Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Holly Roth A Sense of Dynasty

It really happened in 1947 when those who could, flocked to the Riviera — the older ones to repair their war-torn lives, and the young to find the gaiety they’d been cheated of...

The cabdriver said, “There y’are.” He looked at me with curiosity.

I got out, paid him, walked up the two steps, opened the door, and paused. I was still trying to get my breath, control the terrible thumping inside me. Also, I was confused by the look of the place. The sign outside said, “Police Station” but I had never seen anything less like one. It came to me, however, that I never had seen the interior of a police station; my ideas had been formed by the world of fiction. Maybe in reality all police stations looked like this small bare room with its one table and few straight chairs.

The single person in the room was elderly, bespectacled, shirt-sleeved. He was sitting at the table, reading a newspaper. He lowered the newspaper, lowered the eye-glasses by a deft contraction of his nose, and raised his eyebrows. All three motions were fractional — admirably energy-saving, if I had been in the mood to admire.

I accepted the raised eyebrows as a question and replied to them, “I want to report a murder. I think. A something.” My state of shock was great, but an awareness filtered through that my phraseology was not very convincing.

The man — a cop, I supposed — said, “Body?”

“No. That is — no. There never was one. Not exactly. I mean, if you’ll let me—”

“We don’t usually have murders without bodies. Not in this town. But then, we don’t usually have murders. Come to think of it, never have had. But we’re very small. Still growing.”

“This is not funny.”

“Have I laughed? Your name?”

I opened my mouth to protest the waste of time and then realized that we had finally got down to a recognized formula. I welcomed normality. “William Dentelle.” He raised the eyebrows and I spelled it.

He took a big black-covered book out of the table drawer and by sliding down on his spine, found a ballpoint pen in the drawer’s extreme rear. He opened the book toward its middle and wrote down my name. His handwriting was flowing, more outgoing than the man himself seemed.

“Age?”

“Forty.”

“Business?”

“I am a salesman employed by the Simpson-Bluet Manufacturing Company.”

“They make heavy machinery? Largely mining machinery?”

I nodded.

“Here to see the people at the mining works, huh?”

I nodded.

“Staying at the Benntown Hotel?”

There was no place else. I nodded.

“Arrived when?”

“This afternoon. Five o’clock. My appointment at the works is for eight tomorrow morning.”

“The five twelve from Pittsburgh.” It wasn’t a question. “So you’ve been here two hours and you’re a witness to a murder.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t. Didn’t say much. Want to start somewhere? I mean, like telling me who’s dead?”

“Well, of course. But... it was fifteen years ago.”

He put down his pen, took off the drooping eyeglasses, folded the newspaper, and leaned forward to rest on his folded arms. I noticed then that a uniform jacket was hanging on the chair behind him. He was a captain. He said, “So you don’t want me to rush anywhere? We — you and I — are not going off with a clatter of hooves to see justice done?”

“Yes, I think we should do just that. But I’ll have to explain.”

He looked at me for quite a long time — perhaps a minute, but it seemed like a long time. He had clear brown eyes, exceptionally clear for his age, which was probably more than the sixty or so I had estimated at first. He also had all his hair, a nice cap of heavy whiteness. It occurred to me that he spoke with no trace of the accent of the region, although the residents of small hamlets in that corner of Pennsylvania were often almost incomprehensible.

He said, “I am the Chief of Police of this town. It is my duty to see that — ah — justice is done. One way to do my job properly is to save my energy by not wasting it on nuts. I don’t apologize for my choice of words, because I haven’t called you a nut — yet. Truth is, you don’t look like one, but you sure sound like one. Other hand, the Simpson-Bluet people probably don’t employ nuts. Usually. Got anything to prove that you are William Dentelle, and that William Dentelle is employed by Simpson-Bluet?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Sure.”

