The Last Woman in His Life

2. The Second Life

Vincentine Astor? She don’t work here no more. Just didn’t show one night, and not even a postal card since. That’s the way most of these broads are, you can’t depend on them worth a damn. The best ones are the marrieds who are supporting some bum and a couple kids, they can’t afford to walk out on the management. Why she quit? How do I know why? Who knows why they do anything? Maybe she didn’t like the color of the hatcheck room. No, I don’t remember him. Not from this photo, anyways. Sure I’ve seen other pictures of him in the papers, TV, you don’t have to get sore. I know they say he came into my club a few times, I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m only saying I don’t remember seeing him. Kickbacks to the what? Oh, the mob. What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, you mean Vincentine might have been kicking back some of her pay to some hoods or something and fell behind and got in dutch? Look, I run a clean club here, Officer, I don’t know nothing about no mob. What? When didn’t she show up? You mean when did Vincentine rat on me? Wait a minute while I look it up. Yeah, here. She quit me it was Sunday, March twenty-ninth. Yeah, yeah, her home address. Here. Say, Officer, you wouldn’t happen to know of a stacked broad wants a job? Reliable? You know?

No, Miss Astor moved out the end of the month, let’s see now, yeah, as of the thirty-first it was. Yes, sir, paid up right to the day she left. No, these are furnished, so she didn’t have to call a mover or anything, just packed her bags and called a cab. No, I don’t know a thing about her private life. I don’t stick my nose in my roomers’ keyholes like some landladies around here I could mention. As long as they’re quiet, I always say. And don’t give my house a bad name. What man? Oh. No, sir, can’t say I ever did. I mean, I never saw him in this house. Though his picture does look sort of familiar, you might say. Say, isn’t this the playboy who—? Well, I never. I’ll be. No, she didn’t leave no forwarding address; I asked her for one but she said it’s not necessary, I won’t be getting any mail. Was that girl mixed up with him?

Trip sheets for when did you say? Tuesday, March thirty-first. Wait a minute. Hey, Schlockie, I got to talk to you; look, Officer, if you’ll give me a few seconds. We got nothing but kooks roll out of this shop.

Oh, say, you still checking the air pollution in here? I’m sorry, Officer, you can’t take his life if you don’t make a funny once in a while, excuse me. These hackies are going to be my death, to listen to them they got beefs not even the Mayor heard of. Yeah, certainly. Tuesday, March three-one. Here it is, Joseph Levine. You want his license number? Picked up the fare at that address as of ten thirty-four A.M., discharged passenger at Grand Central. No, Joe won’t be pulling in till four forty-five, five this afternoon. Think nothing of it. Always glad to do the P.D. a favor. Yeah.

My dear fellow, I knew Johnny-B as well as any man alive — even though Al Marsh didn’t have the elemental good manners to invite me to the obsequies — and I swear to you on my honor, and you may print this, that when Johnny wrote that clause in his will about some “Laura” or other and how he was going to marry her, he was simply pulling the leg of the whole mother-frugging world. He told me in absolute confidence that he was through with the marriage bit. It was just after his final decree from that country R.N. from — what’s it called? Titusville? Dwightsville? something rare and wonderful like that. “Muzzie,” Johnny said to me, “just between you, me, and the nearest pub I’ve had it. Up to here. No more wedding marches for Johnny-B. From now on I’m strictly tone-deaf, fancy-free, and staying away from aisles.” His exact words. And you may quote me. No, not Mussie. Muzzie, with a double z.

Yeah, I’m Levine. Joseph W. What fare? Now, how the hell do you expect me to remember some dame I picked up God knows how far back? I know, I know, I can read the date on the trip sheet. Okay, so she was a big platinum-type broad with a built. You got any idea how many dames like that a New York hackie picks up in a day? Look, Mac, I’d like to help you out but I just ain’t with it on a hooha like this. I hack I figure three out of every ten fares to some terminal, and what I do at Grand Central is I dump them at the bottom of the ramp, pick up another fare, and away I go. If they start telling me the story of their lives and why they’re leaving New York and where they’re going I blow my ears out like a whale or something and I let it go right on through — I should worry why they’re leaving and where they’re off to? Sorry, Officer, I’m such a drip-dry on this. Let me tell you in confidence, though, I don’t think there’s enough police brutality. Some of the creeps I run into in my line of work you couldn’t beat their brains out with a stainless-steel jack handle, they ain’t got any. Thanks? For what? Did I tell you something?

Look, Sidney, we’re supposed to be keeping our mouths shut about the Benedict case — orders straight from Inspector Queen. I know I owe you. Okay, but for chrissake protect your source. We just put out a flyer on this Vincentine Astor. No, we haven’t got a thing on her. Except what’s likely a coincidence that she quit her job at the Boy-Girl Club March twenty-ninth. No, I’m telling you, Vincentine isn’t wanted except for routine questioning. We have no hard evidence that Benedict ever knew her except to check his hat with. Yeah, we know he visited the Boy-Girl Club a number of times within the past few months. If Vincentine was the hatcheck girl Benedict was giving the rush to lately, he sure changed his M.O., because he must have met her strictly on the q.t. away from his regular hangouts. The general feeling around here is that the reason she quit at the club and left town two days later had not a damn thing to do with Benedict. I’ll give you a little bonus, Sidney, and then I got to go. The word is that the brass upstairs are sore as hell at Inspector Queen for getting New York mixed up in this Benedict brawl, I mean to the extent of carrying the ball for this jerk-town police chief. As if we haven’t got enough headaches around here. Who? No, I haven’t seen Ellery for days. I guess he heard the rumor, too, and doesn’t want to get his old man in worse dutch than he is already.

“On Marsh?” Ellery said, reaching across the Inspector’s desk.

Inspector Queen ignored the hand. “You can look at it later. There’s nothing in it you don’t know about him except you never mentioned that Al isn’t his real name.”

“I never mentioned it because, if you were a friend of Al’s in our Harvard days, you were quickly conditioned not to. I suppose the report notes that he was christened Aubrey, as in C. Aubrey Smith, rest his stiff-upper soul. Anyone who called Al Aubrey like as not wound up with a shiner or a bloody nose.”

“According to one source,” the Inspector said, “‘Aubrey’ was an inspiration of his mama’s. I can’t say I blame him. It’s a hell of a tag for a grown man to have to tote around.”

“Al once told me that when he was in grammar and prep school — private, of course, about which he was surprisingly bitter — he had to lick every kid in his grade before he made the ‘Al’ stick. ‘Al’ doesn’t stand for Albert, or Alfred, or Aloysius, by the way — for just Al, period.”

“His fancy ancestors must be swinging in their graves.”

“By the time he got to Harvard he was too big to tackle even in fun. He was a varsity back and he won the Ivy League wrestling title in his weight class. I doubt if anybody in the Yard knew his name was Aubrey except his most intimate pals, and we had more sense than to bring it up. But I never did learn much about his family background. Al didn’t talk about it.”

The Inspector scanned the report. “His father came from a line of international bankers and high society. His mother, it says here, was a Rushington, whatever that is. Marsh Senior was killed in the crash of his private plane just after Al was born.”

“That might explain something,” Ellery said. “He used to talk about his mother all the time. Never about his father.”

“Mrs. Marsh never remarried, even though she was a young woman when her husband died. She devoted the rest of her active life to Aubrey, and when she became an invalid he returned the service — looked after her like a nurse. The feeling among his friends is that that’s why he never got married. And by the time his mother kicked off he was a confirmed bachelor.”

“His mother left everything to him, of course.”

“What else?”

“How much?”

“Loads. Marsh isn’t as rich as Benedict was, but after the first few millions is there any difference?”

“Then Al is rock-solid financially.”

“Like the Chase National Bank.”

“No trouble? Gambling, bad investments, anything like that?”

“No. He’s pretty much a conservative where money is concerned. He doesn’t gamble at all.”

“So there’s no motive.”

“Not a whimper. He doesn’t gain from any of Benedict’s wills, he wouldn’t need it if he did, and every source we’ve tapped indicates that he’s a topflight attorney with a reputation for absolute personal honesty as well as professional competence.”

But Ellery persisted. “That kind of conclusion depends on the reliability of the source. Have you been able to investigate his handling of Johnny’s affairs?”

“Yes, and as far as we can tell it’s all legal and above-board. Granted we couldn’t be sure without a plant inside, what could Marsh hope to accomplish by diddling with Benedict’s funds? It could only be for a financial reason, and we’re absolutely positive Marsh has no money worries whatsoever. Anyway, most of Benedict’s capital is under the management of Brown, Brown, Mattawan, Brown, and Loring, that old-line law firm, and not under Marsh’s at all.”

