Diedrich said: “I’m not the man I was, Mr. Queen. You say things to me that sound threatening and bitter and it’s all so confusing. What are you talking about?”

  “If your memory is failing,” said Ellery, “let me try to restore it. You knew, Mr. Van Horn, that if you provided Howard with a surname but not with a given name, Howard would simply have to retain the Christian name you gave him when you adopted him—Howard Hendrik; and you knew, further, that he always signed his work H. H. Van Horn. Then if he were to adopt his supposedly genuine surname of Waye, he would accordingly sign himself H. H. Waye, with an e, Mr. Van Horn. And since Howard was engaged in a heroic sculpturing project, it was very likely that he’d scratch the ‘new’ name on his models.

  “But if Howard didn’t do that, you could have done it, Mr. Van Horn. Because you had a tremendous advantage in Howard’s amnesic lapses. You could have scratched the name H. H. Waye—with an e—into his models, and it would be assumed that Howard had done it during one of his blackouts—and who, including Howard, could deny it? You couldn’t lose, Mr. Van Horn, either way.

  “As it turned out, Howard did sign one of his models H. H. Waye, and a number of his working sketches.”

  “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Diedrich feebly from the wheel chair. His big hand, all loose flesh and ropy veins, was up to his eyes. “Why in Heaven’s name would I do a thing like that?”

  “You invoke the name of Heaven naturally, Mr. Van Horn,” said Ellery. “As you did then. Why did you do it? Because you wanted to impose on Howard an anagram for the name of the Lord.”

  Diedrich was silent.

  But then he said: “I find it hard to believe any of this is really happening. Do you really mean all this—this—I mean, imposing anagram’s of the Lord’s name on Howard, inventing stories of Howard’s birth in order to do it! Most fantastic thing I ever heard.”

  “Oh, it’s fantastic,” said Ellery, “but it really did happen. It’s the only explanation. There are no alternatives. You lied about Howard’s parents, you chiseled an extra e on the name in Fidelity Cemetery, and this enabled me to make an anagram out of God’s name which in turn enabled me to accuse Howard of having broken one of the Ten Commandments. Fantastic, as you say. Unbelievably farfetched. And yet it happened, Mr. Van Horn, and it happened because you’re a man of uncanny insight into human nature and of colossal imagination. You were dealing with a man to whom the fantastic and the farfetched are attractive, Mr. Van Horn. You knew my needs!”

  Ellery half rose in an unaccustomed excitement; but then he sank back. And when he resumed, it was in a quiet tone again.

  “You had to work toward fantastic ends, Mr. Van Horn, but the means were practical, ordinary, and logical. Your plan called for imposing on Howard an anagram for the Lord’s name. In selecting one, you had a choice. Probably you narrowed the choice down to two: Jehovah and Yahweh. But it wasn’t easy to work with the name Jehovah. Jehovah, minus the two H’s Howard would have to retain, left j, e, o, v, a, a discouraging combination of letters to anagrammatize into a credible surname. But Yahweh, minus the two H’s gave you the letters y, a, to, e, which could be transposed to form the perfectly acceptable surname of Waye. All that was required then was to find the graves of a couple—or of a woman alone, if you were pressed, but a husband and wife were better—in or around Wrightsville Township, or in Slocum, or Connhaven—anywhere in the County would do, or even in the State—people who had borne the name of Waye and had died after the known birth date of Howard, leaving no family.

  “You didn’t find Waye, but you did find Way. The word itself is of Anglo-Saxon origin; the ethnic background of New England is largely English; it would have been remarkable if you hadn’t found a Way, or a number of Ways among whom you could choose. As for Aaron and Mattie Way, it’s possible you invented their history, too. Or they may well have been poor farmers, as you said. It didn’t really matter; you could shape the facts to your purpose, or your means to the facts; you had a great deal of leeway.”

  The ache in his abdomen had disappeared; but he still felt cold. He did not look at Van Horn.

  The old man in the wheel chair said, “Mr. Queen, what are you attempting to prove with all this—this stuff?”

