A Fine and Private Place

“It’s all right, dad, there’s no point in still keeping it a secret. So we come to the anonymous letters, with their contents.”

“Hold on there, Queen!” the assistant D.A. said. He was standing behind Virginia and Peter, and he jabbed his forefingers meaningly in their direction.

“I said it’s all right, Mr. Rankin. I should explain,” Ellery continued, turning to Virginia and Peter, “that my father was in receipt of a series of anonymous messages at Police Headquarters which were kept secret from all but a handful of officials.”

“Now you’ve tied it,” Rankin said angrily. “I was against this from the start, and I told the D.A. so!”

Ellery paid no attention to him.

“Some of the envelopes from the killer-the 9-signifi-cance of some of the messages made it obvious that they were sent by the Importuna killer-some of them contained playing cards, one whole card or one-half card to a message. Clearly they were intended to convey a meaning. Meanings are conveyed by playing cards, of course, in fortune-telling. I chose to interpret the cards according to a popular fortune-telling system. But the fact is there are a number of fortune-telling systems, in each of which individual cards can have entirely different meanings. The sender of the cards never specified or even hinted at which interpretive system was to be used. So the meanings I ascribed to them were purely arbitrary and for that reason not necessarily relevant. Red herrings, like the zip code numbers of the post offices he picked to mail the envelopes from, which added up to 9s.

“Even the quantity of messages was a sham. True, 9 were received. But then a 10th arrived, compromising the magic number. Red herrings.

“In five of the envelopes there were verbal messages. One stated that a boyhood friend of Importuna’s had grown up to become a justice of the Supreme Court. The 9-significance of the United States Supreme Court is known to every schoolchild. The trouble was, an exhaustive inquiry failed to turn up such a boyhood friend-or any such friend-of Nino’s. The message was simply false. Or, in Chesterton’s word, sham. In your words, dad, red herring.

“The same proved true of the other four worded messages. One stated that in his youth Nino Importuna had played semiprofessional baseball for the Binghamton, New York, team. Only it wasn’t so. Another said that his Palm Springs estate included a golf course-another connotation of 9, from either a 9-hole course or an 18-hole, a multiple of 9. Only neither proved to be true. There was no golf course at all on the Importuna Palm Springs property.

“Another message-forgive me for mentioning it, Mrs. Importuna-alleged Importuna’s fondness for a cat-o’- nine-tails. Mrs. Importuna assured me that it wasn’t true, and no evidence of any sexual aberration could be found.

“Then there was the message about Importuna’s having commissioned the sculpting of the 9 Muses for his villa in Lugano. You, Peter, emphatically denied this, telling me it was just the sort of assignment it was your job to oversee, yet you knew nothing about any such commission. There would have been no point in your lying about it, because the simplest investigation would turn up the sculptor of such a project if the message were telling the truth. The official investigation, in fact, found no trace of such a person.

“So the 9 messages were either irrelevant or false. I was trying to eliminate the sham clues, remember, to discover which 9-clue was not a sham, was not a red herring. And here I was faced with the dismaying conclusion that all the 9s were red herrings!- certainly all that had the least smack of importance. Nino could sign contracts on the 9th, the 18th, or the 27th of the month, or refuse to close a deal except on such dates, or arrange to be married on the 9th day of the 9th month for luck, or falsify his birth date to make it drip 9s, but the 9-isms like these were not really clues. They were things that Importuna, not his killer, had elected to do. I had set out to find a legitimate 9-ism relating to the killer, and here I was with nothing left in the net. Until suddenly that was no longer true. I had eliminated every 9-clue, I then saw,” Ellery said, “except one.”

This was the climax of his carefully plotted scene, and Ellery played it as he had played similar scenes at similar climaxes, holding them with a glittering eye, using his voice as if it were a foil, dominating them with his presence, threatening them with a stabbing forefinger.

“Except one,” he repeated. “One 9 was real. One 9 was not a red herring.

“It was the last 9-ism of the series, emerging as a result of message number 10.

