“I’ve been waiting in the back garden in the dark. I saw Laurel’s car. And after Laurel and... Crowe drove away I thought I’d better wait a little longer. I wasn’t sure that your housekeeper was gone.”
“She’s gone.”
“That’s good.” She laughed.
“Where is your car, Delia?”
“I left it in a side lane at the bottom of the hill. Walked up. Ellery, this is a darling kitchen―”
“Discreet,” said Ellery. Fie had not stirred.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
He said slowly, “I don’t think I’m going to.”
Her smile withered. But then it burgeoned again. “Oh, don’t sound so serious. I was passing by and I thought I’d drop in and see how you were getting on―”
“With the case.”
“Of course.” She had dimples. Funny, he had never noticed them before.
“This isn’t a good idea, Delia.”
“What isn’t?”
“This is a small town, Delia, and it’s all eyes and ears. It doesn’t take much in Hollywood to destroy a woman’s reputation.”
“Oh, that.” She was silent. Then she showed her teeth. “Of course, you’re right. It was stupid of me. It’s just that sometimes...” She stopped, and she shivered suddenly.
“Sometimes what, Delia?”
“Nothing. I’m going. ― Is there anything new?”
“Just that business about the rat poison.”
She shrugged. “I really thought there were mice.”
“Of course.”
“Good night, Ellery.”
“Good night, Delia.”
He did not offer to walk her down the hill and she did not seem to expect it.
He stared at the kitchen door for a long time.
Then he went upstairs and poured himself a stiff drink.
At three in the morning Ellery gave up trying to sleep and crawled out of bed. He turned on the lights in the living room, loaded and fired his brier, turned the lights out, and sat down to watch Hollywood glimmer scantily below. Light always disturbed him when he was groping in the dark.
And he was groping, and this was darkness.
Of course, it was a puzzling case. But puzzle was merely the absence of answer. Answer it, and the puzzle vanished. Nor was he bothered by the nimbus of fantasy which surrounded the case like a Los Angeles daybreak fog. All crimes were fantastic insofar as they expressed what most people merely dreamed about. The dream of the unknown enemy had been twenty years or more in the making...
He clucked to himself in the darkness. Back to the writer of the note.
The wonder was not that he made gifts of poisoned dogs and wrote odd notes relishing slow death and promising mysterious warnings with special meanings. The wonder was that he had been able to keep his hatred alive for almost a generation; and that was not fantasy, but sober pathology.
Fantasy was variance from normal experience, a matter of degree. Hollywood had always attracted its disproportionate quota of variants from the norm. In Vandalia, Illinois, Roger Priam would have been encysted in the community like a foreign substance, but in the Southern California canyons he was peculiarly soluble. There might be Delia Priams in Seattle, but in the houri paradise of Hollywood she belonged, the female archetype from whom all desire sprang. And Tree Boy, who in New York would have been dragged off to the observation ward of Bellevue Hospital, was here just another object of civic admiration, rating columns of good-natured newspaper space.
No, it wasn’t the fantasy.
It was the hellish scarcity of facts.
Here was an enemy out of the past. What past? No data. The enemy was preparing a series of warnings. What were they? A dead dog had been the first. Then the unknown contents of a small cardboard box. Then a deliberately nonlethal dose of arsenic. The further warnings, the warnings that were promised, had not yet come forth. How many would there be? They were warnings of “special meaning.” A series, then. A pattern. But what connection could exist between a dead dog and an arsenic-salted tunafish salad? It would help, help greatly, to know what had been in that box Roger Priam had received at the same moment that Leander Hill was stooping over the body of the dog and reading the thin, multi-creased note. Yes, greatly. But... no data. It was probable that, whatever it was, Priam had destroyed it. But Priam knew. How could the man be made to talk? He must be made to talk.
The darkness was darker than even that. Ellery mused, worrying his pipe. There was a pattern, all right, but how could he be sure it was the only pattern? Suppose the dead hound had been the first warning of special meaning in a proposed series to Hill, the other warnings of which were forever lost in the limbo of an unknown mind because of Hill’s premature death? And suppose whatever was in Priam’s box was the first warning of a second series, of which the second warning was the poisoning ― a series having no significant relation to the one aborted by Hill’s heart attack? It was possible. It was quite possible that there was no connection in meaning between Hill’s and Priam’s warnings.
The safest course for the time being was to ignore the dead dog received by Hill and to concentrate on the living Priam, proceeding on the assumption that the unknown contents of Priam’s box and the poisoning of his salad constituted a separate series altogether...
Ellery went back to bed. His last thought was that he must find out at any cost what had been in that box, and that he could only wait for the third warning to Priam.
But he dreamed of Delia Priam in a jungle thicket, showing her teeth.
Chapter Seven
As Ellery was able to put it together when he arrived at Delia Priam’s summons that fabulous Sunday morning — from the stories of Delia, Alfred Wallace, and old Mr. Collier — Delia had risen early to go to church. Beyond remarking that her church attendance was “spotty,” she was reticent about this; Ellery gathered that she could not go as regularly as she would like because of the peculiar conditions of her life, and that only occasionally was she able to slip away and into one of the old churches where, to “the blessed mutter of the mass,” she returned to her childhood and her blood. This had been such a morning, five days after the poisoning attack on her husband, two after her strange visit to Ellery’s cottage.
While Delia had been up and about at an early hour, Alfred Wallace had risen late. He was normally an early riser, because Priam was a demanding charge and Wallace had learned that if he was to enjoy the luxury of breakfast he must get it over with before Priam awakened. On Sundays, however, Priam preferred to lie in bed until mid-morning, undisturbed, and this permitted Wallace to sleep until nine o’clock.
Delia’s father was invariably up with the birds. On this morning he had breakfasted with his daughter, and when she drove off to Los Angeles Mr. Collier went out for his early morning tramp through the woods. On his way back he had stopped before the big oak and tried to rouse his grandson, but as there was no answer from the tree house beyond Crowe’s Brobdingnagian snores the old man had returned to the Priam house and gone into the library. The library was downstairs off the main hall, directly opposite the door to Roger Priam’s quarters, with the staircase between. This was shortly after eight, Mr. Collier told Ellery; his son-in-law’s door was shut and there was no light visible under the door; all seemed as it always was at that hour of a Sunday morning; and the old man had got his postage stamp albums out of a drawer of the library desk, his stamp hinges, his tongs, and his Scott’s catalogue, and he had set to work mounting his latest mail purchases of stamps. “I’ve done a lot of knocking about the world,” he told Ellery, “and it’s corking fun to collect stamps from places I’ve actually been in. Want to see my collection?” Ellery had declined; he was rather busy at the time.