Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 1. Whole No. 368, July 1974

The World’s Softest Touch by John Pierce[11]

In which Inspector Seal, retired, investigates the mysterious death of one Quentin Armitage, scion of an aristocratic New England family, heir to fifty or so millions, former husband of ten teen-age wives, international playboy and darling of the tabloids — found dead in his bedroom on his sixtieth birthday... a murder investigation with a “difference”...

Creighton Seal, the retired Chief Inspector, attended the services for Quentin Armitage, found dead on his bedroom floor on his sixtieth birthday. He saw the giant gray casket and spoke consoling words to Miss Pritchett, lifelong factotum of the deceased. Then he drove his Rolls-Royce north into Cherry Hills. The Rolls derived from his late Aunt Alice, who had bequeathed him as well her house on Crown Street and the means to his retirement from the police. Alice was the favorite sister of his uncle Malcolm Seal, into whose winding driveway he now turned.

Years of writing articles for the National Geographic magazine had left Malcolm at loose anchor. He had returned just this morning from a world cruise. He had been a classmate (Princeton, ’09) of Doveton Armitage, Quentin’s father, and Seal felt that Malcolm would be interested in the death.

Not wholeheartedly.

“Don’t want to hear a damn word about him,” Malcolm said, puttering about the sprawling desk in his oaken study. “Get yourself some sherry or whatever, but just spare me Quentin Armitage, dead or alive.”

“There were odd circumstances,” Seal remarked.

“But of course there were if you had your foot in it,” the old man grumbled. “In that Daumier world of yours nobody just dies, do they, Creighton? Does anyone just go to bed and die? And now you’ve come bumbling up here to tell me Quentin was murdered. Is that it?”

“Yes and no.”

“That too was predictable. Yes and no. Dammit, can’t a man even unpack his luggage and have a drink?”

Seal smiled. He poured himself a sherry and fell into a leather armchair by the mullioned window overlooking the rock garden. He observed his uncle fondly and jiggled his long legs. “How was your trip?”

“Ghastly. We’ve made of our globe one vast jukebox. Guitarists and retired salesmen and Niki-Wiki oriental cameras. Doesn’t anyone have a job any more? Good God, man, I date back to a world of peace and quiet. Read Henry James on how simple and civilized life used to be.”

He found what he was looking for and added it to the contents of a manila folder. “How in the world did you get tied up with Quentin Armitage anyway?”

“I’ve met him off and on. Used to watch him play polo thirty years ago.”

“Probably that’s what went wrong with your own game. Happy thing you weren’t watching the day he rode out drunk at Hurlingham and fell off his horse before the Queen. And just lay there. Lay there! Degenerate clown. Horrified a whole generation of Americans. How long has that been? I guess eight or nine teen-age wives ago. I presume they were all at the funeral, their dumb doll faces aquiver at how they’ll get at that forty or fifty million he lacked the brains to dissipate.”

“He left no issue. There were no blood relatives.”

“So now the disgusting part begins. Or renews itself. What do they call themselves, that conclave of his ex-wives, the what—”

“Anything Times Six.”

“And are they the ones who did him in?”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“But that grubby, I’ll warrant. Complex but grubby. Hand me that brief case, will you? And pour me a Scotch if you’re going to sit there with that silly smile.”

Seal obliged him and twirled his thumbs and rubbed his pencil mustache.

“What’s so Wagnerianly melancholy about it, Creighton, relates to the quality of that fortune. This was no guitar-playing, bootlegging, plastics, Hollywood money that Quentin tried to drink up and squander for the tabloids and call girls.

This was good old New England horse-and-buggy textile money before it ever branched into shipping and coffee and transportation and all the rest. I knew Doveton very well indeed. There was quality to that family, and taste and breeding, and when you went to visit those people at Newport or Antibes or Florence you had the rare opportunity of experiencing in excelsis the very best of a kind of poise and gentility we’ll never know again.”

“Yes, I wanted to ask you about Doveton.”

“What’s there to ask or answer? He was a gentleman. A well-bred, nongambling, nonwhoring gentleman who succeeded to the family fortune, went quietly about its administration, walked with dignity, married a fine, artistic, cultivated lady from Philadelphia, then made his one colossal mistake — Quentin. His wife died in the influenza epidemic. Or maybe Quentin poisoned her. Odious child. I knew him when his nose ran and he wiped it on his sleeve. Ferrety. A little sneak. Hotfooting Albert Schweitzer while the old gentleman played Bach on the organ.”