I began disgorging more papers than I had realized I carried: driver’s license, business cards, a hospitalization card that had been in an inner flap of my wallet for at least five years, a Social Security card from beneath it. Two credit cards. I looked up at him, but he showed no signs of surfeit. So I produced three letters from my jacket’s inner pocket. They were all addressed to me at Simpson-Bluet; they all had to do with business orders.

I stopped.

He went through each item with care, returning them one at a time. He checked the driver’s license, flicking glances at me as he read “color of eyes, height, and date of birth.” He reopened the black book and entered my home address in it. He then gave each of the business letters his careful attention, and returned them.

He said, “All right, Mr. Dentelle. I’ve had my dinner. You want to tell me a story, is that it?”

“That’s it exactly,” I said gratefully. “It’s long and it’s confused and if you’ll just—”

“Tell it any way you please.” The eyes were very clear, not difficult to talk into.

When the war was over, I — like lots of GI’s — felt the time had come to make up for lost years. I still had two years to spend at Carnegie Tech before I would get my mining engineer’s degree, and I had every intention of completing the course. And it would be easier, what with the GI Bill. My parents were quite well-to-do, but I was twenty-four and it was nice to know that I wouldn’t have to lean too heavily on them.

But first... There was that mustering-out pay and, I figured, a vacation coming to me — two weeks per annum for almost six years, four years of war, two of Occupation. Say, three round months. “Where,” asked William Dentelle of William Dentelle, “is the juiciest, ripest, to-say-nothing-of-gayest vacation spot in the world?”

William Dentelle answered himself and ended up on the French Riviera.

Cannes. In April, 1947. I was twenty-four. And I had company, lots of company. The place was teeming with GI’s who had figured it out the same way I had. And there were girls — French girls, English girls, even American girls. Of the people of middle years, there were few; they were repairing their lives. But those of the old who could possibly afford it came to the sun to mend their tired bones and souls, and the young, whether they could afford it or not, came to find the gaiety they had been cheated of. “Affording it” wasn’t too difficult. The beautiful beach-front avenue — le Boulevard de la Croisette — had almost completely regained its prewar glamor and beauty, but not, as yet, its prices.

Also, of course, there arrived at Cannes the leeches — gamblers, con men, gigolos, budding syndicalists, and plain adventurers; they too had been deprived of their callings, of their chosen way of life, by the years of upheaval. They rushed, as their kind always has, to the spot where people were living easy, free, and in the slight delirium of relaxation that tends to bring incaution.

First there was Irene. Irene was a delight. Then there were three others — I’ve forgotten their names — all delights. They were displaced by Valerie — English, despite her name. Valerie specialized in just lying on the beach. With Valerie’s figure that was enough.

And then there was Anne.

For fifteen years, not a week has passed in which I have not remembered Anne.

I am a married man now. I have two sons, good boys. My wife is a dear and charming woman whom I love with almost all my heart. But a piece of that heart has remained always with Anne. For fifteen years I have remembered and ached, and for the first few I did more than that: I wept. I am six feet two inches tall and I have a broken nose that makes me look a little dangerous, but I wept half the nights of my life during my mid-twenties.

I hope you can forgive a little com — I feel impelled to corniness. Thing is, only repetition makes clichés, and only profound truths are repeated With Whittier, I point out that my regret was based on those saddest of words, “It might have been.” There was a time, you see, when I think I could have married Anne, but I didn’t push it. I can find a dozen excuses for myself — my age, my need to finish college, money, the ambiance of the times — but the excuses have never afforded me solace. Always I have felt that I not only failed to get my heart’s delight — by my selfishness I was guilty of destruction. Of murder...

Anne was swept into town on a wave of medical students, both American and French, from the Sorbonne. It was a confused, practical-joking, somewhat hysterical crowd she traveled with; I understand medical students are often like that, and all such tendencies were heightened in 1947.

Anne wasn’t the least like her companions.

