The Fourth Side of the Triangle

II The Second Side Ashton

The two policemen picked up Ashton McKell and carried him to the couch, loosened his clothing. Dane did nothing.

“You maybe ought to call a doctor, Mrs. McKell,” the bigger detective said.

She shook her head. From somewhere she had produced a silver filigree smelling-salts bottle and she was holding it to her husband’s ashy nose. He twitched, trying to get away from it. She pursued him with firmness. “It’s just overwork. My husband works too hard, and then this shock on top of it... Only yesterday he was called to Washington by the President. Last week he had to fly down to South America. We were just talking about a vacation... Murdered, you say? That poor woman. No, we didn’t hear anything; this is an old house with very thick walls and floors. Dane, please fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Don’t say anything to the servants. There’s no point in distressing them.”

She continued to talk. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, listening to her, that her husband should have fainted on hearing of a tenant’s violent death.

Gradually his color returned; his eyelids fluttered. Lutetia rose and faced the detectives.

“You’ve been very kind. It’s all right now. I know we mustn’t keep you gentlemen.”

“We’ll probably have to come back,” the big sergeant said with an air of apology. The officers left.

Dane had brought the water in a daze. He sat down at the table, trying to master his nerves, which seemed to have been invaded by St. Vitus. All the little muscles in his hands and face were twittering. He knew he would never forget the sight of his father’s face, this morning of September 15th, drawn even before the detectives’ visit, turning clay-colored as the announcement came and his eyes turned over and he slid to the floor. Had his father ever before in his life fainted? Dane was sure he had not. The news of Sheila Grey’s death must have been a tremendous shock.

The two detectives... the tall one with the sledgehammer hands and the rumbling voice who did all the talking — what was his name again? Sergeant Velie — were deference and concern his usual attitudes on the job? Dane thought not. All detectives had to be actors of a sort, and it seemed to Dane that Sergeant Velie had been striding the boards in full make-up. He knew something. Far more than he had let on.

Dane reached for a cigaret. Then it came back to him: he had not been able to find his cigaret case earlier this morning, just the remains of an old pack. The flat taste of the cigaret he had smoked seemed still in his mouth. Or was it the taste of fear?

His father had begun to moan; his mother had phoned Dr. Peabody after all and was back at her husband’s side; Dane ignored them and ran back to his room. He tumbled things about, questioned the servants, went through the other rooms.

“My cigaret case!” He flung the phrase at his parents. Lutetia looked up; her blue eyes were moist, she was holding on to her husband’s hand. “Have you seen my cigaret case?” She shook her head, obviously bewildered that such a thing could be on his mind; as for Ashton McKell, he was now breathing regularly — otherwise, he lay in silence.

Dane collapsed in a chair. His mother — raised in the world of her grandmother, when pipes were Rough, cigars Ostentatious, and cigarets Fast (snuff was regrettably outmoded, while chewing tobacco was not mentioned in polite society) — had given him the silver case on his twenty-first birthday as a sign of grace, conferring the solid right in his new manhood to smoke in her presence without the hint of reproof that had greeted his two or three earlier attempts. The case was a beautifully handcrafted Tiffany piece; the inside of the lid was engraved Philip Dane DeWitt McKell.

Where was it?

If he had left it in Sheila’s apartment, then the police had found it. The presence of his cigaret case on the scene of the crime... He might be able to get by with saying that he had left it there on a previous visit... Worry nibbled at him.

If the police had found the case, why hadn’t the two detectives mentioned it? Of course, they might be laying a trap for him. On the other hand, suppose they hadn’t found it? — because it wasn’t there? In that case, what had happened to it?

The next two days were unpleasant. His parents made no further mention of a European tour. Ashton McKell’s manner at home was listless and preoccupied.

Dane tried to work on his book without any success whatever. It was easier to sit turning the pages of illustrated books of other people, the illustrations distracting without requiring concentration — bulky books, Audubon’s sketchbooks, volumes of Peter Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch. The Bosch he flung aside; that nightmare world ruined his sleep. Demons, naked women and men, apples... silver cigaret cases...

There was something besides the cigaret case. For weeks he had been monopolizing Sheila Grey’s life — lunches, dinners, the theater, the ballet, walks, ferry rides. Cherchez l’homme.

He supposed it worked that way, too. Look for the man. He was the last man in Sheila’s life. How long would it take the police, by routine legwork, to get around to him?

He found it childishly easy to yield to his mother’s plea that for the present he take his meals with her and his father. He wondered if she knew, or suspected, about him and Sheila.

They were at breakfast, a moody one, his father’s New York Times untouched beside his plate, when the two police officers returned. One look at their faces told Dane that it was no longer a matter of questions like Did you hear anything unusual, etc.

Again it was Sergeant Velie who did all the talking. He greeted Lutetia politely, nodded to Dane. But his attention was concentrated on Ashton McKell.

They had all risen; the sergeant waved them back, refused a chair, and said, “On this Sheila Grey murder. I can tell you she was shot through the heart” — a stifled sound from Lutetia, and Ashton gripped her hand without taking his eyes off the officer — “and was killed instantly. A .38 S. & W. Terrier revolver was found next to the body. You want to say something, Mr. McKell?”

Ashton said quickly, “That’s probably my gun, Sergeant. There’s no mystery about it if it is, although of course you want an explanation. I lent it to Miss Grey. She said she was sometimes nervous being all alone in the penthouse. At the same time I didn’t want a frightened woman handling a loaded gun. So I filled the chambers with blanks without mentioning it to her — it was more to give her confidence than anything else. Do you mean to say...?”

“Say what, Mr. McKell?”

“That Miss Grey was shot with my gun?”

“Yes.”

“But it was loaded with blanks! I loaded it myself!”

“It was no blank,” Sergeant Velie said, “that killed her.”

“I don’t know how it could have been replaced,” Ashton McKell said in a calm voice — was there the slightest tremor? — “or by whom. For all I know Miss Grey may have done it herself. I don’t know how much she knew about firearms.”

Sergeant Velie was looking at him with great steadiness. “Let’s skip the gun and bullets for now. You admit you knew the woman?”

“There’s nothing to admit. Of course I knew Miss Grey. I know all the tenants in this building. I own it.”

“You knew her well?”

“Who?”

“Miss Grey,” the sergeant said patiently.

“Quite well.”

“And how well would quite well be, Mr. McKell?”

Dane glanced at his mother. She was absolutely rigid.

“I don’t know what you mean, Sergeant.”

Velie said, “You see, sir, we found men’s clothing in her apartment. One man’s clothing.” The sergeant paused, then repeated, “You want to say something, Mr. McKell?”

The elder McKell nodded with remarkable self-possession. He did not look at his wife. “They’re my clothes, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “You must have traced them.”

“That’s right, we did. We checked out the tailor’s labels and the laundry marks, and so forth. Anything else you have to say to us?”

Lutetia’s face was now expressionless. Their hands were still tightly gripped, Dane noticed.

At this moment Ramon came in. “Sir, excuse me,” he said to Ashton McKell, “but the Bentley will not start. Shall I use the Continental, or...?”

“Never mind, Ramon. Wait in the kitchen, please. Mrs. McKell may need you.”

Ramon withdrew in impervious silence. In Spain, where he had been born and trained, servants did not ask questions.

Dane was thinking: His clothing... What kind of relationship had they had? It sounded like something out of Havelock Ellis. And how could it have satisfied Sheila? The raging wave stirred. He went to work on it...

“You’re leading up to something, Sergeant Velie,” his father was saying steadily. “I’d appreciate your coming to the point.” Dane felt weak and ill.

Sergeant Velie continued to regard Ashton McKell with that same impaling glance. Dane knew what the sergeant was thinking, what had brought him and the other detective to the McKell apartment this morning. Ashton McKell had had the means to commit the murder: it was his revolver that had taken Sheila Grey’s life; his story about the blanks was not substantiated by the facts, and in any case it sounded feeble. He had had opportunity: he and Sheila Grey occupied the same building. He had had motive (but here Dane’s brain shut down; he refused to think of theoretical motive, kept pushing it back and away, out of sight).

Lutetia’s delicate face was cameo-white, cameo-stone.

