The Fourth Side of the Triangle

IV The Fourth Side Dane

The grand jury, the arraignment, the bail — it was beginning to feel like a well-used merry-go-round; as Dane said, “Here we go again.”

Some uniformed policemen in the corridor were discussing him as if he were not present, or were made of wood.

“Think he’ll beat it, too?”

“Well, the D.A.’s got two strikes against him now, the father and mother. One more whiff and he’s out. He can’t afford to strike out.”

“Nah, the son will beat it the way his daddy and ma did. I’ll bet money on it.”

“They’ve got the dough to do it.”

“I don’t think so. Not this time. This time he can paper the hot seat with his money.”

Dane passed on, not comforted.

Part of the carrousel by now was the council of war in the hospital room, with Ellery dourly presiding. The medical conferees had decided at the last moment to keep him in the hospital an extra few days until he became accustomed to crutches. He was not comforted, either.

He had accepted the contract, so to speak, but he was not exactly bursting with confidence. This time he was profoundly certain that the same modus which had saved Dane’s parents would not work. There could be no alibi for Dane. At the critical moment, where Ashton had been in an identifiable bar, talking to an identifiable bartender; where Lutetia had been talking over the telephone on a coast-to-coast TV hook-up... by his own admission Dane was virtually on the scene of the shooting, standing before the penthouse apartment door, separated from slayer and slain by the thickness of the door panel. And in that tiny penthouse elevator foyer he had been standing alone and unobserved — indeed, unobservable, for there were no windows in the foyer. Consequently, there could be no witness to his allegation that he had simply stood there for a few moments and then left without entering the apartment.

No, this time they would have to do what they should have done from the outset, Ellery said.

“I’d have done it if I’d been on my toes and feet,” he told Dane, Ashton McKell, and Judy. “The only way to get Dane off — the only sure way — is to find Sheila’s killer.

“If we had been able to do that when you were under indictment, Mr. McKell, we would have been spared all that followed, including Mrs. McKell’s ordeal, and now Dane’s. Well, we couldn’t; I’ll stop bemoaning it and get down to cases.”

Ellery shifted his aching legs to an equally uncomfortable position. “Up to now we’ve been working from the outside in, trying to prove why the accused couldn’t have done it — the negative approach. This time we’ve got to work from the inside out. Positively. Agreed?”

They followed, they nodded, they agreed. But without spirit. They all felt fagged. Judy Walsh’s eyes were a chronic swollen red; crying had become part of her life, like brushing her teeth. She sat clinging to Dane’s arm as if she were pulling him back from the edge of a cliff.

“The beginning, the source of everything, is Sheila herself. ‘In my end is my beginning,’ as Mary Queen of Scots said.” (Tactfully, Ellery did not mention the circumstances under which she had said it.) “Where did Sheila begin? Her business, for example. Didn’t one of you, when we were first looking at her fashion designs, mention that she’d started her designing career in partnership?”

“With a man named Winterson.” Ashton McKell nodded. “Elisha Winterson. I recall Sheila’s saying he was still in New York.”

“Good. Then we start with him. See if you can’t get him to visit me here this afternoon.”

“I’ll have him here at the point of a gun, if necessary.”

Such measures were not required. Elisha Winterson was highly flattered to have Ashton McKell himself come calling for him at Countess Roni’s, the Fifth Avenue fashion salon with which he was associated.

The countess seemed flattered, too. “Such a dreadful business!” she exclaimed in her strongly Italian accent; she had been in the United States for over twenty years, and it had been a struggle to retain the sound of Rome, but she had been victorious. “Poor Sheila. And this persecution of your family, Mr. McKell. Lish, you must help. Don’t waste a moment!”

As Ramon drove them to the hospital, Elisha Winterson talked and talked. He was a small dapper man with a bald head, the top of which was caved in, so that from above, as Countess Roni (who was six feet tall) had once remarked, his head looked like one of the craters of the moon.

“Roni is very sweet and simpatico,” Winterson chattered. “You know, she’s not Italian at all, although she lived in Italy for a long time. That’s where she met poor old Sigi. I saw his patent of nobility myself, yards and yards of moldy old parchment dripping with seals, Holy Roman Empire, defunct, 1806, but as I say, who cares? I most certainly don’t. As for Sheila—”

Ashton McKell said, “Mr. Winterson, would you mind not going into that until Queen can question you?”

Winterson’s sunken-domed head shot around. “Queen? What queen is that?”

“Ellery Queen.”

“The author? He’s helping you? Well, of course, Mr. McKell, just as you say.” He seemed torn between awe and a private joke. “I’ll stay bottled up till he uncorks me.”

In the hospital room Elisha Winterson babbled away, lit Turkish cigarets, bombarded Ellery with praise, and then presented himself for uncorking. “I understand you want to ask me about Sheila Grey, Mr. Queen. Fire when ready.”

“Tell me all about your association with her. How, when, where you met her, how you came to go into partnership, and so on.”

“I met her in 1956,” Winterson said. “It was at one of those little parties that Roni — that’s Countess Roni, the designer I’m working with now — is famous for. I was, if I may say so, rather widely known. But Sheila was already well on her way to being an international figure in high fashion. So I was flattered when she suggested we go into business together. I mean—”

“This was in 1956?”

“Early in 1957. I mean, Sheila could have had almost anyone in the profession as her partner. That girl had flair, impeccable taste. And a sense of timing, which is very important. She did all her own sketching, too. It was a great break for me. Not only career-wise, by the way. She was the most fascinating woman I’d ever met. I was in love with her even before we established The House of Grey.”

He would be utterly candid with them, Winterson said (glancing at Judy): he was very much the ladies’ man, he said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t think it, looking at me.” But discriminating; he was no old lecher. He wanted Sheila and he pursued her “in my own fashion” (contriving to leave the impression that his “fashion” was immensely subtle, a sort of secret process which he had no intention of giving away). At first their relationship was all work and no play. He had almost given up hope that it would ever be anything else when, one night, without preliminary, she took him as her lover.

“That’s the way it was with Sheila,” Winterson said with a wistful half-smile. “Nothing but camaraderie for months, then — bango! if you’ll forgive the expression, Miss Walsh. No one ever sold Sheila Grey a bill of goods unless she was absolutely ready to buy. She was one of the world’s shrewdest shoppers where men were concerned. And then she kept it a one-man-at-a-time affair.” Dane found his fists curling with hatred of this smug little dressed-up troglodyte.

The House of Grey had its first official showing that year, 1957. It created a sensation abroad as well as in the United States. “Lady Sheila — that was her name for our first collection — put us right up there on top.”

“I mean to ask you about that—” Ellery began.

“Lady Sheila? It was Sheila’s idea to call each year’s collection by some sort of name, and she chose the Lady Sheila label for 1957. Sheila, by the way, wasn’t her own name.”

“It wasn’t?” the McKells cried out together.

“Her original first name was Lillian, and her last name was spelled G-r-a-y. When we organized The House of Grey, it was her decision to change the a to an e in Grey; and when the Lady Sheila collection was such a smash hit, she had her name legally changed from Lillian G-r-a-y to Sheila G-r-e-y.”

