The Origin of Evil (17 page)

‘Just a minute, Wallace,' Ellery heard Keats say.

And Keats was standing before him, between him and Wallace. Keats was saying in a rapid whisper, ‘Queen, look, let me take it from here on in. Why don't you get out of here?'

‘Why should I?' Ellery said clearly.

Keats did not move. But then he straightened up and stepped aside.

‘You're lying, of course,' Ellery said to Wallace. ‘You're counting on the fact that no decent man could ask a decent woman a question like that, and so your lie won't be exposed. I don't know what slimy purpose your lie serves, but I'm going to step on it right now. Keats, hand me that phone.'

And all the time he was speaking Ellery knew it was true. He had known it was true the instant the words left Wallace's mouth. The story of the amnesia was true only so far as the superficial facts went; Wallace had prepared a blind alley for himself, using the Las Vegas police and a mediocre doctor to seal up the dead end. But this was all true. He knew it was all true, and he could have throttled the man who sat half-way across the room smiling that iced smile.

‘I don't see that that would accomplish anything,' Keats was saying. ‘She'd only deny it. It wouldn't prove a thing.'

‘He's lying, Keats.'

Wallace said with delicate mockery, ‘I'm happy to hear you take that attitude, Mr. Queen. Of course. I'm lying. May I go, Lieutenant?'

‘No, Wallace.' Keats stuck his jaw out. ‘I'm not letting it get this far without knowing the whole story. You say you've been cuckolding Priam for almost a year now. Is Delia Priam in love with you?'

‘I don't think so,' said Wallace. ‘I think it's the same thing with Delia that it is with me. A matter of convenience.'

‘But it stopped some time ago, didn't it?' Keats had a wink in his voice; man-to-man stuff. ‘It's not still going on.'

‘Certainly it's still going on. Why should it have stopped?'

Keats's shoulders bunched. ‘You must feel plenty proud of yourself, Wallace. Eating a man's food, guzzling his liquor, taking his dough, and sleeping with his wife while he's helpless in a wheel-chair on the floor below. A cripple who couldn't give you what you rate even if he knew what was going on.'

‘Oh, didn't I make that clear, Lieutenant?' said Alfred Wallace, smiling. ‘Priam does know what's going on. In fact, looking back, I can see that he engineered the whole thing.'

‘What are you giving me!'

‘You gentlemen apparently don't begin to understand the kind of man Priam is. And I think you ought to know the facts of life about Priam, since it's his life you're knocking yourselves out to save.'

Wallace ran his thumb tenderly around the brim of his hat. ‘I don't deny that I didn't figure Priam right myself in the beginning, when Delia and I first got together. I sneaked it, naturally. But Delia laughed and told me not to be a fool, that Priam knew, that he wanted it that way. Although he'd never admit it or let on — to me, or to her.

‘Well,' said Wallace modestly. ‘Of course I thought she was kidding me. But then I began to notice things. Looks in his eye. The way he kept pushing us together. That sort of thing. So I did a little investigating on the quiet.

‘I found out that in picking secretaries Priam had always hired particularly virile-looking men.

‘And I remembered the questions he asked me when I applied for the job — how he kept looking me over, like a horse.' Wallace took a cigar from his pocket and lit it. Puffing with enjoyment, he leaned back. ‘Frankly, I've been too embarrassed to put the question to Delia directly. But unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am, Priam's secretaries have always done double duty. Well, for the last ten years, anyway. It also explains the rapid turnover. Not every man is as virile as he looks,' Wallace said with a laugh, ‘and then there are always some mushy-kneed lads who'd find a situation like that uncomfortable … But the fact remains. Priam's hired men to serve not only the master of the house, you might say, but the mistress, too.'

‘Get him out of here,' Ellery said to Keats. But to his surprise no words came out.

‘Roger Priam,' continued Alfred Wallace, waving his cigar, ‘is an exaggerated case of crudity, raw power, and frustration. The clue to his character — and, gentlemen, I've had ample opportunity to judge it — is his compulsive need to dominate everything and everyone around him. He tried to dominate old Leander Hill through the farce of pretending he, Roger Priam, was running a million-dollar business from a wheelchair at home. He tried to dominate Crowe Macgowan before Crowe got too big for him, according to Delia. And he's always dominated Delia, who doesn't care enough about anything to put up a scrap — dominated her physically, until he became paralyzed, Delia's told me, with the most incredible vulgarities and brutalities.

