The Origin of Evil (2 page)

When he came out safe and suave in slacks, shantung shirt, and burgundy corduroy jacket, she was curled up in his pony-skin chair smoking a cigarette.

‘I've fixed your drink,' she said.

‘Kind of you. I suppose that means I must offer you one.' No point in being too friendly.

‘Thanks. I don't drink before five.' She was thinking of something else.

Ellery leaned against the picture window and looked down at her with hostility. ‘It's not that I'm a prude, Miss —'

‘Hill. Laurel Hill.'

‘— Miss Laurel Hill, but when I receive strange young things
au naturel
in Hollywood I like to be sure no confederate with a camera and an offer to do business is skulking behind my drapes. Why do you think you have to see me?'

‘Because the police are dummies.'

‘Ah, the police. They won't listen to you?'

‘They listen, all right. But then they laugh. I don't think there's anything funny in a dead dog, do you?'

‘In a what?'

‘A dead dog.'

Ellery sighed, rolling the frosty glass along his brow. ‘Your pooch was poisoned, of course?'

‘Guess again,' said the set-faced intruder. ‘He wasn't my pooch, and I don't know what caused his death. What's more, dog-lover though I am, I don't care a curse … They said it was somebody's idea of a rib, and I know they're talking through their big feet. I don't know what it meant, but it was no rib.'

Ellery had set the glass down. She stared back. Finally he shook his head, smiling. ‘The tactics are primitive, Laurel. E for Effort. But no dice.'

‘No tactics,' she said impatiently. ‘Let me tell you —'

‘Who sent you to me?'

‘Not a soul. You were all over the papers. It solved my problem.'

‘It doesn't solve mine, Laurel. My problem is to find the background of peaceful isolation which passeth the understanding of the mere, dear reader. I'm here to do a book, Laurel — a poor thing in a state of arrested development, but writing is a habit writers get into, and my time has come. So, you see, I can't take any cases.'

‘You won't even listen.' Her mouth was in trouble. She got up and started across the room. He watched the brown flesh below the bolero. Not his type, but nice.

‘Dogs die all the time,' Ellery said in a kindly voice.

‘It wasn't the dog, I tell you. It was the way it happened.' She did not turn at the front door.

‘The way he died?' Sucker.

‘The way we found him.' The girl suddenly leaned against the door, sidewise to him, staring down at her cigarette. ‘He was on our doorstep. Did you ever have a cat who insisted on leaving tidily dead mice on your mat to go with your breakfast eggs? He was a … gift.' She looked round for an ashtray, went over to the fireplace. ‘And it killed my father.'

A dead dog killing anybody struck Ellery as worth a tentative glance. And there was something about the girl — a remote, hardened purpose — that interested him.

‘Sit down again.'

She betrayed herself by the quick way in which she came back to the pony-skin chair, by the way she folded her tense hands and waited.

‘How exactly, Laurel, did a dead dog “kill” your father?'

‘It murdered him.'

He didn't like the way she sat there. He said deliberately, ‘Don't build it up for me. This isn't a suspense programme. A strange dead hound is left on your doorstep, and your father dies. What's the connection?'

‘It frightened him to death!'

‘And what did the death certificate say?' He now understood the official hilarity.

‘Coronary something. I don't care what it said. Getting the dog did it.'

‘Let's go back.' Ellery offered her one of his cigarettes, but she shook her head and took a pack of Dunhills from her green pouch bag. He held a match for her; the cigarette between her lips was shaking. ‘Your name is Laurel Hill. You had a father. Who was he? Where do you live? What did he do for a living? And so on.' She looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to her that such trivia could be of any interest to him. ‘I'm not necessarily taking it, Laurel. But I promise not to laugh.'

‘Thank you … Leander Hill. Hill & Priam, Wholesale Jewellers.'

‘Yes.' He had never heard of the firm. ‘Los Angeles?'

‘The main office is here, though Dad and Roger have — I mean had …' She laughed. ‘What tense
do
I use?… branch offices in New York, Amsterdam, South Africa.'

‘Who is Roger?'

