The Origin of Evil

The Origin of Evil

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Cast of Characters

ELLERY QUEEN

the famous sleuth whose brain always works overtime — and in this case it's on a twenty-four-hour shift, carefully unraveling a subtle stumper.

LAUREL HILL

a pert, pretty nineteen-year-old, admittedly fond of pets but much too concerned over a certain dead dog.

DELIA PRIAM

wife of Roger, whose earthy beauty could arouse more passion — of all sorts — in more men than her husband.

MUGGS

the nervous maid in the Priam house — and who could blame her for being nervous?

ALFRED WALLACE

of a doubtful past, who was as handsome and distinguished-looking as a leading man, and he was just that in Roger Priam's life.

ROGER PRIAM

half-paralyzed demon of a man, who looked like a bull and had the temperament to match.

Mr. COLLIER

Delia's elderly father, who spent most of his time in the woods behind the Priam estate.

CROWE MACGOWAN

Delia's strapping son by a former marriage, and a Nature Boy who took the phrase seriously — even when he wasn't in his tree house.

LIEUTENANT KEATS

of the L.A. Police Department, a smart detective who rather begrudgingly dug out the facts but sometimes wished he hadn't.

Dr. VOLUTA

Roger Priam's physician, who was called to the house more often than he — or anyone else — would have liked.

1

Ellery was spread over the pony-skin chair before the picture window,
huarachos
crossed on the typewriter table, a ten-inch frosted glass in his hand, and the corpse at his feet. He was studying the victim between sips and making not too much out of her. However, he was not concerned. It was early in the investigation, she was of unusual proportions, and the
ron
consoled.

He took another sip.

It was a curious case. The victim still squirmed; from where he sat he could make out signs of life. Back in New York they had warned him that these were an illusion, reflexes following the death-rattle. Why, you won't believe it, they had said, but corruption's set in already and anyone who can tell a stinkweed from a camellia will testify to it. Ellery had been sceptical. He had known deceased in her heyday — a tumid wench, every man's daydream, and the laughing target of curses and longing. It was hard to believe that such vitality could be exterminated.

On the scene of the crime — or rather above it, for the little house he had taken was high over the city, a bird's nest perched on the twig-tip of an upper branch of the hills — Ellery still doubted. There she lay under a thin blanket of smog, stirring a little, and they said she was dead.

Fair Hollywood.

Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television.

He squinted down at the city, sipping his rum and enjoying his nakedness. It was a blue-white day. The hill ran green and flowered to the twinkled plain, simmering in the sun.

There had been no technical reason for choosing Hollywood as the setting for his new novel. Mystery stories operate under special laws of growth; their beginnings may lie in the look in a faceless woman's eye glimpsed in a crowd for exactly the duration of one heartbeat, or in the small type on page five of a life-insurance policy; generally the writer has the atlas to pick from. Ellery had had only the gauziest idea of where he was going; at that stage of the game it could as well have been Joplin, Missouri or the kitchens of the Kremlin. In fact, his plot was in such a cloudy state that when he heard about the murder of Hollywood he took it as a sign from the heavens and made immediate arrangements to be present at the autopsy. His trade being violent death, a city with a knife in its back seemed just the place to take his empty sample cases.

Well, there was life in the old girl yet. Of course, theatres with
MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER
on their marquees had crossbars over their portals saying
CLOSED
; you could now get a table at
The Brown Derby
without waiting more than twenty minutes; that eminent haberdasher of the Strip, Mickey Cohen, was out of business; movie stars were cutting their prices for radio; radio actors were auditioning tensely for television as they redesigned their belts or put their houses up for sale; shopkeepers were complaining that how could anybody find money for yard goods or nail files when the family budget was mortgaged to Hoppy labels, the new car, and the television set; teen-age gangs, solemnly christened ‘wolf-packs' by the Los Angeles newspapers, cruised the streets beating up strangers, high-school boys were regularly caught selling marijuana, and ‘Chicken!' was the favourite highway sport of the hot-rodders; and you could throttle a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea any night after 10.30 and feel reasonably secure against interruption.

But out in the San Fernando Valley mobs of little cheap stuccos and redwood fronts were beginning to elbow the pained hills, paint-fresh signal lights at intersections were stopping cars which had previously known only the carefree California conscience, and a great concrete ditch labelled ‘Flood Control Project' was making its way across the sandy valley like an opening zipper.

