Keats shook his head. “What do we do now?”
“What did you find out?”
“Not a thing.”
“No sign of a point of entry?”
“No. But what sign would there be? You come from the suspicious East, Mr. Queen. This is the great West, where men are men and nobody locks his door but Easterners.” Keats rolled a tattered cigaret to the other side of his mouth. “Not even,” he said bitterly, “taxpayers who are on somebody’s knock-off list.” He jumped up with a frustrated energy. “The trouble is, this Priam won’t face the facts. Poison him, and he looks thoughtful. Toss a couple hundred dead frogs around his bedroom and he shakes his head doubtfully. You know what I think? I think everybody in this house, present company excepted, is squirrel food.”
But Ellery was walking a tight circle, squinting toward some hidden horizon. “All right, he got in without any trouble ― simply by walking in. Presumably in the middle of the night. Priam’s door isn’t locked at night so that Wallace or the others can get at him in an emergency, consequently he enters Priam’s room with equal facility. So there he is, with a bag or a suitcase full of murdered frogs. Priam is asleep ― not dead, mind you, just asleep. But he might just as well have been dead, because his visitor distributed two or three hundred frogs about the premises ― in the dark, mind you ― without disturbing Priam in the least. Any answers, Lieutenant?”
“Yes,” said Keats wearily. “Priam polished off a bottle last night. He was dead ― dead to the world.”
Ellery shrugged and resumed his pacing. “Which takes us back to the frogs. A cardboard box containing... we don’t know what;4 that’s warning number one. Food poisoning... that’s warning number two. Warning number three... a zoo colony of dead frogs. One, unknown; two, poisoned food; three, strangled frogs. It certainly would help to know number one.”
“Suppose it was a fried coconut,” suggested Keats. “Would it help?”
“There’s a connection, Lieutenant. A pattern.”