by Ellery Queen
"Queen."
"You go right ahead, Queen."
"Very kind of you, Mr. Priam. By the way, have you added any books since your catalogue was made up?"
"Added any?" Priam stared. "I got all the good ones. What would I want with more? When d'ye want to do it?"
"No time like the present, I always say, Mr. Priam. The night is killed, anyway."
"Maybe tomorrow I'll change my mind, hey?" Priam showed his teeth again in what he meant to be a friendly grin. "That's all right, Queen. Shows you're no dope, even if you do write books. Go to it!" The grin faded as he turned his animal eyes on Wallace. "You push me back, Alfred. And better bunk downstairs for the rest of the night."
"Yes, Mr. Priam," said Alfred Wallace.
"Delia, what are you standing around for? Go back to bed."
"Yes, Roger."
The last they saw of Priam he was waving amiably as Wallace wheeled him across the hall. From his gesture it was apparent that he had talked himself out of his fears, if indeed he had not entirely forgotten their cause.
When the door across the hall had closed, Ellery said: "I hope you don't mind, Mrs. Priam. We've got to know which book this was."
"You think Roger's a fool, don't you?"
"Why don't you go to bed?"
"Don't ever make that mistake. Crowe!" Her voice softened. "Where've you been, darling? I was beginning to worry. Did you find your grandfather?"
Young Macgowan filled the doorway; he was grinning. "You'll never guess where." He yanked, and old Collier appeared. There was a smudge of chemical stain along his nose and he was smiling happily. "Down in the cellar."
"Cellar?"
"Gramp's fixed himself up a dark room, Mother. Gone into photography."
"I've been using your Contax all day, daughter. I hope you don't mind. I've got a great deal to learn," said Collier, shaking his head. "My pictures didn't come out very well. Hello there! Crowe tells me there's been more trouble."
"Have you been in the cellar all this time, Mr. Collier?" asked Lieutenant Keats.
"Since after supper."
"Didn't you hear anything? Somebody jimmied that window."
"That's what my grandson told me. No, I didn't hear anything, and if I had I'd probably have locked the cellar door and waited till it was all over! Daughter, you look all in. Don't let this get you down."
"I'll survive, Father."
"You come on up to bed. Good night, gentlemen." The old man went away.
"Crowe." Delia's face set. "Mr. Queen and Lieutenant Keats are going to be working in the library for a while. I think perhaps you'd better stay.., too."
"Sure, sure," said Mac. He stooped and kissed her. She went out without a glance at either of the older men. Macgowan shut the door after her. "What's the matter?" he asked Ellery in a plaintive tone. "Don't you two get along any more? What's happened?"
"If you must keep an eye on us, Mac," snapped Ellery, "do it from that chair in the corner, where you'll be out of the way. Keats, let's get going."
THE "PRIAM COLLECTION" was a bibliographic monstrosity, but Ellery was in a scientific, not an esthetic, mood and his methodology had nothing to with art or even morals; he simply had the Hollywood detective read off the titles on Priam's shelves and he checked them against the gold-crusted catalogue.
It took them the better part of two hours, during which Crowe Macgowan fell asleep in the leather chair.
When at last Keats stopped, Ellery said: "Hold it," and he began to thumb back along the pages of the catalogue.
"Well?" said Keats.
"You failed to read just one title." Ellery set the catalogue down and picked up the charred corpse of the book. "This used to be an octavo volume bound in laminated oak, with handblocked silk endpapers, of The Birds, by Aristophanes."
"The what, by whom?"
"The Birds. A play by Aristophanes, the great satirical dramatist of the fifth century before Christ."
"I don't see the joke."
Ellery was silent.
"You mean to tell me," demanded the detective, "that the burning of this book by a playwright dead a couple of dozen centuries is another of these warnings?"
"It must be."
"How can it be?"
"Mutilated and burned, Keats. At least two of the four previous warnings also involved violence in some form: the food poisoning, the murder of the frogs ..." Ellery sat up.
"What's the matter?"
