From this position, as helpless as Nikki frozen in the doorway on the other side of the bed, Ellery watched the climax of the nightmare.
The collision of the three thrashing bodies with the desk had shoved open the flat middle drawer.
When Ellery could focus, he saw Van Harrison on the rug before the desk, clutching his groin, his lips curled in agony. Dirk was prone on the desk, where he had been flung in the last savage exchange. His right arm was stretched out and lay in the open drawer. His mouth was open and the blood from his nose dripped over his bruised lips and chin and stained his teeth.
Ellery saw Dirk’s head come around and fix on something in the drawer which his hand was touching. His hand came up and his body came up after it, and he looked down at the thing he was clutching.
It was Harrison’s .22.
Harrison lurched to his feet, plunged. Dirk shot five times. Red holes appeared at Harrison’s throat, chest, abdomen. Two of the bullets dissolved the mirror over the bureau.
Martha screamed.
Dirk turned in a glassy way toward the bed. The gun went off again, and again, and again, and again. After the ninth shot there were no more explosions, but he kept squeezing the trigger.
Ellery staggered to his feet.
“You fool. You fool.”
Martha lay on Harrison’s bed as if she had been flung there from a great height. A convulsion of arms and legs stilled as Ellery turned to her. Red stains were spreading swiftly over her head and dress. He bent over her. He could hear her breath.
There was a thud behind him, and he turned. The revolver had slipped from Dirk’s hand. Dirk toppled to the floor and lay quiet.
“Nikki.”
Nikki did not move.
“Nikki.” Ellery stepped over Dirk’s legs, skirted Harrison’s body, went around the bed to the doorway and slapped Nikki’s face, hard. She whimpered and put her hand to her cheek. “Go downstairs now. Get on the phone. Call the hospital — Stamford or Norwalk. Emergency. She’s still alive. Then call the police if Tama hasn’t got through.” He talked in a loud, clear voice, as if she were hard of hearing.
He spun her around and pushed.
Nikki stumbled along the hall and groped her way down the stairs.
Ellery turned to face back into the room and almost fainted.
Van Harrison, who should have been dead, was on his hands and knees, inching his way toward the wall, dyeing the black rug as he moved. He reached the wall and clawed at it. Mewing sounds were coming from his torn throat. The effort brought on a hemorrhage, and he collapsed at the baseboard, his face pressed against the white leather.
“Stop!” Ellery sprang across the room. “Harrison, don’t move again. Don’t move. They’ll be here for you soon—”
The actor raised his face a little, and Ellery saw his eyes. They were trying to express something his shattered throat could not — the certain imminence of death, perhaps, and something else Ellery could not define at all.
Harrison’s fingers fluttered to his chest, his abdomen, as if to specify his wounds and mark them clear. Blood got all over his hand. He looked down at it, surprised. Then something new came into his eyes, a look — Ellery would have sworn — of pleasure.
Harrison rolled over to face the wall.
He hemorrhaged again.
“For God’s sake, Harrison, lie still.”
The actor raised his bloody hand with the other, steering it to the wall, holding it there. His forefinger was stiffly pointed.
The finger made a shaky, downward, diagonal red stroke on the white leather, from upper right to lower left:
He was trying to write something.
His hand dropped and fumbled at his stomach.
Red ink, thought Ellery. He’s going for more red ink.
Ellery dropped to his knees, He braced Harrison at the armpits The replenished finger came slowly up and wrote again, another downward diagonal which began this time at the upper left and wobbled to the lower right, crossing the first mark en route:
Washington Market... Washington... W. The last meeting with Martha had been W in Harrison’s code.
W... X...
Again. He was struggling again.
He wanted to write more.
Ellery helped him. He helped dip the rigid finger in fresh blood. He raised the heavy arm, held it steady.
Another downward stroke. Beside the X. A stroke exactly like the first:
And still another:
As the last downward stroke reached the diagonal, Harrison’s body heaved in a great backward surge, as if he had been caught in an outgoing wave. He remained bridged in Ellery’s arms, stiffly riding the wave, for a heartbeat or two, then his breath came out in a red spume and he went under.
All through that night, and through the timeless time that followed that night, Ellery was inhabited by a ghost. The ghost had a dripping finger, and the finger kept redly writing over and over the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth letters of the alphabet. It covered every surface of the inner man with its cryptic symbols, until Ellery thought he must burst with its corruption.
And he failed to exercise it.
Afterwards, when he looked back, it seemed to him that many confusing things had happened on that night, in all of which he comported himself with gravity and dignity and no faintest grasp of the issues. He had the clear recollection that the Darien police came, and the state police, and the county people from Bridgeport; that Martha was taken to Norwalk Hospital under guard and put immediately on the operating table; that Dirk Lawrence was whisked away, his mouth fish-like, unable to utter an intelligible word; that the wrecked bedroom and the ruins of Harrison were photographed and measured and the body carted out under the eye of the County Coroner; that newspaper people from New York City and various Connecticut towns and cities gathered rapidly in swarms over the lawns, hammered at doors, popped flash bulbs, attracted great clouds of mosquitoes and millers and crunchy beetles; that he was interrogated over and over, and Nikki, and the Japanese houseman; that some time during the night his father materialized at his side and remained there, pale and wary; that at one point Leon Fields appeared and by some magic won a few minutes alone with him; that at dawn he and Nikki and Tama — and the Inspector — were seated in some office in Bridgeport talking to the State’s Attorney, who wore a jacket over his undershirt and no socks... All these things Ellery remembered, yet he could not have repeated the slightest significant detail of the night past the point when Van Harrison died in his arms. Everything was clouded over by a red fog composed of X’s and Y’s, like a sort of bloody alphabet soup vaporized and darkening the air.
XY...
The scarlet letters.
He had a vague inverted view of himself standing before the leather wall like a professor at a fancy whiteboard, pointing to the bloody XY and explaining patiently Harrison’s code, up to and including the brief meeting at Washington Market; but even that had no real existence, because he had been unable to tell them why Harrison had fought death back in order to paint those symbols on his wall.
There was another memory, of Nikki and the Inspector and himself standing inside the screening curtains surrounding a bed in the emergency room of the Norwalk Hospital, watching Martha breathe. There was very little of her to see, because of the bandages on her face and the tight hospital precision of the sheets, with other bandages beneath. It seemed to Ellery that Nikki had kept saying over and over, above the noisy engine behind the bandages, that Martha needed a specialist, a specialist, and that he had kept assuring Nikki the specialist was there, at the other side of the bed, and a number of other very competent medical men, too. And that somebody told them it was touch and go, but while there was life there was hope. And that now they really must go.