A Fine and Private Place

by Ellery Queen

  The question of how the killer gained entrance to the building without being seen was open. The elderly night security guard, an ex-New York City policeman named Gallegher, swore up and down and sidewise that no one unknown to him had got past him. On the other hand, it was a large building, he could not have been everywhere at once, and the detectives agreed that a determined intruder could have managed, by patient observation and the seizure of an opportunity, to slip by Gallegher unseen.

  To have gained entry to the penthouse apartment without leaving a trace, the detectives reasoned, the industrialist’s killer might have been either admitted by a confederate inside or provided with a key to the front door, which was equipped with a tamper-proof lock of special manufacture. A preliminary investigation of the household staff was begun, and a broad locksmith search was ordered on the possibility that a duplicate key had been made.

  If the murder and suicide of Julio and Marco Importunato had registered on the seismographs of the world’s financial centers, the murder of the head of Importuna Industries-the senior and last-surviving brother-rocked them wildly. The securities shock was felt over most of the globe-in New York, London, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, Athens, Cairo, Hong Kong, Tokyo, even in southern and eastern Africa, where Importuna capital was substantially invested. Two paperback biographies of the murdered industrialist sprouted on the racks and newsstands within three weeks of his death. National Educational Television convoked a roundtable of bankers and economists to discuss the probable long-term effects of Importuna’s departure from the money marts of the world. Sunday newspaper supplements indulged in lurid, largely fanciful, detail about his beginnings, his private life, and his rocket rise into the stratosphere of industrial power.

  And overnight his widow became the most written-and talked-about woman on earth, a preeminence she was to maintain for over a year, until Mrs. John F. Kennedy became Mrs. Aristotle Socrates Onassis. It was not only because of the fact that the brutal murder of her husband had made Virginia Whyte Importuna (as one female wit put it, “in nine fell swoops”) one of history’s wealthiest women. She was also, indisputably, one of the most photogenic. Her cheekbones caught shadows that hollowed her face into a lovely mask of tragedy, and her great light-colored eyes in some photographs gave her an unearthly look.

  The mixture of unique riches and unusual beauty was irresistible. The national women’s magazines tore down their dummies and substituted Virginia Importuna features for earliest possible publication; morgues were ransacked for photos; 99 East was besieged day and night by pleas for interviews and sittings with famous photographers and illustrators. The frenzied demands of the media so interfered with the police investigation that the widow was persuaded to authorize the hiring of an agency to receive and process the requests that poured in.

  But if the gorgeous survivor was the object of importunities, speculation, and gossip (some of it predictably vicious), the ugly victim who had so brutally departed was the even greater target of public curiosity. The man who had shunned publicity in life became an international byword in death. This was sparked by his sensational murder and fueled by the details of his superstition, delivered daily by the media.

  It was a reporter for the New York Daily News who dubbed Nino Importuna “The 9 Man,” and a columnist for the New York Post (on the same day) who christened the Importuna case “The 9 Murder.” Both phrases caught on, and soon they were in general use. (Even The New York Times, in one follow-up story in its city edition, allowed the epithets to show. They were hastily routed from the regular edition.)

  For Nino Importuna, that most practical of men, it was written and said, had throughout his dollars-pounds-francs-lire life clung to a curious, fanatical, illogical belief in the mysterious power of an abstraction. It was a number, the number 9, Importuna’s totem, his life sign, his trademark, as the elephant had served a similar function for e.e. cummings, one erudite commentator pointed out. The late industrialist had made of the number 9 an axle about which revolved virtually every spoke of his existence.

  * * *

  “All right,” Inspector Queen said fitfully. “I’ll discuss it with you. Spout away if you have to. But don’t expect me to buy it, Ellery. I’m up to here in trouble on this case. I’m not about to make a jackass of myself with this baloney about magic numbers.”

  “Did I use the word magic?” Ellery protested. “I merely said that for once the newspapers are justified, I mean in leaning on this 9 thing of Importuna’s. How can you overlook it, dad? It was central to his character.”

  “Is it going to help nail his killer is what I’m interested in,” his father grumbled. “Well, is it?”

