The blackmailer might be waiting to make certain there were no police or hidden confederates about. Or he might have recognized Sally’s emissary as a gentleman of some experience in these matters and been frightened away.

  I’ll give him another ten minutes, thought Ellery.

  He picked up the menu.

  Roast Fork with, Apple Fritters à la Henri…

  The telephone rang.

  Ellery had the receiver off the hook before it could ring the second time.

  “Yes?”

  The voice said: “Put the money in the right-hand top drawer of the bureau. Close the door. Then go over to Upham House, Room 10. Walk right in. You’ll find the letters in the right-hand top drawer of the bureau there.”

  Ellery said: “Upham House, Room—”

  “The letters will be in that room for eight minutes, just long enough for you to walk over there if you start right now.”

  “But how do I know you aren’t—”

  There was a click.

  Ellery hung up, raced to the bureau, opened the right-hand top drawer, dropped the envelope of money in it, slammed the drawer, and ran out of the room, shutting the door behind him. The corridor was empty. He swore and punched the elevator button. The first elevator appeared almost at once. There was no one in it. Ellery pressed a dollar bill into the hand of the operator, a red-haired boy with freckles.

  “Take me right down to the lobby. No stops!” This was no time for finesse.

  It was a rapid trip.

  Ellery plunged into the lobby crowd and came up with a bellhop.

  “Want to make ten dollars the easy way?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ellery gave him the ten-spot. “Go right up to the tenth floor—fast as you can get there—and keep an eye on the door of Room 1010. If anybody comes along, pull a knob-polishing act, anything. Don’t do or say anything, just wait there. 1010. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  He hurried out into the Square.

  Upham House was on Washington Street, a hundred feet from the Square. Its two-story wooden pillars were visible from the Hollis entrance. Ellery shoved his way through the crowds circling the Square. He crossed Lincoln, passed the Ron Ton, the pharmacy which had been Myron Garback’s, the New York Department Store. He ran across Washington against the signal…

  The voice was maddening. It kept whispering in his ear. “Put the money in the right-hand top drawer…” Even a whisper can be revealing. But this whisper…Tissue paper! That was it. The speaker had been whispering through tissue paper. It had given the voice a hoarse, vibrant, fluttery quality, completely deforming, de-sexing, ageless.

  Room 10 at Upham House. Ground floor, that would be. There were a few rooms in the west wing. West wing…As he hurried along, a tiny hand knocked at a door. For some reason a pleasant black face kept popping up, a young man in the uniform of the United States Army, General Issue. Corporal Abraham L. Jackson! Corporal Jackson and his testimony in the Davy Fox case. How he had delivered the six bottles of grape juice when he had been a delivery boy for Logan’s Market. Logan’s Market…It was still there, beyond Upham House, at the corner of Washington and Slocum, its entrance on Slocum. Jackson had…What had Jackson done, and why was it so bothersome now, after all these years? He had carried the carton out to the delivery truck in the alley behind Logan’s…yes…that’s what he’d testified…the alley which the market shared with the fire exits at the rear of the Bijou Theater and…and the side entrance of Upham House. Side entrance! West side of the building! That was it. It was a way of getting into the hotel without attracting attention. Ellery glanced at his watch as he strode past the Upham House entrance. Six and a half minutes. There was the alley…

  He turned into the alley and ran the rest of the way to the side door.

  The corridor, carpeted in Revolutionary blue and papered with a flag-red illustration of the Minute Men at Concord Bridge, was deserted. Two doors away stood the door numbered 10.

  The door was closed.

  Ellery ran over to it and without hesitation turned the knob. The door gave and he darted in and to the bureau and jerked the top right-hand drawer open.

  There lay a bundle of letters.

  Six minutes and a few seconds later Ellery emerged from the third elevator onto the tenth floor of the Hollis. He had run all the way. “Boy!”

  The bellhop stuck his head out of the doorway marked FIRE EXIT.

  “Here I am, sir.”

  Ellery ran up to him, puffing. “Well?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, sir.”