“Mr. McKell, I’m going to have to ask you to come downtown for further questioning. You won’t need your car. We’ve got a police car at the side entrance.” So much was granted Ashton McKell’s position in society. The tumbril awaits... but at the tradesmen’s entrance.

Ashton’s face was stone, too. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. He disengaged his hand gently. “Lutetia, I’m sorry,” he said in a very low voice. She did not reply, but her eyes flew open wide, very wide. “Son—”

Dane moistened his dried-out lips. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll get you out of this right away.”

“Take care of your mother, son. By the way, I forgot a handkerchief this morning. May I have yours?”

On this absurd note Ashton McKell left between the two policemen. After the apartment door snicked shut with guillotine finality, Dane turned back to his mother. She was no longer there. He went to her bedroom and called out, but there was no response. He tried her door; it was locked. After a moment he went to the phone.

Ashton McKell had a staff of six attorneys at his New York headquarters. Dane called none of them. Richard M. Heaton was the McKell family lawyer.

“Almighty God!” said Richard M. Heaton.

Hanging up, Dane felt himself sweating in the air-conditioned apartment. He felt for his handkerchief and remembered that he had given it to his father. Abstractedly he went to his room and opened the handkerchief drawer of his old bureau.

His hand remained in midair.

His silver cigaret case lay on one of the piles of handkerchiefs.

The silver case had been removed from the penthouse before the police got there. Who could have removed it? Obviously, the same one who had placed it here, in his bureau drawer... his father. That was why Ashton McKell had “forgotten” his own handkerchief (as if he ever forgot an essential article of clothing!) and borrowed Dane’s: to make Dane go to his room for a replacement and, as a consequence, to find the cigaret case. His father must have seen it in Sheila’s apartment, recognized it, pocketed it, and only now placed it in Dane’s bureau.

What a bitter night it must have been for him, Dane thought. Finding the evidence of Dane’s presence on Sheila’s premises, he must have realized in a flash why Sheila was easing him out of her life. His own son...

And the king went to the tower which was by the gate, and as he went, thus he said, My son, my son, Absalom. My son, my son, Absalom. Would God I died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.

Absalom had conspired against David, his father.

Suddenly Dane saw Ashton McKell in a very different light from the clownish spectacle of the man who skulked in out-of-the-way places disguising himself in order to visit a woman he could not even embrace. In his blackest hour — an almost-criminal on the brink of scandal, his life in danger — his parting thought had been for the son who had betrayed him, his last directive an unspoken Don’t worry, son, I’ve retrieved your case from the penthouse, now they can’t place you on the scene.

And Dane sat down in his childhood rocker and wept.

In a city in which murder is hamburgers by the dozen, the McKell arrest was caviar to the general. Not often did a case break in which the accused was tycoon, adviser to presidents, prince of commerce, son of a name who was son of a name untainted for generations, and all rolled into one man.

If Lutetia McKell’s anguish at the wild invasion of her privacy by the press was not quite on a level with her horror at Ashton’s predicament, it was still powerful enough to dominate her household. She had caught a single glimpse of a single tabloid (left incautiously in the kitchen by old Margaret, whose open vice was the journalism of murder and rape); it was enough. All newspapers, even the New York Times, were banned from the premises; and when it became evident that the scavengers of the press, in particular the photographers, were laying siege to the building, Lutetia went into strictest seclusion, like a Hindu widow, and forbade the entrance of the clamoring world by so much as an uncurtained window. To reach his mother, Dane found himself having to follow a route he had not used since his boyhood, entering another building around the corner, descending to its basement, and emerging into the alley from which he could reach the apartment of John Leslie, the doorman, by a window. John or his wife would let him in, and then out by the basement door adjacent to the service elevator. It had been great fun when he was a youngster, but somehow the adventure had lost its savor. When it became necessary to confer with Lawyer Heaton, Lutetia reacted to Heaton’s suggestion that she and Dane visit his office as if he had invited her to take a sunbath naked on her roof.

“I shall not set foot outside this apartment,” she said, in tears. “Nothing, nothing can make me!”

So stately Mahomet came to the mountain; and indeed it was almost as traumatic an experience for Richard M. Heaton as it would have been for Lutetia. For Heaton was the very portrait of the trusted family lawyer — elderly, florid, with the dignity of a retired major-general, and as horror-struck by the notion of publicity as Lutetia herself. He gained entry to the McKell building in a slightly disheveled condition after running the gauntlet of newsmen, and from his distress he might have been stripped by their waving hands to his under-clothing.

“Foul beasts,” he muttered, accepting a glass of sherry and a biscuit from Lutetia in great agitation. He wore a resentful look, as if he had been tricked. It took Dane five minutes to calm him.

“This is quite beyond my depth, Lutetia,” he said at last. “I have had no occasion to practice criminal law — haven’t appeared in court for any reason in fifteen years. What a dreadful business! A dressmaker!” Dane was tempted to ask him if he would have felt better about the whole mess if Sheila Grey’s name had been Van Spuyten, the end result of a long line of patroons. But he did not, for he suspected that his mother felt very much the same way.

“Tell Mother what you told me, Mr. Heaton.”

“Why I haven’t been able to pry your father out of the hands of the police? Well, Lutetia, Ashton cannot prove an alibi. He has told the authorities where he was at the time of the — of the event, but they’re unable to corroborate it. Therefore, they are continuing to hold him. Now. Although the charge is the most serious one under the law — with the possible exception of treason, of course, and the last treason indictment I can remember anywhere is that against John Brown by the State of Virginia—”

“Mr. Heaton,” said Dane politely, but firmly. He could see that his mother was holding herself together by sheer heroism.

“I’m rambling, forgive me, Lutetia. This has upset me more than I can say. However, even though murder is among the gravest of charges, an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty, thank God, and I do not for one moment suppose such proof can be obtained in this case.”

“Then why haven’t you been able to get Ashton’s release on bond?” Lutetia asked timidly. “Dane tells me you said that New York State allows bond even in a charge of first — in a first-degree charge.”

“It’s complicated,” sighed Richard M. Heaton. “We have fallen afoul of a very poor climate, politically speaking, on the bail question, I mean here in the city. Of course, you don’t follow such things, but only a few months ago there was the case of another, ah, of a very prominent man who shot his wife to death. He was released on $100,000 bail, and he promptly fled the country. It has made the courts and the district attorney’s office extremely shy where bond in capital cases is concerned, especially since the newspapers have raked up the other case and are asking quite maliciously if this will prove a repetition.”

“But Ashton wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Lutetia moaned. “Richard, he’s innocent. Only guilty men flee. It isn’t fair.”

“I’m afraid we don’t live in as ideal a democracy as we sometimes boast,” the old lawyer said sadly. “The rich and socially prominent are very often discriminated against in our society. We could probably force the issue in the courts, but the trouble is...” He hesitated.

“The trouble is what, Mr. Heaton?” Dane asked sharply.

“Your father seems reluctant to battle it out legally. In fact, he’s all but forbidden me to.”

“What!”

“But why?” asked Lutetia blankly.

“Why indeed? In view of the state of public opinion, he seems to feel that it would be wiser not to press for bail. He actually told me, ‘Perhaps the public is right. If I were a poor man I wouldn’t be able to raise the kind of bail that would be set in a case like this. Let it go.’ I must confess I hadn’t expected such a thoroughly unrealistic attitude from Ashton McKell, and I told him so. A martyr’s attitude will avail him nothing, nothing at all.”

Lutetia sniffed into her tiny bit of cambric. “Ashton has always been so principled. But I do wish...” Then she cried quietly.

Dane comforted her, thinking that neither she nor the lawyer had caught the point. Perhaps Ashton himself was not aware of it. Though his father continued to insist quite rationally on his innocence of the murder charge, he was carrying a heavy load of guilt around for another crime; and of this one he was guilty as hell — consorting, as Lutetia would have termed it, with another woman. It was not as if he despised his wife and, in despising her, sought a more loving pair of arms, bought or offered gratis. Ashton did not despise Lutetia; he loved her. It was like loving a piece of fragile chinaware, the slightest jar to which would crack it. He had been responsible for cracking the delicate image, and he must be feeling the same sort of shame and guilt as if, in fact, he had been contemptuous of it.

Dane went to see his father. The elder McKell looked like a hollow reproduction of himself — as if he had had his stuffing scooped out. Dane could hardly bear to look at him.