“That was also in 1957?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen.”

“How long did your association last?”

“Which association?”

“Both.”

“Well.” Winterson looked coy. “We were lovers for just a few months. I was very happy and assumed she was, too. We were compatible, you know?” Dane closed his eyes. The picture of this scrubbed little creature in Sheila’s arms was almost too much to bear. “We went about together everywhere, enjoyed our love and labors with the gusto of teenagers — oh, it was marvelous. Then...

“I shan’t forget that day.” Winterson was no longer smiling. “It was just before she began designing the 1958 collection, the Lady Nella. I’d worked up some roughs and brought them into her office — laid them on her desk and stooped over to kiss her.” He had turned quite pink. “She drew back and kept on with her work. I was upset, and asked her what was the matter. She looked up and said as calmly as if she were talking about the weather, ‘It’s over between us, Lish. From now on we’re partners, nothing more.’ Just like that. No transition. The way she’d begun.”

He had asked her why, what he had done. “‘You haven’t done anything,’” she had told him. “‘It’s just that I don’t want you any more.’”

Winterson shrugged, but the pink remained. “That’s the way it was with Sheila. All or nothing. When she gave herself, it was fully. When she got tired of it — slam. Shut, locked and bolted the door... Well, that’s the way she was. But I wasn’t. I was in love with her; I wasn’t able to turn it off like a faucet. I’m afraid it became a strain for both of us. Of course, we couldn’t go on. We split up in a matter of months — three months, I think it was.”

She had bought Winterson out and become sole proprietor of The House of Grey. “Of course, my disappearance from the business made absolutely no difference to its continuing success,” he said, with a remarkable absence of bitterness. “I’ve never had any illusions about myself, especially by contrast with a great designer like Sheila. She went on to become one of the world’s top couturières. Rolling in money. Not that money ever meant much to her.”

“Let’s go back a bit, Mr. Winterson,” Ellery suggested. “You remarked that she was a one-man-at-a-time woman. Are you sure of that?”

Elisha Winterson was taking a long drag on his Spahi. He let the thick white smoke dribble out of his mouth before he replied. “I’m sure,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why I’m sure.” His little face suddenly turned foxy. “After she kicked me out of her bed, I kept wondering who was taking my place. I’m not especially proud of myself now — it was a caddish trick — but you know, a lover scorned...” He laughed. “I hired a private detective. I even remember his name. Weirhauser. Face all angles, like Dick Tracy. Had an office on 42nd Street, off Times Square. He watched her for me, and I kept getting full reports — what she did, where she went, with whom. There wasn’t anyone. She hadn’t ditched me for another man. She’d simply ditched me, period.

“Later that year,” said Elisha Winterson, “there was another man. I’m certain that shortly after they met he was parking his shoes where I’d been parking mine, if you’ll pardon the crudity.”

“Who was he?” Ellery asked.

“Well.” Winterson ran the tip of his tongue along his lips. “A gentleman never tells, they say. But these are unusual circumstances, I take it? If it will help you, Mr. Queen—”

“It might.”

Winterson looked around at his silent audience. What he saw made him go on quickly. Sheila had begun to advertise widely, he said. She had selected to do her advertising the Gowdy-Gunder Agency, because of its familiarity with the world of fashion.

“At the same time The House of Grey hired a business manager, a production manager, began to do its own manufacturing, moved out of the rather poky little place we’d had in the East 50s and into the Fifth Avenue salon. Naturally, Sheila Grey was a plum to the agency people, and they turned their Brightest Young Man over to her account.

“Like catnip to a cat,” Winterson said grimly, “though I’m sure the experience did him a world of good. His name was Allen Bainbridge Foster, and she ate him up hide, hair, and whiskers. By the end of the year—”

“Allan as in Edgar Allan Poe?” Ellery had reached for a pad and was taking notes.

“No, Allen with an e.”

“Bainbridge Foster?”

“That’s right. As I started to say, by the end of the year she’d had enough of Mr. Foster, and she gave him his walking papers, too.”

“Were you still having her watched, Mr. Winterson?” Ellery asked, not without a touch of malice.

“Oh, no, I’d called Weirhauser off long before that. But Sheila and I had a lot of friends and acquaintances in common, like Countess Roni and so on, so I heard all the gossip. You know how it is.”

“I do now. And after Foster?”

“I can virtually vouch for her lovers — three of them — in the next four years. Sheila was without shame where l’amour was concerned. She didn’t care a button about her reputation, I mean personally, and while she certainly didn’t go around flaunting her affairs, neither did she take any pains to be discreet. None of this hurt The House of Grey in the least, by the way. After all, she wasn’t designing altar pieces for churches. On the contrary, it seemed to add to her glamour. It attracted men to her salon in herds.”

“You say you know of three others in the next four years. Who were they, have you any idea?”

“Of course. Jack Hurt was one.”

“John Francis Hurt III, the auto racer?”

“That’s the one. Jack made no secret of it. He carried Sheila’s photo in his wallet for good luck. He’d show it to you at the drop of a flag. ‘I’m crazy about this little girl,’ he’d say. I’m sure Sheila didn’t go for him because of his wit. But Jack was muscled like a puma — all male animal. She used to go down into the grease pits at the speedway after him; absolutely gone on him. Then one day, as Jack came roaring in from Lap Eighty-nine to get his lube job or his water changed or whatever they do to the racing cars in the pits — lo! no Sheila. Just changed her mind in mid-lap and went on home. He didn’t pine very long, I must say. Latched onto some little blonde who embroidered his name on her jacket, poor slobby-gob, and I believe married her shortly afterward.”

“That’s Jack Hurt the Three,” said Ellery. “Who was his successor?”

“After Hurt? Ronald Van Vester of the veddy high society Van Vesters, who live on the interest of their interest. Don’t know where Sheila spotted him, but she did start ponying up on polo” — Winterson tittered at his little jest — “and before you knew it he was making eyes at her. Well, one hoof in the doorway was all Miss Sheila needed, and there was Master Ronny on the line. But I suppose the smell of horse manure soon palled on her. Exit Ronny.

“Next there was... let me see.” The ineffable Elisha tapped his teeth with a glittering fingernail. “Oh, yes! Some character named Odonnell. The stage actor. Edgar? Edmond? I don’t recall, because nobody ever called him by his first name except in the programs. You must remember him, Mr. Queen, all smoldering black eyes and hatchet profile. First man to play Hamlet according to the Method, after which no one called him anything but Hamlet Odonnell.”

“You said three in four years.”

Winterson explained that he had spent all of 1961 abroad, and so had been out of touch. “What happened while I was catching up on what Paris and Rome were doing I have no idea. She could have been having her fling with the Assistant Commissioner of Sanitation for all I know. Hamlet was the lucky man in 1962, when I got back. And since then...” Winterson paused.

The silence spread like ink. Dane was looking as if he were about to throw up. Ashton McKell looked deathly ill. All this, then, was new to both of them, Ellery thought. As for Judy, she was grasping the arms of her chair as if they were the rails of a chute-the-chutes car at the top of the trestle.