On the ocean side of the Santa Monica Mountains, from Beverly Glen to Topanga Canyon, lordlier mansions were going up which called themselves ‘estates' — disdaining the outmoded ‘ranch' or ‘rancho,' which more and more out-of-State ex-innocents were learning was a four-or-five-and-den on a 50 x 100 lot containing three callow apricot-trees. Beverly Hills might be biting its perfect fingernails, but Glendale and Encino were booming, and Ellery could detect no moans from the direction of Brentwood, Flintridge, Sunland, or Eagle Rock. New schools were assembling, more oldsters were chugging in from Iowa and Michigan, flexing their arthritic fingers and practising old age pension-check-taking, and to drive a car in downtown Los Angeles at noontime the four blocks from 3rd to 7th along Broadway, Spring, Hill, or Main now took thirty minutes instead of fifteen. Ellery heard tell of huge factories moving in; of thousands of migrants swarming into Southern California through Blythe and Indio on 60 and Needles and Barstow on 66 — latter-day pioneers to whom the movies still represented Life and Love and ‘television' remained a high-falutin word, like ‘antibiotic.' The car-hops were more beautiful and numerous than ever; more twenty-foot ice-cream cones punctuated the skyline; Tchaikovsky under the stars continued to fill Hollywood Bowl with brave-bottomed music-lovers; Grand Openings of hardware stores now used two giant searchlights instead of one; the Farmers' Market on Fairfax and 3rd chittered and heaved like an Egyptian bazaar in the tourist season; Madman Muntz had apparently taken permanent possession of the skies, his name in mile-high letters drifting expensively away daily; and the newspapers offered an even more tempting line of cheesecake than in the old days — Ellery actually saw one photograph of the routine well-stacked cutie in a Bikini bathing-suit perched zippily on a long flower-decked box inscribed
Miss National Casket Week
. And in three days or so, according to the reports, the Imperial Potentate would lead a six-hour safari of thirteen thousand red-fezzed, capering, elderly Penrods, accompanied by fifty-one bands, assorted camels, clowns, and floats, along Figueroa Street to the Memorial Coliseum to convene the seventy-umpth Imperial Session of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine — a civic event guaranteed to rouse even the dead.

It became plain in his first few days in Hollywood and environs that what the crape-hangers back East were erroneously bewailing was not the death of the angelic city but its exuberant rebirth in another shape. The old order changeth. The new organism was exciting, but it was a little out of his line; and Ellery almost packed up and flew back East. But then he thought, It's all hassle and hurly-burly, everybody snarling or making hay; and there's still the twitching nucleus of the old Hollywood bunch — stick around, old boy, the atmosphere is murderous and it may well inspire a collector's item or two for the circulating library shelves.

Also, there had been the press and its agents. Ellery had thought to slip into town by dropping off at the Lockheed field in Burbank rather than the International Airport in Inglewood. But he touched Southern California soil to a bazooka fire of questions and lenses, and the next day his picture was on the front page of all the papers. They had even got his address in the hills straight, although his pal the real estate man later swore by the beard of Nature Boy that he'd had nothing to do with the leak. It had been that way for Ellery ever since the publicity explosion over the Cat case. The newspaper boys were convinced that, having saved Manhattan from a fate equivalent to death, Ellery was in Los Angeles on a mission at least equally large and torrid. When he plaintively explained that he had come to write a book they all laughed, and their printed explanations ascribed his visit to everything from a top-secret appointment by the Mayor as Special Investigator to Clean Up Greater L.A. to the turning of his peculiar talents upon the perennial problem of the Black Dahlia.

How could he run out?

At this point Ellery noticed that his glass was as empty as his typewriter.

He got up from the pony-skin chair, and found himself face to face with a pretty girl.

As he jumped nudely for the bedroom doorway Ellery thought, The
huarachos
must look ridiculous. Then he thought, Why didn't I put on those ten pounds Barney prescribed? Then he got angry and poked his head around the door to whine, ‘I told Mrs. Williams I wasn't seeing anybody today, not even her. How did you get in?'

‘Through the garden,' said the girl. ‘Climbed up from the road below. I tried not to trample your marigolds. I hope you don't mind.'

‘I do mind. Go away.'

‘But I've got to see you.'

‘Everybody's got to see me. But I don't have to see everybody. Especially when I look like this.'

‘You are sort of pale, aren't you? And your ribs stick out, Ellery.' She sounded like a debunked sister. Ellery suddenly remembered that in Hollywood dress is a matter of free enterprise. You could don a parka and drive a team of Siberian huskies from Schwab's Drug Store at the foot of Laurel Canyon to NBC at Sunset and Vine and never turn a head. Fur stoles over slacks are acceptable if not
de rigueur
, the exposed navel is considered conservative, and at least one man dressed in nothing but Waikiki trunks may be found poking sullenly among the avocados at any vegetable stand. ‘You ought to put on some weight, Ellery. And get out in the sun.'

‘Thank you,' Ellery heard himself saying.

His Garden of Eden costume meant absolutely nothing to her. And she was even prettier than he had thought. Hollywood prettiness, he thought sulkily; they all look alike. Probably Miss Universe of Pasadena. She was dressed in zebra-striped culottes and bolero over a bra-like doodad of bright green suede. Green open-toed sandals on her tiny feet. A matching suede jockey cap on her cinnamon hair. Skin toast-coloured where it was showing, and
no
ribs. A small and slender number, but three-dimensional where it counted. About nineteen years old. For no reason at all she reminded him of Meg in Thorne Smith's
The Night Life of the Gods
, and he pulled his head back and banged the door.