The Last Woman in His Life

1. The First Life

And so Ellery stood there, watching the BOAC jet take the Scot away.

He was still standing alone on his island when a hand touched his.

He turned around and it was, of all people, Inspector Queen.

“El,” his father said, squeezing his arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

The old boy always comes through, Ellery thought over his second cup in the airport restaurant.

“Son, you can’t monkey around in this business without once in a while running into the back of your own hand,” the Inspector said. “It didn’t have to happen this way. You let yourself get involved with the guy. If I allowed myself that kind of foolishness I’d have had to toss my shield in years ago. Human flesh can’t stand it.”

Ellery raised his hand as if the other were on the Bible. “So help me Hannah, I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Having said this, he found his glance coming to rest on Benedict and Marsh, in man-to-man conversation at the other side of the dining room.

All men, Shaw said, mean well.

Not excluding Ellery. What was this but the familiar Chance Encounter? Time lines converging for the moment, a brief nostalgia, then everyone on his way and no harm done?

Had he but known.

It began, as such apparently meaningless reunions do, with grips, grins, and manly warmth. The pair immediately accepted Ellery’s invitation to move over to the Queen table. They had not laid eyes on him, and vice versa, since Harvard.

To Inspector Queen, Marsh was just a citizen named Marsh. But he had certainly heard of Benedict — Johnny-B to the world of jet, a charter member of Raffles, fixed star of the lady columnists, crony of nobility, habitué of Monaco, Kitzbühel, and the yachting isles of Greece. January might find Benedict at the winter festival in Málaga; February in Garmisch-Partenkirchen; March in Bloemfontein for the national games; April at the Songkran Festival in Chiangmai; May in Copenhagen for the royal ballet; June at Epsom Downs for the English Oaks and at Newport and Cork for the transatlantic yacht races; July at Henley and Bayreuth; August at Mystic for the Outdoor Art Festival; September in Luxembourg for the wine; October in Turin for the auto show; November at Madison Square Garden for the horse show; and December at Makaha Beach for the surfing championships. These were only typical; Johnny-B had a hundred other entertainments up his sleeve. Ellery had always thought of him as a run-for-your-life man without the pathological stop-watch.

John Levering Benedict III toiled not (toil, he liked to argue, was man’s silliest waster of time), neither did he spin except in the social whirl. He was charming without the obvious streak of rot that ran through his set, a fact that never palled on the press assigned to the Beautiful People. He was even handsome, a not common attribute of his class (in whom the vintage tended to sour) — on the slight side, below-average tall, with fine fair hair women adored stroking, and delicate hands and feet. He was, of course, sartorially ideal; year after year he sauntered onto the Ten Best-Dressed list. There was something anciently Grecian about him, a to-the-bone beauty as fine as the texture of his hair.

Johnny-B’s paternal grandfather had staked out a stout chunk of the Olympic Peninsula and the timberlands around Lake Chelan to become one of the earliest lumber barons of the Pacific Northwest. His father had invested in shipping, piling Pelion on Ossa — that is to say, according to the gossip, leaving the difficulty of spending the resultant riches to Johnny. In Johnny’s set it was often pointed out that with a fortune in the multimillions the feat could not easily be done; that past a certain point great wealth is hard to redistribute. That Johnny tried manfully is a matter of public record. Alimony apparently made mere dents, only enough to bruise; he had just divorced his third wife.

The leash on the runaway tendencies of Johnny Benedict was said to be Al Marsh. Marsh, too, came from a society tree, and he was luxuriously nested in his own right from birth. But he grew up to toil and spin, from choice. With Marsh it was not a question of avarice or anxiety over his wealth; he worked, said those who knew him well, because the life-style of his world bored him. Dilettantism in vacuo had no appeal for him. He had taken top honors at Harvard Law, gone on to serve a brilliant apprenticeship to a United States Supreme Court justice, and emerged into the cynical realities of Washington and New York to found a law firm of his own that, with the aid of his family’s influence and connections, quietly acquired a sterling clientele and a hallmark reputation. He had offices in both cities.

Experts in such matters nominated Marsh one of the matrimonial catches of any season whatever. He was unfailingly attractive to women, whom he handled with the same tact he brought to his practice of law, and not only because he was elusive. He was a bigger man than Benedict, darkly rugged, with a smashed nose from his college wrestling days, a jaw that looked as if it had been mined in Colorado, and a naturally squinty set to the eyes — “the Marlboro type,” Johnny called him affectionately — who seemed born to saddle horses and foreign cars. He had a fondness for both which he indulged when he could find the time, and a passion for flying; he piloted his own plane with a grim devotion that could only be explained by the fact that his father had died in one.

As so often happens in the case of men to whom women respond, other men did not take to Marsh easily. Some called it his aloofness, others his reserve, others his “standoffishness”; whatever it was, it caused Marsh to have a very small circle of friends. Johnny Benedict was one of the few.

Their relationship was not altogether personal. Johnny had inherited from his father the services of an ancient and prestigious law firm which had handled three generations of Benedict investments; but for the management of his personal affairs he relied on Marsh.

“Of course you just flew in from the moon,” Ellery said. “It’s about the only place, from what I hear, you’ve never been.”

“Matter of fact, I got off the jet from London fifteen minutes ago, and Al here got off with me,” Benedict said. “We had some business in London, and th-then there was that auction at S-Sotheby’s.”

“Which of course you had to attend.”

“Please,” Marsh said in a pained way. “Amend the auxiliary verb. I know of no law that compels a man to drop what Johnny just dropped for that Monet.”

Benedict laughed. “Aren’t you always lecturing me about spending my m-money so I’ve a fighting chance for a profit?” He not only stammered, he had difficulty with his r’s, giving his speech a definite charm. It was hard to see a rapacious capitalist in a man who pronounced it “pwofit.”

“Are you the guy who bought that thing?” Inspector Queen exclaimed. “Paid all that loot for a hunk of old canvas and a few francs’ worth of paint?”

“Don’t tell us what you got it for, Johnny,” Ellery said. “I can’t retain figures like that. I suppose you’re going to convert it into a dartboard for your game room, or something equally kicky?”

Marsh signaled for the waiter. “You’ve been listening to Johnny’s detractors. Another round, please. He really knows art.”

“I really do,” Benedict said, pronouncing it “weally.” “So help m-me Ripley. I’d like you to see my c-collection sometime.” He added politely, “You, too, Inspector Queen.”

“Thanks, but include me out,” the Inspector said. “My son calls me a cultural barbarian. Behind my back, of course. He’s too well brought up to say it frontwards.”

“As for me, Johnny,” Ellery said, scowling at pater, “I don’t believe I could bear it. I’ve never quite adjusted to the unequal distribution of wealth.”

“How about the unequal distribution of brains?” Benedict retorted. “From what I’ve read about you and the Glory Guild case, not to m-mention all those other mental miracles you bring off, you’re a second cousin of Einstein’s.” Something in Ellery’s face drove the banter from Benedict’s voice. “Have I said s-something?”

“Ellery’s fagged,” his father said quickly. “The Guild case was a tough one, and just before that he’d been on a round-the-world research trip in some far-out places where there’s no charge for the bedbugs or trots, and that took the starch out of his hide. As a matter of fact, I’ve some vacation time coming, and we were thinking of taking off for a couple of weeks of peace and quiet somewhere.”

“Ask Johnny,” Marsh said. “He knows all the places, especially the ones that aren’t listed.”

“No, thanks,” Ellery said. “Not Johnny’s places.”

“You’ve got the w’ong idea about me, Ellery,” Benedict protested. “What’s today?”

“Monday.”

“No, the date.”

“March twenty-third.”

“Well, just before I flew to London — on the nineteenth, if you want to check — I was in Valencia for the Festival of St. Joseph. W-wild? Before that I attended the Vienna Spring Fair, and before that — the third, I think — I was in Tokyo for the dollie festival. How’s that? C-cultural, wouldn’t you say? Non-wastrel? Al, am I bragging again?”

“Brag on, Johnny,” Marsh said. “That kind of self-puff helps your image. God knows it can use help.”

Ellery remarked, “Dad and I were thinking of something less, ah, elaborate.”

“Fresh air, long walks, fishing,” Inspector Queen said. “Ever go fishing, Mr. Benedict? I mean in a mountain stream all by your lone, with a rod that didn’t cost three hundred dollars? The simple pleasures of the poor, that’s what we’re after.”

“Then you may call me Doc, Inspector, because I have just the prescription for you both.” Benedict glanced at Marsh. “Are you with it, Al?”

“Ahead of you,” Marsh chuckled. “A rowboat gets you a cabin cruiser Ellery doesn’t know.”

“Know?” Ellery said. “Know what?”

“I own a place up in New England,” Johnny Benedict said, “that very few people are aware I h-have. Not a bit doggy, plenty of w-woods, an unpolluted stream stocked with you name it — and I’ve fished it with a spruce pole I cut and trimmed myself, Inspector, and had splendid luck — and a guest cottage about a quarter of a mile from the main h-house that’s as private as one of d-dear Ari’s deals. It’s all terribly heimisch, Ellery, and I know you and your f-father would enjoy it. You’re welcome to use the cottage for as long as you like. I give you my oath no one will bother you.”

“Well,” Ellery began, “I don’t know what to say...”

“I do,” the Inspector said promptly. “Thank you!”

“I mean, where in New England?”

Benedict and Marsh exchanged amused glances again. “Smallish town,” Benedict said. “Doubt if you’ve heard of it, Ellery. Of no c-consequence whatsoever. W’ightsville.”

“Wightsville?” Ellery stopped. “Wrightsville? You, Johnny? Own property up there?”

“For years and years.”

“But I never knew!”

“Told you. I’ve kept it top-hush. Bought it through a dummy, just so I could have a place to let my hair d-down when I want to get away from it all, which is oftener than you’d think.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny,” Ellery said, beating his breast. “I’ve been an absolute stinker.”

“It’s modest — bourgeois, in fact. Down my great-grandfather’s alley. He w-was a carpenter, by the way.”

“But why Wrightsville, of all places?”

Benedict grinned. “You’ve advertised it enough.”

“Well, I swan. Wrightsville happens to be my personal prescription for what periodically ails me.”

“As if he didn’t know,” Marsh said. “He’s followed your adventures, Ellery, the way Marcus Antonius followed Caesar’s. Johnny’s especially keen on your Wrightsville yarns. Keeps checking them for mistakes.”

“This, gentlemen, is going to be the resumption of a beautiful friendship,” Ellery said. “You sure we wouldn’t be putting you out, Johnny?”

They went through the time-honored ritual of protest and reassurance, shook hands all around, and that evening a messenger brought an envelope that contained two keys and a scribbled note:

The Queens set down at Wrightsville Airport a few minutes past noon the next day.

The trouble with Wrightsville — and Wrightsville had developed trouble, in Ellery’s view — was that it had perfidiously kept step with the twentieth century.

Where his favorite small town was concerned Ellery was a mossback conservative, practically a reactionary. He was all for Thursday night band concerts in Memorial Park, with the peanut and popcorn whistles chirping tweet-tweet like excited birds, the streets lined with gawky boys ogling self-conscious girls and people from the outlying farms in town in their town-meetin’ best; and Saturday the marketing day, with the black-red mills of Low Village shut down and High Village commerce swinging.

He felt a special attachment for the Square (which was round), with its periphery of two-story frame buildings (except for the Hollis Hotel, which towered five stories, and Upham House, a three-and-attic Revolutionary-era inn); in its mathematical center the time-treated memorial to Jezreel Wright, who had founded Wrightsville on an abandoned Indian site in 1701 — a bronze statue long since turned to verdigris and festooned with so many bird droppings it looked like a modern sculpture, and at its feet a trough which had watered half a dozen generations of Wrightsville horseflesh. The Square was like a wheel with five spokes leading from its hub: State Street, Lower Main, Washington, Lincoln, Upper Dade; the grandest of these being State with its honor guard of century-old trees, the repository of the gilt-domed red-brick Town Hall and the County Court House building (how many times had he walked up the alley to the side entrance that opened into the Wrightsville police department!), the Carnegie Library across the street (where it was still possible to find books by Henty, Richard Harding Davis, and Joseph Hergesheimer!), the Chamber of Commerce building, the Wrightsville Light & Power Company, and the Northern State Telephone Company; and far from least, at the State Street entrance to Memorial Park, the Our Boys Memorial and the American Legion bandstand. About the Square in those days had been displayed some of the finest fruit of Wrightsville’s heritage — the tiny gold John F. Wright, Pres. on the dusty windows of the Wrightsville National Bank, the old Bluefield Store, the “Minikin Road” on the street marker visible from the corner window of the Bon Ton, and half a dozen other names passed down from the founding families.

Upper Whistling Avenue, which crossed State Street a block northeast of the Square, led up to Hill Drive, where some of the oldest residential properties had stood (even older ones, great square black-shuttered clapboard affairs, most gone to pot even in Ellery’s earliest acquaintance, occupied the farther reaches of State Street). Upper Dade ran northwest up to North Hill Drive, which had been taken over by the estates of Wrightsville’s nouveaux riches (a nouveau riche, in the view of the Wrights, Bluefields, Dades, Granjons, Minikins, Livingstons, et al., being anyone who had made his pile after the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes).

Most of this was gone. The store fronts of the Square were like the façades of the commercial buildings fronting Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley running out of Hollywood, one of Ellery’s favorite abominations — lofty modernisms in glass, stucco, redwood, and neon absurdly dwarfing the mean little stores that cowered behind them. The Hollis, which risked a new marquee just before World War II, had recklessly undertaken a complete face-lift, coming out contemporary and (to his mind) disgusting. The New York Department Store and the High Village Pharmacy had vanished, and the Bon Ton had taken over the entire plinth between Washington and Lincoln Streets and rebuilt from the ground up what to Ellery’s sickened eye was a miniature Korvette’s. The Atomic War Surplus Outlet Store was of course no more, and the eastern arc of the Square was almost all new.

On the high ground to the north, matters were even worse. Lovely old Hill Drive had fallen before the invading developers (a few houses had been saved, after a last-ditch battle by the Landmarks Commission of the Wrightsville Historical Society, as “historic sites”); the old Hill grandeur was today a solid rank of high-rise apartment buildings, frowning down on the town below like concentration camp guards. Many of the extensive estates on North Hill Drive had been sold and the section rezoned for one-acre stands of middle-income private homes. Wrightsville’s humbler suburbs mushroomed to beyond the airport, where whole new communities with regional monickers like New Village and Mahogany Acres had sprouted. At least thirty-five farms Ellery had known and cherished were extinct. There were new factories by the dozen, chiefly neat little plants by the wayside making electronic parts on subcontract to the giants working for the Department of Defense. Even Twin Hills and Sky Top Road, to which the well-to-do had inevitably fled, were beginning to grow tentacles.

