The Finishing Stroke (24 page)

20 … Continued And
Concluded

In Which Mr. Queen Confesses to the Folly of His Youth, and Brings the Story of the Twelve Nights, Albeit Belatedly, to Its End

‘I know,' Ellery went on, ‘from just having synthesized three clues which, on that Epiphany eve so many years ago, I failed to think through.

‘The first was a group of odd little drawings. Do you recall how, on the backs of some of the white cards, Mr. Craig, the creator and typist of the verses had pencilled some primitive-looking pictures? They didn't appear on every card, or even on most of them – just on four of the twelve. Their very random character was indicative more of involuntary than voluntary design – as if, in the case of those four cards, the typist, perhaps deep in thought, had played with a pencil – in a word, doodled.

‘If that was so, the pictures might be significant, an important clue to the versifier-typist-framer-murderer-doodler's
unconscious
self, in contradistinction to the verses and other creations of his consciousness. Unfortunately, the little drawings told me nothing. They merely appeared to be ultrasimplified picturizations of the particular objects with which the typewritten verses of those cards were concerned.'

The old man was listening sharply, almost critically.

‘Yes, yes?' he said. ‘Go on, Mr. Queen.'

Ellery took a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. ‘I copied these from the original cards the other night, Mr. Craig. Perhaps they'll refresh your recollection.' He leaned forward with the paper. ‘Look at them.'

The claw seized the paper. On it appeared:

‘We all recognized at the time that the doodles were representations of the subject matter of the card on which they appeared,' Ellery said. ‘The card introducing the ox, the house and the camel bore on its reverse a doodled “o x”; a doodled little house made up of a pitched roof, five windows and a door; and the most recognizable feature of a camel, its humps. The card introducing the fence bore on its back a doodled fencelike drawing. The card introducing the hand and the palm – a most interesting one, by the way – bore on its back a sort of stencilled-effect hand composed of five outspread fingers, with a crossmark where the palm would be. And the card introducing the water and the fish illustrated on the back a squiggle that could only have meant water, and a very simple fish-abstraction.

‘Did they tell me anything about the doodler?' Ellery shook his head. ‘Not until about thirty-six hours ago. What do they tell you about him, Mr. Craig?'

The old man was staring at the drawings in amazement.

‘Incredible,' he exclaimed. ‘I've only just seen it.'

‘Yes, the unconscious mind is tricky,' Ellery nodded. ‘The hand that drew the originals of these little pictures was consciously if idly drawing the subject matter of the cards involved,
but in an unconscious technique that gave him away
. The proof that it was unconscious and unrealized is that he permitted the cards with the doodles on them to go through. Had he thought they might give him away, he had only to tear them up and type duplicate cards with blank backs.

‘And what was this unconscious technique that gave him away, and that it took me over twenty-seven years to see?' Ellery said. ‘Why, simply that every last element of these drawings – every circle, square, line, dot, crossmark and so on in them – is identified with a certain system of signs, an actual code used in a specific phase of editorial and printing work – proofreading. If a proofreader going over a manuscript or a set of galleys finds a digit or number in the text which he thinks ought to be spelled out in letters, he'll mark a little “o” in the margin as a code sign meaning “spell out”. If he comes across broken or imperfect type in a galley, he marks a small “x” in the margin, and the typographer knows what to look for. Thus the “o” and “x” of “ox”.

‘Alone, of course, they could be the merest coincidences. But take the “house”. It's composed of seven elements. The little square used for five of them is the proofreader's mark meaning “em quad space”, or “indent one em”. The little door-like sign is a proofreader's mark meaning “move in direction indicated.” The little peaked sign is a caret, meaning “insert at this point.” The two little peaks the doodler used to represent camel humps are simply two carets side by side.

‘The representational “fence”? Made up of vertical lines and short horizontals. The vertical line has at least two specific meanings to the proofreader and typographer; the horizontal lines are, of course, simply indicated hyphens.

‘The dots composing the fingers of the “hand”? Dots under words are a proofreader's way of saying, “retain words I have crossed out,” the word “stet” usually being written in the margin in addition; the “x” of the palm is the broken-type sign again.

‘The squiggle of “water”? This mark placed under text means “reset to bold-face type.” And the fish-abstraction is one of the several ways of indicating “delete.”

‘Where
every
element employed, without exception, is a part of the sign language of proofreading, there can be no doubt at all that the doodler had an intimate knowledge of same, so intimate that he employed them unconsciously. Do you agree, Mr. Craig?'

‘Absolutely.' The old man was fascinated.

‘That was my delayed-clue Number One.' Ellery lit another cigarette. ‘Number Two was equally interesting.'

‘You'll recall that the key words of the verses on each card were spaced out – for example, the word “house”, instead of being typed “h, o, u, s, e,” was typed “h, space, o, space, u, space, s, space, e.” Oh, I saw what it meant, all right. I pointed out the very first night that it was obviously intended to emphasize the word so that it would stand out in the verse. What I didn't see until the other night was that this
method
of emphasizing – by letter-spacing – was another unconscious giveaway on the part of the typist.

‘For what would the average person do who wanted to stress a typewritten word? He would underline it, or in the case of printed matter, italicize. Yet as long ago as 1931 a famous British artist, engraver and type designer, Eric Gill, was urging in print the universal adoption of what only typographic purists had been employing up to that time – the use of letter-spacing to emphasize single words instead of italicizing or underlining. The practice still hasn't been adopted universally –
but many typographic purists continue to letter-space for emphasis.
'

‘True, that's true,' the old man muttered.

