The Origin of Evil

by Ellery Queen

  "What? Oh! No, not that, Mr. Priam." Ellery scowled down at the paper. "It's the phrasing." "The what?" "The way the message is worded."

  Priam was puzzled. "What's the matter with it?"

  "A great deal is the matter with it, Mr. Priam. TU go so far as to say that this is the most remarkable collection of words I've ever been privileged to read. How many words are there in this message, Mr. Priam?"

  "How the devil should I know?"

  "Ninety-nine, Mr. Priam."

  Priam glanced at Keats. But Keats was merely smoking with the gusto of a man who has denied himself too long, and there was nothing on Ellery's face but concern. "So it's got ninety-nine words. I don't get it."

  "Ninety-nine words, Mr. Priam, comprising three hundred and ninety-seven letters of the English alphabet."

  "I still don't get it." A note of truculence crept into Priam's heavy voice. "What are you trying to prove, that you can count?"

  "I'm trying to prove—and I can prove, Mr. Priam— that there's something wrong with this message."

  "Wrong?" Priam's beard shot up. "What?"

  "The tools of my business, Mr. Priam," said Ellery, "are words. I not only write words of my own, but I read extensively—and sometimes with envy—the words of others. So I consider myself qualified to make the following observation: This is the first time I've ever run across a piece of English prose, deathless or otherwise, made up of as many as ninety-nine words, consisting of almost four hundred individual characters, in which the writer failed to use a single letter T."

  "SINGLE LETTER T," repeated Priam. His lips moved after he stopped speaking, so that for a moment it looked as if he were chewing something with a foreign and disagreeable taste.

  "It took me a long time to spot that, Mr. Priam," continued Ellery, walking around the body of Alfred Wallace. "It's the sort of thing you can't see because it's so obvious. When we read, most of us concentrate on the sense of what we're reading, not its physical structure. Who looks at a building and sees the individual bricks? Yet the secret of the building lies precisely there. There are twenty-six basic bricks in the English language, some of them more important than the rest. There's no guesswork about those bricks, Mr. Priam. Their nature, their usability, their interrelationships, the frequency of their occurrence have been determined as scientifically as the composition of stucco.

  "Let me tell you about the letter T, Mr. Priam," said Ellery.

  "The letter T is the second most frequently used letter in the English language. Only E occurs more frequently. T is the number two brick of the twenty-six.

  "T, Mr. Priam, is the most frequently used initial letter in the English language.

  "English uses a great many combinations of two letters representing a single speech sound. These are known as digraphs. The letter T, Mr. Priam, is part of the most frequently used digraph—TH.

  "T is also part of the most frequently used trigraph— three letters spelling a single speech sound—THE, as in the word BATHE.

  "TT, Mr. Priam, gives ground only to SS and EE as the most frequently used double letter.

  "The same letters, S and E, are the only letters which

  occur more frequently than T as the last letters of words.

  "But that isn't all, Mr. Priam," said Ellery. "The letter

  T is part of the most frequently used three-letter word in

  the English language—the word THE.

  "The letter T is part of the most frequently used four-letter word—THAT—and also of the second most frequently used four letter word—WITH.

  "And as if that weren't enough, Mr. Priam," said Ellery, "we find T in the second most frequently used two-letter word—TO—and in the fourth most frequently used two-letter word—IT. Do you wonder now, Mr. Priam," said Ellery, "why I called Charles Adam's note to your partner remarkable?

  "It's so remarkable, Mr. Priam, that it's impossible. No conceivable chance or coincidence could produce a communication of almost a hundred English words that was completely lacking in Ts. The only way you can get a hundred-word message without a single T is by setting out to do so. You have to make a conscious effort to avoid using it.

  "Do you want confirmation, Mr. Priam?" asked Ellery, and now something new had come into his voice; it was no longer thoughtful or troubled. "The writer of this note didn't use a single TO or IT or AT or THE or BUT or NOT or THAT or WITH or THIS. You simply can't escape those words unless you're trying to.