  “I don’t know. It might very well, in the end.”

  The Inspector implored heaven with his eyebrows. “Well, go! I said I’d listen.”

  “Let’s start at the start. Nino’s start. He was born when? September 9, 1899. The 9th day of the 9th month.”

  “Big deal.”

  “And the year 1899 is a multiple of 9.”

  “A what?”

  “The number 1899 can be divided by 9 evenly.”

  “So what?”

  “Next: Add the digits of 1899, 1 plus 8 plus 9 plus 9, and what do you get? 27. 27 is also a multiple of 9. And if you add together the two digits of 27-2 and 7-you get 9 again.”

  “Ellery, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Importuna was. Exactly what started him on this lifelong obsession with 9s we’ll probably never dig out. Maybe it was the 9-ness of his birth date, and/or the fact that he happened to be born with 9 fingers instead of the regulation 10. Or something significant, possibly traumatic, could have happened to him on, say, his 9th birthday. Whatever it was, once it took hold it never let go of this tough, cold-blooded businessman.

  “You can’t overlook the strength of the grip it had on him when you realize that he went so far as to change his family name. Family and everything pertaining to it are matters of tremendous pride to the Italian contadino. Yet Nino dropped the last two letters out of his surname and legally became Importuna-something, I point out, his two brothers absolutely refused to do. Why Nino Importuna instead of Nino Importunato? That’s not a very drastic change. It’s hardly a change at all. Yet to Nino it obviously had great meaning. Why? Because it turned an 11-letter name into a name of 9 letters!

  “Don’t keep shaking your head, dad. It sounds silly to you, but it didn’t to Importuna. There’s something here, something important. I know it. I feel it… Take his first name. What was it?”

  “What was it? Nino!”

  “Wrong. Tullio. I took the trouble to have it looked up. When he petitioned the court to allow him to change his surname from Importunato to Importuna, he petitioned at the same time to change his Christian name from Tullio to Nino. Tullio is what he was christened in the tiny church in his hometown in Italy. I cabled a private investigation agency in Rome to get the information. Tullio. Why did he have it changed to Nino?”

  “Nino,” the Inspector said, sucked in in spite of himself. “N-i-n-o. That’s pretty close to n-i-n-e. Does Nino mean 9 in Italian?… What am I jabbering about!”

  “No, Nino doesn’t mean 9 in Italian. In Italian it means child. The word for 9 is nove.”

  “Is there an Italian Christian name that starts with N-o-v-e?”

  “No, or I’m sure he would have appropriated it. So again-why Nino? Was it because it was the closest name to the look and sound of his lucky number that he could come up with? I don’t believe so. In fact, I’ve done some boning on this, dad. You’re going to think I’m mad, or drunk… “

  “I already think so,” his father said with a tired wave. “So go ahead.”

  “We’re never going to prove this, but I’m convinced that Tullio Importunato went into the mystique of the numeral 9 with all 9 fingers and both feet before he turned himself into Nino Importuna. There’
s a great deal to go into, since from antiquity 9 has been held to be one of the important mystical numbers. It can be found virtually everywhere in the ancient world.

  “According to the Pythagoreans, for instance, man is ‘a full chord’-8 notes, diapason-which together with Deity becomes 9.

  “It represents the 9-lettered name of God. It’s 3 times 3-3 being the perfect number, the trinity. Lars Porsena swore by the 9 gods. There were 9 rivers of hell; in some accounts the River Styx wound around the infernal regions in 9 circles. Jesus died on the cross at the 9th hour. The early Christian fathers listed 9 orders of angels. There were 9 spheres in the original Ptolemaic astronomy; that’s where Milton got his ‘celestial syrens’ harmony that sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.’ Scandinavian mythology conjured up 9 earths. Deucalion’s ark, before it landed on Mount Parnassus, was buffeted about for 9 days. The Hydra had 9 heads. We meet the Nine Worthies in Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost and in Dryden, 3 heroes from the Bible, 3 from the classics, and 3 from the age of chivalry-or, as Dryden puts it, ‘Three Jews, three pagans, and three Christian Knights.’ May I add et cetera?”

