And through it all Diedrich wrestled with the arms of his chair and Howard sat sculpturally.

  “That’s the story to date,” continued Ellery. “It may strike you as a series of random incidents, and you may be wondering why I take your time up with a recital of them. The reason is that they’re not random at all, but connected—connected so rigidly that no one incident is less important to the whole than another, even though some seem actually trivial.

  “Last night,” said Ellery, “I was on my way back to New York. I was disgusted with Howard, disappointed in Sally—fed up. A long way from Wrightsville a thought struck me. It was a simple thought, so simple it changed everything. And I saw this case for what it really was. For the first time.”

  He paused to clear his throat and Prosecutor Chalanski said, “Queen, do you know what you’re talking about? Because, frankly, I don’t.”

  But Chief Dakin said, “Mr. Chalanski, I’ve heard this man talk before. Give him a chance.”

  “It’s irregular, anyway. There’s no legal ground for this ‘hearing’—if that’s what it is; I don’t know what it is—and in any event Van Horn ought to be represented by counsel.”

  “This is all more a part of the coroner’s inquest,” said Coroner Grupp. “Maybe it’s a trick to lay the ground for some future claim of illegal process or something, Chalanski.”

  “Let him talk,” said Dakin. “He’ll say something.”

  “What?” jeered the Prosecutor.

  “I don’t know. But he always does.”

  Ellery said, “Thanks, Dakin,” and he waited; and when Chalanski and Grupp shrugged, he went on.

  “I drew up to the side of the road and went over the case piece by piece. I re-examined everything, but this time I had a frame of reference.”

  “What frame of reference?” demanded Chalanski.

  “The Bible.”

  “The what?”

  “The Bible, Mr. Chalanski.”

  “I’m beginning to think,” said the prosecutor, looking around with a grin, “that you’ve got a lot more need for Dr. Cornbranch’s services, Queen, than this fellow here.”

  “Let him go on, Chalanski, will you?” said the neurologist; but even then he did not take his eyes from Howard.

  “It became clear very quickly,” said Ellery, “that Howard had been responsible for six acts, and that these six acts encompassed nine different crimes.”

  At this Chalanski lost his grin and the coroner unfolded his long insolent legs.

  “Nine different crimes?” repeated Chalanski. “You know what they are, Grupp?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Let him talk,” said Dakin.

  “What nine crimes, Queen?”

  But Ellery said: “The nine crimes were different crimes, and yet in a larger sense they were the same crime. I mean by that that they had continuity, congruity, a pattern—they had an integral relationship; they were parts of a whole.

  “Once I understood the nature of that relationship,” Ellery continued, “once you understand it, gentlemen, you’ll see, as I did, that it was possible to predict one crime still to come. It had to be. It was an inescapable conclusion. Nine crimes, and they made the tenth inevitable. Not only that. Once you understand the nature of the pattern, you could predict—as I did to Diedrich Van Horn—precisely what the tenth crime would be, against whom it would be aimed, and by whom it would be committed. I’ve never run into anything so perfect in all my experience, which has been considerable. Without meaning to be presumptuous, I doubt if any of you ever have, either. I’m tempted to say, I doubt if anyone, anywhere, ever will again.”

  And now there was nothing to be heard but the breathing of many men and, outside, a state trooper’s voice raised in anger.

  “The only unpredictable factor was time. I couldn’t tell when the tenth crime would take place.” Ellery said briskly: “Since it could conceivably have occurred even as I sat in the car almost fifty miles from Wrightsville thinking the thing through, I drove for the nearest phone, ordered Mr. Van Horn to take immediate precautions, and returned here as fast as I could.

  “I couldn’t have known that Mrs. Van Horn would choose tonight to drop off to sleep in her husband’s bed, in her husband’s bedroom. Howard’s hands felt for his father’s throat in the dark and choked the life out of the woman he loved instead. If he hadn’t been in the amnesic state his sense of touch would probably have told him of his mistake and he might have stopped in time; as it was, he was simply a killing machine, and the machinery, once set in motion, did its job as machines do.”

  And Ellery said: “That’s the story in general.

  “Now let’s consider Howard’s six acts, the six acts embracing the nine crimes I mentioned, revealing the plan behind them and making the tenth crime predictable.

  “One.” Ellery paused. And then he took the plunge. “Howard was engaged in sculpturing figures of the ancient gods.”

  And he paused. It was too much to ask of any practical mind that it accept such an extraordinary statement out of context as the utterance of sanity. He could only wait.

  “Ancient gods,” said the Prosecutor, looking dazed. “What kind of—”

  “What d’ye mean, Mr. Queen?” asked Chief Dakin, looking anxious. “Is that a crime?”

  “Yes, Dakin,” said Ellery, “and not one crime. It’s really two crimes.”

  Chalanski sank back, openmouthed.

  “Two. Howard had actually reached the point of signing his sculptures—or his sketches and preliminary models—with the curiously significant signature H. H. Waye.”

  Chalanski shook his head.

