A Fine and Private Place (14 page)

“Considering what happened five years later,” the Inspector remarked, “our late friend's marital good-luck number had the whammy on it.”

Ellery glanced at his father curiously. “Are you suggesting that his wife …?”

“Who's suggesting?” the Inspector said. “Keep going, Ellery, you've got me fascinated. How else did he use those 9s of his?”

“The East Side apartment building Importuna bought years ago. Its street number? 99. Number of floors? 9. Can there be any doubt that those 9s are why he bought the building? Or at least that he wouldn't have bought it unless the street number and the number of floors had been part and parcel of the property?

“The man was awesome in his consistency. One report comments that practically every article of Importuna's clothing bears his monogram, and that the monogram in every case—in
every
case—is not merely
NI
for Nino Importuna, but it has a strange little squiggle after the
I
in the design that looks like a small
n-e
! He wasn't satisfied with just the
NI
, you see; he had to have the 9 spelled out by an engraver's trick. This curious monogram—some of his correspondence refers to it as his crest—appears on his personal and business stationery, on his luggage, on his cars, on his planes, on his yachts—right up and down the line. Even his signature … have you seen his signature, dad, or facsimiles of it?”

“What about it?”

“Evidently you didn't notice. He always added a flourish to Importuna. A small flourish attached to the final
a
that, if you examine it carefully, looks remarkably like—you guessed it—a 9.

“To say that he was obsessive on the subject has to be a monumental understatement,” Ellery exclaimed. “Do you know how he paced? How he paced! While dictating correspondence or memoranda, for instance, or thinking aloud—this is a tidbit I had from Peter Ennis—Importuna would take 9 steps one way, 9 steps back. Never more, never less. Ennis says he first noticed it because of a certain rhythm in Importuna's pacing, and he didn't realize the reason until one day he counted the steps.”

“Oh, come on, now,” Inspector Queen said. “That makes the guy a nut.”

“Of course. Who but a magnificent nut could make that much money? Do you know that he wouldn't buy a set of books unless it consisted of 9 volumes, or 18, or 27, or some other multiple of 9? In his apartment you can find everything from
Extinct Birds of the New Hebrides
to
History of Gynecology
. Apparently to Importuna the important thing in his books was not their subject or contents, but their number.”

“Look,” his father said. “He was a nut about 9s. So all right. What I still want to know is, How are 9s going to help us poor flatfeet find his killer? How do the 9s enter into his murder?”

“Ah,” Ellery said, as if he had caught the old man by a debating point. “I don't know how they're going to help us find his killer, but that they enter into his murder is a
fact
. Is several facts, in fact.”

“Say, that's right, isn't it?” the Inspector muttered. “I didn't put 2 and 2, I mean 4 and 5, or 6 and 3—ah, forget it!—together. The time of the murder—”

“That's one of them, yes. The blow that struck Importuna's wristwatch during the attack stopped the watch at 9 minutes past 9 o'clock. I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen the watch myself. And by the way, it's no accident that when Nino ordered that watch made for him he stipulated, as I'm sure he did, the use of rubies. Rubies, along with garnets and bloodstones, are considered lucky stones by people who are influenced by that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, you garner the luck when you wear the lucky gems next to your skin. Nothing can get closer to your skin than a wristwatch.”

The Inspector was not so much silent as speechless. But finally he managed to say, “And the number of blows.”

“Right, 9 distinct and separate skull fractures, from 9 blows. And Doc Prouty says he had to have been dead well before the 9th blow was delivered.”

“But that's all the 9s in the murder.”

“That's not all the 9s in the murder, dad. The weapon, that abstraction in cast iron. With that graceful loopy curve? Didn't you notice it has the general appearance of a number 9?