“I suppose I ought to have realized that, sooner or later, Sheila Grey would come to a nasty end,” Winterson said finally. “And yet... she was so utterly charming when she was in love. She needed love. It was the fuel, I think, that made her go, that and her career... God, what a waste. She had the world at her feet.”

Suddenly he was no longer a ridiculous little frou-frou of a man with a caved-in head. His face was the mask of tragedy. Ellery thought: He’s still in love with her.

Winterson jumped to his feet. “If there’s anything else I can tell you, here’s my card. By all means call on me. Goodbye, Miss Walsh, Mr. McKell.” To Dane he said, “I wish you all the luck.”

Ashton said, “My car—”

“Thank you, but I believe I’ll walk for a bit.” And, nodding all around, his smile perfunctory, he darted from the hospital room, leaving the memory of his twisted face and the sluggish overhang of his Turkish tobacco.

“And that was something Mr. Winterson had to get out of his system,” Ellery remarked. “I wonder how many years he’s unconsciously hunted for the opportunity.”

“He was disgusting.” Judy made a face.

“It was also a rich vein, and we mustn’t let it go untapped. I’ll have to depend on one or all of you to be my eyes, ears, and legs.”

“Tell us what you want done, Mr. Queen,” said the elder McKell.

“I want all four of the men Elisha Winterson named to be checked for alibis for the night of September 14th. No, not four — five. Winterson, too. Yes, begin with Winterson. Then Foster, then” — he glanced at his notes — “Hurt, then Van Vester, then Odonnell.”

Dane was already helping Judy into her coat.

“I’ll get on it right away, Mr. Queen,” Ashton McKell said. “Hire some Pinkerton people — a squad of them, if necessary.”

“Good. And let me have their reports as they come in.”

At last he was alone, and in the way he had of letting himself go mentally — like an athlete deliberately relaxing his muscles, muscle by muscle, on a training table — Ellery sank himself deeper and deeper into thought. There was something here... something... He fanned the air to dissipate Winterson’s smog trail, and as he did so his eye fell on the fanning card, and he saw that it was the personal card Winterson had handed him on departing. Idly, he read it.

And Ellery’s face went white as the card itself.

Was it possible that...?

As his color returned, he kept mumbling to himself something about a fool and his folly.

After that, he could hardly wait for the reports.

As the reports came in from the detective agency, Ashton McKell sent them to Ellery, who arranged them in piles on his writing desk: Winterson, Foster, Hurt, Van Vester, Odonnell.

He analyzed.

On the night of September 14th:

— Winterson had been in an Air France plane en route to Rome. The French press at Orly had interviewed him on his opinions of current fashion, recorded his polite platitudes, photographed him getting on the plane. The Italian press had performed a similar task when he got off in Rome.

— Foster had been in Chicago. He had changed jobs shortly after his breakup with Sheila Grey and moved, with his wife and two children, to the Windy City, where he had been living ever since. At the time of the murder he had been attending a meeting of a bra and foundation garment high command, representing his advertising agency, in the company of a roomful of vice-presidents.

— John F. “Jack” Hurt III was no longer among the automobile-fancying population. In 1961, in a stock-car race in Florida, his machine had hurtled out of control on a turn; when he was removed from the flaming wreckage he was dead.

— Van Vester was also dead. He had been drowned the previous year in a boating accident off the Florida Keys.

— Eddwin “Hamlet” Odonnell had been in England, playing the role he was most noted for in repertory. At the moment of the murder in New York he was giving an imitation of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra at an all-night party in London, in the presence of several dozen more or less sober stars of British stage and screen. Dame Vesta Morisey herself vouched for him.

Then whoever had shot Sheila Grey to death, it had not been one of these five former lovers.

But by this time Ellery knew it could not have been one of them, anyway.

When Dane visited the hospital on the morning of December 31st, he found Ellery’s room in confusion. Clothes and books were everywhere, suitcases lay open, flower vases were being emptied, and Ellery was hopping around on his aluminum crutches in a sort of joyous grouch.

“Are you checking out after all?” Dane asked. “I thought you said the doctor had changed his mind.”

“I changed his mind back,” Ellery snarled. “I’m damned if I’m going to stay in this lazaret for another year. I think they’re secretly burning punk in thanksgiving for getting rid of me. If I could only maneuver gracefully on these cursed hobblesticks! Oops! — sorry, Kirsten.”

He almost knocked the resplendent Swedish nurse over, and in trying to catch her he all but fell himself. Dane sprang in to avert further broken bones.

“Mr. Queen,” the lovely nurse said. “You must not the crutches use so! This way...”

“I’m tired,” Ellery said. And sat down. “By the way, Dane, tonight being what the Scotch call hogmanay, I’m throwing a little party at the apartment—”

“Whose?”

“Mine. Kirsten, do you remember what I said about the time when they cut the concrete pants off me?”

“Oh, so bad, I cannot come,” the nurse said, blushing. “Sture, his ship comes in. We go together tonight, you see.”

“Who’s Sture?” demanded Ellery.

She murmured a word in Swedish. “Oh, my boy friend — no, yes, my fiancé. He is second mate. Now we go back to Sweden and he gets yob in ship company office. We will marry.” And, scarlet, she fled.

“And a good thing, too,” Ellery said gloomily. “Having to occupy the same living space with that goddess day after day without being able to touch her has been almost too much for me to bear. Sture! The Swedes have all the luck. Anyway, I wasn’t going to invite Kirsten to my New Year’s Eve party. That’s strictly for our little in-group. I can count on you-all? Good. Now how about helping me pack?”

The Christmas tree which Ellery had not been able to see on its day of glory was still there when the three McKells and Judy Walsh got to the Queen apartment at 9:30 that night. Partly because of Ellery’s delayed Yuletide, partly in the old Knickerbocker tradition of New Year’s Day, the McKells had brought gifts. Ramon’s arms were full of them.

Inspector Queen was there, too, not altogether gracefully. (“What do you think you’re doing?” he had demanded of Ellery. “It isn’t bad enough having the parents here, after my part in getting up a case against them, but this son of theirs I arrested! It isn’t exactly the setup for good social relations.” “Dad, trust me.” “Trust you?” the Inspector had said scathingly. So Ellery had explained; and after that the Inspector helped Ellery ready the apartment; and he was johnny-on-the-spot, dentures grinning, when the McKell party arrived, playing the role of mine host’s aging parent like the hardened trouper he was.)

“All these gifts,” Ellery said, glowing. “Well, I’ll be having a New Year’s gift for the McKell family myself later tonight. Do you suppose I could borrow Ramon?”

“Of course,” said Ashton McKell.

Lutetia said, “How thoughtful of you, Mr. Queen,” her anxiety tempered by her supreme confidence that everything would come out right in the end. Sooner or later the law would release her son, as it had released her and her husband. Ashton would see to that. Or Ellery Queen, or both.

“The gift isn’t ready, but if Ramon can get back a little after eleven o’clock and run an errand for me...”

“Certainly,” Ashton said. “Ramon, be back here at, say, 11.15.”

The chauffeur said, “Yes, sir,” and left.