  “H. H. Waye.” It was the coroner who said that, not even resentfully; he merely said it, as if he wanted to hear how it might sound in a familiar voice.

  “Is that a crime, too?” demanded the prosecutor with an exasperated grin.

  “Yes, Mr. Chalanski,” said Ellery, “and a particularly blasphemous one.

  “Third. Howard stole twenty-five thousand dollars from Diedrich.”

  They all relaxed at that, gratefully, as if in the midst of a lecture in Urdu the lecturer had inserted a sentence in English.

  “Well, I’ll agree that’s a crime!” Chalanski laughed, looking around. But no one responded.

  “You’ll agree, Mr. Chalanski, when you grasp the overlying design, that all of Howard’s acts were crimes, although not all were necessarily penological crimes.

  “Four. Howard abused the graves of Aaron and Mattie Waye.”

  “We’re getting on solider ground,” said Coroner Grupp. “Now that’s a crime, Chalanski—vandalism, or something, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly. There’s a statute that—”

  “The two crimes Howard committed in desecrating his parents’ graves, Mr. Chalanski,” said Ellery, “will not be found in your statutes. May I go on?

  “Five. Howard fell in love with Sally Van Horn. And that constitutes two crimes, also.

  “And finally, six. Howard’s outrageous lie when he denied that he’d given me Sally’s diamond necklace to pawn.

  “Six acts, nine crimes,” said Ellery. “Nine of the ten worst crimes a man can commit, according to an authority a great deal older than your statutes, Mr. Chalanski.”

  “What authority would that be?”

  “An authority who’s usually spelled with a capital G.”

  Chalanski jumped up. “I’ve had just about—”

  “God.”

  “What?”

  “Well, God as we know Him from the Old Testament, Mr. Chalanski—Who, after all, in that form, is still professed by Greek and Roman Catholics and most Protestants, as well as by the ancient Jews who first memorialized Him in the Book. Yes, Mr. Chalanski, God—or Yahweh, which is a transliteration of the Hebrew tetragrammaton translated as Jehovah in the Christian exegesis; the ‘ineffable’ or ‘incommunicable name’ of the Supreme Being, Mr. Chalanski…the Lord, Mr. Chalanski, Who in whichever nominal form called Moses into the midst of the cloud on the mount of Sinai and kept him there for forty days and forty nights, and he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.

  “IN THOSE SIX ACTS,” said Ellery, “HOWARD BROKE NINE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.”

  And now it was the neurologist who stirred; he stirred uneasily, as if he were himself having a significant dream. But all the others sat still, including Howard, who seemed outside the world of real things and in a world uniquely his own. And into this terrifying land no one intruded, not even Ellery.

  “By sculpturing the gods of the Roman pantheon,” said Ellery, “Howard broke two Commandments: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image and Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

  And Ellery said: “By signing his sculpture H. H. Waye, Howard broke the Commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; and this is an especially fascinating example of how Howard’s mind worked in his criminal illness. Here he dabbles in the cabala and emulates the occult theosophists of medieval times who believed, among other things, that each letter, word, number, and accent of Scripture contains a hidden sense. The greatest mystery of the Old Testament is the name of the Lord, which He Himself revealed to Moses; and that name is hidden in the tetragrammaton I mentioned, the four consonants which were variously written—actually in five ways, from IHVH to YHWH, and from which the supposed original form of God’s name has been variously reconstructed; and of these reconstructions the most commonly accepted in the modern world is Yahweh. And if you’ll take the letters which form the name H. H. Waye, you’ll find that they constitute an anagram for Yahweh.”

  Chalanski opened his mouth.

  But Ellery said, “Yes. Quite mad, Mr. Chalanski.”

  And Ellery said: “By appropriating twenty-five thousand dollars from Diedrich Van Horn’s safe, Howard broke the Commandment: Thou shalt not steal.”

  And Ellery said: “By desecrating the graves of Aaron and Mattie Waye in Fidelity Cemetery during the early hours of Sunday morning last, Howard broke two other Commandments: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy and Honor thy father and thy mother.” He smiled faintly. “I should have asked Father Chichering of St. Paul’s-in-the-Dingle to sit in on this, because on one of these points I feel the need for expert advice. I mean about the Sabbath. The ‘sabbath day’ referred to in the Fourth Commandment—it’s the Third to Roman Catholics and Lutherans, I believe, but the Fourth to Jews, Greek Catholics, and most Protestants—is the Sabbath of Israel, which is of course Saturday and which I think the earliest Christians kept observing sabbatically as distinguished from the weekly celebration of the Resurrection, ‘the Lord’s day,’ which was Sunday; I seem to recall now that this double observance was practiced for several centuries after the Resurrection, even though Paul from the start laid down the dictum that the Jewish Sabbath was not binding on Christians. Well, it doesn’t matter. To Howard, a Christian, sabbath means Sunday; and it was in the early hours of Sunday morning that he dishonored his father and mother.”