“Did Albert improvise a quick cadenza or two?”

“He was not, for the moment, the Albert Schweitzer the world knew and loved. Who was at this funeral besides call girls and readers of dirty magazines?”

“The top brass from all the Armitage enterprises in their long limousines. People I didn’t know. Miss Pritchett, of course.”

“Poor battered Miss Pritchett. Miss Button Nose. At last she’ll get a full night’s sleep. Can you fathom riding herd on that lunatic for fifty years? How old is she now?”

“Oh, sixty-seven,” Seal said. “You say Quentin was Doveton’s one mistake. You wouldn’t call Cordelia Coulter his second?”

Cordelia, the stage and silent-film actress, had been Doveton’s second wife, Quentin’s stepmother.

Malcolm contemplated his rock garden and sighed. “Yes, I suppose she was. But at least that was comprehensible. Cordelia mesmerized people — with her beauty, with her acting talent. I never trust theater people. Never know what they’re up to. When Doveton married her? As I recall, by that time — in the twenties — actresses were no longer dismissed as so much flotsam. There was an element of surface respectability to the best of them, and Cordelia Coulter’s credits were solid ones, her upbringing rather genteel.

“I suppose he loved and needed her after Emily died. And maybe he had in mind someone to lend a hand with Quentin, of whom he’d just about washed his hands. Quentin irritated him. Then she got herself killed on a road outside of Naples with some Italian adventurer, which must have been the last straw. The things a pretty face does to the judgment. Doveton should have foreseen it. Cordelia had a habit of just walking off, strolling out of a room, away from a lawn party, out of a life.”

“And Doveton?”

“Punctured him like an old blimp. He turned over Quentin — in hysterics — lock, stock, and barrel to that governess, Pritchett, and went off and began behaving strangely.”

“In what way?”

“Various. Went exploring the Amazon in a pith helmet. Became a recluse, delegated all management responsibilities, tried to be a Blake mystic. It was not comfortable being around him. I went to his funeral when he died of something in ’32.”

Seal finished his sherry. “And where was motherless Quentin during this Amazonian and mystic period?”

“Getting thrown out of prep schools, as I remember, Pritchett in tow. No college would ever keep him. Therein one of his more imperishable statements to the world press: ‘Why go to college when I’m a multimillionaire?’ ”

“Pretty shaky childhood for someone coming into all that money.”

“Play that on your cello, Inspector. No man could have been the fool Quentin Armitage was without a well-devised and meticulously rehearsed master plan and constant, total dedication and daily morning prayer. ‘Guide me, oh, Lord, to some really revolting new atrocity.’ ”

“Come on now. You don’t mean that?”

“I’m afraid I’m serious. This man was the sole heir to a distinguished fortune of fifty or so million. Stayed in the headlines. Nude yachting parties. Brawls with the police in half the countries of Europe. Banished out of France. Hundred-mile-an-hour auto chases, and those fine lovely homes built by four generations of Armitages handed over to those gum-chewing, fortune-hunting women.”

“They had little sentimental meaning for him?”

“Sentiment be damned. Sheer round-the-clock drunkenness. One wife, all right, or two, or even three, but ten? Ten? Carhops. Women out of bars. And always about nineteen years old. Not one of them stayed with him as. long as six months — one lasted only four days — but longevity had no bearing on the scale of payment, did it? One million in U.S. currency — no alimony — to each one as she walked out the door to some new assignation.

“Well, no, it’s not even that, is it? It’s afterward that this frightful amorality creeps in. These same women following him here, settling in town with their lovers or whatever, using his home and grounds and swimming pool and bedrooms for a long loud bacchanalia while he sits there all shriveled up in his oversize walking shorts and claps his hands to the music.”

“You’re going to get indigestion again, Uncle.”

Malcolm subsided. “Yes, I know. I’ll join you in one more drink. Go ahead. You were saying Quentin was murdered.”

“Giving ‘murdered’ a bit of leeway, that was Miss Pritchett’s interpretation.”

“You?”

“I didn’t disagree.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“There’s not much anyone could ever do about it if we did know. About thirty people — ex-wives, freeloaders, and petty thieves — showed up uninvited at Quentin’s place Monday night to celebrate his impending sixtieth birthday. He’d had a stroke and some heart seizures; his blood pressure was a mile high. This was well known to all of them, that he’d been in and out of the hospital and in oxygen tents.