Ashton asked, in tones softer than Dane could remember, “Son, how are you? How is your mother?”

“We’re fine. The question is, Dad, how are you?”

“This is all a dream, and I’ll soon wake up. But then I know I’m awake — that the past was the dream. It’s something like that, son.”

They chatted awkwardly for a while, about Lutetia chiefly, how she was reacting to her overturned world. Finally Dane got around to the object of his visit. “Dad, I want you to tell me all about that night — what you did, where you went. In detail. Just as you told the police.”

“If you want me to, Dane.” The elder man considered for a moment, sighing. “I got to the penthouse just before ten o’clock — the cab was held up by an accident on the highway, or it would have been sooner. The traffic from the airport isn’t very heavy at that hour.”

About ten o’clock. It would have been mere minutes after he himself had left her alive in the penthouse.

“I didn’t stay long. She was terribly upset. By what she wouldn’t say.”

Dane bent over the pad, on which he was taking notes, to cover his wince. “How long were you there, Dad? As exactly as you can recall.”

“She asked me to leave almost at once, so I did. I couldn’t have been there more than several minutes. I’d say I left at 10:03 at the latest.”

“Where did you go from there?”

Ashton said quietly, “I was rather upset myself. I walked.”

“Where? For how long?” And why didn’t I ask him why he was upset? Dane thought. Because I know, that’s why...

“I just don’t remember. It couldn’t have been too long, I suppose. I do remember being in a bar—”

“What bar?”

“I don’t know. I had a drink and talked to the bartender, I remember that.”

“You’re sure you don’t know where the bar is?”

“Not even approximately, although for some reason First Avenue sticks in my head. But I can’t honestly say it was there. Somewhere in the Sixties — I think. A side street, I seem to recall that, anyway. I was simply not paying any attention to things like that.” A ghost of a smile touched the rocky face. “I certainly wish now that I had.”

“And you didn’t notice the name of the bar?”

“Or I’ve forgotten. You know, a lot of those little places have no names. Just Bar.”

“Have you an idea how long you were in there?”

“Quite a while. More than a few minutes. I do remember leaving the place and walking some more. Finally I took a cab—”

“I don’t suppose you remember the cabbie’s name or number.”

“God, no. Or when, or where, or what street I got out at. I remember getting out some blocks short of home because I suddenly wanted air. I walked the rest of the way.”

“And you can’t even recall what time it was when you got home?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea, Dane.” Dane knew that his mother did not know, either, for she had told him, “I didn’t know your father was home until early morning, when I woke up.”

“I’m afraid, son, the information isn’t of any use.”

Dane wanted to talk about his father’s having replaced the silver cigaret case; he had even thought of bringing up the whole business of his relationship with Sheila Grey; but just then the turnkey terminated his visit. The street was steaming with gasoline fumes and oily vapors, but the air seemed sweetly pure after the jail.

He went over to police headquarters and got in to see the man in charge of several phases of the Grey investigation, a birdy little man with a gray brush mustache, an inspector named Queen.

“Take a load off your feet, Mr. McKell,” said Inspector Queen, nodding toward a chair of rivuleted black leather, “and listen to the gospel. We have to go by the weight of the circumstantial evidence. The weight of the circumstantial evidence is against your father. Ballistics says the bullet that killed her came from the gun your father admits belongs to him — not that it’s important whether he admits it or not; his ownership is a matter of record. He was admittedly on the scene within minutes of the exact moment of the shooting as recorded by the desk sergeant of the 17th Precinct, from hearing the shot over the phone. And while the State doesn’t have to prove motive, it comes in handy, and your father’s motive sticks in the old slot they all stick in when a man is having an affair with a woman not his wife — sorry I have to be blunt, but there it is. And all he offers us in rebuttal is this yarn about having been in a bar. But what bar, where, when, he can’t tell us.”

Dane wondered what this little briar of an inspector would say if he were to be told about the disguise and the impotence. Probably, he thought, boot me out of here for telling bad jokes so early in the day.

“Have you tried to check out his story, Inspector?”

The Inspector said explosively, “People give me a pain. I forgive you because it’s your father who’s involved, and people don’t think straight when they’re upset. My dear Mr. McKell, you don’t suppose we collect bonuses for every indictment the grand jury brings in, do you? Like fox tails in chicken country? Of course we checked it out. Or tried our damnedest to. You know how many bars there are in every square mile of Manhattan Island? I’ve got a pile of reports here that make my feet ache just looking at ’em.

“We checked every last bar in the neighborhood your father mentioned, and not just in the Sixties, or on First Avenue, either. We hit that whole midtown East Side area in a saturation investigation. Nobody — but nobody — remembers having seen him that night; and our men carried photographs. That night or any other night, I might add. So what do you suggest we do? I’m sorry, Mr. McKell, but my advice to you is to get your father the best trial lawyers money can hire.”

Dane McKell did not know what the police could or could not do, but he knew what he had to do. He had to find that bar. He went back to his parents’ home, fished in the family album and, armed with a photograph of his father, set out in his MG.

He drove from street to street. He was operating on the theory that the police had interpreted “bar” too narrowly; besides, perhaps his father was in confusion or error as to the exact location of the place. The police having covered bars on the East Side midtown, he would widely extend the hunt.

He visited bars, grills, restaurants, oyster houses, steak joints, even hotels; the dark and the light, the new and old and ageless places. “Have you ever seen this man? Are you sure? He might have had a drink in here on the night of September 14th, between ten P.M. and midnight.”

In one dim bistro the inevitable happened.

“Sure,” the barkeep said. Dane perked up. “He’s here right now. Jerry? Here’s a guy looking for you.” Jerry did bear a resemblance to Ashton McKell, if Ashton McKell had spent his days boozing in a fourth-rate grogshop and shaved every third day.

Dane stumbled over another trail in a place on Second Avenue, in the upper 60s. The barman took one look at Ashton McKell’s photo and grunted, “Who is this guy, everybody’s rich uncle?”

Dane was tired. “What do you mean?”

“The girl.”

“What girl?”

“Ain’t she working with you? First she comes in, then you. Nice-looking broad. She was in here a few minutes ago. Nah, I never seen this old duck, and that’s what I told her, too.”

So a girl was combing the bars with a picture of his father, too! Could she be a policewoman? Dane did not think so. It seemed scarcely the sort of work to which a policewoman would be assigned; besides, that phase of the police investigation had been covered. Then who was she? Could there have been two other women in his father’s life? By now Dane did not care if there had been a haremful. His own meddling had helped bring his father to a human kennel, his life in jeopardy. Only get him out of there! Nothing else mattered any longer.

The mystery of the girl was solved prosaically enough. Dane had come out of a pink-and-white barroom occupied by slender men in form-fitting clothing and had entered a white-and-pink barroom occupied by women who used too much eye make-up and who looked up quickly as he came in. The bartender was at the other end of the bar, half blocked out by the figure of a woman who was showing him something.

“No, miss,” the man was saying. “Not on September 14th or any other night.”

Dane moved toward her; she turned around and they almost collided.

“Judy!”

It was Judith Walsh, his father’s secretary. He had seen nothing of Judy since the fateful night; he had supposed that in his father’s trouble she was holding down the fort at the McKell offices.

“Dane, what are you doing here?”

“The same thing you are, apparently. Trying to prove Dad’s alibi.”

He took her to a booth and ordered beers.

“How long have you been at this?” he asked her.

“Seems like ten years,” she said disconsolately. “I simply didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t just do nothing.”

Dane nodded; he knew something — not much — of the story behind her devotion to his father. The elder McKell had given Judith Walsh her first and only job, at a time when she could see for herself nothing but the fate of most girls from her economic class — a hasty and overfertile marriage, and a life of drudgery. She had made herself indispensable to Ashton, and he had repaid her handsomely.

“Look, Judy, we’re both pulling on the same oar,” Dane said. “Why don’t we hook up? What places have you covered?”

“I have a list.”

“So have I. Between the two of us, we ought to turn it up.”

Judy set down her half-finished beer. “We’re wasting time, Dane. Let’s get back on it.”

They kept going by day and by night; after a while, in a sort of sleepwalking daze. The photographs became cracked and dog-eared.