She was sitting on the edge of a crowd, a slender girl, obviously American. She had a very slight figure; what there was of it was startlingly swathed in an unusual bathing suit, a vivid green woven with silver. Metallic material like that was almost unknown in the making of bathing suits at that time. She was also wearing a small smile; the conversation didn’t deserve more. The boys were discussing who they would plant a cadaver on.

I took a chance. “Do they travel with them?”

“With what?”

“Cadavers.”

“Part of the necessary equipment of their lives.”

“But—” And then I realized she did not mean of their professional lives but of their juvenility. “You’re not one of them?” I asked.

She shook her head; straight brown hair, very simply cut, fanned out in the sun. “I’m with them,” she said, “but mine is the world of the good old liberal arts.”

“And so why are you with them?”

“I like them. Perhaps I’m morbid too.”

“I don’t believe it. What is it you’re looking for?” — I should explain that the direct-and-searching question was a ‘line’ with me in 1947. It seemed to intrigue girls. I was too immature to realize that questions about themselves intrigued girls, boys, men, women, and the senile. I thought I had discovered a formula.

It was not a formula to use on Anne, however. The truth of that was the beginning of her attraction for me. My question caused her to focus on me for the first time — a surprisingly penetrating look. She had large, very light eyes, with small pupils. They were her only beauty, but that beauty was reinforced by the contrast the lightness made against her tanned skin, and by the fact that her undistinguished features were set in a thin little face, with a slightly pointed chin.

“I am looking for a husband.”

I backed up — mentally and probably physically as well.

She gave me her small smile. “Is that unusual?” she asked.

“Well, no. I suppose not. But—”

“The statement of truth is unusual?”

“Well — yes. I suppose so.”

“That is a difference between us,” she said. “You suppose things. I know them.” She sounded factual, not arrogant. She stood up, gracefully but with no effort wasted, no coquetry expended. “Excuse me,” she said and joined the budding doctors.

A few days later I ran into her again. In the water. It was 6:30 on a Riviera morning, sky clear, air warm, water not too warm, beach almost empty. A delightful time to swim.

My frenzied Australian crawl — fashionably if unscientifically practiced to cause a maximum of froth and fury — had isolated me from everything, even something as near as Anne, until she raised her voice and shouted, “Hi!”

She was five feet away, drenched. Of course, she’s drenched, I told myself, and realized that the fact was underlined by her lack of a bathing cap. She was less attractive — a drowned-mouse look. But her eyes seemed even bigger when one saw the smallness and narrowness of her skull.

I stopped flailing and said, “Hi.”

“You swim very well, don’t you?” Not a comment but a question, it was earnestly delivered.

That earnestness trapped me into honesty. “Not really,” I admitted. “Wear myself out — raft and back and I’ve about had it.” I treaded water, gasping for breath, thoroughly surprised at myself.

“Oh.”

Was she disappointed? Perhaps she had cast me as an Apollonic hero. I used my formula and veered the subject hastily. “How about you? You don’t seem winded and we’re quite a way out.”

“Oh, I don’t swim at all. Not really. I just sort of half float, and do a little bit of sidestroking. I can go practically anywhere but it takes me forever.”

“Well, let’s go in and talk about forever.” I had quite a line in those days.

As she emerged from the water, the same gleaming green-and-silver bathing suit came into view. (I later realized it was the only one she had.) The material shimmered even more when wet. I said, “That’s quite a thing, that suit.”

There was no nonsense about “this old rag.” Anne said, “It should be quite a thing. I had it specially woven. Cost me six months of clothes, practically.”

“It’s beautiful, but...”

“But?”

“Somehow it isn’t like you.”

She laughed.

When I asked her to have dinner with me that night, she said, “With you? Or on you?”

I gulped and made an unusually adult response. “With me, in a civilized sense.”

“Ah.” She smiled that grave little smile. “Don’t forget that I travel with medical students. If they had money they wouldn’t be inclined to spend it. They haven’t any, so the question doesn’t arise. But forgive me.”