And most of the old families had withered away, or the culls of their descendants had given up, hacked off their roots, and rerooted elsewhere.

Still, to Ellery it was Wrightsville. The cobbled streets of Low Village remained, the poor being America’s last caretakers of old things. The Willow River that serviced the mills ran as yellow and red and turquoise as ever without noticeable effect on the immortal old willows and alders on its banks that sucked on its poisonous brew. Al Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor and the refaced Wrightsville Record building on Lower Main off the Square stood their ground. And the surrounding hillsides still beamed benign, with the muscular Mahoganies beyond promising to withstand any onslaught of man except a saturation attack by hydrogen bombs, which was unlikely, Wrightsville being too unimportant (the town kept reassuring itself) in the scheme of things.

So, to Ellery’s eye, Wrightsville with all its flaws was a still-viable Shangri-la.

He hired a Cougar at the car-rental agency in the airport and the Queens, gladly gulping lungfuls of genuine air, drove out to Benedict’s hideaway.

From the way Benedict had talked Ellery expected a dilettante twenty or thirty acres. They found instead a two-hundred-acre spread of timber, water, and uncut pasture halfway between Wrightsville and Shinn Corners, in a farmed-out section of the valley where it began to creep up into the northwestern hills. The property was barred off by tall steel fencing and posted against hunting, fishing, and trespassing generally, in large and threatening signs bolted to the fence.

“Used to be all dairy farms out this way,” Ellery complained as he got out to open the main gate. “The sweetest herds you ever saw.”

“Well, don’t blame Benedict,” his father said. “They were probably given up before he bought them out. Small farms are going out of business all over New England.”

“Still,” Ellery carped, and he got back into the car with a slam.

The dirt road took them past the main house, which was a few hundred yards in from the entrance, apparently one of the original farmhouses of the property, a spready old two-story clapboard, with half a dozen chimneys, that appeared to house twelve or fifteen rooms. A quarter of a mile farther in they came to the guest house, a five-room Cape Cod-type cottage with a recent look. It lay deep in the woods, in a glade that had been hacked out to let the sun through. As they got out of the Cougar they heard a brook that seemed to be in a hurry and was making a great deal of noise about it.

“Sounds as if we could cast a line right out the bedroom window,” the Inspector said. “Man, what a way to live!”

“If somebody else bakes the bread,” Ellery said sourly.

“Ellery, what in hell is the matter with you?” his father cried. “If you think I’m going to put up with a prima donna for two weeks...! We’d better have this out right now. It was plain damn decent of your friend to offer you this place. The least you can do if you feel like bellyaching is keep it to yourself. Or so help me I’ll take the next plane back to New York!”

It was a long time since Inspector Queen had talked to him that way, and it so astounded Ellery that he backed off and shut up.

They found the inside of the cottage as heimisch as Benedict had advertised. No Park Avenue decorator had been at work here. The furniture — Ellery checked the labels — came from A. A. Gilboon’s in High Village, and the household fixtures and hardware had been purchased at Clint Fosdick’s or Hunt & Keckley’s, or both. “Bon Ton” was written all over the rest. It was a homely, cheerful little place that was long on chintz, “peasant” ware, and rag rugs, and had a fireplace in the living room that made his palms itch for the poker. The shelves held books; there was a stereo and a collection of cartridge tapes; and, tucked away in a corner as if to say there was no law requiring its use, a portable color TV.

The Inspector volunteered to unpack and get them settled while Ellery drove down into town to supplement the larder. They had found plenty of steaks, chops, and poultry in the freezer and a generous supply of canned goods, but they needed perishables — milk, bread, butter, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables.

“Pick up something, too, son,” the Inspector said, “at what’s-his-name’s, Dunc MacLean’s. Rye, Scotch, vodka, anything to warm the bones.”

“Unnecessary.” Ellery waved. “You missed that retractable bar in the living room, dad. It’s stocked with everything from absinthe to zubrovka.”

He passed up Logan’s Market on Slocum between Upper Whistling and Washington — he was known there — in favor of the supermarket across the street, where he might expect to go unnoticed. As it was, he had to avert his face to avoid two women he thought he recognized. The trip into town depressed him further; the changes were too numerous and, to his eye, all for the worse. He was glad to get back to the cottage, where he found his father in slacks and an open-neck shirt lolling before a fire with a glass of brown waters in his fist.

“Yes, siree,” the Inspector said happily, “this is the life.”

The old man gave Ellery his head. He neither pushed nor pulled, contenting himself with a suggestion here or there and saying nothing if Ellery begged off. On Wednesday the Inspector spent most of the day fishing (in spite of Benedict’s boast about cutting his own spruce pole, the old man found a roomful of sporting equipment that included some superb rods) and hauled in a mess of gorgeous trout for their dinner. Ellery spent that day on his spine’s end, listening to Mozart and Bach, with a fillip of Tijuana Brass, and occasionally snoozing off. That night he slept the night through without benefit of sleeping pill or a dream he could recall on awakening — his first unbroken sleep in weeks; he had been living on nightmares. On Thursday the Queens explored the property, tramping over most of Benedict’s two hundred acres and coming back ravenous; they devoured a couple of prodigious steaks Ellery charcoal-broiled on the backyard barbecue along with some husky baked potatoes topped with his favorite sour cream and chives. The Inspector pretended not to notice that Ellery polished his plate — the old man had not seen him finish a dinner for weeks.

Ellery had just turned on the dishwasher when he was startled by a jarring buzz. It seemed to come from what looked like an intercom. He snatched the receiver and said, “Who the devil is this?”

“Johnny,” Benedict’s voice said. “How’s the patient?”

“Johnny? I’m just beginning to unlax.” Had Benedict followed him up? “Oh, I see, this thing is hooked up to the main house. Two-way?”

“Yes. Ellery, I know I promised not to b-bother you—”

“When did you get in?”

“Late this afternoon. Look, there’s s-something I have to tell you. Is it all right if I walk down and palaver for a minute?”

“Don’t be a horse’s patoot.”

Ellery hung up and went to the bedroom the Inspector was using. The old man was just getting into his pajamas.

“Dad, Benedict’s here. Wants to talk to us. Or to me. He’s coming over from the main house now. Do you want to sit in on this?”

They looked at each other.

“You sound mysterious,” Inspector Queen said.

“I’m not looking for trouble, you and God believe you me,” Ellery said. “But there’s a smell about this.”

“All right. But I hope you’re wrong, son.”

Ten minutes later Ellery admitted a preoccupied Johnny-B — preoccupied, and something more. Worried? Whatever it is, Ellery assured himself, I’m staying out of it with both feet.

“Come in, Johnny.”

“Forgive the pajamas and robe, Mr. Benedict,” the Inspector said. “I had a strenuous day pacing off your property. I was just going to bed.”

“Drink, Johnny?”

“Not just now, thanks.” Benedict sank into a chair and looked around. His smile was perfunctory. Something was wrong, all right. The Queens did not glance at each other. “Like it up here?”

“I want to thank you properly, Johnny. I’m really beholden. This is exactly what I needed.”

“Ellery and me both,” the Inspector said.

Benedict’s fine hand fluttered. Here it comes, Ellery thought. “Ellery?”

“Yes, Johnny.”

“What I want to tell you. I’m h-having guests this w-weekend.”

“Oh?”

“No, no, I’m not booting you out! They’ll all stay at the main house. Acres of room there. Al Marsh is due up tomorrow, and Al’s secretary — girl named Susan Smith — is coming Saturday evening. Also due tomorrow—” Benedict hesitated, made a face, and shrugged “—my three exes.”

“Ex-wives?”

“Ex-wives.”

“Excuse me for gawking, Johnny. What is this, Homecoming Week?”

The Inspector decided to improve on the light note. “I’ve always read what an interesting life you lead, Mr. Benedict, but this is ridiculous!”

They all laughed, Benedict weakly. “I wish it were as funny as that. Well. The point is, I don’t want you people to be in any way discombobulated. There’s nothing social or nostalgic about this get-together. Strictly b-business, if you know w-what I mean.”

“I don’t, but that’s all right, Johnny. You don’t owe us an explanation.”

“But I can’t have you thinking I’m an Indian giver. You won’t be disturbed, I give you my w-word.”

It all seemed so unnecessary that Ellery had to fight down his curiosity. They were a long way from the Harvard Yard, and he realized suddenly that he knew very little about Johnny-B that mattered. He had thought the invitation genuine. But had Benedict had an ulterior purpose...?

Having given his word, Benedict stopped talking. He seemed hung up on a problem. The silence became depressing.

“Something wrong, Johnny?” Ellery asked. And cursed himself for having opened the door.

“Does it sh-show that much? I think I’ll take that drink now, Ellery. No, I’ll make it myself.” Benedict jumped up and activated the bar. It was of the rotating type, swiveling out of the wall. He poured himself a stiff Scotch on the rocks and when he came back he said abruptly, “I have a favor to ask of both of you. I hate asking favors, I don’t know why... but this one I have to.”

“We’re under obligation to you, Mr. Benedict,” the Inspector said, smiling, “not the other way around.”

“There’s hardly anything within reason we could refuse you, Johnny,” Ellery said. “What’s the problem?”

Benedict set his glass down. He pulled a long single sheet of white paper from his breast pocket. It was folded in three. He unfolded it.

“For the record, this is my last w-will and testament.” He said this in an oddly chill tone; to Ellery’s sensitized ears it sounded like a sentence in a capital crime. Benedict felt his pockets. “I’ve simply got to start carrying a pen,” he said. “May I borrow yours, Ellery?” He stooped over the coffee table. “I’ll sign this and date it, and I ask you b-both to w-witness. Will you?”

“Naturally.”

“Of course, Mr. Benedict.”

They noted how he concealed the holograph text with his forearm as he wrote. When he was finished he flapped the sheet over so that only the bottom lay exposed. He indicated where the Queens were to sign, and they did so. He returned Ellery’s pen, produced a long envelope, folded the will, slipped it into the envelope, sealed it, hesitated, and suddenly offered it to Inspector Queen.

“Could I ask you to k-keep this for me, Inspector? For a short w-while?”

“Well... sure, Mr. Benedict.”

“I don’t blame you for looking kind of puzzled,” Benedict said in a hearty way. “But there’s no big deal about this. Marsh is going to draw up a formal will for me over the weekend — that’s why his secretary is coming — but I wanted something down on paper in the meantime.” He laughed; it seemed forced. “I’m getting to the age when life looks more and more uncertain. Here today and here tomorrow — m-maybe. Right?”

They laughed dutifully, and when Benedict finished his Scotch he said good night and left. He seemed relieved.

Ellery was not. He shut the front door carefully and said, “Dad, what do you make of all that?”

“A lot of question marks.” The Inspector stared at the blank envelope in his hands. “With the money he’s got — and lawyers like Marsh — it’s a cinch he’s had a formal will practically from birth. So this thing he wrote out in longhand that we just witnessed supersedes the previous one.”

“Not merely supersedes it, dad,” Ellery said. “Changes it, or why a new will at all? The question is, what does it change it from, and what does it change it to?”

“Neither of which is your business,” his father pointed out.

“This obviously involves his ex-wives,” Ellery murmured; he was back at his pacing, the Inspector noted uneasily. “Business weekend... No, I don’t care for the smell of this.”

“I can see I’ll have to put off that shuteye for a while.” The Inspector went to the bar. “I think you can use one, son. What’ll it be?”

“Nothing. No, thanks.”

“Who are the lucky ladies?”

“What?”

“The women he married. Do you know?”

“Of course I know. The Benedict Saga’s always fascinated me. His first wife came out of a chorus line in Vegas. A bosomy redhead named Marcia Kemp, a sex-pot who was thick with some really rough characters until Johnny plucked her out of the state and made an honest woman of her.”

“Marcia Kemp.” The old man nodded. “I remember now. That one lasted — how long was it? Three months?”

“Closer to four. Mrs. Benedict number two was Audrey Weston, a blonde with acting ambitions who didn’t have the talent to make it on Broadway or in Hollywood. She gets a small part now and then, mostly in TV commercials. But Johnny evidently thought she was Oscar or Emmy material — for five or six months, anyway.”

“And number three?” the Inspector asked, sipping his Chivas.

“Number three,” Ellery said, “I have particular reason to recall.” He was still pacing. “Alice Tierney. The reason I paid special attention to Alice Tierney is that I’d read she came from Wrightsville. One of the columnists. Naturally that titillated me, although the name Tierney was unfamiliar to me. Or maybe that’s why. Anyway, it seems that this Tierney girl — in her news photos a rather plain-looking brunette — was a trained nurse. Johnny ran his Maserati or whatever he was driving then off a country road — it must have been around Wrightsville somewhere, though the piece didn’t say — and was laid up for a long stretch at his ‘country home,’ the story said, which I realize now must have been the main house here. If Wrightsville ever came into the stories I missed it, which is unlikely; my hunch is that Johnny paid one of his patented quid pro quos to keep the Wrightsville hideaway here out of the columns. At any rate, Nurse Tierney was hired on a sleep-in basis to take care of her famous patient, and enforced proximity to a female for several weeks, even a plain one, was apparently more than Johnny could resist. After the usual Benedict-type courtship he married the Tierney girl. That lasted the longest — nine and a half months. He was legally unhitched only a month or so ago.”

“A redheaded Vegas mob girl, a New York no-talent blonde actress, a brunette plain-Jane small-town nurse,” the Inspector mused. “Doesn’t sound as if they have much in common.”

“They do, though. They’re all huge women. Amazons.”

“Oh, one of those. The little guy who keeps shooting for Mount Everest. Must give fellows like Benedict a sense of power, like when they get behind the wheel of a souped-up car.”

“My innocent old man,” Ellery said with a grin. “I’ll have to give you a couple of sex-and-psychiatry books appropriately marked... And he’s asked all three up for the weekend, along with his lawyer, for a change of will — or at least he says so — and he’s kind of nervous about it all. You know something, dad?”

“What now?”

“I don’t like it. One bit.”

The Inspector brandished his glass. “And you know what, sonny? You’re going to quit this racing up and down like that road runner in the commercials and you’re going to sit down here and watch the Thursday night movie — right now — and this weekend you’ll keep your schnozz strictly out of your friend Benedict’s affairs — whatever they are!”