  The Inspector opened his mouth, but Ellery had already plunged on.

  “Folklore is chock-full of it. The abracadabra is worn for 9 days before it’s flung into a river. To see the fairy people all you have to do is put 9 grains of wheat on a four-leaf clover. And so on endlessly. To this day, we drink a toast to people of exceptional merit with a ‘three-times-three,’ and it’s common practice in renting a commercial building to find that the lease extends for a term of 99 years. Heraldry recognizes 9 different crowns and 9 marks of cadency, and church architects speak of the 9 kinds of cross. If you’re ‘dressed to the 9s,’ you’re perfectly attired; and let’s never forget that ‘9 tailors make a man.’ If something is ‘to the 9th degree,’ it’s superplus; if you have ‘the 9 points of the law’ on your side, you have every possible advantage short of actual right. Shall I go on?”

  “Please, no,” his father groaned. “Granted from all the evidence you’re tossing at me, 9 is one hell of a number. But what of it, Ellery?”

  “To Importuna, evidently a great deal. So much, in fact, that I’m prepared to bet he went back to the old Chaldean and Hebrew alphabets, which assigned number values to individual letters. Look up Cheiro’s Book of Numbers. You’ll find that the letter N has the value of 5, I of 1, 0 of 7. N-I-N-0 gives you 5 plus 1 plus 5 plus 7, or a sum total of 18. 18? 18 is made up of 1 and 8. And 1 and 8 total… 9! Incidentally, the Hebrew word chai means life-the Jewish toast L’Chayim means To Life. The numerical designation of chai is 18, the first multiple of 9, and it’s a number full of merit, being associated with giving and charity.

  “I know it’s a cockamamie, dad, but I tell you with pure, unqualified, absolute conviction that Tullio turned himself into Nino because back in the recesses of antiquity somebody worked out a symbological system whereby N-I-N-0 adds up to-here we go again-9.”

  Silence and the faint dropping of jaw.

  Finally Inspector Queen clicked his dentures decisively. “All right, son, I’ll put a down payment on it. What have I got to lose? On the other hand, what have I got to gain? How does it advance us?”

  “The question is more properly, How did it advance Nino? Apparently in the proverbial leaps and bounds, judging by his fabulous success. Do you want a rundown on the extent to which he worshiped at the shrine of the great god 9? It’s all in the fine print of the background reports I’ve been studying for the past two days, and which nobody but I seems to be taking seriously.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Importuna would sign contracts and other important documents only on the 9th day of the month, or the 18th which is 1 plus 8, as I just said, or the 27th, which is 2 plus 7.

  “New ventures of Importuna Industries were never-repeat, never-entered into or launched, or old ventures liquidated, except on a 9th, an 18th, or a 27th. Even, be it noted (and to the investigator’s credit he did note it) if it caused a delay that meant considerable inconvenience to the parties. Even if the delay resulted in huge gobs of money being lost-in one instance cited by the executive vice-president of one of Importuna Industries’ participating companies, Importuna held up the consummation of a deal for three days until the 18th of the month, in the full knowledge that the holdup was going to cost the parent company over $20,000,000. Importuna, he said, never hesitated in ordering the delay.

  “Importuna’s marriage,” Ellery continued. “Note that he arranged to marry Virginia Whyte on September the 9th in the year 1962. The 9th day of the 9th month in a year whose integers total 18, which converts to 9. A year, moreover, that by the nature of mathematics is a multiple of 9. Our late friend wasn’t taking any chances getting married on an inauspicious day, which would have been any day not all wrapped up in 9s.”

  “Considering what happened five years later,” the Inspector remarked, “our late friend’s marital good-luck number had the whammy on it.”

  Ellery glanced at his father curiously. “Are you suggesting that his wife…?”

  “Who’s suggesting?” the Inspector said. “Keep going, Ellery, you’ve got me fascinated. How else did he use those 9s of his?”

  “The East Side apartment building Importuna bought years ago. Its street number? 99. Number of floors? 9. Can there be any doubt that those 9s are why he bought the building? Or at least that he wouldn’t have bought it unless the street number and the number of floors had been part and parcel of the property?