She looked very nice in street clothes. She looked like something I had almost forgotten existed: a lady. I outdid myself in the choice of a restaurant. I couldn’t afford it often during three months but one indulgence couldn’t ruin ninety days, I told myself... until I saw the check. Then I controlled my blink, and reached despondently for my wallet.

Anne made no bones about reading the check. She never made any bones about anything, of course. She studied the upside-down figure and said, “Are you rich?”

“No.”

“Then that is a whopper.”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind?”

And suddenly I didn’t “No,” I said. “It was a good meal.”

She nodded gravely. “You like to live well. So do I.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it mattered to you.”

“Wouldn’t you? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. I like to live well, and that takes money. So” — she smiled — “I want to get married.”

“You want to marry money?” I was shocked.

“In a way,” she said. “In a way.”

I saw her every day and every evening for almost a month. For twenty-six days, to be exact.

During that time we discussed Life, of course. At least, I did. Anne didn’t talk much. She listened, and if prodded she sometimes gave an opinion. She was always frank, or seemed so. If she did not want to be frank, she said so.

If you have not yet realized it, she was a most unusual person. Most unusual for a female. Astonishingly unusual for a young female. She said what she meant, meant what she said, knew what she wanted, and tried in a direct way to get it.

“Aren’t you wasting your time with me?” I asked her, all humor on the outside, a small ache and a growing confusion on the inside. (I could afford to marry. It wouldn’t be a snap, but my parents would be happy to indulge an only son who had emerged whole from a nasty war... I had never told her that.)

“Probably,” Anne said, and didn’t miss a step. We were dancing at the Casino at Monte Carlo. She looked virginal and unutterably sweet in a long white gown.

“Let’s get off this floor!”

She seemed momentarily surprised, but not disconcerted. She moved gracefully, but with no swinging of hips, to our table.

I sat down with a thump that shook the neighborhood, and demanded, “Don’t you believe in love?”

“Certainly I believe in love.”

That surprised me. “But... still you want to marry for money?”

“In a way.”

“Because you’ve never been in love?”

“I’ve been in love.”

I was an instant victim of gnawing jealousy. “Who with?”

“Grammar, grammar, sir. — With a man not unlike you — a poor boy who is an engineering student. He can’t afford me now and will never earn a penny. He’s a weak man, I know that, but he is — well, somehow suitable. Still, he’s not the kind of man who can earn money.”

“I am not weak and I can earn money.”

“Are you asking me to marry you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you were.” But she smiled.

“You wouldn’t marry me,” I said, still playing with the fire I feared but couldn’t seem to get far away from, “if only because I have such a pug-ugly sort of face.”

“Ah, that.” She didn’t deny it, just put her head a little to one side, and examined me. Then she said, “That inclines me toward you.”

“How about the fact that I will be a money-maker? Don’t you believe it?”

“I do believe it. Entirely. But I want money now. I am twenty-two. I don’t want to wait thirteen years. I want these next thirteen years to be full of nights like this — of gaiety and clothes and beautiful things.”

“That dress is beautiful.”

Her face went totally plain, the only time I ever saw it that way. “This dress,” she said, “is cheap and shoddy. If it doesn’t look bad that’s because I’m twenty-two. It would have looked even better when I was sixteen. But by the time I’m twenty-six, twenty-seven, I won’t be able to get away with this sort of off-the-rack cheapness. I’m not beautiful, but I could be. With money. Only with money.”

That was the one moment when she looked most unbeautiful.

“Thirteen years,” I said. “Why thirteen years? Thirteen and twenty-two — does the age of thirty-five mean something special to you?”

