Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 12, 1967

Rufus King The Patron Saint of the Impossible

It seemed, a hopeless case. All the evidence pointed to Candice’s sweetheart — he had motive, opportunity, and the hot blood of a Latin lover. So, once again, Monsignor Lavigny put his faith in Saint Jude...

The murder backdrop was the Florida room of the Hoffmann home in Halcyon, which is a small town inhabited by the modestly retired, graced by seasonal tourists and native crackers, and enlivened by a thin lunatic fringe of horse-happy railbirds, amiable bookies, and glazed divorcees. It rests, this gentle haven, on the Atlantic seaboard between the gilt splendors of Miami Beach and the ormolu patina of Fort Lauderdale.

The Hoffmann house is one of the older and more pretentious of Halcyon’s estates, being surrounded with lush masses of semi-tropical shrubbery and flowering trees that afford a screening of privacy from all neighboring houses.

The hour when Monsignor Lavigny became involved in the crime (he lived directly to the east of the Hoffmanns) was eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning in April — during a tranquil moment in which the Monsignor was annoying several aphids on his Bella Romana camellias with a nicotine spray. Sunshine slanted gently onto his silver-crested head and distinguished appearance, which bore a nostalgic resemblance to Walter Hampden in the actor’s turn-of-the-century portrayal of Cardinal Richelieu.

The people involved in the tragedy he knew very well. They were Candice Hoffmann, the murdered man’s teenage niece-and-ward, and a black-browed athletic young ox with the romantic name of Raul Eusebio Fuentes, who was the Hoffmanns’ neighbor to the west.

The youngsters were, of course, in love. It was the first and therefore the fiercest sort of blind emotion on Candice’s part, but hardly the first on Raul’s whose reservoir of sentiment had begun operations in his birthplace in the Oriente province of Cuba at the tender age of twelve. This in no way diluted the young man’s intensity, nor the passionate resentment he felt toward Hoffmann (now a corpse) over Hoffmann’s refusal to consent to his ward’s marriage while she remained a minor and legally under his skeletal thumb.

Perhaps skeletal was a tough extreme, as Monsignor Lavigny believed that Hoffmann’s air of fleshlessness, both physically and in the amenities, was basically due to the man’s several ailments, among which was a rickety heart, and all of which combined to make him a decidedly acid character.

It was a character to be deplored, even for its lesser sins of pride, conceit, and a miserly grip on possessions both human and material. So convinced was Hoffmann of his control over his body and mind that he even refused to acknowledge the existence of physical pain. As for the parading of any bodily deficiency, that was out of the question. And yet, in spite of it all, Monsignor Lavigny had always looked upon Hoffmann as a soul to be enticed into the fold. Difficult, and now (thanks to a bashed skull) beyond further attempt.

The fourth member of the blood-tinged masque was Hoffmann’s wife, Elise. She seemed a brave and handsome asset, much younger than her husband, and a woman whom Monsignor Lavigny considered to have been a bride of circumstance. Just what the circumstances were that had induced her into a marriage with Hoffmann he did not know, but he imagined they had lain within the periphery of economics, perhaps of loneliness, perhaps of some fortuitous avenue of escape. Gratitude too was a possible explanation — but never love.

The curtain rose at eight in the morning on the tooting of an automobile horn.

Monsignor Lavigny left the outraged aphids in a state of suspended peace, and responded with a wave to the gloved hand of Elise Hoffmann as she drove past in her foreign convertible, heading for home. The glimpse of her cotton-crisp freshness and gaily insolent excuse-for-a-hat blended pleasingly with the tone of the morning.

As he later told his young friend Chuck Day of the sheriff’s CBI division, not many minutes seemed to have passed before the Monsignor heard the scream. Even across the distance that separated the two houses, the scream came clearly through the masking flora as one of shock mingled with horror.

The prelate cast dignity to the winds and broke into a lope that halted at the open jalousies of the Hoffmann Florida room, where the scene was appallingly similar to the final curtain of a Greek tragedy.

Elise Hoffmann, still hatted and gloved, stood stage-center and had been turned, apparently, into a pillar of stone. At her feet, with his acid face flecked with blood, lay Hoffmann, flat as only the dead can lie flat. Then to complete the ghastly tableau, under an archway leading into a central hall, young Candice was stretched out on terrazzo tiling in a state of collapse.

