The Player on the Other Side (30 page)

Still, here he was on the sidewalk before the entrance to the Hotel Altitude, smoking with large, unhurried puffs; smoking, and watching through the plate-glass door the tiny desk with the tiny desk clerk behind it visible at the tiny end of his line of sight, like Alice looking down the rabbit-hole.

A signal was passed.

Gill, the manager, came round the end of the desk to stand in full view of the entrance; he stretched; he yawned; then he shuffled over to a door marked MEN and opened it and disappeared, the door closing behind him.

Walt immediately stopped smoking. He did not toss the cigarette into the gutter; he did not drop it and step on it. He did a rather curious thing: he crushed out its burning end between thumb and forefinger, not quickly, with no evidence of pain, but deliberately and thoroughly; and then, when he was satisfied that the cigarette was out, he tossed the butt over his shoulder with the oddest gesture of contempt and stepped forward and entered the Altitude.

This was the anxious time. Ellery had not been at all sure what Walt would do. Mr. Wye at his last departure had left the passkey to 312 at the desk; Walt had no key.

Eyes watched, ears listened, from everywhere.

He did not go to the desk and behind it where in the cubicle plainly labeled 312 the tagged key lay in plain sight for his convenience. He did not even glance beyond, or even at, the desk. He strode smoothly and quietly and directly to the stairs.

Between the second and third floors he met a man coming down. At once Walt set the typewriter on the stair and stooped over his left shoe. When the man was gone Walt rose, picked up the machine and resumed his ascent.

At the third floor he made unhesitatingly for Room 312.

Here Ellery's reserve plan proved its efficacy. Before the door tin-figured 312, Walt set the typewriter down again and put his right hand in his pocket. When his hand emerged empty, he frowned. But then the frown cleared and he turned the knob and pushed, and the door swung inward into darkness, and he picked up the typewriter and walked into the darkness as if he had expected nothing less; and he shut the door and touched the light switch, evoking a low thin illumination from a little gooseneck lamp corded to the socket in the ceiling — it left the upper part of him in tantalizing gloom. The duplicate key they had inserted in the keyhole on the room side of the door Walt immediately turned locking himself in. The miraculous appearance of the key he accepted with utter calmness.

On the fire escape outside 312's window Ellery gave a nervous cluck and nodded. ‘Yes,' he muttered. ‘Of course.'

Room 312 was at the rear of the Hotel Altitude, so that its fire escape faced nothing but the grimy backs of loft and other business buildings, all untenanted and dark at this hour. They had nothing to fear from curious eyes.

Ellery crouched against the dirty brick wall, eye glued to the eyepiece of a magnifying periscope. His father, the District Attorney, the Commissioner were listening to reports in their earplugs; but now all sounds ceased, and as one man they turned to Ellery.

He nodded. ‘It's Walt.'

‘You sure this Y is meeting him here?' whispered the D.A.

‘I'm sure.'

‘That's all right then,' said the Commissioner, with satisfaction. The room was bugged; the tapes of recorders in adjacent and opposite rooms were winding.

‘Get away!' said the Inspector swiftly. He had a periscope device, too. Walt had laid down his typewriter and was approaching the window. The four men glued themselves to the wall, two to each side of the window.

Walt tried the window; it was stuck fast. After a moment he turned back. And this was a small triumph for Inspector Queen; it had been his notion to grease the window carefully with a silicone compound and install a quick-release lock, invisible from the room, on the fire-escape side.

‘Watch this,' said Ellery softly. He put his periscope back in place. The Inspector followed suit.

They had arranged the small night table at the foot of the bed; the gooseneck lamp was standing on one corner of it. The position of the night lamp and the chair at which Y had sat had been predetermined by examination of impressions on the carpeting.

Walt set the typewriter on the little table and removed its cover. He placed the cover, the envelopes and the cheap tablet on the bed. Then he sat down at the table, his left profile to the window, and reached over to adjust the angle of the lamp. The light sprang strongly to his face.

Inspector Queen made a throaty noise. He straightened up, knuckled his eyes, then peered into the eyepiece once more. Finally he sat back on his heels and looked up at the others in the dim glow from the window.