‘Roger Priam. Dad's partner. We live off Outpost, not far from here. Twelve acres of lop-sided woods. Formal gardens, with mathematical eucalyptus and royal palms, and plenty of bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, poinsettia — all the stuff that curls up and dies at a touch of frost, which we get regularly every winter and which everybody says can't possibly happen again, not in Southern California. But Dad liked it. Made him feel like a Caribbean pirate, he used to say. Three in help in the house, a gardener who comes in every day, and the Priams have the adjoining property.' From the carefully scrubbed way in which she produced the name Priam it might have been Hatfield. ‘Daddy had a bad heart, and we should have lived on level ground. But he liked hills and wouldn't hear of moving.'

‘Mother alive?' He knew she was not. Laurel had the motherless look. The self-made female. A man's girl, and there were times when she would insist on being a man's man. Not Miss Universe of Pasadena or anywhere else, he thought. He began to like her. ‘She isn't?' he said, when Laurel was silent.

‘I don't know.' A sore spot. ‘If I ever knew my mother, I've forgotten.'

‘Foster-mother, then?'

‘He never married. I was brought up by a nurse, who died when I was fifteen — four years ago. I never liked her, and I think she got pneumonia just to make me feel guilty. I'm — I was his daughter by adoption.' She looked around for an ashtray, and Ellery brought her one. She said steadily as she crushed the cigarette, ‘But really his daughter. None of that fake pal stuff, you understand, that covers contempt on one side and being unsure on the other. I loved and respected him, and — as he used to say — I was the only woman in his life. Dad was a little on the old-school side. Held my chair for me. That sort of thing. He was … solid.' And now, Ellery thought, it's jelly and you're hanging on to the stuff with your hard little fingers. ‘It happened,' Laurel Hill went on in the same toneless way, ‘two weeks ago. June third. We were just finishing breakfast. Simeon, our chauffeur, came in to tell Daddy he'd just brought the car around and there was something “funny” at the front door. We all went out, and there it was — a dead dog lying on the doorstep with an ordinary shipping tag attached to its collar. Dad's name was printed on it in pencil:
Leander Hill
.'

‘Any address?'

‘Just the name.'

‘Did the printing look familiar? Did you recognize it?'

‘I didn't really look at it. I just saw one line of pencil-marks as Dad bent over the dog. He said in a surprised way, ‘Why, it's addressed to me.' Then he opened the little casket.'

‘Casket?'

‘There was a tiny silver box — about the size of a pill-box — attached to the collar. Dad opened it and found a wad of thin paper inside, folded over enough times so it would fit into the box. He unfolded it, and it was covered with writing or printing — it might even have been typewriting; I couldn't really see because he half-turned away as he read it.

‘By the time he'd finished reading his face was the colour of bread-dough, and his lips looked bluish. I started to ask him who'd sent it to him and what was wrong, when he crushed the paper in a sort of spasm and gave a choked cry and fell. I'd seen it happen before. It was a heart attack.'

She stared out the picture window at Hollywood.

‘How about a drink, Laurel?'

‘No, thanks. Simeon and —'

‘What kind of dog was it?'

‘Some sort of hunting dog, I think.'

‘Was there a licence-tag on his collar?'

‘I don't remember seeing any.'

‘An anti-rabies tag?'

‘I saw no tag except the paper one with Dad's name on it.'

‘Anything special about the dog-collar?'

‘It couldn't have cost more than seventy-five cents.'

‘Just a collar.' Ellery dragged over a chartreuse latticed blond chair and straddled it. ‘Go on, Laurel.'

‘Simeon and Ichiro, our houseman, carried him up to his bedroom while I ran for the brandy, and Mrs. Monk, our housekeeper, phoned the doctor. He lives on Castilian Drive and he was over in a few minutes. Daddy didn't die — that time.'

‘Oh, I see,' said Ellery. ‘And what did the paper in the silver box on the dead dog's collar say, Laurel?'

‘That's what I don't know.'

‘Oh, come.'