The pillar of stone swayed as shock began to recede from Elise. Her clouded eyes seemed to clear as she focused them upon Monsignor Lavigny.

“He ran out,” she said. “He struck Candice brutally — senselessly—”

“Who did, Elise?”

There was a flicker of irritation in her voice, as though the answer should be obvious.

“Why, Raul, of course.”

“The thought is beyond belief,” Monsignor Lavigny said to Chuck Day as they sat in the Lavigny patio eating cashew nuts and drinking a cooled chablis.

“The evidence proves otherwise, Father.” (The prelate preferred the usage of that title by his friends rather than that of Monsignor, with the latter’s stiltedness and variety of mispronunciations.) “I am sorry about it, too, because I know you like the bum.”

“Bum? No, never that. Patriot, if you wish. Raul is a youngster who is deeply, devotedly in love and hence unpredictable; but he is neither a killer nor a bum.”

Chuck, whose mind and experience inclined him to the dogma that a fact was ruler-straight, could never accustom himself to Monsignor Lavigny’s proved ability to throw a few curves across the plate. There had been that child-kidnaping case last year, the beach robbery of the Terressi diamonds the year before...

“What has patriotism got to do with it?” he asked skeptically, nevertheless filing the thought for further consideration. “Raul Fuentes has been naturalized and living here for years.”

“Perhaps it has everything to do with it. Or nothing. There is a parable—”

Chuck interrupted with a certain firmness, but still within the limits of respect. Monsignor Lavigny’s parables were notoriously of interminable length. “Father, let me give you the picture as we are turning it over to the county prosecutor, I think you’ll agree that the job was one of passion? Balked love, then murderous hate?”

“Yes — with some reservations.”

“But what’s left? Money? Profit? Neither motive figures. Whatever else he is, Fuentes is a rich kid, and Candice is a wealthy girl. Just happens she’s under age. They could elope and get hitched by some J.P. up in Georgia but they’re both sincerely religious, and surely such a marriage would not be acceptable in the eyes of the church. Especially with her guardian forbidding it.”

Monsignor Lavigny absently inclined his head.

“Actually,” Chuck went on, “they had no alternative but to persuade Hoffmann to change his decision. Do you know his reasons for objecting to the match?”

“I did talk with him, and it is possible to understand his point of view.”

“It makes good sense to me too. Elise Hoffmann discussed it while you were staying over at the Sacred Heart with Candice.” (This was the hospital where the. young girl had been taken.) “Consider Raul’s actions. He’s, in his early twenties and rich, but where does the dough come from?”

“Why, from his paternal estate down in Cuba, as I understand it.”

“So he says. Then why within the past year did he set up a phony ranch in the boondocks west of Davie? Why does he keep a plane there which he pilots himself, and a camouflage stable of mixed-up plugs strictly out of old milk routes?”

Monsignor Lavigny smiled blandly. “Hope springs eternal, especially on the race track.”

“Now, that’s nonsense, Father, and you know it. If one of those antique platers even caught sight of a starting gate he’d collapse from fright. And what about Raul’s habit of disappearing for a day, or a week, and then side-stepping questions as to where he was or why? According to Mrs. Hoffmann, even Candice can’t dig it out of him.”

“There are certain things that cannot be discussed except,” Monsignor murmured, “in the confessional. If I may refer to certain of the martyrs—”

“Fuentes? A martyr? In my book the guy’s up to his neck in some sort of racket.”

“My reference was oblique.”

“Well, there was nothing oblique about the three-cornered row Elise Hoffmann overheard yesterday morning before she drove over to Pompano. She got a load of it while she was packing a bag in her bedroom. Hoffmann, Candice, and Fuentes were in the patio just outside her windows. Fuentes gave them both the works, the gist being that either Hoffmann changed his mind, or Candice agreed to forego the church and elope — and then he tacked on the threadbare old cliché of ‘or else.’ ”

“The boy was overwrought. In his heart he did not mean it.”

“Father, Father!” Chuck’s tone was kindly with pity. “The evidence proves that Raul was sitting right at the table this morning while Hoffmann ate breakfast, and where he was killed.”

“Did any of the servants — but they couldn’t have. I remember that they are gone.”

“Yes, the staff left yesterday to open up the Hoffmann summer place on Sea Island. The family were to drive up there today, which is why Elise Hoffmann made her early start back from Pompano.” Chuck studied Monsignor Lavigny with a slight frown. “You have something on your mind, Father?”