‘Now imagine,' murmured Wallace, ‘what paralysis from the waist down did to Priam's need to dominate his woman. Physically he was no longer a man. And his wife was beautiful; to this day every male who meets her begins strutting like a bull. Priam knew, knowing Delia, that it was only a question of time before one of them made the grade. And then where would he be? He might not even know about it. It would be entirely out of his control. Unthinkable! So Priam worked out the solution in his warped way — to dominate Delia by proxy.

‘By God, imagine that! He deliberately picks a virile man — the substitute for himself physically and psychologically — and flings them at each other's heads, letting nature take its course.'

Wallace flicked an ash into the tray on Keats's desk. ‘I used to think he'd taken a leaf out of Faulkner's
Sanctuary
, or Krafft-Ebing, except that I've come to doubt if he's read a single book in forty-five years. No, Priam couldn't explain all this — to himself least of all. He's an ignorant man; he wouldn't even know the words. Like so many ignorant men, he's a man of pure action. He throws his wife and hand-picked secretary together, thus performing the function of a husband vicariously, and by pretending to be deaf to what goes on with domestic regularity over his head he retains his mastery of the situation. He's the god of the machine, gentlemen, and there is no other god but Roger Priam. That is, to Roger Priam.' Wallace blew a fat ring of cigar-smoke and rose. ‘And now, unless there's something else, Lieutenant, I'd like to salvage what's left of my day off.'

Keats said in a loud voice, ‘Wallace, you're a fork-tongued female of a mucking liar. I don't believe one snicker of this dirty joke. And when I prove you're a liar, Wallace, I'm going to leave my badge home with my wife and kids, and I'm going to haul you into some dark alley, and I'm going to kick the — out of you.'

Wallace's smile thinned. His face reassembled itself and looked suddenly old. He reached over Keats's desk and picked up the telephone.

‘Here,' he said, holding the phone out to the detective. ‘Or do you want me to get the number for you?'

‘Scram.'

‘But you want proof. Delia will admit it if you ask her in the right way, Lieutenant. Delia's a very civilized woman.'

‘Get out.'

Wallace laughed. He replaced the phone gently, adjusted his fashionable hat on his handsome head, and walked out humming.

Keats insisted on driving Ellery home. The detective drove slowly through the five o'clock traffic.

Neither man said anything.

He had seen them for that moment in the Priam hallway, the day he had come at her summons to investigate the plague of dead frogs. Wallace had been standing close to her, far closer than a man stands to a woman unless he knows he will not be repulsed. And she had not repulsed him. She had stood there accepting his pressure while Wallace squeezed her hand and whispered in her ear
…
He remembered one or two of Wallace's glances at her, the glances of a man with a secret knowledge, glances of amused power … ‘I always take the line of least resistance …' He remembered the night she had hidden herself in his bedroom at the sound of her son's and Laurel's arrival. She had come to him that night for the purpose to which her life in the Priam house had accustomed her. Probably she had a prurient curiosity about ‘celebrities' or she was tired of Wallace. (And this was Wallace's revenge?) He would have read the signs of the nymph easily enough if he had not mistaken her flabbiness for reserve
—

‘We're here, Mr. Queen,' Keats was saying.

They were at the cottage.

‘Oh. Thanks.' Ellery got out automatically. ‘Good night.'

Keats failed to drive away. Instead he said, ‘Isn't that your phone ringing?'

‘Yes. Why doesn't Mrs. Williams answer it?' Ellery said with irritation. Then he laughed. ‘She isn't answering it because I gave her the afternoon off. I'd better go in.'

‘Wait.' Keats turned his motor off and vaulted to the road. ‘Maybe it's my office. I told them I might be here.'

Ellery unlocked the front door and went in. Keats straddled the threshold.

‘Hello?'

Keats saw him stiffen.

‘Yes, Delia.'

Ellery listened in silence. Keats heard the vibration of the throaty tones, faint and warm and humid.

‘Keats is with me now. Hide it till we get there, Delia. We'll be right over.'

Ellery hung up.