And he whispered, ‘
That's not Walt.
'

The Commissioner stooped, and looked, and his tough cop's face rippled with shock.

‘My God, Burt,' he said to the District Attorney. ‘Look!'

The D.A.'s lips parted audibly, his jaw dropped; and when he shifted from the eyepiece he glanced at Ellery as if he had never seen Inspector Queen's son before. But Ellery merely bit down on his own teeth and kept watching the man in the room.

The man was reaching over now to the bed. He flipped the cover of the tablet open and removed the top sheet of paper. The Queens hastily adjusted the knurled brass rings of their eyepieces, got the field onto the blur that represented the sheet of paper and focused until they could see it sharply.

‘The pale blue lines,' muttered the Inspector. ‘The identical paper?'

The man in the chair slipped the sheet into the carriage of the portable and began adjusting it, apparently for exact alignment with the blue lines.

Choked the Inspector: ‘I'll be damned …'

‘What, Dick, what?' asked the Commissioner excitedly.

But the old man's response was to his son. ‘So that's how you knew. A somersaulting dog, and thumbprints at the top corners of the Y letters!'

‘It had to be that,' nodded Ellery without looking away. ‘From adjusting the paper on the machine so that it typed precisely on the blue lines. From doing it on line after line, because the spacing between the paper's blue line-spacing obviously didn't conform to the machine's line-spacing. The conclusion had to be: Whoever left all those thumbprints at the top corners of the letters typed the letters. Simple.' And Ellery added in so bitterly low a tone that only his father heard him, ‘
Very
simple. It took me a mere three murders and an almost-fourth to figure it out.'

And now the man who had been Walt was launched on his letter. He was typing with two fingers; steadily, evenly, rapidly unrolling a stream of words. At each succeeding line he stopped to realign the paper, as Ellery had predicted.

‘What's he typing?' moaned the Inspector. ‘I can't make it out —'

‘I can.' And Ellery read off the words as they appeared on the blue-lined sheet:

‘My Dear Walt:

‘You have been all I asked you to be. You have done all I asked you to do. But, because of developments beyond your understanding, our last task remains uncompleted.

‘I assure you out of the depths of my admiration and approval of you, My Dear Walt, that this temporary failure is not of your making, and I absolve you of blame.

‘There must come now a time of waiting.

‘All things in their season.

‘Be observant, My Dear Walt.

‘Be patient, and be yourself.'

‘He's stopped typing,' Ellery mumbled.

‘I think,' said the Commissioner, ‘that's enough. Don't you, Burt?'

The District Attorney's lips were set in a long thin line. ‘Plenty enough.'

‘Okay,' said the Inspector, ‘let's take him.'

The Commissioner spoke a word into the grille of his little transceiver.

Ellery put a thumb on the window-lock and the other fingers at the bottom edge of the sash, and he gathered his legs under him.

Out in the hall a man drifted, like smoke in a draft, from the room directly opposite to the door of 312, placed his fingers on the jamb and yanked. The entire doctored jamb swung outward, bringing the strike-plate and lock-bolt with it.

The door swung open at the exact second that the window slammed up and Ellery dived into the room.

Electrically quick, the typist's face flashed toward Ellery; the man half rose.

‘Hold it,' said the detective in the doorway. The face in the light turned toward the detective slowly, slowly and phlegmatically glanced at the revolver in his hand and seemed amused. The man got to his feet and deliberately faced Ellery.

‘If I raise my hand, of course,' he said in a voice so deeply and surely unlike Walt's that Ellery's scalp crept, ‘you will cease to exist.'

There was a long silence. At the window behind Ellery the faces of Inspector Queen, the Police Commissioner and the D.A. were plaster masks. The detective in the doorway, now joined by two others, began a movement; Ellery checked it with the slightest gesture.

And in the silence they all took in the strange man's imperial stance; his bright, sharp eyes; his almost lipless mouth.

‘Please be good enough to tell me,' Ellery said with the softest courtesy, ‘why the Yorks had to die?'

‘For the sins of the father,' intoned the man at the table.

‘Not the fath
ers
?' Ellery stressed the sibilant.

‘I have said it.'