“How about women?”

“How about them?”

“I mean a possible romantic rivalry.”

“Nothing. What we’ve dug out indicates that Marsh has never been involved with any number on Benedict’s hit parade except, on occasion, in his legal capacity, when Benedict wanted to pay some girl off or make some sort of settlement on her to close the book when he’d got tired of her.”

“And the ex-wives?”

Inspector Queen shook his head. “Nothing there, either. Marsh got to know them through Benedict, except the Kemp girl, and his contacts with them were strictly as Benedict’s friend and, in the course of time, as Benedict’s attorney. Anyway, Marsh’s preference in women is the opposite of Benedict’s. Marsh goes for small, feminine-type females.”

Ellery grinned. “Al once showed me a photo of his mother. She was a small, feminine-type female.”

His father frowned. “Will you clear out of my office and let me do some of my own work?” The Inspector had an old-fashioned sense of propriety, and cracks about possibly unhealthy mother-son relationships did not amuse him. As Ellery was opening the door the old man asked, “Where you off to now?”

“I thought of something I want to ask Al about Johnny. I’ll tell you about it later.”

Mr. Marsh, Miss Smith said, was tied up with a client and could not under any circumstances be disturbed. Anyway, Mr. Marsh never saw anyone except by appointment. Unless, her hostile glance suggested, it was the kind of snoop business that experience had taught her to associate with the presence of one Ellery Queen? Miss Smith’s tone and demeanor were such that, had she been barefoot, love-beaded, and unkempt, she would have spat the word “pig” at him, with an appropriate modifying obscenity; as it was, being a lady and the product of a no doubt Victorian mother, she could only resort to the subtleties of eye-and vocal cord-play to express her loathing.

Mr. Queen, ever the gentleman in the presence of a lady, scribbled a few words and asked with utter politesse that Miss Smith in her secretarial capacity convey the note to Mr. Marsh, client notwithstanding.

Miss Smith: I can’t do that.

Mr. Queen: You astonish me, Miss Smith. It may be that you will not do that, or that you may not do that, but that you cannot do it — since you seem normally ambulatory and otherwise in unimpaired possession of your physical faculties — I do not for an instant believe.

Miss Smith: How you do go on. You think you’re smart. You’re the kind who makes fun of people.

Mr. Queen: I’m emphatically nothing of the sort. I simply feel it my duty to the cause of semantic hygiene never to allow a grammatical slovenliness to go uncleansed.

Miss Smith: You must have a real dandy time all by yourself listening to the radio and TV commercials pollute the English language.

Mr. Queen: Miss Smith, how marvelous! You have a sense of humor! Now will you take that note in to Al, like I asked you?

Miss Smith: You made a booboo! You said ‘like’ instead of ‘as’!

Mr. Queen: Alas, so I did. Demonstrating the fallibility of even the purest purist. The note, Miss Smith?

Miss Smith: You made that mistake purposely. You’re pulling my leg.

Mr. Queen: No, but is it permitted? I might add that I have admired your limbs, Miss Smith, from the moment I laid eyes on them. Ah, you’re smiling. We advance. The note?

Al Marsh came out for a moment, glancing at Miss Smith in a puzzled way.

“Miss Smith seems all of a flutter, Ellery. Charm, or an emergency?”

“Hardly the first, and no to the second. It’s just that I wanted to ask you something about Johnny. It won’t take a minute—”

“I don’t have a minute. The old gent in my office takes a dim enough view of me as it is. His point is that keeping a man of his age waiting — he’s ninety — constitutes a felonious act. How about meeting me at my place? Sevenish? Dinner, if you’ve no other plans. Louis used to cook at Le Pavilion. Miss Smith will give you my address if you don’t know it.”

It proved to be a duplex penthouse high over Sutton Place. Above the dismal city — in spite of calendars, not quite out of winter, not fully into spring — Ellery found himself luxuriating. A houseman named Estéban ushered him into a man’s huge habitat of feudal oak, Spanish iron, velvets, brass, copper; a place of lofty ceilings, hunter’s trophies, and weapons. While he waited for Marsh to appear Ellery strolled about taking his peculiar inventory, totting up the stock that declared the man.

There was not a trace of modernism about the apartment, such of it as he could see; it might have come out of an exclusive men’s club of the Nineties. The small private gymnasium off the living room (the door was open) displayed weights, barbells, exercycles, parallel bars, a punching bag setup, and other paraphernalia of the aging ex-athlete; that was to be expected of Marlboro Man. But there were surprises.

Half a short wall was taken up with stereophonic equipment for the high fidelity reproduction of a large collection of LPs and cassettes. There was a great deal of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, he noted, struck by the romanticism he had not associated with Marsh. The hi-fi was playing “Prince Gremin’s Air” from Eugen Onegin; Ellery recognized the Russian-singing basso as Chaliapin, whose great masculine voice he often sought for his own reassurance.

A leaded-glass bookstack enchanted him. It contained rare American, French, and British editions of Melville, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Henry James, Proust, Wilde, Walt Whitman, Gide, and Christopher Marlowe, among many others — rank on rank of literary giants, many in first editions the sight of which made Ellery’s wallet itch. There were rare art books of enormous size illustrated with the paintings and sculptures chiefly of da Vinci and Michelangelo. A row of niches in the oak walls held busts of historical figures whom Marsh evidently admired — Socrates, Plato, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Frederick the Great, Lord Kitchener, Lawrence of Arabia, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

“I see you’re casing my treasury,” Marsh said, turning off the stereo. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but that old fellow has had me hopping all afternoon. Drink?” He had changed to a lounge suit with an open silk shirt; he wore huaraches.

“Anything but bourbon.”

“You don’t go for our native elixir?”

“I once got myself beastly drunk on it. Why do I malign the beasts? Humanly. I haven’t been able to sniff it since.”

Marsh went behind his taproom-sized bar and began with energy to make like a bartender. “You? Got drunk?”

“You make it sound like a capital crime. I’d just been extinguished by the then light of my life.”

“You? Had an affair with a girl?”

“It certainly wasn’t with a man. What do you take me for, Al?”

“Well, I don’t know. Here’s your gin on the rocks. That’s as far from bourbon and branch as you can get.” Marsh sank into a chair that dwarfed him, nuzzling a concoction of unguessable ingredients. “I’ve never thought of you as really human, Ellery. I must say I’m relieved.”

“Thank you,” Ellery said. “I envy you those first editions. I’m beginning to grasp the full advantages of wealth.”

“Amen,” Marsh said. “But you didn’t drop into my office this afternoon, or here tonight, to admire my etchings. What’s on your mind?”

“Do you recall that Saturday night in Wrightsville, Al?”

“It’s written in acid.”

“As you know, I was eavesdropping from the terrace while Johnny was delivering that spiel about his new-will intentions.”

“Yes?”

“Something I overheard him say that night has been bothering me. I’m not clear about what he meant. He remarked that his three marriages had been ‘strictly business.’ Just what did he mean by that?”

Marsh settled back with his glass and a menthol cigaret. “By the terms of his father’s will, contrary to popular belief, the Benedict fortune was left in trust and all Johnny received was three hundred thousand dollars per annum out of the income from the estate. Well, I don’t have to tell you that to a lad of Johnny’s tastes, upbringing, and habits three hundred thousand a year didn’t begin to provide for his standard of living.”

“He broke his father’s will?”

“Unbreakable. But not unshakable.” Marsh shrugged. “Johnny asked me what, if anything, could be done to raise the ante. I studied Benedict Senior’s will and found what looked like a possible loophole. More in jest than anything else I pointed it out to Johnny — a looseness of expression in one of the provisions that might yield an interpretation Mr. Benedict had never intended.”

“Sounds fascinating. What was it?”

“One clause in the will gave Johnny the sum of five million dollars out of the principal estate quote “when my son John marries’ unquote.”

Ellery laughed.

“Of course you’d see it. Johnny certainly did. “When my son John marries’ could reasonably be construed to mean ‘whenever my son John marries’ — in other words, every time he married he was entitled to collect another five million from the estate. I actually wasn’t serious when I called the wording of the clause to Johnny’s attention, and I didn’t dream he would rearrange his life to revolve around it. But that’s just what he did. He insisted on going into court with our argument about construing the ‘when’ as ‘whenever,’ and it was typical Johnny-B luck that the court upheld our interpretation. So then he launched his series of marriages, divorces, and remarriages.”

Ellery was shaking his head. “‘Strictly business’ is right. His marriages were keys to the strongbox. Another key, another haul.”