She smiled, and the almost-ugliness went away. “Mean something?” she said gently. “Yes, my dear Bill, it means something. At thirty-five I inherit my father’s estate. Very substantial. Quite rich, I’ll be. At thirty-five. He left a very explicit will when he died — when I was seven years old. The point he made was that women are flighty, foolish, idiotic. I was not to be married for my money. If, at thirty-five, I had still not married, then perhaps it would be best if I were married for my money. His will was unforgivable, but it was not difficult to understand his reasons. My mother was flighty and foolish. She ran away with another man. She died before he did, but he never forgave her and he never forgave me.

“He left me to be a ward of the court, and he pleaded posthumously with that court to bring me up ‘simply.’ Parsimoniously, was what he really meant. In my opinion they carried out his will very faithfully. If he were around to have an opinion he would probably feel that they have been extravagant.” She paused. “Perhaps he didn’t know, perhaps he didn’t realize what a monstrous thing he was doing, was creating. Perhaps?”

She took a deep breath. Then she said, “I don’t like to talk about it. I’m surprised that I am talking about it. But you’re a — nice boy. You see, I want family. I want children, but not if I have to scrape and treat them as my father did not have to but did treat me. And even more than children, I want to belong to someone, to something, to be a part of family. That’s easy to understand, too — the sort of common-sense psychology that preceded Freud. I have been alone, always alone. I have a need to belong — a sense of” — she paused, and then said almost violently — “dynasty.”

“Dynasty?” I smiled. “Look, Anne, I haven’t been entirely frank with you.”

“No?” She came with bewilderment out of her absorption, her fixation, and tried to remember who William Dentelle was. “No?” she asked.

“Not exactly. It’s true that I’m poor, but... well, I don’t really have to be. My parents are pretty well off. And they would help me. Willingly. Until I could earn that money that I know I will earn.”

“Oh.” She found me then, remembered me. But her reactions weren’t what I expected. Her so-clear eyes seemed to cloud, and the small pupils grew even smaller. Then she shook her head — not in dismissal of me, I didn’t think, but of some thought, some notion of her own. She said, “You know, you are a very nice young man, Bill. Too nice, in a way.” Her eyes left my face and looked over and behind me. “Who is that?”

“Who?”

“That man, the handsome man at the bar?”

“Oh, him.” And I told her.

Paul... well, I don’t remember his last name, probably because he was always called “the Baron.” One said, “Paul,” “the Baron,” or “the Baron Paul.” He was undeniably handsome — theatrically so, the sort who was too good-looking to be trusted, and the distrust was justified.

His mother was the queen of some little Balkan country — I’ve forgotten which. She was a very real queen, a very real Bourbon. His father was a gardener. Not — so the joke went — the head gardener. People made gags about Lady Chatterley’s lover. The little country went down into the dust, the lady his mother went into the dust, and Paul, like his father, never rose above dirt level. He supported himself, if one can put it that way, openly and explicitly, by paying suit to ladies.

Something about his openness was disarming. To my surprise and slight shame, and in defiance of my upbringing, I rather liked him.

“I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ and you’ve finally given me the chance, Anne. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s an outright gigolo. And you’ve surprised me once again. I don’t think you’ve ever paid much attention to another man. Good manners, you have.” I grinned. “Usually.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the Baron, and my grin faded. “Usually,” I said a little sharply. “But I’ll admit he is surprisingly good-looking.”

She gave a decisive little nod. “Yes, he is. But most of all he is astonishing because he looks exactly like what he is. Even his clothes. That’s what made me ask about him. I had never seen ‘an outright gigolo’ before. Do you know him?”

“The way one does. Around.”

“Introduce me, will you?”

She had explained her interest. It seemed harmless. I brought Paul over to the table and performed the introductions.

She married him two weeks later.

I didn’t see her during those two weeks, except at a distance. I kept saying to myself, “Dynasty.” That funny, unsuitable word she had used to explain her desire in life — I decided that was what she found fascinating in the man she herself had admitted was a blatant example of a low kind.

But she married him.

One week after the marriage they went out in a little boat, and he came back alone.