Ellery did his best, which faltered only once. On Friday evening after dinner he felt the healthful need to walk. Making an instant diagnosis, the Inspector said, “I’ll join you.” When they got outdoors Ellery turned in the direction of the hunted like a yellow hound dog. His father seized the quivering paw. “This way,” he said firmly. “We’ll go listen to the music of the brook.” “Poetry really doesn’t become you, dad. If I’d wanted to communicate with Euterpe I’d have used the stereo.” “Ellery, you’re not going down to that house!” “Now come on, dad. I’m not going to barge in on them or anything like that.” “Damn it all to hell!” shouted the old man, and he stamped back into the cottage.

When Ellery got back his father said anxiously, “Well?”

“Well what, dad?”

“What’s going on down there?”

“I thought you weren’t interested.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. I said we oughtn’t to get involved.”

“House is lit up like Times Square. No sounds of girlish laughter, however. It can’t be much of a party.”

The Inspector grunted. “At least you had the sense to turn around and come back.”

But they were not to remain uninvolved. A few minutes past noon on Saturday — the old man was about to lie down for a nap — there was a knock on the door and Ellery opened it to a very tall blonde girl with the bony structure and empty face of a fashion model.

“I’m Mrs. Johnny Benedict the Two,” she said in a drawl that sounded Method-Southern to Ellery’s ears.

“Of course. You’re Audrey Weston,” Ellery said.

“That’s my professional name. May I come in?”

Ellery glanced at his father and stood aside. The Inspector came forward quickly. “I’m Richard Queen,” he said. He had always had an eye for pretty girls, and this one was prettier than most, although in a blank sort of way. Her face looked as if it had been stamped out of a mold, like a doll’s.

“Inspector Queen, isn’t it? Johnny’s told us you two were staying at the guest cottage — practically threatened to knock our heads together if we didn’t leave you alone. So, of course, here I am.” She turned her gray, almost colorless, eyes on Ellery. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink, dahling?”

She used her eyes and hands a great deal. Someone had evidently told her that she was the Tallulah Bankhead type, and she had never got over it.

Ellery gave her a Jack Daniels and a chair, and she leaned back with her long legs crossed and a long cigaret smoldering in the long fingers with the long fingernails that held the glass. She was dressed in a floppy silk blouse in fashionably wild colors and a calfskin skirt that was more mini than most, to her cost, for it revealed shanks rather than thighs. A matching leather jacket was draped over her shoulders. “And aren’t you wondering why I disobeyed Johnny?” she drawled.

“I was sure you’d get around to it, Miss Weston,” Ellery said, smiling. “I ought to tell you right off that I’m here with my father at Johnny’s kind invitation to get away from problems. This is a problem, isn’t it?”

“If it is—” the Inspector began.

“My evening gown is missing,” Audrey Weston said.

“Missing?” the Inspector said. “A dress?”

“What do you mean missing?” Ellery said, leaning into the wind. “Mislaid?”

“Gone.”

“Stolen?”

“You want to hear about it, dahling?”

“Oh. Well. As long as you’re here...”

“That gown set me back a bundle. It’s all black sequins, an Ohrbach copy of a Givenchy original, with an absolutely illegal back and a V-front open to the bel — navel. And man, I want it back! Sure it was stolen. You don’t just mislay a gown like that. At least I don’t.”

Her speech had been accompanied by so many vehement gestures and poses that Ellery felt tired for her.

“It probably has the simplest explanation, Miss Weston. When did you see it last?”

“I wore it to dinner last night — Johnny likes formality with women around, and when in Rome, y’know... Even if the Roman is your ex.”

So she expected to get something out of Johnny-B this weekend. Probably all three of them... Ellery tucked the surmise away. As if he were on the case. Case? Which case? There was no case. Or was there?

“I hung it in my closet when I went to bed last night, and I noticed it hanging there this morning when I dressed. But when I came up from brunch to change my outfit the evening gown wasn’t hanging there any more. I ransacked the room, but it was gone.”

“Who else is staying at the house?”

“Al Marsh, Johnny, of course, and the two other exes, that Kemp tramp and Miss Yokel from Wrightsville here, Alice Tierney, and what he ever saw in her—! Oh, and two characters from town who make like a maid and a butler, but they went home last night after they cleaned up. They were back this morning and I asked both of them about my gown. They looked at me as if I were out of my everloving mind.”

If one of them is Morris Hunker, baby, Ellery chuckled to himself, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

“Did you ask any of the others?”

“Where do you think I’m from, Dumbsville? What good would that have done, dahling? The one who lifted it would only deny it, and the others... oh, it’s just too embarrassing! Do you suppose I could impose on you to, well, find it for me without raising a fuss? I’d go poking around Marcia’s and Alice’s bedrooms, but I’d be sure to get caught, and I don’t want Johnny getting, I mean thinking, well, you know what I mean, Mr. Queen.”

For the sake of the amenities he was willing to concede that he did, although in truth he did not. As for the Inspector, he was watching Ellery like a psychiatrist observing if the patient would curl up in a fetal position or spring to the attack.

“Nothing else of yours was taken?”

“No, that was it. Just the gown.”

“Seems to me,” Inspector Queen said, “either Miss Kemp or Miss Tierney borrowed it for some reason, and if you’d just ask them—”

“I can see you don’t know anything about Paris-type gowns, Inspector,” the model-actress drawled. “They’re like Rembrandts or something. They couldn’t wear it without giving themselves away. So why take it? Y’know? That’s why it’s such a mystery.”

“How about the maid?” Ellery asked.

“That tub? She’s five-foot-two and must weigh two hundred.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Miss Weston,” he said.

She played her exit scene seductively and with much emotion, sweeping out at last after half a dozen more “dahlings” and a long trailing goodbye arm, and leaving him with the scent of Madame Rochas Perfume for Ladies. The moment she was gone the Inspector barked, “Ellery, you’re not going to start poking around for some stupid evening gown and spoil your vacation — and mine!”

“But I just promised—”

“So you’re unreliable,” the Inspector snorted, settling down with the Wrightsville Record Ellery had picked up in High Village.

“I thought you were going to take a nap.”

“Who could sleep now? That phony knocked it all out of me. Now that’s that, Ellery. Understand?”

But that was not that. At thirteen minutes past one the door called again, and Ellery opened to a vision in flesh, curves, and genuine red hair — a rather large vision, to be sure. She was almost as tall as Ellery, with the build of a back-row showgirl: long-muscled legs, long dancer’s thighs, and a bust of Mansfieldian proportions. She was dressed for the greatest effect, in briefs and a halter, with a coat loosely open over all; it showed a great deal of her. Her flaming hair was modestly bound in a scarf.

“Marcia Kemp,” Ellery said.

“Now how in Christ’s name did you know that?” The redhead had a deep, coarse, New York voice — from the heart of the Bronx, Ellery guessed. Her green eyes were glittery with anger.

“I’ve had an advance description, Miss Kemp,” Ellery said with a grin. “Come in. Meet my father, Inspector Queen of the New York City police department.”

“Grandpa, fuzz is just what I need,” the Kemp woman exclaimed. “You’ll never guess what’s happened to me. In Johnny-B’s own house, mind you!”

“What was that?” Ellery asked, ignoring his father’s look.

“Some creep heisted my wig.”

“Your wig?” the Inspector repeated involuntarily.

“My green one! That piece of shrubbery set me back a whole hundred and fifty bucks. I go down to breakfast this morning, or lunch, or whatever the hell it was, and when I get back... no wig! Can you tie that? It left me so goddam uptight... I need a shot. Straight bourbon, Queenie baby, and lean on it.”

He poured her enough bourbon to make a Kentucky colonel stagger. She tossed it down as if it were a milk shake and held the glass out for more. He refilled it. This one she nursed in her powerful hands.

“You last saw this wig of yours when, Miss Kemp?”

“I wore it last night to dinner along with my green lamé evening gown. Johnny likes his women to do the dress-up bit. It was still on my dressing table when I went downstairs this morning. When I come back it’s gone with the wind. If I didn’t know how Johnny hates a rumble I’d tear those bitches’ luggage limb from limb! Could you find it for me, Ellery? Hush-hush, like? Without Johnny knowing?”

“There’s no chance you mislaid it?” The Inspector, hopefully.

“Gramps, I ask you. How do you mislay a green wig?”

“A dress and a wig,” Ellery yapped after he got rid of the redhead. “Something missing from each of the first two ex-wives. Is it possible that the third—?”

“Son, son,” his father said in not entirely convincing reproof. “You promised.”

“Yes, dad, but you’ll have to admit...”

And indeed Ellery was looking more like his old self, with a near-jaunty bounce to his step and at least a half sparkle in his eye that for some time had been missing altogether. The Inspector consoled himself with the thought that it was likely one of those pesky little problems, with the simplest of explanations, that would keep Ellery harmlessly occupied while time and river washed away the stains left by the Glory Guild case.

So when at midafternoon Ellery suddenly said, “Look, dad, if there’s any logic in all this, the third one ought to be missing something, too. I think I’ll stroll over...,” the Inspector said simply, “I’ll be down at the brook with a rod, son.”

Benedict had had a sixty-foot swimming pool built behind the main house. It was still covered by a winter tarpaulin; but summer furniture had been set out on the flagstoned terrace at the rear of the old farmhouse that he had had laid down in the reconstruction, and there Ellery found Alice Tierney stretched out in a lounging chair, sunning herself. The spring afternoon was warm, with a gusty little breeze, and her cheeks were reddened as if she had been lying there for some time.

The moment he laid eyes on her Ellery recognized her. During one of his trips to Wrightsville he had had to visit the hospital. On that occasion, attending the object of his visit, she had been in a nurse’s cap and uniform — a large girl with a healthy butt, a torso of noble dimensions, and features as plain as Low Village’s cobbles and as agreeable to the eye.

“Miss Tierney. I don’t suppose you remember me.”

“Don’t I just!” she cried, sitting up. “You’re the great Ellery Queen, God’s gift to Wrightsville.”

“You don’t have to be nasty about it,” Ellery said, slipping into a wrought-iron chair.

“Oh, but I mean it.”

“You do? Who calls me that?”

“Lots of people around here.” Her cool blue eyes shimmered in the sun. “Of course, I’ve heard some say the gift comes from the devil, but you’ll find sourpusses everywhere.”

“That’s probably because of the rise in the crime rate since I began coming here. Smoke, Miss Tierney?”

“Certainly not. And you oughtn’t to, either. Oh, futz! There I go again. I can never forget my training.”

She was in mousy slacks and jacket that did nothing for her, and he thought her long straight hair style was exactly wrong for her face and size. But it all tended to dwindle away against her general air of niceness, which he suspected she cultivated with great care. He could understand what Johnny Benedict, with his superficial view of women, had found so appealing about her.

“I’m so glad you decided to come out of your shell,” Alice Tierney went on animatedly. “Johnny threatened us with all sorts of punishment if we didn’t let you strictly alone.”

“I’m still not diving back into the drink. As a matter of fact, I came here for only one reason: to ask what may strike you as a peculiar question.”

“Oh?” She did seem puzzled. “What’s that, Mr. Queen?”

Ellery leaned toward her. “Have you missed anything today?”

“Missed? Like what?”

“Something personal. Say an article of clothing.”

“No...”

“You sure?”

“Well, I suppose something could be... I mean, I haven’t taken inventory.” Alice Tierney laughed, but when he did not laugh back she stopped. “You really mean it, Mr. Queen!”

“I do. Would you mind going to your room right now — quietly, Miss Tierney — and checking over your things? I’d rather no one in the house knows what you’re about.”

She rose, drew a breath, smoothed her jacket, then launched herself toward the house rather like an oversized missile.

Ellery waited with the patience of a thousand such interludes, when a puzzle loomed which gave off no immediate meaning, only a promise for the future.

She was back in ten minutes. “That is queer,” she said, plumping back into the lounge chair. “A pair of my gloves.”

“Gloves?” Ellery looked at her hands. They were big and capable-looking. “What kind of gloves, Miss Tierney?”

“Long evening gloves. White. The only such pair I had with me.”

“You’re sure you had them.”

“I wore them to dinner last night.” The red in her cheeks deepened. “Johnny prefers his women to look, oh, untouchable, I suppose it’s what it is at bottom. He hates slobby-gobs.”

“White evening gloves. Is anything else of yours missing?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You checked?”

“I looked through everything. Why in the world should someone steal a pair of gloves? There’s not much use for evening gloves in Wrightsville. Among the class of people who’d steal, I mean.”

“That, of course, is the problem. Miss Tierney, I’m going to ask you to keep this to yourself. About the theft, and about the fact that I’ve been asking questions.”

“If you say so, of course.”

“By the way, where is everybody?”

“They’re getting ready to drive over to the airport to pick up Al Marsh’s secretary, a Miss Smith. She’s due in at the field at five thirty. Annie and Morris are starting dinner in the kitchen.”

“Morris Hunker?”

“Is there more than one?” Alice Tierney grinned. “You know Morris, I take it.”

“Oh, yes. But who’s Annie?”

“Annie Findlay.”

“Findlay...?”

“Her brother Homer used to run the garage down on Plum Street. You know, where High and Low sort of meet.”

“Homer Findlay and his Drive Urself! For heaven’s sake. How is Homer?”

“Peaceful,” Miss Tierney said. “Cardiac arrest. I closed his eyes in the Emergency Room at WGH six years ago.”

Ellery left, shaking his head at Old Mortality. And other things.

Inspector Queen had taken the Cougar down into town and came back chortling over a find. He had stumbled on a store, new to Ellery, which sold fresh fish and shellfish — “not frozen, mind you, son, you freeze fish, shellfish especially, and you wind up losing half the flavor. Wait till you see what I’ve got planned for the menu tonight.”

“What, dad?”

“I said wait, didn’t I? Don’t be so nosy.”

What his father served that evening was, he said, an “Irish bouillabaisse,” which Ellery found indistinguishable from the Mediterranean variety except that it had been made by an Irishman who left out the saffron — “can’t abide that yellow stuff,” the chef declared. It was delicious, and Ellery gave it its due. But after dinner, when the Inspector suggested they go into town to see “one of those naked movies” (Wrightsville had acquired an art cinema), Ellery grew less communicative.

“Why don’t you go see it, dad? I don’t feel much like a movie tonight, even a naked one.”

“Sometimes I wonder! What’ll you do?”