“Exactly. There was no misrepresentation to the women. They understood just why he was marrying them and just what they could expect to get out of it. I might add, Ellery, that I was completely against Johnny’s change of heart about those million-dollar settlements.” Marsh’s big hand tightened about his glass. “I suppose it’s silly of me to admit this, but the fact is I had a considerable row with Johnny about that intention of his to change from the million to the hundred-thousand-dollar settlements. I told him it would be an act of bad faith, a cop-out, really, certainly unethical, and I wanted no part in it. In the end we left it unresolved — I mean my participation in it.”

“When did this row take place?”

“On the jet coming back from England, when he first broached his plan.”

“You sounded pretty much on Johnny’s side that night, Al. Are you sure you aren’t trying to snow me?”

“I’m not snowing you. Johnny made it clear to me that last weekend in Wrightsville that, friends or no friends, if I didn’t do it for him he’d get some other lawyer to. It forced me to do some weighing and balancing. I’d known Johnny since we were teenagers — hell, I loved the guy. And I could hardly defend the ethical conduct of three girls who’d walked into a cold-blooded money deal under the guise of romance with their eyes wide open. In the end I picked Johnny, as of course he knew I would. Although I confess I’ve had qualms since.”

Ellery sipped his gin. Marsh rose to freshen his drink, whatever it was.

“All right,” Ellery said at last. “I suppose it’s easy to make value judgments in a vacuum. About this Laura everybody’s looking for, Al. You really have no notion who she might be?”

“No. I’ve begun to think — along with a great many others, I understand — that Laura existed only in Johnny’s fertile mind. Although what motive he could have had for writing an imaginary beneficiary into a will is beyond me.”

“She exists, Al. One other thing. What was the state of Johnny’s financial health around the time of his death?”

“He was ailing again. You know, Johnny was the world’s softest touch. He was a lifelong victim of his guilt for having come into so much money. He especially couldn’t turn down a friend. One of his last exploits — which is typical — was to build a catsup factory in Maryland somewhere to produce a new kind of goo for an old pal, so-called, whose wife came up with the recipe one night — you won’t believe this — in a dream. Johnny tasted it, pronounced it divine, and before he — and it — were through he sank eight hundred thousand in it, an almost total loss. Do you want a few hundred cases? We couldn’t sell any, and the last I heard Johnny was giving it away, with few takers.”

“I meant, Al, was he due for another five-million-dollar marriage deal? Could that have been his reason for intending to make this Laura number four?”

“Well, according to his own words he was going to remarry,” Marsh said dryly, “and he certainly could use the five million. Draw your own conclusion.”

“Then you believe that all that talk of his about the Laura romance being the real thing at last was a lot of self-deluding nonsense?”

Marsh shrugged again. “I wish I knew. It’s conceivable that he may have thought he was in love for the first time in his life — for all his knocking about Johnny in some ways was still an adolescent. Yes, Estéban?”

“Louis say you and guest come now,” Estéban said in considerable agitation. “Louis say you and guest no come now, he quit.”

“My God.” Marsh jumped to his feet, looking stricken. “Ellery, vite, vite!”

Louis’s dinner warranted Marsh’s haste. It opened with an Icre Negre caviar from Romania and a Stolichnaya vodka; the soup was a petite marmite, served with an 1868 Malmsey Madeira. Then Estéban brought a heavenly quenelles with sauce Nantua accompanied by an estate-bottled Montrachet, Marquis de Laguiche 1966; for the pièce Louis had prepared a delectable noisettes de veau sautées, each serving crowned with a blackish, toothsome cèpe which could only have come from a French boletus bed (the small round veal steaks, Ellery learned, had been flown in from Paris; the proper cut, according to the word as transmitted from Louis, was unobtainable in the United States and, even assuming it could be procured locally somewhere, Louis turned his culinary thumb down in advance. “He has nothing but contempt for the chefs in les États-Unis,” Marsh explained, “who substitute loin or kidney veal chops for the noisettes véritables and call them the real thing. In fact, Louis has nothing but contempt for practically everything not French.” “Forgive him, Al,” Ellery pleaded, “for at least at the range your paragon of les pots et pans knoweth precisely what he doeth”); with the noisettes came, in magnificent simplicity, garnished new potatoes, a Château Haut Brion of the 1949 vintage, and a braised Romaine salad; followed by a delicate fromage de Brie (airmailed by Fauchon) and a Château Cheval Blanc St. Emilion 1949; a Dobos Torta which decided Ellery to make Bucharest his next continental port of call; a champagne sherbet; and finally an espresso with a thirty-year-old private-stock Monnet cognac.

“This has been one of Louis’s lighter dinners, whipped up more or less on the spur,” Marsh said slyly. “Nevertheless, agréable au goût, non?”

Ellery whispered, “Vive la France!”

“It’s a question of professional pride, I guess,” Chief Newby grumbled, leaning back in his swivel chair and tonguing a fresh cigar. “Have one?”

“I’m not smoking this week,” Ellery said. “What is?”

“I’ve never had a homicide this important. I’d hate to flub it.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You don’t know what I mean, Ellery. You’ve got too blame good a statistical record. But I’m a back-country cop who all of a sudden gets hit with a big-time case, and it’s got me uptight, like the kids say. You know, I’ve been thinking.”

“You have company, Anse. What exactly about in your case?”

“We’ve been going on the assumption that the motive for Benedict’s killing ties in to the will situation and the three ex-wives.”

“Yes?”

“Maybe no.”

“Anse,” Ellery said severely, “I don’t appreciate anyone’s cryptic remarks except my own.”

“I mean, suppose the motive had nothing to do with Benedict’s wills?”

“All right. For instance?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thank you, Chief Newby. You have now joined a very select group.”

“No kid, there could be something.”

“Of course, but what?”

“You haven’t struck anything in New York?”

“We haven’t struck anything anywhere. Dad’s people have failed to turn up anything or anyone in Johnny’s life that provides a possible reason for someone to break into his Wrightsville house and kill him. And by the way, Anse, did your tech men find any trace — any at all — of a B. and E.?”

“No. It was either an inside job, like we’ve been figuring, or an outsider who got in and out without leaving a trace. Go on, Ellery.”

“Go on where? I’ve just completed my statement. Nobody. Not even a theory about anyone. For a while we fumbled around with a Vegas contract theory, possibly tied in somehow to Marcia Kemp — those boys hit on contract with no respect for caste or class, true democracy in action. Although the whole trend in their set these days is away from violence. But we drew a blank. No evidence that Johnny-B ever welshed on a betting loss, in Vegas or anywhere else for that matter, according to — believe me, Anse — highly reliable sources. We’ve turned up no involvement with the Corporation, or the Combine, or whatever the Mafia’s calling itself this month. Anyway, the pro touch is missing in this murder. Contract killers come equipped with their own working tools; they certainly don’t depend on picking up a Three Monkeys on the scene to beat their victim’s brains out.”

“Then it could have been an amateur job for a personal reason, like somebody had a grudge against him for something.”

“I told you, Anse. Nothing like that has turned up.”

“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.”

Ellery shrugged. “I have long had a convenient murderer for cases that stall. I call him, as I pull him out of my hat, The Man From Missing Forks, Iowa. Sure it could be, Anse. Anything could be. But you know and I know that most homicides are committed not out of the blue for obscure or bizarre reasons by the pop-up gent from Missing Forks, but by someone connected directly or obliquely to the victim for a reason that, to the killer at least, seems perfectly sensible, if not inevitable. The problem is to put your finger on him and/or it. So far we’ve been surveying the terrain for all the possibles, with no luck. What you do is, you keep plugging away with the hope that sooner or later, preferably sooner, your luck is going to change.”

“So it still may come down to those three women and the will,” Newby grunted, emerging from his cloud.

“You don’t sound satisfied.”

“With that theory? It’s too — now don’t laugh, Ellery! — too damned easy.”

“Who’s laughing?”

“You sure you didn’t run up here on something you’re keeping back from me?”

“Anse,” Ellery said, and rose. “May I have the key now?”

“Then why do you want to go back to Benedict’s place?”

“You’re not the only one with uneasy feelings. The key, Anse?”

“If you don’t mind,” the chief said, rising also, “I think I’ll keep you company.”

Newby drove Ellery over to the Benedict property in his 1967 unmarked Dodge (to avoid notice, he claimed); he unlocked the front door and waved Ellery in before him, following on the visitor’s heels. Ellery galloped upstairs and into Johnny-B’s bedroom as if he expected to be greeted there by a miracle, or the answer, which his whole air announced would have been the same thing.

“You act like you forgot something, Ellery,” the Wrightsville police chief said. “What?”

“I wish I could tell you.” He was looking about the room as if he had never laid eyes on it.

“You mean you won’t tell me?” Newby cried.

“I mean I don’t know.”

