The Player on the Other Side (28 page)

J. H. Walt sat like a good little citizen, neatly, cleanly, knees and feet together, reading his Bible. At the corners of his mouth dwelt the shadows of a smile, a serene smile, a smile of peace. ‘… and all's right with the world,' the smile said. He did not look up. He was absorbed in his Book.

The bars insisted on trying to slide upward through Ellery's hands. He gripped them, which had the extraordinary effect of squeezing two tears out of his eyes. They scalded; he was glad that they hurt, glad that they turned the prim Bible reader into a blur; glad masochistically, childishly. Pain in any amount would at this moment, he felt, be just. He wished he could be sure that a fit punishment would seal off his bottomless self-scorn; oh, if it would he would seek out the stern wielder of the nine-tailed cat, whoever he might be, confess his criminal stupidity and be thankfully flogged for it. Fantasy, of course: there would be no escape, ever, from the fury and contempt in which Ellery Queen held the great man.

A hand grasped his shoulder. No matter what policeman this might be, Ellery thought, he can never make a case against me; and this, really, was the core of his despair.

The hand squeezed his shoulder, and the Inspector's voice said, ‘It's all right son. We got here in time after all. He did a sloppy job. He's going to be all right.'

Ellery felt his hands slip from the bars and his body turn toward the source of the voice. He did not wipe his face or feel embarrassment; in a warm, all-but-forgotten sense, this was his father.

‘Hey … hey …' A soft, drawn-out breath; Ellery recalled its use over barked knees and broken treasures. ‘Hey, now, son.'

Ellery went with his father down the corridor. He could draw a clean breath now, remember his handkerchief, stand six feet tall once more. And it was rue and wry he felt, blowing his nose and trying to grin.

‘Want to tell me what happened to you, son?' Inspector Queen asked gently.

‘You bet,' said Ellery. ‘I've solved it.'

‘Solved what?'

‘The mystery of Y.'

‘The what?'cried the old man. ‘How do you mean, Ellery?'

‘I know who it is.'

32

Combination

In the car Ellery subsided into a corner. ‘Call in,' Inspector Queen instructed the driver. ‘Tell 'em I can be reached at home. And if they reach me at home it had better be important.'

After a moment they swung uptown, and Ellery opened his eyes. ‘Dad, you don't have to make a production of this. You're busy —'

‘You've scraped something off the bottom of this case, right?' growled the old man. Ellery nodded. ‘Well, whose case is it? The quicker you get started, the sooner I'll know what you've got.'

‘You ought to hang out a shingle,' Ellery said. The Inspector kept a knowledgeable silence. After a while Ellery said, ‘The best way to do this sort of thing is to test every brick as you build. Why don't I ever learn that lesson?' Still silence. Defensively Ellery said to the dome light above him, symbolically unlit, ‘Yes, sir, I think I go pretty much to the point.'

‘And
I
think,' said his father, ‘that it would be lovely if you started talking English. Is it all right for me to ask a few questions?'

‘Ask away.'

‘How in the name of Houdini did you know Percival York was going to commit suicide?'

‘I didn't. I just saw it as a possibility when I realized that he's innocent. That he isn't Y.'

‘Whoa!' exploded the Inspector. ‘What are you giving me, Ellery? He
isn't
? I've never known you to blow so hot and cold about anything —'

‘I'm sure,' Ellery said; and from the way he said it his father knew that now, at last and forever, the pieces would fit.

‘If York's not Y, who is?' demanded the old man.

‘I'll be coming to that —'

‘Okay, I'll play,' said the Inspector with a sigh, and he sank back. ‘How about this: What made you rush to the jail like that?'

‘I wanted to tell Perce York I was sure he was innocent, and not to hang, so to speak, but to hang on.' Ellery touched his own neck absently, squinting into some distance. ‘Dad, I saw this fellow — before his arrest — straightening the kinks out of himself. Working hard. Keeping regular hours. I saw it, I recorded it, but I didn't compute it. Electronic clog, you might call it.

‘Here was a man,' Ellery frowned at the driver's neck, ‘taking a good look at himself for the first time in his life. So much so that he could even see past and around a bequest of eleven million dollars, which is a mighty hard trick. He'd faced the ugly fact of what he'd been, and he was doing something about it.