“He had no business eating the rich foods they brought in. He should not have been drinking or smoking cigarettes or staying up past midnight. But at their urging he did all these. He made it upstairs after they’d left. Miss Pritchett, who had dozed, discovered the party was over and went in to check on him.

“He was dead on the floor of his bedroom, just short of the balcony overlooking the pool. The glycerin pills he always carried in his trousers pocket were not in his pocket. They were on a dressing table not six feet away. No evidence that he tried to reach them.”

“This was a coronary?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s giving ‘murder’ leeway, all right. More like giving it the Gulf of Mexico for a turning basin. What is all this nonsense?”

“It has to do with the pattern of his relationship with the six ex-wives who hung around. The other four seem to have taken better care of their money.”

“Let’s slow down now. You’re intimating that these six, these recipients of those huge settlements, had gone through that money in two or four or six or however many years?”

“That’s our story.”

“And they came back for more and he was giving it to them?”

“He’s always been the world’s softest touch.”

“Appalling. Simply appalling. What is this Anything they so coyly called themselves?”

“Anything Times Six. It came about accidentally. Some local TV impresario hit on the bright idea of having the six ex-wives of playboy Daddy Quent together on a show. They got up a singing act and chose that name for themselves. They did a parody on a musical number from a Broadway show. Their version was:

“Anything he can do we can do better;

“Anything they can do we can do too.

“In which offering, in line one, they make crude reference to Quentin’s sexual incapacity, a point they’ve elsewhere belabored — he never fathered a child — and in the second line ventured to climb aboard the Women’s Liberation wagon. Tasteless performance. They couldn’t sing, but they displayed a lot of firm flesh and it got them considerable publicity.

“So they decided to hold onto the appellation — Anything Times Six. And decided to milk it even further. Loudly announced that they were gang-authoring a memoir, Our Six Lives with Daddy Quent. Boudoir secrets never told, unrevealed facts about the Armitage family and fortune, snapshots, intimate letters, etc.

“And he watched this unfold and continued to finance them?”

“All this, or most, was done very naughtily — good clean fun, no surface malice. It was difficult to know what he thought until they made the mistake of hooking some private papers from Miss Pritchett for source material, some of it having to do with Cordelia. He was always getting robbed. He was not at all well.”

“Just how unwell was he?”

“The stroke had jammed up his speech, but depending on how tired or rested he was, he could get around and make good enough sense. Other times he’d just sit like a little monkey by the pool, brooding or cackling or spooning baby food or watching a bird. You never knew.”

“But able to sign checks.”

“Oh, yes. He parceled it out willy-nilly.”

“And just what was this bonehead Pritchett doing about it?”

“She couldn’t stop it. It was what he wanted to do. That’s why she called me the first time.”

Pritchett had telephoned him one night at eleven. He was just in from his Aunt Alice’s upstate farm where he had disposed of two Santa Gertrudis bulls. She had been calling him for two hours and she apologized excessively. But she had heard Quentin speak of having known him in the past, and now she called in desperation. This was life or death. She needed advice, she did not know what to do. Could he drive out and help her? She would have sent a car for him but could not locate the chauffeur.

Without changing from the black sports shirt, black slacks, and loafers he’d worn to the farm, Seal got back into his Rolls and found the pillared driveway off Grantland Trail and drove up among the trees to the well-lighted old home. Miss Pritchett, a slight harrowed gray lady, met him at the door.

What struck him was not the great Spanish furniture or the paneled walls or the rich dark carpeting but the carnage — the drink glasses and ashtrays overturned, long-play records scattered, plates of food and dislodged sofa cushions and debris. They exited where floodlights lit the swimming pool and the white statuary and oleander. Lawn furniture was in the water, china and glassware were shattered on the tile, a white wrought-iron bench was overturned.

Alone, small and comatose in a white chair at the far comer, was Quentin Armitage, his bald head nodding over his paunch, his spindly brown wrists on the chair arms. He wore rope sandals and walking shorts. His tanned narrow shoulders and small hollow chest were bare.

“I’m too old to manage him alone now,” Miss Pritchett said timidly, “and could not find the chauffeur or the gardener.”

Seal easily picked up the old fellow and followed her inside and up a curving staircase to the capacious bedroom she indicated. He lowered him onto the canopied bed. As he did so he heard her sobbing.

Gently Seal put an arm about her shoulders and steered her to a Morris chair. He stood near the French windows at the balcony. Someone was down there, among the trees. He saw the glow of a lit cigarette.