“Oh, listen to some music. Maybe get potted on Johnny’s slivovitz or akvavit or something.”

“May I live to see the day,” his father grumbled; and, surprisingly, he took off.

There’s libido in the old boy yet, Ellery thought, and blessed it.

He had no intention of communing with Mozart or the three Bs, or the international contents of Benedict’s bar. As soon as the sound of the Cougar died, Ellery slipped a dark jacket over his white turtleneck, rousted a flash from the tool room, left several lights burning in the cottage and a stereo cartridge playing, and stole outside.

There was a new moon, and the darkness was as dark only as dark can be in Wrightsville’s woods. He kept his hand over the light as he walked up the path toward the main house. There was a rawness to the night; he would have welcomed a symphony of peepers, but apparently the season was too early or the weather discouraged them, even though spring was officially a week old. If the Inspector had been present to ask him what he was doing, Ellery could not honestly have answered. He had no idea what he was about, except that he could not get the three thefts out of his head. And since they had taken place in Benedict’s house, he was drawn there like a flower child to a pot party.

There was something maddeningly logical about the thefts. An evening gown, a wig à la mode, and evening gloves. They went together like pieces of a jigsaw. The difficulty was, when they were assembled they represented nothing. The three articles had some value, of course; and, value being relative, theft for a material reason could not be dismissed as a possibility, although the monitor who sat deep in Ellery’s brain kept shaking its infallible little head. The obvious reason, that they had been stolen to be worn, was even less appealing: if the thief had been one of the ex-wives, it meant that she had included one of her own things in order to spread the guilty area, an absurd complexity considering the peculiar nature of the thefts; and if the thief had not been one of the ex-wives but some woman from Wrightsville, where could she wear the stolen finery without becoming suspect?

Morris Hunker he eliminated without a doubt; the old Yankee would not have taken a crust from a sparrow if he were dying of hunger. Annie Findlay, of course, was an unknown quantity to him, and the simple answer might be that the roly-poly sleep-out “maid” had been unable to resist the glittery gown, the fantastic wig, and the — to her — unusual gloves. But Ellery had understood that, like Hunker, Annie hired out for her livelihood to special employers like John Benedict; in a small town like this she could hardly have indulged a regular weakness for other people’s belongings without long since being found out. Besides, lightfingered hired help were practically unknown in Wrightsville. No, Annie as the culprit just didn’t scan.

Then who? If it had been a prowler, surely he could have found far more valuable and negotiable pickings in the Benedict house than a second-hand gown, a green wig, and a pair of women’s evening gloves (undoubtedly soiled). Yet the three women had reported nothing else missing. And certainly if Benedict or Marsh had suffered a loss, he would have heard by this time.

It was the kind of trivial-seeming puzzle that always drove Ellery to distraction.

He circled the house, choosing his path with stealth. The front and the side where the kitchen and pantry must lie showed no lights; evidently Hunker and the Findlay woman had cleaned up after dinner and gone home. But lights blazed onto the terrace through the French doors Benedict had had installed in the living room’s rear wall during his reconstruction of the farmhouse.

Ellery edged onto the patio, keeping to the shadows beyond the lighted area. He chose a position under the branches of a forty-year-old pink dogwood tree very near the house, from where he could see into the living room without being seen. The room must be warm: one of the French doors was ajar. He heard their voices clearly.

They were all there: Benedict, his ex-wives, Marsh, and a girl who could only be Marsh’s secretary, Miss Smith. The secretary was seated at the edge of a sofa, to one side, legs crossed, with a pad on her knee and a pencil poised; she wore a no-nonsense navy blue skirt of medium length, a tailored white blouse, and a white cardigan thrown about her shoulders and buttoned at the neck. There was nothing youthful or even womanly about her; her mechanical makeup gave her horsy face a circus precision; she was, in fact, quite masculine-looking aside from her legs, which were shaped well and surprisingly feminine. She told Ellery something about Marsh. A man who would select a Miss Smith for private secretarial chores could be relied on to reserve his office hours for business purposes exclusively.

Two of the ex-wives seemed dressed for a race, in evening getups that evoked the yachtsman’s starting gun.

Audrey Weston’s blonde beauty was offset by black evening pajamas and a black crepe tunic, with a broad red satin sash tied high above the waist that underscored her breasts, and needle-heeled red satin shoes that added inches to her mainmast height; she wore a bracelet of gold links that looked heavy enough to secure an anchor, and gold coil earrings.

The generally flappy, full-canvas effect of Audrey’s outfit, exciting as it was, barely held its own with Marcia Kemp’s. The redheaded expatriate from Las Vegas had trimmed down to the bare poles; her turquoise evening sheath was so painted to her body that Ellery wondered how she was able to sit down without cracking her hull... and, as a corollary, whether Benedict’s wives numbers two and one had put their heads together in planning their racing strategy. Was the contest fixed?

By contrast, Alice Tierney’s coloring showed darker against the whiteness of her gown and accessories; she looked pure and chaste in it, and very nearly striking. It was as if she realized that she could not by natural endowment outshine her predecessors and so had shrewdly employed a tactic of simplicity.

But if Audrey’s and Marcia’s calculated art and Alice’s calculated artlessness were designed to stir old passions in Benedict’s libido, the effects were not visible to the Queen eye. Outwardly, at least, he was as unmoved by their bountiful charms as a eunuch. If proof of his general contempt for the trio were needed, Ellery found it in Benedict’s attire. The millionaire being so finical about his women, one would expect consistency, or at least noblesse oblige, in the form of a dinner jacket; but while Marsh was suitably in black tie, Benedict was wearing an ordinary brown suit — as if, being Johnny-B, he could afford to flout the conventions he expected of his ex-wives. It made Ellery see his old friend in a newish light.

Ellery felt no qualms at eavesdropping; he never did when his curiosity was engaged. He had long since had this out with himself. (He did not recommend it as a general practise; only — as in the practise of bugging — when performed by experts for lawful purposes, in which category he felt entitled to place himself.)

What they had been talking about before his arrival, Ellery gathered, was “the new will” Benedict was having Marsh draw up for him “tomorrow.” (So he had not told the ex-Mrs. Benedicts of the holograph document he had signed in the Queens’ presence Thursday night, and which lay in the Inspector’s pocket at this moment.)

“But that’s nothing but fraud,” Audrey Weston snarled.

“Fraud?” The redhead from Vegas uttered a four-letter word with great sincerity. “It’s murder!”

Alice Tierney looked pained.

“You know, Marcia, your vulgarity is so lacking in originality,” Marsh said from the bar, where he was replenishing his drink. “I’ll give you this, though: people know just where they stand with you at all times.”

“You want me to give you a personal reading right now, Al?”

“Heaven forbid, dear heart!” He enveloped his drink hastily.

Ellery found himself bound to his dogwood. Fraud? Murder? But then he decided it had been hyperbole.

“Leeches!” Benedict’s sang-froid was gone. “You know damn w-well what our marriages were. Strictly business. Contracts with a m-mattress thrown in.” He stabbed at them with his arms. “Well, I’m finished with that kind of stupidity!”

“Down, boy,” Marsh said.

“You know our d-deal! The same in each c-case, a thousand a week, payable till your remarriages or my death; then, on my death, each of you under my will, if still not m-married” — which will? — “gets a settlement in a lump sum of one m-million dollars.”

“Yes, but look what we signed away,” Alice Tierney said in a soft and reasonable voice. “You made us sign prenuptial agreements in which we had to renounce all dower and other claims to your estate.”

“Under the threat, if I recall correctly — and, brother, do I! — ” Audrey Weston said caustically, “that if we didn’t sign, the marriage was off.”

“Sweetie,” Marcia Kemp said, “that’s the great Johnny-B’s style.”

Marsh laughed. “Still, girls, not a bad deal for leasing Johnny the use of your bodies, impressive as they are, for a few months.” He had made too many trips to the bar; there was the slightest slur to his speech and a stiffness to his smile.

“Impressive is as impressive does — right, Al?” Benedict brandished a hand graceful as a dagger. “The p-point is, pets, I’ve been thinking a great many things over, and I’ve decided that with you three specimens I didn’t get my m-money’s worth. So I’ve changed my mind about the whole bit. Besides, there’s a new element in the plot I’ll get to in a m-minute. I’m having Al write my new w-will tomorrow, as I told you, and you can be n-nice about it or not, it’s all the s-same to me.

“Hold on, dahling!” Tallu was back. “You can’t change a settlement just like that, you know. A girl scorned has some rights in Uncle Sam country!”

“I do believe you didn’t read the f-fine print, Audrey,” Benedict said. “The agreements in no case made your renunciation of dower rights and other claims against my estate c-contingent on what I chose to leave you in my will. Read it again, Audrey, will you? You’ll save yourself an attorney’s fee. Right, Al?”

“Right,” Marsh said. “Also, the agreements and the will they’re attached to were in no way affected by the decrees.”

“And if I want to change my mind about those three millions, there’s not a b-bloody thing you can do about it.” Benedict displayed his teeth. “I assure you that what we’re planning is p-perfectly legal. Anything that might be iffy — well, I’ll match my beagle against yours on any track in the land.”

“Wuff,” Marsh said.

“In other words, buster,” and the redhead showed her teeth, “you’re going to the muscle.”

“If I must.”

“But you promised,” the ex-nurse said. “Johnny, you gave me your word...”

“Nonsense.”

Marcia had been thinking. She lit a cigaret. “All right, Johnny, what’s the new deal?”

“I’ll continue to p-pay each of you a thousand per week until you remarry or I d-die, but the million-apiece lump-sum payoff on my death, that’s out.”

Marcia spat one word: “Why?”

“Well, it’s really none of your b-business,” Benedict said, “but I’m getting married again.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Audrey cried. “You catch a case of marriage every spring, Johnny, like a cold. What’s getting remarried got to do with anything?”

“You couldn’t be that mean,” Alice wailed. “A million dollars is no joking matter.”

“So you’ll be hitched to this broad for a few months,” Marcia growled, “and then—”

“This time it’s d-different,” Benedict said, smiling. “This time,” and he stopped smiling, “I’m in love.”

It was Audrey, the blonde, who shrieked, “Love? You?” but the incredulity might have been sounded by any of them. Then they all burst into laughter.

“Al, get him to a shrink presto,” the redhead said, “before he drops what’s left of his marbles. Listen, bubby, the last thing you were in love with was your mama’s titty. What do you know about love?”

Benedict shrugged. “Whatever it’s called, I’ve c-caught it. I want to settle down — go ahead and snicker! — breed a flock of kids, lead a normal l-life. No more chick-chasing or marriage quickies. My next wife is going to be the last woman in my life.” They were roosting there like three birds on a perch, bills gaping. “That’s the m-main reason behind this move. If I’m going to be the f-father of children, I want to secure their future. And their mother’s. I’m n-not going to change my mind about that.”

“I still say it’s fraud,” the blonde snapped. “Or was that will you showed me prior to the divorce proceeding, leaving me a million dollars — was that another con?”

“If it was, he conned me, too,” Marcia barked. “And I say it again. It’s plain murder to cut us off after we’ve given you—”

“I know, Marcia — the b-best months of your life.” Benedict grinned. “You three never would let me finish a sentence. I was about to announce that this isn’t going to be a total l-loss to you. What’s m-more, you’ll have till tomorrow noon to decide. How f-fair can a fairy god-husband get? Al, d’ye mind? A Black Russian.”

It was a new one to Ellery, and he watched Marsh busy himself at the bar. Marsh blended what appeared to be vodka and some coffee liqueur over ice.

“Decide what, Johnny?” Alice asked in a defeated voice.

“Tell you in a minute. The point is, if you three do agree, Al makes out my new w-will and that will be that.”

“What — is — the — deal?” Audrey as Audrey. No stagey nonsense now.

“A thousand a week as at p-present, with the usual hedge in case of remarriage, and on my death each of you receives one hundred thousand dollars. And that’s the end of the g-game as far as our foursome is concerned. Granted a hundred th-thousand isn’t a million — thank you, Al — but it’s not exactly b-birdseed, either. Even for three rare birds like you.

“So think it over, ladies. If you decide to make a court fight of it, I tell you now before w-witnesses: the new w-will tomorrow won’t leave you a red c-cent! I might even change my mind about the thousand a week. Nighty night.”

And John Levering Benedict III drained his Black Russian, waved it in their general direction, set the empty glass down, and went upstairs to bed as if he had had an active but rewarding day.

Benedict left behind him an atmosphere of anger, frustration, and curiosity, with curiosity dominant on a field of gold.

“Who is this babe Johnny’s going to marry?”

“Do you know? You know, goddam it!”

“Tell us, Al! Come on...”

The Amazons surrounded Marsh, pushing their soft plenitude at him.

“Please, girls, not before Miss Smith. We run a proper ship in the home waters, don’t we, Miss Smith? That’s it for tonight, by the way. You’re on your own. Perfectly free to raid the kitchen if you want a snack.”

“I’m on a diet,” Miss Smith said unexpectedly, and the lawyer looked surprised. Ellery gathered that the personal remark was not characteristic of Miss Smith’s professional behavior. She shut her stenographic book over the pencil with a little snap. “Good night, Mr. Marsh,” she said emphatically, and marched upstairs as if the ex-wives had gone back into a bottle. She had taken down every word uttered in the room during Ellery’s surveillance.

“I know you know who she is, Al,” Audrey said, shaking him playfully.

“Is it that hatcheck broad they say he’s been giving the treatment to lately?” big Marcia wanted to know.

“He wouldn’t dream of making a mistake like that again, dear,” Alice said sincerely.

“At least I never sucked blood like you did when he picked you up in this outhouse they call a town,” the redhead retorted. “Bat Girl! Is there anything lower than a bloodsucker?”

“Look who’s talking!”

“Come on, Al,” the blonde whinnied, “stop hogging the sauce. I want a drink, dahling. And shovel us the dirt.”

Marsh shook them off and walked back to the bar with his glass. “Mine not to shovel, mine but to do as I’m told. My advice to you, offered absolutely free, is to accept Johnny’s offer and be damned to him. Turn it down and you’ll wind up like the call girl in the gay bar — I mean to say, girls, with a handful of nothing. That hundred thousand per ex is the most you’ll ever get out of Johnny, and you’ve got about twelve hours to grab for it. Think it over. You can verbalize your pretty little decisions to me in the morning.”

“You go to hell, dahling,” Audrey said. “What about my drink?”

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

“I’m not desperate enough. Oh, all right, I’ll get it myself.” The blonde actress got up and sauntered to the bar.