"Frogs. Another play by Aristophanes has that exact title. The Frogs."
Keats looked pained.
"But that's almost certainly a coincidence. The other items wouldn't begin to fit ... The Birds. An unknown what's-it, food poisoning, dead toads and frogs, an expensive wallet, and now a plushy edition of a Greek social satire first performed—unless I've forgotten my Classics II—in 414 b.c."
"And I'm out of cigarets," grunted Keats. Ellery tossed a pack over. "Thanks. You say there's a connection?"
" 'And for each pace forward a warning .., a warning of special meaning for you—and for him,' " Ellery quoted. "That's what the note said. 'Meanings for pondering and puzzling.1 "
"How right he was. I still say, Queen, if this stuff means anything at all, each one stands on its own tootsies."
" 'For each pace forward,' Keats. It's going somewhere. No, they're tied. The whole thing's a progression." Ellery shook his head. "I'm not even sure any more that Priam knows what they mean. This one tonight really balls things up. Priam is virtually an illiterate. How could he possibly know what's meant by the destruction of an old Greek play?"
"What's it about?"
"The play? Well .., to the best of my recollection, two Athenians talk the Birds into building an aerial city, in order to separate the Gods from Man."
"That helps."
"What did Aristophanes call his city in the air? Cloud ... Cloudland . .. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land."
"That's the first thing I've heard in this case that rings the bell." Keats got up in disgust and went to the window.
A long time passed. Keats stared out at the night, which was beginning to boil and show a froth. But the room was chilly, and he hunched his shoulders under the leather jacket. Young Macgowan snored innocently in the club chair. Ellery said nothing.
Ellery's silence lasted for so long that after a time Keats, whose brain was empty and wretched, became conscious of its duration. He turned around tiredly and there was a gaunt, unshaven, wild-eyed refugee from a saner world staring back at him with uninvited joy, grudgingly delirious, like a girl contemplating her first kiss.
"What in the hell," said the Hollywood detective in alarm, "is the matter with you?"
"Keats, they have something in common!"
"Sure. You've said that a dozen times."
"Not one thing, but two."
Keats came over and took another of Ellery's cigarets. "What do you say we break this up? Go home, take a shower, and hit the hay." Then he said, "What?"
"Two things in common, Keats!" Ellery swallowed. His mouth was parched and there was a tuneful fatigue in his head, but he knew he had it, he had it at last.
"You've got it?"
"I know what it means, Keats. I know."
"What? What?"
But Ellery was not listening. He fumbled for a cigaret without looking.
Keats struck a match for him and then, absently, held it to his own cigarette; he went to the window again, inhaling, filling his lungs. The froth on the night had bubbled down, leaving a starchy mass, glimmering like soggy rice. Keats suddenly became aware of what he was doing. He looked startled, then desperate, then defiant. He smoked hungrily, waiting.
"Keats."
Keats whirled. "Yes?"
Ellery was on his feet. "The man who owned the dog. What were his name and address again?"
"Who?" Keats blinked.
"The owner of the dead dog, the one you have reason to believe was poisoned before it was left on Hill's doorstep. What was the owner's name? I've forgotten it
."
"Henderson. Clybourn Avenue, in Toluca Lake."
"I'll have to see him as soon as I can. You going home?"
"But why—"
"You go on and get a couple of hours' sleep. Are you going to be at the station later this morning?"
"Yeah. But what—"
But Ellery was walking out of Roger Priam's library with stiff short steps, a man in a dream.
Keats stared after him.
When he heard Ellery's Kaiser drive away, he put Ellery's pack of cigarets in his pocket and picked up the remains of the burned book.
Crowe Macgowan awoke with a snort.
"You still here? Where's Queen?" Macgowan yawned. "Did you find out anything?"
Keats held his smoldering butt to a fresh cigaret, puffing recklessly. "I'll send you a telegram," he said bitterly, and he went away.
SLEEP WAS IMPOSSIBLE. He tossed for a while, not even hopefully.
At a little after six Ellery was downstairs in his kitchen, brewing coffee.