“Tell me more about it, Miss Pritchett.”

“It’s all here in front of you. He’s very sick. He’s under strict instructions from the best doctors in the country. And they know this and they come here and ransack the place and pillage the kitchen and steal his possessions and profane the bedrooms and get drunk and get him drunk and upset and it’s only a matter of time.”

“You say ‘they?’ ”

“Those ex-wives of his. Anything Times Six,” she said contemptuously. “Strumpets. They went through all that money they clipped him for. Now it’s driving them wild, the thought of the millions up for grabs and them without a proper claim to it. They come and hang on him and rub his head and bring him little gifts and all the while they’re ridiculing him and laughing behind his back. And feeding him drinks until they can shove a checkbook in his hand for whatever they think he’ll sign.”

“He signs?”

“Oh, sure, always. For all his follies he’s always been a kind man, Inspector. You go to his business people and ask about the charities he supports — Boys Towns, orphanages in Europe, colleges, hospitals, he never turns anyone down. But this. A thousand here. Two thousand there. One of them got away with his Jaguar. Two Picasso sketches given to him personally. Jewelry, personal effects — it’s all sickening.”

“Does he give these people any large amounts?”

“No, not tremendous.”

“And you have no control?”

She shook her head. “Last week I called the police. He was furious. He said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ ” She indicated Armitage — the last of the Armitages — diminutive on the great bed. “That’s what he’s doing. Letting them kill him.”

Seal considered. “I’m not sure what could be done, Miss Pritchett, unless you’d choose to have him declared incompetent, get a power of attorney and an injunction against those people coming here.”

“But he’s not incompetent. Left alone he makes perfect sense. No, I wouldn’t do that if I could.”

“You’ve talked to his attorneys?”

“Until my head aches. They suggest I hire some strong fellow who’d throw them right out of here. But that’s just like calling the police, and he’d rebel.”

He tried to think of something. “It’s not as if he’s completely taken in by them and, say, giving away large chunks of money.”

“No, they’ve tried that. He knows better. I’m sure this is what makes them furious, inspires all that meanness and humiliation. If you could see them taunting and cajoling him until he gets out on that balcony there and does those inept embarrassing imitations of Mussolini or Hitler or Juliet before a lot of parasites and strangers, and down there they’re snickering while they clean out the food and the liquor and wander through the house. All those millions of dollars — so near and yet so far.”

From the shadow Seal watched the cigarette beneath the ebony tree below. It arched out and into the pool. “I wish I could do something, Miss Pritchett. It’s more a legal matter.”

“Might I ask you then, since he knows you, could you, say, drop by for lunch someday this week and be company to him? Try to find out anything I might not know?”

“I’d be happy to,” he said. “Were you aware, Miss Pritchett, that there’s still someone down there by the pool?”

“Oh, yes, I knew it. That’s Amanda, the last of his wives.”

“Two years ago, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. Married him, stayed a week, picked up her money, and ran to Tijuana. Somebody in Las Vegas took her for every dime.”

“What’s her problem now?”

“The same game they’re all playing — Anything Times Six, whatever it means. They’re all deadly suspicious of each other, those six. They’re terrified that one of them is going to slip in here some night, get him juiced up and before a Justice of the Peace for a remarriage. That’s why they usually come together. They watch each other like cobras.”

“Any danger of such a remarriage?”

She laughed harshly. “Lord, no! He despises them the same way they laugh at him. They’re just too dumb to know it. Sometimes I think that might be the heart of it. He enjoys watching them being the kind of damned fool he used to be.”

“So Amanda’s on guard at the gate.”

“Or toying with the idea of slipping up here later and scoring a few points. Or walking off with the color TV. No way. I’ll lock her little fanny out. I sleep in the next room and I hear everything.”

Seal left her getting out Quentin’s pajamas. He went down the staircase. In his pocket was the $6,200 in one-hundred dollar bills he had realized from the sale of the bulls. As he came out and skirted the pool he had these bills in his hand. He counted them conspicuously. Peripherally he saw the white minidress and the tanned thighs as he counted. When she spoke he feigned surprise.

“Payday?” she said. The voice was hard and toneless. He saw an attractive blonde woman of 35, her hair in a becoming bun; she wore large round gray-tinted glasses.

“Didn’t see you.” He finished with and pocketed the money.

“Nice night,” she said.

“Place looks like a hog wallow.”

