Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Hugh Pentecost Jericho and the Deadly Errand

It was a chance meeting with an old love, almost forgotten with the passage of years, that brought John Jericho face to face with a violent murder. Words spoken to him in the strictest confidence set him on a path totally different from the ones taken by the police and the District Attorney’s staff. That he walked that path at all was due to a blazing anger that made it imperative for him, personally, to see to it that Justice was not blind.

What developed into a bloody horror began in the most pleasant of ways. It was a summer day in New York City, one of those rare blue-sky days without smog or unbearable humidity. The sky was cloudless. Jericho, walking uptown on Fifth Avenue, felt younger than he was and carefree. This was a coincidence because, unsuspecting, he was about to encounter his youth again. He found himself thinking of a day like this in Paris, ten years or more ago, when he had been sitting at an outdoor cafe with friends, drinking a particularly good wine, watching the world go by, and thinking how marvelous it was just to be alive. He had been a young artist in those days, just launching a career that was to make him world-famous. The future hadn’t seemed too important that day in Paris — just the present, the joy of being alive and doing what he wanted to do, of being mildly in love.

Remembering that, Jericho now paused at a crossing and looking east saw a sign outside a building: WILLARD’S BACK YARD. This was an expensive little restaurant he could afford to patronize in these days of success, and in the summer months there was a charming outdoor garden, shaded by awnings and potted trees. It would be pleasant to sit there and drink a glass of wine and remember Paris. So he turned east and went into Willard’s.

Coincidences are the enemies of fiction writers, but life is full of them. Willard’s was filling up for luncheon, but Willard, an old friend, found Jericho a table in the garden. People turned to look at him as he was led to his place. He was eye-catching: six feet four inches tall, 240 pounds of solid muscle, with flaming red hair and a blazing red beard.

He sat down, ordered a split of champagne, filled and lit a black curve-stemmed pipe, and leaned back to watch the world go by, just as he had years ago in Paris.

A woman was led to a table a few yards away from Jericho and he looked at her, enjoying her as he always enjoyed looking at beautiful women. She was, he guessed, in her very early thirties, expensively dressed, with an unusual personal electricity. There was something familiar about her, he thought — the familiar charm of a woman of taste and experience, without a veneer of toughness. This kind was rare — familiar but rare.

The woman looked at him, her dark violet eyes widening. “Johnny?” she said. It was a question.

She was no stranger. The absurd thing was that he had been thinking about her as he walked up Fifth Avenue, thinking of her as she had been ten or more years ago, thinking of her as she had been in Paris when he was mildly in love with her.

“Fay!”

He went over to her table and her small cool hands were in his.

“The beard,” she said. “I wasn’t sure for a moment.”

He had been a smooth-faced young man in Paris. “May I join you? Are you expecting someone?”

“Please. No,” she said.

He beckoned to the waiter to bring his wine.

“It’s wild,” she said. “I came in here because I was thinking of you and the old days.”

“ESP,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened to me.”

“Oh, Johnny!”

He ordered a stinger for her. Her taste couldn’t have changed. Nothing had changed. He said something to that effect.

“I wear a size twelve dress today,” she said. “It was an eight back in those days. That much has changed.”

She had been a model in those Paris times. She had also been a member of a young group of Revolutionaries bent on destroying the establishment in general and General de Gaulle in particular. Jericho had thought of them as crackbrained and lovable, particularly Fay. She had posed for him and they had made love and she had forgotten about the Revolution. There had been no anxieties, no guilts, no regrets when they came to the inevitable parting.

“Of course I’ve kept track of you, Johnny. You’re famous now. I’ve gone to all your exhibitions, including your one-man show at the Mullins Gallery last month.”

“You’re living in New York?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And you never tried to get in touch with me? I’m in the phone book.”

“So am I. You’ve forgotten, Johnny, that it was you who walked out. You would have to do the getting in touch — if you wanted to.”

“I was young and stupid,” he said. “I always thought of you as still being back in that other world, taking pot shots at General de Gaulle.”

She laughed. “We were pretty crazy kids, weren’t we? No, I came back here right after we broke up. I am a respectable secretary now, for a man in the brokerage business. You may have heard of him. He’s in the news these days. Lloyd Parker.”

“He’s running for the United States Senate. That your man?”

She nodded. A tiny frown edged lines in her forehead. “A fine man,” she said. “A good warm idealistic man.”