  "The note refers to you and Leander Hill; that is, to two people. He says: / have looked for you and for him. Why didn't he write: / have looked for the two of you, or / have looked for both of you?—either of which would have been a more natural expression than for you and for him? The fact that in the word TWO and in the word BOTH the letter T occurs can hardly escape us. He just happened to express it that way? Perhaps once; even possibly twice; but he wrote for you and for him three times in the same message!

  "He writes: Slow dying . . , unavoidable dying. And again : dying in mind and in body. He's no novelist or poet looking for a different way of saying things. And this is a note, not an essay for publication. Why didn't he use the common phrases: Slow death . . , inevitable death . . , death mentally and physically? Even though the whole message concerns death, the word itself—in that form —does not occur even once. If he was deliberately avoiding the letter T, the question is answered.

  "You believed me dead . . . Had he expressed this in a normal, natural way he would have written: You thought 1 was dead. But thought contains two T's. We find the word pondering, for to think over, for obviously the same reason.

  "And surely Here is warning number one is a circumlocution to avoid writing the more natural This is the first warning.

  "Am I quibbling? Can this still have been a coincidence, dictated by an eccentric style? The odds against this mount astronomically when you consider two other examples from the note.

  "And for each pace forward a warning, he writes. He's not talking about physical progress, where a pace might have a specialized meaning in the context. There is no reason on earth why he shouldn't have written And for each step forward, except that step contains a T.

  "My last example is equally significant. He writes: For over a score of years. Why use the fancy word score? Why didn't he write: For over twenty years, or whatever the actual number of years was? Because the word twenty, or any combination including the word twenty —from twenty-one through twenty-nine—gets him involved in Ts."

  ROGER PRIAM WAS baffled. He was trying to capture something, or recapture it. All his furrows were deeper with the effort, and his eyes rolled a little. But he said nothing.

  And, in the background, Keats smoked; and, in the foreground, Alfred Wallace lay under the blanket.

  "The question is, of course," said Ellery, "why the writer of the note avoided using the letter T.

  "Let's see if we can't reconstruct something useful here.

  "How was the original of Leander Hill's copy written? By hand, or by mechanical means? We have no direct evidence; the note has disappeared. Laurel caught a glimpse of the original when Hill took it from the little silver box, but Hill half-turned away as he read it and Laurel couldn't specify the character of the writing.

  "But the simplest analysis shows the form in which it must have appeared. The letter could not have been handwritten. It is just as easy to write the letter T as any other letter of the alphabet. The writer, considering the theme of his message, could hardly have been playing word games; and no other test but ease or difficulty makes sense.

  "If the note wasn't handwritten, then it was typewritten. You saw that note, Mr. Priam—Hill showed it to you the morning after his heart attack. Wasn't it typewritten?"

  Priam looked up, frowning in a peculiar way. But he did not answer.

  "It was typewritten," said Ellery. "But the moment you assume a typewritten note, the answer suggests itself. The writer was composing his message on a typewriter. He used no Ts. Why look for complic
ated reasons? If he used no 7"s, it's simply because 7"s were not available to him. He couldn't use T's. The T key on the machine he was using wouldn't function. It was broken."

  Surprisingly, Priam lifted his head and said, "You're guessing."

  Ellery looked pained. "I'm not trying to prove how clever I am, Mr. Priam, but I must object to your verb. Guessing is as obnoxious to me as swearing is to a bishop. I submit that I worked this out; I've had little enough fun in this easel But let's assume it's a guess. It's a very sound guess, Mr. Priam, and it has the additional virtue of being susceptible to confirmation.

  "I theorize a typewriter with a broken key. Do we know of a typewriter—in this case—which wasn't in perfect working order?

  "Strangely enough, Mr. Priam, we do.

  "On my way to your house for the first time, in Laurel Hill's car, I asked Laurel some questions about you. She told me how self-sufficient you've made yourself, how as a reaction to your disability you dislike help of the most ordinary kind. As an example, Laurel said that when she was at your house 'the day before' you were in a foul mood over having to dictate business memoranda to Wallace instead of doing them yourself—your typewriter had just been sent into Hollywood to be repaired."

