Ellery waved his dead pipe. “Isn’t it evident?”
“Not a bit. Why didn’t you tell all this to me a long time ago?”
“You haven’t thought it out, Lieutenant.” Ellery stared into the fire, tapping his lips with the stem. “Not a word of this could have been brought out at the trial. Not a word of it constitutes legal evidence. None of it is proof as proof is construed in a court of law. Even if the story could have been spread before the court, on the record, in the absence of legal proof of any of its component parts it would certainly have resulted in a dismissal of a charge against Wallace, and it might even have so garbled things as to get Priam of? too, or sentenced to a punishment that didn’t fit his crime.
“I didn’t want to chance Priam’s squeezing out by reason of sheer complication and confusion, Keats. I preferred to let him get what was coming to him and try to deal with the gentleman in this chair later. And here he’s been for a couple of months, Keats, under my eye and thumb, and I still haven’t found the answer. Maybe you have a suggestion?”
“He’s a damn murderer,” grated Keats. “Granted he got a dirty deal twenty-five years ago... when he took the law into his own hands he became as bad as they were. And if that sounds like a Sunday school sermon, let it!”
“No, no, it’s very true,” said Ellery sadly. “There’s no doubt about that at all, Lieutenant. He’s a bad one. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. But he isn’t talking, and what can you and I prove?”
“A rubber hose―”
“I don’t believe would do it,” said Ellery. “No, Keats, Wallace-Adam is a pretty special problem. Can we prove that he broke the T key on Priam’s typewriter? Can we prove that he suggested the plan behind Priam’s murder of Hill? Can we prove that he worked out the series of death threats against Priam... threats Priam boasted in court he’d sent to himself? Can we prove anything we know this fellow did or said or suggested or planned? A single thing, Keats?”
Wallace looked up at Lieutenant Keats of the Hollywood Division with respectful interest.
Keats glared back at him for fully three minutes.