It was bitterly interesting to see how the news of the indictment handed down by the grand jury affected people Dane knew. A girl who had been in pursuit of him since the spring, phoning him several times a week, vanished from the face of the earth. Friends these days were always hurrying somewhere, unable to chat for more than a minute or two. On the other hand, old Colonel Adolphus Phillipse, Lutetia’s cousin, appeared at the McKell apartment for the first time since the funeral of Lutetia’s grandmother’s sister — pausing en route just long enough to whale away at a cameraman with his walking stick — and announced that he had pawned his mother’s jewelry, offering the proceeds, $10,000, as a reward leading to the arrest and conviction of what he termed “the real culprit.” He was persuaded with difficulty that his generosity was not needed.

By November 1st, Dane and Judy were worn out, stumped. The only thing they did not doubt was the truth of Ashton McKell’s story. As Dane said, “If for no other reason than that, if he’d made the story up, he could hardly have helped inventing a better one!”

And on November 1st, in a crowded courtroom, Judge Edgar Suarez presiding, the trial of Ashton McKell began. It was a Tuesday.

On Wednesday, after another night’s fruitless search, not concluded until the bars closed, Dane insisted on taking Judy home to her West End Avenue apartment. Her eyes were deeply stamped with fatigue. Outside her building he said, “You swallow a sleeping pill, missie, and hit the sack.”

“No,” Judy said. “I want to check off the places we covered tonight against the list of licenses I have upstairs. To make sure we didn’t skip one.”

She swayed, and he caught her. “Here! I’d better come up and help you tick them off. Then you’re going to bed.”

He had never been in her apartment before. It was tailored but feminine, with some creditable pieces of bric-à-brac, and an impressive hi-fi set backed up by a formidable collection of recordings.

“All my money goes into it,” Judy laughed, noticing his respectful eyebrows. “I’m a frustrated musician, I guess. How are you on music?”

“Long-haired,” said Dane.

“Wonderful! Maybe we can spend an evening listening to a whole nightful of music. I mean when this is, well, over.”

“I’d like that.”

“I have some simply marvelous old 78s. Do you know the prewar Beethoven symphonies recorded by Felix Weingartner and the Vienna Philharmonic? In my opinion they’re still the definitive performances...”

They checked their list of the evening. In the area they had covered, not one place that sold liquor over a bar had been passed by. “There,” Judy said, putting down her pencil. “That’s done. Funny, I don’t feel as tired—”

Dane took her in his arms, kissed her mouth. After one gasp of surprise, she returned the pressure.

Later, he told himself it had been inevitable. The attraction between them — how old was it? It seemed to him now that it dated from their first sight of each other, years before. He had always been drawn to a certain quality of sweet cleanliness about her, dainty and uncomplicated and altogether feminine. Why hadn’t he realized it sooner? And where now was his passion for Sheila Grey? Already her memory was a vestigial relic of the past. Was he so shallow, or had his love for Sheila been no love at all?

But just as suddenly as he had begun making love to Judy, he stopped, pushed her aside, and hurried from her apartment. She was more puzzled than hurt, more tired than puzzled. As she sank into sleep the thought drifted through her head: He feels guilty about being happy while his father is in a mess, that’s why. Dane was such a strange man...

They established a routine. During the day they attended the trial; the evening and night were dedicated to the hunt for the elusive bar and the invisible bartender. They took their hasty meals together. Judy was aware of a restraint on Dane’s part — a hint of wariness, a drawing away. And yet there were times when he seemed to recapture something of those few minutes in her apartment that night. But these were mere glimpses into what had already become a misty remembrance of things past. It was almost as if she had dreamed the whole episode.

A chill invaded the city. The tang of hot chestnut smoke hung about Manhattan street corners, the city’s equivalent of suburbia’s burning leaves. Through streets fashionable and down-at-heel, clean and dirty, through areas of high-rent apartments and melting-pot neighborhoods and garbage-littered slums, they pressed their search. And still the search went unrewarded.

The trial approached its climax. Few defendants against a charge of murder had had so distinguished a group of character witnesses as paraded to the stand to testify to the probity and non-lethal nature of Ashton McKell. But Dane knew, and Judith Walsh knew, and Richard M. Heaton knew, and most of all Robert O’Brien knew — the highly capable criminal lawyer associated with Heaton for the defense — for how little all this counted. The district attorney had only to paraphrase the prosecution’s words in the Richard Savage case of long ago (“Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a much greater man than you or I; that he wears much finer clothes than you or I; and that he has much more money in his pocket than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that he should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?”) for everyone to see how very little all the fine words by all the fine people added up to.

“What are my father’s chances?” Dane asked O’Brien. And O’Brien looked him in the eye and said, “Very poor indeed.” Had his answer been anything else, Dane would not have believed him.

Judy wept. “There has to be something else we can do,” she wailed, “before it’s too late. Couldn’t you hire a private detective, Dane?”

“To do what?” His laugh was more of a bark. “Show them anything out of the ordinary and they’re afraid to touch it. Oh, it wouldn’t be hard to find one who’d take the money, but...” And just then something slipped to the surface of his mind.

It was the name of a man he had met once at a literary cocktail party in the Algonquin. A man who wrote detective stories for a living, and for a hobby... there were some impressive, if incredible, stories in circulation about his hobby. And wasn’t his father connected with the New York police?

“By God!” Dane exclaimed. “His father is that old man I talked to at police headquarters!”

“Whose father?” Judy asked, puzzled.

“I know just the fellow!”

So they went to look for Ellery Queen.

They found Ellery in the private pavilion of the Swedish-Norwegian Hospital in Murray Hill.

“We squareheads are very adept at patching up ski accident cases,” genial Dr. Johanneson had said, patting the casts in which Ellery was immobilized.

“You ought to be,” Ellery growled, “you invented the damned things. And don’t look so pleased with yourself. I’ll have you know the Queens were breaking their bones in civilized ways when your barbarian ancestors were still chiseling runes in the forests of Gothland!”

It was a pleasant enough room, the walls painted a tonic yellow-sand. Ellery regarded his two young visitors quizzically. “This just isn’t my year,” he complained. “I’d gone up to Wrightsville to get in some early skiing. It was my luck that a movie outfit was shooting winter scenes in the Mahoganies and the director, a man I know, wheedled me into the act. The crew had rigged a camera on a bobsled, the bobsled broke loose, and next thing I knew, as I came downslope the sled and I had an argument. You know, I don’t so much mind the leg that was broken by the sled. It’s the one my own skis broke that bugs me! How’s your latest novel coming along, McKell? — I seem to recall you were planning one when we met” — this last in a different tone.

Ellery sat enthroned in an armchair, both legs in their bulky casts stretched out before him, resting on a hassock. Each morning he was hoisted out of bed, and each evening he was hoisted back in. Books, magazines, tobacco, fruit, writing materials, a bottle of wine, the telephone, were within reach. There was even a remote-control device for the television set.

“I didn’t come here to talk about my novel,” Dane said.

“Then it can only be about your father.”

Dane nodded bleakly.

“I’ve followed the case.” Ellery glanced at both of them. “But newspaper accounts leave everything to be desired. Tell me all about it.”

Dane told him everything — everything, that is, but his own attack on Sheila. When he was finished, Judy went into a detailed account of their unsuccessful search for the bar and the bartender who alone could give Ashton McKell the alibi he so desperately needed.

Ellery listened, questioned, took notes. Then he leaned back in his armchair and lost himself in thought. There was a long silence. The little noises of the hospital — the clatter of a tray, the hoarse voice of the communicator, the rattle of a dressing cart, the hum of a floor polisher... Ellery seemed asleep with his eyes open. Dane found himself wishing that he could sleep — for a hundred years, to wake up and find that recent events had receded into the harmless pages of history.

Suddenly Ellery said, “One question. It comes down to that.”

“Of course, Mr. Queen,” Judy said. “What bar was Mr. McKell in?”

“No. Strange that the question hasn’t been asked before. It’s the heart of the matter. The whole case may well center in it.” His voice dribbled away.

Just then a glorious blond nurse came in, seemed disappointed to find company present, exchanged smiles with the patient, and hurried out. Ellery, still smiling, reached for the phone, identified himself by name and room number, and gave the hospital operator the telephone number of police headquarters.