“There is a definite contradiction. Please explain your conviction that Raul was seated at the breakfast table with Hoffmann.”

“For one thing, you yourself were told by Mrs. Hoffmann that the man she saw escaping was Fuentes.”

“The poor woman was in a state of shock.”

“We’ll have further confirmation when Candice recovers consciousness. But even if Candice didn’t see who struck her, there is the circumstantial evidence of the drinking glass, and you can’t get around it.”

“What glass?”

“First, let’s follow Elise Hoffmann’s story. She waves hello to you as she drives by and you wave back. She puts the car in the garage, then carries her overnight bag into the house. She passes Candice’s room and knows the girl is in it because through the closed door she hears Candice’s portable TV set turned on. She leaves her overnight bag in Hoffmann’s and her suite, figures he’s breakfasting in the Florida room, and goes there. You know what she found.”

“A shocking, hideous thing!”

“She is stunned almost senseless. I will admit — in fact, she admits it herself — that her vision may have become blurred by the shock. She sees this figure who she thinks is Fuentes — and the drinking glass proves he was Fuentes — doing a quicksilver exit towards the archway where he bumps into Candice, bashes her with some sort of metal bar, and beats it as Mrs. Hoffmann gets back her vocal powers and starts to screech.”

Monsignor Lavigny said patiently, “The glass?”

“Yes, the all-important glass. Now, get this, Father. The breakfast table was laid for one — for Hoffmann. Candice had her own tray in her bedroom. Apart from other things like coffee and toast, there were a pitcher of orange juice and two glasses on the table. Both glasses had been used and each still contained some juice. One glass was beside Hoffmann’s plate. The other was across the table where someone else has been sitting.”

“Surely it was Candice, joining her uncle in a glass of orange juice after having prepared his breakfast?”

“No, Father — no on a, couple of counts. Besides the fact that she was probably still in a huff over yesterday’s row and therefore steering clear of Hoffmann, Elise Hoffmann tells me that Candice dislikes any citrus fruit or juice. All of which is purely academic, because of the fingerprints.”

“On the second glass?”

“Yes. There are those of Fuentes where he held it. They have been identified by comparison with ones found on objects in his bathroom and on silver toilet articles on his dresser. Now, this is the clincher, Father. There are also — on that second glass, mind you — prints of the thumb and three fingers of Hoffmann’s left hand, left there when he poured the orange juice into the glass and handed it to Fuentes.”

Monsignor Lavigny shook his head sadly.

“We think,” Chuck continued, “that Fuentes stepped over to renew his demands of yesterday, or possibly to apologize and make peace with Candice. We think what happened is that somehow Hoffmann had learned the nature of Fuentes’s racket, the reason for his disappearances, and threatened exposure if the kid didn’t give Candice up. Well, you know Fuentes. You can imagine how his hot Spanish blood took over.” Chuck felt sudden contrition at the expression on Monsignor Lavigny’s kindly face. “Do not take it so hard. Father. Isn’t it possible even for you to be mistaken in a man’s character?”

“I am not mistaken, but I am a bewildered and deeply disturbed old man.”

“There’s nothing to be bewildered about, Father.”

Monsignor Lavigny disagreed, speaking with difficulty, as though he were trying to establish for himself a sounder belief in what he was saying. “At the Sacred Heart, after several hours at Candice’s bedside, there was one moment, brief but perfectly sane and clear, when consciousness returned.”

“She spoke? She recognized you?”

“She did. She had heard a crash as if someone had fallen — obviously her uncle, when he was killed. It took a moment or two for the sound to register, then she ran out of her bedroom and got as far as the archway to the Florida room when she was struck on the head and knew nothing further.”

“She didn’t see who it was?”

Monsignor Lavigny spoke more hesitantly. He was reluctant to go on, but he managed it. “I must tell you that at this point her voice weakened in answer to my question as to whether her attacker might have been Raul. She said that was impossible, that Raul was in New York City this morning, that she had seen him. Then her voice faltered even more and she relapsed into coma. She has been so ever since.”

“Obviously it was delirium speaking. Just an hallucination.”

“Perhaps, and yet you have not found him in his house, nor out at the ranch, and his plane is gone.”

“Of course it is. When he fled from the Hoffmanns’ he would have driven directly out to the ranch and used the plane for escape.”