“You know what you are?” Marcia said to the lawyer in an even voice. “You’re a lousy brown-nose. Mix me a gibson, will you, Audrey?”

“Mix it yourself.”

“You’re a charmer. Don’t think I won’t.” The redhead joined the blonde at the bar.

“Al...,” the brunette from Wrightsville began.

“You won’t get any more out of me than they did, Alice. Good night.”

“You can’t dismiss me as if I were Miss Smith! Or a child.” Alice gave him a cold and thoughtful look on her way to the bar.

Ellery was more intent on observing Marsh. Marsh had evidently had enough alcohol for the moment; the glass he set down was more than half full. But he was continuing to smoke full blast. He had been chainsmoking menthol cigarets ever since Ellery began to eavesdrop, and he was chainsmoking them still. Well, Ellery thought, being legal eagle as well as companion and confidant to a man like Johnny-B did not exactly make for an untroubled existence. The Marlboro man sitting his faithful steed might well develop, along with calluses, a neurosis or two. Even agoraphobia.

Ellery studied the heavy male features and the big and sensitive hands, and he wondered if Marsh had any notion of the can of peas his friend and client had so blithely opened. Marsh’s intelligence had been systematized by his legal training; surely he must be able to analyze the possibilities. Well, perhaps not surely. He hasn’t had my conditioning in murder, Ellery thought. It takes experience and a soiled mind to think of a thing like that.

He slid off the terrace, and on his way back to the cottage — using the flashlight sparingly — Ellery let conditioning take charge. His thoughts did not provoke, amuse, or engross him. The exercise, as usual, was futile. The trouble with foreseeing homicide on the sole ground of past performances was that there was no profit in it. The victim was never convinced before it was too late for convincing, and warning off the potential murderers either spurred them to a more cunning crime or planted an unsocial thought where none had been. The victim, like all mortals, assumed that he was immortal, and the murderer, like most murderers, that he was infallible. Against these diseases there was no specific.

It was all very sad and discouraging; and Ellery was grumbling away in his sleep before Inspector Queen got back from his movie.

It came off on schedule, almost as if Ellery had planned it.

He groped for the light-chain at the eruption of the telephone, found it, dragged it, blinked at his watch and noted the time as 3:03 A.M., fumbled about for the phone and found that — all before he was really awake. But the gasp and heave in his ear were like a wash of seawater.

“Who is this?”

“J-J-J...”

“Johnny? Is this Johnny?”

“Yes.” He was hauling the breath from his lungs as if it had weights attached. “El...?”

“Yes, yes, what’s wrong?”

“Dying.”

“You? Wait! I mean, I’ll be right over.”

“No... time.”

“Hang on—”

“M-m-m...” He stopped. There was a gurgly sob. Then Benedict said, “Murder,” in a quite ordinary way.

Ellery said swiftly, “Who, Johnny? Tell me. Who did it?”

This time the dragged-out breath, interminable.

And Johnny Benedict said distinctly, “Home,” and stopped again.

Ellery found himself irritated. Why does he want me to know where he is? I know where he is. Or must be. At the main house. Using the extension. It made no sense. He was making no sense. If he could call me, he could be lucid. He had no right to be out of his head — to go this far only to tell me he was calling from home.

“I mean, who attacked you?”

He heard some meaningless sounds. It was exasperating.

“Hold on, Johnny, hold on! Who did it?” It was like trying to coax a recalcitrant child. “Try to tell me.” He almost said “daddy” instead of the pronoun.

Johnny tried, according to his lights. He was on the “home” kick again. He said it three times, each time less distinctly, less assertively, with more of a stammer. Finally he stopped trying and there was nothing but a defeated thunk! at the other end, the phone hitting something, as if Johnny-B had flung it away or, what was less pleasantly probable, had dropped it.

“What is it, son?”

Ellery hung up. To his surprise, he found himself yawning. It was his father, in the doorway. The Inspector did not sleep well any more. The least interruption in the rhythm of his environment disturbed him.

“Ellery?”

He told the Inspector what Johnny had said.

“Then what are you standing here for?” the old man yelled, and dived for his bedroom.

There’s no hurry, Ellery thought as he hurriedly pulled on his pants. Johnny’s gone with the wind he sowed.

Wrightsville strikes again.

The Cougar covered the quarter mile in nothing flat. The main house was dark except for two windows upstairs which they took to be in Benedict’s room, the master bedroom. Ellery jumped out, and the Inspector cried, “Did you remember to bring that key Benedict gave you?” to which Ellery replied, “Hell, no, I forgot it. Who ever used a key in Wrightsville?” and was immediately vindicated, because the front door, while it was closed, was not locked.

They ran upstairs. The master bedroom door stood open.

Benedict was in puce-colored silk pajamas, a milk-chocolate-striped silk kimono, and Japanese slippers. He lay in a heap on the floor beside the bed and he looked like a cake just out of the oven, decorated, and set aside to cool. The cradle of the telephone was on the nightstand; the receiver dangled to the floor. There was amazingly little blood, considering the wounds in Benedict’s head.

The weapon lay on the floor six feet from the body, between the bed and the doorway. It was an oversized, heavy-looking Three Monkeys sculpture in a modern elongated style, cast in iron. Both the material and the stylistic distortion gave its familiar “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” homily an irony terribly grotesque. Neither man touched it.

“He’s dead, of course,” Ellery said.

“What do you think?”

“For the record.” Ellery’s lips were tight. “We’d better verify.”

The Inspector squatted and felt Benedict’s carotid.

“He’s dead. What I can’t understand is where he found the strength to pick up a phone.”

“He obviously found it,” Ellery said coldly. “The point is: having found it, what did he do with it? Not a damned thing!”

And in an aggrieved way he wrapped a handkerchief around his right hand, picked up the receiver, punched the button on the cradle for an outside line, and from too, too solid memory dialed the number of Wrightsville police headquarters.

“It’s going to be some time before Newby gets here,” Ellery remarked to his father, replacing the phone. “Which is probably just as well. By the way, these guests of Johnny’s sleep like the dead. Maybe we’d better check their carotids, too.”

“Let ’em be,” the Inspector growled. “Their time is coming. What do you mean ‘just as well’?”

“The night desk man, a fellow named Peague — I’m betting he’s related to Millard Peague, who used to have the locksmith shop on Crosstown and Foaming — says the chief went to a Red Man blast tonight and just got into the sack, so he won’t appreciate having to get up and come out here. The three radio cars on the graveyard tour are all over at Fyfield Gunnery School — some students got high on speed or something and they’re wrecking the administration building. It’s developed into a full-scale engagement — state police, patrol cars from Slocum as well as Wrightsville — the locals won’t be able to get here for hours, Peague says. While we’re waiting for Newby we may as well make ourselves useful.”

The Inspector looked doubtful. “I hate cutting in on another cop’s turf.”

“Newby won’t mind. The Lord of battles knows we’ve charged shoulder to shoulder often enough. Let’s see if we can find any writing materials.”

“What for?”

“Superman or not, Johnny’d have written something in preference to phoning — if he could. My hunch is we’ll find nothing.”

They found nothing. It gave Ellery a small satisfaction.

One mystery was solved. On the opposite side of the room from the windows, helter-skelter on the floor as if thrown there, they found the three articles of clothing Benedict’s ex-wives had reported missing: Audrey Weston’s black sequined gown, Marcia Kemp’s green wig, and Alice Tierney’s white evening gloves.

Ellery examined them eagerly. The evening gown was long enough to trail on the floor; the wig was not only absurdly green but distended — it looked like an excited hedgehog; the gloves were of high-quality kid. None of the three showed even a pinpoint of bloodstain.

“So they weren’t being used at the time of the assault,” the Inspector mused. “A plant?”

“Three plants,” Ellery said, squinting. “Otherwise why leave all three? If Johnny’s assailant had wanted to implicate Marcia, he’d have left just the wig. Or Audrey, just the gown. Or Alice, just the gloves. By leaving all three he implicates all three.”

“But why?”

“That is the question.”

“But I don’t get it, Ellery.”

“I wish I could enlighten you. I don’t, either.”

“Something tells me we should have stood in Manhattan,” the Inspector said gloomily.

The bed had been slept in; the spread had been neatly folded at the foot, the bottom sheet was wrinkled, and the pillow still showed the depression made by Benedict’s head.

“He certainly didn’t go to bed with his robe on,” Ellery said. “That means something woke him up, and he jumped out of bed and slipped into his robe and slippers. So the next question is: what disturbed him?”

“No sign of a struggle,” the Inspector nodded. “It’s as if the killer didn’t want to spoil the neatness of the room.”

“You’re getting whimsical, dad.”

“No, I mean it. No clothes thrown about, chair as naked as a jaybird, and I’ll bet if you look in that hamper you’ll find...” Inspector Queen darted into the bathroom and yanked up the cover of the laundry hamper, which was just visible from the foot of Benedict’s bed. He exclaimed in triumph, “What did I tell you? Shirt, socks, underwear — neatly deposited before he went to bed.”

The Inspector came out and looked about. “He must have been left for dead, Ellery — on the bed or floor — and when the killer was gone, Benedict somehow found the moxie to crawl to the phone and call you.”

“Agreed,” Ellery said. “Also, from the absence of a struggle I’m tempted to conclude that Johnny knew his assailant. Although, of course, it could have been a housebreaker or other stranger who jumped him and got in an incapacitating blow just after Johnny got out of bed and put his robe and slippers on. That’s one of those alternatives you never quite eliminate.”

“But what did he kill him for?” The Inspector was going through the elephant-ear wallet lying on the nightstand. The wallet was fat, like the craw of a Strasbourg goose. The Rolex watch with the matching bracelet beside the wallet was an 18-carat gold, 30-jewel affair that must have set Benedict back over a thousand dollars.

“For money, that’s what for,” Ellery said. “But not the kind of goose feed you tote around. I went to bed worrying about exactly that. What’s this?”

“This” was a walk-in wardrobe closet. The Queens walked in and routinely took inventory. Hanging on racks, with the neatness of a tailor’s shop, were a dozen or so custom-made suits in fabulous fabrics and numerous shades of blue and gray; two summer dinner jackets, one white, the other burgundy; a variety of pastel-hued slacks and sports jackets; a white yachting uniform, hound’s-tooth golf togs, a brown plaid hunting and fishing outfit; four topcoats, in charcoal gray, light gray, gabardine tan, and chocolate; three overcoats, one black with a velvet collar, another navy blue double-breasted, the third a casual tan cashmere. The shoe racks held dozens of pairs of shoes — conventionals, cordovans, alligators, suèdes, two-tones; an assortment of boots and athletic shoes; blacks and browns and grays and tans and oxbloods. On an upper shelf lay ten hats and caps, from a black homburg to a severe dark brown fedora, through the well-dressed man’s Alpine, woodsman, and other sporty styles. An enormous revolving rack offered a selection of four-in-hand neckties, ascots, bow ties, and scarves in all the basic solid colors, in combinations, and in a range of materials and designs that would not have disgraced Sulka’s.

The Inspector marveled. “Why in God’s name did he need all these duds? In Wrightsville, of all places?”

“And this is just a hideaway,” Ellery pointed out, “where he apparently did little entertaining and no visiting. Imagine what the closets in his New York, Paris, and other apartments must look like.”

The bureau was a built-in affair with haberdasher’s drawers stacked with custom-made shirts of every description: broadcloths, Pimas, silks, synthetics; in whites, blues, browns, tans, grays, greens, pinks, even lavenders, in solids and in pinstripes; with button cuffs and French cuffs; with dress collars and buttoned-down collars; including a collection of plaids and flannels and other outdoorsy items, and another of frilled and lacy as well as conventional summer dress shirts. Several drawers turned up a selection of knitwear. Others held T-shirts and shorts by the dozens, chiefly of silk, and handkerchiefs functional and ornamental. And in one lay a shop-sized stock of hose, in woolens, lisles, nylons, silks; in blacks, browns, grays, blues; in solids and in combinations. And, of course, a jewelry drawer for a collection of tie clasps, tackpins, cufflinks, and other essentials of the bureau.

The Inspector kept shaking his head. Ellery’s remained at rest, all but his eyes, which reflected a puzzle of some sort.

It was as if he had mislaid something, but could remember neither what it was nor where he had mislaid it.

Waiting for Chief Newby, the Queens went about rousing Benedict’s guests. The reason for the undisturbed sleep of the ex-wives and Marsh was detectable at once by anyone with less than a severe cold. The air in the bedrooms was sour with alcohol; evidently the three divorcees and the lawyer had done some serious extracurricular drinking after Ellery’s departure from his eavesdropping post on the terrace. They were a little stubborn about waking up.

As for Miss Smith, Marsh’s secretary, she had locked her bedroom door, and Ellery had to pound for several minutes before she responded. There were no fumes in her room. “I sleep like the dead,” Miss Smith said — a figure of speech she clearly regretted a moment later when he told her why he had roused her. From the noises immediately emanating from her bathroom, Miss Smith was paying the price the three other women should have paid but had not. Ellery left her to fortify her rebellious stomach.

As far as he and his father could make out, Marcia Kemp, Audrey Weston, and Alice Tierney greeted the news of Benedict’s violent death with stupefaction. They seemed too stunned to grasp the implications; there were no hysterics and very few questions. As for Marsh, he gaped at the Queens from a graying face, his big hands trembling. “Are the police here yet?” he asked; and Ellery said, “On their way, Al,” whereupon the lawyer sat down on the bed mumbling, “Poor old Johnny, what a stinking deal,” and asked if he might have a drink. Ellery brought him a bottle and a glass; Inspector Queen warned the quintet to remain where they were, each in his own room, and took up a sentry post at the door of Benedict’s bedroom; and that was all.

Ellery was downstairs waiting for Newby when the chief — tieless, a topcoat thrown over his uniform — stalked into the house.

Anselm Newby had succeeded Chief Dakin, who personified law and order in Wrightsville for so long that only the thinning ranks of oldtimers remembered his predecessor, a fat, spittoon-targeting ex-farmer named Horace Swayne. Dakin, who always reminded Ellery of Abe Lincoln, had been the old-fashioned small-town incorruptible policeman; Anse Newby was of the new breed, young, aggressive, and scientifically trained on a city-sized police force. He was a ball of fire where Dakin had been a plodder, yet he had had to prove himself a dozen times over before the town would grudgingly grant that he might be able to fill part of old Dakin’s size-13 shoes. Newby’s fate it was to be a small, delicate-appearing man in a community where any suspicion of effeminacy was hated rather than despised, and in a police chief was considered a crime in itself. He soon disabused the town on this score. When the rumors reached his ears he tracked them to their source, shucked his uniform jacket, and administered a scientific beating to the offender — who had a six-inch height and thirty-five-pound weight advantage — that was the talk of Wrightsville’s bars for many years. With this demonstration of his masculinity Newby had no further trouble with rumormongers. And with his stinging voice and eyes of inorganic blue, unwinking as mineral, he tended to grow on people, not always pleasantly.

