Irons also called Tama Mayuko, who testified to at least five separate occasions on which he had admitted Martha Lawrence to Harrison’s house and witnessed her retirement with the actor to his bedroom.
The second part of Darrell Irons’s defense was devoted lovingly to Harrison. The lawyer called a parade of witnesses — in some cases the courtroom was cleared of spectators, in others testimony was given in chambers — who testified to Harrison’s numerous amours with married women preceding his affair with Mrs. Lawrence. Irons put into evidence the figures of Harrison’s meager earnings from his profession during recent years; he put into evidence Harrison’s savings bank accounts and the contents of several safedeposit boxes, showing large accumulations of cash unaccounted for by his legitimate earnings and unreported in his income tax returns. And the lawyer connected Martha’s withdrawals of cash with identical sums deposited in Harrison’s numerous accounts...
At the close of Friday’s session, Dirk’s lawyer had still not finished painting the dead actor in his full gigolo colors. He promised more — much more — for Monday.
Dirk was taken back to his cell in the county jail on Bridgeport’s North Avenue, and Ellery and Nikki drove to Norwalk Hospital. Martha’s condition was unchanged; she was alive under heavy sedation, and that was all. They were allowed to peep into her room for five seconds. Her eyes were open, but she seemed not to recognize them. Her doctors had refused pointblank both Irons’s and the State’s Attorney’s formal requests to take a statement from her.
Ellery persuaded Nikki to return with him to New York for the weekend.
Saturday began badly. The phone rang, the buzzer buzzed, all morning. Ellery, who had planned a quiet day for Nikki, spirited her away from West 87th Street and they went to Central Park.
They drifted for sweltering hours with no conversation. When Nikki’s step lagged, Ellery found a place for her under a shade tree, and she dozed with her head in his lap. Occasionally she moaned.
XY...
He could not get it out of his mind.
Nothing had been made of it in court, by either side. It had been put into the record and dismissed as the irrelevant meandering of a dying brain.
But Ellery remembered the incredible effort, worthy of a meaning. It was relevant. Of this he was certain.
What could Harrison have meant to convey?
When Nikki woke up, they strolled across the park, and in late afternoon they found themselves among the beautiful little buildings of the park zoo. They found a table on the terrace overlooking the seal pool, and Ellery went into the cafeteria and came back with sandwiches and milk, and they sat there munching and sipping and watching the scampering children and the crowds about the tall monkey cages and the seals.
And finally Nikki said with a sigh, “I’m glad we came, Ellery. It’s always so restful at the zoo.”
“What?” said Ellery.
“The zoo,” Nikki repeated. “I love that word, don’t you? There’s no other word like it in the English language. It’s a fun-word, but to me a quiet fun-word. Even when I was growing up in Kansas City and Papa took me sometimes to the zoo in Swope Park, it didn’t mean racing-around-fun so much as looking-with-your-mouth-open-fun, and dreaming about zebras and monkeys for days afterward... What did you say?”
“Zoo,” Ellery muttered again. “Zoo.”
He was sitting straight.
Nikki looked at him, astonished. “Well, of course,” she began. “That’s what I just—”
“Zoo... I’d forgotten about that!”
“Forgotten about what, Ellery?”
“Z. The last code-letter indicated in Harrison’s book.”
The look of pleasure left Nikki’s face, and she turned away.
But Ellery went on, raptly. “Harrison wrote the letters X and Y. And then he died. Suppose, Nikki... suppose he hadn’t finished?”
And now Nikki frowned. “You mean he meant to add Z, but died before he could?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I guess that could be...”
“It has to be! As XY, it makes no sense.”
“XYZ... I can’t see that XYZ makes any more sense than XY.”
“It’s an ending,” said Ellery, waving his arms. “The ending. The ending of Harrison’s code... the ending of Harrison.”
“What,” sighed Nikki, “are you talking about?”
Ellery glanced at his watch. “It’s too late to get up there today—”
“Get up where today, Ellery?”
“To the zoo.”
“You’re in the zoo!”
“Not Harrison’s zoo,” said Ellery. “Harrison’s zoo in his code book was the zoo in Bronx Park. And that, Nikki, is just where I’m going first thing tomorrow morning.”
“But what on earth do you expect to find there?”
Ellery looked blank. “I haven’t any idea.”
Some friends took Nikki away to Long Island for a day’s boating, the Inspector had to be at Headquarters on a hot homicide, so on Sunday Ellery drove off alone. He was rather glad it had worked out that way.
It was a dreary day with heavy gray skies and an advance guard of thunderheads over the Palisades. It matched his mood, although he worried about Nikki. Portents seemed in the air.
He squirmed behind the wheel as he inched along the West Side Highway. His skin itched.
XYZ... It was possible. It was even likely.
But then what?
Ellery felt dogged. Z was the end. It completed the circle. So you hooked onto the merry-go-round and went along for the ride. Maybe there was a ring—?
He had never felt so foolish.
He left the express highway at Dyckman Street and drove north on Broadway to 207th Street. There was little traffic on the streets. He turned east on 207th and followed Fordham Road into Pelham Parkway and the Concourse Gate of the Bronx Zoo.
He left his car in the parking circle beyond the entrance and began his aimless odyssey. He felt a little more like Jurgen than Odysseus — searching for he knew not what. But Odysseus had adventured with swine; and because one objective was as good as another, Ellery set a leisurely course for the southwest corner of the park, where the wild swine rooted. He was that desperate.
On the way he paused at the Lion House to admire the big tankfuls of tropical fish in the Aquarium. He passed the Children’s Zoo and the camels and elephants and rhinos. He almost went into the Question House at the solicitation of the sign. Would they know, he wondered, what Van Harrison had meant by his X and his Y and his probable Z? He decided they would not, and he went on.
The wild swine depressed him. Pigs with tusks. They gave him nothing.
He went on, bearing east.
And there were the kangeroos and the giraffes and the cavies, the bongos and the okapi, the great apes and the wild goats and the thrilling spread of the African Plains, where lions roamed apparently free.
And he wondered what he was doing there.
And so he turned north by west, and he visited with the panting polar bears and the biggest carnivores in the entire known universe, according to the description of the Alaska brown bears. And they gave him less than nothing, unless it was a feeling of relief at the steel bars that stood between him and them. And he viewed the moose and Père David’s Deer and the Heads and Horns Museum, and the Monkey House and the sea lions and the Administration Building — and there he was, back at the parking space, having gone the great circle from nothing to nothing.