The Player on the Other Side (31 page)

‘Dad, I think Walt-Y made an identification in a weird sort of way with young York, Nathaniel Junior, whose jungle death Nathaniel Senior could never get himself to believe. Remember that the old man's will left everything to junior if he should turn up alive. Walt-Y, I think, took upon himself not only young Nat's grievances but also his right to the inheritance. In a sense, Walt-Y took upon himself young Nat.'

‘Could be,' the Inspector grumbled. ‘Far as I'm concerned, son, in this case anything could be.'

‘Including the possibility that Walt actually knew young Nathaniel.'

The old man stared.

‘It might pay, in fact, to do some backtracking along the trail that ended with Junior's death. You might find that his path crossed Walt's somewhere, that the two might even have been friends. This would have to have been, of course, before Walt broke into two personality pieces. It would clear up a lot, Dad. Why Walt gravitated to this vicinity. Why he drifted — if he did — into the Walt-young Nat syndrome. Who Walt really is, for that matter — or, rather, who he originally was — and where he came from and so on. But I'm pretty sure that somehow, somewhere, Walt knew Nathaniel York, Junior.'

Ellery shrugged. ‘For no reason at all, by the way, I once looked up that birth date chiseled into Junior's plaque in York Park. April 20, 1924. Know when that fell, Dad? On Easter.

‘So meek Walt gradually talked himself into inheriting the earth — began to feel it was his due — then began to be outraged that the York cousins were getting it instead.

‘What may well have tipped him overside was the discovery, one time when he was poring over his Bibles, that JHW — his own initials — constituted part of the Tetragrammaton. For Walt it was quite logical for “part” of the Tetragrammaton to become “most” of it, and finally “all” of it. That may well have been the exact point in time when Mr. Y made his bow. JHWH. Jehovah. Yahweh. Y.

‘And then,' said Ellery, squinting through his cigarette smoke at his silent father, ‘and then Yahweh went to work with a vengeance, as you might say.'

Ellery got up to refill his coffee cup, and the Inspector's. Neither had drunk anything stronger than strong coffee since the phantasmagoria in Room 31
2
of the Altitude.

‘So now we have God-and-Nat-identified-Walt brooding over the Yorks of York Square,' Ellery resumed. ‘They had, or would have, so much; and what they would have was rightfully his. Or maybe Yahweh's sense of justice was outraged. A lot of quite sane monopersonality people wouldn't hesitate to charge that not one of the Yorks deserved the treasure, Myra and Percival in particular. Even Robert and Emily, on the at least arguable ground that neither had the slightest notion of the right way to spend that kind of loot. That used to be Percival's point about Robert and Emily, remember? By the way, Dad, is he suing the city?'

‘Nah,' said the Inspector. ‘Percival is saintly now. An honest mistake, he calls it; he's ready to forgive and forget.'

‘Forgive,' murmured Ellery, ‘and ye shall receive?'

‘I'll admit,' said his father dryly, ‘that the thought has occurred to me. Retaliatory forgiveness. Perce may have turned over a whole set of new leaves, but there's a lot still in print on the flip side.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He's forgiven his blonde, too.'

‘No!'

‘Yes. And a sickening sight it was, too. After she read in the papers about his attempted suicide, she camped at the jail until they let her in just to get rid of her. She cried salty tears all over the prison infirmary, and Perce patted her shoulder in a sad and fatherly way and told her it was okay, he understood.' The old man grimaced. ‘Ellery, I wanted to set her down on her fat rump for coming to me the way she did with that out-and-out lie about Percy “confiding” in her how he'd talked Walt into doing his dirty work. But there's nothing I can do — her statement wasn't made in court or under oath.'

‘How did she know anybody persuaded Walt to do anything? We sat on that pretty hard.'

‘A shrewd guess. There's some sort of brain under that mop of hair dye. She lay awake nights thinking it up, to get even with Perce for giving her the boot.'

‘So now they'll live happily ever after?'

‘Guess again,' chuckled the Inspector.

‘Don't tell me,' said Ellery, his cup in midair, ‘Perce has another doll already!'