  “That Howard,” said Ellery, “did not break all of the Ten Commandments. At this point I was able to say: I now know that at least one of the Commandments whose violation I ascribed to Howard was not Howard’s work at all, but was the result of your work, Mr. Van Horn.

  “So I asked myself as I sat in Fidelity Cemetery in the twilight today, Mr. Van Horn: If Howard didn’t break one Commandment, is it possible he didn’t break some of the others?”

  5

  DIEDRICH WAS SEIZED BY a spasm of coughing that made the wheel chair dance. Bent over, his eyes frantic, he made a violent gesture toward the desk.

  There was a silver decanter on the desk and Ellery jumped up to pour a glass of water from it and hurry with it to the coughing man. He held the glass to Diedrich’s lips.

  Finally Diedrich said, “Thank you, Mr. Queen,” and Ellery returned the glass to the desk and sat down again.

  Diedrich’s big chin rested on his breast now; his eyes were closed and he seemed asleep.

  But Ellery said: “I asked myself another question. I asked myself which of the ten crimes I’d charged Howard with could I be sure he’d committed? Not crimes he was made to appear guilty of, Mr. Van Horn; not crimes he was forced to commit; not crimes imposed on him—but crimes of which he was personally, directly guilty, of his free will. And do you know?” Ellery smiled. “Of the ten crimes I heaped on Howard’s head that day a year ago, I could now—a little late, wouldn’t you agree?—I could now be sure that he’d been unequivocally responsible for only two.”

  The eyelids flickered.

  “I knew beyond possibility of error that Howard had wanted or had thought he wanted Sally; he’d told me that himself. And I knew beyond possibility of error that Howard has slept with Sally; they’d both told me that.”

  The hands twitched.

  “So I knew Howard had broken two Commandments: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife and Thou shalt not commit adultery.

  “But what of the other eight? I’d proved that you were responsible for the Commandment clue involving the name of God, Mr. Van Horn. Was it possible you were also responsible for the seven remaining unaccounted for?”

  Ellery got up suddenly. Diedrich’s eyes flew open.

  “I sat on a broken stone bench in Fidelity Cemetery in the darkness this evening, Mr. Van Horn, and I went through a kind of hell. I’m going to take you with me on that tour of hell, Mr. Van Horn! Do you mind?”

  Diedrich’s mouth opened. He tried again, and this time a croak came out. “I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m confused.”

  But Ellery said: “Last year I began by ‘proving’ that Howard broke the Commandments: Thou shalt have no other gods before me and Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. And what did my proof consist of, Mr. Van Horn? This: That Howard was in the process of sculpturing the ancient gods. And this was very good proof—as far as it went, Mr. Van Horn. But, Mr. Van Horn, it didn’t go far enough. Because who—when you really examine the facts—made Howard’s sculpture of the ancient gods possible?

  “You, Mr. Van Horn—you alone. It was you who came to the rescue of the Wrightsville Art Museum Committee when their fund-raising drive failed of its goal by a wide margin. It was you who promised to make up the enormous deficit providing Howard was commissioned to execute the sculptures for the exterior of the proposed Museum building. It was you who specified as a condition of your financial assistance that the statues Howard was to execute were to be of the classical gods.”

  6

  THE WHEEL CHAIR SLID back and now Diedrich was altogether in shadow. Ellery experienced a shock of recognition, as if this had happened before. But then he knew it was simply the resemblance between the great lump in the wheel chair and the lump of the old woman as he had first glimpsed her seated in the gardens that night so long ago.

  “Then I charged Howard with having broken the Commandment: Thou shalt not steal. Now there I felt I was on solid ground, Mr. Van Horn. Was there, could there be, any doubt that Howard had stolen the twenty-five thousand dollars which he’d handed me at Quetonokis Lake to pay over to Sally’s blackmailer? Not the least bit. The money came from your wall safe here; it was your money; I had your check fist of the serial numbers of the fifty stolen five-hundred-dollar bills to compare with the fifty five-hundred-dollar bills Howard had given me—and they checked to the last number. Why am I flogging the point? Howard himself admitted stealing the money from your safe.