“He’s got servants,” she said. “You seem to be doing all right.”

“Old friend of mine, Daddy.”

“Yeah, I saw the Rolls. What’s your secret?”

“My secret? That everyone’s got a secret.”

“And you know one of his.”

He smiled.

“I’m Amanda Armitage,” she said. “Cool your loafers.”

Seal took a chair near her. “I saw you on television. Cute.”

“I never got your name.”

“Quo Vadis,” he said with a straight face.

“What’s that, Italian?”

“Sicilian.”

“Well, well,” she said. “What part?”

“The central highlands.”

“I don’t think I know anyone there.”

“They’re hard to get to know.”

“I never heard him mention you.”

“You probably didn’t stick around long enough.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “A week after that Mexican divorce he hit the ground like a watermelon.”

“There you go. Haste makes waste, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what I need, all righty. A Bible reading.”

“Take it out on yourself, sugar. You got yours. What you did with it is your problem.”

“Yeah, I guess I lack your business head, or your angle. How’d you get it while he was passed out? Pritchett? She never gave anything away.”

Seal smiled again.

“Well. Congratulations, I guess,” she said. “I guess there’s enough for everybody.”

“Not if you people keep this stuff up. You’re just about to be short one golden goose.”

“Tragic loss. The only time he’ll sign a checkbook is when he’s three-quarters loaded. Nickel and diming around here for what we do. He likes young naked women. So we swim naked in his pool while he watches. Watching is about all he could ever do.”

“You kill him you won’t even have a pool.”

“Don’t kid a kidder. There’s a hundred grand in an insurance policy for Amanda. And I’ve got a New York lawyer and a million-dollar spinal defect with traumatic complications dating to that marriage.”

“What’d he do, stone you on the way out with a vitamin pill? What about the others, all spinal?”

“That would be a little corny, wouldn’t it? Charleyne has psychiatric damage. Dawne’s got a baby she forgot about. Cherrye’s got some mysterious papers he’s supposed to have signed. The others aren’t talking.”

He sat a while. “Well.”

“Well what?”

“I’d lay off this strongarm business if I were you. Kill him, there could be bad feeling everywhere.”

“Yeah, well you go back and tell The Godfather to take it up with A. A. Daddy Quent was bombed twenty years before I was born and there’s nobody holding his mouth open and pouring it down him.”

“Suit yourself,” Seal said, standing. “Don’t let the mosquitoes get you.”

“Thanks millions,” she said.

“Ciao.”

“Delectable,” Malcolm said. “Except that I can’t see but what he’s getting just what he spent forty years asking for.”

“It could be you’re too much with Henry James and Edwardian greenery mid the blueblooded, dignified, royalty-loving Armitages Senior. Who did not give one damn about Quentin. Hire him a nanny. Do something with him — we’ll be in Greece. And here comes Cordelia, this empty-headed, self-centered actress, testing her subtle skills on his confusion. What else did these people wire him for but disaster?

“You see Quentin, the be-crazed satyr, lunging around the continent with his checkbook, taking a beauty queen, losing her; buying a yacht, wrecking it; standing drunk on the platform of a private railroad car or insulting the honored Duke of Bulgaria. But like Henry James you deny him a hangover.

“You give him no deep feelings. You permit Doveton to go decorously askew after Cordelia’s defection but refuse Quentin — who experienced this tenfold — the same privilege. I learn that he was leveled, devastated, increasingly embittered each time one of those hookers walked out on him in the middle of the night and ran singing her sad song to the tabloids. The first one who left him, he spent sixteen hours in a bar on the Riviera and then walked out into the Mediterranean fully clothed and would have kept on to Corsica if someone hadn’t pulled him out. It was Pritchett, the hired help, who assumed the whole parental function, whether as babysitter, governess, night nurse, mother confessor, getter-out-of-jail, financial manager, whatever.”

“He continues to flout logic, my boy. What kind of ‘devastation’ when he stands now at his door yelling, ‘Y’all come?’ ”

“He never invited them. They just came when it began to appear he was dying. Only when illness called a halt to the marrying did he find time to sum them up for what they were. He was not quite so dumb in the end.”

Conversation was a long brooding silence shattered by volcanic observations from Quentin Armitage. They sat by the pool at mid-morning. They drank iced tea. The grounds had been cleaned and tailored, and sunlight shone bright on the white statuary. When Quentin spoke it was haltingly, sometimes laboriously, overloud. Or he would fall into himself and intently watch a tree or send his mind back through the years.