Monsignor Lavigny said with what, for him, held a quality of fierceness, “If it only were not for Elise Hoffmann’s identification and the two sets of fingerprints on the glass!”

“An unsurmountable if, Father.”

“Yes, perhaps. I can conceive that under certain provocation Raul might kill — but as for his striking Candice, never!”

“He may not have known who it was — just heard a person running towards the archway and struck blindly.”

“I cannot bring myself to accept that. I have had a sudden thought — it may be fantasy, yet might lead us to the truth. I shall be gone from here until tomorrow evening. And you... you will not be offended, not think me officious, if I make a few suggestions?”

“Why do you suppose I’m here? What are they, Father?”

“I would continue the search for the murder weapon or — what may even be more important — try to establish its absence from the place where it might normally be.”

“I take it you have an idea what it was?”

“Forgive me if I seem evasive, but to be more specific at this moment might bring grievous injustice upon the innocent. I would suggest that you look for a glove that is perhaps stained with dark grease. Also it might be advisable to consider the types of glasses that contained the orange juice.”

“You’re confusing me badly, Father.”

“Have patience, and a reliance upon your own excellent deductive powers. Your department has a plane at its disposal, has it not?”

“Yes.”

“Then a flight to Sea Island might also be indicated, and a questioning of the Hoffmann staff.”

Chuck looked at the prelate sharply. “Along any particular line?”

“Perhaps as to any unusual visitor who may have called on the Hoffmanns during the past few weeks.”

“Unusual in what way?”

“Let us say in the sense of being a stranger to the servants.” Monsignor Lavigny grew deadly serious. “And this is the most important suggestion of all.”

“Yes?”

“You might arrange with Mother Superior at the Sacred Heart to permit two women from your staff, dressed in nursing habits, to alternate watches in keeping a constant guard over Candice.”

“There’s a man posted there now, but we’ll do as you say. Both Can-dice and Mrs. Hoffmann are under protection. Until Fuentes is caught.”

“Until,” Monsignor Lavigny murmured in polite correction, “the murderer is trapped.”

“And you, Father? Where will you be while we’re doing all this?”

Monsignor Lavigny’s smile was both enigmatic and strangely affectionate. His eyes held what Chuck Day later described to his wife as a beyond-the-horizon look.

“I am considering a pilgrimage accompanied by Saint Jude. He has helped me in the past, and I shall ask him to help me now. Saint Jude, you know, is the patron saint of the impossible, of the seeming impasse. He is of inestimable assistance at a time when there seems no hope left.”

The following evening, again in the patio with its velvet chiaroscuro of moonlight and the night-released scent of jasmine, Monsignor Lavigny sat in troubled contemplation, absently sipping, his after-dinner brandy and awaiting the arrival of the CBI man.

The prelate had paused at the Sacred Heart on his way home from the airport and had satisfied himself that Candice was under watchful observation by women from the sheriff’s department in their borrowed nursing habits.

He had learned that the girl’s condition remained unchanged, that the coma continued unbroken. Elise Hoffmann had come to the hospital and had also telephoned anxious inquiries numerous times, as had many of Candice’s young friends. There had been (perhaps understandably) no message or inquiry from Raul Fuentes — this, even though the Hoffmann case continued to be front page news.

Chuck came. He slumped into a chair, accepted brandy, and went directly to the point.

“Father, your suggestions have opened up a new slant. We believe now that Elise Hoffmann did the job, but the evidence is slim, circumstantial, and a topflight trial counsel might easily get her off.”

“My thoughts lay that way, too. I suspected, and I still suspect, a frame-up. The nature of it is almost clear, but not quite. We will find it to have been exceedingly clever, the work of a truly devious mind. Is Mrs. Hoffmann under arrest?”

“No. She is under surveillance. We won’t haul her in until we’ve got Fuentes. The case against that young buzzard is still too strong. Unless,” Chuck added with a friendly grin, “your pilgrimage with Saint Jude cleared his slate?”

“To a certain extent it did — at least to my own satisfaction. I am infinitely grateful. When I flew to New York I carried with me a good photograph of Raul. You will remember Elise Hoffmann saying that when she passed the closed door of Candice’s bedroom she heard a TV program going on inside?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it occurred to me that the broadcast might have offered a solution to Candice’s apparent hallucination when she told me that she, with herself being here in Halcyon, had seen Raul in New York City yesterday morning.”

