He stared at the kitchen door for a long time.
Then he went upstairs and poured himself a stiff drink.
At three in the morning Ellery gave up trying to sleep and crawled out of bed. He turned on the lights in the living room, loaded and fired his brier, turned the lights out, and sat down to watch Hollywood glimmer scantily below. Light always disturbed him when he was groping in the dark.
And he was groping, and this was darkness.
Of course, it was a puzzling case. But puzzle was merely the absence of answer. Answer it, and the puzzle vanished. Nor was he bothered by the nimbus of fantasy which surrounded the case like a Los Angeles daybreak fog. All crimes were fantastic insofar as they expressed what most people merely dreamed about. The dream of the unknown enemy had been twenty years or more in the making...
He clucked to himself in the darkness. Back to the writer of the note.
The wonder was not that he made gifts of poisoned dogs and wrote odd notes relishing slow death and promising mysterious warnings with special meanings. The wonder was that he had been able to keep his hatred alive for almost a generation; and that was not fantasy, but sober pathology.
Fantasy was variance from normal experience, a matter of degree. Hollywood had always attracted its disproportionate quota of variants from the norm. In Vandalia, Illinois, Roger Priam would have been encysted in the community like a foreign substance, but in the Southern California canyons he was peculiarly soluble. There might be Delia Priams in Seattle, but in the houri paradise of Hollywood she belonged, the female archetype from whom all desire sprang. And Tree Boy, who in New York would have been dragged off to the observation ward of Bellevue Hospital, was here just another object of civic admiration, rating columns of good-natured newspaper space.
No, it wasn’t the fantasy.
It was the hellish scarcity of facts.