“Sorry about this, Chief—” Ellery began, not altogether humorously.

“You’re always sorry about this,” Newby snapped. “I’m suggesting to the First Selectman that he haul arse on up to the capital and see if he can’t talk our assemblyman into pushing a bill through the legislature putting Wrightsville off limits to anybody named Queen. Can’t you set foot in this town without causing a homicide? I didn’t know you were visiting, or I’d have put out an A.P.B. on you! How are you, Ellery?”

“I feel as rotten about it as you, Anse,” Ellery said, pumping the delicate hand. “Rottener. I purposely kept our visit quiet—”

“Our? Who’d you come up with?”

“My dad. He’s upstairs keeping an eye on Benedict’s room and the body. We’re here on a rest cure. On Johnny Benedict’s invitation.”

“Father or not, he probably doesn’t know your Wrightsville record as well as I do, or he’d never have come. For a cop to take a vacation with you is a busman’s holiday for sure. And look what Benedict’s invite got him. Well, tell me about this one, you hoodoo.”

“Let’s go up.”

Upstairs, the Inspector and Newby shook hands like adversaries; they had never met. But when the old man said, “I hope you don’t mind our poking around while we waited for you, Chief. I don’t care much myself for police officers who stick their noses into other men’s territory,” Newby warmed perceptibly. “Mighty lucky for me you were here, Inspector,” he said, and Ellery let his breath go.

It took the best part of forty-five minutes to brief the Wrightsville chief on the marital and testamentary situations that had presumably led to Benedict’s murder, while Newby examined the body and the premises.

“I left orders to get my tech men out of bed,” Newby said. “Where the hell are they? Ellery, d’ye mind? Fetch those five people down here while I notify the coroner’s doc to climb out of his sack and bring his tail over here. We just don’t have the kind of setup and manpower you’re used to, Inspector,” he said in what sounded like an apology, and he made for the telephone in the foyer.

“He seems to think he has to put a show on for me,” the Inspector remarked to Ellery.

Ellery grinned, “I didn’t realize Anse was that human,” and hurried upstairs.

The five trooped into the living room in a symbiosis of reluctance and relief. None of them had been told more than the unembellished fact of Benedict’s murder; each having been isolated from the others, they had had no opportunity to exchange speculations or recriminations or to compare stories; they were all, in the flamboyant word of the times, uptight. Even more interesting, the ex-wives tended to cluster together where before Benedict’s death they had staked out independent territories in the living room.

As for Miss Smith, not unexpectedly after her exhibition of secretarial aloofness, she showed signs of strain. The bout with her stomach had left her pale and ill. She mewed for a brandy, at which Marsh, even in his preoccupation, looked astonished. And she kept babbling away in a complaining voice, principally to Marsh, as if the predicament in which she found herself was all her employer’s fault. At least four times she whined, “I’ve never had anything to do with a murder before,” as if he had dragged her into something very common in his set; until Marcia Kemp tossed her red locks and said grimly, “Oh, for chrissake, shut up,” at which Miss Smith looked frightened, clutched her brandy, and subsided.

“Now look, folks,” Newby said when the Inspector had identified the five. “I know darned little about this setup, though I guarantee you I’ll know a lot more about it before I’m through. But as of this minute I have no notion who killed Mr. Benedict. So that’s our first order of business. Anybody here got anything to tell me that’s going to cut our work down?”

No one seemed able or prepared to do so. Until finally Marsh said in a voice as gray as his face, “Surely, Chief, you can’t believe anyone here had anything to do with Johnny’s death?”

“All right, that formality’s out of the way. Anybody hear anything after getting to bed? An argument, a fight? Or even just footsteps?”

No one had. Deep sleep had been the order of the night during the period of the murder (they claimed at first), in the main induced by bourbon and vodka. Except, again, in Miss Smith’s case. (Miss Smith did not “drink” — she placed audible quotation marks around the word. The brandy in her clutch was for restorative purposes.)

The ex-Mrs. Benedicts, it seemed, had originally found sleep elusive. Freshly bedded, they said, they had been wakeful.

“I tossed and tossed,” Audrey Weston said. “So I thought if maybe I did some reading. You know.” (Ellery waited for her to add “dahling,” but the blonde seemed to realize that Chief Newby would not take kindly to the endearment.) “I came downstairs and got a book.”

“Where downstairs, Miss Weston?” Newby asked.

“This room. From those bookshelves there.”

“Was anybody down here while you were?”

“No.”

“How long did you stay?”

“Just long enough to pick out a book.”

“Then you went back upstairs?”

“That’s right.”

“How long did you read, Miss Weston, before you tried to get to sleep again?”

“I found I couldn’t. The type began swimming before my eyes.”

“Which book was it?” Ellery asked.

“I don’t recall the title,” the blonde said haughtily. “Something — the latest — by that Roth person.”

“Philip Roth?”

“I think that’s his Christian name.”

“Harry Golden will be delighted to hear it. The title wasn’t Portnoy’s Complaint, was it?”

Miss Weston grew haughtier. “I’d forgotten.”

“Miss Weston, if you’d begun Portnoy’s Complaint, I don’t believe the type would have swum before your eyes. The fact is you read for some time, didn’t you?”

“The fact is, dahling,” Audrey Weston spat, “I was so absolutely revolted I threw the disgusting thing across the room! Then I went downstairs for another book, and I got one, and started to read that, but that was when the sauce hit me and I got very sleepy all of a sudden, so I put out the light and the next thing I knew I was out of this world. And don’t ask me what the other book was, Mr. Queen, because I haven’t any recollection. It’s still in my room if you think it’s important.”

“So you made two trips downstairs during the night.”

“If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem.”

“It may well be yours,” Ellery said thoughtfully, and stepped back with a wave to Newby. “Didn’t mean to monopolize, Anse. Go ahead.”

“What time was it, Miss Weston, when all this happened?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“No idea at all?”

“I wasn’t watching clocks.”

“Not even your wristwatch when you undressed?”

“I just didn’t.”

“Can’t you make a guess what time it was? One? Two? Three?”

“I don’t know, I tell you. Marcia, what time did I go up to bed?”

“You answer your questions, dearie,” Marcia Kemp said, “and I’ll answer mine.”

“I’ll tell you what time it was when you went up to bed,” Alice Tierney said suddenly. “It was just about two.”

“It couldn’t have been that late!” Audrey cried.

“Well, it was.”

“You tossed and tossed,” Newby said, “then you went downstairs for Portnoy’s Complaint, which you read for how long?”

“Really,” the blonde said. “I wasn’t counting. A short while.”

“Fifteen minutes? A half hour?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Or an hour?” Ellery murmured.

“No! Closer to a half hour.”

“In other words, Mr. Roth’s opus revolted but held you for a half hour or more. I got the impression from what you said before that you’d hardly begun reading when you flung the book aside in disgust. You’re really not making very responsive answers.”

“Why are you after me, Mr. Queen?” the blonde cried. “What are you, out to get me or something? All right, I read that foul book a good long time, and the second one I hardly glanced at. But it all comes out the same at the end, because I was fast asleep long before whoever killed Johnny killed him.”

Newby pounced. “How do you know when Benedict was killed, Miss Weston? No one here mentioned it.”

She was stricken. “Didn’t...? Well... I mean, I just assumed...”

He let it go. “Did you happen to see anyone on your trip downstairs or on your way back up? Either time?”

“Nobody. The bedroom doors were all shut, by the way, as far as I could see. I naturally thought everyone but me was asleep.”

Newby said suddenly, “How about you, Miss Kemp?”

But she was ready for him. “How about me?”

“Did you fall right asleep when you went up to bed?”

“I wish I could say I did,” the redhead answered, “but something tells me when you’ve got nothing to hide in a case like this it’s better to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I’d had a real snootful down here and I didn’t think I’d make it to the hay, I was so rocky. But I no sooner hit the bed than I was wide awake—”

“Hold it. What time was it when you left to go to bed?”

“I was in no condition to tell time, Chief. All I know is it was after Audrey went upstairs.”

“How long after?”

Marcia Kemp shrugged.

“I can tell you,” Alice Tierney said, “It was close to two thirty.”

“You li’l ol’ timekeeper, you,” the redhead growled. “Anyway, my head was spinning, and I thought food might settle my stomach down, so I went downstairs to the kitchen and made myself a dry chicken sandwich and a cup of warm milk and brought them back up to my room. Grandpa there spotted the plate with the crumbs on it and the dirty glass when he woke me up a while back. Tell ’em, Grandpa.”

“I saw the plate and the glass, yes,” Inspector Queen said. He had been standing by the French doors overlooking the terrace, keeping himself out of the way.

“See?” Marcia said. She was wearing a shortie nightgown under her negligee, and the negligee kept coming apart. Ellery found himself wishing she would fasten it so that he could keep his mind on the testimony. Under the translucent stuffs she appeared like a giant flower about to burst into blossom. “The warm milk must have done it because after a while I corked off. I didn’t know a blessed other thing until old fuzz there woke me up.”

“Did you happen to see anyone during your trip to the kitchen and back?”

“No.”

“I suppose you didn’t hear anything around the time of the murder, either?”

“You’re not catching me, buster. I don’t know when the time of the murder was. Anyway, I didn’t hear anything any time.”

Alice Tierney’s difficulty had been the alcohol, too. “I’m not much of a drinker,” the Wrightsville ex-nurse said, “and I’d had a few too many last night. I went up to my room after Marcia, and when I couldn’t fall asleep I crawled to the bathroom for something for my head. I couldn’t find aspirin or anything in the medicine chest, so I went to the downstairs lavatory where I’d noticed some Bufferin during the day. I swallowed a couple and went back to my room. The Bufferin didn’t help much, so I tried cold compresses. Finally out of desperation I took a sleeping pill from a bottle I found in the medicine chest — I hate sleeping pills, I’ve had too much experience with them — and that did it. I went out cold.” Like Audrey and Marcia, Alice had seen no one and heard nothing.

“Funny,” Chief Newby remarked. “With all that cross traffic up and down the stairs last night, you’d think somebody would have run into somebody. How about you, Mr. Marsh? What did you go traipsing downstairs for?”

“I didn’t. Once I got to my room I stayed there. I had more than my quota last night, too, especially after Johnny went up to bed. I don’t think I was conscious for two minutes after my head hit the pillow. The next thing I knew Ellery was shaking me.”

“What time did you go up to bed?”

“I don’t know exactly. My impression is it was right after Alice Tierney, but I’m fuzzy about it.”

“No, that’s right,” the Wrightsville girl said.

“And you, Miss Smith?”

Challenged by name Miss Smith started, slopping what was left in her snifter. “I can’t imagine why you should question me at all! I don’t think I ever said more than a hello to Mr. Benedict when he visited Mr. Marsh’s office.”

“Did you leave your room last night after you went to bed?”

“I did not!”

“Did you hear anything that might help us, Miss Smith? Try to remember.”

“I told Mr. Queen before you got here, Chief Newby, I sleep very soundly.” (“Like the dead,” Ellery reminded her silently.) “I thought I might have a busy day Sunday and I need my sleep if I’m to function efficiently. After all, I wasn’t invited to this house as a guest. I’m here only because I’m Mr. Marsh’s secretary.”

“Miss Smith can’t have anything to do with this,” Marsh said. He said it rather harshly, Ellery thought. “I don’t mean to tell you your business, Chief, but isn’t all this a waste of time? Johnny must have been killed by some housebreaker who got in during the night to steal something and lost his head when Johnny woke up and surprised him.”

“I wish it were that simple, Mr. Marsh.” Newby glanced at Ellery. Ellery promptly went out and came back with the sequined gown, the wig, and the evening gloves.

“Since you’re all Mrs. Benedicts,” Ellery said to the ex-wives, “from here on in I’m going to make it easier on us by addressing you by your given names. Audrey, you came to me yesterday afternoon to report the theft of a gown from your room. Is this the one?”

He offered the black dress to the blonde. She examined it suspiciously. Then she got up slowly and fitted it to herself. “It looks like it... I suppose it is... yes. Where did you find it?”

Ellery took it from her.

“Marcia, is this the wig you told me yesterday somebody stole from your room?”

“You know it. If there’s another green wig in this town I’ll eat it.” The redhead slipped it over her boyish crop. “This is it, all right.”

“Alice, these evening gloves?”

“There was a slight nick in the forefinger of the left hand,” the brunette said. “Yes, here it is. These are mine, Mr. Queen. But who had them?”

“We don’t know who had them,” Newby said, “but we know where they wound up. We found them in Benedict’s bedroom, near his body.”

This remark produced an almost weighable silence.

“But what does it mean?” Alice exclaimed. “Why should somebody steal my gloves and then leave them practically on Johnny’s corpse?”

“Or my evening gown?”

“Or my kook wig?”

“I don’t understand any part of this.” Marsh was back at the bar, but he was paying no attention to the glass in his hand. “This sort of thing is your dish of blood, Ellery. What’s it all about? Or don’t you agree a burglar, or maybe a tramp—?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Ellery said. “There is a bit of sense to be made out of it, though, Al, and that’s where you come in.”

“Me?”

“Anse, do you mind?”

Newby shook his head. “You know more about this setup than I do, Ellery. Forget the protocol.”

“Then let me shortcut this,” Ellery said. “I was out on the terrace listening when Johnny made that speech last night about his intention to write a new will. I assume, Al, that since you were the lawyer who drafted Johnny’s original will — the one extant when he came up here the other day — and the purpose of the weekend was to write a new will, you brought a copy of the old one along with you?”

“Yes.” Marsh’s tough jaw was belligerent. “You were eavesdropping, Ellery? Why?”

“Because I was uneasy about Johnny’s situation, and events have borne it out. I’d like to see the will in your possession.”

Marsh set his glass down on the bar. His jaw had not declared a truce. “Technically, I can refuse—”

“We know what you can do, Mr. Marsh,” the chief said with a twitch of the whiplash. “But up here we aren’t so formal in murder investigations. In my territory, Mr. Marsh, murder opens up a lot of doors. Let’s see Benedict’s will, please.”

