But Ellery was shaking his head. “No go, Mr. Van Horn. Like so many elements in this case, the two you bring up now are true, but only partially. You’ve employed the half truth, and the appearance of truth, to tremendous advantage throughout.

  “Howard didn’t deny guilt, true; but not because he was guilty in fact. He didn’t deny being guilty because he thought he was guilty!

  “Howard didn’t know you’d drugged him, Mr. Van. Horn; he thought, as I thought, that he’d gone through another amnesic episode. What happened during his blackouts always worried Howard. When he came to me in New York, that was uppermost in his mind. And when he asked me to come to Wrightsville, it was for precisely that reason: to keep watching him, to follow him when he went into another blackout, to find out what he did during episodes—whether he was, as he put it, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—because a feature of his blackouts was that he remembered nothing afterward.

  “You knew all about Howard’s amnesia, Mr. Van Horn; it was the keystone of your arch. Howard’s mind was obsessed with the fear that during his blackouts he committed criminal acts. You knew that, and you knew that when he recovered from what would seem to him—and to me and to everyone else but you—another blackout and discovered that during his blackout Sally had been strangled and some of her hairs and flesh had been found on his hands…you knew Howard would believe himself guilty. The entire psychological history of his amnesia had prepared Howard for the unquestioning acceptance of any evidence of his criminality.

  “As for his subsequent act of self-destruction, Howard was always a potential suicide, Mr. Van Horn. The suicide climax is implicit in psychological patterns like Howard’s. He told me, for example, that when he snapped out of the blackout he suffered in New York—the one that sent him to me—he seriously contemplated throwing himself out of the flophouse window. As a matter of fact, in my first talk with Howard, I suspected suicide as an unconscious pattern, and I asked him point-blank if he’d ever come to—come out of a blackout—in the act of trying to kill himself, and he admitted to three distinct experiences of that sort.

  “No, there was nothing remarkable about Howard’s act of self-destruction after I demonstrated his ‘guilt,’ Mr. Van Horn. He was convinced he’d murdered Sally, he knew he was through, and he chose the way out which anyone who knew his make-up well—as well, say, as you knew it, Mr. Van Horn—might quite conceivably have predicted.

  “While I’m on the subject,” Ellery added suddenly, “it occurs to me that virtually every clue pointing to you as the god of the machine was known to me last year, when I obligingly sent Howard to his death for you. There was even a clue in my possession to your knowledge of psychology—a knowledge without which, as I’ve already said, you couldn’t have begun to plan your crimes. You handed me that clue very coolly the first night I met you, during our dinner-table conversation. You introduced the subject of books and their relation to practical living. And you included, among the few books you said had had practical value to you, ‘certain studies of the human mind.’ Which ones, Mr. Van Horn? I’m afraid I didn’t look your library over carefully enough.”

  Diedrich was still smiling a little, but Ellery noticed now that there was a resemblance between his smile and Wolfert’s, a resemblance which had not been apparent when Diedrich’s face had been fuller.

  “I think you know, Mr. Queen, what an admirer of yours I’ve always been—your work in fiction and in real life,” Diedrich said. “I should have told you last year, while you were visiting here, that in spite of my admiration I’ve always considered your method—that justly celebrated ‘Queen method’—extremely weak in one respect.”

  “In more than one, I’m afraid,” said Ellery. “But which one do you have in mind?”

  “Legal proof,” said Diedrich pleasantly. “The kind of proof policemen with no imagination and district attorneys with factual training and judges with rules to judge by demand when a man is accused of a crime. The law, unfortunately, isn’t impressed with mere logic, no matter how brilliant. It asks for admissible evidence before it’s willing to put a defendant in jeopardy.”

  “Nice point,” nodded Ellery. “I’m disinclined to defend myself beyond saying that I’ve always left the gathering of evidence to those whose business evidence-gathering is. My function has been to detect criminals, not to punish them. I admit that occasionally someone I’ve put the logical finger on has given the evidence-gatherers a run for their money.