Her man? Jericho wondered. Something in her voice—

“I don’t have very good luck with men, Johnny,” she said, reading his mind. She’d been like that in the old days. “First it was you who mattered. You walked out. Then there was — is — Lloyd Parker. I am his efficient, loyal, ever-ready office machine. He couldn’t get along without me — in the office. Out of the office he is married to a beautiful, exotic, fabulously rich gal. Crandall Steel — she was Ellen Crandall. I am the classic figure of the secretary hopelessly in love with her boss, preferring to work with him every day and not have him rather than drop him and find someone who might want me as a woman.”

“There are probably a hundred such someones,” Jericho said.

She seemed not to hear that. “I was thinking of you when I came in here, Johnny, because I need help.”

“Oh?”

“I need advice from someone who understands how complex people are, who wouldn’t make judgments by hard and fast rules. I thought that of all the people I’d ever known you never prejudged, never insisted that all people follow black-and-white formulas.” She tried a smile. “I thought that if I could only get advice from you — and presto, here you are.”

“Try me, before I make improper advances,” he said, answering her smile.

Her frown returned and stayed fixed. “Lloyd is running against a man named Molloy — Mike Molloy to his friends. Molloy is a machine politician, supported by the big-city moguls, the hardhats, the labor bosses. Perhaps not a bad man, Johnny, but not a man of Lloyd’s caliber, not a potential statesman, not in any way an idealist. Lloyd could be Presidential material in the future. Molloy belongs to other men. Lloyd belongs to himself and his country.”

“He can have my vote.”

“Lloyd is about forty-five. He has always had a little money. His family was Plymouth Rock-Mayflower stuff. I say ‘a little money’ in comparison to his wife’s fortune. He was graduated from Harvard in the late forties, having missed the War. He knew that sooner or later he would be faced with the Army, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do, really. A college friend persuaded him to put some money into a business, one of the first computer-dating services. Lloyd had nothing to do with the operation of the business; he was just a part owner. Someone blew the whistle on them. Lloyd’s partner was using information they gathered to blackmail clients. He was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison. Lloyd was cleared.”

“So?”

“After that came the Army in Korea. One day Lloyd’s top sergeant asked him to mail a package for him. On the way to the post office Lloyd was stopped by M.P.s and it was discovered that the package contained about thirty thousand dollars in cash. The sergeant, it turned out, had been stealing the P.X. blind. There was a court-martial. The sergeant went to Leavenworth. Lloyd was cleared. He had simply been an innocent messenger boy.”

“But not lucky with his friends or connections,” Jericho said.

“Neither of these things was a great scandal at the time,” Fay said. “They’ve been long forgotten. But suddenly they’ve reappeared in Wardell Lewis’ political column. Lewis is supporting Molloy. Someone has fed him these two old stories, along with some malicious gossip about a love affair which Lloyd is supposed to have broken off in order to marry the Crandall money.”

“A love affair with you, Fay?”

“No,” she said sharply. “There is some truth in it, though. He did have an affair with a girl, he did break it off, he did marry Ellen Crandall five years ago. Lewis is using all this and I’ve been trying to find out who’s been feeding Lewis this information.”

“Any luck? The partner, the sergeant, the dropped girl?”

Fay shook her head. She looked at Jericho, her eyes wide. “Ellen, Lloyd’s wife, is having an affair with Wardell Lewis.”

“Wow!” Jericho said.

“Of course Lloyd has no knowledge of it,” Fay said. “That’s what creates my problem. He loves his wife deeply. If he learns the truth, I think it will destroy him. What do I do? Do I go to Lloyd and wreck his life with the truth? Do I go to her and Lewis and threaten them with exposure? They would laugh at me. Exposure, beyond what it might do to Lloyd personally, would ruin his political future. A cuckolded candidate for the Senate becomes a national joke.” Fay brought her closed fist down on the table. “What do I do, Johnny?”

“Have another stinger,” he said, wondering just what she should do. She obviously was in love with the man.

Jericho didn’t come up with an immediate answer for Fay Martin. Parker, his wife, and Wardell Lewis were not real people to him. They were X, Y, and Z in a problem. Pay was real, very real. She had set out to help a man she loved and she could only help him, it developed, by hurting him terribly. It mattered to her whether or not Lloyd Parker won an election; but it mattered even more that he not be hurt.