“Inspector Queen, please... Dad?... No, I’m fine. Dad, Dane McKell is with me... I know, he told me. I wish you’d do something for me. I want to see his father... Wait a minute! There’s something I must ask Mr. McKell, and you’ll have to arrange it with the D.A.’s office... Come on, Dad, you certainly can. Today is Saturday, the trial is recessed, there’s plenty of precedent... Yes, it’s important, or I wouldn’t ask you. All right?... I’ll phone you as usual tonight.”

He turned back to his visitors. “There’s something wholesome to be said about old-fashioned drag. Have some fruit, you two. Or wine? McKell, about your novel...”

An hour and a half later he was saying, “Confound it, Dane, it doesn’t matter in the slightest if the old stone quarry has fish in it or not. As long as Jerry thinks it has, it’s reason enough for him to go there. So in your third chapter...” Someone knocked on the door. “Yes?”

And there stood Ashton McKell, between two detectives, a gray-haired one and one who looked like Sugar Ray Robinson.

The fall sun through the windows fell on the elder McKell’s face, and it seemed to Dane paler and hollower even than when he had seen his father in the Tombs. There was a dream quality to the experience, standing in the sunny hospital room touching his father’s shoulder while Judy clung to his free arm murmuring, “Oh, Mr. McKell,” over and over in a litany of grief and pleasure, while the two detectives bantered with the man in the casts.

“Ellery, you damn fool,” the gray-haired one said, “getting yourself banged up like this. You look like a goalie at the Garden.”

“Floogle yourself, Piggott,” Ellery said pleasantly, “and may all four of your legs never know a splint. Zillie, what are you doing out on a daytime assignment?”

The other detective grinned and said, “It’s a fact the Inspector reserves me for the nighttime tricks, says I blend better with the dark.” His brown wrist was locked to Ashton McKell’s.

“Look, men, it’s been a lovely visit,” said Ellery. “Now would you wait in the hall?”

“Well,” said Detective Piggott cautiously.

“You know we can’t do that, Ellery,” Detective Zilgitt said. “Got no business being here at all. How did you swing it?”

“Never mind how. And Piggie, don’t give me any of your legalistic hawing. I’m being allowed to see Mr. McKell as a friend of the court. That makes me an officer of the court, which in turn makes what I have to say to him privileged.”

“In a Piggott’s eye,” said Piggott. “You going to be responsible, broken legs and all?”

“I’m responsible.”

“Well, just in case,” Zilgitt said, “we’ll be outside the door.” He unlocked the handcuffs and the detectives left the room.

Ashton McKell shook hands with Ellery. “I don’t know what you want to talk to me about, Mr. Queen, but I’m not looking a gift horse under the tail. It seems to me I’ve lived in a cell for twenty years.”

“Dane, Miss Walsh, tell Mr. McKell what you two have been up to.”

Dane did so. Ash McKell listened quietly; he seemed a little bewildered, as if at a new experience. “And Mr. Queen has one important question to ask you, Dad. That’s why you’re here.”

“From the story I’ve been told,” Ellery said, “and I assume it’s the whole story, we can take for granted that the police have searched certain places thoroughly — Miss Grey’s apartment, your apartment, Mr. McKell, your office and so on.”

Ashton McKell looked puzzled now.

“And yet,” Ellery went on, “one thing has never been mentioned. It was not, after all, Ashton McKell who called each Wednesday on Sheila Grey, was it? It was Dr. Stone. Correct? That was your invariable practice?”

The prisoner nodded slowly. Dane looked chagrined.

“Ashton McKell got into the Continental, and Dr. Stone climbed out. Somewhere between the back door of the Cricket Club and that garage off Park Avenue, Ashton McKell with the assistance of the contents of a little black bag became Dr. Stone. The question I want answered — the one that nobody seems to have thought of asking — is: Mr. McKell, what happened to your little black bag?”

Dane’s father looked confused. “I’ll have to think... Does it matter, Mr. Queen?”

Ellery banged on one of his casts. “Does it matter!” he cried. “Obviously the police haven’t found it, or you can bet it would be one of the People’s exhibits at the trial right now. There hasn’t been a word about ‘Dr. Stone’ — no identification of the bag, no testimony about Dr. Stone’s weekly visits to the Grey apartment, no identification of you as Dr. Stone, no placing of the ‘doctor’ on the scene of the crime, and so on. Not only haven’t the police found the bag containing your make-up materials, they’ve never even connected you with such a bag. Seems to me it’s proved the perfect disguise. Too perfect. So I repeat: What happened to the bag?”

Ashton shook his head, sank into a chair, shading his eyes.

“Take it a step at a time,” Ellery said encouragingly. “You had it with you when you left the airport that night after getting off the plane from Washington?”

“Yes. I remember carrying it into Sheila’s — Miss Grey’s apartment. I was there such a short time. Did I...? Yes, I had it when I left. I recall shifting it from one hand to the other as I walked the streets — changing hands, because I was also carrying my overnight bag. And I had it with me in that bar. I know, because I recall setting it down on the bar stool beside me.”

“Do you remember taking it home with you, Mr. McKell?”

“I didn’t have it when I got home. I’m sure of that. Could I have left it in the bar? No... I recall picking it up as I left the bar... I wouldn’t have taken it home. Usually I kept it locked up in my room at the Cricket. But I was closer to Grand Central at the time—”

“Grand Central,” Ellery said softly.

Ashton was looking astonished. “I did say Grand Central, didn’t I? How our minds play tricks on us! That’s it, of course. I checked it at the baggage room, or whatever it’s called — the counter. When I left the bar I must have walked all the way down to Grand Central. And I didn’t remember it!”

“Where is the baggage check, Mr. McKell?”

“Probably still in the suit I wore the night I got home.”

Dane said slowly, “Then how is it the police didn’t find it when they searched your things?”

“Never mind that now, Dane,” Ellery said briskly. “Get on this phone and call your mother. Have her look for it at once.”

It was the senior maid, old Margaret, who answered.

“But I can’t call Mrs. McKell,” Margaret protested. “Herself says I’m not to disturb her for no reason, Mr. Dane, not a single one.” It seemed that his mother had locked the door in the corridor leading to her separate apartment — bedroom, bath, sitting room — with the strictest instructions. Meals were to be left on a wagon at the door. She would not see anyone, and she would not answer the telephone.

“Maggie, listen to me. Did you find anything in my father’s rooms the morning we got the news about Miss Grey? Or afterward? Did you find...?”

He was about to say “a tan suit,” but old Margaret interrupted him. “The phone, Mr. Dane,” came her Irish whisper. “Maybe it’s tapped.” Dane was dumfounded. The possibility had not occurred to him. Could it be that Margaret knew about the suit, had found the baggage check?

To his further surprise, Margaret uttered three more words and hung up on him. He put the receiver down foolishly.

“Mother won’t talk on the phone and Margaret’s afraid it may be tapped. But I think she knows. She said to me, ‘Go to Bridey,’ and hung up. Dad, who the deuce is Bridey?”

“It’s her younger sister, Bridget Donnelly. Her husband used to work for me.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to understand, Dane,” said Judy. “You go and do as old Maggie says. Find Bridey.”

“Miss Walsh is right,” said Ellery. “And do it fast, Dane. I don’t know how long I can bluff that pair out there into letting me keep custody of your father.”

Ramon drove him over to Chelsea in the Bentley. Mrs. Donnelly lived in a crumble-edged brownstone, in a musty but spotless apartment. She was a stouter version of her sister Margaret. “You say you’ll be Mister Dane McKell?” she demanded as she showed him into a parlor decorated with litho-chromes of St. Lawrence O’Toole and the Sacred Heart. “And how would I be knowing that?”

It had not occurred to him that he would require identification. “Look, Mrs. Donnelly, I’m in an awful hurry.” He explained his mission.

But Bridey Donnelly was not to be rushed.

“You called up me sister Margaret,” she said, “and you asked her about something important for your father, may the saints deliver him from harm; ain’t I been praying for him night and day? — and Maggie said, ‘Go to Bridey,’ and you think that means she give it to me. Well, and what might it be you think she give to me, Mr. Dane McKell-Maybe-You-Are-and-Maybe-You-Ain’t?”

Her concern over his father was plainly not going to get in the way of her Irish caution. “Tan suit?” Dane said.