  And Ellery said: “By falling in love with Sally and taking her to bed in the Van Horn lodge at Lake Pharisee, Howard broke the two Commandments: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

  And, quickly, Ellery passed on to the ninth of his citations, and he said: “By lying when he denied having given me Sally’s necklace to pawn, Howard broke the Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

  And now they were under the spell of the gigantic oddity, and they would not have broken it if they could.

  And Ellery resumed: “As I sat there on the road last night, in Howard’s car, piecing these nine fragments together, I asked myself the natural question: Could all this have been coincidence? Could it have been chance that led Howard to commit just such specific acts as to cause him to break nine of the Ten Commandments? And I had to answer myself: No, that isn’t possible; the odds that such a congruency of crimes against the Decalogue might occur by accident are too unreasonably great; those nine Commandments were therefore broken by design, they were broken premeditatedly and systematically, following the Decalogue as a guide.

  “But if Howard broke nine of the Ten Commandments,” Ellery cried, “he would not, he could not, stop. Ten is the whole, and nine is not ten. The Commandment that was missing, that was still to be broken, was the Commandment above all the others which modern man has held to be the most socially desirable, if not the most morally: Thou shalt not kill. Ten is the whole, and nine is not ten, and when the tenth is the moral precept forbidding murder, I knew Howard was holding back murder as the climax of his stupendous rebellion against the world.

  “Whom was Howard planning to murder? The answer came out the same whether I considered the outward manifestations of Howard’s behavior or its underlying psychological implications. What was it Howard wanted?—or thought he wanted, because it’s my admittedly layman’s theory, Dr. Cornbranch, that Howard was never really in love with Sally at all, but only thought he was. He wanted, or thought he wanted, Diedrich’s wife. Who stood in the way of this? Only Diedrich. By removing Diedrich, then, it would seem to Howard that he achieved Diedrich’s wife. The fact that in trying to kill Diedrich he accidentally killed Sally is, logically speaking, of no importance—a tragic irrelevance.

  “But you arrive at Diedrich as the intended victim by a psychological route, too. There has never been the least question in my mind—in fact, from the time ten years ago when I got to know Howard in Paris—that the chief propulsive force of Howard’s emotional mechanism from early childhood has been Oedipean. His worship of Diedrich Van Horn was naked and unmistakable. The sculptures in Howard’s Parisian studio were of Zeus, Adam, Moses—Moses even then—but they were all, in essence, Diedrich; and when, ten years later, I met Diedrich in the flesh, I saw that they had all been Diedrich in feature and physique as well.

  “Howard’s entire history made his adoration of the father-image almost inevitable: the unknown mother who had rejected him in infancy; the big, powerful, admirable male of males who had taken him in and become his father-protector and served as both father and mother to him. And, as in Oedipus, the seeds of father-murder were there, too. Because love became hatred when the father-image rejected the son and transferred his love, as it seemed to Howard, to a woman, and that woman a stranger. At that moment the seed sprouted: coincidental with the event of Diedrich’s marriage to Sally came the first amnesic episode. And then Howard ‘fell in love’ with the woman who had stolen his father! I stand ready to be corrected, Dr. Cornbranch, but I submit that this was no love at all—it was a double-barreled attempt unconsciously both to punish the father who had rejected him and to regain the father’s love by destroying the father’s relationship with the woman who was responsible for the rejection.

  “Now observe this remarkable fact: In plotting the murder of the perfidious father-image, the son employs a technique whereby in the process he murders another father-image!” Dr. Cornbranch looked puzzled. Ellery leaned forward, addressing the neurologist directly. “In this family, where Christina Van Horn, the foster grandmother, in Howard’s childhood and thereafter was obsessed with the Word of God—deriving from her marriage to a fundamentalist fanatic who had preached the living Jehovah—how could Howard have escaped being steeped in the concept of the paternalism of God? Whereupon we see how perfect this perfection is: For in deliberately violating the Ten Commandments of God the Father, Howard breaks the greatest Father-Image of all.”

  Ellery glanced at the unjointed lump that had been Howard with the pity and loathing of all normal men in the presence of the mad, and he said with great gentleness: “And now you know, gentlemen, why I’ve taken your time with this: The whole concept of Howard’s plot is the concept of an unbalanced mind.

  “I don’t know what name you medical men will give to Howard’s madness, Dr. Cornbranch, but it must be apparent even to laymen that to take the Decalogue as the pattern for a series of crimes culminating in the crime of murder, and to follow that pattern with the cunning and the pertinacity which this man, both consciously and unconsciously, has followed in this case, calls for a diagnosis in the consulting room by qualified psychiatrists, not for a trial in a court of law according to the rules of punishment laid down for sane lawbreakers.

  “This man has no business being handled or treated as an ordinary murderer. He is, if you please, criminally insane; and I’ll tell my story and give my Biblical analysis anywhere you designate, at any time, if by doing so I can help place him where I believe he belongs, which is in a mental institution.”

  And Ellery looked at Diedrich Van Horn, and then away, because Diedrich was crying.