“This unexpected, 9-total-breaking final message, Mrs. Importuna, was the basis of the question I asked you about your luncheon date with Peter Ennis on December 9, 1966.” Virginia flinched, then braced herself with a scornful look. “I’m sorry, but I have no choice. I told you that I couldn’t promise to keep your diary in confidence from the authorities if I found it contained information pertinent to the case.”

“Information? What information?” Inspector Queen was bristling. And Assistant District Attorney Rankin was jotting away at a tremendous pace.

“Mrs. Importuna has kept a diary from girlhood, dad. She was kind enough to let me read her entry for December 9, 1966. From that entry I learned that in the course of her lunch that day-it was with Ennis-a 9-ism cropped up. It was this.” Ellery leaned forward. “That Virginia’s and Nino’s prenuptial agreement had exactly 9 more months to run-9 months from that day, December 9, 1966, to September 9, 1967, which was the cutoff date specified in the agreement for Mrs. Importuna to become her husband’s sole heir.

“Now that 9-month-to-the-day period was no invention of somebody’s, no sham, no red herring. That 9 months was a fact. And it was a significant fact. Because if someone wanted Virginia to inherit her husband’s half-billion- dollar estate, he had to wait 9 months before her claim to it became a legal, if potential, reality.

“In a grimly real sense this whole unavoidable 9-month waiting period resembles a pregnancy. Conception occurs on December 9, 1966. There are 9 months of gestation. Then on September 9, 1967, the child is born, the monstrous child, and its name is murder. Why, even the forceps used in its delivery bears the label Newborn Child Emerging.”

Ellery paused for breath, and they hitched forward, even Rankin in his corner, to urge him on.

“Let’s consider the occasion of what I’ve called the conception, that lunch in a hideaway restaurant on December 9th of last year. I was looking for a clue, remember, that in some way involved the killer. I had to ask myself, was there anything about that lunch the killer might have reason to dread? Well, what about the fact of the meeting itself? Suppose Virginia’s and Peter’s appearance in public, their only indiscretion as far as the outside world was concerned, were to become known? Suppose they had been seen and their conversation overheard? For if it became known that Virginia Importuna and Peter Ennis, her husband’s confidential secretary, were having an affair, if it became known that because of her prenuptial agreement Virginia couldn’t leave or divorce her husband without losing everything, if it became known that Peter had to wait 9 months for Virginia to become Importuna’s heir-from these simple facts all the rest… the conception of Importuna’s murder, the gestation of the murder plot, and the birth, the fruition, of the crime… could be deduced by anyone with an IQ of 100. And that was a mortal danger to the plotter. That was the 9-fact he tried to bury in that barrage of sham 9s he bombarded us with after the rr.urder was born.”

Inspector Queen had begun to develop a pinched and greenish expression about the mouth, as if he were trying without success to ignore an extremely bad taste.

“To wrap this up,” Ellery continued with an encouraging smile at his father-Courage! Fear not!-”let me explain what I mean by the period of gestation. The plotter, as I said, had to wait 9 months before Virginia could come into Importuna’s estate, after which he would kill Importuna. Why not use that 9-month waiting period to the best possible advantage? After all, on December 9th of last year Nino Importuna owned only a third of the family fortune. But if Nino’s two brothers were to die in the meantime… So he murdered Julio and framed Marco for it, thus counting on being rid of both.

“The frame-up wasn’t quite successful, but Marco was so obliging as to commit suicide, the police concluded that this constituted in effect a confession that Marco had killed Julio and hanged himself in remorse; the net effect to the plotter was perfectly satisfactory. Both younger brothers were dead, he-the plotter-killer-was unsuspected, and Nino’s fortune was tripled. So that when that September day rolled around on which Virginia became Nino’s legal heir, the final act-the killing of Nino-would bring the killer a half-billion-dollar fortune. Not directly, of course, but through his tie with you, Virginia. Because I’m positive you and he have long since made plans to marry-”

“Not directly? Marry?” Peter Ennis was on his feet, looking suddenly formidable. “What in hell are you hinting at, Queen?”

Ellery frowned. Virginia was smiling.