For some time there was no sound but the sound of Diedrich, and then even that stopped.

  Prosecutor Chalanski looked at Dr. Cornbranch.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Doctor, what’s your opinion about…about all this?”

  The neurologist said: “I’d rather not commit myself on the medicolegal aspects of this case right now, Chalanski. It’s going to take some time, and a lot of er- consultation.”

  “Well!” The prosecutor put his elbows on his knees. “From a prosecution standpoint—aside from what his attorneys may try to get across—we have a case I’m ready to take into court as soon as the inquest is out of the way.”

  Chief Dakin stirred. “Connhaven Labs?”

  “Yes. I got a preliminary report from them by phone just before this started, Dakin. The four hairs found between his fingers have been scientifically identified as coming from Mrs. Van Horn’s head. The fragments of flesh and so on under his fingernails, it’s the Lab’s opinion, came from Mrs. Van Horn’s throat. Practically speaking, there’s no doubt about it; but I think we can establish it legally, too. And, frankly, I’m not too concerned right now with whether he killed her knowing it was she or mistaking her in the dark for Mr. Van Horn. We’ve got a motive either way. He wouldn’t be the first adulterer who killed his partner-in-sin. In fact,” and something like a smile came over the prosecutor’s face, “I’d find it a darned sight easier adducing that as a motive than all this fancy stuff about hating the father-image. Well, I guess that’s that—”

  Chalanski started to rise.

  Howard said: “Are you taking me away now?”

  If the plasticine image of Jupiter in Howard’s studio had suddenly broken into speech they could not have been more startled.

  He was looking, not at Chalanski, not at Ellery, but at Chief of Police Dakin.

  “Taking you away? Yes, Howard,” said Dakin uncomfortably, “I’m afraid that’s about the size of it.”

  “There’s something I want to do before they take me.”

  “You mean go to the toilet?”

  “The oldest dodge in the world,” smiled Chalanski. “Not that it would do you any good, Van Horn. Or Waye, is it? The house is pretty well covered, inside and out.”

  “Nutty, is he?” drawled Coroner Grupp.

  “I don’t want to run away,” said Howard. “Where would I run to?”

  Grupp and Chalanski laughed.

  “Why don’t you listen to him!”

  It was Diedrich, on his feet, his face convulsed.

  Howard said in the same, reasonable, patient way: “I just want to go upstairs to my studio, that’s all.”

  No one said anything for some time.

  “For what, Howard?” asked Chief Dakin finally.

  “I’ll never see it again.”

  “I don’t see any harm in it, Chalanski,” said Dakin. “He can’t get away and he knows it.”

  The prosecutor shrugged. “Custody of the prisoner is your responsibility, Dakin. Me, I wouldn’t let him.”

  “What’s your opinion, Dr. Cornbranch?” asked the chief of police, frowning.

  The neurologist shook his head. “Not without an armed guard.”

  Dakin hesitated.

  “Howard, just what is it you want to do in your studio?” asked Ellery.

  Howard did not answer.

  “Howard…” And that was Diedrich, too.

  Howard just stood there, looking at the floor.

  Dr. Cornbranch said, “Why don’t you answer the question, Howard? What is it you want to do?”

  And Howard said, “I want to smash my sculptures.”

  “Now that,” said the neurologist, “is a reasonable request. Under the circumstances.”

  He glanced at Dakin and nodded.

  Dakin looked grateful. He said to the tall young policeman who was standing behind Howard: “Go with him, Jeep.”

  Howard turned on his heel and walked steadily out.

  The policeman hitched his belt, his right hand feeling for the black butt of his gun. Then he followed Howard from the room, almost stepping on Howard’s heels.

  “Don’t take too long,” called Dakin.

  Diedrich sat down heavily. Howard had not glanced at him even in leaving.

  Or at me, thought Ellery; and he walked over to one of the big man’s big windows and looked out over the gardens where three troopers stood in the late afternoon sunshine smoking and laughing.

  No more than three minutes had passed by the time the first splintery crash brought all their heads around and up.

