Before Priam’s bulging eyes the blanket on the floor rose like the magic carpet, and there, under it, stood Alfred Wallace, smiling.
Roger Priam screamed.
Chapter Sixteen
What no one foresaw ― including Ellery ― was how Roger Priam would react to his arrest, indictment, and trial. Yet from the moment he showed his hand it was impossible to conceive that he might have acted otherwise. Alfred Wallace was a probable sole exception, but Wallace was being understandably discreet.
Priam took the blame for everything. His contempt for Wallace’s part in the proceedings touched magnificence. Wallace, Priam said, had been the merest tool, not understanding what he was being directed to do. One would have thought, to hear Priam, that Wallace was an idiot. And Wallace acted properly idiotic. No one was fooled, but the law operates under the rules of evidence, and since there were only two witnesses, the accused and his accomplice, each ― for different motives ― minimizing Wallace and maximizing Priam, Wallace went scot-free.
As Keats said, in a growl, “Priam’s got to be boss, by God, even at his own murder trial.”
It was reported that Priam’s attorney, a prominent West Coast trial lawyer, went out on the night of the verdict and got himself thoroughly fried, missing the very best part of the show. Because that same night Roger Priam managed to kill himself by swallowing poison. The usual precautions against suicide had been taken, and those entrusted with the safety of the condemned man until his execution were chagrined and mystified. Roger Priam merely lay there with his bearded mouth open in a grin, looking as fiercely joyful as a pirate cut down on his own quarter-deck. No one could dictate to him, his grin seemed to say, not even the sovereign State of California. If he had to die, he was picking the method and the time.
He had to be dominant even over death.
To everyone’s surprise, Alfred Wallace found a new employer immediately after the trial, an Eastern writer by the name of Queen. Wallace and his suitcase moved into the little cottage on the hill, and Mrs. Williams and her two uniforms moved out, the cause leading naturally to the effect.
Ellery could not say that it was a poor exchange, for Wallace turned out a far better cook than Mrs. Williams had ever been, an accomplishment in his new employe Ellery had not bargained for, since he had hired Wallace to be his secretary. The neglected novel was still the reason for his presence in Southern California, and now that the Hill-Priam case was closed Ellery returned to it in earnest.