  Ellery looked the boy over carefully. But all he could detect on the face of Mamie Hood’s youngest was curiosity.

  “No one went into 1010.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Of course no one came out.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t take your eyes off the door?”

  “Not once.”

  “You’re sure, now.”

  “Cross my heart.” The boy lowered his voice. “You a detective?”

  “Well…in a way.”

  “Dame, huh?”

  Ellery smiled enigmatically. “Think if a five-spot joined that ten, you could forget all about this?”

  “Try me!”

  Ellery waited until the boy disappeared in the elevator. Then he ran over to 1010.

  The envelope containing the money was gone.

  When your wits are your stock-in-trade, to be outwitted is a blow. To be outwitted in Wrightsville is a haymaker.

  Ellery walked back to Upper Dade Street slowly.

  How had the blackmailer got the money?

  He hadn’t been hiding in 1010; Ellery had searched the room before and after. The closet was empty. The bureau drawers were empty (logic must take midgets into account). There was no one under the bed. There was no bathroom. There was not even a door to an adjoining room. He could hardly have entered through the window; a human fly would have packed the Square below like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  Yet the fellow had managed to get into 1010 after Ellery’s departure and he had managed to get out before Ellery’s return. He had managed to get out even earlier than that…before the bellboy took up his post on the tenth floor.

  Of course.

  Ellery shook his head at his own innocence. Unless the hop was lying, the answer lay in a simple time sequence. The room was under observation for all but one short period: between the time Ellery stepped into the down-elevator until the time the bellboy stepped out.

  In that interval the blackmailer had acted.

  He had phoned from inside the Hollis, either from another room on the tenth floor, or the ninth, or from one of the house phones in the lobby. He had placed a time limit on the letters. Shrewd! Reflection should have shown that either the letters were not in the bureau of Room 10 of Upham House at all, or, if they were, the blackmailer would scarcely risk appearing there at the expiration of a stipulated number of minutes to retrieve them. But he had given Ellery no time for reflection. And he had had still another advantage. Reflection or no, Sally’s representative was hardly in a position to disobey instructions. The whole point of the blackmailing operation, from the victims’ standpoint, was to regain possession of the letters. To achieve this, even the risk of losing the money and fading to get the letters back had to be run. The blackmailer could count on this. And he had done so.

  He had simply entered Room 1010 after Ellery’s departure, he had taken the money, he had come out again before the bellhop reached the tenth floor. Probably he had strolled down the fire stairway to one of the lower floors and taken an elevator down from there.

  Ellery considered returning to the Hollis and investigating the reservation for 1010, and going back to Upham House for some clue the blackmailer may have left there. But then he shrugged and got into Howard’s car. He might wind up, through a suspicious clerk, in the hands of Chief Dakin or a reporter for Diedrich Van Horn’s Record. The police and the newspapers must be avoided.

  He found himself wondering by what insanity he had come to be mixed up in the whole dreary business.

  Ellery parked Howard’s roadster outside The Hot Spot on Route 16 and went in. It was thronged and noisy. He sauntered over to the second booth from the rear, on the left, and said, “Mind if I join you?”

  The beer before Sally was untouched but there were three empty whiskey glasses before Howard.

  Sally was pale: her lipstick made her look paler. She was dressed in a mousy sweater and skirt, with an old gabardine coat over her shoulders. Howard wore a dark gray suit.

  They both stared up at him.

  Ellery said: “Shove over, Sally,” and he sat down beside her, turning so that his back was to the room. A white-aproned waiter pounded past, saying, “I’ll be right with you folks,” and Ellery said, without looking around, “No hurry.” He slipped something into Sally’s lap with his left hand as with his right he picked up her glass of beer.

  Sally looked down.

  Her cheeks flamed.

  Howard muttered: “Sally, for the love of God.”

  “Oh, Howard.”

  “Pass them to me.”

  “Under the table,” said Ellery. “Oh, waiter. Two beers and another whiskey.”