Two days later they arrested him. The medical students had set up a clamor, and the police — although very anxious not to get involved with Americans, which is all Anne spelled to them, very anxious to let Cannes reestablish itself as the playground of the world, very anxious to avoid any but the happiest of publicity, very anxious to deny that such types as Paul ever, ever put a foot in their paradise — the police gave in and arrested him.

Then, because he was so damned inept, they had no choice but to hold him for trial. To the question of where his wife had disappeared to, he said, “She got out and swam away.” And he stuck to that idiocy. It was his whole defense.

After talking to me the prosecution asked, not as a legal command but as a favor, if I would remain for the trial. They seemed to feel I would be helpful. I didn’t understand that until the trial. Then I could see how I was helpful, very helpful.

The cour d’assises would not sit for two months. Then they would hold court farther up the shore, in Nice, which is the prefecture of the canton of the Alpes-Maritimes.

So my three idyllic months on the fabulous Riviera stretched to five bitter ones...

A French courtroom is fancily confusing. I had to be guided to my place; I took a long time spotting the accused; I took a longer time accustoming myself to acceptance of the fact that he was considered guilty until he had proved otherwise.

Once I did get accustomed to it, I took a great pleasure in it.

The testimony was totally damning. All of it including the Baron’s. And he was left without a shred of dignity — not that he had much to start with, but he made a surprisingly good try for it at that trial. Still, out came the illegitimacy of his birth. Everybody knew it of course, but in a whispering sort of way, and he had a passport that clouded the facts.

And out came his age. When had this little Balkan country vanished? 1915. And how old was he at the time? Small bits of history piled up to push him to the truth: he was fifteen. So his passport had been falsified; the man who looked thirty-four and admitted to thirty-seven was forty-seven — and the admission meant more to him than to other men. Youthfulness was one of his stocks in trade.

And why did he marry this twenty-two-year-old? He flabbergasted everyone with the truth: he married her for her money. Ah, then he didn’t know that she would have no money for thirteen years? “Not,” said the prosecuting attorney nastily (he was given to nastiness), “until you reach the very edge of the age of sixty?”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

I remember that the defense attorney gasped helplessly.

“So you married her for her money, discovered you weren’t going to get it for thirteen years, and so decided you would collect it by inheritance?”

“I married her because she asked me to, because she was a nice person, and because she said she was rich. Until I entered this court I did not know anything about this ‘thirteen years.’ She said she had transferred money but that French banks are slow. Which they are. We had only a week of marriage.”

“A week. Only a week,” the prosecuting attorney said, slowly and bitterly, and sat down.

I was eventually guided to the stand, where I stood, hanging on, shaking with pain, loss, and rage. Did I want an interpreter? I was asked, and I said no, although my French wasn’t really sufficient. But I didn’t want anything clouding the air between me and vengeance.

My main value to the prosecution, I realized later, was my passion of love and regret. Through my eyes the judges saw how simple, how direct, how young, how eager for life she was. Through my loving eyes they saw how lovable she was.

They also got some facts.

“You went swimming with the Baroness?”

“Often.”

“She swam well?”

“Not at all well. Very badly.”

“You discussed money with the Baroness?”

“Yes.”

“She led you to believe she was in possession of her estate? Of the considerable assets — bank accounts, company stocks, bonds, et cetera — that were read out and entered as evidence?”

“She did not.”

“She told you the contrary?”

“She told me, explicitly and in detail, that she could not touch any of her money until she reached the age of thirty-five.”

“And yet you were in a similar relationship to her as the accused later was? That is, the question of marriage arose between you?”

“It arose between us. It was then that she explained she had very little; she lived ‘parsimoniously — that was the word she used.”

The defense tackled me briefly, and was sorry.

“You said you went swimming with the deceased?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, she could swim, could she not?”

“Certainly. She swam like an infant poodle, half on her back, with one paw waving.”

“A little less rhetoric, Monsieur Dentelle, and a little more fact.”