He drank three cups, staring into the mists over Hollywood. A dirty gray world with the sun struggling through. In a short time the mist would be gone and the sun would shine clear.
The thing was sharply brilliant. All he had to do was get rid of the mist.
What he would see in that white glare Ellery hardly dared anticipate. It was something monstrous, and in its monstrous way beautiful; that, he could make out dimly.
But first there was the problem of the mist.
He went back upstairs, shaved, took a shower, changed into fresh clothing, and then he left the cottage and got into his car.
Thirteen
IT WAS ALMOST eight o'clock when Ellery pulled up before a small stucco house tinted cobalt blue on Clybourn Avenue
off Riverside Drive
.
A handcolored wooden cutout resembling Dopey, the Walt Disney dwarf, was stuck into the lawn on a stake, and on it a flowery artist had lettered the name Henderson.
The uniformly closed Venetian blinds did not look promising.
As Ellery went up the walk a woman's voice said, "If you're lookin' for Henderson, he's not home."
A stout woman in an orange wrapper was leaning far over the railing of her red cement stoop next door, groping with ringed fingers for something hidden in a violet patch.
"Do you know where I can reach him?"
Something swooshed, and six sprinklers sent up watery bouquets over the woman's lawn. She straightened, red-faced and triumphant.
"You can't," she said, panting. "Henderson's a picture actor. He's being a pirate mascot on location around Catalina or somewhere. He expected a few weeks' work. You a press agent?"
"Heaven forbid," muttered Ellery. "Did you know Mr. Henderson's dog?"
"His dog? Sure I knew him. Frank, his name was. Always tearin' up my lawn and chasin' moths through my pansy beds—though don't go thinkin'," the fat woman added hastily, "that I had anything to do with poisonin' Frank, because I just can't abide people who do things like that to animals, even the destroyin" kind. Henderson was all broke up about it."
"What kind of dog was Frank?" Ellery asked.
"Kind?"
"Breed."
"Well .., he wasn't very big. Nor so little, neither, when you stop to think of it—"
"You don't know his breed?"
"I think some kind of a hunting dog. Are you from the Humane Society or the Anti-Vivisection League? I'm against experimentin' with animals myself, like the Examiner's always saying'. If the good Lord—"
"You can't tell me, Madam, what kind of hunting dog Frank was?"
"Well. .."
"English setter? Irish? Gordon? Llewellyn? Chesapeake? Weimaraner?"
"I just guess," said the woman cheerfully, "I don't know."
"What color was he?"
"Well, now, sort of brown and white. No, black. Come to think of it, not really white, neither. More creamy, like."
"More creamy, like. Thank you," said Ellery. And he got into his car and moved fifty feet, just far enough to be out of his informant's range.
After thinking for a few minutes, he drove off again.
He cut through Pass and Olive, past the Warner Brothers studio, into Barham Boulevard to the Freeway. Emerging through the North Highland exit into Hollywood, he found a parking space on McCadden Place and hurried around the corner to the Plover Bookshop.
It was still closed.
He could not help feeling that this was inconsiderate of the Plover Bookshop. Wandering up Hollywood Boulevard disconsolately, he found himself opposite Coffee Dan's. This reminded him vaguely of his stomach, and he crossed over and went in for breakfast. Someone had left a newspaper on the counter and as he ate he read it conscientiously. When he paid his check, the cashier said, "What's the news from Korea this morning?" and he had to answer stupidly, "Just about the same," because he could not remember a word he had read.
Plover was open!
He ran in and seized the arm of a clerk. "Quick," he said fiercely. "A book on dogs."
"Book on dogs," said the clerk. "Any particular kind of book on dogs, Mr. Queen?"
"Hunting dogs! With illustrations! In color!"
Plover did not fail him. He emerged carrying a fat book 1 and a charge slip for seven and a half dollars, plus tax. He drove up into the hills rashly and caught Laurel Hill a moment after she stepped into her stall shower.
"GO AWAY," LAUREL said, her voice sounding muffled. "I'm naked."