“YOU COME TONIGHT,” he shouted suddenly. “ALL WIVES SWIM NAKED.” Then he lapsed into silent laughter, laughing until his old shoulders shook and his bald head bobbed and saliva ran down his chin.

The laughter made Seal smile. “I’ll look at my engagement calendar.”

“ALL NAKED. YOU TAKE PICK,” Quentin yelled, and laughed silently and then went far away.

In time he pointed at Seal. “You polo?”

“I played some. My Uncle Malcolm had some ponies. I watched you play long ago.”

He nodded vehemently. “I polo. Play with Cecil Smith. You know?”

“Remember him well.”

Armitage meditated. “Ten trainloads whiskey, ten wives, ten polo ponies. Fine biography.” This triggered helpless laughter. He choked his way out of it.

“More interesting than mine,” Seal remarked.

A long silence. A sparrow fluttered water in a birdbath.

“WHOLE WORLD CONCERNED HOW I SPEND MONEY,” Armitage shouted fiercely. “EVERYBODY.”

“Shouldn’t bother you.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t. How would you?”

“How would I what?”

“Spend fifty million dollars.”

Seal smiled. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“EXACTLY,” he exploded. “NOBODY KNOWS. But tell me how not.” He pointed to himself. “I know. Good time. Naked girls. Young.”

“Wisest course of all.”

Busy concentrated silence.

“Leave to government, my money?” He shook his head dourly. “No. Vietnam. Politicians, South America. Farm subsidy for not growing. Fifty million gone one day.” He waved his arms. “GOVERNMENT ALL MONEY GONE ONE DAY.”

Seal watched a hummingbird flying backward and observed a discreet silence before he ventured an opinion. “But listen, Quentin, may I say something?”

“YOU TALK GO AHEAD.”

“You can’t let these women and their friends rile you up. It’s bad for you. You can’t drink the way you did the other night. You know what your doctors say.”

Had these words been received anywhere? In the long labored silence Seal wondered.

Finally Armitage spoke, this time quietly. “Bums,” he said. “All bums. Want money. Make fun of me. ‘Anything they can do.’ ” He chuckled. “Write book about me? I slap injunction. Who cares.”

“Just don’t let them stuff you with liquor and cigarettes.”

“All swim naked,” he said, and gave way again, laughing until his tea glass fell and shattered and coughs convulsed his body and Miss Pritchett came running from the house.

“You are such an unrelenting ham, Creighton. Why must you clothe everything in the garb of a mystery story? Come out with it, what’s missing? We have a poor little rich boy who turns to alcohol and searches for love. He fails, destroys himself, becomes a joke figure, a senile little Prometheus cackling and salivating as they dance naked about the pool singing Anything they can do, and darting in for quick strikes at his checkbook. What was that about Cordelia you’ve magpied away? What was this theft that occurred?”

“I like to build suspense carefully,” Seal answered.

“I like, after five months in a ship’s cabin, to unpack my bags.”

“I believe in justice grinding slowly.”

“Two hours is glacial.”

“I am telling it as it was revealed to me.”

“It’s your hobby, not mine.”

Armitage died three weeks later. A boisterous birthday celebration had ripped the house and grounds.

“I think he quit caring,” Miss Pritchett said. “I think he just let them do it — kill him. He said, ‘I’m too tired anyway, and what better way to die than at a party.’ After your first talk with him that morning — two days after — something happened that seemed to change everything.”

It was almost four in the morning. She had telephoned Seal before anyone. They sat in the bedroom where Quentin Armitage lay on the parquetry flooring near the windows to the balcony. Below was the disarray Seal had witnessed once before.

“What did happen?” Seal asked.

“The bright year of his life was with Cordelia Coulter. This was the person he loved. And so I kept from him the truth about her disappearance and death in that accident — that she had walked out with a man and was not coming back, and did not even care enough about him to say goodbye. Clever actress, you know, fooled him thoroughly. She left me a little note — where to send her clothes and things. Not a word in it about Quentin — not a ‘love’ or a ‘goodbye.’ I kept this note for a reason. It went far toward explaining Quentin to people who didn’t understand.”

She regarded the body on the floor.

