“Doesn’t fit what?” asked Ellery mildly.
“Doesn’t fit Priam. I mean, what Priam was. Take that letter he typed on the broken machine and put in the collar of the dead beagle for delivery to Hill...”
“Something wrong with it?”
“Everything wrong with it! Priam was an uneducated man. If he ever used a fancy word, I wasn’t around to hear it. His talk was crude. But when he wrote that letter... How could a man like Priam have, made such a letter up? To avoid using the letter T, to invent roundabout ways of saying things ― that takes... a feel for words, doesn’t it? A certain amount of practice in ― in composition? And punctuation ― the note was dotted and dashed and commaed and everything perfectly.”
“What’s your conclusion?” asked Ellery.
Keats squirmed.
“Or haven’t you arrived at one?”
“Well... I have.”
“You don’t believe Priam typed that note?”
“He typed it, all right. Nothing wrong with your reasoning on that... Look.” Keats flipped his cigaret into the fire. “Call me a halfwit. But the more I think about it, the less I buy the payoff. Priam typed that letter, but somebody else dictated it. Word for word. Comma for comma.” Keats jumped out of the chair as if he felt the need of being better prepared for the attack that was sure to come. But when Ellery said nothing, merely looked thoughtful and puffed on his pipe, Keats sat down again. “You’re a kindhearted character. Now tell me what’s wrong with me.”