Ten days wonder, p.27
Ten Days’ Wonder,
p.27
“The Ten Commandments,” said Ellery. “What did the newspapers say? ‘Ellery Queen at his greatest’ ”
And Ellery continued in the same even, colorless tone: “But it’s interesting to note that, in judging me accurately, and as a result of your analysis giving me the Ten Commandments idea to play with, you betrayed something of fundamental importance about yourself, Mr. Van Horn.”
A glitter of curiosity came into the eyes.
“All along I’d diagnosed Howard’s emotional troubles as being tied in to his psychoneurotic worship of the father-image. I don’t think there can be any doubt of that. But when I extended that diagnosis to include Howard’s whole conception of the violation of the Ten Commandments as a deliberate revolt against the greatest Father-Image of all, the Fatherhood of God, I was obviously in error, since the Ten Commandments concept wasn’t Howard’s at all. It was yours.
“Why did your brain conceive and hold to that idea, Mr. Van Horn? How did you come to think of it? Why the Ten Commandments? You might have conceived a hundred other ideas possessing the attributes you required to impress me into your service. But no—you chose the Ten Commandments. Why?
“I’ll tell you why, Mr. Van Horn—the only thing I’ll have told you tonight that I think will come as news to you. Your very choice of the Ten Commandments idea was a clue to you as the guiding mentality if only I’d had the brains to see it. Not to Howard, but to you.
“I attempted last year, in expounding my pompous little thesis to Prosecutor Chalanski and Chief Dakin and Dr. Cornbranch, to explain that Howard’s choice of the Ten Commandments weapon—breaking the Father-Image of God in breaking the father-image of you—must have been rooted in his environment as a child…in a home where a foster grandmother was obsessed with religion, and so on. But when you really dig into it, that was a pretty weak point—as it applied to Howard. Your mother, Mr. Van Horn, according to your own version, has never been an active influence in your household—at least, in Howard’s lifetime. She was hardly ever seen; nobody paid much if any attention to her when she was. And Howard was brought up by nurses and tutors; it was their influence which would dominate, not your mother’s. And certainly, aside from your mother, this was not an oppressively religious household.
“But how about you, and your boyhood environment, Mr. Van Horn?—the environment you were raised in during the impressionable childhood years? Your father was an itinerant evangelist, a fundamentalist fanatic who preached the anthropomorphic, personally vengeful, jealous God of the Old Testament—who, as you told me, used to beat the hell out of you and your brother; you were, you said, scared to death of him. Howard loved his father, Mr. Van Horn, but you hated yours. And it’s out of that hatred that your Ten Commandments idea was born…a means by which, unknown to your conscious self, you employed your father’s own weapons to kill him fifty years after he dropped dead of apoplexy.”
And now Ellery said rapidly: “I think this brings us up to date, Mr. Van Horn. You murdered Sally and framed Howard for it, and so Howard’s death is also on your hands; I helped you commit these crimes; and we’ve both, in our fashion, got to pay the penalty.”
“Penalty?” said Diedrich. “Both?”
“In our fashion. Mr. Van Horn,” said Ellery, “you’ve destroyed me. Do you understand that? You’ve destroyed me.”
“I understand that,” said Diedrich Van Horn.
“You’ve destroyed my belief in myself. How can I ever again play little tin god? I can’t. I wouldn’t dare. It’s not in me, Mr. Van Horn, to gamble with the lives of human beings. In the kind of avocation I’ve chosen to pursue there’s often a life at stake, or if not a life then a career, or a man’s or woman’s happiness.
“You’ve made it impossible for me to go on. I’m finished. I can never take another case.”
And Ellery was silent.
Then Diedrich, nodding, asked with a sort of humor: “And my penalty, Mr. Queen?”
Ellery pushed back the swivel chair and with his gloved hand he opened the top drawer of Van Horn’s desk.