The presence of the Inspector was something of a damper. Ellery worked hard at playing host. He had put some Elizabethan music on the hi-fi, and he presided like a pitchman over the punch bowl, in which he had prepared a Swedish punch after a convivial recipe given him by one of the hospital doctors. Judy helped him serve the food, which boxed the compass from Peking duck to tiny buckwheat cakes. “There’s something of a rite involved in handling the duck,” he said. “Mr. McKell, would you be kind enough to carve?” (at which the Inspector growled a very low growl that only his son heard)... “Thank you... First we take one of these thin little pancakes, or knishes — almost like tortillas, aren’t they?... spread them with slices of duck... green onions... the soy sauce, the other sauces... roll ’em up... tuck in the ends so that the sauce doesn’t drip, and fall to. Dane, some more of that hot punch, and skoal to the lot o’ yez!”

He told them the story of the very young student nurse who had rushed from a patient’s room screaming that his pulse had dropped to 22. The staff had come running, the resident took the pulse over again, laughed, and said, “What did you do, take a fifteen-second count? His pulse is 88.” The poor girl had forgotten to multiply by four.

Ellery labored to keep the party going, but the Inspector noticed that he kept glancing at the foyer. Only when the buzzer sounded, and Inspector Queen went to answer the door, did Ellery’s anxiety turn to confidence.

“It’s Ramon back,” the Inspector said.

“Come in, Ramon. A glass of punch?”

The chauffeur glanced at his employer, who nodded. Ramon accepted the steaming red liquid, murmured a health in Spanish, and drank quickly.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Ellery. “Where did you want me to go?”

“I have the address right here.” Ellery handed him a card. “Hand them this and they’ll give you a package. Try to get back as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Ramon left, Ellery commandeered the services of Dane, and Dane came back with a cooler of champagne. Judy turned on the TV set. Times Square was jammed with its New Year’s Eve quota of ninnyhammers, as Dane called them — “They’re the same folksy folks who clutter up the beaches in summer and jump up and down when the camera turns their way.” But no one smiled. The approach of midnight was turning the screw on nerves, as at some impending grim event. And when the door buzzer sounded again, everyone started. But it was only Ramon, back from his errand.

“Not quite midnight,” said Ellery. “Thank you, Ramon. Have a glass of champagne with us.”

“If it is all right with Mr. McKell—”

“Certainly, Ramon.”

The package was tubular, about two feet long. It seemed an odd shape for a gift. Ellery placed it carefully on the mantelpiece.

“There goes the ball on the Times Building,” he said. “Fill up!” And as the announcer’s countdown reached the tick of midnight, and Times Square roared and fluttered, Ellery lifted his glass. “To the New Year!”

And when they had all drunk, he hobbled over to the television set and turned it off; and he faced them and said, “I promised you a gift. Here it is. I’m ready to name the murderer of Sheila Grey.”

Inspector Queen backed off until he was leaning against the jamb of Ellery’s study door. Ashton McKell placed both hands on the chair before him, gripping it. Lutetia, in the chair, set her glass down on the table, and it slopped a little. Judy leaned against Dane, who was watching Ellery like a dog.

“Here, once more, and for the last time,” said Ellery, “is the timetable of the night of September 14th:

“A few minutes to ten: Dane left Sheila Grey’s apartment.

“A few moments later: You, Mr. McKell, arrived. You were sent away about 10:03, almost at once.

“10:19: You, Dane, returned to the building.

“10:23: Sheila Grey was shot to death in her apartment.

“It took the first police officers only a few minutes to reach the scene, since the precinct man was able to put out a call practically at the moment of the shooting, from hearing it over the phone. The radio car men found Sheila Grey dead and began an immediate search of the apartment. They found the revolver. They found the cartridges. They did not find Sheila Grey’s note, describing Dane’s earlier visit and attack.”

The quiet in Ellery’s voice did not relax anyone. He seemed unaware of their tension and went on.

“Why didn’t the investigating officers, first on the scene, find the note? Obviously, because it had already been removed from the premises. Who removed it? Well, who do we know had it in his possession later, in order to be able to send it to the police? The blackmailer. There was only one way in which the blackmailer could have got hold of the note, and that was by taking it from the Grey apartment.

“Let’s tackle the same question temporally,” Ellery continued. “When did Sheila write the note? Between Dane’s first departure and Ashton’s arrival? Not likely: the time that elapsed could not have been more than five or six minutes, and some of that time Sheila must have spent recovering from the near-throttling she had suffered. Also, you told me, Mr. McKell, that when you walked into the apartment she was still terribly upset, too upset to have dashed off that longish letter to the police. I think, then, we can rule out the period between Dane’s departure and Ashton’s arrival as the time when she wrote the letter. She wrote it later.

“When? You left about 10:03, Mr. McKell. Then clearly the note must have been written between 10:03 and 10:23, when she was shot. And it had to have been taken from her workroom between the time she wrote it and the time the police got there. And just as clearly she had not given it to the blackmailer, for she addressed it to the police. So again we reach the conclusion: The blackmailer stole it from the apartment. And he could only have stolen it after it was written, which would place him in the apartment around the time of the murder. Let’s see if we can narrow this down further.”

Someone let out a breath stealthily. The Inspector glanced sharply around, but whoever had done it was again as rigid as the others.

“Who do we know now was in the apartment between the writing of the letter and the arrival of the police? The blackmailer. Who else? The murderer. Considering the short time involved, it’s a reasonable assumption that blackmailer and murderer were one and the same. But we know something else about this blackmailer-murderer. His attempted blackmailing of Dane was not his first such try. He had had a previous victim — you, Mr. McKell.” (And at this Inspector Queen cast such reproach at his son as should have withered him in his tracks had he been looking his father’s way; but he was not looking his father’s way, he was concentrating on his hypnotized audience.) “I’ve gone all through the reasoning that identifies each blackmail as the work of the same person, so I won’t repeat it.

“The keystone question is: What was the basis for his first blackmail, the blackmailing of Ashton McKell?”

Ellery addressed Lutetia directly, who sat twisted in the chair. “Forgive me if I have to call spades by their right name, Mrs. McKell. But we’re dealing with hard facts, and only hard words can describe them.

“The basis of the Ashton McKell blackmailing was the blackmailer’s knowledge of the relationship between Ashton McKell and Sheila Grey. Who knew or could have known of this relationship? How many persons? Who are they?”

He paused, and into the silence crept the sounds of New Year revelry from other apartments, the streets.

“I count five. Sheila herself, number one. And would Sheila attempt to blackmail Ashton McKell? Hardly. She admired and respected him.” Ashton gripped the back of his wife’s chair still harder. “She was willing to foster a communion of spirit, a Platonic friendship, under difficult and sometimes ludicrous circumstances, because of that admiration and respect, quite aside from the misinterpretation society would have placed on the relationship had it become generally known. Sheila certainly did not need money; and had she needed money she would not have had to resort to blackmail — all she had to do was ask for it, and it would have been given to her in full measure, to overflowing — am I right, Mr. McKell?”

“Of course,” Ashton said stiffly.

“No, Sheila did not blackmail Ashton McKell. Who else knew of their liaison? Naturally, Ashton. Surely he didn’t blackmail himself. Why should he conceivably have done so? It makes no sense. So we eliminate Mr. McKell.