The only thing that occurred to Jericho was that there might be a way to silence Wardell Lewis without using Ellen Parker’s adultery as the weapon. Lewis’ kind of muckraking journalism suggested the kind of man who might well have skeletons in his own closet. Jericho had friends. He would, he promised Fay, put something in motion.

Would she have dinner with him? That was impossible. She had to go to a public debate that was being held up in Westchester between Parker and Molloy. She would, however, join him for lunch again tomorrow. By then he might have dug up something that could be used as leverage against Lewis. A newspaperman and a friend in the District Attorney’s office would nose around for Jericho. But Jericho promised he would not tell either of them about the triangle.

The next morning Jericho woke early as usual. He was in his apartment on Jefferson Mews in Greenwich Village. When he came out of the shower he switched on the radio to hear the eight o’clock news. What he heard turned him to stone.

Fay Martin was dead.

The facts, put together from the radio account and from the morning papers, were as follows: the debate between Lloyd Parker and Mike Molloy was to be held in the auditorium of the Community Center Building in White Hills. Parker and his wife had driven out there in his Cadillac and left the car, locked, in the parking area. Shortly before the debate was to begin, Parker’s secretary, Fay Martin, had come out to the parking area, and asked the attendant where the Parker Cadillac had been left. She identified herself and showed the man keys. Parker, she said, had left something he needed in the Cadillac’s glove compartment.

The attendant pointed out where the car was and watched her go to it. She unlocked the door, got in, and leaned forward to open the glove compartment. An explosion blew the car and Fay to bits, started a raging fire, and severely damaged a half dozen other cars parked nearby.

The debate was never held. Some odd facts were turned up by the police. Parker, in a state of shock, denied that he had sent Fay to the car to get anything for him. She had, he told police, come to White Hills in her own car to make sure everything was in order for the debate. He hadn’t sent her out to his car for anything. There wasn’t anything he needed. Furthermore, he insisted that she didn’t have a set of keys for the car, which he had locked himself. There was only one set of keys, his own, and he had them in his pocket. There was no other set! Why Fay had gone to the car and where she had got a set of keys was completely inexplicable to Parker.

The police were certain the bomb had been planted in the glove compartment and rigged so that when the compartment door was opened, the bomb would go off. The bomb had obviously been meant to kill Parker, the police said, since he was the only person who drove the Cadillac and the only person who had keys to it.

Except that there must have been a second set of keys.

Mrs. Ellen Parker confirmed her husband’s statement. There was no second set of keys that she knew of. She had her own car — she never drove her husband’s Cadillac.

Public outrage was high. People were sick of bombings and assassinations. A political analyst expressed the opinion that Parker, who had been running behind Molloy in the polls, would now be an odds-on favorite to win the election. Sympathy would push him into the head. The Molloy forces would be high on the suspect list. Innocent as it might be, the Molloy machine had been put behind the eight-ball.

Jericho, his muscles aching from tension, didn’t give a damn about the election.

Fay was dead — loyal, dedicated Fay, in love with a man who had passed her by for ten years, and for whom she had been murdered.

Someone must have handed Fay a set of keys, probably saying they were Parker’s. “He wants you to get an envelope he left in the glove compartment of his car.” Of course she had gone, cheerfully. She would have done anything in the world for Parker without question. Whoever gave her the keys, not Parker’s, had to know what would happen when the glove compartment door was opened. The bomb hadn’t been meant for Parker, not ever.

Fay was dead, and it had been meant that she should die.

Do you set an elaborate and dangerous trap to kill a girl simply because she has found out about a case of adultery? What did Ellen Parker have to lose if her affair with Lewis became public? She had all the money in the world; she was tired of her husband.

What did Lewis have to lose? His man-about-town reputation would only be enhanced by the news that Ellen Parker was his latest conquest. This was 1972, not 1872. Infidelity was no longer a “curiosity.” Fay had wanted to keep Parker from learning the truth about his wife. To kill her to keep her silent made no sense, not when she would have kept silent under any circumstances.

But she had known something, or had done something, that called for violence — something, Jericho concluded, that she hadn’t mentioned to him during their brief reunion.

