The Player on the Other Side (21 page)

Outside, the old man said almost cheerfully, ‘So Percival doesn't have it, and that's that. Where do you want to check me next?'

‘Walt's room.'

‘We searched it like Maxwell J. House looking for the last drop. I think three times.'

‘Robert's house?'

‘Inside and out.'

‘And the garage?'

‘We even started to pull the cars apart.'

‘Let's look there again,' said Ellery.

They cut across the park to the garage behind Robert York's castle and indeed looked again. Inspector Queen showed Ellery just where the box of poison had stood; and Ellery demonstrated where Walt said he had been; under the Ryan sports car — when Robert was murdered; and they were about to denude the shelves in order to tap and measure the walls behind them when the son clutched the father's ropy arm with a warning clutch.

And they listened, not breathing, and heard through the closed door footsteps coming stealthily toward the garage.

The Inspector's right hand visited his left armpit and returned with a Police Positive. Ellery squared his shoulders until they crackled, than hunched over and drifted toward the door.

The footsteps came closer, stopped. The Inspector raised his weapon.

The knob turned, very, very slowly. Then —
crash!
the door was kicked open and, ‘Oh,
scheissmonger
,' said the Inspector disgustedly, and put away his gun.

‘You could lose half a head that way, Archer,' said Ellery. ‘Nevertheless, heroic. How are you?'

‘You did give me what is known as a turn,' said Tom Archer, grinning whitely. ‘I didn't know who it was.'

‘And we forgot you'd still be working at Robert's. How's it coming?'

‘It's going to be three cuts too high for any but a multimillionaire's private stamp collection. Fantastic' Archer looked around the garage curiously. ‘Can I help you with anything?'

‘No,' said Inspector Queen.

‘Yes,' said Ellery. He reached over to the work bench for his parcel. We've been looking for …
this.
' And he snatched away the wrapping.

Father and son were watching the face, eyes, stance, everything. Archer did not turn a hair. ‘What is it?' he asked, and bent forward to read aloud, ‘Prints Charming. Oh, I see. This is what those ridiculous cards were stamped with.'

‘Yes,' said Inspector Queen.

‘No,' said Ellery. ‘One like it, and we can't find it. Have you seen anything like this around here?'

Young Archer shook his head. ‘By the way, I hear you arrested Walt. You can't actually think
he
did it?'

‘Go on back to your work,' sighed Ellery. ‘We'll be rummaging around for some time.'

‘Anything I can do to help, sing out.' Archer waved and went away.

On their way up the narrow stairs to the upper story of the garage the Inspector grumbled, ‘I don't know what you expect to find, Ellery. If you think Mrs. Schriver's super-clean and Emily lived like a nun, wait till you see Walt's room. It must be symptomatic of whatever's wrong with him. He couldn't hide a guilty thought in it.'

‘A man just can't live in a room for years without impressing his personality on it in some way, Dad.'

‘He
has
no personality. That's Walt's secret weapon.' Inspector Queen took out the ring of passkeys he had brought along. ‘Now which one was it again?'

The second key worked. The old man pushed the door open; it moved as silently as Walt. Ellery stepped inside.

Coming from the dim stairwell, he blinked in the blaze of blankness. The floor was pine, scrubbed white, bleached, waxed; a table to match; white curtains simple as pillow slips; an immaculate blanket, white, tucked tight barracks-fashion, on a canvas cot; a plain straight chair; a rectangular table lamp with a base turned from the same white pine, with a tubular white shade. The place was so aching-clean it hurt.

‘Might's well live in an aspirin tablet,' grunted the Inspector. ‘Did I exaggerate?'

Ellery stood still in wonderment. ‘What does he do with himself up here?'

‘Reads, I guess.' His father pointed.

Between the far side of the bed and the wall beyond stood a small raw bookcase in the inevitable white. Ellery ran over, slid the cot aside — it, too, moved noiselessly — and squatted.

‘Talk about one-track minds,' he breathed. ‘
Plywood Projects. Concrete and Masonry Handbook. Woodworker's Manual
. Four books on the care and feeding of lawns. Roses. Pumps. Heating systems. House wiring. And a Bible, the Douay. Wait, here's a paperback
Modern Reader's Bible
. And the
Revised Standard
!'