  “The man was awesome in his consistency. One report comments that practically every article of Importuna’s clothing bears his monogram, and that the monogram in every case-in every case-is not merely NI for Nino Importuna, but it has a strange little squiggle after the / in the design that looks like a small n-e! He wasn’t satisfied with just the NI, you see; he had to have the 9 spelled out by an engraver’s trick. This curious monogram-some of his correspondence refers to it as his crest-appears on his personal and business stationery, on his luggage, on his cars, on his planes, on his yachts-right up and down the line. Even his signature… have you seen his signature, dad, or facsimiles of it?”

  “What about it?”

  “Evidently you didn’t notice. He always added a flourish to Importuna. A small flourish attached to the final a that, if you examine it carefully, looks remarkably like-you guessed it-a 9.

  “To say that he was obsessive on the subject has to be a monumental understatement,” Ellery exclaimed. “Do you know how he paced? How he paced! While dictating correspondence or memoranda, for instance, or thinking aloud-this is a tidbit I had from Peter Ennis-Importuna would take 9 steps one way, 9 steps back. Never more, never less. Ennis says he first noticed it because of a certain rhythm in Importuna’s pacing, and he didn’t realize the reason until one day he counted the steps.”

  “Oh, come on, now,” Inspector Queen said. “That makes the guy a nut.”

  “Of course. Who but a magnificent nut could make that much money? Do you know that he wouldn’t buy a set of books unless it consisted of 9 volumes, or 18, or 27, or some other multiple of 9? In his apartment you can find everything from Extinct Birds of the New Hebrides to History of Gynecology. Apparently to Importuna the important thing in his books was not their subject or contents, but their number.”

  “Look,” his father said. “He was a nut about 9s. So all right. What I still want to know is, How are 9s going to help us poor flatfeet find his killer? How do the 9s enter into his murder?”

  “Ah,” Ellery said, as if he had caught the old man by a debating point. “I don’t know how they’re going to help us find his killer, but that they enter into his murder is a fact. Is several facts, in fact.”

  “Say, that’s right, isn’t it?” the Inspector muttered. “I didn’t put 2 and 2, I mean 4 and 5, or 6 and 3-ah, forget it!-together. The time of the murder-”

  “That’s one of them, yes. The blow that struck Importuna’s wristwatch during the atta
ck stopped the watch at 9 minutes past 9 o’clock. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen the watch myself. And by the way, it’s no accident that when Nino ordered that watch made for him he stipulated, as I’m sure he did, the use of rubies. Rubies, along with garnets and bloodstones, are considered lucky stones by people who are influenced by that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, you garner the luck when you wear the lucky gems next to your skin. Nothing can get closer to your skin than a wristwatch.”

  The Inspector was not so much silent as speechless. But finally he managed to say, “And the number of blows.”

  “Right, 9 distinct and separate skull fractures, from 9 blows. And Doc Prouty says he had to have been dead well before the 9th blow was delivered.”

  “But that’s all the 9s in the murder.”

  “That’s not all the 9s in the murder, dad. The weapon, that abstraction in cast iron. With that graceful loopy curve? Didn’t you notice it has the general appearance of a number 9?

  “So that’s three 9-elements in the murder itself,” Ellery declaimed to his feet as he blundered about pulling his nose, “and I refuse to accept even the mathematical possibility that they were coincidences. Death at 9:09 p.m., caused by a weapon in the shape of a 9, a weapon moreover that struck Importuna’s head 9 times… “ Ellery shook his own head so vigorously it made his father’s neck ache. “There’s only one explanation that satisfies me: The killer, fully informed of Importuna’s all-inclusive faith in the mystic qualities of 9, went out of his way to surround Importuna’s murder-to infuse it, identify it, call attention to it-with 9s. I’m almost tempted to say, although I don’t quite know why, to bury it under a pile of them. Note that he didn’t have to hit his victim’s head 9 times-Importuna was dead well before, according to the M.E.

  “Was he satisfying his own passion for fantasy, for grotesquerie, some bizarre sense of the fitness of things, even things like murder? Nino having lived by the 9, so to speak, the murderer thought he ought to die by the 9 as well?”