It would have to be, to keep it from falling off when the shelf is swung aside and dropped. Besides, Laurel Hill told me so.
“So, except for those times when the typewriter needs a major repair, it’s a permanent fixture of your wheelchair. Was the original of the note to Hill typed on your machine after it was removed for repair but before the broken T key was replaced? No, because the note was delivered to Hill two weeks before you sent the machine into Hollywood. Did someone type the note on your machine while you were out of your wheelchair? No, Mr. Priam, because you’re never out of your chair; you haven’t left it for fifteen years. Was the note typed on your machine while you were ― say ― asleep? Impossible; when the chair is a bed the shelf obviously can’t come up.
“So I’m very much afraid, Mr. Priam, there’s only one conclusion we can reach,” said Ellery. “ You typed that warning note yourself.
“It’s you who threatened your partner with death.
“The only active enemy out of your past and Hill’s, Mr. Priam, is Roger Priam.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Ellery. “Charles Adam is not imaginary. He was an actual person, as our investigation uncovered. Adam disappeared in West Indian waters ‘over a score of years ago,’ as you wrote in the note, and he hasn’t been seen or heard of since. It was only the note that made us believe Adam was still alive. Knowing now that you wrote the note, we can only conclude that Adam didn’t survive the Beagle’s voyage twenty-five years ago after all, that you and Hill did succeed in killing him, and that his reappearance here in Southern California this summer was an illusion you deliberately engineered.
“Priam,” said Ellery, “you knew what a shock it would be to your partner Hill to learn that Adam was apparently alive after so many years of thinking he was dead. Not only alive but explicitly out for revenge. You knew that Hill would be particularly susceptible to such news. He had built a new life for himself. He was bound up emotionally with Laurel, his adopted daughter, who worshiped the man he seemed to be.
“So Adam’s ‘reappearance’ threatened not only Hill’s life but, what was possibly even more important to him, the whole structure of Laurel’s love for him. There was a good chance, you felt, that Hill’s bad heart ― he had had two attacks before ― could not survive such a shock. And you were right ― your note killed him.
“If Hill had any doubts about the authenticity of the note, you dispelled them the morning after the heart attack, when for the first time in fifteen years you took the trouble of having yourself carted over to Hill’s house. The cause could only have been a telephone agreement with Hill to have a confidential, urgent talk about the note. You had, I imagine, another and equally pressing reason for that unprecedented visit: You wanted to be sure the note was destroyed so that it couldn’t be traced back to your typewriter. Either Hill gave it to you and you destroyed it then or later, or he destroyed it before your eyes. What you didn’t know, Priam, and what he didn’t tell you, was that he had already made a copy of the note in his own handwriting and hidden it in his mattress. Why? Maybe after the first shock, when Hill thought it over, he hadn’t been quite convinced. Maybe a sixth sense told him before you got to him that something was wrong. Whether you convinced him during that visit or not, the note was probably already copied and in his mattress, and a native caution ― despite all your arguments ― made him leave it there and say nothing about it. We can’t know and won’t ever know just what went on in Hill’s mind.
“But the damage was done by the sheer impact of the shock, Priam.