“Two nights after you came and talked to him those people got into my personal papers and took some things, that Coulter note among them. I assume they planned to use it in that book. Then I don’t know what happened. Whoever it was — Amanda, I suspect — must have had too much to drink and gone off and forgotten them. In the morning when I saw my file open I was frantic. I ran everywhere and almost called you, but then went down into the library and there was Quentin. He had found it — a manila folder; he was reading what was inside. He had read that cold note from Cordelia.

“ ‘I never wanted you to know, Quentin,’ I said.

“He smiled and said, ‘I knew it long ago.’

“But the fact of their having done this — gone prowling through my private papers and sat there in his own house reading them — well, that did it. He never gave them another nickel. But they kept coming, and came in force last night, and here he is.” She looked at Seal questioningly. “You spoke to him, Inspector: Would you think, by any stretch of the imagination, that he was at the last at least partially happy?”

Seal turned from the balcony. “Cheer up, Miss Pritchett. For forty-five years they’ve been hustling him, and it always stung. Rest assured that Quentin Armitage, ill as he was, reduced to spectator sports, was pulling off the biggest hustle of all. You know how laughter convulsed him. Who knows but what he got upstairs here and reviewed the evening and laughed himself — yes, laughed himself to death.”

“Explain ‘hustle,’ ” said Malcolm.

“Simple mathematics. The combined duration of the time spent with him in marriage by those six women comes to less than six months. For that-allotting each wife the million she took him for — he paid six million dollars, or, say, one million a month.

“Since his stroke they’ve been visiting him. for a year, all six of them in a body — or six bodies. For those en masse attentions over a year’s time, according to Pritchett’s bookkeeping — the checks he signed for them, the items they purloined — he doled out a little over one hundred thousand total, or roughly nine thousand a month.

“Call him a lover of the beautiful, his genre the young female figure. But allot him, in his final year, some business sense. He arrived at a group rate:

“1 wife $1,000,000 per month

“vs.

“6 ex-wives $9,000 per month total.

“Nine thousand into a million; say, one hundred. Thus for approximately one one-hundredth of what he had paid them individually, he now had all six of them performing regularly in the raw — bringing him gifts, cuddling him, rubbing his old bald head. And no threat of walkout or divorce suit or conjugal liability. Divide six wives into nine thousand to get the monthly fee to each and the fraction becomes infinitesimal to a man with his millions. Not bad at all. Can you or I summon up six naked beauty queens by just sitting by a swimming pool with a drink? Are there, for an incurable invalid and nature lover, worse ways to die?”

“I must score him one point there,” said Malcolm, “but the charge, you said, was murder.”

“Murder with leeway, I said. Or with permission. Say he permitted them to induce his death, which, in his condition, was not altogether unwelcome. Joined them in a last clamorous wassail, heard the distant voice call out, ‘Time, gentlemen,’ and forewent the heart pills that might have saved him.”

“So they get their insurance policies.”

“Those proved completely nonexistent.”

“What about the will, if any? On what structure will the six mount their assault?”

“On the holdings of his widow, Gladys Pritchett, if they’ve got time to waste. Pritchett was taken to wife in a secret ceremony just after the bungled theft of the Cordelia Coulter papers. He married Pritchett to settle the financial thing once and for all. But so as not to lose his nude act prematurely, he swore her to secrecy about the marriage until after his death. He left her everything in a new and final will.”

“Good heavens. Wife number eleven? Must be a new American record. And the Anything Times Six girls?”

“They, beneath the revelation of Pritchett as widow, made the newspaper obituary columns. Note the second line of their naughty theme song: Anything they — men — can do, we can do better. He gave them their chance to so demonstrate. Do this better, he said, and named them as pallbearers. Pallbearers, the ex-wives Amanda, June, Charleyne, Dawne, Steffanye, and Cherrye Armitage.

“At the foot of that vast casket in the chapel was a large floral wreath Quentin had personally arranged for. On it, in large red letters on a wide golden ribbon, was his riposte to their martial air:

“Magnificent,” said Malcolm. “And did the six indeed pallbear better?”

“They failed to show in any guise. Not hide nor hair nor floral contribution.”

“Back to the streets and the bistros, back to Jiffy-Burger Number Four.”

Seal said, “I doubt they’ve got a hundred bucks between them since he shut the cut-off valve. While they laughed and sang and made faces behind his back he digested the nubile scenery and prepared them — for worse than nothing.”

“As you have me for three hours. The licentious old fool. Which reminds me of something I wanted to ask you. Did you, ah, accept his invitation that night to the, uh, informal swimming party? Get to know Amanda any better?”

“Uncle Malcolm!”