The Origin of Evil (3 page)

Laurel jumped up, but immediately she sat down again, fumbling for another Dunhill. Ellery let her strike her own match; she failed to notice.

She puffed rapidly. ‘Nobody knows what he said to Roger. Whatever it was, it took only a few minutes, and it brought Roger right over. He'd been lifted, wheel-chair and all, into the back of the Priams' station wagon, and Delia — Roger's wife — drove him over herself.' And Laurel's voice stabbed at the name of Mrs. Priam. So another Hatfield went with this McCoy. ‘When he was carried up to Dad's bedroom in his chair, Roger locked the door. They talked for three hours.'

‘Discussing the dead dog and the note?'

‘There's no other possibility. It couldn't have been business — Roger had never felt the necessity of coming over before on business, and Daddy had had two previous heart attacks. It was about the dog and note, all right. And if I had any doubts, the look on Roger Priam's face when he wheeled himself out of the bedroom killed them. He was as frightened as Daddy had been the day before, and for the same reason.

‘And that was something to see,' said Laurel softly. ‘If you were to meet Roger Priam, you'd know what I mean. Frightened looks don't go with his face. If there's any fright around, he's usually dishing it out … He even talked to me, something he rarely bothers to do. “You take good care of your father,” he said to me. I pleaded with him to tell me what was wrong, and he pretended not to have heard me. Simeon and Itchie lifted him into the station wagon, and Delia drove off with him.

‘A week ago — during the night of June tenth — Daddy got his wish. He died in his sleep. Dr. Voluta says that last shock to his heart did it. He was cremated, and his ashes are in a bronze drawer fifteen feet from the floor at Forest Lawn. But that's what he wanted, and that's where he is. The sixty-four-dollar question, Ellery, is: Who murdered him? And I want it answered.'

Ellery rang for Mrs. Williams. When she did not appear, he excused himself and went downstairs to the miniature lower level to find a note from his housekeeper describing minutely her plan to shop at the supermarket on North Highland. A pot of fresh coffee on the range and a deep dish of whipped avocado and bacon bits surrounded by crackers told him that Mrs. Williams had overheard all, so he took them upstairs.

Laurel said, surprised, ‘How nice of you,' as if niceness these days were a quality that called for surprise. She refused the crackers just as nicely, but then she changed her mind and ate ten of them without pausing, and she drank three cups of coffee. ‘I remembered I hadn't eaten anything today.'

‘That's what I thought.'

She was frowning now, which he regarded as an improvement over the stone face she had been wearing. ‘I've tried to talk to Roger Priam half a dozen times since then, but he won't even admit he and Dad discussed anything unusual. I told him in words of one syllable where I thought his obligations lay — certainly his debt to their lifelong friendship and partnership — and I explained my belief that Daddy was murdered by somebody who knew how bad his heart was and deliberately shocked him into a heart attack. And I asked for the letter. He said innocently, “What letter?” and I realized I'd never get a thing out of him. Roger's either over his scare or he's being his usual Napoleonic self. There's a big secret behind all this and he means to keep it.'

‘Do you think,' asked Ellery, ‘that he's confided in Mrs. Priam?'

‘Roger doesn't confide in anybody,' replied Laurel grimly. ‘And if he did, the last person in the world he'd tell anything to would be Delia.'

‘Oh, the Priams don't get along?'

‘I didn't say they don't get along.'

‘They do get along?'

‘Let's change the subject, shall we?'

‘Why, Laurel?'

‘Because Roger's relationship with Delia has nothing to do with any of this.' Laurel sounded earnest. But she was hiding something just the same. ‘I'm interested in only one thing — finding out who wrote that note to my father.'

‘Still,' said Ellery, ‘what was your father's relationship with Delia Priam?'

‘Oh!' Laurel laughed. ‘Of course you couldn't know. No, they weren't having an affair. Not possibly. Besides, I told you Daddy said I was the only woman in his life.'

‘Then they were hostile to each other?'

‘Why do you keep on the subject of Delia?' she asked, a snap in her voice.

‘Why do you keep off it?'

‘Dad got along with Delia fine. He got along with everybody.'