The lawyer hesitated. Finally he shrugged. “It’s in my attaché case. In my room. Miss Smith—”

“Never mind,” Inspector Queen said. I’ll get it.”

They had forgotten he was there. He was out and back in the same unobtrusive way. “For the record, Mr. Marsh, I didn’t open it.”

Marsh gave him a queer look. He opened the case and drew out a thick folded document in a parchment slipcase. This he handed to Newby, who drew out the will, riffled through its numerous pages, and passed it to Ellery, who spent rather more time on it.

“I see that the basic will was drawn up a long time ago, Al, with supplementary sections added after each marriage and divorce.”

“That’s right.”

“And according to the additions, the weekly payments to each divorced wife of a thousand dollars stop on Johnny’s death but the will leaves her, if unmarried at such time, a principle sum of a million dollars as a final settlement.”

“Yes.”

“Then each ex-wife,” Ellery said, “had a million dollars’ worth of vested interest in seeing that this will remained in force until Johnny died.”

“That’s a rather funny way to put it, but I suppose so, yes. What’s the point?”

“Oh, come, Al, I know a lawyer of your standing and background doesn’t like to be mixed up in a nastiness like this, but you’re in it and you’d better face up to the fact. What I overheard from the terrace last night, in the light of what subsequently happened, confirms every fear I’ve had. If Johnny’d survived the night, he intended to write a new will today. The new will, he said, while it would continue these ladies’ thousand a week till their remarriage, at his death would cut their settlements from a million to a hundred thousand — a mere ten percent of what they could figure on collecting if he didn’t or wasn’t able to write the new will. And if they contested, he warned them, he wouldn’t leave them a cent. I ask you, Al: From Audrey’s, Marcia’s, and Alice’s standpoints, wasn’t it a lucky break that Johnny failed to live through the night?”

Marsh gulped his drink. And the subjects of Ellery’s soliloquy sat so very still they scarcely disturbed the flight of the molecules in their vicinity.

“So the way it looks,” Chief Newby announced in the hush, “You used-to-be-wives of Benedict’s had motive and opportunity — equal motive and opportunity. And, I might add, equal access to the murder weapon.”

“I don’t even know what the weapon was!” Audrey Weston, leaping. “You didn’t tell us. For God’s sake, I couldn’t commit murder. Maybe Alice Tierney could — nurses get used to blood. But it makes me sick...”

“I’ll remember that, Audrey,” Alice said in a hypodermic voice.

“For nine hundred thousand dollars, Miss Weston,” the chief remarked, “most anybody could commit most anything. And oh, yes. Your evening gown was found on the scene of the crime.”

“But I told Mr. Queen yesterday that it was stolen from me!” she wailed. “You found Alice’s gloves and Marcia’s wig up there, too, didn’t he say? Why pick on me?”

“I’m not, Miss Weston. Whatever applies in this case applies to all three of you. So far. I grant you, finding all those articles in Benedict’s room doesn’t add up. But there they were, and juries tend to go not by fancy figuring but by plain facts.”

“There’s a fact in this case none of you knows,” Ellery said. “Dad?”

Inspector Queen stepped forward. “On Thursday night — that was before any of you people came up here — Benedict dropped in on Ellery and me at the guest house. He told us that Marsh was going to write a new will for him over the weekend, but that, wanting to protect himself in the meantime, he’d drawn up the substance of it in his own hand and he wanted us to witness it.”

The old man produced the long envelope Benedict had consigned to his care.

“My son and I watched Benedict sign and date this holograph will, we signed as witnesses, he slipped it into this envelope, and he asked me to keep it for him temporarily.”

“We don’t know what’s in the holograph,” Ellery said “—he didn’t let us read it, or read it to us — but we assume it sets forth the same provisions as the one he intended Al Marsh to put in more formal language today. Under the circumstances, Anse, I believe you have every right to open it here and now.”

The Inspector handed the envelope to Newby, who glanced at Marsh. Marsh shrugged and said, “You’ve made it clear where the local law stands, Chief,” and stepped over to the bar to refill his glass.

“Did Benedict say anything to you about writing out the new will himself in advance of the weekend, Mr. Marsh?” Newby asked.

“Not a word.” Marsh took a he-man swallow and flourished the glass. “Come to think of it, though, he did ask me some questions about phraseology and form in the case of a holograph will. It didn’t occur to me he was seriously asking for himself.”

Newby slit the envelope with his penknife and withdrew the handwritten will. The Queens rubbernecked. As they read, the three men looked increasingly surprised and puzzled.

The chief said abruptly, “You’d best take a look at this, Mr. Marsh.”

Newby waved the crowding ex-wives back and offered the document to Marsh, who handled the paper, his glass, and a smoldering cigaret like a boy learning to juggle. Finally he set glass and cigaret down, and read.

He, too, looked puzzled.

“Read it aloud, Al.” Ellery was watching Audrey, Marcia, and Alice. The trio were craning like giraffes. “Just that pertinent paragraph.”

Marsh frowned. “He revokes all previous wills — the usual thing — and leaves his residuary estate quote ‘to Laura and any children’ unquote. He goes on: ‘If for any reason I am not married to Laura at the time of my death, I bequeath my residuary estate to my only living kin, my first cousin Leslie.’ That’s the gist of it.” The lawyer shrugged. “It’s sloppily drawn, but in my judgment this is a legal will.” He returned it to Newby and retrieved his glass and cigaret.

“Laura,” Marcia muttered. “Who the hell is Laura?”

“It couldn’t be that hatcheck number he’s been seen with lately,” Audrey said. “From what the columns have been spilling, her name is Vincentine Astor.”

Alice said, “He’s never mentioned a Laura to me.”

“Or me,” Audrey complained. “Is it possible that two-legged rat got married secretly before he came up here?”

“No,” Ellery said. “Because in that event he’d probably have written that he was leaving his estate to ‘my wife Laura,’ the common form, rather than simply ‘to Laura.’ If he died before he married her, the phrase ‘my wife Laura’ on a will predating the marriage might well invalidate the document and toss a will case involving millions into the surrogate’s court for years. No, Johnny was anticipating his marriage to Laura — ‘if for any reason I am not married to Laura,’ etcetera, tells us that. Al, do you know who Laura is, or might be?”

“He never mentioned a woman of that name to me.”

“I agree with you, Ellery,” Chief Newby said. “He meant to marry this Laura right off and figured he’d jump the gun by writing her into his interim will beforehand. He protected himself by that ‘if for any reason’ clause. He must have been awfully sure of her.”

“It’s a tough, tough world for poor old Laura,” Marcia said with a laugh that was more of a bray. “Whoever knocked Johnny off did her out of a load of rice, Russian sable, square-cut emeralds, and Paris originals.”

“Absolutely correct,” Ellery said. “She won’t inherit now, whoever she is. The estate goes to Johnny’s cousin. Who is Leslie, Al, do you know?”

“Leslie Carpenter. Everyone else in both the Benedict and Carpenter families is gone. I’ll have to notify Leslie about this right away.”

“Read the part about our hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Newby,” Alice said.

Newby glanced at the will in his hand. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“This will doesn’t mention you or Miss Kemp or Miss Weston. There’s nothing in it about leaving you a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Or ten dollars.” After the shrieks died the chief said, “It figures. He wasn’t going to commit himself on paper to you ladies for one red cent beforehand.”

“That was smart of Johnny,” Marsh said with a laugh.

“Shrewd would be the word,” Ellery said. “He meant to propose a deal, as he subsequently did, and he saw no reason to settle his part of the bargain before you had a chance to settle yours. Also, at the time he wrote this will out I imagine his only concern was the protection of Laura or Leslie.”

“In other words,” said the Inspector’s dry voice, “if one of you ladies knocked Benedict off, all you’re going to get out of it is a choice of your last meal.”

Newby’s tech men and the coroner’s physician drove up then, with the lightening sky, and the chief sent the ex-Mrs. Benedicts, Miss Smith, and Marsh back to their rooms and sought the phone to notify the Wright County prosecutor and the sheriffs office. The Queens left for a few hours’ sleep.

Driving slowly back to the cottage in the damp dawn, Ellery said with a scowl, “I wonder how right Marsh is about that holograph will standing up.”

“You told me he knows his business,” the Inspector said, “so his opinion ought to be worth something. But you know how these multimillion will cases go, Ellery. Those three are sure to find hungry lawyers who for a big contingency fee will tie the case up for years.”

Ellery shrugged. “Marsh and that other law firm Benedict had wished on him wield an awful lot of clout. Well, we have to assume the holograph knocks out the earlier will and, as you said back there, whoever pulled the homicide committed a murder for nothing. This Leslie Carpenter fellow picks up all the marbles.”

“You can imagine how those vultures are feeling right now. Especially the one who beat Benedict to death... Something wrong, son?”

Ellery looked vague.

“You’re all of a sudden a hundred miles away.”

“Oh. Something’s been bugging me ever since we left Johnny’s bedroom.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. A feeling. That we’ve overlooked something.”

“Overlooked what?”

Ellery braked the Cougar in the carport and switched off the ignition.

“If I could answer that, dad, I wouldn’t be bugged. Out. Sack time.”

Benedict’s cousin Leslie drove in during the early afternoon of Monday.

To the surprise of everyone but Marsh, it was a woman who got out of the airport taxi. “It never occurred to me you’d assume the name Leslie meant a man,” Marsh said to the Queens. “I’ve known her through Johnny since she was in deep orthodontia. How are you, Les?”

She turned a glad smile on Marsh. She was years younger than Johnny-B, and the Queens soon perceived that she was not only of a different sex from her late cousin, she was of a different species. Where Benedict had been the child of fortune, Leslie had had to scrimp all her life.

“My mother, who was Johnny’s aunt — Johnny’s father’s sister — got the heave from my grandfather. In the good old Victorian-novel style, he disinherited her. It seems that mother was too much of a rebel and didn’t have the proper reverence for capital. And worst of all she insisted on falling in love with a man who had no money and no social standing.” Leslie smiled mischievously. “Poor grandfather, he couldn’t understand mother, and he accused daddy to his face of being — oh, dear — a ‘fortune hunter.’ Dad a fortune hunter! He thought less of money than even mother did.”

“You paint a filial picture,” Ellery smiled.

“Thank you, sir. Dad was the typical absent-minded professor who taught in a country school at a starvation salary, tyrannized by a school board who thought anybody who had read more than two books was a dues-paying Communist. He died at the age of forty-one of cancer. Mother was sickly, had a rheumatic heart... if this sounds like soap opera, don’t blame me, it actually happened... and I had to go to work to support us. That meant leaving school. It was only when mother died that I was able to go back and get my degree. In sociology. I’ve been working in the fields of welfare and education ever since.

“Johnny evidently nursed a guilt feeling because mother had been kicked out, so that his father inherited everything and passed it along to him. Poor old John. He kept looking us up and pressing money on us. Mother and dad would never take any. Me, I wasn’t the least bit proud. I gratefully accepted John’s financial help after mother passed away, or I’d never have been able to go back to college at all, I had too many debts to pay off. The way I saw it,” Leslie said thoughtfully, “Johnny’s making it possible for someone like me to complete her education was encouraging him to do something useful with his money instead of throwing it away on a lot of gimme girls. And if that’s a rationalization, so be it.” And Leslie’s little chin grew half an inch.

Inspector Queen (concealing a smile): “Miss Carpenter, did your cousin John ever indicate to you that he was going to make you the principal beneficiary of his estate under certain circumstances?”

“Under no circumstances, never! I didn’t dream he’d leave me so much as grandfather’s watch. We used to argue our social and political differences — remember, Al? Al will tell you I never pulled my punches with John.”

“She certainly did not,” Marsh said. “Johnny took a great deal from you, Les, more than from anybody. He was crazy about you. Maybe in love with you.”

“Oh, come, Al. I don’t think he ever even liked me. I was the bone in his throat — I kept telling him I was the voice of his superego. As far as I was concerned, John Levering Benedict the Three was a nonproductive, useless, all-wrapped-up-in-his-own-pleasures parasite, and I was the only one with the nerve to tell him so. There’s so much he could have done with his money!”

“Aren’t you overlooking something?” Marsh asked dryly. “He has done it, Les. Now.”

Leslie Carpenter looked amazed. “Do you know, I’d forgotten! That’s true, isn’t it? Now I can do all the wonderful things...”

There was something about the capsule autobiographer that tickled Ellery, and he surveyed her with an interest not altogether professional. On the outside she was a porcelain bit of femininity, looking as if you could see through her if you held her up to the light, but experience in reading character told him she was made of tough materials. There was a tilt to her little head, a glint in her eyes, that signified Sturm und Drang for anyone she disapproved of.

But what he perceived in her, or thought he did, went deeper than a strength developed through the exercise of poverty and the need to fight back in a world that crushed pacifists. There was a womanliness in her, a sweet underlying honesty, a lack of guile, that drew him. (And she possessed that paradox of nature, blue eyes that were warm.)

He thought it wonderful, then, that Leslie turned to Marsh and asked abruptly, “How much am I inheriting, Al?”

“The answer to that goes back to Johnny’s father. Under Benedict Senior’s will, on Johnny’s death his heir or heirs would receive the entire income from the Benedict holdings. Mind you, Leslie, I said income, not principal. Mr. Benedict didn’t believe in distributing principal, even after he was dead. The principal remains in trust and intact.”

“Oh,” Leslie said. “That sounds like a letdown. How much will the income come to?”

“Well, you’ll be able to do a few good works with it, Les, and maybe have a few dollars left over for yourself. Let me see... oh, you should be collecting an income of some three million dollars a year.”

“My God!” Leslie Carpenter whispered; and she fell, weeping, into Marsh’s arms.

The press and the networks had descended in clouds late on Sunday, when the news of Johnny-B’s murder got out of Wrightsville. The invasion brought with it the usual orgy of sensationalism and slush. Newby and his small department, groggy from coping with the riotous student mass-trip at Fyfield Gunnery, had their hands overfull; in the end, the chief had to call on the state police for assistance, and a number of importunate newsmen and slop sisters were escorted from the grounds. Order was restored when a news pool was agreed upon, consisting of one representative each of the wire services, the TV networks, and the radio people. A single round-robin conference with the ex-wives and Leslie Carpenter was authorized to take place in the living room of the main house, a brouhaha that the Queens and Newby observed out of range of the cameras, watching and listening for some slip or lapse, no matter how tiny or remote. But if their quarry was one of the disinherited women, she was too guarded to give herself away. The women merely contended for camera exposure and had nothing but kind and grieving words for the passing of their Lord Bountiful. (The trio had evidently made a pact not to malign Benedict in public for tactical reasons, at least until they could consult counsel about the will trick and the prestidigitation of their millions.) Leslie Carpenter limited herself to an expression of surprise at her windfall and the statement that she had “plans for the money” which she would disclose “at the proper time.”