"Turn that water off and come out here!"
"Why, Ellery."
"Oh ... I I'm not the least bit interested in your nakedness—"
'Thanks. Did you ever say that to Delia Priam?"
"Cover your precious hide with this! I'll be in the bedroom." Ellery tossed a bath towel over the shower door and hurried out. Laurel kept him waiting five minutes. When she came out of the bathroom she was swaddled in a red, white, and blue robe of terry cloth.
"I didn't know you cared. But next time would you mind at least knocking? Gads, look at my hair—"
"Yes, yes," said Ellery. "Now Laurel, I want you to project yourself back to the morning when you and your father stood outside your front door and looked at the body of the dead dog. Do you remember that morning?"
"I think so," said Laurel steadily.
"Can you see that dog right now?"
"Every hair of him."
"Hold on to him!" Ellery yanked her by the arm and she squealed, grabbing at the front of her robe. She found herself staring down at her bed. Upon it, open to an illustration in color of a springer spaniel, lay a large book. "Was he a dog like this?"
"N-no . . ."
"Go through the book page by page. When you come to Henderson's pooch, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, indicate same in an unmistakable manner."
Laurel looked at him suspiciously. It was too early in the morning for him to have killed a bottle, and he was shaved and pressed, so it wasn't the tag end of a large night. Unless ...
"Ellery!" she screamed. "You've found out something!"
"Start looking," hissed Ellery viciously; at least it sounded vicious to his ears, but Laurel only looked overjoyed and began to turn pages like mad.
"Easy, easy," he cried. "You may skip it."
"I'll find your old hound." Pages flew like locust petals in a May wind. "Here he is—"
"Ah."
Ellery took the book.
The illustration showed a small, almost dumpy, dog with short legs, pendulous ears, and a wiry upcurving tail. The coat was smooth. Hindlegs and forequarters were an off-white, as was the muzzle; the little dog had a black saddle and black ears with' secondary pigmentation of yellowish brown extending into his tail.
The caption under the illustration said: Beagle.
"Beagle." Ellery glared. "Beagle ... Of course. Of course. No other possibility. None whatever. If I'd had the brain of a wood louse . . . Beagle, Laurel, beagle!" And he swept her off her feet and planted five kisses on the top of h
er wet head. Then he tossed her on her unmade bed and before her horrified eyes went into a fast tap— an accomplishment which was one of his most sacred secrets, unknown even to his father. And Ellery chanted, "Merci, my pretty one, my she-detective. You have follow ze clue of ze ar-sen-ique, of ze little frog, of ze wallette, of ze everysing but ze sing you know all ze time—zat is to say, ze beagle. Oh, ze beagle!" And he changed to a soft shoe.
"But what's the breed of dog got to do with anything, Ellery?" moaned Laurel. "The only connection I can see with the word 'beagle' is its slang meaning. Isn't a 'beagle' a detective?"
"Ironic, isn't it?" chortled Ellery; and he exited doing a Shuffle-Off-to-Buffalo, blowing farewell kisses and almost breaking the prominent nose of Mrs. Monk, Laurel's housekeeper, who had it pressed in absolute terror to the bedroom door.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER Ellery was closeted with Lieutenant Keats at the Hollywood Division. Those who passed the closed door heard the murmur of the Queen voice, punctuated by a weird series of sounds bearing no resemblance to Keats's usual tones.
The conference lasted well over an hour.
When the door opened, a suffering man appeared. Keats looked as if he had just picked himself up from the floor after a kick in the groin. He kept shaking his head and muttering to himself. Ellery followed him briskly. They vanished in the office of Keats's chief.
An hour and a half later they emerged. Keats now looked convalescent, even robust.
"I still don't believe it," he said, "but what the hell, we're living in a funny world."
"How long do you think it will take, Keats?"
"Now that we know what to look for, not more than a few days. What are you going to do in the meantime?"
"Sleep and wait for the next one."
"By that time," grinned the detective, "maybe we'll have a pretty good line on this inmate."