  “However,” and Ellery’s tone grew grim, “I don’t think they’re going to find this particular job too much for them.”

  “No?” said Diedrich, and now his smile was remarkably like Wolfert’s.

  “No. Your feat has been tremendous in sweep, but here and there you’ve left a hole. The whole concept of yourself as the blackmailer, while daring and imaginative, was also exactly the sort of thing by which men hang. Last year the various pawnbrokers in whose shops you pawned Sally’s jewelry could only attempt to describe a free-floating image; they had no frame of reference. Now it will be possible to show these people a photograph of you, or better still to face you with them. While time is on your side, I think it not unlikely that one or two of the pawnbrokers will identify you as the man who pawned that jewelry.

  “Then there was the business of the room at the Hollis and the room at Upham House which the blackmailer engaged for the purpose of collecting the first twenty-five thousand dollars. I didn’t follow that up at the time because I was pledged not to endanger the negotiations—something, of course, you counted on. But now a thorough checkback will be made. You must have signed two registers. Experts will identify your handwriting. The clerks may even be able to identify you as the man who engaged those rooms.

  “The photostats may have been a bluff, but there’s a good chance you had at least one set made in case you had to prove you still had a real threat of producible letters. If that’s true, the photostats will be traced back to you. Could you have used the facilities of the Wrightsville Record you own, I wonder?

  “The money itself: Fifty of your five-hundred dollar bills were taken by Howard from your safe here, turned over to me, and I turned them over to the ‘blackmailer’—which is to say, back to you.” Ellery leaned forward and said softly: “Did you destroy that twenty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Van Horn? I doubt it. The great weakness of your plan was that you were positive you would never be suspected. To have burned fifty five-hundred-dollar bills—your own money—would hardly have occurred to you, a man who came up the hard way, from poverty, a man of big business. But I doubt that you’ve yet dared to use them. So you probably have those bills hidden somewhere, Mr. Van Horn; and, I assure you, you’ll get no opportunity to destroy them now. By the way—I still have your memorandum of the serial numbers of those bills. I saved it…as a memento of my most spectacular ‘success.’ ”

  Diedrich was pursing his lips now, frowning.

  “I can’t say what you did with the second twenty-five thousand dollars, J. P. Simpson’s money, which I left for you on the lockers in the Wrightsville station; but maybe the bank still has its record of those bills, and if you’ve put them where you keep the other bills, that’s another nail in your coffin.”

  “I’m trying to follow you, Mr. Queen,” said Diedrich, “with respect, believe me! But am I wrong in pointing out that, even if all this is true, all it would do would be to connect me with the blackmailer?”

  “All, Mr. Van Horn?” Ellery laughed. “Proving you were the blackmailer would be the prosecution’s important job. Because it would establish that you knew all about the adulterous relations between your wife and Howard. It breaks down the one defense you had, psychologically, throughout the whole affair: the presumption that you were ignorant of what was going on. It gives you motive, Mr. Van Horn; it sets the whole case up against you.

  “I should imagine the prosecution’s case against you,” continued Ellery, “difficult as it would be, would set out to prove two things: That you knew your wife was unfaithful with your son, and that you planned to punish both of them—your wife by outright murder, your son by framing him for her death.

  “Proof of your knowledge will be established by proving that you were the blackmailer; proof that you planned to punish them both will be established by showing that you were behind all the events which apparently proved that Howard had deliberately broken all Ten Commandments—that is, that you framed Howard. In this connection, I’m afraid my testimony will be crushing. Your lie about having put the Connhaven Detective Agency to work tracing Howard’s parents—I’ll nail that one, and so will Burmer (who, incidentally, has an excellent reputation in this State). The nonexistence of ‘Dr. Southbridge’—I’ll nail that lie, too, squarely to you as the liar. And there’s always Wolfert to corroborate my testimony—and that’s something I’ll watch with a great interest, Mr. Van Horn; I mean the spectacle of Wolfert succumbing to his lifelong hatred of you.