“Damn it, stop answering me in riddles!” the exasperated man said. “You remind me of that Sam Lloyd puzzle book my mama used to keep in her parlor.”

“I’m not being coy, Anse. I really don’t know. It’s simply a feeling, like yours that the three women and the will as an answer is too easy.”

“But what kind of a feeling is it?”

“I’ve had it before,” Ellery said slowly, touring the room. “Often on a case, in fact.” He avoided the chalked outline of Benedict’s body on the floor. “A feeling that I’ve missed something.”

“Missed something?” Newby swung about suddenly as if he had heard a door creak open. “What?”

“That,” Ellery intoned, “is the question. What? I’ve keel-hauled my brain, couldn’t come up with it, and decided that a return to the scene might be what the doctor ordered.” He paused at the bed. “Here?” Glanced at the nightstand. “There?” Into the clothes closet. “There?” At the windows. Into the bathroom.

“You’re putting me on,” Newby muttered. “By God, you’ve got me creepier than a kid in a haunted house!”

“I wish it were that ordinary,” Ellery said with a sigh. “No, Anse, it’s not a put-on, it’s a hangup. There’s something here, something I saw — something I’m seeing, damn it all! — and for the life of me I can’t latch onto it.” He addressed the chalk outline on the floor. “Well, it was a long shot, Johnny, and like most long shots it didn’t come in.” He nodded disgustedly at Newby. “I’m through here, Anse, if you are.”

The first break in the case came, as breaks usually do, out of the drudgery of plodding police work.

The concentration of effort on the part of Inspector Queen’s staff had been on the three ex-wives, notwithstanding Chief Newby’s failure of enthusiasm. Several interesting reports on the women noted that, with the cutoff on Benedict’s death of their $1000 weekly incomes, and with their cash settlements held up if not gone forever by the holograph will, two of them at least were in financial difficulties. Audrey Weston and Marcia Kemp had been living up to their alimony incomes. (Alice Tierney, Newby reported, had on the contrary been living frugally in frugal Wrightsville and had saved a considerable sum, although the settlement outlook had turned her sullen and uncommunicative.) In fact, both the blonde and the redhead had been compelled to go back to work, if any. The Weston girl was making the rounds off-Broadway, so far without success; the ex-Vegas chorine was hawking the Manhattan nightclubs through her agent for a “starring” turn somewhere. But no one was snapping up the Kemp girl, either. Apparently times had changed. The notoriety they had been enjoying as a result of the Wrightsville murder was no longer the kind of open-sesame that used to break down golden doors in the days of the New York Mirror.

The discovery about Marcia Kemp turned up during the routine investigation of her present and past, and the development appeared significant.

Ellery learned about it on Sunday, April 19. On arising that morning he had found himself alone in the Queen apartment, and a note from his father saying that the Inspector had had to go down to Centre Street and suggesting that Ellery follow. Which he did so precipitously that he did not even stop for his cherished Sunday breakfast of Nova Scotia salmon, sweet butter and cream cheese, cum generous slice of sweet Spanish onion, all on toasted bagel and accompanied by freshly brewed coffee in copious quantity.

He found Sergeant Velie with the Inspector.

“Tell him, Velie,” the Inspector said.

“I think we got something, Maestro,” the very large sergeant said. “Ever hear of Bernie Faulks?”

“No.”

“He’s a punk in the rackets, a small wheel the pigeons call The Fox, or Foxy, because he’s got a genius for beating the rap. He’s been collared I don’t know how many times on charges that didn’t stick — armed robbery, B. and E., A.D.W., burglary, you name it; his one big rap, a charge of murder during an attempted felony — armed holdup — he beat when he was acquitted through the failure of a key witness to come through for the D.A. This shtunk Faulks is a miracle man. He’s never served a day behind bars.”

“What’s the point, Velie?” Ellery asked. “I passed up my lox and bagel for this.”

“The point is,” Sergeant Velie said, “we been digging into Marcia Kemp like we had advance information, which we didn’t, and by God we struck oil. You know what, Maestro?”

“Stop milking it, Velie,” the Inspector said; he looked tired.

“No,” Ellery said, “what?”

“The Kemp babe and Foxy Faulks — they’re married.”

“I see,” Ellery said, and he sat down in the cracked black leather armchair he had forbidden his father to throw out. “Since when?”

“I’m way ahead of you,” his father said. “I’d like nothing better than to be able to hold her on a charge of bigamy, but the fact is she didn’t marry Faulks till after the divorce from Benedict.”

“How accurate is your information, Velie?”

“We got a copy of the marriage license.”

“Well.” Ellery pulled his nose, by which the Inspector knew he was cerebrating furiously. “That does put a new light on Miss Kemp. And raises all sorts of interesting questions about Mr. Faulks. When can the happy couple be interrogated?”

“I wanted them here today,” the Inspector said, “but Foxy is out of town. He’ll be back late tonight, you sure, Velie?”

“That’s what my source says,” the sergeant said, adding less grandly, “My prize pidge.”

“Well, I want Mr. and Mrs. Foxy Faulks here in my office at nine on the nose tomorrow morning.”

At nine-five Monday morning Ellery strolled into his father’s office to find the Inspector, Sergeant Velie (looking vindicated), Marsh (in his capacity of executor for the Benedict estate), an edgy Marcia Kemp (in a purple minidress and mod hat that emphasized her Amazonian proportions), and a man Ellery naturally took to be Bernie the Fox Faulks. Faulks was younger than Ellery had expected him to be, or he had the knack of looking younger; his was the sort of baby face that maintains its bloom into the fifties, then sags into old age overnight. He was undeniably handsome; Ellery thought it quite reasonable that a girl of Marcia’s background and outlook should have fallen for him. The pretty hood reminded him of a young Rock Hudson — tall, lean, and on the boyish-faced side. He was just the least bit overdressed.

“You know everybody here but Faulks,” Inspector Queen said. “Foxy, this is my son Ellery. In case you’re interested.”

“Oh, yes, it’s a great pleasure, I’m sure, Mr. Queen.” Foxy clearly decided not to offer his hand for fear of a rebuff. He had a dark, intimate voice suitable for a sex movie. For the next few minutes he kept sneaking glances at the civilian Queen.

“We were just discussing Miss Kemp’s marriage to Mr. Faulks,” the Inspector said, settling back in his aged swivel chair. “You notice, Ellery, I use her maiden name. She prefers it that way. Don’t you, Mrs. Faulks — I mean, Miss Kemp?”

“It’s usual in show business,” the redhead said. The flush on her face seemed too deep for street makeup. “But I still don’t get... Bern, why don’t you say something?”

“Yeah, sweetie.” Her husband shifted his feet; he had refused a chair, as if to be better prepared for flight. “Yeah, Inspector. We don’t understand—”

“Why I asked you two down here?” The Inspector showed his dentures like the Big Bad Wolf. “For one thing, Mrs. Faulks, how come you didn’t tell Chief Newby when he was questioning you up in Wrightsville that you were married again? You’d have saved us the trouble of digging the information out for ourselves.”

“I didn’t think it had anything to do with... well, Johnny and all,” the big showgirl burbled.

“No? Mr. Marsh,” the Inspector said, turning his smile on the attorney, “has Mrs. Faulks — as Marcia Kemp — been receiving a thousand dollars a week from Mr. Benedict since their divorce, and if so has she been cashing or depositing the checks, according to your records?”

“She certainly has.” Marsh raised his attaché case. “I have every canceled voucher that went through Miss Kemp’s bank right here — each made out to ‘Marcia Kemp’ and endorsed ‘Marcia Kemp’ in her verifiable handwriting.”

“These canceled vouchers cover the whole period since the date of her undisclosed marriage to Faulks?”

“Yes. Up to and including the week of Johnny’s death.”

“Did she ever notify Benedict, or you as Benedict’s lawyer, that she was remarrying or had remarried and that therefore under the terms of her agreement with Benedict the thousand-dollar weekly checks should stop, since she was no longer legally entitled to them?”

“She did not.”

“How about that, Mrs. Faulks? That constitutes fraudulent acceptance in my book. I think the District Attorney’s office is going to see it the same way, if Mr. Marsh decides to press charges on behalf of the Benedict estate.”

“If I may put in a word?” Faulks said elegantly, and as if he were a mere bystander. Marcia sent him a long, green, dangerous look. “I never saw that agreement, so of course I had no way of knowing that Marcia’s accepting the grand per week was illegal—”

Marcia made the very lightest choking noise.

“—but you got to understand, Inspector, my wife doesn’t know about such things, she can’t hope to cope — hope to cope! I’m a poet and don’t know it! — with a bigshot mouthpiece, I mean lawyer, like Mr. Marsh; she’s got no head for the smart stuff at all, she’d probably forgotten all about that clause, like you do when Mr. Right comes along — hey, baby?” He fondled her neck, smiling down. She nodded, and his hand found itself fondling the atmosphere.