‘Not everybody, Laurel,' said Ellery.

She looked at him sharply.

‘That is, if your theory that someone deliberately scared him to death is sound. You can't blame the police, Laurel, for being fright-shy. Fright is a dangerous weapon that doesn't show up under the microscope. It takes no fingerprints and it's the most unsatisfactory kind of legal evidence. Now the letter … if you had the letter, that would be different. But you don't have it.'

‘You're laughing at me.' Laurel prepared to rise.

‘Not at all. The smooth stories are usually as slick as their surface. I like a good rough story. You can scrape away at the uneven places, and the dust tells you things. Now I know there's something about Delia and Roger Priam. What is it?'

‘Why must you know?'

‘Because you're so reluctant to tell me.'

‘I'm not. I just don't want to waste any time, and to talk about Delia and Roger is wasting time. Their relationship has nothing to do with my father.'

Their eyes locked.

Finally, with a smile, Ellery wavered.

‘No, I don't have the letter. And that's what the police said. Without the letter, or some evidence to go on, they can't come into it. I've asked Roger to tell them what he knows — knowing that what he knows
would
be enough for them to go on — and he laughed and recommended Arrowhead or Palm Springs as a cure for my “pipe dream,” as he called it. The police point to the autopsy report and Dad's cardiac history and send me politely away. Are you going to do the same?'

Ellery turned to the window. To get into a live murder case was the last thing in the world he had bargained for. But the dead dog fascinated him. Why a dead dog as a messenger of bad news? It smacked of symbolism. And murderers with metaphoric minds he had never been able to resist. If, of course, there was a murder. Hollywood was a playful place. People produced practical jokes on the colossal scale. A dead dog was nothing compared with some of the elaborations of record. One he knew of personally involved a race-horse in a bathroom, another the employment for two days of seventy-six extras. Some wit had sent a cardiac jeweller a recently deceased canine and a fake Mafia note, and before common sense could set in the victim of the dog-play had a heart attack. Learning the unexpected snapper of his joke, the joker would not unnaturally turn shy. The victim, ill and shaken, summoned his oldest friend and business partner to a conference. Perhaps the note threatened Sicilian tortures unless the crown jewels were deposited in the oily crypt of the pterodactyl pit in Hancock Park by midnight of the following day. For three hours the partners discussed the note, Hill nervously insisting it might be legitimate, Priam reasonably poohing and boshing the very notion. In the end Priam came away, and what Laurel Hill had taken to be fear was probably annoyance at Hill's womanish obduracy. Hill was immobilized by his partner's irritation, and before he could rouse himself his heart gave out altogether. End of mystery. Of course, there were a few dangling ends … But you could sympathize with the police. It was a lot likelier than a wild detective-story theory dreamed up by deceased's daughter. They had undoubtedly dismissed her as either a neurotic girl tipped over by grief or a publicity hound with a yen for a starlet contract. She was determined enough to be either.

Ellery turned about. She was leaning forward, the forgotten cigarette sending up question marks.

‘I suppose,' said Ellery, ‘your father had a closetful of bony enemies?'

‘Not to my knowledge.'

This astonished him. To run true to form she should have come prepared with names, dates, and vital statistics.

‘He was an easy, comfortable sort of man. He liked people, and people liked him. Dad's personality was one of the big assets of Hill & Priam. He'd have his moments like everybody else, but I never knew anyone who could stay mad at him. Not even Roger.'

‘Then you haven't the smoggiest notion who could be behind this … fright murder?'

‘Now you
are
laughing.' Laurel Hill got to her feet and dropped her cigarette definitely into the ashtray. ‘Sorry I've taken up so much of your time.'

‘You might try a reliable agency. I'll be glad to —'

‘I've decided,' she smiled at him, ‘to go into the racket personally. Thanks for the avocado —'

‘Why, Laurel.'

Laurel turned quickly.

A tall woman stood in the doorway.

‘Hello, Delia,' said Laurel.