‘Now I don't think anybody has liked Perce York since the day he sneered his first word. And at the head of that numerous company you can put Perce York himself. All he really wants is to be like other people, because up to now he's lived with the absolute belief that he's less than other people. The only thing in his whole life he's ever done reasonably well is to mount Robert's stamps in those albums; it was his first, his
first
positive achievement. Know what he said to me, Dad?' Ellery swallowed. ‘He said, “I've got the Sadim touch. That's Midas turned backwards.” What he meant was that anything good he touched was bound to turn bad. In a different time he might have said, “I'm accursed.”'

‘Come to think of it,' said the Inspector thoughtfully, ‘when we cut him down and he opened his eyes and found he was still in the land of the living, he looked me square in the kisser and croaked, “I botched this one, too, Inspector, didn't I?”'

Ellery nodded. ‘That's it. Now. I think all along he felt he'd never live to get the money, or if he had he wouldn't get to use it. His arrest must have been the end of the world to him and, at the same time, just the sort of thing he expected would happen. In that state he was what a head-candler I know calls “a psychological emergency,” the result of which is often the victim's destroying himself — either by literal suicide or schizoid withdrawal. The one thing Perce York needed at that crisis was to be told that somebody believed in him, that somebody knew he was innocent. That somebody gave a damn about what happened to him —'

‘Ellery Queen, say.'

‘All right. Now you see why I was in such a rush, Dad. I held the only thing that could help him, and I was the only one who did.'

‘Well, how about sharing the wealth?' his father goaded him gently. ‘It's about time, wouldn't you say?'

‘Don't Jostle me, I'm getting there,' scowled Ellery. ‘Very well. Mr. Y wasn't Percival. Then who?'

‘Archer,' said the old man suddenly. ‘Tom Archer. He's smart enough to have seen how to use Walt as his murder weapon. And God knows Archer's been smack in the middle of the premises from the beginning —'

Ellery shook this head. ‘Not Tom Archer.'

‘You leading me by the nose really far out?' asked the Inspector sarcastically. ‘Okay! Let's dress up little Ann in men's clothing and keep trying to believe she was Mr. Wye of the Hotel Altitude.'

Ellery faintly smiled. ‘Let's do no such thing.'

‘How about Mrs. Schriver?' demanded the Inspector. ‘She far enough out for you?'

Ellery managed a chuckle at this. ‘It's not Mrs. Schriver.'

‘You can bet your sweet asafetida it's not! That would be almost as ridiculous as saying it's Miss Sullivan. Far out … Mallory. How about Mallory? He's pretty far out. Boston.'

‘Not far enough, Dad.'

‘Look, son, can we stop playing games? There's nobody left?'

‘But there is,' said Ellery; and he said it in such a peculiar way that the old man's nostrils began to itch. He was rubbing them vigorously when Ellery said, ‘Here we are.'

The Inspector stopped rubbing and saw the familiar 87th Street brownstone façade. He dismissed the driver, and Ellery got out his key, and they trudged up the interior stairs like two very tired men coping with the heavy burden of their unspoken thoughts. When they were in the Queen apartment, Ellery automatically made for the living-room bar, his hands became independently active and he began again.

‘What's torn me up so much,' he said, ‘is realizing how plop under my nose it's been, practically from the start. It isn't as if I didn't
notice
. My alleged brain recorded it, all right — it just didn't compute.'

The Inspector had long ago learned the lesson of inhuman patience at times like these. There was no point, he now saw, in any further prodding. In the climactic stages Ellery had to be given his head; in his own mysterious time he'd head for home.

‘Don't be so hard on yourself, son.'

‘I couldn't be,' said Ellery with profound disgust. He stood a while, then gradually focused on the two glasses he held. He came around the bar, handed his father the highball and retired to the couch with his cocktail.

‘The evidence was evident all along the path,' Ellery went on. ‘It was to be seen even in the first murder, Robert's, that this was the work of some species of madman. A madman with a systematized madness.'

‘But we didn't know then that he was intending to work his way all around the Square, son,' Inspector Queen said intently.

‘But we did know he'd sort of warned Robert with that kooky J card. Do sane killers — to make a fine distinction — warn their victims of their homicidal intentions?'