  Priam twisted. Keats stood by his wheelchair, lifting the attached typewriter shelf.

  Priam choked a splutter, glancing painfully down at the shelf as Keats swung it up and around.

  Ellery and Keats bent over the machine, ignoring the man in the chair.

  They glanced at each other.

  Keats tapped the T key with a fingernail. "Mr. Priam," he said, "there's only one key on this machine that's new. It's the T. The note to Hill was typed right here." He spread his fingers over the carriage of Priam's typewriter, almost with affection.

  A sound, formless and a little beastly, came out of Priam's throat. Keats stood by him, very close.

  "And who could have typed a note on your machine, Mr. Priam?" asked Ellery in the friendliest of voices. "There's no guesswork here. If I'd never seen this typewriter shelf I'd have known the machine is screwed on. It would have to be, to keep it from falling off when the shelf is swung aside and dropped. Besides, Laurel Hill told me so.

  "So, except for those times when the typewriter needs a major repair, it's a permanent fixture of your wheelchair. Was the original of the note to Hill typed on your machine after it was removed for repair but before the broken T key was replaced? No, because the note was delivered to Hill two weeks before you sent the machine into Hollywood. Did someone type the note on your machine while you were out of your wheelchair? No, Mr. Priam, because you're never out of your chair; you haven't left it for fifteen years. Was the note typed on your machine while you were—«ay—asleep? Impossible; when the chair is a bed the shelf obviously can't come up.

  "So I'm very much afraid, Mr. Priam, there's only one conclusion we can reach," said Ellery. "You typed that warning note yourself.

  "It's you who threatened your partner with death.

  "The only active enemy out of your past and Hill's, Mr. Priam, is Roger Priam."

  "DON'T MISUNDERSTAND ME," said Ellery. "Charles Adam is not imaginary. He was an actual person, as our investigation uncovered. Adam disappeared in West Indian waters 'over a score of years ago,' as you wrote in the note, and he hasn't been seen or heard of since. It was only the note that made us believe Adam was still alive. Knowing now that you wrote the note, we can only conclude that Adam didn't survive the Beagle's voyage twenty-five years ago after all, that you and Hill did succeed in killing him, and that his reappearance here in Southern California this summer was an illusion you deliberately engineered.

  "Priam," said Ellery, "you knew what a shock it would be to your partner Hill to learn that Adam was apparently alive after so many years of thinking he was dead. Not only alive but explicitly out for revenge. You knew that Hill would be particularly susceptible to such news. He had built a new life for himself. He was bound up emotionally with Laurel, his adopted daughter, who worshiped the man he seemed to be.

  "So Adam's 'reappearance' threatened not only Hill's life but, what was possibly even more important to him, the whole structure of Laurel's love for him. There was a good chance, you felt, that Hill's bad heart—he had had two attacks before—could not survive such a shock. And you were right—your note killed him.

  "If Hill had any doubts about the authenticity of the note, you dispelled them the morning after the heart attack, when for the first time in fifteen years you took the trouble of having yourself carted over to Hill's house. The cause could only have been a telephone agreement with Hill to have a confidential, urgent talk about the note. You had, I imagine, another and equally pressing reason for that unprecedented visit: You wanted to be sure the note was destroyed so that it couldn't be traced back to your typewriter. Either Hill gave it to you and you destroyed it then or later, or he destroyed it before your eyes. What you didn't know, Priam, and what he didn't tell you, was that he had already made a copy of the note in his own handwriting and hidden it in his mattress. Why? Maybe after the first shock, when Hill thought it over, he hadn't been quite convinced. Maybe a sixth sense told him before you got to him that something was wrong. Whether you convinced him during that visit or not, the note was probably already copied and in his mattress, and a native caution—despite all your arguments —made him leave it there and say nothing about it. We can't know and won't ever know just what went on in Hill's mind.