She shook her head. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Claim check? Baggage? Grand Central?”

“Still don’t. Keep talking.”

By this time he could have throttled her. “A black bag, then!”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than she waddled off, beckoning him to follow. Down past the dark chain of bedrooms in the railroad flat she plodded, and stopped in the last but one, where she switched on the light. The little bedroom mirror was still decorated with desiccated fronds from Palm Sunday seven months before.

“You’re younger than me, and a lot skinnier,” Bridget Donnelly said. “You get it. ’Tis under the bed.”

The only thing he could find under the bed was an ancient horsehair trunk with an Ould Sod look. He dragged it out. “But it’s locked.”

She rapped him on the forehead with her knuckles as he turned his head. “You look the other way a minute now,” directed Mrs. Donnelly, “for all you’re a boy and I’m an old widow woman.” Petticoats rustled. “Here.” She thrust a trunk key, fastened to a safety pin, over his shoulder. He got the trunk open, flung back the lid. “Leave me do it,” the widow said, taking out a Douay Bible that must have weighed twenty pounds. Under the Bible lay a tightly packed wad of clothing. And under the clothing there was a black leather bag.

He got to his feet, stammering his thanks.

“And you can save your thanks, young man. We know whose bread and salt we’ve et these thirty years, Maggie and me and me dead Tom. And now go on about your business, and let me hear over the radio that your blessed father’s okay.”

Dane kissed her. She boxed his ear, grinning. It rang halfway back to the hospital.

He had been gone less than forty minutes. The detectives in the corridor glanced at the bag he was carrying, but neither of them said anything, and he went into Ellery’s room with a sigh of relief.

Ellery’s silvery eyes lighted up at sight of the bag. “Good for you, Dane! All right, Mr. McKell.”

Dane’s father opened the bag and quickly set its contents on Ellery’s dresser. He began to apply grease paint and spirit gum to his face.

“What the devil?”

Ellery chuckled at Dane’s cry. He glanced at Judy, but that young lady was busy with a small camera, adjusting a flash bulb.

“Let me sum it up for you, Dane,” said Ellery. “You, Judy and the police have been searching for the wrong man. Of course no one in any of those bars recognized Ashton McKell. He wasn’t Ashton McKell that night. He was Dr. Stone.”

Ashton began to pluck at a bundle of gray fibers. He arranged them on his chin in Vandyke fashion, working with the sureness of long practice.

“What a chump I’ve been,” Dane groaned. “That’s what comes of trying to play detective. Dad, where did you make the change that night?”

“In one of the men’s rooms at the airport when I got off the plane,” replied his father. “Then after I left Sheila’s and wandered off, eventually winding up at Grand Central, I removed the make-up in the Grand Central men’s room, although I didn’t bother to change out of the tan suit. Then I checked the black bag and went home. It’s all come back. Mr. Queen’s acted as a sort of oxygen tent. The fresh air’s cleared the cobwebs out of my head.”

When he turned from the mirror Ashton McKell was no longer Ashton McKell but gray-haired, gray-bearded Dr. Stone. It was remarkable how the false hair and the really skillful touches he had applied to his eyes and face transformed his appearance.

Judy sat him down and circled him with her camera, searching for the best angle. The bulb flashed, Judy said, “One or two more, just to be sure,” she took a second shot, then a profile, and then said, “Come back, Mr. McKell — I feel funny looking at you,” and Ashton McKell even laughed as he removed the false hair and make-up and became himself again. But then they heard him mutter, “How did I ever get mixed up in this foolishness?”

“The classic question, Mr. McKell,” Ellery remarked dryly. “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ and so on. Are we ready? Call them in, Dane.”

When the detectives had departed with their prisoner, Ellery waved cheerfully. “Now, you two. The pubs await you. Start crawling. Meanwhile, I’ll phone Bob O’Brien and see if I can get him to talk Judge Suarez and the D.A. into agreeing to a forty-eight-hour recess — even a twenty-four-hour stay may do it. I think we can get it. O’Brien can do more things with his tongue than the head chef at the Waldorf.”

When they were gone, Ellery leaned over and rang for the nurse. He seemed pleased with himself.

“I’m worn down,” he said to the ravishing blonde when she came in, “and I badly need tuning up. Put on a record, Kirsten, skin me a grape, and tell me you’re not going to be busy the night of the day they finally peel off these plaster pants.”

“Pardon?” said the girl, frowning.

“This armchair Hawkshaw role is debilitating. What price Mycroft Holmes?”

“Mr. Queen, I do not understand—”

“Never mind, Kirsten. Teach me your native tongue. All I know is akavit and snoose. Meanwhile, I’ll try not to let your Nordic beauty overexcite me. May I hold your hand?”

The nurse gave him her sizzling smile. “I think you are very yoking, Mr. Queen. But it is nice yoke, no?”

“It is nice yoke, yes. Would you hand me the phone?”

On the morning the trial resumed there was a marked alteration of the atmosphere. No cluster of bankers, non-career ambassadors, bishops, and captains of industry waited to take the stand. Robert O’Brien arose, in a radiation of confidence. Something not quite a whisper or ripple passed through the courtroom and reached His Honor, who looked up from the bench sharply. The judge, grown so old in the juridical service that he had developed a sixth sense, felt his sleepiness slip away and that telltale tingle in his brain that made him sit up in his swivel chair.

Bob O’Brien was in his early forties, a burly Irishman with the face of a boy. He specialized in lost legal causes and brought them off with amazing consistency. A family man, a Harvard man, learned in history and the classics, he was a Sunday painter, a summer archeologist, and a courtroom terror. He had just fought a penniless defendant’s murder case through three mistrials to an acquittal. His successful defense of an alien from deportation earned him the sobriquet of “the new Darrow” in liberal circles; then when he sued for the right of a handicapped child to obtain special transportation to a parochial school on public funds, he lost the most vocal part of his support.

Bob O’Brien, then, on that November morning, rose.

“Call Ashton McKell,” he said, to the tune of another murmur. McKell, chin high, took the stand as if it were the chair at an international shippers’ convention, and the oath as if it admitted him to clerical orders.

“State your full name.”

“Philip Cornelius Ashton McKell.”

“Have you ever used another name?”

“Yes.”

District Attorney De Angelus leaned forward as if impelled by a wire.

“What name was that?”

“Dr. Stone.”

The D.A. shook his head as if to dislodge something from his ear.

“This other name — Dr. Stone — was it an alias?”

“No.”

“Please explain just what use you put it to, Mr. McKell.”

“It involved an entirely different identity. In order to become Dr. Stone, I would put on make-up and clothing of a type I do not ordinarily wear. I also used false eyeglasses, which I do not need to see by, and carried a walking stick and a physician’s black bag.”

“All this in your Dr. Stone identity?”

“Yes.”

Bob O’Brien was back at his table and reaching under it. He pulled out the little satchel. “Is this the bag you refer to, Mr. McKell?”

“It is.”

“Would you open it and display its contents?”

Ashton McKell did so. “This is spirit gum, this is false gray hair, this is...”

“In other words, Mr. McKell, this bag contains make-up materials for a disguise?”

“Yes, except for the clothing and cane.”

“Thank you. I place this bag and its contents in evidence as defendant’s Exhibit—”

The judge opened his mouth, but too slowly. District Attorney De Angelus was finally on his feet, waving wildly.

“Your Honor, may I ask Counsel what is the relevance of this evidence?”

“It is necessary for my client,” said O’Brien, “to use the contents of this bag in order to make himself up.”

“In this courtroom?” cried the district attorney.

“In this courtroom,” said the Irishman courteously.

“Here? Now?”

“Here and now.”

“Counsel,” said His Honor, “we all appreciate the more colorful practices you occasionally indulge in in the courtroom — when you’re permitted to get away with them — but tell me: What is the purpose of introducing amateur theatricals into this trial?”

O’Brien permitted himself to look disconcerted. “I hadn’t intended to reveal defense’s reasons so early. However, if Your Honor insists—”

“His Honor insists,” said His Honor.

“Very well. Mr. McKell, will you tell the Court, please, for what purpose you were accustomed to assuming this false identity?”

“In order to conceal my true identity.” Ash McKell hesitated for the briefest moment. “I mean while visiting the apartment of Miss Sheila Grey.”