The police, Jericho learned from his friend in the D.A.’s office, were still working on the theory that the bomb had been meant for Parker. Experts had put together small pieces. The bomb had evidently been a simple device — sticks of dynamite tied together, set off by a Fourth of July cap and triggered when the glove compartment door was opened. The killer didn’t have to be an explosives expert.

There was simply no way to guess who had sent Fay on her deadly errand. She had died with that information unrevealed. The unexplained set of keys to the car was a puzzle. Parker, under persistent questioning, remembered that when he’d bought the Cadillac a year ago there had been a duplicate set of keys. He’d put them “in a safe place” and now hadn’t the faintest recollection where that had been. Ellen Parker denied all knowledge of them. Fay might have known, but Fay was dead. The dead kept their secrets and the living would lie to suit their own purposes.

Jericho, convinced that the bomb had not been meant for Parker, was inclined to bypass the Molloy forces. Parker, dead by violence, could do nothing but harm them. Parker’s forces could run Mickey Mouse and win. Molloy could only be involved if Fay had discovered something criminal about him and had kept it to herself long enough for Molloy’s men to rig her death. But it didn’t make sense. If she was a danger to Molloy he would have struck swiftly and less obviously, and would have made sure that it didn’t appear to have been aimed at Parker.

Yesterday had been a blue-sky day, a day for reunions, a day to remember a carefree time, a day to promise help. Today the skies were dark and the rain, wind-swept, was swirling in the gutters. Too late for promises, but not too late to demand payment in full.

A man wearing a slicker and a brown rain hat stood in the foyer of a remodeled brownstone on the east side. He had a bright red beard and his eyes were pale blue, and cold as two newly minted dimes. He had stood there while half a dozen people left the building to go to work, and two or three tradesmen arrived to deliver orders. The buildings custodian had approached him on the subject of loitering, and a crisp ten-dollar bill had changed hands.

At about eleven o’clock a taxi stopped outside the building. A woman got out and ran across the sidewalk to the sanctuary of the foyer. She was a tall, very beautiful, very chic blonde. She looked at Jericho with a kind of detached curiosity as she pressed one of the doorbells in the brass nameplate board. The ring was a signal — one short, one long, two shorts. The woman’s picture had been in the paper that morning, so Jericho had no doubts about her. “The Beautiful Mrs. Lloyd Parker” had been the newspaper caption.

The front door made a clicking sound and Ellen Parker opened it. Jericho was directly behind her, then inside before the door could close in his face. She gave him a startled look and hurried up the stairway to the second floor. Jericho was behind her and he could sense her sudden panic. She almost ran along the second-floor hallway to the apartment in the rear. The door was opening and a man in a seersucker robe was smiling at her — and the man with the red beard was directly behind her.

There was a moment of confusion.

“Ward!” Ellen Parker cried out.

She was pushed hard from behind, then she and Wardell Lewis and Jericho all wound up inside the apartment. The door was closed and Jericho was leaning against it. Lewis, tall, with longish dark hair and a mod mustache, was naked under the seersucker robe. He looked around, obviously frightened, for a weapon.

“He followed me in,” Ellen Parker said in a husky voice.

The world is full of black tales about the city and its violences. Women are attacked and robbed in the hallways of their apartment houses; drug addicts steal, even kill, for the price of a fix. It would come like this, they were thinking — unexpected, catching them totally unprepared.

Jericho took off his rain hat and shook the water out of it. He tossed it onto a chair near the door.

Lewis’ eyes widened. He was the man-about-town, the gossip hunter, the man who knew everyone. “You’re John Jericho, the painter!” he said.

“I’m John Jericho, friend of Fay Martin’s,” Jericho said. “We’ll have a talk and I hope for your sake you’ll answer questions.”

“What do you mean by breaking in this way?” Lewis demanded.

“I wanted to catch you two together,” Jericho said. “Fay told me about you. I wanted to make sure for myself. Now I’m going to get the truth about last night if I have to scrape you out of your shells.”

Lewis walked over to a table in the center of the room and took a cigarette from a lacquered box. It was a cluttered room, every inch of the wall space covered with photographs of celebrated people in society, politics, and show business, all autographed to Wardell Lewis. Lewis held a table lighter to his cigarette with an unsteady hand.

“If you were a friend of Parker’s secretary,” he said, “I can understand why you’re so steamed up. But so help me, I’m going to have you arrested for breaking and entering, and for threatening us with violence.”