2

Nothing in Laurel Hill's carefully edited remarks had prepared him for Delia Priam. Through his only available windows — the narrow eyes of Laurel's youth — he had seen Delia's husband as a pompous and tyrannical old cock, crippled but rampant, ruling his roost with a beak of iron; and from this it followed that the wife must be a grey-feathered hennypenny, preening herself emptily in corners, one of Bullock's elderly barnyard trade … a dumpy, nervous, insignificant old biddy.

But the woman in his doorway was no helpless fowl, to be plucked, swallowed, and forgotten. Delia Priam was of a far different species, higher in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and she would linger on the palate.

She was so much younger than his mental sketch of her that only much later was Ellery to recognize this as one of her routine illusions, among the easiest of the magic tricks she performed as professionally as she carried her breasts. At that time he was to discover that she was forty-four, but the knowledge remained as physically meaningless as — the figure leaped into his mind — learning the chronological age of Ayesha. The romantic nonsense of this metaphor was to persist. He would even be appalled to find that he was identifying himself in his fantasy with that hero of his adolescence, Allan Quatermain, who had been privileged to witness the immortal strip-tease of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed behind her curtain of living flame. It was the most naked juvenility, and Ellery was duly amused at himself. But there she was, a glowing end in herself; it took only imagination, a commodity with which he was plentifully provided, to supply the veils.

Delia Priam was big game; one glance told him that. His doorway framed the most superbly proportioned woman he had ever seen. She was dressed in a tawny peasant blouse of some sheer material and a California print skirt of bold colours. Her heavy black hair was massed to one side of her head, sleekly, in the Polynesian fashion; she wore plain broad hoops of gold in her ears. Head, shoulders, bust, hips — he could not decide which pleased him more. She stood there not so much in an attitude as in an atmosphere — an atmosphere of intense repose, watchful and disquieting.

By Hollywood standards she was not beautiful: her eyes were too deep and light-tinted, her eyebrows too lush; her mouth was too full, her colouring too high, her figure too heroic. But it was this very excessiveness that excited — a tropical quality, humid, brilliant, still, and overpowering. Seeing her for the first time was like stepping into a jungle. She seized and held the senses; everything was leashed, lovely, and dangerous. He found his ears trying to recapture her voice, the sleepy growl of something heard from a thicket.

Ellery's first sensible thought was,
Roger, old cock, you can have her
. His second was,
But how do you keep her?
He was on his third when he saw the chilly smile on Laurel Hill's lips.

Ellery pulled himself together. This was evidently an old story to Laurel.

‘Then Laurel's … mentioned me.' A dot-dot-dot talker. It had always annoyed him. But it prolonged the sound of that bitch-in-a-thicket voice.

‘I answered Mr. Queen's questions,' said Laurel in a warm, friendly voice. ‘Delia, you don't seem surprised to see me.'

‘I left my surprise outside with your car.' Those lazy throat-tones were warm and friendly, too. ‘I could say … the same to you, Laurel.'

‘Darling, you never surprise me.'

They smiled at each other.

Laurel turned suddenly and reached for another cigarette.

‘Don't bother, Ellery. Delia always makes a man forget there's another woman in the room.'

‘Now, Laurel.' She was indulgent. Laurel slashed the match across the packet.

‘Won't you come in and sit down, Mrs. Priam?'

‘If I'd had any idea Laurel was coming here …'

Laurel said abruptly, ‘I came to see the man about the dog, Delia.
And
the note. Did you follow me?'

‘What a ridiculous thing to say.'

‘Did you?'

‘Certainly not, dear. I read about Mr. Queen in the papers and it coincided with something that's been bothering me.'

‘I'm sorry, Delia. I've been upset.'

‘I'll come back, Mr. Queen.'

‘Mrs. Priam, does it concern Miss Hill's father's death?'

‘I don't know. It may.'

‘Then Miss Hill won't mind your sitting in. I repeat my invitation.'

She had a trick of moving slowly, as if she were pushing against something. As he brought the chartreuse chair around he watched her obliquely. When she sat down she was close enough so that he could have touched her bare back with a very slight movement of his finger. He almost moved it.

She did not seem to have taken him in at all. And yet she had looked him over; up and down, as if he had been a gown in a dress shop. Perhaps he didn't interest her. As a gown, that is.