Ellery bowed his head. ‘Thank you,' he said. At the slight sound of the Inspector preparing to put his leg over the window sill, Ellery casually put a hand behind his back and with it made a peremptory gesture. ‘We will meet again,' he said with deference.

‘If I … will … iiiii …'

The
it
dribbled off into silence. And the bright, sharp eyes dulled and blunted and opened wide and opened wider until they were quite round. And the almost lipless mouth began to materialize, to inflate, to become fleshy and wet. And the imperial set of the shoulders wilted, rounding them. And the corded demarcations of jawbone and cheek muscles and neck tendons all softened and sagged and ran together.

And there was Walt.

‘Hello, Walt,' said Ellery.

‘Mr. Queen.' And there was Walt's flat, unencumbered voice. The round eyes blinked past Ellery to the window, took in the Commissioner, the District Attorney, Inspector Queen, returned to Ellery.

‘Walt, we'd like you to come back with us,' said Ellery.

A smile spread the slack lips. A gentle, happy, I-have-secrets-I-am-loved-smile.

‘Yes,' said Walt.

‘Dr. Morton Prince,' said Ellery a century later. ‘He pioneered in this thing. But it didn't become general knowledge until those two psychiatrists, Doctors Thigpen and Cleckley, published their remarkable report in the
Three Faces of Eve
, and Evelyn Lancaster herself followed it up, with the help of James Poling, in
The Final Face of Eve
. So I suppose there's hardly anyone who hasn't heard of multiple personality.'

Inspector Queen was still incapable of coherent speech.

‘I imagine,' Ellery chuckled, ‘that the Commissioner and the D.A. would still be debating whether to put me under psychiatric observations at Bellevue if they hadn't seen with their own eyes how Walt slipped from his second personality back into his first. I don't know why two disassociated personality manifestations in the same body should be so tough to credit. Evelyn Lancaster had three before developing her final one. Dr. Prince documents as many as five in one body, none of them knowing the existence of the others.'

The Inspector cleared his throat and found his voice at last. ‘Poor devil. How do you handle a thing like this? I mean legally?'

‘The psychiatrists and the lawyers will have to battle this one out, Dad. I don't think there's any doubt that in the end Walt will be “protected,” as his
alter ego
Y promised. He'll be studied and treated and taken care of for the rest of his life. And who knows? Maybe he'll develop a third personality, as socially responsible as Walt and Mr. Y can never be.'

The Inspector shook his head, ‘I guess I'll never really
believe
it. It's too much like black magic. That little schmo Walt and that egomaniac Y in the same body!'

‘Well, Dr. Prince and others have pointed out that alternate personalities are most often extremely opposite expressions of the bottled-up ego. In one kind of dual personality the ultra-prim teetotaling spinster will abruptly produce a gin-loving party girl. Robert Louis Stevenson instinctively made Dr. Jekyll the embodiment of goodness, and Mr. Hyde just about as evil as a man could be.

‘So here's Walt. It wouldn't be easy to locate another human being who scores nearer zero in looks, intelligence, wit, social and economic standing and what-have-you. It's no surprise, really, that he produces an alternate personality who's very close to infinity.'

His father shuddered and was silent again. But then he looked up and asked, ‘And you really think Walt didn't know he was writing those letters to himself?'

‘The head boys will probably have an answer for that. It's happened before, Dad. As I understand it, down deep at the heart of such cases is a demanding hunger, a kind of dictatorial want. Walt
wanted
God to like him and send him messages, therefore he
didn't want
to know who wrote them. Or rather, he'd want not to know.'

‘And why the Yorks, son? Why did Walt — I mean Y! — pick on the Yorks?'

Ellery twisted his nose thoughtfully. ‘I really had no idea until the other night — until “Y,” before he reverted to Walt, gave me that curious answer when I asked him the same question.'

‘He said something about the sins of the fathers.'

‘No,' Ellery said, ‘what he said was “of the father.” Singular. When you stop to think of it, that's a singularly revealing statement. The only father in this game was Nathaniel York, Senior — whose son became so fed up with old Nat's dictatorial ways that he threw up everything, lit out and never came back.