Jericho’s pale eyes were fixed on the woman who was standing behind a chair, gripping it to support herself. He appeared not to have heard Lewis. Fay had been right — she was beautiful. What, he wondered, did she see in a creep like Lewis?

“Fay had found out about you and Lewis,” Jericho said to her. “But she was willing to do anything to keep your husband from finding out that you were having an affair with this clown and feeding him information that could hurt your husband. You didn’t need to kill Fay.”

Ellen Parker’s eyes were wide with fright. “That bomb wasn’t meant for Fay, God help her,” she said. “It was meant for me!”

“Keep still, Ellen,” Lewis said. “This man is your enemy.”

“What makes you think the bomb was meant for you, Mrs. Parker?” Jericho asked.

“Because I was meant to go to the car,” she said. She looked as if her legs were about to fold under her. She clung to the chair.

“Take it slowly from the beginning,” Jericho said. He told himself he had an ear for the truth. Lewis was the kind of man who’d grown up saying, “I didn’t do it!” — but Ellen Parker was something else again. She was two-timing her husband, betraying his secrets, but she obviously believed what she had just said. She believed the bomb had been meant for her.

“It was at the White Hills Community Center, just before last night’s debate was about to begin,” Ellen Parker said. “I had left my seat to go to the powder room. When I came back there was an envelope on my seat. In it was a set of car keys and a scribbled note saying my husband wanted me to get an envelope he’d left in the glove compartment of his car. He was up on the speaker’s stand on the stage. He smiled and waved at me. I waved back, indicating I’d do what he asked — waved back with the note.”

“Was the note in your husband’s handwriting?”

“No. I thought one of his staff had written it. I was just starting to edge my way out of the row of seats when Fay appeared. She asked me if anything was wrong, because they were just about to start. I told her Lloyd needed something from the car and she said she’d get it. I–I was glad not to have to go, so I gave her the keys and the note.”

“Which were blown up in the car with her,” Lewis said. “Ellen can’t prove a word of what she’s saying and he denied he asked anyone to get anything.”

“He?”

“Parker, for God’s sake. Who else? Of course he denies it — he meant to kill Ellen!”

“Why?”

“Because he’d found out about us, why else?”

“I don’t dare go home,” Ellen Parker said, her voice shaking. “The police were there all last night — to protect him. But once they’re gone he may try again.”

“The man’s turned into a homicidal maniac,” Lewis said. “Ellen and I are going to have to get protection from the police.”

“Were you at the Community Center in White Hills last night, Lewis?” Jericho asked.

“Of course I was there,” Lewis said. “I’m covering the campaign, as you know if you read the papers.”

Jericho glanced at Ellen Parker. “And how you’re covering the campaign!” he said. “A man who goes berserk and tries to kill his wife for an infidelity doesn’t usually leave out the wife’s lover. Well, maybe Parker’s saving you for dessert.”

“You think it’s something to joke about?” Lewis said. “I’ve had about enough of this.” He bent down and opened the drawer of the table behind which he was standing. His hand didn’t get out of the drawer with the revolver — Jericho moved too fast. His left hand grabbed Lewis’ right wrist and brought it down on the edge of the table. The gun fell noiselessly to the rug. Jericho’s right hand swung to Lewis’ jaw. The columnist’s head snapped back and he collapsed on the rug without a sound.

Ellen Parker didn’t move from her place behind the chair, still clutching it for support. Her eyes, wide with fear, were fixed on Jericho, as if she expected to be next. He was moving toward her and she obviously wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He took her arm gently.

“There are things I need to know about your husband,” he said. “Could we go somewhere else to talk — somewhere that smells less of treachery?”

She made no move to go to Lewis, but asked, “Is he hurt?”

“He will have a severe headache — I hope,” Jericho said.

They sat together in a corner booth in a little restaurant a couple of blocks from Lewis’ apartment. The rain had let up and they had walked there, Ellen Parker in a kind of trance. Jericho ordered coffee, with brandy to lace it. He leaned back in the booth, watching her, waiting for her to speak. There was something unexpectedly vulnerable about her. She wasn’t the kind of woman he had expected.

“I’ve destroyed myself,” she said finally, not looking at Jericho. “It’s always been that way. I have always destroyed everything that has been good in my life.”

“Your marriage?” he asked quietly.

