our murderer, of course, John Henry Walt in the clink, cheerfully signing a full statement of four premeditated capital crimes. John Henry Walt doesn't defend himself; he denies nothing; he admits everything.

Everything, that is, but the important things.

The why of it all he will not answer.

He still does not know that we have Y's letters. Ask him: ‘Did you have help?' Is there anyone else involved?' — and he smiles.

Ellery thought: Oh, that queer little dead-faced man, he has the prettiest smile. Want to see that smile at its prettiest? Ask him what the final H on Perce York's card means. Walt smiles and smiles.

And Ellery thought: The man is crazy, of course. Crazy in the worst way, with a craziness consistent as the law of gravity. With a craziness so consistent as to make him a more reliable tool for Y's mysterious purposes than a sane triggerman would have made.

Ellery brought his fist down on the arm of his chair, jarringly. It was wrong. It was
wrong
. It was like arresting the gun for murder.

The player on the other side …

He was brought back by the grate of a key and the thump of a door.

‘Dad?'

‘Hi,' said the old man. He came into Ellery's workroom and dropped his hat on the floor and sank wearily onto the sofa.

‘Still working on Walt?'

The Inspector nodded. ‘I've got what I thought we wanted. And all it's going to get me is that nothing's going to get
him
. He'll be committed. He'll spend the rest of his life on free grub and rent, with movies on Saturdays and no income tax. You know what? I'll bet that's what he keeps smiling about.'

‘You got nothing out of him.'

‘Nothing but more smiles.' And the Inspector gave such a gruesome imitation of Walt that Ellery winced and said, ‘
Please.
'

They were silent for a while.

‘Anything on the gun?' asked Ellery finally.

‘No.'

‘Did you tell him about the other letters?'

‘No, I'm still operating from the one we found on him.'

‘Prints —?'

‘Just Walt's.'

They were silent for another while.

Then Ellery muttered, ‘Did you ask the lab if this latest letter from Y had Walt's thumbprints all over the top corners?'

‘No,' said the old man, ‘I looked for myself. They're there all right.'

‘Many?' Ellery asked eagerly. ‘I mean — more than on the other letters, or fewer, or the same?'

‘I'd say about the same.'

Ellery made a puzzled sound far back in his throat. He reached over and picked up a piece of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
stationery and held it, dangling, with his thumbs in the upper corners, before his eyes. ‘Why in the name of Sam Lloyd would Walt — even Walt? — read a letter in this position? I wonder … Dad, has he been doing any reading in his cell?'

‘Not that way,' sighed his father. ‘Stop badgering me, son. I've had a rough day.'

‘Wait, Dad. Has anyone said anything to him about Percival?'

‘No. He never even asked. By the way, how is our hero today? I haven't had time to call.'

‘According to Archer, still in mild shock.' Ellery found rather to his chagrin, that he was feeling annoyed with Percival York. Everything had been carefully outlined to him in advance; how the entire evening was a vast trap; how the rear lawn and environs were to be flooded with infra-red light, invisible to Walt, in which a police sharpshooter with a snooperscope on the garage roof beside Detective Zilgitt would have Walt on the crosshairs every second; how the script Ellery and the Inspector had worked out called for a bit of acting on the part of everyone, with the blackout as its climax to provide darkness in which to yank Percival from behind the desk and make a swift substitution in the chair of a bolster wrapped in Percival's jacket, surmounted by a department-store dummy's head. ‘I guess Perce isn't the new man he thinks he is. Shock! He couldn't have been safer if he'd been locked up for the night in Fort Knox.'

‘Where's your Christian charity?' jeered the Inspector. ‘I thought you were pro-Percival now. Look, El, I'm dog-tired and I want a shower —'

‘Dad.'

‘What now?' The Inspector sank back.

‘I think we ought to reconsider Percival,' said Ellery slowly.

‘
Again
?'

‘Well, he is the only one who gains from these murders.'

‘And he planned this last attack — on himself? Hmm?'

‘If Percival is Y, why not? If you had planned to get rid of three co-heirs, wouldn't a fourth attack — on yourself —make a good smoke screen?'

‘This thought,' said the old man, ‘has crossed my feeble mind too.' He snorted. ‘Kind of chancy, though, wouldn't it be? If Percival is Y, Walt doesn't know it. And that's one customer, once you give him an order, who can't tell let'spretend from the real thing.'

‘It wasn't chancy at all. Percival could count on our not risking his life.'

‘All the same, those were real bullets, not spitballs.'

And the stakes were real high, if you'll pardon the syntax.'

The Inspector rubbed his gray brush of mustache fretfully. ‘I don't know, son … If Perce is behind all this, he ought to apply for an Equity card. Because he sure put on a performance every time Walt got near him. And he knew he was safe then, too.'

But Ellery shook his head. ‘The more you look at it, the more attractive it gets. You can't blink the fact that the deaths of Robert, Emily and Myra York leave Perce York all eleven of the millions. There just isn't anyone else who benefits by the three murders. Percival certainly knew the habits, characters and routines of his three cousins. He's had an insider's opportunity to watch and evaluate Walt. And to hire that hotel room. And type and mail those letters.'