“Order! Counsel will approach the bench. You, too, Mr. District Attorney.”

There was a three-cornered whispered conversation of considerable liveliness before the bench. Finally De Angelus waved his hand wearily, Judge Suarez said, “The exhibit will be admitted,” and everybody sat down but a bailiff, who moved a small table to a position before the witness chair, set the black bag on it, and retired. McKell removed the contents of the bag, which included a small swivel-mirror on a stand, and spread them on the table.

“Mr. McKell,” said Bob O’Brien, as if he were ordering a ham sandwich on rye, “make yourself up as Dr. Stone.”

And Ashton McKell, eighty to a hundred times a millionaire, adviser of Presidents, refuser of ambassadorships, proceeded to make himself up in full fascinated view of judge, jury, prosecutor, defense counsel, bailiffs, the press, and spectators.

When the tycoon was Dr. Stone, he straightened up from the mirror and glanced at his lawyer. The silence hung, broke. The gavel rapped, and the silence hung again.

O’Brien: “And this is how you always looked when you posed as Dr. Stone?”

“Yes, except for the tan suit and walking stick.”

“I think we can imagine those. All right, Mr. McKell. Your Honor, in the interest of more orderly development, I should like Mr. McKell’s testimony to be interrupted while we introduce the testimony of two other witnesses. If the Court and the district attorney don’t object?”

Another colloquy. McKell was told to stand down, and O’Brien said, “Call John Leslie.”

Leslie, shaven to a violent pink, stiff in the same suit he had worn to stand on the sidewalk and cheer the visiting Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, was called into the courtroom and sworn, and he testified that he was the doorman of 610½ Park Avenue, and had been since it opened its doors as a multiple dwelling. He had therefore known Mr. Ashton McKell, yes, sir, for over twenty-five years.

“Do you see Mr. McKell in this courtroom?”

Leslie scanned the room. He looked puzzled. “No, sir, I do not.”

“Well, would you recognize a Dr. Stone?” asked O’Brien.

“Dr. Stone? You mean the doctor who used to visit Miss Grey? I think so, sir.”

“Do you see Dr. Stone in this courtroom?”

Leslie looked around. “Yes, sir.”

“Point him out, please... Thank you, Mr. Leslie. That’s all.”

District Attorney De Angelus: “Mr. Leslie, do you recall the night Miss Grey’s body was found?”

“Yes, sir.”

“On that night, did this man you have identified as Dr. Stone visit the apartment building at 610½ Park?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At what time?”

“It was quite late in the evening. Somewhere around ten o’clock.”

“Can you be more exact as to the time?”

“No, sir. I had no reason to.”

“Do you recall his leaving the building?”

“Yes, sir, not long after. A few minutes. I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“A half hour?”

“Might be.”

“You just said a few minutes.”

“I just don’t know, sir.”

“That’s all.”

Surprisingly, O’Brien did not recross. “I call Ramon Alvarez.”

Old John departed, still frowning over the incomprehensibility of the proceedings, to be succeeded on the stand by Ramon. Who testified that he had been employed as Ashton McKell’s chauffeur for the past five years; that since early spring — about April, he thought it was — he had at his employer’s direction been driving him, Ashton McKell, in the Bentley, at about four o’clock each Wednesday afternoon, to the front door of the Metropolitan Cricket Club. It was his, Ramon’s, practice then to park the Bentley at a garage behind the club.

“What did you do then?”

“I would have orders to meet Mr. McKell back at the club late that night, with the Bentley.”

“Did Mr. McKell ever tell you where he was going on those Wednesday evenings?”

“No, sir.”

“This happened every Wednesday since about April, Mr. Alvarez?”

“Once or twice not, when Mr. McKell was in South America or Europe, on business.”

O’Brien turned. “Mr. McKell, would you stand up? Thank you. Mr. Alvarez, did you ever see Mr. McKell dressed and made up as he appears right now?”

“Sir, no.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“Sir, yes.”

“You were never curious as to where Mr. McKell was going on Wednesday nights?” O’Brien persisted. “Without you to drive him?”

Ramon shrugged. “I am the chauffeur, sir. I do what I am told.”

“And not once did you see him in make-up...?”

“Your Honor,” said the district attorney, “Mr. O’Brien is cross-examining his own witness.”

O’Brien waved, De Angelus waved, and Ramon was dismissed.

“I recall Ashton McKell to the stand.” When Ashton resumed the witness box, being admonished that he was still under oath, O’Brien said, “Mr. McKell, I am going to ask you a painful question. What was your underlying reason for disguising yourself each Wednesday as a nonexistent Dr. Stone — even going so far as to conceal the disguise from your own chauffeur?”

“I didn’t want my family or anyone else to know about my visits to Miss Grey.” The courtroom rustled. “In this,” added the elder McKell bitterly, “I seem to have failed with a bang.”

It was an unfortunate metaphor. Someone in the courtroom tittered, and at least one newspaper reporter dodged out to phone his paper the “expert psychiatric opinion” that the lapsus linguae might well have been a Freudian slip by which the accused confessed his guilt. As for O’Brien, he frowned ever so slightly; he did not care for witnesses who volunteered information on the stand, especially defendants. He was taken off the hook by the district attorney, who had not caught the inference and was fretting about the accused’s sitting around the courtroom like an actor at a dress rehearsal. He said so, emphatically.

“The defendant will remain in make-up only a little while longer, Your Honor,” O’Brien said, “and only for the purpose of having one other witness corroborate his identity.”

Judge Suarez waved, and O’Brien went on: “I will ask you to tell us once again, Mr. McKell, of your arrival at Miss Grey’s apartment on the night of September 14th, and of what happened subsequently.” He led Ashton through his story. “Then you don’t remember the name of the bar? Or where it was located?”

“I do not.”

“Your witness.”

De Angelus’s cross-examination was long, detailed, theatrical, and futile. He could not shake the defendant’s story, although he spattered it liberally with the mud of doubt. In the end McKell sat labeled adulterer, home-wrecker, betrayer of trust in high places, perverted aristocrat, corrupt citizen of the democracy, and above all murderer. It was an artistic job, and it made Dane and Judy writhe; but no flicker of anger or resentment — or shame — touched the elder McKell’s stone-hard face; and Robert O’Brien simply listened with his big head cocked, boyishly attentive, even — one would have thought — a little pleased.

When the district attorney sat down, sated, O’Brien idly said, “Call Matthew Thomas Cleary to the stand.”

A thick-set man with curly gray hair was sworn. He had a squashed nose and round blue eyes that seemed to say: We have seen everything, and nothing matters. His brogue was refreshing, delivered in a hoarse voice.

He was Matthew Thomas Cleary, part owner and sometime bartender of the Kerry Dancers Bar and Grill on 59th Street off First Avenue. He had never been in trouble with the law, saints be praised.

“Now, Mr. Cleary,” O’Brien said easily, walking over to “Dr. Stone” and touching his shoulder, “have you ever seen this man before?”

“Yes, sor. In me bar one night.”

O’Brien strolled back to the witness stand. “You’re sure, Mr. Cleary? You couldn’t be mistaken?”

“That I could not.”

A police officer escorted a woman to a seat at the rear of the courtroom, unnoticed. Her face under the half-veil was chalky. It was Lutetia McKell, sucked out of her shell at last.

“Mr. Cleary, you must see hundreds of faces across your bar. What makes you remember this man’s face?”

“’Twas this way, sor. He was wearing this beard. That was in the first place. The Kerry Dancers bar don’t get one customer in a thousand wears a beard. So that makes him stick in me mind. Second place, on the shelf behind the bar I got me a big jar with a sign on it, ‘The Children of Loretto,’ that’s this orphanage out on Staten Island. I put the small change into it that people leave on the bar. This fellow with the beard, his first drink he gives me a twenty, I give him change, and he shoves over a five-dollar bill. ‘Put it in the jar,’ he says, ‘for the orphan children.’ And I did, and I thanked him. That makes me remember him. Nobody else ever give me a five-dollar bill for the jar.”

“What night was this, Mr. Cleary?” O’Brien asked suddenly.

“September 14th, sor.”

“You mean to say, Mr. Cleary, you can remember the exact night two months ago that this man had a drink at your bar and gave you a five-dollar bill for The Children of Loretto?”