“Since I was a little girl I’ve always been afraid that people only liked me because I was so rich. I never believed that any man really wanted me for myself. I always tested them and tested them until I drove them away. Then Lloyd Parker came into my life and for the first time I really believed I was loved and wanted for myself, that my money didn’t have anything to do with how he felt about me. For the first time in my life I was happy, without doubts, without fears.”

“What changed it?”

“This venture into politics,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “You can’t get elected dog catcher these days, Mr. Jericho, without spending a great deal of money. Lloyd asked me for a great deal of money and I gave it to him gladly, happily. Then, as soon as I did, he seemed to lose interest in me. Our love life came to an end. I told myself it was because he was working fourteen-eighteen hours a day. But the old doubts, the bitter certainty that it was only my money he wanted, took charge again. I guess I went a little crazy. I went out on the town looking for a man, any man, who’d find me attractive without knowing I was rich, rich, rich. It was Ward Lewis who picked me up and restored my ego.”

“Lewis, who knew who you were from the first moment he laid eyes on you, knew you were rich, rich, rich, and who planned to use you to help the Molloy crowd.”

“I wanted to hurt Lloyd,” she said, her lips trembling. “I wanted revenge. And — and I hated myself.”

“Good for you,” Jericho said.

“Last night, when Lloyd told me that he knew about Ward and me, I—”

“He knew?” Jericho sat up straight.

“He told me while we were driving out to White Hills. There’d been an anonymous letter. He’d checked on me and found out it was true. I knew how much it hurt him and I was glad for a moment. But he was wonderful about it. He took the blame, admitted he’d neglected me, begged me to give him another chance. I almost began to believe in him again.”

“Why do you suppose he told you he knew if he was planning to kill you?” Jericho asked.

She looked at him, her eyes wide. “So I’d know, at the last moment when the bomb went off, why I was dying.”

“That makes him into some kind of monster,” Jericho said.

Ellen Parker closed her eyes. “God help me,” she said.

The receptionist in the brokerage offices of Sheftel & Parker was not cordial.

“I’m afraid Mr. Parker can’t see you today, Mr. Jericho. If you’ve heard the news—”

“Give him this note,” Jericho said. “I think he’ll see me.”

Jericho felt out of place in the paneled waiting room with its rich green-leather furnishings. His corduroy jacket and turtlenecked shirt were altogether too casual for this palace of wealth. There was another out-of-place man sitting in one of the big chairs across the room. Jericho’s artist’s eyes picked up details that might have escaped others. A slight bulge at the other man’s waistline spelled gun. Cop, Jericho thought. The police weren’t risking another attempt on Parker’s life.

The receptionist, looking mildly surprised, reappeared. “Mr. Parker will see you,” she said.

She led Jericho into an inner room. He was aware that the waiting man had risen and was following him. In the inner room another out-of-place man faced him. He showed a police shield.

“Mr. Parker doesn’t know you, Mr. Jericho. Under the circumstances you’ll understand why we must make sure you’re not armed.”

Jericho raised his arms languidly. The man behind tapped Jericho over. There was a moment of tension when he felt a bulge in the pocket of the corduroy coat. It turned out to be Jericho’s pipe.

Lloyd Parker was about six feet tall, with soft, curly brown hair. He had a square jaw, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his brown eyes suggested a man of good humor. But those eyes were red-rimmed, probably from lack of sleep. He looked like a man fighting exhaustion. This had been Fay’s kind of man, Jericho thought: gentle, undemanding, considerate. Most people would instinctively like Lloyd Parker under normal circumstances. Now he was undermined by tensions and anxiety. He stood in front of his big flat-topped desk, leaning against it.

“Your note, Mr. Jericho, tells me that you were a friend of Fay’s, which is why I agreed to see you. It also says that you know where my wife is. Why should you think that would interest me?”

“Aren’t you wondering if she’s gone back to Wardell Lewis?”

A muscle rippled along Parker’s jawline. “Just what, exactly, do you mean by that?”

“Oh, come, Mr. Parker, let’s not waste time with games. I’ve just been talking to your wife. I knew about the affair from Fay.”

“Fay? Fay knew?”

“Fay knew and was prepared to do anything to keep you from finding out about it. But you did find out.”

Parker’s face hardened. “What do you want of me, Mr. Jericho?”

“I want to ask you a question before I call in those cops out there and charge you with the murder of Fay Martin and the intention to murder your wife.”