10
“BECAUSE, YOU SEE,” SAID Diedrich, watching Ellery’s hand, “there’s no good can come from telling the truth to them. The truth won’t bring her back, Mr. Queen, or him.
“You just think you’re finished, Mr. Queen, but I am. I’m an old man. I don’t have much time left. I’ve built something in my lifetime. I don’t mean this,” his gaunt hand waved vaguely, “or my money, or anything unimportant like that. I mean, a life. A name. The sort of thing that makes a man go to the grave with just a little less sense of waste.
“You’re a man of considerable insight, Mr. Queen. You must know that what I did left me with no sense of triumph or satisfaction. Or if you didn’t see it, you can see it now simply by looking at what’s happened to me. What’s that line in Lear? ‘Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, unwhipp’d of justice.’ To a man who’s three-quarters dead already, Mr. Queen, isn’t that penalty enough?”
And Ellery said: “No.”
Diedrich said quickly, “I’m a very rich man, Mr. Queen. Suppose I offered you—”
But Ellery said: “No.”
“I’m sorry,” said Diedrich, nodding. “I spoke on impulse. That was beneath both of us. We can do a great deal of good, you and I. Name a charity and I’ll write out a check for one million dollars.”
Ellery said: “No.”
“Five million.”
“Not fifty.”
Diedrich was silent.
But then he said, “I know money as such means nothing to you. But think of the power it could give you—”
“No.”
Diedrich was silent again.
Ellery, too.
And the study. There was not even a clock.
Finally Diedrich said: “There must be something. Every man has a price. Is there anything I can offer you to keep you from going to Dakin?”
And Ellery said: “Yes.”
The wheel chair rolled forward quickly.
“What?” asked Diedrich eagerly. “What is it? Name it, and it’s yours.”
Ellery’s gloved hand came out of the desk drawer.
In it glittered the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 safety hammer-less he had seen there on the night Van Horn had shown him the rifled safe.
Diedrich’s mouth twitched, but that was all.
Ellery laid the revolver back in the drawer.
He did not close the drawer.
He got to his feet.
“You’ll write out a note first. Give any excuse you think will ring true—grief, ill health.
“I’ll wait outside the study. I don’t think you’ll demean yourself further by trying to take a pot shot at me; but if you have any such thought in mind, forget it. By the time you can wheel that chair around to this side of the desk to get the gun, I’ll be in the other room; and I’ll be in the dark.
“I think, Mr. Van Horn, that’s all.”
Diedrich looked up.
Ellery looked at him.
Diedrich nodded, slowly.
Ellery glanced at his wristwatch. “I give you three minutes.” Then he glanced at the desk, the chair, the floor. “Good-by.”
Diedrich did not reply.
Ellery stepped quickly around the desk, passed the silent old man, crossed the study, and walked out into the darkness of the room beyond.
He sidestepped and waited, careful not to lean against the wall. He had his wrist close to his face.
And after a few seconds the illuminated dial of his wristwatch began to take form.
A minute passed.
The study was quiet.
Another twenty-five seconds.
He heard the scratching of a pen.
The pen scratched for seventy-five seconds. Then it stopped, and there was a new sound—the slight squeak of the wheel chair.
The squeak of the wheel chair stopped.
And there was another new sound, a clicking sound.
And, very quickly, a shot.
Ellery backed away from the wall and skirted the edge of the area illuminated by the study until he stood in the darkness beyond.
He glanced into the study.
Then he turned and walked unhurriedly through the dark room to the foyer and the front door.
As he eased the front door open he heard a door open upstairs, then another, and a third. Wolfert? Laura? Old Christina?
He heard Wolfert’s thin sawing voice cut through the house. “Diedrich! Was that you down there?”
Ellery closed the front door noiselessly.
Lights were springing up in the house.
But he set his feet on the Van Horn driveway and began the long night walk into Wrightsville.
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Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen
Cover design by Jim Tierney
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Queen, Ellery, Ten Days’ Wonder