Ellery looked around. ‘What in God's name would he want with three Bibles?'

‘Four,' said the Inspector. ‘There's a King James locked in the table drawer.' He unlocked it.

Ellery rose and swooped on the drawer. ‘The Oxford, with Concordance … Dad, this is neat! This figures.'

‘What figures?'

‘Duty. Devotion to Duty — always, always capitalized.' Ellery waved at the bookcase. ‘A couple of shelves full of musts. A must is like a should, explaining the Bibles.' He began the long hungry lope, explaining to himself aloud. ‘He's a zombie, a robot … does what he must do … should do …'

‘And nothing he shouldn't?' demanded his father. ‘Is that your point?'

‘Exactly. This room closes the point out, Dad — it isn't even debatable any more. The man who lives in this room could not — repeat, could
not —
have conceived this devious business, as I've held repeatedly. It's too … too inventive. Too romantic.'

‘Romantic!'

‘Well, adventuresome,' muttered Ellery. ‘The only way Walt could ever have committed these crimes is by someone telling him to, spelling it all out for him, step by step. And whoever that is, he's not sitting in your jail smiling.'

Inspector Queen choked. ‘There are Walt's clothes.'

In one corner of the room, an L-shaped partition segregated the tiny bathroom. White curtains over the doorway. Another across an area where the partition was single wall-board instead of double, with the studs removed. There, on hooks hung in a ruler-straight line, hangers were angled to the narrow space. Two immaculate ‘good' suits, cheap but cared for: one black, one brown. Dress shoes: one pair black, one pair brown. Work shoes: three pairs, of excellent quality. On shelves, small or wide as needed: stacks of socks, black and brown; underwear; handkerchiefs. Shirts were on hangers, obviously laundered and pressed by hand, for they were not folded. Ironing board hinged from the partition; iron in a cubbyhole. Every possible space in the little partition was used; it was a miniature storage wall, only four inches thick.

‘If he hid it here,' said Ellery, ‘he chewed it up fine and painted it on.'

‘You think that's packed? Look at the kitchen.'

Ellery turned around twice before he saw the ‘kitchen'. Stove — a two-burner electric plate — and work surface hinged down from the wall opposite the window. This exposed china — heavy white cafeteria crockery, exactly one service — and a stainless-steel knife, fork, teaspoon and tablespoon upended in the single china coffee mug. There was no refrigerator: Walt apparently ate from cans and boxes, of which there was a supply on the shelf beside the dishes. No sink: he must use the tiny one in the bathroom.

Ellery closed it all up and walked thoughtfully across to the window, a dormer, which alone broke the boxlike proportions of the room. He could see along the side of Robert York's castle and across the end of the diamond-shaped park to Myra's front door.

Suddenly he threw his forearm across his eyes and stood motionless.

‘Son. What's the matter?'

Ellery gave the Inspector an impatient headshake. He flung down his arm and bounded for the door. ‘I'll be back in a minute,' he exclaimed, and raced down the stairs.

His father hopped for the window. He saw Ellery gallop out the side door of the garage, turn and look up while running, stumble, recover and scramble into the building, to race back up the stairs.

‘Ellery, what in time —?'

Ellery held up a breathless wait-a-minute palm and dashed to the window, scooping up the chair as he passed the table. He set it before the window, leaped on it and, using his knuckles, pressed upward.

The Inspector gaped. For the dormer ceiling, a mere piece of fiberboard, lifted readily to expose a quite sizable blackness above. Still holding the panel up with his knuckles, Ellery reached over the nearest beam and felt beyond it, shouted, ‘Dad!' and drew forth a shiny box bearing the legend
Prints Charming
. He jumped down with it, the panel fell back into place with a cushioned
whoosh
; he threw the toy printing set to his father and dropped gasping into the chair.