  “There are numerous other angles for the police to work on, Mr. Van Horn. Such as the drug you must have used to put Howard to sleep on at least two occasions. It may even be necessary to exhume Howard’s body to test for the existence of the drug in his remains; if that can be done, it might not be too difficult to connect you with the purchase of such a drug. And so on.”

  But Diedrich was smiling faintly again. “A great many conditional clauses, Mr. Queen. But even granting everything you say, I haven’t heard a syllable connecting me with the act itself…the murder.”

  “No,” said Ellery, “no, that’s true. That may well be impossible. But Mr. Van Horn, very few murderers are convicted on direct evidence. A case will be scraped together, a circumstantial case, admittedly, and you’ll be tried for murder…Yes,” said Ellery, after a moment, “I think that’s the important thing, Mr. Van Horn. You’ll be indicted, you’ll stand trial, the whole story will come out, and the great Diedrich Van Horn, who until now has been the object of public sympathy, the betrayed husband and father, will stand revealed for what he is—the supreme egocentric who committed murder for revenge. Not murder on impulse, in the emotional explosion of betrayal discovered, but coldly deliberate, plotted, premeditated murder.

  “You’re an old man, Mr. Van Horn, and I don’t imagine death as such has many terrors for you—you being what you are. But I do think public exposure has. And that will be a far more painful death for you. A much more terrifying punishment. That’s the kind of punishment a man suffers even when he’s lying in the bottom of a grave.”

  And now Diedrich was not smiling, nor did he smile again. He sat very quietly in his wheel chair. Ellery did not disturb him. He merely stood there looking at the old man.

  But then Diedrich looked up, and he asked almost bitterly: “And if my purpose was to kill the bitch and frame the dog, why didn’t I do just that? Why this high-flown, fancy business of the Ten Commandments?”

  When Ellery answered, it was in the same even tone; but there was a deep flush on his face.

  “A detective would have one answer,” he said, “and a psychologist another. The truth is a combination of both.

  “For all your physical structure and the practical affairs of business that occupied you all your life, you’re essentially a man of the mind, Mr. Van Horn. Like all tyrants, you think. You’ve never acted on impulse. Everything must be thought out, planned, like a battle, or a political coup. You molded Howard from his infancy to a preconceived shape. You planned Sally as deliberately as Howard planned a statue; she thought you fell in love with her suddenly—she was wrong; she didn’t know that you determined to marry her from the day you plucked her out of Low Village and started doing her over into the woman you intended to share your kingdom with years hence.

  “Your Ten Commandments idea was in many respects the culminating inspiration of your intellectual life. It had scope, sweep, power. It was gigantic. It was worthy of Diedrich Van Horn.

  “It began where all logical processes begin: with a premise. Your premise was twofold: You must punish your betrayers; and in punishing them you must yourself be unsuspected. Or, to put it more crudely, you must get away with murder. The injury you suffered was fundamentally to your ego, the ego of a megalomaniac. So the affronted all-powerful had to avenge the affront to his power; and he had to repair the injury to his ego by avenging with impunity—showing that he was above the laws governing ordinary men, that his power was greater than the power of law.

  “But it isn’t easy to commit murder and frame an innocent person for the murder and remain safe from suspicion. If you had murdered Sally simply and directly, Howard would have been no more a suspect than you; in fact, you would have been the preferred suspect. And if you had framed Howard simply and directly, Howard may well in sheer panic have blurted out the whole story of his relations with Sally, in which case you’d have been revealed as possessing the strongest motive—almost the exclusive motive.

  “So your problem, plan-wise, was to make Howard appear to be the only possible suspect. But if Howard had a motive to murder anyone, under the circumstances, that one was you, not Sally. Therefore you had to arrange a crime in which apparently Sally had been murdered by Howard in mistake for you. And, what’s more, Howard himself had to be convinced he’d done it!