  It was followed by another, and another, and then by many others in a quickening rhythm of destruction. And the sounds of breakage stopped, and there was the pause of a long breath, and then one final furious iconoclasm.

  This time the silence remained.

  They were all turned toward the doorway now, through which the foot of the staircase was visible, waiting for the breaker of images to descend into their view followed by the policeman; but nothing happened, no destroyer appeared, no policeman. There was the same empty perspective of hall and staircase.

  Dakin went into the hall and put his hand on the bleached oak newel post. “Jeep!” he shouted. “Bring him down now!”

  Jeep was silent.

  “Jeep!”

  This was a roar, with panic in it.

  But Jeep did not reply.

  “My God,” said Dakin. His face, turned momentarily toward them, was clay-pale.

  And then he scrambled up the stairs, and they all scrambled after him.

  The policeman was sprawled before the closed door to Howard’s studio with a purple lump over his left ear, his long legs twitching as he tried to struggle to his feet.

  The gun was no longer in his holster.

  “Hit me in the belly just as we got to the door,” he gasped. “Grabbed my gun. Hit me with it. I went out.”

  Dakin rattled the door.

  “Locked.”

  Ellery yelled. “Howard!” but Chalanski shouldered him aside and shouted, “Van Horn, you open this door and be damned quick about it!”

  The door yielded nothing.

  “Got a key, Mr. Van Horn?” panted Dakin.

  Diedrich looked at him dumbly. He had not understood the words.

  “Have to break it down.”

  They were gathered a few feet from the door, prepared to lunge in a body, when the shot came.

  It was a single shot, followed by the sound of something metallic dropping to a floor.

  There was no heavier, duller sound, as of a man’s body.

  They burst through the door in the first rush.

  Howard was hanging from the center beam of his raftered studio. His arms dangled and blood still dripped from his wrists into two pools on the floor; he had slashed himself with a chisel. Then he had climbed onto a chair with a rope taken from a sculptor’s block-and-tackle and he had slung the rope over the beam and knotted both ends tightly about his neck and kicked the chair out from under him. Then he had put the muzzle of the policeman’s gun into his mouth at an acute angle and pulled the trigger. The .38 slug had torn through the roof of his mouth and emerged, taking a piece of the top of his head with it.

  Prosecutor Chalanski, making a face, dug the slug out of the rafter in which it had lodged and wrapped it in his handkerchief.

  Coroner Grupp said, “He sure wanted to die in the worst way.”

  Plasticine, clay, stone fragments littered the studio floor, and Wolfert Van Horn yelped when he stepped on a large chunk of

  Jupiter and turned his ankle.

  The newspapers did nip-ups.

  As Inspector Queen said: “Murder, sex and God—circulation managers dream about a case like this.”

  Somehow a full report of Ellery’s sermon on the Ten Commandments got to the ears of the first wire service to hook onto the case. Thenceforward it was rugged. Ellery Queens Greatest Case, Noted Tec’s Ten-Strike, Mosaic Murderer Meets Master, Sleuth Traps Bad Man with Good Book, E. Q. Tops Own Triumphs—these were merely a few of the original headlines and subheadlines which made the master squirm. Blizzards of clips from newspapers all over the United States and Canada whitened the floor of the Queen apartment as Inspector Queen invested his hard-earned money for the greater glory of his son’s scrapbook, which was no idea of his son’s but strictly of his son’s father’s. For three weeks wise men and fools beat a widening path to the Queen door, and the telephone rang uninterruptedly. There were reporters for interviews; ghost writers with already typed sagas of the Van Horn case requiring only the master’s nod and a modest cut to the apparition; magazine editors at the end of the wire and photographers on the unsafe side of the door; at least two representatives of advertising agencies who thought Noted Sleuth’s Endorsement of, in one case, a cream shampoo, in the other, a new perfume to be known as “Murder,” would make a dynamic tie-in with the cause célèbre; and radio, not to be worsted, came up with an offer to Mr. Queen to appear on Sunday afternoon with a panel of prominent clergymen, representing the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish faiths, on a program to be entitled “The Holy Bible Versus Howard Van Horn.” These in addition to an army of assorted ax grinders who wanted to whittle Noted Sleuth into even more heroic shape, and at uniformly fabulous rates. Ellery threatened wrathfully to perform a little whittling job of his own on the unknown blabbermouth who had given the Ten Commandments story to the press—he swore for months afterward that it had been Dr. Cornbranch, motivated by some abstruse, higher psychology—but Inspector Queen soothed him; and, to withhold nothing, it must be recorded that, after the ninth day of the wonder, when he could do so without fear of being caught at it, Mr. Queen sneaked a few looks into the Inspector’s scrapbook, which was now in the final stage of obesity. Whereupon he experienced, willy-nilly, that fine full glow which suffuses the hearts of the most modest at times; and he even read one piece through to the sweet end, the magazine article which called him “the Wonder Boy of West Eighty-seventh Street in his most spectacular performance.”