“So that's three 9-elements in the murder itself,” Ellery declaimed to his feet as he blundered about pulling his nose, “and I refuse to accept even the mathematical possibility that they were coincidences. Death at 9:09
P
.
M
., caused by a weapon in the shape of a 9, a weapon moreover that struck Importuna's head 9 times …” Ellery shook his own head so vigorously it made his father's neck ache. “There's only one explanation that satisfies me: The killer, fully informed of Importuna's all-inclusive faith in the mystic qualities of 9, went out of his way to surround Importuna's murder—to infuse it, identify it, call attention to it—with 9s. I'm almost tempted to say, although I don't quite know why, to bury it under a pile of them. Note that he didn't have to hit his victim's head 9 times—Importuna was dead well before, according to the M.E.

“Was he satisfying his own passion for fantasy, for grotesquerie, some bizarre sense of the fitness of things, even things like murder? Nino having lived by the 9, so to speak, the murderer thought he ought to die by the 9 as well?”

“I don't believe it,” the Inspector snorted. “That would make Importuna's killer as cracked as Importuna. Two nuts in one case is one too much for me to swallow, Ellery.”

“I'm with you.”

“You are?” his father said, astounded.

“Certainly. Whatever else he is, the man who planned and executed that cock-eyed murder of Julio and then, after Marco hanged himself, pulled this 9 murder of Nino is a brain—a twisted brain, maybe, but a mighty sharp one. By killing Nino in the way he did, he threw those 9s in our faces. I can almost hear him laughing. Still, I get the queasy feeling that …”

“He's crazy!”

“You just said he can't be.”

“So I've changed my mind,” the old man exclaimed. “You know, a case like this could drive a whole police force nutty?”

Little did he know that the nuttiness had barely got off the ground.

And—in the stately language of the Inspector's youth—had he but known, he might have turned in his shield on the spot, dragging Ellery with him into the blessed crimelessness of some unsuspected isle of the poet's, in far-off seas.

The first of the anonymous messages (they could not be classified as anonymous letters since some were not written communications) arrived by first-class mail on the morning of Tuesday, September 19. It had been posted the previous day—the date on the envelope was September 18—somewhere in the area served by the Grand Central postal station. The envelope was the ordinary medium-sized stamped type purchasable at any United States post office from Maine to Hawaii. It was addressed to Inspector Richard Queen, New York Police Department, Centre Street, New York, N.Y. 10013. The address had been inscribed, the experts said, by one of the hundreds of millions of blue-ink ball-point pens in daily use throughout the civilized world, and for that matter in some places not civilized. The writing was not script, which might have given them something to work on, but block-printed capital letters so meticulously featureless that they had no distinguishable character whatever and consequently provided nothing at all to work on.

The first comment Inspector Queen made when he saw the contents of the envelope was, “Why me?” The question was not altogether Joblike, in spite of the “O Lord” he was tempted to tack onto it. There were numerous other department brass involved in the Importuna investigation, some considerably more elevated in the hierarchy of command than Richard Queen. “Why me?” indeed? It seemed to portend fine deductions if only its inner meaning could be penetrated. But no one was to answer it until Ellery answered the other questions, too.

Curiously, there was not the smallest hesitation on the part of the Inspector in connecting the September 18th communication, cryptic as it appeared to the uninitiated, with the Importuna murder. He linked them instantly, without benefit of Ellery, so well had he been briefed in the 9-ness of the case.

The Grand Central Station point of origin led nowhere (although later—after Ellery pointed out that its zip code was 10017, and that in all likelihood future messages from the anonymous sender would come through post offices whose zip codes also added up to 9—there were hopes that stakeouts at such stations might result in a lucky grab. Succeeding messages from Anonymous did indeed come through the Triborough station, 10035, the Church Street station, 10008, and the Morningside station, 10026, but Anonymous remained ungrabbed).

No fingerprints or other identifiable marks were found on the contents of any of the envelopes. As for the envelopes themselves, what latents the print men developed could not be matched with the finger impressions of anyone directly or indirectly connected with Importuna, the Importunatos, or Importuna Industries. They were eventually proved to have got on the envelopes through routine handling by specific postmen and postal clerks. An automatic check-out of the civil service employees involved turned up none with even a remote link to the Importuna family or organization.