“Who else? You, Mrs. McKell. And subsequently you, Dane. But you are both rich in your own right; even in theory, you would not have to resort to blackmail if you needed money. True, each of you was hurt and resentful of Ashton’s conduct, but blackmail is hardly the answer to hurt and resentment. If you wished to punish husband and father for what you conceived to be misconduct, each of you would have chosen a far different course — as in fact each of you did. Blackmail figured in neither.

“So there we are,” Ellery said. “Five people knew or could have known about Sheila Grey and Ashton McKell, of whom we have thrown out four as possible blackmailers. The conclusion is inescapable that the fifth person was the blackmailer and, therefore, Sheila Grey’s murderer.”

“I don’t understand,” Dane mumbled. “Five? I can’t think of a fifth.”

“We’ll get to that later, Dane. Meanwhile, what else do we know about the identity of this Janus — this individual with two faces, one of blackmail, the other of murder? Curiously, we know a great deal, but to get to it we must dig a rather deep hole.

“Follow me.

“We begin with the gold mine of information deeded to us by Winterson, Sheila’s original partner in The House of Grey.

“What did Winterson tell us?

“That Sheila had a succession of lovers, beginning with himself. (If there were earlier ones, as I suppose there were, they are irrelevant to the issue.)

“What else did Winterson say? That Sheila was not her original name. She was born ‘Lillian.’ When did she change Lillian to Sheila? After the great success of her first important showing, the collection she named Lady Sheila. Why Lady Sheila? Why Sheila at all — which wasn’t her name at the time, yet which so captivated her that she subsequently took it as her legal name?

“I kept puzzling over this. But the answer came to me in one flash. What’s Winterson’s given name?”

“Elisha,” said Judy, wonderingly.

“Elisha.” Ellery waited. No one said anything. “Doesn’t any of you see the relationship between ‘Elisha’ and ‘Sheila’?”

Judy cried, “They’re anagrams!”

“Yes. ‘Sheila’ is a rearrangement of the letters of ‘Elisha.’

“When I saw that, of course,” Ellery said, “I also saw that it could have been coincidence. So I went on to her next year’s collection, the 1958 one. That one she named Lady Nella. What else was significant in Sheila Grey’s life during the year 1958? Well, she had dropped Elisha Winterson both as partner and lover by that time. Did she take a new partner? No. A new lover? Winterson said yes, and named him. Remember his name?”

“Foster, wasn’t it?” Dane said.

“His full name.”

There was another silence. Then Judy said, “I remember. Something about Edgar Allan Poe... Yes! You asked Mr. Winterson how to spell Foster’s first name, which was Allen.”

“Allen — with an e — Bainbridge Foster,” Ellery nodded. “Allen — an anagram of Nella, the name of her 1958 collection!

“Another coincidence? Let’s see.”

Winterson had mentioned three other men’s names, Ellery pointed out, in identifying Sheila’s lovers during the following four years. In 1959 it had been John F. “Jack” Hurt III, speed demon of the raceways. In 1960 it had been the high-society polo player, Ronald Van Vester. Winterson had been abroad during 1961 and was able to suggest no lover’s name for that year, but for 1962 he had put the finger on Eddwin Odonnell, the Shakespearean actor.

“John F. Hurt III, 1959,” Ellery said. “And the name of Sheila’s collection in 1959? Lady Ruth. Hurt — Rath — anagrams.

“Ronald Van Vester, 1960. And the name of the 1960 collection — Lady Lorna D. ‘D’ for ‘Doone’? Not a bit of it. ‘Ronald’ and ‘Lorna D.’ are anagrams.

“The pattern is fixed,” said Ellery. “Four years, four anagrams of contemporaneous lovers... I must admit that the absence of 1961, the Lady Dulcea year, piqued me, and still does. Because Dulcea — a very strange name indeed, so strange it sounds forced — when you unscramble it trying to make a man’s name out of it, peculiarly enough yields the name ‘Claude.’ Of course, we don’t know if there was such a man, or if Sheila was simply taking a sabbatical that year—”

“Wait,” Ashton McKell said. “Claude... Yes, Sheila spoke a great deal about some Frenchman, a playwright, who came to New York in — when was it? — 1961, I think — yes, 1961 — to have a play of his produced on Broadway. The way she spoke of him — now that I realize—”

“Claude Claudel,” Dane said slowly. “Damn it all, don’t tell me he too—”

“1961. Claude. Dulcea.” Ellery nodded. “It’s too perfectly fitted into the pattern to be coincidental. I think we have a right to assume that Monsieur Claudel was Number One on Miss Grey’s 1961 hit parade, for part of the year, anyway.”

“But what about 1962?” Inspector Queen could not help asking. He was as fascinated as the others by the anagrammatical pattern.

“Well, according to Winterson, in 1962 the favored man was the actor, Odonnell, whose given name, by which no one ever calls him except on theater programs, is ‘Edd’ — two ds — ‘win.’ Odonnell is always called ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell, from his tiresome playing of the Shakespearean role. And what was Sheila’s 1962 collection named? Lady Thelma. ‘Hamlet’ — ‘Thelma.’ Anagrams.

“Every lover of Sheila’s anagrammatically inspired the name of The House of Grey’s collection current during his interregnum. Apparently she preferred to use his Christian name as the basis of the anagram, but she would use the surname if she had to.”

And the room was a pocket of silence again in the celebrating world, with the wind outside adding to the noisy merriment. A clock, which had been ticking all along, sounded as if it had just begun. Someone’s chair creaked, and someone else breathed a snorty breath. In this emphasized silence a strained voice, Lutetia’s, said, “Mr. Queen, do go on. Please.”

“In a way,” Ellery said, “this completes the record. The last complete showing of The House of Grey was the ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell — Lady Thelma year. But at the time of her death Sheila was working on her new collection. She had drawn roughs and made sketches, and had actually completed at least one design.

“Since collections and lovers go together in Sheila’s case, who was her last — her most recent — lover? What man was intimate with her during the past year? Forgive me for becoming personal again, Mr. McKell, but that wasn’t you. You fell into a special category in Sheila’s life; besides, your name doesn’t anagrammatize.” Ashton McKell’s face was still set in plaster of Paris. “Was it you, Dane? Yes, but only in the most limited of senses, as far as I can gather. You and Sheila had really not had time to establish a meaningful relationship. You may have been on your way to it; but, in any case, whom were you following? Whose place would you have filled? Because there is someone — someone you don’t suspect.”

Ellery sounded as weary as his audience looked startled.

He reminded them, from Winterson’s account and from what Sheila herself had told Dane, that she dropped her lovers as suddenly as she took them. If at the time of Dane’s appearance in her life she had already dropped her most recent lover — assuming such an unknown existed — or if he had somehow learned that he was about to be dropped by this unpredictable one-man-at-a-time woman, as she had called herself, then a perfect motive for murder could be expected. Hell might have no fury like a woman scorned, Ellery pointed out, but as a matter of statistical fact more murders of frustrated passion and love-revenge were committed in the United States by men than by women.