  But in all the journalistic literature of that fevered interlude in Ellery’s career, none surpassed the neophrastic genius who, in a Sunday feature article for one of the most elevated journals entitled “The Case of the Schizophrenic Bibliomaniac,” coined a phrase which was to become part of the dictionary of criminology.

  This Einstein of etymology referred to Mr. Queen as “he who must henceforward and for all time be known as The Deca-Logical Detective.”

  So endeth the book of the dead. And beginneth the book of the living.

  PART TWO

  TENTH DAY’S WONDER

  That would be ten days’ wonder at the least.

  That’s a day longer than a wonder lasts.

  —SHAKESPEARE, King Henry VI

  The Tenth Day

  HIS PREY WAS MAN, and he prowled the bottom lands of iniquity with an enchanted weapon, swelling in fame with each bloody chase. Never had evildoers seemed fiercer, or more cunning, or more willing for the bag. For he was Ellery, son of Richard, mighty hunter before the Law; and none might prevail against him.

  The yeah that followed the Van Horn tour de force was easily the busiest and most brilliantly successful of Ellery’s career. Cases besieged him, winging in from all directions; some crossed oceans. He made two trips to Europe that year, and one to South America, and one to Shanghai. Los Angeles knew him, and Chicago, and Mexico City. Inspector Queen complained that he might just as well have brought Ellery up to be an advance man for the circus, he saw his son so seldom. And Sergeant Velie actually went ten feet past Ellery on the sidewalk skirting Police Headquarters before a vestigial memory made him turn around.

  Nor was there dearth of crime business on the master’s native heath. The moors of New York City resounded with his exploits. There was the case of the spastic bryologist, in which Ellery made the definitive deduction—from a dried mass of sphagnum no larger than his thumbnail—and reached into the surgery of one of New York’s most respectable hospitals to save a life and blast a reputation; there was the case of Adelina Monquieux, his remarkable solution of which cannot be revealed before 1972 by agreement with that curious lady’s executors; and these are cited merely in example—the full list is on the Queen agenda and will in time, no doubt, find publication in one form or another.

  It was Ellery himself who called the halt. Never heavily fleshed, he had lost so much weight since September of the preceding year that even he became alarmed.

  “It’s this blasted running around,” said Inspector Queen over an early breakfast one morning in August. “Ellery, you’ve got to put the brakes on.”

  “I’ve already done so. Saw Barney Kull yesterday and he said if I wanted to die gloriously of coronary thrombosis I was to keep up my pace of the last eleven months.”

  “I hope that put some sense into your head! What are you going to do, son?”

  “Well…I’ve gathered enough material this year for twenty books and I haven’t had time to write, or even plan, one. I’m going to get back to authorship.”

  “And the Crippler case?”

  “I’ve turned it over to Tony, with my condolences.”

  “Thank God,” said the Inspector piously, for there wasn’t room enough on the shelves over his bed for even one more scrapbook. “But why the rush? Why not take a rest first? Go away somewhere.”