  “And yet this evening, in the cemetery, Mr. Van Horn, I had to ask myself: But did Howard steal that money because he was naturally a thief, or naturally susceptible to temptation, or did he steal it because something had happened of such an unusual nature, exercising such an unusually strong compulsion, as to force Howard to steal it against a nature normally impervious to such temptation? And if events forced Howard to steal your twenty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Van Horn, who created those events?

  “And this brings me to the crux of the case.”

  Diedrich stirred in his cocoon of shadows, almost as if he were preparing to rise.

  “Now I knew that Howard had been framed for some of the crimes I’d held him responsible for.

  “So I considered the framer.

  “I considered the framer, Mr. Van Horn, as a disembodied entity, a factor in a mathematical problem—an unknown. Howard was framed; therefore a framer existed. Immediately I asked myself: What did this ponderable, if unknown, quantity represent? What were his values, this Mr. X?

  “Well, out of five Commandments broken, I knew that my X-entity was responsible for three. It began to look bad for Mr. X. It began to look very bad. Because I’d reached an answer last year, and the answer was that Howard had broken the Ten Commandments. Now I knew that had not been true in the important sense. My X had made possible the appearance, the illusion, of Howard’s violation of the Decalogue, or at least of three of the five parts of it which I’d examined. This, then, seemed to have been X’s ‘value,’ mathematically speaking: He had manipulated events to make it appear that Howard had set out to break all ten of the Commandments.

  “But if this were so, what did X—Howard’s framer—have to know? He had to know this basic fact: That Howard himself, unmanipulated, of his free will, had broken two of the Commandments; or rather that he had committed two crimes against the ethical code which we call the Ten Commandments. I say Framer X had to know this, Mr. Van Horn, because to say otherwise is to say that Framer X arrived at his extraordinary decalogic plan independently of Howard’s acts. This is unthinkable. No; it was Howard’s breaking of the Commandments against wife-coveting and adultery which gave Framer X the larger, broader, encompassing inspiration of causing Howard to break all the Commandments. Or all but one, Mr. Van Horn; but the whole illusion tended to that one and it’s the climax of my argument; I’ll leave it to its proper place.”

  Ellery poured a glass of water for himself. He put it to his lips. But after staring at the glass for an instant, he rubbed his gloved finger over the place which his lips had touched and he set the glass down, untasted.

  “How could Framer have known that Howard desired Sally and that he subsequently satisfied his desire? In only one way. Two people alone knew in the beginning: Howard and Sally. Neither told anyone but me. And I had told no one. That any of the three of us, but especially Howard and Sally, could have told a fourth was a possibility to be discarded as soon as it was broached. All the trouble they got into was a result of their refusal to tell. And I was bound to silence by their wishes.

  “How, then, did the Framer know? How could he have known? Did a fact exist which made his knowledge possible?

  “Yes! The written record of Howard’s feelings and Howard’s and Sally’s adulterous act; the four letters Howard stupidly wrote after the Lake Pharisee episode.

  “Conclusion? Framer read those letters.

  “But this is remarkable, Mr. Van Horn!” cried Ellery. “Because someone else read those letters…the mysterious person whose knowledge of the contents of those letters made it possible for him to blackmail Sally! Did I say someone else? Why should I say someone else? Why shouldn’t I say…Framer X read letters, Blackmailer read letters, Framer X is therefore Blackmailer?”

  Diedrich was staring at the glass Ellery had set down at the desk. It seemed to fascinate him.

  “But now, Mr. Van Horn,” said Ellery in a quivering voice, “we can get away from mathematical symbols and back to human quantities. Who was Framer X? I’ve proved that already: You, Mr. Van Horn. But Framer Equals Blackmailer. Therefore, Mr. Van Horn, you were the one who blackmailed Howard and Sally.”

  Now Diedrich raised his head and Ellery saw his face full. And what Ellery saw in Diedrich’s face made him go on more rapidly, as if to falter now was in some baffling way to lose a battle.