At this juncture Marcia Kemp was heard to say, “Which is going to be never, baby!” — not by the press, fortunately for her, only by the Queens and Chief Newby. They questioned the redhead about the remark later, when the news people were gone. She explained quickly that she had been referring to the coming contest over the holograph will, which she was “sure” she, Alice, and Audrey would win; she had certainly not intended the remark as a threat to Miss Carpenter. (Newby thereupon assigned an officer to keep an eye on Miss Carpenter.)

But that was the only note of discord.

There followed the surprising episode of the little hill and what stood upon it.

During the idyllic (pre-homicide) part of their stay, while exploring Benedict’s property, the Queens had come across what looked like a Greek antiquity in miniature, a sort of ancient temple for dolls, with a little pediment and some more than creditable frieze-figures of a bucolic nature, little Doric columns, and for fillip two heavily stained-glass little windows. The tiny structure stood on the crest of a hillock surrounded by meadow, a pleasant if incongruous sight in the New England countryside.

The Queens, père et fils, walked around the diminutive construction wondering what it was. It did not look old, yet it did not look new, either. Ellery tried the adult-sized bronze door and found it as immovable as the entrance to SAC headquarters.

“A playhouse for some rich man’s little girl?” the Inspector ventured at last.

“If so, it was an expensive one. This is genuine marble.”

It did not occur to either man that it might have been built by John Levering Benedict III to shelter his moldering mortality.

But that was what it proved to be, a mausoleum. “Johnny left a covering letter about it,” Al Marsh told them Monday night. “He wanted to be laid away in it. He had a horror of being planted in the elaborate family vaults — there’s one in Seattle and one in Rhinebeck, New York. I don’t really know why — in fact, I doubt Johnny did himself. At heart he was a rebel like his Aunt Olivia — Leslie’s mother — only he had too much of his father in him, who in turn was dominated all his life by the grandfather. Or, as Johnny put it, ‘I inherited my father’s disease — no guts.’ It’s my opinion Johnny hated everything that had gone into creating the Benedict fortune.

“Anyway, shortly after he purchased this property he designed the mausoleum — rather, had an architect blueprint it to his specifications — and hired a couple of oldtimers, country masons, practically an extinct breed, I understand, from around here to build it on that rise above the meadow. He brought in a sculptor from Boston to do the figures in the pediment; and the only reason he went to Boston for one is that he couldn’t find a local sculptor. Johnny loved this town and the surrounding country. The marble comes from the Mahoganies up there, native stuff. He left a special maintenance fund in perpetuity, by the way. He said, ‘I expect to lie here for a long time.’”

“But how did he finagle a cemetery permit?” Inspector Queen asked curiously. “Doesn’t this state have a law against burial in private ground?”

“I had something to do with that, Inspector. I rooted around and found that the section of land where that hill and meadow lie has been in dispute between Wrightsville and Wright County for over a hundred and seventy-five years, the result of a surveying error in the eighteenth century. Wrightsville’s always claimed that the meadow is within the town limits, with Wright County just as stubbornly maintaining that it’s outside the disputed line. The claims have never been satisfactorily adjudicated; it’s one of those Biblical problems these old communities run into sometimes, with no Solomon around to settle them. I worked through a local law firm, Danzig and Danzig, and we just stepped into the legal No Man’s Land and presented the contending parties with the accomplished fact. The thing is in such a tangle that I could assure Johnny he might count on resting in peace in that miniature temple till the day after Armageddon. So he went ahead with his plans.”

On Wednesday, Benedict’s body was officially released by the coroner’s office (the jury, having little of evidential substance to go on but the meager autopsy report, found that the deceased had come to his death “by a homicide caused by a blunt instrument hereunder described at the hand of person or persons unknown”); and on Friday, which was the third of April, Benedict was laid to rest in his meadow.

There had been a fierce if hushed competition for the business. Wrightsville’s mortuary needs were served by three establishments: Duncan Funeral Parlors (the oldest in town), the Eternal Rest Mortuary, and Twin Hill Eternity Estates, Inc. They cuddled together on the east side of Upper Whistling Avenue (across from The Nutte Shop and Miss Sally’s Tea Room) like three cotyledons in a seed. The notoriety of the case, which in an earlier day would have caused the conservative gentry of the embalming fluid to shudder and shy, only spurred their descendants to the chase; it was not every day that a local undertaking parlor was called on to bury a Benedict, and a murdered Benedict at that.

The determinant in the selection of the Duncan establishment was free enterprise. The incumbent, Philbert Duncan, had absorbed his art at the knees of the old master, his father, whom envious detractors had called “the slickest people-planter east of L.A.” Johnny Benedict’s letter of instructions on the subject of his interment had directed that his remains be encased in a stainless-steel inner container of a solid bronze casket of specified quality and design. No such magnificent box being available at any of the Wrightsville parlors, there was talk of postponing the funeral until the appropriate one could be shipped up from Boston. But Philbert Duncan drove over to Connhaven in the middle of the night of Wednesday — Thursday (presumably after moonset by the light of a dark lantern) and returned in triumph at dawn carting the specified coffin; it turned out that he had a cousin, one Duncan Duncan, who was in the business in Connhaven, a good-sized city in which demands for $5000 caskets, while uncommon, were not unknown.

Benedict’s instructions had also called for an Episcopal funeral service, since he had been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican communion; and old Father Highmount was pressed into service for the occasion, having to come out of retirement because his successor, young Reverend Boyjian (he was, to Ernest High-mount’s horror, not only Low Church but of Armenian descent!) was in the Bahamas with his wife on a vacation financed by the vestry in lieu of a much-needed rise in salary.

As the one and only next of kin, Leslie Carpenter decided to bypass a formal service in the church because of the rowdy press and the great curiosity of the public. A delegation of Benedict’s closest friends, selected by Leslie on Marsh’s advice, came by invitation from south, east, and west. It was calculatedly not large, so that the company assembled on the meadow before the little Greek temple at two o’clock Friday afternoon, even with the pool from the news media included, was handled without difficulty by Chief Newby’s officers, with the state police relegated to the boundaries of the property to balk crank crashers and just plain nosy noonans from town.

It could not be said that Father Highmount produced a snappy service. He had always been a mumbler, a failing that had hardly improved with age; he was also suffering from a sloppy spring cold and he was having trouble with his dentures, so that most of what he said before the mausoleum came out a mumbo jumbo of mutters, squeaks, snuffles, and spit. About all the Queens heard with any clarity were “resurrection and the life,” “Dominus illuminatio The Lord is my light,” “My soul fleeth,” “St. John fourteen one,” and a final mighty “one God, world without end Amen!” which was miraculously free of sludge.

But the day was lovely, the breeze ruffled the old man’s few fine silvery hairs in benediction, and no one seemed to mind the unintelligibility of his message to the dead man. For there was a quality of sincerity in his performance, a devotion to what he was saying over the invisible stranger in the casket (Leslie had wisely decided, in view of her cousin’s wounds, not to put Philbert Duncan’s cosmetic artistry to the test by having an open-coffin service), even though no one understood the old man but himself — there was in this quality a something that raised the flesh and brought a meaning out of the mystery. In spite of himself, Ellery was impressed.

He found himself reflecting that the whole bit — Benedict’s valueless life, his dearth of accomplishment in spite of unlimited means, his uncompensated guilts, his failure to contribute anything but money to sad and greedy women who promptly threw it away, and finally a brutal death on the eve of what might have turned out to be his reformation — the whole bit was out of the theater of the absurd. Or, for that matter (thinking of the mausoleum), of Sophocles.

Still, he had redeemed part of his worthlessness. Aside from the mysterious Laura, Benedict had thought to provide for the far-out contingency — an act of incredible foresight, when one thought about it — that he might not survive the weekend. In which case, he had decided, everything went to little Leslie Carpenter, who had a very positive idea — as she had apparently told him so often to his face — of what could be done with three million a year.

So his life had not been all wasteland.

Ellery half expected the hapless Laura to put in an appearance at the funeral — in a dramatic black veil surely — weeping for sympathetic cameras and perhaps angling for a paid interview with LIFE or LOOK, or the slushier newspapers. But no mystery woman showed up in Wrightsville or sent a telegram or a letter to Leslie or Marsh or the police; and no unidentified funeral wreath arrived to pique the press, Newby, or the Queens.

Only Leslie, Marsh, a trapped Miss Smith, the three ex-wives, Chief Newby, and the Queens remained while Duncan’s assistants carried the bronze casket into the mausoleum, set it precisely on the catafalque, arranged the many wreaths and floral baskets artistically, and emerged to lock the door and hand the key to Chief Newby. Who turned it over to Marsh, as the attorney of record, for safekeeping until the estate should be settled.

There was no conversation on the tramp back through the fields to the house. Glancing over his shoulder, Ellery saw the stained glass in the little building glow in the sunlight, and he hoped that Johnny Benedict was comforted, although — his unorthodox views being what they were — he doubted it.

The fleet of taxis and private cars had all driven off; only two state policemen were left guarding the road; in spite of the sun and the breeze, there was a clammy feel to the air, and not only the women shivered.

Waiting for them inside was young Lew Chalanski, an assistant prosecutor of Wright County, the son of a popular former prosecutor, Judson Chalanski. Young Chalanski conferred with Chief Newby aside, smiled his father’s famous vote-getting smile, and left.

Newby’s poet’s face was preoccupied.

“I understand everyone here except Alice Tierney, who’s local, lives in New York City. You’re all free to go home.”

“Meaning you haven’t got a damned thing on us,” Marcia Kemp said, tossing her red head like a flamenco dancer. “Or you’d never let us out of your state.”

“Correction. What it means, Miss Kemp,” the chief said, “is that we haven’t enough evidence against any individual to bring before a grand jury at the present time. But I want to emphasize: this is an open case, under active investigation, and you three ladies are the hot suspects. Do any of you have plans to leave New York State in the immediate future?” They said they did not. “That’s fine. If that situation should change, however, get in touch first with Inspector Queen at his office in Centre Street. The Inspector’s agreed to act as liaison man for us up here.”

“How cosy,” Audrey Weston sniffed.

“We cops stick together — sometimes,” Newby said. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for now. This house, as the scene of a homicide, is going to be under seal, so I’d appreciate it if you left as soon as possible.”

On the plane out of Boston the Inspector said, “Why so close-mouthed, Ellery?”

“I can’t decide whether to admire the cleverness or marvel at the stupidity.”

“Of whom? What are you talking about?”

“Of whoever left those three things in Johnny’s bedroom along with his body. Each one points to a different ex-Mrs. Benedict.”

“We’ve been all through that. It’s a cinch somebody planted them.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“The thing is, though — what would the point be of framing three different women for the murder? And aside from that. A frameup has to make sense on the face of it — it has to look legitimate if it’s to fool the cops. What investigating officer in his right mind would believe that three women visited that bedroom, presumably at different times, and each one dropped an article of her clothing on the scene, presumably in her excitement or by accident, and so implicated herself? Anyone who’d expect a ‘frameup’ like that to work would have to be AWOL from the cuckoo house.”

Ellery stared out the window at the flooring of cloud they were gliding over, and he nodded. “It’s much likelier we’re dealing with Miss Smarty Pants. Who lifted something belonging to the other two and deliberately left all the articles — her own included — on the scene in order to spread the inevitable suspicion and so, so to speak, distribute her guilt. She knew that she and the other two ex-wives were the natural — in fact, the only viable — suspects. Since all three had identical motive, opportunity, and access to the weapon — in effect, making herself one-third of a suspect instead of a standout individual.”

“Unless it was a conspiracy,” Inspector Queen mused. “The three of them, recognizing they were all in the same boat, ganging up on Benedict.”

“That’s the one situation in which they wouldn’t have left clues to themselves at all,” Ellery retorted. “No, it was just one of them.”

“But you aren’t satisfied.”

“Well, no,” Ellery said, “I’m not.”

“What’s bugging you?”

“The whole thing.”

The plane hummed along.

“And another thing,” the Inspector said. “Why did I let you con me into promising Newby I’d follow through on this Laura woman? God knows I carry a heavy enough case load as it is! And suppose we find her — so what? I can’t see how she could possibly be implicated.”

“Unless Johnny told her something.”

“Like what? Spell it out for an old illiterate.”

“You also weren’t cut out to be a comedian! She has to be found, dad, you know that, long shot or not. It shouldn’t be too hard. He must certainly have been seen with her in public. Marsh can tell you Johnny’s favorite haunts.”

“Newby also asked me to check out the three exes,” his father grumbled.

“Noblesse oblige. Some day Anse may be able to help you out on a tough Manhattan homicide.”

“And you’re the lousy comic’s son,” the Inspector said tartly; after which they flew in silence.

But not all the way. Because ten minutes out of Kennedy Ellery suddenly said, as if they had never stopped talking, “Of course, this is all on the assumption that Johnny was slugged by Marcia, or Audrey, or Alice. Suppose he wasn’t.”

“You suppose,” his father retorted. “My supposer is all tired out. Who else could it have been?”

“Al Marsh.”

The Inspector swerved in his seat. “Why in hell should Marsh have knocked Benedict off?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s independently wealthy, or if he’s in financial trouble he certainly didn’t stand to gain anything under Benedict’s wills. He was also Benedict’s personal attorney, confidant, closest friend — what earthly reason would Marsh have to splash Benedict’s brains all over the place?”

“I told you, I don’t know. But we do know he had the same opportunity and access to the weapon that the three women had. So all he lacks is motive to be as suspect as they are. If you’re going to lend Newby a hand, dad, I suggest you dig into Marsh and see if you can come up with a possible motive. My offhand guess would be women.”

“Laura?” the Inspector said instantly.

Ellery looked out the window.

“I love the way you assign the work,” his father said, sinking back. “Any other little thing?”

“Yes.” Ellery’s nose wrinkled. “And this one makes me feel like a heel.”

“No kidding. Let me in on it.”

“Leslie Carpenter. It’s a thousand-to-one shot, but... check out her alibi for last Saturday night.”

And so, with the jet touching down on a runway in the Borough of — by coincidence — Queens, their vacation came to an end and one of Ellery’s queerest cases began.