“No, you keep going, Keats. Is there anything else that’s bothered you?”
“Lots more. You talked about Priam’s shrewd tactics, his cleverness; you compared him to Napoleon. Shrewd? Clever? A tactician? Priam was about as shrewd as a bull steer in heat and as clever as a punch in the nose. He couldn’t have planned a menu. The only weapon Priam knew was a club.
“He figured out a series of related clues, you said, that added up ― for our benefit ― to a naturalist. Evolution. The steps in the ladder. Scientific stuff. How could a roughneck smallbrain like Priam have done that? A man who bragged he hadn’t read a book since he was in knee pants! You’d have to have a certain amount of technical knowledge even to think of that evolutionary stuff as the basis of a red herring, let alone get all the stages correct and in the right order. Then picking a fancy-pants old Greek drama to tie in birds! No, sir, I don’t purchase it. Not Priam.
“Oh, I don’t question his guilt. He murdered his partner, all right. Hell, he confessed. But he wasn’t the bird who figured out the method and thought up the details. That was the work of somebody with a lot better equipment than Roger Priam ever hoped to have.”
“In other words, if I get your thought, Keats,” murmured Ellery, “you believe Priam needed not only someone else’s legs but someone else’s gray matter, too.”
“That’s it,” snapped the detective. “And I’ll go whole hog. I say the same man who supplied the legs supplied the know-how!” He glared at Alfred Wallace, who was slumped in the chair, hands clasped loosely about the glass on his stomach, eyes gleaming Keats’s way. “I mean you, Wallace! You got a lucky break, my friend, Priam sloughing you off as a maroon who trotted around doing what you were told―”
“Lucky nothing,” said Ellery. “That was in the cards, Keats. Priam did believe Wallace was a stupid tool and that the whole brilliant plot was the product of his own genius; being Priam, he couldn’t believe anything else ― as Wallace, who knew him intimately, accurately foresaw. Wallace made his suggestions so subtly, led Priam about by his large nose so tact-fully, that Priam never once suspected that he was the tool, being used by a master craftsman.”
Keats glanced again at Wallace. But the man lay there comfortably, even looking pleased.
Keats’s head ached. “Then ― you mean―”
Ellery nodded. “The real murderer in this case, Keats, was not Priam. It’s Wallace. Always was.”