“We have one feasible way,” he said, “to check the theory that another lover existed in Sheila’s life — the lover Dane was in the process of displacing. Had she named the new collection she was working on at the time of her death?” Ellery started to rise, but he sank back in the chair with a grimace. “These damned legs of mine,” he said. “Ramon, would you mind? The tubular package on the mantelpiece.”

The chauffeur brought it to him, and Ellery unwrapped it, disclosing a roll of heavy paper. He unrolled it, glanced over it, nodded, and held it up for all to see.

It was the beautifully finished fashion drawing of a model in a sports outfit. The clothes were sketched in exquisite detail.

“This is the only design Sheila Grey had time to finish,” Ellery said. “And it tells us the name Sheila had selected for the collection. Here it is at the bottom: Lady Norma, in block lettering.

“Lady Norma,” Ellery went on swiftly, with no sign of weariness now, “and I point out to you that ‘Norma’ is an anagram of the name of the fifth person who was in a position to know of the Sheila-Ashton rendezvous — the fifth person who, the other four having been eliminated, must have been the blackmailer — and Sheila’s killer. For who else could have known that Ashton McKell visited Sheila Grey? His chauffeur, who dropped him off at the club Wednesday after Wednesday and picked him up again late every Wednesday night, and who was uniquely situated to suspect the nature of those Wednesday excursions — and to verify them. His chauffeur, who somehow became Dane’s predecessor in Sheila’s affections and then murdered her for throwing him over — Dad, watch Ramon!”

Ramon had backed toward the foyer. His skin had turned a putty color; his nostrils were pinched white with surprise, anger, and fear; the line-up of his teeth glittered in his swarthy face. And as Inspector Queen, Dane, and Ashton McKell closed in on him, Ramon seized a heavy chair, flung it at them, and was gone through the apartment door.

The Inspector half caught the chair; part of it banged against Ashton McKell’s legs and tripped him; and Dane tripped over his father. For a moment the three men were an impossible tangle of arms and legs. Then, shouting, the McKells regained their feet and plunged toward the foyer. But Inspector Queen roared, “No! He may be armed! Let him go!” And as they stopped, panting, he said, “He can’t get away. I have detectives posted at every exit of the building. He’ll run straight into their arms.”

Later, over restorative brandy — although Ashton McKell was still too shocked by the revelation to regain his natural florid color — Ellery said, “Yes, Ramon, whose name inspired Sheila Grey to label her new collection Norma, was her last lover.” Out of pity he did not glance at the elder McKell. “It was Ramon whom she dropped when she became interested in you, Dane, and his Spanish pride brought on a homicidal rage.” He forbore to go into the question of Sheila’s taste in men, knowing that part of Ashton’s shock resulted from the fact that his own chauffeur had been sleeping with the woman of his dreams; her lovers had been a heterogeneous lot, and he supposed that the Spaniard — Ramon was handsome in a Mediterranean way — had struck her fancy.

“It was Ramon who came to Sheila’s apartment that night, sneaked into the bedroom to get the revolver he knew was in the night-table drawer — forgive me again, but he had had plenty of opportunity to become acquainted with that bedroom — and, entering Sheila’s workroom, shot her dead as she sat telephoning the police. It was Ramon, of course, who replaced the phone on the cradle, found Sheila’s letter to the police, pocketed it, and escaped.

“He took the letter to use for blackmailing Dane; or, if that failed, as it did, to draw suspicion away from himself by pointing it toward Dane... as it also did.

“He almost got away with it.”

There was very little conversation until someone rapped at the door and Inspector Queen opened it to find Sergeant Velie there, grinning massively.

“You got him, I take it,” the Inspector said.

“We got him, Inspector. He’s quiet now, being a real good boy. You coming downstairs with us?”

“As soon as I get my coat and hat.”

When the door closed on them, as if on signal a babble of exclamations broke out.

“It’s over, it’s over.”

“How can we ever thank you, Mr. Queen?”

“By God, he did it. Mr. Queen — Ellery—”

“This calls for another toast!”

“What a New Year’s gift,” cried Ashton McKell. “Are there the fixings for another toast?”

Three more bottles of champagne were found in the kitchen. Glasses chimed joyously. After a while, Ashton was singing a song of his college youth. (“Oh, we’ll sing of Lydia Pinkham/ And her love for the human race,/ How she makes her Vegetable Compound,/ And the papers publish her face.”) And Lutetia hiccupped ever so slightly and burst into slightly raffish laughter; and Judy danced a jig to the humming by the assembled company of “The Irish Washerwoman.”

And when Ellery said, “I don’t mind telling you that my self-esteem has been restored,” it was Lutetia McKell who cried, “To the armchair detective and his restored self-esteem!” and they drank the toast in the last of the champagne, while Ellery smiled and smiled.

The fact that “the chauffeur done it,” as the man on the street put it, seemed to take the zing out of the Sheila Grey murder case. It was as if the case-hardened mystery buff, reading a new work of fiction, were to follow the red herring through 250 pages and find, on page 251, that the criminal was the butler. Other news began to crowd the Grey case into corners of the front pages, and soon it was being reported on page 6, and beyond.

The McKells dropped out of the news entirely.

It was a wonderful relief. Ashton threw himself back into his business with something very like fury. He had neglected his affairs for a long time, and he was not a man to be satisfied with the work of subordinates. The cocoa bean crop in Ghana, the sugar shipments from Peru, the problem of substitutes for Havana tobacco, the efforts of half a dozen new nations to create merchant marines — he dealt with such matters like a juggler confident of his prowess. Judy was lunching with him at the office these days because of the heavy work-load he piled on her.

Lutetia was happily back at her charity sewing, even (for the first time in two decades) engaging a seamstress to help her with the backlog of illegitimate layettes.

Dane set out to finish his novel, secretly doubting that it would ever be accomplished. It held too many associations for him of the summer. Summer of probing Sheila, dating Sheila, wooing Sheila, loving Sheila... summer of Sheila; he knew it would never be anything else in his mind. Except that it was also the summer of having lost Sheila forever.

Half-heartedly he toyed with the idea of abandoning the novel-in-progress and starting another, but he put it off, promising himself that he would embark on a profitable schedule as soon as the indictment against him was formally dropped. The only word he had had since Ramon’s arrest was that his lawyers had procured an indefinite postponement of his trial, pending the quashing of the indictment. But as the days passed and he heard nothing, he grew irritated.

He phoned police headquarters.

At first Inspector Queen, who sounded peculiar, suggested that he get in touch with the district attorney’s office. Then suddenly he said, “Maybe it’s just as well. Wait, Mr. McKell. As long as you’ve phoned me—”

“Yes?”

“Some questions have come up. Maybe I’d better discuss them with you. I was intending to call you later, but I guess this is as good a time as any.”

“What questions?”

“I’ll tell you what,” the Inspector said. “I’d like my son to be present. Suppose we make it my apartment at two o’clock, all right?”

Dane showed up with his parents and Judy in tow. “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said to the Queens, “but I told my father about it, and he seemed to feel that all of us ought to be present.”

“I don’t know what it’s about, either,” Ellery said, regarding the Inspector with narrowed eyes. “So, Dad, how about laying it on the line?”