“It was the right hour for the Dave Garroway program ‘Today’ — people in the street before the exhibition hall window. Haven’t I read or seen—”

“Yes, there was nothing especially original in my thought, nor in the fact itself. I, too, have read of similar incidents — one in which a spectator in a ringside seat at a televised prizefight was recognized by his wife, who was watching the program at home. She later divorced him, I believe, naming his rather notorious lady companion at the bout as co-respondent. No, the thought was nothing new, but it served as a possible lead to casting doubt on Elise Hoffmann’s story.”

“What’s the result?”

“Mr. Garroway was most courteous, most kind — as were Mr. Lescoulie and Mr. Blair. They studied Raul’s picture, and did remember a man who might have been he. They had noticed the man because of his gestures.”

“But why on earth would Fuentes risk showing himself on a nationwide hookup if he wanted to keep his ‘mysterious’ absences secret? It doesn’t make sense.”

“A man in love often makes no sense. He was asking forgiveness.”

“Of Candice?”

“Yes, for his tantrum with its hotheaded ‘or else.’ He knew Candice’s habit of watching that broadcast, and took a chance on her doing so yesterday morning. Raul’s gestures were quite compelling in, Mr. Garroway informed me, an operatic fashion. A Latinesque pantomiming of forgive-me-and-I-love-you, done with bravura.”

“Would they make the identification under oath in court, or by sworn affidavit?”

“No. I asked. They would hesitate to do so. There would be too strong an element of doubt.”

“At least the kid’s got one strike in his favor. There’s the hotel he stayed at, or friends. He should be able to prove an alibi.”

“He might not be willing to.”

“Why not?”

“He may refuse flatly to talk about his business in New York or his contacts there.”

“If he doesn’t, the two sets of fingerprints on that second glass will knock our case against Elise Hoffmann into the nearest ashcan.”

“Just how strong has it become?”

Chuck gave the prelate a concise account. The murder weapon had been found. Its place of concealment was in a large clump of star jasmine. It was a jack bar, looked for specifically because of its absence from where it should have been (as Father had suggested), along with the jack in the trunk compartment of Elise Hoffmann’s car.

There was more. The two glasses were of different types. No gloves were found. They could have been disposed of later, and more carefully, than the jack bar.

The Sea Island questioning of the Hoffmann staff revealed that there had been a stranger. Ten days ago. He had been closeted with Hoffmann for over half an hour. No name, but the Hoffmann maid who had let him in offered a general description which included a noticeable cast in the man’s left eye. Identification had proved simple — a local private investigator, well-known to the department and to Chuck. Up to the time of Hoffmann’s death the private investigator had been in Hoffmann’s employ — his assignment, to obtain evidence for a divorce. A Miami Beach character, a young muscle-operator of the Hercules type, came into the picture as the “other man.” This handsome hulk and a legal separation from the Hoffmann assets by divorce offered plenty of motive for the elimination of Hoffmann...

A house boy interrupted. Mister Chuck was urgently wanted on the telephone.

Monsignor Lavigny, while Chuck went into the house, mused on all human frailty, deploring, yet understanding it very well. It was not for him to judge, certainly not for him to punish. That was within the province of the law, while the ultimate appeal lay in the discretion of God. What malignant germ was it that festered in the brain of murder? Never had it been isolated since the days of Cain. What flaw...

“Word from the office,” Chuck said, rejoining him. “They caught Fuentes. His plane just landed at the ranch. He clammed up. A ‘no comment’ to end all ‘no comments.’ They put him in a car, started for headquarters, and he jumped. Now the boondocks have him, not us.” Chuck smashed an angry fist into the palm of his hand. “One other report. The guard we’ve kept on Elise Hoffmann called in that she left the house and drove off in her convertible. Caught him without warning, too late to check on where she’s heading. Father, we’re doing just fine!”

Monsignor Lavigny stood up. “It would be wise for us to go to the Sacred Heart. On the way we can discuss the advisability of certain arrangements. I believe I can persuade Mother Superior to give her consent. Mrs. Hoffmann will take time to drive around while considering her next move. Before,” he added softly, “she strikes again.”

Owing to a regional wave of the Asian flu with its subsequent complications, and that vague bite noir elastically labeled virus, even some of the corridors of the Sacred Heart held beds, and a suppressed air of tension pervaded the hospital. With it existed a certain laxity of the less imperative regulations, while a greater than usual ebb and flow of traffic — nurses, sisters, interns, orderlies, visiting relatives, an occasional doctor — gave the place a slight semblance of Grand Central Station during this normally quiet evening hour.