When it was generally acknowledged that the first communication (“If you can call it that!” Inspector Queen groused to one of his superiors) was from the murderer they were massively seeking, the order came down from on high to keep its arrival and contents, indeed its very existence, confidential within the department, and even there only on a restricted need-to-know basis. Word was passed along from the office of the First Deputy Commissioner himself that any violation of this order resulting in a leak to the press or broadcast media would immediately be turned over to the Deputy Commissioner-Trials for severe disciplinary action. When other messages in the vein of the first were received, the injunction was repeated in even stronger terms.

What Inspector Queen pulled out of the commonplace envelope bearing the Grand Central Station postmark that morning of September 19 was part of a quite remarkable, crisp, never-played-with Bicycle-brand playing card with the red design on the back. What was remarkable about it was that the card had, with great care, been torn in half from side to side.

It was half a 9 of clubs.

The instant the Inspector spotted the figure 9 in the corner, a vision of 9 pips on a whole 9 of clubs flashed through his head. Thereupon he handled the half card as if it had been presoaked in a solution guaranteed to kill on contact.

“It's from Importuna's killer,” the Inspector said to Ellery, who had winged to his father's office at the old man's call. “The 9-card tells us that.”

“Not only the 9-card.”

“There's something else?” his father said, nettled. He had expected a pat on the back for having learned his lesson so well.

“When was this mailed?”

“September 18, according to the postmark.”

“The 9th month. And 18 adds up to 9. And I point out further,” Ellery went on, “that Importuna was murdered on the 9th of September—9 days before this was mailed.”

The Inspector clasped his head. “I know I'm going to wake up any minute! … All right,” he said, taking hold of himself. “A 9 of clubs torn in half. The 9's as good as a trademark all by itself. I admit it, I admit the 9 days business, everything! This has to do with the Importuna case, no question about it. Only what, son, what?”

The silver eyes of the younger Queen held a glitter of high adventure. “Didn't you ever have your fortune told by cards in Coney Island?”

“Coney Island.” His father chomped on the words as if he tasted them and they tasted foul. “Fortune-telling … No!”

“Fortune-telling yes. Each card of the 52 in the deck has its individual meaning, not duplicated by any of the others. For example, the 5 of diamonds in the modern referent system means a telegram. The jack of hearts indicates a preacher. The ace of spades—”

“I know that one, thanks,” the Inspector said grimly. “What's the 9 of clubs supposed to mean?”

“Last warning.”

“Last
warning
?” The Inspector chewed on it in a surprised way.

“But this doesn't mean last warning, dad.”

“Make up your mind, son, will you? First you say it means last warning, then you say it doesn't mean last warning! Ellery, I'm in no mood for jokes!”

“I'm not joking. It means last warning when it's a whole 9 of clubs. But this one was torn in half. When a card is torn in half its meaning is reversed. That's the rule.”

“The rule … reversed.” The Inspector looked dazed. “You mean … like …
first
warning?”

“That seems obvious.”

“It does? Why? First warning about what?”

“I can't tell you.”

“You can't? Why not?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't
know
? Ellery, you can't march into my office and get off a lot of—of stuff about fortune-telling, and then leave me with my tonsils hanging out! I've got to make a report on this.”

“I wish I could help you, dad. But I simply have no idea what he's warning you about. First
or
last.”

The Inspector muttered, “Helpful Henry!” and hurried off with his mysterious clue to his fated rendezvous at Golgotha. It was only late that night, tossing from one side of his bed to the other, when he could no longer hide the memory of the day's subsequent developments, that it popped up in all its hideous clarity. Last warning … cut in half means first warning.… What does that mean, Queen?… I don't know
what
it means, sir.… Doesn't that weirdo—I mean that son of yours have an opinion, Queen? This is his weirdo kind of case.… No, sir, Ellery doesn't.… Those growling executive voices and those concrete executive faces would constitute the stuff of many a future nightmare.