  “I’m sick of going away somewhere.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I can expect you to flop sensibly on your back, where you belong,” grumbled the old gentleman, reaching for the coffee pot. “Now, I take it, you’ll shut yourself up in that opium den you call a study and I won’t see you at all. Say! You’ve put on that crummy old smoking jacket!”

  Ellery grinned. “I told you. I’m starting a book.”

  “When?”

  “Right away. Today. This morning.”

  “Where you get the energy…Why don’t you blow yourself to a new jacket? If you have to wear one of those sissy jobs.”

  “Give up this jacket? It’s my writing habit.”

  “When you start punning,” snarled his father, hastily pushing away from the table, “it’s every man for himself. See you tonight, son.”

  So once again Mr. Queen enters his study, shuts the door, and prepares to give his auctorial all.

  Mark that the process involved in preparing to conceive a book is technically different from that involved in preparing to bear it. In the latter stage there are typewriters to examine and clean, ribbons to change, pencils to sharpen, clean paper to be arranged at the precise distance from the arm at which the least exertion is called forth, notes or outlines to be propped at the exactly acute angle to the machine, and so forth. The situation at the outset of the conceptual stage is quite deplorably different. Even assuming that the author’s head is fully charged with ideas and giving off impatient sparks, he has utterly no need for paraphernalia or their care or placement. He has only a rug and his miserable self.

  So observe Mr. Queen in his study on this fine early morning in August of the year following the Van Horn case.

  He is fired with energetic intentions. He paces his rug like a general, marshaling his mental forces. His brow is clear. His eyes are intent but calm. His legs are unhurried and untroubled. His hands are quiet.

  Now observe him twenty minutes later.

  His legs pump. His eyes are wild. His brows work fiercely. His hands are helpless fists. He leans against a wall, seeking the cool plaster. He darts to a chair, perches on its edge with hands clasped, as if imploringly, between his knees. He jumps up, fills his pipe, sets it down, lights a cigaret, puffs twice, it goes out, it remains between his lips. He nibbles his fingernails. He rubs his head. He explores a dental cavity. He pinches his nose. He plunges his hands into his jacket pockets. He kicks a chair. He glances at the headline of the morning newspaper on his desk but glances away heroically. He goes to the window and soon becomes interested in the scientific aspects of a fly crawling up the screen. He fingers the tobacco grains in his right pocket, rolls a grain in a wad of lint, places the wad in a piece of paper which happens to be in the same pocket. He folds the paper around it, takes the paper out, glances at it.

  It says:

  Van Horn

  North Hill Drive

  Wrightsville

  1

  ELLERY SAT DOWN IN HIS desk chair. He placed the scrap of paper on the blotter, leaned forward, put his arms flat on the desk; rested his chin on his hands, and stared at the paper two inches from his nose.

  Van Horn. North Hill Drive. Wrightsville.

  All that’s left of the Van Horn case.

  He remembered now that scene of almost a year before.

  He had been dressed in this same smoking jacket (by gosh, last time I had it on).

  He had given Howard some money to get home on and walked him downstairs and Howard hailed a taxi and they were shaking hands on the sidewalk when it had struck Ellery that he didn’t know where Howard lived. They had laughed over it, and Howard had taken a black notebook out of the suit of Ellery’s he was wearing, and he had ripped out a page and scribbled his address.

  This page.

  And Ellery had gone back upstairs and thought about Wrightsville, and finally he had thrust the scrap of paper into a pocket of the smoking jacket and there it had remained, for he had hung the jacket in his closet the following day, where it had been hanging, uncalled to duty, ever since.

  All that’s left.

  Studying the tiny, etching script, Howard came back to him, and Sally, and Diedrich and Wolfert and the old woman; he thought of them all.

  A fly dropped onto the “Van” and stood there, insolently. Ellery pursed his lips and blew. The fly soared away and the paper turned over.

  There was writing on the other side!

  The same small, engraving-like handwriting. But this side was covered with it.

  Ellery sat up and reached for the paper curiously.

  Howard’s handwriting. Black notebook. But these weren’t addresses or telephone numbers. A solid page of minute script. Sentence after sentence.