Candice Hoffmann had been fortunate in having been placed in a private room, one vacated through a fatal case of pneumonia. It was a pleasant, impersonal room, its main furnishings being a hospital bed, a dresser, a locker, and some chairs. There were two doors, one to the corridor, one to a private bathroom. There was about the room an aseptic openness that made concealment impossible.

Two windows, open to the trade wind with its odors of the flowering night, were frames for pale moonlight, while a shaded night lamp washed faint amber across the bed’s white pillow and the white-bandaged head with its contusion-marked face resting motionlessly upon it.

Chuck and Monsignor Lavigny stood in the bathroom, in tense expectancy. The bathroom door was opened a crack, sufficiently for them to have a view that included the bed and the corridor door. The two men were continuing an argument in whispers.

“Father, it is still a crime against the Federal government.”

“Technically, yes. But isn’t it the intention that truly constitutes a crime? More so, even, than the crime itself? Remember that Raul has been running guns and ammunition to the rebels at his own expense, paying for them out of his own pocket. There has never been any question of illicit gain. Granted he is a naturalized citizen, yet his roots go back to Cuba. He feels that his family and many of his friends have suffered intolerable injustices from the present regime.”

“A case of patriotism once-removed.”

“Precisely. And precisely the reason why he would rather suffer death than betray his rebel contacts by revealing the truth about his ‘mysterious’ disappearances. So far there exists no proof of his activities and he will never speak. Just as I, except for your confidential ear, shall never speak.”

A sudden pressure of Chuck’s fingers on Monsignor Lavigny’s arm brought immobility and silence. The corridor door, observed through the crack, was opening.

Elise Hoffmann looked in, satisfying herself that the room, with the exception of the patient, was empty. She had been keeping the door under observation for the past five minutes from an inconspicuous post in the traffic-filled corridor, after having noted the departure from the room of a nurse who presumably had arranged her patient for the night.

She came inside and closed the door. A few hurried footsteps carried her to the bed where in fumbling haste her hands pulled the pillow from under the bandage-swathed head, while her dark, abandoned eyes flickered in apprehensive observation between pale windows and the closed corridor door.

She pressed the pillow firmly down on the bruise-marked face.

There was no movement, no struggle. A sound made Mrs. Hoffmann look toward the bathroom door which, remarkably, now stood open with, more remarkable still, that CBI man Mr. Day framed there with a Leica camera held against one eye. Then he was saying, almost casually, “All right, Miss Brown. I have it. You can get up now.”

The strong arms of Miss Brown (sheriff’s dept., physical ed. grad., adept at judo) gave a practiced shove, knocking Elise Hoffmann backward and into a fortuitously located chair.

Extraordinary, the mind, the nerves of a murderer, with that fierce egomaniac clinging to avoid punishment, to save his neck until the last ditch failed! Those were Monsignor Lavigny’s thoughts as he watched Elise Hoffmann stiffen into an icy rage on the chair while, assisted by Chuck, Miss Brown was unswathed from bandages and cleaned of the grease-paint bruise marks that had camouflaged her face.

“I was rearranging the pillow more comfortably,” Elise Hoffmann said in a clear and frigid tone. “Seeing you quite naturally gave me a shock. Unconsciously I put the pillow down. That photograph you have just taken, Mr. Day, shall be the basis of a suit I shall bring against your office.”

No, there was not even a quiver, much less a break. Elise Hoffmann’s control was superb and it was perfectly obvious that she intended to fight. Collapse had been expected, and certainly not this collected defiance.

Chuck took over.

Dispassionately, courteously, he outlined the case against her, tracing the probable moves, both physical and mental, she had gone through.

Her years of oppression under Hoffmann’s domination, with a fretful hatred inevitably building up. The threat of imminent divorce proceedings, ruining her share under the community property law between husband and wife.

(Elise Hoffmann did not even start to break. She sat as a figure of chiseled stone, waiting for an idiot to finish with his maunderings. And Monsignor Lavigny again had that over-the-horizon look.)

Chuck continued. Opportunity presented itself with the morning of the servant-free house, when the staff would be gone at Sea Island, when Candice would, as was her habit, be breakfasting while watching TV in her bedroom, when Hoffmann would be breakfasting alone in the Florida room.