Inspector Queen said, “We’ve been questioning this Ramon Alvarez day and night for — it seems to me — an eternity. He’s a funny one.”

“How do you mean, Dad?”

“Well, I’ve grilled murder suspects by the hundreds in my time, and I’ve never run across one with just this combination of frankness and mulishness. He’s made some important admissions, such as being in the penthouse during the general crime period, but he keeps insisting he left her there alive. He won’t budge from it.”

“Why would you expect him to admit it?” asked the elder McKell. “Don’t murderers always deny their guilt?”

“Not as often as people think. Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s telling the truth.”

“That’s nonsense, Dad,” Ellery said. “The man is guilty. I proved—”

“Maybe you didn’t, son.”

Ellery gaped at him.

“In any event, Inspector,” growled Ashton McKell, “all this is your problem, not ours. Why have you brought Dane back into it?”

“Because he may be able to help us clear this up once and for all.

“Let’s go back over this,” the old man said in a head-on, plodding sort of way. And he ticked off the time elements of the crime. Sheila Grey had sent Ashton away at a few minutes past ten — at 10:03 P.M. Then she had sat down and written her letter about Dane to the police. “We’ve had people write out the letter in longhand, as she did, trying to time the writing at the pace she must have used — it was fresh on her mind, a matter of urgency and fear, so she couldn’t have written slowly.

“Five policewomen tried it. The quickest time ran a few seconds over four minutes, the longest just under six. Let’s take the longest time. She had to go to her desk after you left, Mr. McKell, she had to sit down, take paper and pen from her drawer, write — and let’s even say she read the letter over, which she may not have done — seal it in the first envelope, write on it ‘To be opened in the event I die of unnatural causes,’ place the first envelope into the larger envelope, and write on that, ‘For the Police.’

“Now we’ve gone all through this, and no matter how we figure it, she simply couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes at the outside for the whole procedure. I think ten minutes is away over — eight would be far more likely. But let’s even call it ten. So she was finished with the letter and the sealing and so on by 10:13 at the latest. But she was shot at 10:23. What happened during those ten minutes? Okay, the killer came. But did it take him ten minutes to get the revolver out of the bedroom drawer and shoot her?”

“They talked,” Dane suggested.

“And she picked up the phone and called the precinct with the killer standing over her? It won’t wash. Remember what she said to the operator — that it was an emergency. When she got the precinct sergeant, she told him, ‘Someone is in my apartment,’ and you’ll recall he said she was whispering, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. No, she didn’t spend any of the time talking to the murderer. Still — there it is. We don’t have a full picture of that ten minutes, between the time she finished the letter and the shot the sergeant heard over the phone.”

“I don’t understand what’s bugging you, Dad,” Ellery said testily. “It’s simple. Part of the ten minutes was consumed by Ramon’s coming in and shooting her. The rest of it was just nothing — before he came she sat there, or worked on a sketch, or did something else inconsequential but time-consuming.”

“But Ramon got there, he says, at 10:15,” Inspector Queen retorted. “He insists he only stayed four to five minutes at the most. That would bring us to, say, 10:20. If Ramon is telling the truth, there was enough time for somebody else to get into the penthouse after he left.”

“If he’s telling the truth,” remarked Ellery caustically. “Or if his calculation of the time was accurate, which seems highly unlikely to me. What was he doing, holding a stopwatch on himself? We’re dealing with minutes, Dad, not hours! I don’t know what’s the matter with you today.”

The Inspector said nothing.

And Ellery looked at him very hard indeed. “And another thing,” he said. “Ramon denies killing her. Did he say what he was doing up there?”

“Collecting a blackmail payment.”

“What!”

“Ramon was blackmailing Sheila, too?” Ashton cried.

“That’s right. He was playing both sides of the street.”

“But why should Sheila have paid him money?”

“He says because of you, Mr. McKell. She didn’t care about her reputation, but she did about yours, and she was willing to pay Ramon to keep his mouth shut.”

Ashton fell silent.

“Incidentally, she was smarter than you were,” the old man said dryly. “Ramon says she figured out right off that he was the blackmailer — that he’d probably followed you one Wednesday to find out what you were doing those afternoons and evenings, and learned that you were visiting her apartment in disguise. But she paid him anyway, to protect you.”

Dane’s father turned away. Lutetia’s profile set. But then it softened, and she leaned over and took her husband’s hand.

“Anyway, Ramon says he came up that night to put a harder squeeze on. He was collecting a thousand a month from her, too, but he was losing the money on the horses a lot faster than he was raking it in from you people, and he was leery about tackling you for more, Mr. McKell, figuring that a woman would be a softer touch. So he went to her. He says she was lying spread out in a chair looking pretty sick, half unconscious, holding her throat. She hardly seemed to know he was there, he said. He suspected something was very wrong and he beat it. But not before he spotted the letter addressed to the police in her handwriting, thought there might be something juicy in it for him, and put it in his pocket. That’s his story, and I believe him.”

“How did he leave the apartment?” Ellery asked in a half snarl. “By which door? Did he say?”

“The service door and service elevator.”

“That would explain why Dane didn’t run into him,” began Ellery in a mutter; but then he subsided. No one said anything for a long time.

“I still don’t see what all this has to do with me,” Dane said finally.

The Inspector did not reply, and Ellery stirred and said, “It’s true that if Sheila was that easy a mark for blackmail — and it shouldn’t be too hard to trace thousand-dollar withdrawals from her account with dates Ramon ought to be able to supply — it isn’t likely he would want to kill her... That would mean that my analysis of the crime was wrong — that the blackmailer was not the killer... It’s because of the loose time situation... You’re more than half inclined to think, then, that between 10:13 and 10:23 two people came to Sheila’s apartment? Ramon the blackmailer, and then the killer? That Ramon did not shoot her?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Then why did Ramon run away,” Judy burst out, “when Mr. Queen accused him of the shooting?”

“Blackmail isn’t exactly a light rap, Miss Walsh,” said Inspector Queen. “He panicked. Especially when, on top of it, he was accused of murder.”

But Ellery was shaking his head and mumbling, more to himself than to them. “There’s something awfully wrong here... We know how Sheila selected the names for her annual fashion collections. She did it consistently for seven consecutive years, making anagrams out of the names of her successive lovers. And this last one is Lady Norma, which is an anagram of Ramon. Is it possible ‘Norma’ came from some other name? ‘Roman’? ‘Moran’? I can’t think of any others... Did you dig up another man in her life since Eddwin Odonnell, Dad?”

The Inspector shook his head.

“Then it still gets down to Ramon. He was more than Sheila’s blackmailer, he was also her lover. And if he was her lover, she dropped him for Dane, and jealousy proved stronger than greed. In my book Ramon remains her killer.”

“That’s the funniest part of it,” Inspector Queen said dryly, “if funny is the word. He says he wasn’t ever her lover. At all.”

“He says!” exploded Ellery. “I’m tired of hearing what Ramon says. He’s lying!”

“Take it easy, son.”

“He wasn’t her lover?” Ashton McKell said, in a painfully relieved way.

And his son said, “I don’t follow any of this.”

“I don’t blame you,” the old policeman said, “it’s one of those now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t cases. But this is one thing, Ellery, in which we don’t have to take Ramon’s word. We can prove it.”