  "But the damage was done by the sheer impact of the shock, Priam. Murder by fright," said Ellery. "Far colder-blooded and more deliberate than killing by gun or knife, or even poison. A murder calling for great pains of premeditation. One wonders why. Not merely why you wanted to kill Hill, but why you splashed your crime so carefully with that elaborate camouflage of 'the enemy out of the past.'

  "Your motive must have been compelling. It couldn't have been gain, because Hill's death brought you no material benefits; his share of the business went to Laurel. It couldn't have been to avoid exposure as the murderer of Adam twenty-five years ago, for Hill was neck-deep in that crime with you and had benefited from it equally—he was hardly in a position to hold it over you. In fact, he was in a poorer position than you were to hold it over him, because Hill had the additional reason to want to keep it from Laurel. Nor is it likely that you killed him to avoid exposure for any other crime of which he might have gained knowledge, such as—I take the obvious theory —embezzlement of the firm's funds. Because the truth is you have had very little to do with the running of Hill & Priam; it was Hill who ran it, while you merely put up a show of being an equal partner in work and responsibility. Never leaving your house, you could hardly have been so in control of daily events as to have been able to steal funds, or falsify accounts, or anything like that. Nor was it trouble over your wife. Hill's relationship with Mrs. Priam was friendly and correct; besides," said Ellery rather dryly, "he was getting past the age for that sort of thing.

  "There's only one thing you accomplished, Priam, by killing Leander Hill. So, in the absence of a positive indication in any other direction, I'm forced to conclude that that's why you wanted Hill out of the way.

  "And it's confirmed by your character, Priam, the whole drive of your personality.

  "By killing Hill you got rid of your business partner. That is one of the facts that emerge from his death. Is it the key fact? I think it is.

  "Priam, you have an obsessive need to dominate, to dominate your immediate background and everyone in it. The one thing above all others that you can't stand is dependence on others. With you the alternative is not so much independence of others as making others dependent on you. Because physically you're helpless, you want power. You must be master—even if, as in the case of your wife, you have to use another man to do it.

  "You hated Hill because he, not you, was master of Hill & Priam. He ran it and he had run it for fifteen years with no more than token help from you. The firm's employees looked up to him an
d loathed you. He made policy, purchases, sales; to accounts, big and small, Leander Hill was Hill & Priam and Roger Priam was a forgotten and useless invalid stuck away in a house somewhere. The fact that to Hill you owe your material security and the sound condition of Hill & Priam has festered inside of you for fifteen years. Even while you enjoyed the fruits of Hill's efforts, they left a bitter taste in your mouth that eventually poisoned you.

  "You planned his death.

  "With Hill out of the way, you would be undisputed master of the business. That you might run it into the ground probably never occurred to you. But if it did, I'm sure the danger didn't even make you hesitate. The big thing was to make everyone involved in or with Hill & Priam come crawling to you. The big thing was to be boss."

  ROGER PRIAM SAID nothing. This time he did not even make the beastly sound. But his little eyes roved.

  Keats moved even closer.

  "Once you saw what you had to do," continued Ellery, "you realized that you were seriously handicapped. You couldn't come and go as you pleased; you had no mobility. An ordinary murder was out of the question. Of course, you could have disposed of Hill right in this room during a business conference by a shot. But Hill's death wasn't the primary objective. He had to die and leave you free to run the business.

  "You had to be able to kill him in such a way that you wouldn't be even suspected.

  "It occurred to you, as it's occurred to murderers before, that the most effective way of diverting suspicion from yourself was to create the illusion that you were equally in danger of losing your life, and from the same source. In other words, you had to create a fictitious outside threat directed not merely at Hill but at both of you.

  "Your and Hill's connection with Charles Lyell Adam twenty-five years ago provided a suitable, if daring and dangerous, means for creating such an illusion. If Adam were 'alive,' he could have a believable motive to seek the death of both of you. Adam's background could be traced by the authorities; the dramatic voyage of the Beagle was traceable to the point of its disappearance with all hands; the facts of your and Hill's existence and present situation in life, plus the hints you could let drop in 'Adam's' note, would lead any competent investigator to the conclusion you wanted him to reach.