  The waiter grabbed the empty glasses and began to swab the table off with a dirty rag.

  “Never mind the damn rag,” said Howard hoarsely.

  The waiter stared and hurried away.

  Ellery felt a hand in his. The hand was small, soft, and hot. Then it was withdrawn, quickly.

  Howard said: “All four of them. All four, Sal. Ellery—”

  “You’re sure they’re all there. And the right ones.”

  “Yes.”

  And Sally nodded. Her eyes burned at Howard.

  “They’re the originals, not copies?”

  “Yes,” said Howard again.

  And Sally nodded again.

  “Pass them to me under the table.”

  “To you?”

  “Howard, you’d argue with God,” Sally laughed.

  “Watch it!”

  The waiter slapped down two beers and a whiskey, belligerently. Howard fumbled in his back pocket.

  “I’ve got it,” said Ellery. “Oh, keep it, waiter.”

  “Say! Thanks.” Mollified, the waiter went away.

  “Now, Howard.” And a moment later, Ellery said: “Now pass the ash tray over here.”

  He put his hand on the ash tray, looked around casually, and when he looked back the ash tray was on the booth seat between him and Sally.

  “Both of you drink, talk.”

  Sally sipped her beer, her elbows on the table, smiling, and she said to Howard, “Ellery, I’ll thank God every night on my knees for you and for this till the day I die. Every night and every morning, too. I’ll never forget this, Ellery. Never.”

  “Look down here,” he said.

  Sally looked. There was a pile of small scraps on the big glass ash tray.

  “Can you see it, Howard?”

  “I can see it!”

  Ellery lit a cigaret and then transferred the burning match to his left hand and dropped it into the ash tray.

  “Watch your coat, Sally.”

  He made the burnt offering four times.

  When they had gone, separately, Ellery brooded over his third beer. Sally had been first to leave, her shoulders back and her step as light as the flying birds over Quetonokis Lake. There’s a quality in pure relief, Ellery mused, which puts a velvet lining on the roughest reality.

  As for Howard, he had talked loudly and with exultation.

  The letters were retrieved, they were burned, the danger was over. This was what Sally’s step had said, and Howard’s tone.

  No point in disillusioning them.

  He went over the events of the afternoon.

  The blackmailer had risked leaving the originals of the letters to be picked up before collecting his blackmail. Would any self-respecting blackmailer have done this? Suppose the envelope in the bureau drawer at the Hollis had contained strips of blank paper? The originals would have been repossessed and he would have had exactly nothing for his pains. So of course he had had photostats of the four letters made beforehand. Then returning the originals cost him an insignificant asset. Photostats would serve almost precisely the same purpose, especially in this case. Howard’s handwriting was distinctive: a peculiar, very small, engraving-like script identifiable at a glance.

  No point in telling them now.

  Walk in the sun today, Sally. Tomorrow cloudy.

  And when the blackmailer calls again, Howard, then what? If you were forced to steal the first time, how will you satisfy a second demand?

  And there was something else.

  Ellery frowned into his beer.

  There was something else.

  What it was, exactly, he didn’t know. But whatever it was, it made him uneasy. That old prickly sensation again in the scalp. The tickle of doom.

  Something was wrong. Not the adultery, or the blackmail episode, or anything he had yet run into in the Van Horn household. Those things were “wrong,” but this wrong was a different wrongness, it covered everything. It was a great wrong, as distinguished from a number of lesser wrongs, component wrongs. That was it—component wrongs! When he tried to isolate the source of his unease, a vaguely satisfying solution arose from the sheer concept of an all-over wrong of which these individual wrongs were mere parts. As if they were portions of a pattern.

  Pattern?

  Ellery drained the beer.

  Whatever it was, it was developing. Whatever it was, it could only end badly. Whatever it was, he’d better stick around.

  He left The Hot Spot on the double and exceeded the speed limit returning to North Hill Drive. It was almost as if something was happening at the Van Horn house and by getting there quickly he might avert it.