The Inspector waved his hand, keeping the wave genial by main force. ‘All right, that told us — you — that he was crazy.'

‘Don't give me any premature credit, Dad. I couldn't stand it.' Ellery took a swallow. ‘We — I — should have left that itty-bitty door wide open. But no, I had to keep whittling my sights down to ordinary motivations. Instead of bearing in mind that anything —
anything
— could figure into this man's plans, I — oh, well, it's too late to pick
those
nits.'

He emptied his glass and banged it down on the coffee table.

‘With an open mind I might have guessed the truth by the time we laid eyes on that second card. Because by then we had two letters of the message, J and H. But again … I suppose it's because I'm not conditioned to madness. A madman has his logic, but it's not a sane man's logic — and, although I know you sometimes have your doubts, I think I'm more on the sane side than the other way.'

‘I'll give you that much,' said the Inspector. ‘Skoal.'

‘Skoal,' said Ellery absently. ‘Where I really fumbled the ball, of course, was in Myra's murder. Even before it
was
a murder. Remember I spoke to Walt not ten minutes after he'd dropped the rat poison into Myra's water jug? He had just left Myra's house, and I stopped him and questioned him.'

‘So?'

‘I'll get to it later,' and the old man could have screamed. ‘Anyway, that was the afternoon I decided to take off and find Mallory'

‘Take off is right. We had one dilly of a time finding you.'

‘I didn't know it would take that long. And my Mallory notion seemed so far-fetched. I thought you'd laugh me off the case. Wait till you see how far-fetched it really was.'

‘My son,' sighed the Inspector, ‘I reckon I'm just about the best li'l ol' waiter ever.'

Ellery ignored this. ‘I still have the nagging feeling that if I'd picked up my cues and clues, if I hadn't gone to Boston just then, maybe Myra … All right, I'll quit being iffy.

‘That third case, Myra's. The one with the W. Adding W to J and H and giving us J.H.W.; obviously — what could be more obvious? — the initials of John Henry Walt. Bingo! this so-called mind closes down to any other possibility.' Ellery scowled at his empty glass. ‘Charles Fort, who made a career out of jeering at conventional scientific thinking, wrote somewhere that it takes a special species of idiot — or was it fool? — always to concede that any answer is the only answer. All I could see was that JHW were initials, and that the initials stood for Walt's full name. Perfect example of recording and not computing. If I'd remembered that principle I might — I just might — have added insanity to the murder of these particular people, plus J and H and W, and summed up accurately. I had the opportunity to do the simple arithmetic again, when we found the typewritten letters signed with a Y — those do-my-bidding, I-own-the-universe letters. I could have applied Fort's dictum
then
. And I'd have known. I'd even have been able to prophesy that the next card would have another H on it.'

‘Do tell,' murmured the Inspector, his pulse at last beginning to accelerate. This must be it! ‘How does that figure?'

Ellery frowned at his father. ‘The letters JHWH have no meaning for you?'

‘Not a glimmer.'

‘Coupled with someone who calls himself Y?'

‘Y? “York” satisfies me there. Or,' added the Inspector wryly, ‘did.'

‘You insist on joining Fort's special-species-of-fool club along with me, don't you? No, it isn't York.'

‘Here we go again,' muttered the old man. ‘Okay. Yoicks. Yehudi. Yuk-yuk. Will you stop diddling, son, and get to it?'

‘JHWH,' said Ellery, ‘makes up the Tetragrammaton.'

‘JHWH,' said Inspector Queen, ‘makes up the Tetragrammaton. What in God's name is
that
supposed to mean?'

‘You,' and Ellery, to his father's consternation burst into frenetic laughter, ‘you have said it!'

‘What have I said?'

‘God's name — that's what Yod Ho Waw Ho — JHWH — represents. The name of Names. In Old Testament times it was forbidden to speak the true name of the Lord. JHWH — in its ancient Hebrew, Greek and other equivalents — was the Hebrew way of writing down what could not be uttered. They used the consonants, and substituted the vowels from the words Adonai or Elohim — both scriptural terms for “God” or “the Lord” — so that JHWH became
Jehovah
. Or
Yahweh
, the other of the two best-known versions. Yahweh, with a Y.'