that same morning, running a temperature, they said afterward, of over 106°. The company and hospital authorities will, of course, corroborate my statement.
“Do you want the cable address or telephone number of the Menachem-Lipsky-Negev Development Company, and the names of the pilot, the employees who met me in the desert, and the doctors in Tel Aviv who saved my life? And oh, yes,” Mr. E added shyly. “When you check my story, be sure to inquire about me under the name of Mortimer C. Ginsberg. Otherwise they won’t know whom you’re talking about.”
NOVEMBER 9, 1967
Ellery selected the date and site of the confrontation to satisfy the esthetics of the case and the yearning for justice in his heart: the 9th of the month and Nino Importuna’s bedroom, where the industrialist had met his death.
Inspector Queen consented with misgivings; he insisted on having a member of the district attorney’s staff present.
“What can go wrong?” Ellery had said with none of his customary humility; he was positively euphoric. “You know me, dad. I’ve had a really hard time, but I’ve finally run it down. I never pull a drawstring till I know my quarry’s in the bag.”
“Sure, son, sure,” his father had said through the gnawed-ragged fringe of his mustache. “But just supposing, I want to be covered.”
“Have you no faith?”
“This case has made an agnostic out of me!”
The assistant D.A. was a young man named Rankin whom Ellery did not know. The lawyer stationed himself in a corner of the room, from where he had a panoramic view of the action. The expression on his foxy face said that, while he hoped for the best out of this unheard-of, if not illegal, proceeding, all he could realistically look forward to was the reverse. Ellery ignored him.
The only others present, aside from the Queens, were Virginia Importuna and Peter Ennis. The widow was almost serenely expectant; she might have been taking her seat at an opening night. Ennis, however, was pallidly twitchy, a very nervous young man. Ellery smiled at both of them.
“The secret of this offbeat case,” he began, “lies in its 9s. All along I’ve been convinced that the 9s in Nino Importuna’s murder constituted the crucial element-that if only we could fathom their real meaning we’d reach the treasure. But it remained unfound until you, dad, inadvertently provided the key. You referred to the 9s as red herrings.
“Those words unlocked the door.
“The 9s lying in heaps around the corpus of the case,” Ellery went on-”were some of them contrived? Deliberately invented? Red herring used to be used in training tracking dogs; the strong smell of smoked fish tended to throw them off the scent. Did the 9s in the Importuna case sei-ve an analogous purpose?
“I explored the hypothesis. Assuming they did, which of the 9s had been dragged across the trail to make the job of tracking down the killer harder, if not impossible?”
The assistant D.A. began to look interested. He dug out a pad and pencil.
“I didn’t really get anywhere on this tack until I recalled G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword,’ one of the short stories in
“This recollection furnished me with the key question I was groping for. I paraphrased Flambeau: ‘Do you mean that when a murderer has to hide a real clue he might hide it among sham ones?’
“I immediately saw the murderer’s dilemma plain and his plan clear: There was a genuine 9-clue which pointed to him as the guilty party and which he could not wish out of existence. At the same time he could not afford, in self-defense, to leave it as it was. Therefore he would hide it, like Father Brown’s pebble, on a beach of 9-clues, all but one of which were false. In the confusion the only significant one, the legitimate one, would go unnoticed. At least, that was his thinking and his objective. In any event, he had nothing to lose and a great deal to gain-his safety-by drawing his red herrings across the trail.
“The obvious counterploy was to check back on all the 9s, to take them one by one out of the net and see which were herrings. We came up with a strange catch.”
Ellery turned to Virginia Importuna.
“Your husband’s totem, the number 9, has its apparent inception in the date he claimed for his birth, September 9, 1899. I proceeded to question its validity, as I meant to question all the 9s in the case, by procuring a copy through an Italian inquiry agency of Importuna’s baptismal certificate. Sure enough, it turned out that he was born not in 1899 but in the year before, and not in the 9th month of that year but in the fifth, and not on the 9th day of that month but on the 16th. May 16, 1898 was a far cry from September 9, 1899; as a 9 totem, it failed completely. So he simply appropriated as his birth date the 9th day of the 9th month in the year that added up to 9 every which way.
“In other words, the 9s in his professed birth date were, as Chesterton put it, a sham, satisfying not the truth but your husband’s superstition. A red herring.
“His name, Importuna, composed of 9 letters? Sham: His real name was Importunato, 11 letters. His Christian name, Nino, its number values adding up to 9? Sham: His real Christian name was Tullio. The whole name Nino Importuna was a red herring.
“This building, 99 East. My father had it checked. And found that 99 was not its original street number. Originally it was 97; there was no number 99 on this street. To satisfy his need for surrounding himself with 9s, Importuna had the building renumbered 99 when he bought it; with his means and power it was no problem. And 9 floors? A more subtle sham. A 9-story building with a penthouse apartment can more properly be said to have, not 9 floors, but 10.”
“I didn’t know about Nino’s real birth date, Mr. Queen, or the renumbering of the building,” Virginia said. “Did you, Peter?”
Ennis started at being addressed and quickly removed from his mouth the knuckle he was gnawing on. “They’re both news to me.”
“But these were not the important red herrings,” Ellery said. “Let’s dip into our net again.
“The time of death: Your husband’s wristwatch, Mrs. Importuna, stopped by a blow, fixed the time of the murder attack at 9 minutes past 9 o’clock. Sham: The medical examiner placed death at shortly past midnight, about three hours later than the stopped watch indicated. The murderer must have set the watch back after the killing and then struck it to stop it, thereby giving us the 9th minute past the 9th hour of the evening, and two more red herrings to chew on. And, by the way, the M.E.’s postmortem report even exposed the date of death-September 9th-as a sham. A few minutes after midnight put the actual date of death at the next day, September 10th.
“Now consider in this context the weapon used, that curvy abstraction in cast iron we-especially I-were so eager to see as a 9-shape, when the killer went out of his way to get hold of it for the commission of his crime. Can there be any doubt that its resemblance to a 9 was his reason for choosing it? Yet it’s really not a 9. To the sculptor, according to the title he gave it, it was
“But it does look like a 9,” Peter protested.
“Held in one position, yes. But turn it upside down-how can you ever be sure with an abstraction?-and it becomes a 6. Sham. Red herring.
“And again. The number of the killer’s blows with the sculpture as his not-so-blunt instrument. We kept saying he struck 9 blows. We were wrong. The killer struck 10 blows. The blow to the wrist, to stop the watch at the phony time, according to Dr. Prouty was not a glance-off from one of the 9 blows to the head but a separate blow, in his opinion not even delivered by the same weapon. Red herring again.”
Inspector Queen muttered, “There were lots more 9s,” and then he looked about him guiltily.