“That was fact.”

“Another fact is that you discussed marriage with the lady?”

“We talked around it.”

“What does that mean?”

“What it says.”

“It does not say anything in French. I put it to you that you asked her to marry you, she refused, she then decided to marry another man, a far handsomer man. Perhaps she told you just that and you do not feel a kindness toward the accused as a result?”

“I did not actually ask her to marry me, and so she did not refuse. I think if I had asked her she might have accepted. And the only comment she ever made to me regarding the man she married was he looked exactly like a gigolo.”

The defense excused me abruptly.

Paul’s lawyers had only a few forlorn little points to play with, and one powerful fact.

They tried first to play on the point that Anne’s estate was not hers to will, that her father had entailed it. On her death, they reminded the court, the money would go to some woman in the States, a distant cousin of Anne’s. (The will had been read droningly aloud, and then droningly translated. I had noted bitterly that the woman in the States inherited directly. Either she was well over thirty-five or Anne’s father’s enmity had not stretched to her.) Now, said the defense, what man would commit murder without even bothering to find out that he wouldn’t inherit? — And the answer was too obvious to avoid: Paul had admittedly married for money that was untouchable, and he hadn’t bothered to find that out He was simply a foolish man.

Who would drop someone overboard and then say she swam away?... He was simply a foolish man.

All right they said, where’s the body?

That one caused the usual fuss. The corpus-delicti business is often tossed around, but it has never really been resolved. Men have been found guilty of murder although no body was produced, and anyway, the term is misunderstood. “Corpus delicti” does not, in law, mean the physical body of the victim of a murder. It means the fundamental facts necessary to the commission of a crime. The prosecution claimed they had that and then some.

But they weren’t stuck with it because in mid-trial a part of the body showed up.

Doctors were then paraded to and from the witness stand. Those called by the defense said the body was too long dead to be the body of the Baroness. Those called by the prosecution said the body was too long in the water to be able to say how long it was dead.

And the prosecution simply pointed out that the pathetic remnants were clothed in shreds of Anne’s bathing suit. And nobody — the defense, the prosecution, Paul, or me — denied that that bit of silvery green was not from Anne’s bathing suit.

The Baron Paul was hanged.

The Chief of Police nodded at me. “And you came home,” he said, “and then you got married and had two sons and remembered the young lady in the green suit with the light eyes. It’s a very interesting tale, Mr. Dentelle. Sad. But — forgive me — so what?”

“So,” I said, “an hour ago, as I was walking from the hotel toward that roadside place where they serve the charcoal-grilled steaks—”

“The Bluebell Inn. On Long Lane.”

“Yes. As I was walking along, before I reached the end of the main street that has the two traffic lights, a plum-colored Mercedes-Benz, chauffeur-driven, drew up beside me to wait for the light—”

“I know the car.” He nodded. “Naturally. Only thing like it in town. Belongs to the people who own the mill.”

Why didn’t he put a name to the main street, I wondered impatiently, since he was such a glutton for detail? But... “Own the mill?” I repeated. “I’ve dealt with it for years but never thought of it as being ‘owned.’ It’s a monster of an operation. Isn’t it a public stock company?”

“Uh-huh. Family held. But he isn’t an executive type. They travel. Rarely here. Some say he’s a nice boss, and some say he’s just a bad businessman and has the sense to know it... As I said, so what?”

“So in the back seat of that plum-colored car was Anne.”

The chief took his weight off his elbows. “You,” he said slowly, “are nuts. Most likely, the lady in the back was Mrs. Frauenfeld.”

“It was Anne. The brown hair is silvery now — it can’t be hex age, but however false, it looks good. She is very beautiful and very cold-looking.”

He was still looking at me as if I were totally insane. He said, “Thirty-five? Thirty-six?”

“She is thirty-seven now, but she looks older.”