“You’ve got an understanding husband, Mrs. Faulks,” the Inspector said approvingly. “But I think it would be easier on you if you talked for yourself. You’ll notice there’s no stenographer present, none of this is being taped, and you haven’t been charged formally with any crime. Our main interest is the Benedict murder; and while I’m not making promises, if it turns out this remarriage of yours had nothing to do with the homicide you’ll probably be able to work something out about that money. What’s your feeling, Mr. Marsh?”

“Of course I can’t promise anything, either. I certainly can’t commit the estate to overlooking Mrs. Faulks’s having collected money from my late client under circumstances that look dangerously like fraud. But it’s true, Inspector, that my chief concern is the murder, too. Cooperation on Mrs. Faulks’s part will naturally influence my attitude.”

“Look, bud, who’s bulling who?” Marcia demanded bitterly. “What are you going to do, Al, take it out of me in blood a pint at a time? I’m dead busted and I haven’t got a job. My husband’s broke, too. So I couldn’t pay that money back if I wanted to. Sure, you can haul me up on criminal charges, Inspector, and the way things have been going for me you know what? I wouldn’t give a hairy hoot in hell if you did. It’s also a rap your D.A. might find it tough to make stick in court. Bern here knows some real sharpie lawyers.”

“Speaking of Bern here,” Ellery said from the wall he was supporting at the rear of the office, “where did you happen to be, Bern, on the night of Saturday — Sunday, March twenty-eight — twenty-nine?”

“It’s a funny thing you should ask that,” Marcia’s husband said in his sexy voice. “It so happens I can answer that quick like a bunny, which ain’t — isn’t such an easy shmear, as I don’t have to tell you gentlemen. On the night of Saturday — Sunday, March twenty-eight — twenty-nine, it so happens I was one of six fellas picked up in a raid on a little private game we were engaging in in a hotel room off Times Square. I don’t know what those meathead cops were thinking of, making a big deal out of a friendly poker session, just passing the time, you understand, like the boys do on Saturday night, have a few beers, a couple pastrami sandwiches—”

“I’m not interested in the menu,” Inspector Queen snarled; he was glaring at Sergeant Velie, who was attempting the difficult feat of making himself look like a dwarf for having failed to check out the Fox’s alibi beforehand. “What precinct did you wind up in?”

“I don’t know the number. It’s the one in the West Forties.”

“You don’t know the number. Faulks, you know the numbers of the Manhattan precincts better than I do — you’ve spent half your life in them! Velie, what are you waiting for?” Sergeant Velie nodded hastily and jumped out of the office. “Sergeant Velie’s gone to do a little checking. You don’t mind waiting?”

Dad, dad, Ellery said in his head, as an ironist you’re still pounding a beat. It was a lost cause, he saw, and saw that the Inspector saw it, too. Mr. Faulks was breathing without strain, as confident of the outcome of the sergeant’s telephone call as a roulette dealer presiding over a fixed wheel. True, there was a trace of anxiety on his wife’s face; Faulks even patted her hand, which was larger than his; but this could be accounted for by a certain lack of communication between the recently marrieds. Once, when Marcia said something to him in a low voice, he made a fist and tapped her affectionately on the chin.

When the sergeant returned to whisper into the Inspector’s ear, Ellery detected the twitch in his father’s mustache and saw his fears confirmed: the mustache twitch was an unfailing sign of inspectorial disappointment.

“Okay, Foxy, you can take off with the missus.” Their speedy crossing to the Inspector’s door was a thing of antelope grace. “Oh, just one thing,” the Inspector said to the antelopes. “I don’t want either of you even going over to Brooklyn without checking with my office first.”

“He was picked up that night as he claims?” Ellery asked when the pair fled.

“Well, yes,” Sergeant Velie said, trying to pass the episode off as immaterial. “There’d been a lot of heat from upstairs about Times Square gambling when that Congressman who’s always kicking up a storm sounded off for the TV — seems one of his campaign contributors got rooked in a crooked crap game and yelled for mama — so the word came while you were on vacation, Inspector, to crack down, which the Gambling Squad did. That’s how come Foxy got caught in that hotel. A stool gave the tip-off, but by the time the Squad got there the lookout had flashed the signal and the boys broke in to find Foxy and his lodge brothers playing a hot game of penny ante. The lookout must have been their bagman, too, because the detectives didn’t find any big bills on the players or the premises. Anyway, the six were held for a couple hours at the station house and let go. That included Foxy Faulks. He was at the precinct between midnight about and two A.M. He couldn’t have got to Wrightsville by three-o-three without a spaceship.”

“So there goes our break,” Inspector Queen said glumly. “Another blasted nothing. Just the same, Velie, assign two men to keep their eyes on Faulks especially. I don’t like the smell of him — he’s dangerous. Ellery, where you going?”

“For a walk,” Ellery said. “I’ll get more action in the street than I’m getting here.”

“Who conned who into this, and whose friend got popped?” his father groused. “Go take your walk, and if you’re mugged in some alley don’t come crying to me!”

“You sure about this, Barl?” Newby asked, tapping the report with a skeptical forefinger.

“You know old Hunker,” Officer Barlowe said. “I do believe he’s been sneaking out there, Chief. Keeping an eye on the place. You hire Morris, you’ve bought yourself Old Faithful. If he says he seen lights in the house late at night, I buy it.”

“Anything missing?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Then why would anyone pussyfoot around in there in the middle of the night?”

Officer Barlowe, who was new to the Wrightsville force, decided that this was a rhetorical question and consequently kept his mouth shut.

“I’d better take a run out there myself,” Newby decided. “Meantime, Barl, you keep an eye peeled on that place, and pass the word along.”

The next day the chief wrote to Inspector Queen: “Morris Hunker reported seeing lights on in the Benedict main house Monday night, April 20, past midnight. The old man claims he investigated — he would! — but by the time he got into the house the lights had been turned off and he could not find anyone there. I then went over the premises personally and found no evidence that anything had been taken or even disturbed. Whoever it was was either being extra-careful or old Hunker imagined the whole thing; he is not as quick-minded as he used to be. I thought, though, I had better let you and Ellery know about this.”

“She wants to see me,” Al Marsh said over the telephone. “Naturally, I’m not going to see her alone. Can you be present, Inspector Queen?”

“Hold on a minute,” the Inspector said. “Ellery, Audrey Weston has called Marsh for an appointment. Says she has something important to tell him concerning the Benedict estate. Do you want to sit in?”

“Tallulah Revisited?” Ellery exclaimed. “I certainly do.”

“Ellery will come, too,” the Inspector said into his phone. “You figuring on anyone else, Mr. Marsh?”

“Leslie Carpenter. If it concerns the estate it concerns her.”

“When’s this for?”

“Wednesday at two thirty, my office.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Well be there.” The Inspector hung up. “I wonder what the blonde’s got up her sleeve.”

“I’m glad somebody has something up something,” Ellery said. “It’s being a most unsatisfactory case.”

Marsh’s office was off Park Row, in an old set of buildings that reeked of musty estates and quill pens.

On his original visit, Ellery had very nearly expected to see old gentlemen in Prince Alberts stalking along the corridors, and bewhiskered clerks in leather cuff protectors and green eye-shades toiling away on high stools in Marsh’s office. Instead, he had found sharp-looking young mods in a stainless-steel interior, the latest indirect lighting, and a strictly functional office. Miss Smith, of course, was for all seasons.

“They’re in Mr. Marsh’s office waiting for you, Mr. Queen,” she said, sniffing twice in the course of the sentence.

Mr. Queen’s only reference to Manhattan’s constipated traffic was by indirection. “How did they get here on time,” he asked, “by B-52?”, and allowed himself to be ushered into Al Marsh’s private office. Miss Smith immediately sat down in a corner of the room, crossed her formidable legs, and opened a notebook.

Ellery found one stranger in the assemblage, a man in his forties with eyes like steak knives and a complexion resembling barbecued beef, in the general getup of an habitué of the Playboy Club. This man glanced accusingly at his wristwatch as Ellery entered, by which Ellery knew that he was present in the interests of Audrey Weston, at whose taut side he stood.

“I believe the only one you don’t know is this gentleman, Ellery,” Marsh said. “Ellery Queen, Sanford Effing, representing Miss Weston.”

Ellery was about to offer his hand when Audrey’s attorney said, staccato, “Can we get down to it?”

Marsh waved Ellery to a chair and reseated himself, to light one of his menthol cigarets. “All right, Mr. Effing. You do that.”