  “I think this was the low point of my thoughts this evening on that bench, Mr. Van Horn. Because it took me back to last year, to my ‘brilliant’ analysis, when I was delivering the death blows to Howard with the merciless perfection of my reasoning. And I saw, Mr. Van Horn,” said Ellery with a single glance so bitter cold that the great eyes across the room glittered, “that while my reasoning had been merciless, it had been anything but perfect. It had been not only loose, not only superficial, but it concealed a great hole—it had neglected even to bring up the question of the all-important blackmailer’s identity! Unconsciously, stupidly, I had absorbed the repeated suggestion that the blackmailer was John Doe, burgler. But there was no John Doe, Mr. Van Horn; there was no burgler. You were John Doe, Mr. Van Horn; you were the blackmailer.”

  He paused, but Diedrich said nothing; and he went on.

  “How did you become the blackmailer? Very simply, I think. In May of last year, or early in June, you discovered the false bottom to Sally’s japanned box. You found the four letters. It could have happened quite accidentally: You were putting in or taking out a piece of Sally’s jewelry, the box fell out of your hands, the false bottom popped open, you saw the letters, the fact that they were in a hiding place prompted you—out of curiosity or your total absorption in all matters concerning your wife—to read them. Or perhaps you caught a word, or a phrase, without even intending to read them—there were no envelopes; and if it were a certain word, or a certain phrase, then you would be sure to read them. Quite sure.”

  Diedrich still said nothing.

  “You didn’t disclose to your son and your wife that you had learned their secret. Oh, no. They misjudged you ludicrously there. How often they assured me you didn’t suspect a thing! How frantic they were, how childishly frantic, to keep you from suspecting what you’d known for months! And how consummately you acted the role of unsuspecting innocence.

  “But all the time you knew and all the time you were watching for your opportunity…Sally told me that if you found out you’d give her a divorce without a word, settle a fortune on her.

  “Poor Sally,” said Ellery with a smile.

  And he said: “To maintain yourself in the role of pure and unsuspecting cuckold, and to create the atmosphere essential to your greater plan, you took the jewel box and its contents and manufactured the evidence necessary to give the impression that a professional burgler had entered Sally’s bedroom and stolen the box for the jewels in it. You cleverly saw to it that the jewelry got to pawnshops in various cities—no doubt that period of your activities last year, if it were checked, would be found to involve several sudden and important ‘business trips.’ And, of course, you knew the jewelry would be recovered.

  “But the letters you kept, Mr. Van Horn. And when the time was right, you used them blackmail-wise; you became the blackmailer. I blush to recall that every time the ‘blackmailer’ telephoned, and that during the one time that he made a physical if invisible appearance—to take the money from the bureau drawer of that room at the Hollis—you were away from this house.”

  Ellery took out a cigaret. The action was automatic. But when he saw the cigaret between his fingers, he carefully put it back in his pocket.

  “At the time you laid your blackmail plans, back in last May or early June, when you found the four letters, I doubt if the decalogic idea was in your mind; in fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. Your purpose then was more likely to prepare the ground for a campaign of assault on Howard’s and Sally’s nerves. The inspiration was born later, out of independent developments—like the Museum project—and the information in the letters in your possession; and I don’t think it reached its full growth until the day Howard phoned you from my apartment in New York to say that I was coming up to Wrightsville as his house guest. But I’ll go into that later.”

  Ellery stirred restlessly.

  “Let’s move on to the events surrounding the blackmail operation itself. As the blackmailer, you demanded twenty-five thousand dollars in cash from Sally; your first demand. You knew Sally would tell Howard. You knew that neither Sally nor Howard, or the two of them together, had twenty-five thousand dollars. You knew them so well, their gratitude to you, their obsessive dread of hurting you, that you could be certain they would do anything to keep the “blackmailer’ from making good his ‘threat’ to turn the letters over to you! You knew that both were aware of the large amount of cash you usually kept in the study safe at home here. You knew that, pushed to the wall, Howard would think of that money and that he would take it from the safe; and you saw to it that in the safe there was exactly enough; or perhaps what was in the safe dictated the amount of blackmail you demanded.