“Mrs. Frauenfeld does give an impression of being — well, ‘beautifully preserved.’ Odd, since she’s pretty young.”

“Frauenfeld?”

“I told you—”

“Frauenfeld. Wait.” I frowned, and then it came. “That was the name of the distant cousin. It was read out in court. That was the name of the distant cousin who inherited. But — it was a woman.”

“His first name is Marion.”

“Ah. Yes, that was it.”

“Something is funny, Mr. Dentelle?”

“Was I smiling? Well, it depends on one’s sense of humor. I was wondering if Anne took that feminine-sounding name into her careful account, and I decided it was not impossible. Because I also was remembering that unusual but not very suitable bathing suit. Only thing I ever saw on her that wasn’t understated. Cost her several months’ clothes, she told me.”

He stared at me for one of his long minutes. Then he said, “You are sure, Mr. Dentelle?”

“Absolutely sure. Older, colder, more beautiful. Same eyes.”

He said slowly, “I noticed Mrs. Frauenfeld’s eyes at a charity affair once. She handed me a cup of punch. She was very charming, very gracious. But I wondered if she took dope.”

“I don’t think so. Pinpointed with total determination, that’s all. That may make medical nonsense, but it’s what I always thought.”

He looked at the clock behind me on the wall. He looked at the telephone on his table. Then he looked at me. He said, without expression, “Not a heck of a lot is known about the Frauenfelds. Perhaps because there is no one of their social level in town. There is a rumor — women’s gossip, I’m sure — that she is ‘no better than she should be,’ as my mother would have said. Lives her own life, the ladies suggest. Doesn’t respect her husband. But then he isn’t a strong man. Has a weak chin. Pointy. One thing I do know — he is a mining engineer. Like you.”

“Like me and the man she loved — who was no businessman and would never be rich, who was ’weak, but somehow suitable.’ Has a pointed chin, huh? Like his wife and cousin?... Dynasty,’ she said. Maybe she had some idea that to marry the only relative she had would make for a kind of dynasty, and keep the money in the family.”

His hand moved slowly toward the telephone, arrived, and stayed there, motionless. He said, apparently to himself, “Not only her, but him. Accessory... So what you’re saying is this: she couldn’t inherit for thirteen years. But if she ‘died,’ her cousin — the man she was in love with — would inherit. So she arranges ‘to be murdered,’ her cousin inherits, she marries him, and has the money right away... There are details to check, to confirm — wills, birth certificates, marriage certificates, that part of a body in shreds of the green bathing suit. And” — he looked at me — “slowness, sureness, silence — until we reach certainty. Will you join me in these precautions, Mr. Dentelle?”

“Yes.”

“The state’s attorney,” he said musingly. “Too big for me.” He still held the phone, thinking it out. “Will you come back when we need you, Mr. Dentelle?”

“I’ll wait around.”

He looked dubious. “At least two weeks. Might be much more”

“I waited on the Riviera for two months.”

He looked at me curiously. “You feel — vengeful?”

Did I? I said slowly, “Less so every minute. At first I felt sorry for the weeks of agony suffered by the young William Dentelle, and then for his years of pain-filled, regret-filled nights. But now I am thinking only of simple justice. I feel that you and I must ride off and see justice done. For Paul’s sake. As I told Anne, he was really a likeable guy, and honest according to his peculiar lights.”

“Um. Well, you know, so was she. And I think you might also experience some thankfulness.”

“For what?”

“Despite the fact that your face might have had a suitable effect on a jury, your parents were unsuitably well-to-do. You lacked motive to kill her, and motive to murder her was one of the qualifications for marriage.”

He watched realization dawn on me, smiled, and then became businesslike. “Do you, Mr. Dentelle, wish formally to charge that you believe murder was done to one Baron Paul — we must get that last name — that murder was done to one Baron Paul Something, in the city of Cannes, France, in the year nineteen hundred and forty-seven?”

“I do.”

He took the phone off the hook.