  But he found nothing out of the ordinary, unless relief is out of the ordinary, and the sudden release of tensions.

  Sally at dinner was vivacious. Her eyes sparkled, her teeth flashed. She filled her lord’s hall with herself, and Ellery thought how right she looked at the end of the table, opposite Diedrich, and what a pity it would be if not Diedrich sat there, but Howard. Diedrich was in seventh heaven and even Wolfert made a remark about Sally’s spirits. Wolfert seemed to take it personally; his remark was edged with malice. But Sally simply laughed at him.

  Howard was feeling good, top. He talked volubly about the Museum project, to his father’s delight.

  “I’ve started sketching. It feels right. It feels great. I think it’s going to be something.”

  “Which reminds me, Howard,” said Ellery. “You know, I haven’t even seen your studio. Is it sacred ground, or…?”

  “Say! That’s right, isn’t it? You come on upstairs!”

  “Let’s all go,” said Sally. She glanced at her husband significantly and intimately.

  But Wolfert snapped: “You promised to work on the Hutchinson deal tonight, Diedrich. I told him I’d go over the papers with him tomorrow.”

  “But it’s Saturday night, Wolf. And tomorrow’s Sunday. Can’t that crowd wait until Monday morning.”

  “They want to get going Monday morning.”

  “Hell!” Diedrich scowled. “All right. Darling, I’m sorry. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be host as well as hostess tonight.”

  Ellery had expected something vast and grand, with gargantuan draperies in royal swoops and huge blocks of, stone sitting about in various stages of nascence, the whole resembling a sculptor’s studio on a Hollywood sound stage. He found nothing of the sort. The studio was large, but it was also simple; there were no great blocks of stone (“You don’t have the architectural mind, Ellery,” Howard laughed. “This floor would hardly support them!”) and the draperies were reasonable. The place was a clutter of small armatures, points, modeling stands, and tools—clamps, gouges, vises, scrapers, chisels, mallets and so on, which Howard explained had different uses, in wood and ivory carving as well as in stone. Many small models stood about, and rough sketches.

  “I use this place for the preliminary work,” Howard explained. “There’s a big barn of a building way out in back which I’ll show you tomorrow if you like, Ellery. I do the finished work there, I mean on the stone. It has a good solid floor and it’ll take a lot of weight. It also simplifies carting the blocks in and the finished out. Imagine trying to hoist a three-ton block of marble up here!”

  Howard had done a number of sketches for the Museum figures. “These are all very rough,” he said. “Just an all-over visualization. I haven’t got down to specifics yet. I’ll make more detailed sketches and then get to work with the plasticine. I’ll be holed up in the attic here for a long, long time before I’m ready to go ahead in the back studio.”

  “Dieds told me, Howard,” said Sally, “that you wanted some changes made in the studio down there.”

  “Yes. I think the floor will have to be strengthened and I want another window cut into the west wall. I’ll need all the light I can get. And a lot more distance. I’m considering having the west wall knocked out and the studio there enlarged by at least half.”

  “You mean to hold all your sculptures physically?” asked Ellery.

  “No, for perspective. The problem of decorative, monumental sculpture is a lot different from portrait sculpture or even the sort of thing Michelangelo did. You have to get up close to his work really to appreciate it—the textures, details of contour, and so on. At a distance that kind of work tends to blur, get shapeless. My problem is different. These figures must be planned to be seen from a distance, in the open air. The technique will have to be sharp and clear—clear silhouettes, profiles. That’s why Greek sculpture appears to such remarkable advantage in the open—why, as a matter of fact, I go for the neoclassic. I’m strictly an outdoor chiseler.”

  Howard was a different man here. His confusion and introspection were gone, his brow was untroubled, and he spoke with authority and even grace. Ellery began to feel a little ashamed of himself. He had thought of Diedrich’s “purchase” of a museum as a rather sickening phenomenon of wealth. Now he saw it as possibly giving a talented young artist an opportunity to create something altogether worth-while. It was a new element in his calculations; one he liked very much.