‘When he fell unconscious the paper was still in his hand, crumpled into a ball. I was too busy to try to open his fist, and by the time Dr. Voluta came, I'd forgotten it. But I remembered it that night, and the first chance I got — the next morning — I asked Dad about it. The minute I mentioned it he got pale, mumbled, “It was nothing, nothing,” and I changed the subject fast. But when Dr. Voluta dropped in, I took him aside and asked him if he'd seen the note. He said he had opened Daddy's hand and put the wad of paper on the night table beside the bed without reading it. I asked Simeon, Ichiro, and the housekeeper if they had taken the paper, but none of them had seen it. Daddy must have spotted it when he came to, and when he was alone he took it back.'

‘Have you looked for it since?'

‘Yes, but I haven't found it. I assume he destroyed it.'

Ellery did not comment on such assumptions. ‘Well, then, the dog, the collar, the little box. Have you done anything about them?'

‘I was too excited over whether Daddy was going to live or die to think about the dog. I recall telling Itchie or Sim to get it out of the way. I only meant for them to get it off the doorstep, but the next day when I went looking for it, Mrs. Monk told me she had called the Pound Department or some place and it had been picked up and carted away.'

‘Up the flue,' said Ellery, tapping his teeth with a fingernail. ‘Although the collar and box … You're sure your father didn't react to the mere sight of the dead dog? He wasn't afraid of dogs? Or,' he added suddenly, ‘of dying?'

‘He adored dogs. So much so that when Sarah, our Chesapeake bitch, died of old age last year he refused to get another dog. He said it was too hard losing them. As far as dying is concerned, I don't think the prospect of death as such bothered Daddy very much. Certainly not so much as the suffering. He hated the idea of a lingering illness with a lot of pain, and he always hoped that when his time came he'd pass away in his sleep. But that's all. Does that answer your question?'

‘Yes,' said Ellery, ‘and no. Was he superstitious?'

‘Not especially. Why?'

‘You said he was frightened to death. I'm groping.'

Laurel was silent. Then she said, ‘But he was. I mean frightened to death. It wasn't the dog — at first.' She gripped her ankles, staring ahead. ‘I got the feeling that the dog didn't mean anything till he read the note. Maybe it didn't mean anything to him even then. But whatever was in that note terrified him. It came as a tremendous shock to him. I'd never seen him look
afraid
before. I mean the real thing. And I could have sworn he died on the way down. He looked really dead lying there … That note did something devastating.' She turned to Ellery. Her eyes were greenish, with brown flecks in them; they were a little bulgy. ‘Something he'd forgotten, maybe. Something so important it made Roger come out of his shell for the first time in fifteen years.'

‘What?' said Ellery. ‘What was that again?'

‘I told you — Roger Priam, Dad's business partner. His oldest friend. Roger left his house.'

‘For the first time in fifteen years?' exclaimed Ellery.

‘Fifteen years ago Roger became partly paralyzed. He's lived in a wheel-chair ever since, and ever since he's refused to leave the Priam premises. All vanity; he was a large hunk of man in his day, I understand, proud of his build, his physical strength; he can't stand the thought of having people see him helpless, and it's turned him into something pretty unpleasant.

‘Through it all Roger pretends he's as good as ever and he brags that running the biggest jewellery business on the West coast from a wheel-chair in the hills proves it. Of course, he doesn't do any such thing. Daddy ran it all, though to keep peace he played along with Roger and pretended with him — gave Roger special jobs to do that he could handle over the phone, never took an important step without consulting him, and so on. Why, some of the people at the office and showrooms downtown have been with the firm for years and have never even laid eyes on Roger. The employees hate him. They call him “the invisible God,”' Laurel said with a smile. Ellery did not care for the smile. ‘Of course — being employees — they're scared to death of him.'

‘A fear which you don't share?'

‘I can't stand him.' It came out calmly enough, but when Ellery kept looking at her she glanced elsewhere.

‘You're afraid of him, too.'

‘I just dislike him.'

‘Go on.'

‘I'd notified the Priams of Dad's heart attack the first chance I got, which was the evening of the day it happened. I spoke to Roger myself on the phone. He seemed very curious about the circumstances and kept insisting he had to talk to Daddy. I refused — Dr. Voluta had forbidden excitement of any kind. The next morning Roger phoned twice, and Dad seemed just as anxious to talk to
him
. In fact, he was getting so upset I let him phone. There's a private line between his bedroom and the Priam house. But after I got Roger on the phone Dad asked me to leave the room.'