‘Two clues so uncompromising made the conclusion all but inescapable,' Ellery went on. ‘But the other night I found still a third clue that I'd overlooked during that Christmas holiday, and this one clinched it.

‘Remember, Mr. Craig, the last line of the last card John received, the card on which I found John III lying with a dagger in his back? That line read: “This finishing stroke to end your life.”

‘Perhaps it sounds far-fetched, but not when you recall how devious the unconscious mind so often is in its operation. “Finishing stroke” happens to be the definition – deriving originally from the ancient Ionian city of Kolophon, whose famous cavalry troop was supposed invariably to put “the finishing stroke” to a battle – of the modern bibliographer's word “colophon” – which, as I hardly have to tell you, sir, is an inscription placed at the very end of a book containing facts relevant to its production … names of printer, author, illustrator, place and date of publication, and so on.

‘How the typist-framer-murderer's unconscious betrayed him there! It made him, in murdering the brother he thought was the original John and so winding up
his
production, employ the definition of a printer's term meaning the identical thing!'

Ellery flipped his cigarette away with a gesture as final as his subject. ‘And there it was. Who in the group had such an intimate knowledge of proofreader's marks that he would unconsciously use them as drawing elements? Who in the group would employ by habit the emphasis-device of letter-spacing used only by the most finicky of purists in the typographic profession? Who in the group would be most likely to use the precise printer's meaning of the word “colophon”? Who but the one person in the group who was a professional typographer and printer – a man so deeply grounded in his trade that he had raised it, as someone once said, to a profession? Mr. Craig, you typed those cards. You drew those doodles. You sent those “gifts”. You plunged the finishing dagger-stroke into the back of the man you thought was your ward.
You framed yourself for the crime
.'

The old man was silent. He sat clutching his pipe, which had gone out, swinging his right leg over the side of the porch, jaws working as he ruminated.

And then he said, almost slyly, ‘I framed myself, you say. And yet you have just said that no intelligent man would build an elaborate structure of clues that had no other effect than to point to himself as the criminal. You told me yourself that it was on that very point you decided I was the innocent victim of a frame-up.'

‘In January of 1930, Mr. Craig,' Ellery said, nodding, ‘I was very young, and it does sound logical, doesn't it? Yes, no one would believe that an intelligent man would point suspicion to himself. But it's taken me over a quarter of a century to learn that an intelligent man might point suspicion to himself for the very reason that no one would believe it.'

The old man cackled so long and so hard that he wound up choking and gasping. Ellery got up and patted his back gently. When Craig stopped choking, Ellery sat down again.

‘You're clever, my boy, clever,' the old man wheezed.

‘You were a great deal cleverer, Mr. Craig. You'd read my book, you'd undoubtedly pumped John dry about me – you dug until you found out what my cleverness was made of, then you planned accordingly. You offered me the obvious, certain I would reject it, and you were right. It was a masterly double bluff that took me in completely. I can only offer you my belated admiration.'

‘But what a risk I took, eh?' the old man chortled. ‘Foolish, wasn't it, to take such a risk? Eh?'

‘No,' Ellery said, ‘because you ran a far greater risk. You wanted to kill John. But if you killed him directly, even if you left no clues to yourself in the commission of the crime, you would stand out as the most prominent suspect. For you had a powerful motive for wanting John dead before the sixth of January, 1930. And there was no conceivable way in which you could conceal that motive. According to his father's will,
if John died before his twenty-fifth birthday you, Arthur Benjamin Craig, inherited the Sebastian estate.
The only way you could hope to draw attention
away
from that motive was to draw attention dramatically
to
someone else. If I could be convinced that you were being framed for the murder, I would accept your motive as something the framer merely took advantage of. I would pass over it – as I did.'

‘Still, it wasn't in character, wouldn't you say?' And now a tinge of bitterness coloured the old voice. ‘Why would I, a wealthy man, want the Sebastian estate, too? Did I ever strike you as that grasping a man, Mr. Queen?'

‘No, Mr. Craig,' Ellery said, ‘but this was Christmas of 1929. Only two months before, on October the twenty-ninth, the stock market had collapsed with the biggest bang in its history. You must have been caught in the crash, like hundreds of thousands of others. But I don't believe you're the type of man who would have committed murder merely to recoup his own monetary losses. You were the administrator of John Senior's estate; you had been handling its assets, investing in its interests, for almost twenty-five years. I suggest that it was principally the estate's funds that you had unwisely gambled away on the market on the dangerous margins dangled as bait in those days – and for that you could have gone to prison. The only way you could cover up your maladministration of the estate was by getting rid of John before he could legally come into it. Then the gutted estate would pass to you, and nobody'd be the wiser . . . The alternative was not to kill John, but to confess to him that he was inheriting little or nothing, and to throw yourself on his mercy. I think you had reason to doubt John's mercifulness, Mr. Craig. I myself sensed the hard streak in him. You knew he would probably not only make you liquidate everything you owned and turn it over to him, but send you to prison in the bargain. And to keep from going to prison you were willing to commit murder.'

‘Yes,' the old man mumbled, ‘and it all went wrong anyway … I'd lost every cent of the estate. I planned the whole thing in the last two months after the crash – got the gifts together, typed the verses on a machine I had hidden at my plant – got everything ready for you, to the last detail … And then, when I did the killing, I found out I'd killed the wrong man.'