Parker’s mouth dropped and he gasped for air like a landed fish. “You’re out of your mind!” he whispered.

“I think not.” Jericho’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Your wife got your instructions to go to the car, where a bomb was waiting for her. By mischance Fay offered to do the errand for her. I said in my note that I know where your wife is. I do. She’s not with Lewis, if that matters to you. But it must be obvious to you that she won’t see you or go back home with you. She’s afraid you might try again.”

“This is sheer madness!” Parker said. “I don’t want my wife dead. I love her. There’s nothing in the world that matters to me without her. I had nothing to do with the bomb, I sent no message asking her to go to the car, I had just been pleading with her to give our marriage a second chance.”

“When did you tell Fay she could stop looking for the person who was feeding Wardell Lewis with information about you?”

“Last night, just a little while before the debate was to begin. I told her the truth — that I’d found out Ellen was having an affair with Lewis, which explained his source of information.”

“She wasn’t shocked, Parker. She had told me earlier in the day about the affair. She was, as I told you, prepared to do anything to keep you from knowing.”

“She told me that. I was grateful, but I explained to her that Ellen was all that mattered to me, that I’d do anything to get her back.”

Jericho’s eyes wandered toward a small bar in the corner of the office. “Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?”

“Yes, I mind!” Parker said. “Does Ellen really think I tried to kill her?”

“She’s sure of it,” Jericho said. He went over to the bar and poured himself a bourbon. He looked at Parker and raised his glass. “Maybe I can persuade her that she’s wrong.”

“But you just threatened to—”

“I know,” Jericho said. “You have an extraordinary effect on women, Parker. One of them runs away from you and into the arms of a heel because she thinks you don’t love her enough. Another gives up being a woman for ten years just to breathe the same air that you do. But I don’t suppose Fay ever gave up hope that some day, somehow, you might be more than that to her.”

“Poor Fay.”

“Yes, poor Fay,” Jericho said. “It could have been this way, Parker. When she found out about your wife’s affair with Lewis she wanted to save you the hurt. Your wife’s death might be a terrible blow to you, but having your male ego shattered would be even worse. I think she had already planned a way when she talked to me at lunch yesterday. Maybe she hoped I’d come up with a better answer, but unfortunately I didn’t.

“So it was she, it was Fay who rigged the bomb in your car. Keys? There was a spare set which you’d put ‘in a safe place’ that you no longer could remember. Fay knew. Your secretary, Parker, your devoted, loving secretary knew. Your wife might not know your ‘safe place,’ or the size of your collar, or how you liked your eggs, but Fay knew; she knew everything there was to know about you and she cherished the knowledge.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Parker said, his voice shaken. “How would she know how to rig a bomb? Fay? Impossible!”

“Quite possible,” Jericho said. “There’s an odd fact I know about her that you’d have no reason to know. When I first met Fay in Paris ten or twelve years ago she was a model. I am a painter. She was also a member of a wild young revolutionary group that was constantly demonstrating, bombing, and burning. Their aim was to get rid of General de Gaulle. They were trained by experienced people. She would know how to make a simple bomb.

“I met her, she modeled for me, we fell in love in a sort of way, and for a good many months she forgot about being a Mata Hari. When we parted she came back here and went to work for you. But she had the knowledge about explosives.”

“And you say she meant to kill Ellen?”

“I think so. She would kill Ellen and at the same time improve your election prospects, because Molloy and his crowd would be suspected. She prepared the note that would send your wife out to the car and left it on her seat. It must have been after she’d done that you told her you knew. More important — more devastating to Fay — you made it clear that Ellen was still all that mattered to you. That there’d be no future for Fay even if Ellen died. If Ellen was the only one you wanted, poor defeated Fay would make certain you had her. She must have hurried to retrieve the note and the keys. But Ellen already had them.”

“Good God.”

Jericho looked at his empty glass. “So she volunteered to run the errand for Ellen.”

“Knowing the bomb was in the car?”

“Maybe she thought she could deactivate it. Maybe, in that brief trip to the parking lot she decided to take it as a way out. Perhaps she thought she would be doing you a last service. The bomb would at least end Molloy’s chances of defeating you in the election.”

“Can you prove this?”

“Not one word of it,” Jericho said. He turned back to the bar and poured himself another drink. “But I might persuade your wife that it’s true. Care to come with me and help me try?”