Opportunity aligned itself with the fortuitous clash overheard among Fuentes and Candice and Hoffmann. Fuentes stepped immediately into the role of being groomed as Suspect Number One for the proposed crime.

Then the actual, and this time the true steps. After passing Monsignor Lavigny with a toot of her horn and a good-morning hand wave, the car was garaged. The jack bar was removed from the trunk compartment.

(Elise Hoffmann’s face remained a remotely interested, fashionable mask. Monsignor Lavigny had begun to mutter quietly in his Richelieu beard.)

Candice was, as expected, in her bedroom. Hoffmann was, as expected, breakfasting alone in the Florida room. Not much of a blow on the head was required to cause death — his rickety heart contributed to the result. He toppled sideways off the chair and crashed down on the floor. The sound of running footsteps — Candice. A hasty flattening against the wall beside the archway and a blow with the jack bar as Candice ran through — a blow to silence her as an eyewitness to the immediate picture of the crime.

(Elise Hoffmann smiled. Monfignor Lavigny’s muttering grew faintly severish.)

Chuck steadfastly went on. Not yet the screams. First, the run outdoors to conceal the jack bar among the jasmines. Then the hurried return to the Florida room with the assuming of a horror-stricken pose. Then the screams.

Chuck’s recapitulation was a dud.

He felt swamped with weariness, a bitter wash of failure. The woman would never break.

In the hush of the room, as Chuck’s voice died out, Elise Hoffmann laughed. A cold, amused, diamond-hard laugh.

“Isn’t there a rather important piece of evidence omitted, Mr. Day? Even the newspaper accounts played it up quite strongly. I refer, of course, to the second glass?”

Yes, Chuck realized, her bastions of defense still held. She would never yield while the contradiction offered by the fingerprints remained unresolved. Disheartedly he noticed that Monsignor Lavigny’s mutterings were approaching the decipherable. They seemed to be a murmured supplication to Saint Jude. Then the prelate’s voice exploded with the effect of a minor bomb.

“I have it! The solution to the second glass. The glass was,” he said, “a different type from the one beside your husband’s plate, because it came from no set of glassware in your house.”

“Merely an odd one, Monsignor,” Elise Hoffmann said indifferently. “A leftover from a former set.”

Monsignor Lavigny wrapped himself in the full dignity of his high office. His voice might remotely be said to have thundered.

“Madame, we are through with lies! You had determined to make Raul Fuentes the scapegoat. You could not place him physically upon the scene, so you placed an object he had handled upon the scene.

“I am convinced that you stopped at Raul’s house as you started off for Pompano to pick up such an object. You had the excuse of mediating the quarrel that had shortly occurred. But you did not need the excuse. You found him gone. You were able unobserved to find and take a glass, probably from his bathroom shelf.

“You were wearing driving gloves of chamois, the ones you wore when you waved to me, the ones you have since destroyed. You carried that glass with you to Pompano, guarding and preserving Raul’s fingerprints with some protective covering such as a scarf.

“After you had killed your husband and struck Candice down, you concealed the jack bar, got the glass, poured orange juice into it and set it on the table — after, I am convinced, you had pressed your dead husband’s fingerprints upon it to indicate that he had filled and handed the glass to Raul.”

“You are convinced,” Elise Hoffmann said. “But will a jury be?”

“They will be because you made one fatal error. When you pressed your husband’s fingerprints upon the glass, two of those prints were superimposed upon those of Raul. Proving that Raul’s were there first — and that your husband’s were put on it after his death. You look ill, Madame — and well you may!”

She broke completely.

Raul had been intercepted, and released, in the hospital grounds on his way to Candice. He was with her now in the room to which she had been transferred when the sheriff’s Miss Brown had taken her place.

Scotch and soda rested on the patio table.

“Father, was it Saint Jude?”

Monsignor Lavigny’s voice mellowed with a modest note. “I am gratefully certain that it was. My own poor wits could never have accomplished it of themselves.”

“And I suppose,” said Chuck drily, “that it was Saint Jude who cracked Elise Hoffmann’s nerve? That it was not you, Father, who made the flat statement that two of Hoffmann’s prints were superimposed on those of Fuentes?”

Monsignor Lavigny’s eyes were the essence of pious innocence as he said, “Well, weren’t they?”

“No, Father — as you very well know.”