  “All this, Mr. Van Horn, as you saw, cut your work out for you. It made a complex plot unavoidable. I imagine you rather enjoyed the prospect. The Napoleonic mentality thrives on difficulties; it even seeks them; and sometimes it creates them.

  “You took your time. To cover your discovery of the letters in Sally’s jewel box you took the necessary steps to set up the illusion of an outside thief. But thereafter you rested and schemed. Between June and early September you thought, you analyzed, you crystallized your knowledge of your intended victims. You made tentative plans, but you took no action.

  “I think what held you up was your realization that the more complex a crime-plan is, the more dangerous for the planner. Every added complication increases the chances for slips, loopholes, unforeseeable accidents of what Thomas Hardy called ‘happen-stance.’ You were groping toward some solution of this very major difficulty when Howard himself gave you your opportunity.”

  Ellery suddenly caught Diedrich’s eye. Their glances locked, and after that the two men held on in a sort of death grip.

  “Howard phoned you from New York that he was bringing me back to Wrightsville, or rather that he was coming right home and I was following within a couple of days.

  “Instantly you grasped what that could mean to you. The cover of innocence you required, and which your thinking had not been able to evolve, would be amply provided by me. How could anyone doubt your innocence or suspect your guilt if a well-known detective solved the case your way? It was the answer to everything.

  “Oh,” said Ellery, “it had its risks. Greater dangers in some ways than not involving me at all. But the beauty of this conception of Ellery-Queen-the-murder-accomplice, its breadth, its kind of risk, thrilled your imagination. Here was a campaign and a struggle worthy of Napoleon himself.

  “I daresay you never hesitated.”

  He stopped; and Diedrich, his great eyes unwavering, said coldly, “Go on.”

  “Howard phoned you on a Tuesday morning. I arrived in Wrightsville on Thursday. You had two days. In those two days, Mr. Van Horn, you conceived the Ten Commandments idea and you prepared every phrase of it for my arrival. You invented the story of the Connhaven Detective Agency and its ‘investigation.’ You worked out the Yahweh anagram, found the graves of Aaron and Mattie Way in Fidelity, added the E to the surname. You set in motion the whole business of the Art Museum project—you told me about that on Thursday evening, saying you’d offered to make up the Museum fund deficit ‘yesterday’—which would make it Wednesday, the day after Howard’s phone call! You went into action with your long-perfected blackmail plan; need I remind you that the blackmailer’s first call to Sally also came on Wednesday, the day after Howard told you I was coming to Wrightsville?

  “Everything started to move with the announcement of my visit.

  “Yes, Mr. Van Horn, you handed me the part of accomplice and I accepted it as gullibly as you knew I would. And I did everything you planned for me to do—danced to your tune at every step of the way. And that was really your greatest triumph, Mr. Van Horn, because I was really your most obedient puppet.”

  Ellery paused again. He went on with some difficulty.

  “The Ten Commandments business was wholly for my benefit. For me to solve the case your way, you had to prepare the kind of case I have a natural affinity for. You knew me very well. Oh, we’d never met, but you told me yourself how you’d read every book I’ve ever written, how you’d followed my career in the papers—I think you actually used the phrase, ‘I’m a Queen expert.’ And so you are, Mr. Van Horn, so you are—in a way I didn’t dream of until today.

  “You knew me better than I knew myself. You knew my working method. You knew my weakness. You knew you had to give me the kind of case I’d fall for, the kind of solution I’d fight to bring to a triumphant conclusion—that I’d believe in!

  “You knew I’d choose the subtle answer to the obvious, always; the complicated rather than the simple; the pyrotechnical over the commonplace.

  “You knew I possess a rather grandiose psychological pattern myself, Mr. Van Horn. That I like to think of myself, whether I ever admitted it or not, as a worker in mental marvels. And that’s exactly what you gave me—a sort of marvel to perform. A grandiose concept. A steep, labyrinthine trail. A blinding, stunning climax. And I performed for you, Mr. Van Horn. I worked out this stupendous solution for you, and everyone fell flat on his face being impressed with my cleverness—and you were never once suspected.