“That he was her lover,” snapped Ellery, “or that he wasn’t?”

“That he was not. The name on Sheila Grey’s last finished drawing clinches it. When Ramon said he’d never had an affair with Sheila, we made a very careful laboratory examination of that sketch with the ‘Lady Norma’ on it. I don’t know which method the lab used — sulfide of ammonia or ultraviolet rays — but whichever it was, the lab reports a positive finding. And what they found will stand up in any court of law.

“Underneath the words ‘Lady Norma’ on the sketch, they found another name.”

Ellery had been through many ratiocinative crises in his life, but it was doubtful if any hit him as hard as his father’s disclosure this bleak January afternoon. Perhaps the long weeks of inactivity in a hospital room, the sheer lack of tone in his muscles from too little exercise, had dulled the edge of his mental weapon, so that when the revelation came, its assault was all the more devastating. He felt as if he had been struck a powerful blow.

He shaded his eyes with his hand, his brain stumbling over the implications of the statement. Whatever the name was, it was obviously not Norma; therefore, Ramon had not inspired an anagram for the collection; therefore, there was no reason to postulate Ramon as Dane’s predecessor in Sheila’s affections; therefore, the chauffeur was telling the truth; therefore, blackmailer-as-murderer-also was out the window; and the blood, at least, was washed from Ramon’s hands.

The murderer of Sheila Grey was someone else.

He had been completely wrong.

Completely!

Inspector Queen’s dry voice broke into his sodden thoughts. “You see, someone had used ink eradicator — there was a bottle of it on Sheila’s work desk — on the original collection name on the drawing, and then handprinted ‘Lady Norma’ over the erasure. Notice I said ‘handprinted’; because the name under ‘Lady Norma’ was handwritten. And without any question we can establish the handwriting of the erased collection name as being Sheila Grey’s.”

“I didn’t see an erasure,” muttered Ellery. “Ink eradicator! I ought to go back to kindergarten. Dad, what was the name underneath in Sheila’s writing?”

The Inspector reached into a portfolio and drew forth a photographic enlargement of the bottom portion of Sheila Grey’s last finished drawing. He handed it to Ellery, and the others crowded about, pushing a little.

“Here it is,” Ellery said, swallowing.

Two words in the now familiar Sheila Grey script stood out in the laboratory blowup through the printed ‘Lady Norma,’ like a ghost.

Lady Edna.

“Lady Edna,” Ellery said with difficulty as the others stared, speechless. “Edna — anagram of Dane.”

“So she did intend to name her collection after you,” Inspector Queen said to Dane, while Ellery fell into bitterest silence. “She must have done this before the argument that broke you up. And the drawing was lying there on her work desk that night. And with Ramon eliminated, who’s the only other one we know was on or about the scene of the murder, and who also had motive to erase the Dane anagram and substitute ‘Norma’ so as to throw suspicion on Ramon — can you tell us, Dane?”

Dane did not reply. His face was undergoing a dreadful transformation. Component features seemed to twist in incongruous directions at the same instant. His eyes burned with a feverish light. His hands clenched and unclenched and clenched again. A series of gibberish sounds began to growl in his throat.

Then Dane uttered a single maniacal cry and leaped at Inspector Queen’s throat.

The attack was so sudden that the Inspector was taken by surprise. Before he could raise his hands, Dane’s fingers were closing about the old man’s throat and shaking the wiry body as if it were a puppy’s.

Ellery staggered forward, but his legs betrayed him; he fell. In the end it was Dane’s father who pitted brute strength against his son’s and pulled him off the Inspector.

The old man lay back, gasping and clutching his throat.

As if an electrical contact had been broken, a current shut off, Dane went limp. He covered his face with his hands, and he wept.

“I can’t stand it any more, I’m tired. I couldn’t stay away from her. Judy? I’m sorry. Judy, Judy... Now you know what was wrong with me. It was driving me mad, what I had done to Sheila. It was bad enough that first time, when I almost strangled her. But when I lost my head again, later that awful night... I couldn’t stay away, I came back. I told you I came back after walking and walking around outside. What I didn’t tell you was that on my way back to the building I saw Ramon sneaking in — sneaking, unmistakably. Ramon — pussyfooting it up to Sheila’s apartment through the service elevator... It came back to me then, those peculiar phone calls, her evasive remarks when I was around. Suppose those calls hadn’t been from my father, as I’d thought? Suppose... suppose she was having an affair with Ramon? With my father’s chauffeur, for God’s sake! I went up after him, he didn’t see me, because I used the front way. I was so quiet they didn’t hear me. Ramon was talking in the workroom, with a mumble from Sheila now and then — I couldn’t hear — I couldn’t hear what they were saying — but it seemed to me he had an intimate note in his voice, and he laughed once or twice in a way... the way... I was sure they were lovers. Why else would he be there? It never occurred to me that he was blackmailing her. All I could think was, how vile, how cheap of her... He wasn’t there long, but I heard him say he’d be back, and I took it to mean he was coming back to spend the night with her and I was so crazy blind furious with jealousy and humiliation I was shaking all over. And the fury got me. And I made my hands stop shaking — I didn’t give a damn about Ramon, he didn’t count, he was a bug, it was Sheila, Sheila... So I got the gun out of the drawer, my hands weren’t shaking any more, and I went to the doorway of the workroom and she was sitting at her desk talking into the phone and I fired straight at her lying, cheating heart, and she fell over, and the phone fell out of her hand and I went over and picked it up and put it back on the cradle... And there was one other thing. I knew how she named her collections because she had told me, she had shown me the one she’d finished for this year with my name on it in the anagram form of ‘Edna.’ The spell had passed and I was thinking cold sober and I knew that name mustn’t be found because if it was, someone might figure out that ‘Edna’ meant me and that I was her current lover or had been, and so I looked over the sketches on her work desk and found the finished one with ‘Edna’ on it. I didn’t dare destroy it, because there was probably a record of such a finished drawing at her salon that a lot of people knew about, so instead I went to work on it with ink eradicator and I applied it to the ‘Lady Edna’ so the name disappeared. Then I got an idea. It might well happen that I’d be suspected. Suppose I put a name down on the sketch, an anagram, that would lead the police astray. If they didn’t see it, I could always call it to their attention... I had seen in a flash that an anagram could be made from Ramon’s name. I never doubted he was her lover, never, not once — and, well, Ramon had been in the apartment only a few minutes before, and I was furious with him... I framed him with the anagram ‘Lady Norma,’ handprinting it over the erasure — I had no time to try to forge Sheila’s handwriting. The whole thing didn’t take me three minutes... Dad, Mother, Judy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, there’s something wrong inside me, there always has been, since I was a kid. Everything went wrong. First, Dad, you were accused. I’d never thought that would happen. Then you, Mother — that was terrible. Oh, you have to believe that I wouldn’t ever have allowed either of you to be convicted. If everything else had failed, if Queen hadn’t come up with something, if the bartender hadn’t been found or the TV thing hadn’t come out, I would have come forward and given myself up. I would have. You have to believe that. I would have confessed...

“Sheila, Sheila!”