“Yes, sor. On account of that was the night of the championship fight. I’d drew a ring around the date on me bar calendar so I wouldn’t forget, I mean so I’d remember not to turn on a movie or a speech or something on the bar TV instead of the fights. And this man come in, like I say—”

District Attorney De Angelus was sitting on the edge of the chair at his table, elbows planted securely, listening with both cocked ears in a kind of philosophic panic.

“Let’s not go too fast, Mr. Cleary. All right, it was the night of the championship prize fight, September 14th, and that made you remember the date. But how can you be so sure this man with the beard came in on that night? Couldn’t it have been on some other night?”

“No, sor,” said Cleary stoutly. “On account of him and me was talking about the fight. I says, ‘Time for the big fight any minute now,’ and he says, ‘Big fight?” like he never heard of the fights. Who’s fighting?’ he says — a championship fight! So I tell him the champ is battling this Puerto Rican challenger, Kid Aguirre, and he looks at me like I’m talking Siwash.”

“And that made you remember it was this man, on that particular night?”

“Wouldn’t it make anybody? Anyways, I turn on the TV and we watch the fight. After the first round I says to him—”

“To the gentleman with the gray beard?”

“Sure, who else we talking about? I says to him, ‘What d’ye think?” And he says, ‘That boy — the Kid — he’ll never make it. He ain’t got what it takes. The champ will knock him out,” he says to me.”

“One moment, Mr. Cleary. Mr. McKell, will you please rise — it isn’t necessary to come forward — and face this witness? Now will you please say in a conversational tone, ‘That boy will never make it. The champ will knock him out.’”

“That boy will never make it,” said Ashton McKell. “The champ will knock him out.”

“Mr. Cleary, to the best of your recollection, is that the voice, the same voice, of the gray-bearded man you talked to in your bar on the night of September 14th?”

“Sure and it’s the same, ain’t that what I’m telling you, sor?”

“You’re sure it’s the same voice.”

“I can hear it ringing in me ears,” said Cleary poetically, “right now.”

O’Brien quickened the pace of his questions. They watched the fight, Cleary said, and in round two they made a ten-dollar bet on the outcome, Cleary maintaining that Kid Aguirre would last the full fifteen rounds, the gray-bearded man insisting that the Kid would be knocked out. And knocked out he was, “as ye’ll remember, sor, in the third, to me sorrow.”

“Did you pay the man the ten dollars?”

“He wouldn’t let me. ‘Put it in the jar for the orphans,’ he says, which I done.”

“One last question, Mr. Cleary: You and this gray-haired man were watching the original telecast of the fight, not a rerun on tape?”

Cleary was sure. The fight had been fought in Denver over closed-circuit television, but it was telecast live for the East, and the tapes were not shown anywhere until the following day.

The district attorney made a savage attempt to break down Cleary’s identification of “Dr. Stone.” But luck had thrown a stubborn Irishman his way. The harder De Angelus hammered, the more positive Cleary became. When the cross-examination became abusive, O’Brien politely stepped in: “It seems to me, Your Honor, the witness has answered each of the district attorney’s questions not once but half a dozen times. I think we are approaching the point of badgering, and I respectfully call your attention to it.”

The judge glared at O’Brien, but he stopped De Angelus.

Nothing was left for O’Brien but to thrust the point between the horns. He introduced into evidence the official time of the Kid Aguirre knockout, as certified by the timekeeper of the championship fight and the records of the Colorado boxing commission.

Time of knockout: 10:27:46 — forty-six seconds after twenty-seven minutes after ten o’clock P.M. Eastern Time.

Robert O’Brien summed up for the defense: “I am sure it isn’t necessary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that none of us is here in this courtroom to punish moral turpitude. The question you are asked to decide is not one of sin but of guilt. There is only one question on which His Honor will charge you to consider your verdict, and that is: Was the defendant, Ashton McKell, guilty of murdering Sheila Grey by gunshot at twenty-three minutes past ten o’clock on the night of September 14th? You have heard testimony here that must convince anyone that Mr. McKell could not physically have been guilty of that crime. He could not have committed it because, at the time it was committed, he was seated at a bar half a city mile from the scene of the crime, and continued to sit there for some time afterward.

“Not only could Ashton McKell not have shot Sheila Grey, he could not have been at or even near the scene of her death when the fatal shot was fired.

“I repeat: No other aspect of the case should concern you, or — under what I am confident will be Judge Suarez’s charge-legally can concern you. Consequently, no reasonable man or woman could bring in a verdict of anything but not guilty.”

The waiting was a stasis, the blood piling up in the vessel to the bursting point, the question being would there be resolution and relief before the complete blockage and eruption. Reporters spotted Lutetia McKell and crowded round her, to her distress, until Richard M. Heaton rescued her; none of them dared leave the courtroom while the jury deliberated; they sat and talked, or were mute, thinking their own thoughts. Heaton tended to be optimistic, O’Brien noncommittal (“I never speculate on what a jury will or will not do”), except to point out that District Attorney De Angelus had not left the room, indicating the prosecution’s belief that the jury would not be out long — for whatever that was worth; De Angelus himself was the recipient of a message, delivered to him by messenger, to which he dashed off an immediate reply, and sank back only to be aroused by another messenger with another envelope.

“He’s kept so very busy, isn’t he?” said Lutetia. Then she began nibbling at her handkerchief.

So Dane and Judy captured her attention by telling the story of their original unsuccessful search for the bar and bartender, and of their visit to Ellery Queen.

“That’s his father, Inspector Queen, who just came in and spoke to the D.A.,” Robert O’Brien pointed out.

And of the lightning development of the hunt thereafter.

Lutetia was touched. “Margaret is so faithful,” she said. “You know, Dane, how she worships your father. I suppose all along she’s known a great deal more than any of us, from this and that picked up at random. She must have realized something was wrong when she found that outlandish tan suit in Ashton’s bedroom. She always empties the pockets of his suits, you know.”

For want of something better to do, they discussed old Margaret’s incredible enterprise in the matter of the baggage claim check and the black bag. They agreed that she must have found the claim check in the tan suit shortly after the first visit of the police; to old Maggie, Irish-born, to whom “police” and “rebel-hunters” would forever be synonymous, at the same time loyal unto death to Ashton McKell, the sight of the claim check must have triggered her instinct for trouble, and she had simply secreted it to keep it out of the hands of the law. After Ashton’s arrest she had sneaked down to Grand Central, found all her fears confirmed when, in return for the check, she was handed the little black bag, and promptly enlisted her sister as a confederate, hiding the bag in her sister’s flat for no other reason than to keep it from being found by the authorities, who were searching everything pertaining to McKell.

“Hers not to reason why,” said Dane. “Good old Maggie.”

“Something’s about to break,” said O’Brien alertly. “Look at what’s going on at the D.A.’s table... I was right. There goes the bailiff into the judge’s chambers. The jury’s probably reached a verdict.”

They had.

Not guilty.

There was a frantic moment when everyone was in motion — hands clasping, lips babbling, backs being slapped, Ashton embracing Lutetia (in public!), Dane embracing Judy (both electrically surprised at the naturalness with which they turned and fell into each other’s arms) — then everything suddenly stopped, hands, eyes, mouths, everything. For an instant it was hard to say why, because really nothing had happened except the approach of a very large man grasping a folded piece of paper. But then it came through: there was something in his very approach, a balls-of-the-feet guardedness, the way his great fingers grasped the paper, the hard look on his hard face, that was like a gush of ice water.

It was Sergeant Velie.

Who said politely, “Mr. McKell.”

Ashton still had his arm about Lutetia. “Yes?”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Sergeant Velie said, “I have to speak to Mrs. McKell.”

“To my wife?”

It seemed to Dane that his mother started and then took a perceptible grip on herself.

But her glance at the big sergeant was coldly courteous. “Yes? What is it, please?”

“I’m going to have to ask you,” said the detective, “to come down to police headquarters with me.”

Lutetia stirred, ever so slightly. Her husband blinked. Dane moved forward angrily: “What’s this all about, Sergeant? Why do you want to take my mother — of all people! — down to headquarters?”

“Because I have to book her,” the sergeant said impassively, “on a charge of suspicion of the murder of Sheila Grey.”