Ellery began to pay the strictest attention after a smile at little Leslie Carpenter and a nod to his father.

“From what Miss Weston’s told me about John Benedict’s will,” the lawyer said, “there’s a rather queer phrasing of a key clause. I’d like you to quote me the exact language, Mr. Marsh, of the clause that refers to this Laura.”

Marsh opened the top drawer of his steel desk and withdrew a Xerox copy of the Benedict holograph will. He handed it to Effing.

“Your recollection was correct, Miss Weston,” Effing said with satisfaction. “Benedict left his residuary estate quote ‘to Laura and any children’ unquote. Mr. Marsh, the phrase ‘and any children’ — what exactly do you take that to mean?”

“Any children by Laura,” Marsh said.

“Ah, but it doesn’t say that, does it?”

“What do you mean?” Marsh said, startled.

“I mean it doesn’t say that, period. If Benedict had meant ‘any children by Laura’ it’s our perfectly reasonable contention that he would have written ‘any children by Laura.’”

“But that’s nonsense,” Marsh protested. “What other children could Johnny have been referring to but children presumably resulting from his contemplated marriage to this Laura?”

“To any children,” and Effing bared his large and shiny teeth, “that Benedict may have fathered by any mother whatsoever.”

“We know of no such children,” Marsh said firmly, but beginning to look doubtful.

“You’re going to find out about one of them, Mr. Marsh, in three seconds. Miss Weston, tell these people what you told me.”

“I have a child,” the blonde girl said, speaking for the first time. The stagey voice quivered a little. “Johnny’s child.” She had been sitting with hands clasped and head lowered, but at this statement she made fists and looked up defiantly, her colorless eyes taking on a gray sparkle, like jellyfish suddenly touched by the sun. “And you don’t have to look at me, Al, as if I were a monster from outer space! It’s the truth.”

“Your unsupported statement to that effect means less than nothing to me as a lawyer, as Effing will tell you,” Marsh said sharply. “For a claim as important as this, the surrogate is going to demand indisputable proof. And even if you can prove your allegation, in view of the rest of that paragraph in the will I’m not at all sure your interpretation would stand up in court. As far as my considerable knowledge goes — speaking not only as John Benedict’s attorney but as his close friend as well — he never so much as hinted to me that he was the father of a child by you.”

“He didn’t know about it,” Audrey said. “He died not knowing. Besides, Davy was born after the divorce.”

“Johnny didn’t notice you were pregnant?”

“We separated before it showed.”

“You never notified him you were carrying his child?”

“Davy was conceived the last time Johnny and I were intimate,” Audrey said. “Right after that we separated and he divorced me. I had my pride, Al, and — okay — I wanted revenge, too. I was goddam mad at the way he treated me, tossing me out of his life like I was — like I was a pair of old shoes! I wanted to be able to tell him later in his life — when he wasn’t a cocky stud any more — tell him that all these years he’d had a son he didn’t know a thing about... and wasn’t going to.”

“Indeed, Mr. Congreve, Heav’n has no rage, and so forth,” Ellery muttered; but nobody heard him.

“Now, of course,” Effing said smoothly, “with the father dead, the situation is quite different. Why should the son of the father be denied his birthright, and all that jazz? I don’t have to go through the routine, Marsh. You know how surrogates feel about the rights of infants. Regular old mammy-tigers, they are. I’d say Miss Carpenter’s got something to worry about.”

Ellery glanced at Leslie, but aside from a certain pallor she seemed serene.

“Tell us more about this child,” Inspector Queen said abruptly. “What’s his full name? When and where was he born? Do you have custody of him? If not, where and with whom is he living? That’s for openers.”

“Hold it, Miss Weston,” Effing said, making like a traffic cop. “I don’t think I’m going to let my client answer those questions right now, Inspector. I’ll merely state for the record that the boy is known as Davy Wilkinson, Wilkinson being my client’s legal maiden name, Arlene Wilkinson — she took ‘Audrey Weston’ as her stage name—”

“Johnny didn’t know that, either,” Marsh said. “How come, Audrey?”

“He never asked me.” Her hands were back in her lap and her blonde head was lowered again.

Marsh pursed his lips.

“Miss Weston felt she couldn’t adequately bring up her child and at the same time pursue a theatrical career, too,” Effing went on. “So she gave the baby out for adoption immediately — in fact, the arrangements were settled before the birth — but she knows where Davy is and she can produce him on reasonable notice when necessary. The people who adopted him are certainly as interested in securing his legal rights and insuring his future as the natural mother is.”

“The fact that she can produce the child,” Marsh said, “is a far cry from proving Benedict was its father.”

“Then you’re going to fight this?” Effing asked with an unpleasant smile.

“Fight? You have a peculiar idea of an attorney’s responsibilities. I have an estate to protect. Anyway, in the long run it’s the surrogate you’re going to have to satisfy. So worry about impressing him, Effing, not me. I’ll have my secretary send you a transcript of this meeting.”

“Don’t bother.” Sanford Effing unbuttoned the three buttons of his sharp suit coat. A little black box hung there. “I’ve recorded the entire conversation.”

When Audrey and her lawyer were gone, Marsh relaxed. “Don’t worry about this, Leslie. I don’t see how they can prove the boy is Johnny’s especially now that she’s admitted before witnesses that she never told Johnny about this Davy. That’s why I was careful to pinpoint that part of her testimony. The will is perfectly clear about Johnny’s intentions: if he was not married to Laura at the time of his death, his estate was to go to you, Leslie, period. Unless this Laura comes forward with proof of a marriage to Johnny, which seems very unlikely now, it’s my opinion you’re in the clear.”

“That’s one of the difficulties a mere layman runs into,” Leslie said, “dealing with lawyers.”

“What is?”

“Trying to get a meeting of minds that isn’t all fouled up in quidnuncs and quiddities, or whatever your jabberwocky is. I’m not the least bit interested in the law of this, Al. If I’m convinced the Weston woman had a child by Johnny, as far as I’m concerned that’s it. In my lawbook the boy would be entitled to his father’s estate, not me. It’s true I’ve been making plans for the money — a certain project in East Harlem I had my heart specially set on — but I’m not going to break down and boohoo about it. I’ve been churchmouse poor and largely disappointed all my life, so I can put all this down to a dream and go back to washing out my nylons and hanging them up to dry on the shower rail. Nice seeing you again, Inspector, Mr. Queen. And Miss Smith. Just let me know how it all comes out, Al.”

And with a smile Leslie left.

“Now there is a gal,” Inspector Queen said “—if I were, say, thirty years younger—”

“Almost too good to be true,” Ellery fretted. When his father said, “What did you say, son?”, he shook his head, said, “Nothing of importance,” and began to fumble with his pipe and the tobacco discovery he had just made by mail in a Vermont country store. Everybody knew there was no particular harm in smoking a mild pipe tobacco if you didn’t inhale. He got the briar fired up and drew a deep lungful of the aromatic smoke.

“That’s all, Miss Smith, thank you,” Marsh was saying; and Miss Smith stalked past the Queens to the office door. Ellery thought he detected a certain twitch of her hip as she passed him. “You know, there’s an irony in this development. Benedict Senior’s will, as I told you, contained an ambiguity that allowed Johnny to draw another five million every time he contracted a new marriage. Now Johnny’s will — I wish people would take lawyers’ advice about not trying to write their own wills! — also contains an ambiguity he didn’t intend... I wonder about this Davy.”

“We can be all-fired certain Audrey Weston has a kid farmed out somewhere,” the Inspector said in the quaint slang of his youth. “She’d have to be an idiot to try to pull a stunt like this based on nothing but hot air. And Effing doesn’t strike me as the kind of lawyer to take on a tough will case that could drag along in the courts for years without something good and solid behind it. If Effing’s in on it, there’s a child, all right. But that the child was Benedict’s, that Audrey never told him about it...” The old man shook his head. “I don’t know how this claim ties in, Mr. Marsh, if it ties in at all, but one thing’s for sure: we have to start with the fact. How do you plan to establish that the boy is or isn’t Benedict’s son?”

“I don’t have to establish either,” Marsh said. “Proving the child is Johnny’s is Effing’s problem.”

“Effing,” Ellery repeated with distaste. He unfolded from the chair. “Un type, definitely. What — or who — next? Coming, dad?”

In these days of universal holdups, muggings, assaults, rapes, homicides, and other public indecencies it is a seldom-noticed fact of urban life that there is one class of citizen for whom late-night strolls in little-frequented places of the city hold no terrors; to the contrary, he positively looks forward to his midnight meander in the park.