‘Yump. I was the one brought 'em together. Suggested they could help each other.'

‘
Miss Sullivan?
'

‘That's my boy,' nodded the old man, grinning. ‘I'll bet you didn't know there's going to be — actually going to be — a rehabilitation center near the city that'll be the biggest thing since Father Damien invented leprosy.'

‘And I'll bet,' Ellery grinned back, ‘that Miss Sullivan gets York Square, too.'

‘No takers — she does. With Mrs. Schriver thrown in, who's so smitten by the new Percival York she's ready to follow him to hell and back.'

To hell and back …

Even aside from esoteric terrors like multiple personality, the human mind was an awesome thing. There were apparently key words in key situations, a chance encounter of all the right ingredients.

Ellery sat in silence and thought how, through this mind case, while the answer eluded him and he chased it like a cat after a moth, a hidden power had been trying to call it to his attention.

How early had it been that Ann Drew refused to tell him why the puppy-dog was named Beelzebub? How close had he been then, and how much closer that later time when he had turned whimsy into a whip? At any stage in the game Tom Archer could have — would have — told him, had Ellery had the wit to ask.

To hell and back …

Beelzebub; the Devil. Archer had wickedly named the dog for the Devil because the Devil is God's opposite … and ‘dog' is ‘God' spelled backwards.

Well, Ellery thought (and he smiled), perhaps it was too much to expect, even from himself.

‘What, Dad?' he said. ‘I wasn't listening.'

‘I said, so that ends your game. The one you weren't going to play.'

It seemed so long ago. And all of it seemed to have happened to a driveling stranger with a pure bone head. A stranger who had felt he must go on to something else because technology had deprived him of opponents. Such nonsense. Madness, or aberrance — or, for that matter, ‘that rare disorder' from which John Henry Walt suffered — were outside the jurisdiction of the mechanical equalizers. Someone had to be standing by for such times as the Devil possessed the Player on the Other Side.

‘Dad,' he said out of his reverie. ‘Do you remember the Huxley quotations? “The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side —”'

‘What?' said the Inspector, roused from a reverie of his own.

‘“The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient.” When I first read that,' Ellery frowned, ‘I couldn't buy the “fair, just and patient” part. Now … Well, I mean, who's to judge fairness, justice? Fairness and justice really aren't absolute, are they? They're conditioned by the time and place. They emerge as a function of the rules; what he thinks they mean has to affect what
I
think they mean. So … I've been standing myself in a corner and memorizing the rest of what Huxley said.'

‘What was that?' asked his father.

‘“But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”'

‘To our cost,' said the Inspector thoughtfully.

‘It reminds me,' Ellery went on, ‘of something Rimbaud the French poet, once wrote to a friend: “
Je est un autre.
” Not
je suis
, you'll note. “
Je
est
un autre
” — “I
is
someone else.” Sounds like something out of Joel Chandler Harris. Until you start mouthing it. Then all of a sudden, it becomes: “I … is-someone-else.”'

But it was too much for the old man, and he stopped listening. ‘It's a tough one,' Ellery reflected aloud. ‘It calls on the head. I is someone else … Then I ran across Archibald MacLeish's interpretation of Rimbaud's line. MacLeish interprets it as meaning: “One is played
upon
, not player.” One is played upon, not player,' he repeated, savoring it. ‘Tasty, isn't it?'

But —
to our cost
, thought the Inspector; and he let his eyelids droop, the better to see the board, and the taken pieces lying, discards, in the margins: the bronze plaque to the living memory of Nathaniel York, Junior, kept loving-bright by the machines of Walt's hands; the demolished head that had belonged to Robert York; the country dreams of Emily York, thrown into the mandibles of the great steel underground worm; the little presleep nip of juniper juice in Myra York's little pink mouth, and the instant quiet flash of agony; and, off by itself, in a strange terrain, a place of distortions seen through another dimension … off by itself the checkmated king, writhing with hideous life. And, in some hideous way, happy. All for the lack of a bit of regard here, a warming hand there, a spoonful of loving concern in a critical hour.

‘To our cost,' Inspector Queen sighed.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1963 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2002-2

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