“Get on your wagon.”
Ellery sped back to the empty room. “I’ve got to drive down to New York, officer. You can take these back to the courtroom.”
When Ellery returned to the county courthouse, it was late afternoon. He dashed to a phone booth and called the laboratory to which the other exhibit had been sent.
“There’s no question about that?”
“No, Mr. Queen. A minimum of four years, most likely five.”
“Thank you!”
Ellery hurried up to the courtroom, glancing confidently at his watch.
The corridor was thronged. People milled, talking noisily.
“Ellery?”
“Nikki! What’s all this? Session over for the day?”
“Don’t you know? Haven’t you been here?”
“Obviously not,” said Ellery, a frost settling over his bones. “What’s happened?”
“The case just went to the jury.”
“No!”
“For some reason,” said Nikki, eying him curiously, “Mr. Irons rested for the defense shortly before noon. After the noon recess, they had a short recross-examination and went right into the summations. The jury went out about fifteen minutes ago. Where you going?”
“To see Judge Levy!”
Ellery faced the judge, the prosecutor, and a poker-faced defense counsel in the judge’s chambers. Nikki sat in a corner, searching Ellery’s face.
“I’m not going to waste time in recriminations, Mr. Irons,” Ellery began rapidly. “You pulled a fast one in the interests of your client. But from what I know about you, you’re concerned with justice as well as doing a smart legal job.
“About the feeling of the State’s Attorney’s office and you, Judge Levy, I have no doubts.
“So we all want to see justice done. The only question is: Is there time? For all I know, with the jury already out, it may be too late. No... please. We haven’t time to go into the legal technicalities.
“Listen to me. Very carefully.”
Ellery leaned over the judge’s desk. “I’ve spent the day trying to find proof of a theory that came to me late yesterday. As I said this morning, it’s a theory I couldn’t expect anyone of legal training to accept without the corroboration of evidence. I’ve found that evidence. It puts an entirely new construction on this case.
“The theory hinges on a proper interpretation of Van Harrison’s dying message to me, which everyone has ignored so far because it seemed meaningless.
“The truth is, it had the most pertinent meaning.
“I myself have held three different views about what Harrison wrote on that wall in his own blood.
“The first was that the letters XY constituted the complete message he intended to convey to me. This one I finally discarded, for the simple reason that no explanation offered itself. As XY, the message bore no significant relevance to the situation, its background, or its climax.
“My second view necessarily jumped off from the failure of the first. If XY meant nothing, then perhaps the message wasn’t complete. Harrison died just as he finished the short left-hand crosspiece of the Y. Suppose he had intended to go on?”
The three men looked startled.
“If that was so, what could he have meant to add? He’d written an X, and he’d written a Y. It seemed to me that the only logical extension of X and Y was Z. Was this message to have been XYZ? But just as X and Y individually led nowhere, so with Z. And they meant nothing in combination, as XYZ. I was stumped again.”
“Wait, wait,” said Judge Levy. “I’ve never been very quick at puzzles. Do you mean that if Harrison had finished his message, the element he meant to add would not have been Z, but something else?”
“That’s right, Your Honor. The failure of Z forced me to an entirely different speculation.”
“And you know, Mr. Queen, what Harrison intended to add?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Just a moment,” said the State.
He jumped up and went to the door. He came back hurriedly.
“Nothing from the jury room yet. Go on, Queen!”
Darrell Irons shifted in his chair.
“May I borrow a soft pencil and a sheet of paper, Judge?” asked Ellery.
The judge produced them. Ellery bent over the desk.
“I’ll repeat the demonstration I gave on the stand. This is exactly the way Harrison scrawled his message. First he drew a diagonal, from upper right to lower left, like this.”
Ellery drew a line:
“Then, starting at upper left, he drew a crossing diagonal, like this.
“His third stroke duplicated his first stroke, but a little beyond the X he had already drawn.
“And finally, beginning again at upper left, as in the second stroke of the first X, Harrison drew a short diagonal which just touched the long diagonal, like this.
“At this point, he died,” said Ellery. “Now, gentlemen, there is more than one way in which Harrison could have left his message unfinished. I learned that at the Bronx Zoo yesterday. I saw a park workman start painting a letter of the alphabet on a sign. The letter was the G of ZOOLOGICAL. But it started to rain while he was doing it, and so he stopped, leaving the G uncompleted. And it didn’t look like a G at all; it looked like a C, because he never got to add the crossbar... Suppose,” said Ellery, “suppose it was the last stroke — the short one — which Harrison didn’t live long enough to finish?”
With a frown, Judge Levy began: “You mean—”
“I mean, Your Honor: Suppose Harrison meant to carry that last stroke all the way down? As, in fact, he had done in the case of the second stroke of the first X, Then the letter following the X would not have been Y, but...”
And Ellery completed the stroke.
“X,” exclaimed the State. “Another one. Not XY, but XX.”
Irons kept staring at the paper. As he stared, his great gray brows drew slowly together.
“XX,” repeated the judge. “I can’t see, Mr. Queen, that you’ve advanced an iota. It’s the new evidence you claim to have turned up that I’m interested in. Would you get on to that?”
Ellery came back from the door. The jury was still out.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m getting to it step by step because there’s a road to the truth and the evidence lies at the end of it. Let me put it this way: What else is an X, Your Honor, besides being a letter of the alphabet?”
“A Roman numeral. Signifying ten.”
“Then XX — two X’s — in this interpretation would signify twenty. Does the number twenty suggest a connection with any phase of this case?”
“Not to me,” said His Honor. He changed his position in his leather swivel chair, glancing impatiently at the clock.
“Twenty?” The State shook his head.
Defense counsel leaned back and lit a cigar. He devoted himself with concentration to the removal of the band and the clipping of the tip.
“Then if as a Roman numeral the two X’s get us nowhere,” continued Ellery, “we must look for still another interpretation. What else is an X?”