‘What does the lady want?' asked Keats.

‘She says she's just found another cardboard box. It was in the Priam mailbox on the road, apparently left there a short time ago. Priam's name hand-printed on it. She hasn't told Priam about it, asked what she ought to do. You heard what I told her.'

‘Another warning!'

Keats ran for his car.

10

Keats stopped his car fifty feet from the Priam mailbox and they got out and walked slowly toward it, examining the road. There were tyre-marks in profusion, illegibly intermingled. Near the box they found several heel-marks of a woman's shoe, but that was all.

The door of the box hung open and the box was empty.

They walked up the driveway to the house. Keats neither rang nor knocked. The maid with the tic came hurrying towards them as he closed the door.

‘Mrs. Priam said to come upstairs,' she whispered. ‘To her room.' She glanced over her shoulder at the closed door of Roger Priam's den. ‘And not to make any noise, she said, because
he's
got ears like a dog.'

‘All right,' said Keats.

Muggs fled on tiptoe. The two men stood there until she had disappeared beyond the swinging door at the rear of the hall. Then they went upstairs, hugging the balustrade.

As they reached the landing, a door opposite the head of the stairs swung in. Keats and Ellery went into the room.

Delia Priam shut the door swiftly and sank back against it.

She was in brief tight shorts and a strip of sun halter. Her thighs were long and heavy and swelled to her trunk; her breasts spilled over the halter. The glossy black hair lay carelessly piled; she was barefoot — her high-heeled shoes had been kicked off. The rattan blinds were down and in the gloom her pale eyes glowed sleepily.

Keats looked her over deliberately.

‘Hello, Ellery.' She sounded relieved.

‘Hello, Delia.' There was nothing in his voice, nothing at all.

‘Don't you think you'd better put something on, Mrs. Priam?' said Keats. ‘Any other time this would be a privilege and a pleasure, but we're here on business.' He grinned with his lips only. ‘I don't think I could think.'

She glanced down at herself, startled. ‘I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I was up on the sun deck before I walked down to the road. I'm very sorry.' She sounded angry and a little puzzled.

‘No harm done, Delia,' said Ellery. ‘This sort of thing is all in the eye of the beholder.'

She glanced at him quickly. A frown appeared between her heavy brows.

‘Is something wrong, Ellery?'

He looked at her.

The colour left her face. Her hands went to her naked shoulders and she hurried past them into a dressing-room, slamming the door.

‘Bitch,' said Keats pleasantly. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and jammed it between his lips. The end tore and he spat it out, turning away.

Ellery looked around.

The room was overpowering, with dark Spanish furniture and wallpaper and drapes which flaunted masses of great tropical flowers. The rug was a sullen Polynesian red with a two-inch pile. There were cushions and hassocks of unusual shapes and colours. Huge majolicas stood about filled with lilies. On the wall hung heroic Gauguin reproductions and above the bed a large black iron crucifix that looked very old. Niches were crowded with ceramics, wood carvings, metal sculptures of exotic subjects, chiefly modern in style and many of them male nudes. There was an odd book-shelf hanging by an iron chain, and Ellery strolled over to it, his legs brushing the bed. Thomas Aquinas, Kinsey, Bishop Berkeley, Pierre Loti, Havelock Ellis.
Lives of the Saints
and
Fanny Hill
in a Paris edition. The rest were mystery stories; there was one of his, his latest. The bed was a wide and herculean piece set low to the floor, covered with a cloth-of-gold spread appliquéd, in brilliant colours of metallic thread, with a vast tree of life. In the ceiling, directly above the bed and of identical dimensions, glittered a mirror framed in fluorescent tubing.

‘For some reason,' remarked Lieutenant Keats in the silence, ‘this reminds me of that movie actor, What's-His-Name, of the old silent days. In the wall next to his john he had a perforated roll of rabbit fur.' The dressing-room door opened and Keats said, ‘Now that's a relief, Mrs. Priam. Thanks a lot. Where's this box?'

She went to a trunk-sized teak chest covered with brass-work chased intricately in the East Indian manner, which stood at the foot of the bed, and she opened it. She had put on a severe brown linen dress and stockings as well as flat-heeled shoes; she had combed her hair back in a knot. She was pale and frigid, and she looked at neither man.