“And what’s your attitude now?” She laughed again. “That you don’t feel like a rooster any more?”
“I’ll be glad to answer that question, Delia, in the living room.” Her head came up sharply.
“You don’t have to answer any questions,” she said. She got up and strolled past him. “In your living room or anywhere else.” As he shut the bedroom door and turned to her, she said, “You really don’t like me?” almost wistfully.
“I like you very much, Delia. That’s why you mustn’t come here.”
“But you just said in there―”
“That was in there.”
She nodded, but not as if she really understood. She went to his desk, ignoring the mirror above it, and picked up one of his pipes. She stroked it with her forefinger. He concentrated on her hands, the skin glowing under the sheer nylon gloves.
He made an effort. “Delia―”
“Aren’t you ever lonely?” she murmured. “I think I die a little every day, just from loneliness. Nobody who talks to you really talks. It’s just words. People listening to themselves. Women hate me, and men... At least when they talk to me!” She wheeled, crying, “Am I that stupid? You won’t talk to me, either! Am I?”
He had to make the effort over again. It was even harder this time. But he said through his teeth, “Delia, I want you to go home.”
“Why?”
“Just because you’re lonely, and have a husband who’s half-dead ― in the wrong half ― and because I’m not a skunk, Delia, and you’re not a tramp. Those are the reasons, Delia, and if you stay here much longer I’m afraid I’ll forget all four of them.”
She hit him with the heel of her hand. The top of his head flew off and he felt his shoulderblades smack against the wall.
Through a momentary mist he saw her in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” she said in an agonized way. “You’re a fool, but I’m sorry. I mean about coming here. I won’t do it again.”
Ellery watched her go down the hill. There was fog, and she disappeared in it.
That night he finished most of a bottle of Scotch, sitting at the picture window in the dark and fingering his jaw. The fog had come higher and there was nothing to see but a chaos. Nothing made sense.
But he felt purged, and safe, and wryly noble.
Chapter Nine
June twenty-ninth was a Los Angeles special. The weather man reported a reading of ninety-one and the newspapers bragged that the city was having its warmest June twenty-ninth in forty-three years.
But Ellery, trudging down Hollywood Boulevard in a wool jacket, was hardly aware of the roasting desert heat. He was a man in a dream these days, a dream entirely filled with the pieces of the Hill-Priam problem. So far it was a meaningless dream in which he mentally chased cubist things about a crazy landscape. In that dimension temperature did not exist except on the thermometer of frustration.
Keats had phoned to say that he was ready with the results of his investigation into the past of Hill and Priam. Well, it was about time.
Ellery turned south into Wilcox, passing the post office.
You could drift about in your head for just so long recognizing nothing. There came a point at which you had to find a compass and a legible map or go mad.
This ought to be it.
He found Keats tormenting a cigaret, the knot of his tie on his sternum and his sandy hair bristling.
“I thought you’d never get here.”
“I walked down.” Ellery took a chair, settling himself. “Well, let’s have it.”
“Where do you want it,” asked the detective, “between the eyes?”
“What do you mean?” Ellery straightened.
“I mean,” said Keats, plucking shreds of tobacco from his lips―”damn it, they pack cigarets looser all the time! ― I mean we haven’t got a crumb.”
“A crumb of what?”
“Of information.”
“You haven’t found out anything?” Ellery was incredulous.
“Nothing before 1927, which is the year Hill and Priam went into business in Los Angeles. There’s nothing that indicates they lived here before that year; in fact, there’s reason to believe they didn’t, that they came here that year from somewhere else. But from where? No data. We’ve tried everything from tax records to the Central Bureau fingerprint files. I’m pretty well convinced they had no criminal record, but that’s only a guess. They certainly had no record in the State of California.
“They came here in 27,” said Keats bitterly, “started a wholesale jewelry business as partners, and made a fortune before the crash of ‘29. They weren’t committed to the market and they rode out the depression by smart manipulation and original merchandising methods. Today the firm of Hill & Priam is rated one of the big outfits in its line. They’re said to own one of the largest stocks of precious stones in the United States. And that’s a lot of help, isn’t it?”
“But you don’t come into the wholesale jewelry business from outer space,” protested Ellery. “Isn’t there a record somewhere of previous connections in the industry? At least of one of them?”
“The N.J.A. records don’t show anything before 1927.”
“Well, have you tried this? Certainly Hill, at least, had to go abroad once in a while in connection with the firm’s foreign offices ― Laurel told me they have branches in Amsterdam and South Africa. That means a passport, a birth certificate―”
“That was my ace in the hole.” Keats snapped a fresh cigaret to his lips. “But it turns out that Hill & Priam don’t own those branches, although they do own the one in New York. They’re simply working arrangements with established firms abroad. They have large investments in those firms, but all their business dealings have been, and still are, negotiated by and through agents. There’s no evidence that either Hill or Priam stepped off American soil in twenty-three years, or at least during the twenty-three years we have a record of them.”
He shrugged. “They opened the New York branch early in 1929, and for a few years Priam took care of it personally. But it was only to get it going and train a staff. He left it in charge of a man who’s still running it there, and came back here. Then Priam met and married Delia Collier Macgowan, and the next thing that happened to him was the paralysis. Hill did the transcontinental hopping for the firm after that.”
“Priam’s never had occasion to produce a birth certificate?”
“No, and in his condition there’s no likelihood he ever will. He’s never voted, for instance, and while he might be challenged to prove his American citizenship ― to force him to loosen up about his place of birth and so on ― I’m afraid that would take a long, long time. Too long for this merry-go-round.”
“The war―”
“Both Priam and Hill were over the military age limit when World War II conscription began. They never had to register. Search of the records on World War I failed to turn up their names.”
“You’re beginning to irritate me, Lieutenant. Didn’t Leander Hill carry any insurance?”
“None that antedated 1927, and in the photostats connected with what insurance he did take out after that date his place of birth appears as Chicago. I’ve had the Illinois records checked, and there’s none of a Leander Hill; it was a phony. Priam carries no insurance at all. The industrial insurance carried by the firm, of course, is no help.
“In other words, Mr. Queen,” said Lieutenant Keats, “there’s every indication that both men deliberately avoided leaving, or camouflaged, the trail to their lives preceding their appearance in L.A. It all adds up to one thing―”
“That there was no Leander Hill or Roger Priam in existence before 1927,” muttered Ellery. “Hill and Priam weren’t their real names.”