“Now something is happening, I don’t know what. If Laurel had kept her mouth shut, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger. But by going about insisting that Leander Hill was murdered, Laurel’s created an atmosphere of suspicion that threatens my position. Sooner or later the papers will get hold of it ― it’s a wonder they haven’t already ― and the fact that Roger is apparently in the same danger might come out. I can’t sit by and wait for that. My people will expect me to be the loyal wife. So that’s what I’m being. Mr. Queen, I ask you to proceed as if I’m terribly concerned about my husband’s safety.” Delia Priam shrugged. “Or is this all too involved for you?”
“It would seem to me far simpler,” said Ellery, “to clear out and start over again somewhere else.”
“This is where I was born.” She looked out at Hollywood. Laurel had moved over to a corner of the garden. “I don’t mean all that popcorn and false front down there. I mean the hills, the orchards, the old missions. But there’s another reason, and it has nothing to do with me, or my people, or Southern California.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Priam?”
“Roger wouldn’t let me go. He’s a man of violence, Mr. Queen. You don’t ― you can’t ― know his furious possessiveness, his pride, his compulsion to dominate, his... depravity. Sometimes I think I’m married to a maniac.”
She closed her eyes. The room was still. From below Ellery heard Mrs. Williams’s Louisiana-bred tones complaining to the gold parakeet she kept in a cage above the kitchen sink about the scandalous price of coffee. An invisible finger was writing in the sky above the Wilshire district: MUNTZ TV. The empty typewriter nudged his elbow.
But there she sat, the jungle in batiste and colored cotton. His slick and characterless Hollywood house would never be the same again. It was exciting just to be able to look at her lying in the silly chair. It was dismaying to imagine the chair empty.
“Mrs. Priam.”
“Yes?”
“Why,” asked Ellery, trying not to think of Roger Priam, “didn’t you want Laurel Hill to hear what you just told me?”