And who is this hero, this paragon of courage? Some holder of the black belt? A just-returned Congressional Medal of Honor winner, schooled to the wiliest tricks of Charlie? Alas, no. He is the robber, mugger, assailant, rapist, or man-slaughterer himself, who, like the vampire bat hanging in its cave, finds warmth and security where simpler creatures feel a shivering fear.

Which explains why, in an early hour of Friday, April 24 — “estimated as on or about 2:00 A.M.,” was the way a detective noted it later in his report — Bernie Faulks Walked into Central Park (East) by the Fifth Avenue entrance immediately south of the Museum of Art, and made his way with confidence to a certain clump of bushes behind the building, where he settled himself in the tallest one and at once merged with the shrubbery and the night.

If Marcia Kemp’s husband felt any fears, they were certainly not of the dark or of nightmarish things like switchblades at his throat; that side of the street had been thoroughly explored territory to him since his boyhood.

Still, there was tension in the way he stood and waited.

The moon was well down in the overcast sky; there was little light in the shadow of the museum; the air insinuated a sneaky chill.

Faulks wore no topcoat. He began to shiver.

And wait.

He shivered and waited for what seemed to him an hour. It was really ten minutes later that he saw something take shape on the lamplit walk he was watching. It held its form for a moment, then glided into the shadow of the museum and headed his way. Faulks stood quite still now.

“You there?” its voice whispered.

The tension left him at once. “You bring the bread?”

“Yes. Where are you? It’s so dark—”

Faulks stepped unhesitatingly out of his bush. “Give it to me.”

He extended his hand.

There are soundless shrieks in the darkness of such moments, a dread implosion of more than mortal swiftness, that inform and alarm. Faulks experienced these even as the newcomer did indeed give it to him — a bulbous envelope, and immediately something else. For the Fox made as if to turn and run.

But he was too late, the knife had already sunk into his belly, blade up.

Faulks groaned, his knees collapsed.

The knifer held the weapon steady as the dying man fell. The weight of his body helped it slice down on the blade.

With the other hand Faulks’s assailant took back the envelope.

The knife landed almost carelessly on the body.

The murderer of Marcia’s husband stripped off rubber gloves, thrust gloves and envelope deeply away, then fled in a stroll northward toward an exit different from the place of entry... to a hurrisome eye just another foolhardy New Yorker defying the statistics of Central Park’s nighttime crime.

“Ellery? I’m over here.”

Ellery went through the police line, blinking in the spotlights, to where his father was talking to a uniformed man. The man saluted and left to join the group of technicians, scooter men, and other officers around the body.

“That was the Park patrolman who found the body,” the Inspector said. “You took your time getting here.”

“I’m not exactly full of zap at four o’clock in the morning. Anything?”

“Not yet.” And the Inspector went into a song and dance — a song of profanity and a dance of rage — and it was as if he had been saving it all up for his son’s arrival, preferring the thickness of blood to the thin edge of bureaucratic protocol. “Somebody’s going to catch it for this! I gave orders Bernie Faulks was to be staked out around the clock!”

“How did he get away from his tail, and when?”

“Who knows when if we don’t know how? Probably over the roofs of next-door apartment buildings. Velie had men posted back and front. Roof — nobody. I’ll have his hide!”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always beefing about the manpower shortage in your department?” Ellery said. “Velie’s too old a hand to slip up on a routine thing like that unless he simply had no one to assign to the roof.”

The Inspector confided in his mustache. So all right. That was the case. Helping that cow-pasture chief out. And at half-rations personnelwise. The truth was — he almost said it in audible accusation — it was all Ellery’s fault. For dragging him up to Wrightsville in the first place.

“What?” the Inspector said.

“I said,” Ellery repeated, “that this could be a coincidence.”

“How’s that again?”

“Faulks was one of the bad guys from puberty. Who knows what enemies he’s made? I’m betting you’ll find them crawling back under every second rock. My point is, dad, his murder tonight could have nothing to do with the Benedict case.”

“That’s right.”

“But you don’t buy it.”

“That’s right,” the Inspector said again. “Any more than you.”

There was a flurry of sorts just beyond the lighted area. The bulk of Sergeant Velie emerged suddenly into the glare with his right hand decorously anchored on Marcia Kemp Faulks’s left elbow. She made the sergeant look like a normal-sized man.

The Inspector hurried over, followed at a 4 A.M. pace by Ellery.

“Has Sergeant Velie told you what’s happened, Mrs. Faulks?”

“Just that Bern is dead.” She was inner-directed rather than shattered by grief, Ellery thought; or she was in shock. He did not think she was in shock. She had got into wide-bottomed slacks and a nautical shirt and thrown a short leather coat over her shoulders. She had not stopped to make up. There were traces of cream on her cheeks and a towel was wrapped turban-fashion about her head. She was trying not to look over toward the group of officers. “How did it happen, Inspector Queen?”

“He was knifed.”

“Knifed.” The redhead blinked. “Murdered?... Murdered.”

“It could be hara-kiri,” the Inspector said flatly. “If he was Japanese, that is. Yes, Mrs. Faulks, murdered, with a switchblade his killer had the nerve to drop on the body, it’s so common and untraceable. And you can bet without fingerprints. Are you up to identifying your husband?”

“Yes.” It was almost as if Marcia had said, Of course, what a silly question.

They walked over to the group — detectives from Homicide, Manhattan North, the Park precinct — the officers stepped back, and the widow looked down at her late spouse without hesitation or fear or anguish or revulsion or anything else visibly human, so far as Ellery and his father could determine. Perhaps it was because she was emotionally disciplined, or the victim was not gruesome. The doctor from the Medical Examiner’s office, who was off to one side packing up, had covered everything but the head, and he had closed the eyes and mouth after the photographer took his pictures.

“That’s Bern, that’s my husband,” Marcia said, and did not turn immediately away, which was odd, because they almost always did — one look and let me out — but not Marcia Kemp, apparently she was made of crushed rock; she looked down at him for a full thirty seconds more, almost with curiosity, then turned abruptly and finally away. “Do I go now, Inspector Queen?”

“Are you up to answering a couple of questions, Mrs. Faulks?” he asked, very kindly.

“Not really. I’m pooped, if you don’t mind.”

“Just a couple.”

She shrugged.

“When did you see your husband last?”

“We had dinner around seven thirty, eight o’clock. At home. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went right to bed—”

“Oh? Didn’t have to call a doctor?”

“It isn’t that kind of unwell, Inspector. I get clobbered once a month.”

“So you didn’t see him again?”

“That’s right. I dropped off to sleep. I’d taken a pill.”

“Did you happen to hear him leave your apartment?”

“No.”

“So you have no idea what time he left?”

“No. Please, Inspector. That’s more than a couple, and I’ve got cramps.”

“Just a couple more, and you’re through. Did Bern say anything to you last night about having to meet somebody, or having to go out, anything like that?”

“No.”

“Was he in trouble of some kind?”

“I don’t know. Bern was pretty uptight about his affairs.”

“Even with you?”

“Especially with me. He says to me — he used to say to me — the less you know the less you’ll worry.”

Ellery said, “Who wanted to kill him, Marcia?”

She had forgotten he was there, or perhaps she had not known. It was he rather than his question that startled her. “Ellery. I don’t know of anybody. I really don’t.”

“Could it be he welshed on a gambling debt?” the Inspector suggested. “Or got in bad some other way with one or another of his playmates?”

She shook her head. “I really don’t.”

“Do you have any idea why he was knifed? Any at all?”

“None at all.”

“Okay, Mrs. Faulks. Velie, take her home — just a minute. Doc?” He took Dr. Prouty’s brisk young staff doctor aside. Ellery strolled along. “What’s the verdict?”

“I set the time of death on a prelim estimate as around two A.M., give or take a half hour.”

“Any reason to suspect the knifing might not have been the cause of death?”

“Didn’t you see that belly of his?” the young man from the M.E.’s office said. “Though of course we’ll find out for sure on the p.m.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not a thing. Anything here?”

“Not so far. If you ask me, Doc, we won’t find so much as a bruised blade of grass. An operator cool enough to leave the sticker on the body for us isn’t going to lose his monogrammed cigaret case on his way out.”

“Okay, Inspector?” asked Sergeant Velie.

The Inspector nodded, and Velie marched the big widow away. The young doctor waved and trudged off.

Ellery said, “She lied in her capped teeth.”

“Your manly intuition?” his father inquired.

“I’m the son of my old man. You didn’t believe her, either.”

“You said it, I didn’t. She knows something, Ellery.”

“We’re communicating again after a gap in the generations. What led you to your conclusion, Inspector Queen?”

“Marcia’s not the type gal to know so little about her hubby’s affairs. She worked Vegas a long time. She knows these bums, and she’d make mighty sure she kept tabs on Foxy.”