The old man's face was a sight to behold. For just as all the combined rays of the spectrum reflect to the eye the color white, so all the Inspector's emotions — stupefaction, self-castigation, professional chagrin, anger at subordinates and half a dozen others — produced an expression of total blankness. He proceeded mechanically to set the box on Walt's table, raise the lid, take out his display handkerchief and, with it, lift the letter J from its bed, examine its stamping surface and, shaking his head in a dazed way, replace the J and lift out the H. And then the W. And then all the other letters, and the numbers.

‘The only ones showing ink on the stamping surfaces are the J, H and W,' the old man mumbled; and, carefully replacing the lid, he turned and looked at his son, who was still breathing hard.

‘If I didn't think you might do it,' said the Inspector in a sort of croak, ‘I'd turn around and instruct you to kick me where it'd do the most good. Will you kindly tell me: are you a genius or am I an idiot? A hand-picked squad searched this room, not once but three times. I searched it personally. Yet you walk in here, take one look, point —'

‘Oh, come on, Dad,' Ellery said irritably. ‘You just didn't happen to notice one thing, and I just did. This is a dormer window with a pitched roof. Yet inside the window the ceiling is flat. So there had to be a space up there. That's not what's bothering me.'

‘You're
bothered
about finding this?' snapped the old man. ‘What's the matter with you, Ellery? This find of yours cinches the case against Walt. It's going to send him to the Chair.'

‘That's what's bothering me,' muttered Ellery. ‘Because it pins all three murders on him.'

‘Are you suggesting that the box was planted up there to frame him? That Percival pipe dream again?'

‘No, I was wrong about that,' said the son wearily. ‘I don't doubt you'll find Walt's fingerprints all over it. I'm ready to concede that Walt executed the three murders, Dad. What I'm not ready to concede is that he
planned
the three murders.'

‘What are you doing now?' demanded his father. For Ellery had risen suddenly and stepped back onto the chair.

‘See if there's anything else up here.'

Again Ellery used his knuckles to raise the ceiling plasterboard. With the other hand he felt around the floor of the hiding place. ‘Nothing on this side …' He changed hands on the ceiling panel and fumbled about in the opposite direction — and then, with almost a surprised look, stopped fumbling. The Inspector, watching him, stiffened.

‘What is it, Ellery?'

‘Feels like a clipboard,' said Ellery slowly; and he withdrew the hand of discovery with care, and the panel came down with a
whoosh
; and it was indeed a clipboard, with a number of sheets of paper held neatly in its jaws.

And as he read the topmost sheet from his elevated position in John Henry Walt's white and sterile room, with Inspector Queen shifting restlessly below him, one hand making futile requests, Ellery sighed a long and satisfied sigh, and some of the hunch went out of his taut shoulders, and even the lines drawn lately on his face underwent erasure.

But when he handed the clipboard to his father, and the Inspector began to read the topmost sheet as Ellery got down from the chair, there was neither satisfaction nor relaxation on the old man's face, only a deepening of its anxieties.

For what the Inspector read was:

Dear Walt:

You know who I am.

You do not know that you know.

You shall.

I write this to let you know that I know who you really are. I know the skill of your hands. I know the quality of your obedience. I know where you come from and what you are doing. I know what you think. I know what you want. I know your great destiny.

I like you.

Y

24

Queen's Countergambit

Ellery Queen was fast asleep when at last be began to understand — really to understand — the rules of the York Square game he was playing.

It did not come to him as a game at first, when he was profoundly dreaming. It began as a series of impressions, whimsical, laughable even; not until then did he find himself locked in combat with a chess piece. But which one? which one? — oh, horrible, it was a bishop, but instead of the miter it had a squashed head …

And then he was running, running over the square (squares?) and he was tiny, too tiny to cover that much distance quickly; but he must get there, he must … and the squares grew larger as he grew smaller until he could see only one square — York Square, of course, with the four castles at the corners.

And Ellery knew with a great desolation that he was running, had been running, to save a chess piece that was under attack; he saw her standing with her doom descending like a great hand, come to take her away. And take her it did, and then there was the horror of stasis wherein suddenly he must stand where he found himself, helpless, waiting, waiting, and immobile because it was not his turn.