The Player on the Other Side by Ellery Queen Page B

yourself.
    Be yourself, My Dear Walt. Be yourself, for by so doing you please me in my choice. Watch yourself being yourself, and share with me my pride in you, and recognize, as I have recognized, how infallibly I have chosen.
    No one — no one at all — could do what you have done. No one will ever do what you will do. To qualify for that, a man would have to be you — and only you can be that. Be yourself, My Dear Walt.
    Have you asked yourself why I call you, with these capital letters, My Dear Walt? — why I have not done so before, and whether there is some special meaning to it?
    I assure you there is, and I promise you I shall make this revelation in my next writing. And that will be after you have performed this service for me — for us.
    Dispose of this letter as you have the others.
    Y

8
    Self-Block
    The time came (yet again) when Inspector Richard Queen of New York City police Headquarters had had altogether and finally enough — up to here and brimming over. He recognized the signs. From long practice he knew how to contain what could be contained and how to sluice off the rest silently. But he knew also that when frustrated fatherhood reached the floodline, it would crest and overflow because of one extra drop — without warning, with a roar.
    That time came one evening when, having let himself into the Queen apartment, the Inspector found no Ellery to greet him with a smile (or a frown) and/or a tingling highball to wash away the back-tooth grit of Centre Street.
    The old man felt an almost audible pop! of disappointment. He kicked the foyer door to with his heel and put away his keys, frosted head, and sparrow face cocked to listen; for the next most welcome thing, queerly enough, would be to find himself alone at this hour — meaning that Ellery had found something outside himself to interest and occupy him. The rattle of newsprint from Ellery’s study ended that, and Level Two of anticipation went the way of the first.
    Level Three was the wishful-thinking one, belonging as it did to the dream-of-glory family — of warty frogs turning into genuine handsome princes, of six-cent stock certificates suddenly quoted at &785. Anticipation on this third level, as it applied to Ellery’s current plight, would have the voice of his typewriter soaring out of this world (away from Centre Street, or a private case, or an item in the newspaper) … high, high out of this world into the interplanetary spaces of Pure Mind … the voice bespeaking a new idea, a new twist, an Original. A sealed-room answer, perhaps, which no one had thought of before. A murderer with motive as deviously obscure as his logic was brilliantly clear to the all-seeing Ellery in the tale. Or the story might be The One, the ultimate case, the book for the books, satisfying on all counts to all critics, to the author himself — and, of course, to the Inspector. For Level Three was a split level, whose impossible creation would bring joy even to an old man who knew how impossible it was.
    But … listening to the inhabited silence, smelling the bitterness of coffee too long warming in the pot and of air blue-fogged by too much tobacco in a room dead-still with failure, Inspector Queen felt the bottom go out of his Level Three and the silly disappointment invade his shoulders, which it bowed.
    The old gentleman crossed his living room to the son’s study doorway and stood there looking in at the long limp ingrown figure at the desk — slumping as it had slumped yesterday, and the day (and week) before, and as it would likely slump tomorrow, at that mute, reproachful typewriter. Then Ellery turned his silvery eyes (tarnished now) from the newspaper, his head not moving, his spine remaining slack and hopeless, and in a voice as warm as ever (but tired as ever, too) said, ‘Hello, Dad. Anything happen downtown today?’ And this was simply another way of saying, Because nothing