“Exactly my reasoning. The only puzzle about Marcia is why she married him in the first place.” Ellery looked after the departed couple. “Could love possibly go so far?”

“I wouldn’t know. Or if I ever did I’ve forgotten.”

“I’d keep her on a short leash, dad.”

“Velie will. We’ll know everything she does and everybody she says hello to.”

“How about Audrey? Alice? Marsh?”

“They’ll be checked right off.” The Inspector shivered. “I’m cold and tired, son. Getting old.”

“He had two hours’ sleep and he’s cold and tired,” Ellery proclaimed to Central Park. “How decrepit can you get? Come on, grandpa, I’ll take you home and tuck you into bed.”

“With a toddy,” his father said, hopefully.

“With a toddy.”

By Friday morning the autopsy report was in from the Medical Examiner’s office, and by Friday evening the little standing army of suspects had been checked off. Audrey Weston had landed a part in an off-Broadway production the previous week — it was tentatively called A, B, C, D, E, F orGy — and she had been home alone Thursday night, she said, hard at work studying her five sides. No confirmation. Alice Tierney, it turned out, had been in New York, not Wrightsville. She had driven down on Thursday and registered at a midtown hotel; she was in Manhattan, she said, to see Al Marsh on a matter connected with Johnny-B, an estate matter. “It’s a long drive and I was tuckered out,” the report quoted Miss Tierney. “So I went to bed very early.” She had attempted to reach Marsh by telephone before turning in, she stated, but had been unsuccessful. (There was a record of her call at the hotel, and it was also confirmed by Estéban.) Marsh had gone out Thursday evening for a big night on the town, he said (he was in bad shape, the report said); his date was a stunning showgirl whose career had been launched in the centerfold of Playboy and who had zoomed from there into millionaire dates; however, in the course of their rounds she had ditched him for a certain Italian movie director who had muscled in on Marsh at a notorious disco — the details were in the Friday morning newspapers, featuring the director with his ample bottom ensconced in a bass drum, throwing up from a right to the solar plexus — after which Marsh had proceeded to go solo pub-crawling. Subsequent details were vague in his memory. Estéban had poured him into bed about 3:30 A.M. An attempt to log his course through the bars of after-midnight Manhattan proved spotty and unsatisfactory.

“It’s just like in one of your books,” Inspector Queen grumbled. “You’d think once one of the suspects would have an alibi that could be proved and eliminate her. Or him, damn it. But no, Foxy Faulks was knifed between one thirty and two thirty, and not one of the three can prove where they were—”

“He was,” Ellery corrected automatically.

“—so we’re back where we started from. Maybe you were right, Ellery.”

“I was? About what? I can’t think of anything recently.”

“About Faulks’s murder having nothing to do with the Benedict case.”

“Nonsense.”

“You brought it up yourself!”

“One has to cover everything,” Ellery said stiffly, and he went back to pulling his nose. He was actually engaged in his favorite exercise in futility these days, trying to solve the mystery of the clothing thefts from Audrey Weston, Marcia Kemp, and Alice Tierney. It all seemed like ancient history by now, and he was beginning to feel like an inadequately funded archeologist; but the dig went on, secretly, in his head, where no one else could trespass.

“You know,” Ellery said to little Leslie Carpenter, “if I hadn’t met you in a case I’d ask you for a date.”

“What a horrid thing to say.”

“Horrid?”

“You imply that I’m a suspect in Johnny’s death.”

“I was only stating a principle,” Ellery said, bathing sybaritically in the blue warm pools of her extraordinary eyes. “It’s bad policy to enter into a personal relationship with someone you’ve met in the course of a continuing investigation. Muddies the thinking. Makes waves where dead calm is called for. By the way, do you consider yourself a suspect in Johnny’s death?”

“Certainly not! I was talking about you.”

“Let’s talk about you. You know, I never thought I could go for a halfpint, speaking femalewise?”

“You are not a groove, Ellery Queen!”

They were in Al Marsh’s outer office, waiting for Audrey Weston. Marsh was trying to get rid of a client who was overstaying his appointment. Inspector Queen sat restively nearby, munching Indian nuts in lieu of lunch.

Ellery was about to launch himself splash into the pools when the client reluctantly departed. Marsh beckoned Leslie and the Queens into his private office.

“What’s this one all about, Mr. Marsh?” the Inspector demanded. “Seems to me I spend more time in your office than in mine.”

“It’s Audrey, as I told Ellery over the phone.” Marsh swung a tier of law books out and it became a bar. “Proving that the law isn’t always as dry as it sometimes seems. Drink, anyone? Don’t usually indulge during office hours — Miss Smith doesn’t approve — but I think I’ll make an exception this afternoon. I’m still not over that hairy night last Thursday, and I have a feeling I’m going to need it.” He poured a long one. “I can recommend the Irish, Inspector.”

“I’m working,” the Inspector said bitterly.

“I’m not,” Ellery said.

“Les?”

“No, thanks,” Benedict’s heir said with a shudder.

“I mean,” Ellery went on, “there are no regulations on my job. Sorry, dad. Irish and soda, Al. Did you know that the Irish invented whiskey? The English didn’t find out about it till the twelfth century, when Henry the Second’s boys invaded the sod and came back with a few stolen hogsheads. Thank you, sir. To Henry the Second’s boys.” When he had drunk a healthful draught Ellery said, “What does Tallulah want?”

“If you mean Audrey, she didn’t call this meeting, I did.” Marsh lit a menthol cigaret. “I’ve dug out some information on this paternity claim of hers. While we’re waiting — did you know that Alice Tierney’s in town?”

“We know,” the Inspector said, sourly this time. “Is it a fact that she’s visiting New York to see you?”

“Let’s see, this is Monday... I saw her Friday, Inspector,” the lawyer said. “I didn’t tell you people about it because I knew I’d be seeing you today.”

“I hope you aren’t going to pull one of those ‘this is a lawyer-client confidence’ things,” Ellery said.

“Not at all. Miss Tierney has come up with what the Little Flower used to call a ‘beaut.’ She had the gall to claim — get this — that Johnny promised her the Wrightsville property, the buildings and the land, as a gift.”

“Oh, dear,” Leslie said. “She sounds desperate.”

“No proof, I take it.”

“You’re so right, Ellery. She has no evidence of any kind to back up her story. It isn’t plausible on the face of it — did she expect me to swallow it? Anyway, I told her as politely as I could to stop wasting my time and hers. Yes, Miss Smith?”

Miss Weston and Sanford Effing had arrived, the blonde nervous, Effing narrow-eyed and sniffy, searching for clues like a bloodhound. When they were seated and everyone had got over the strain of being polite, Marsh (who had restored his wall before their entrance to its lawbook look) said, “Take this all down, Miss Smith. Is your tape recorder on, Effing? Good. I’ve done some poking into your client’s allegation that she had a child by John Levering Benedict the Third whom she placed for adoption.”

“And found that her allegation is true,” Audrey’s lawyer said severely.

“And found that her allegation — as it legally affects the disposition of the Benedict estate — is false,” Marsh said. “There was and is a child, a male child named Davy Wilkinson — I have his adoptive surname as well, but in the child’s protection I am keeping it confidential — but Davy is not John Benedict’s son.”

“He is, he is!” Audrey cried.

“Miss Weston, may I handle this?” Effing asked in a pained way. “My client says that he is, Marsh, and she ought to know.”

“She ought to, but in this case Miss Weston seems confused. I have the date of birth from the records of the hospital where Davy was born. That date is eleven months and three days after the date of the divorce. Manifestly we have a marital impossibility. I think, Mr. Effing, you’ll have to agree that there’s no point to pursuing this further. Unless Inspector Queen wishes to do so?”

“If you’re implying that there’s attempted fraud here, Counselor,” Sanford Effing stated icily, “I not only resent the implication on Miss Weston’s behalf, but on my own as an attorney. I wouldn’t have taken this case if I didn’t have every reason to believe my client’s claim to be the substantive truth. I do think she’s been unwise to insist—”

“Ah, we get down to the old bippy,” Marsh said, smiling. “To insist what, Effing?”

“About the dates. Please clear up that date situation, Miss Weston, here and now. You have no choice.”

Audrey went into an elaborate hand-twisting routine. “I didn’t want anyone to know... I mean, it was like — like stripping myself naked in public...”

“Come on, Miss Weston,” Effing said sternly, “it’s too late for modesty.”

“I said we were intimate for the last time before the divorce because I was ashamed to admit that Johnny and I had sex on a number of occasions after the — after the decree.” The North Sea-water eyes began to look stormy. “But that’s the truth, Al, so help me Almighty God. We did. It happened mostly at my apartment, but once in his car... oh, it’s too embarrassing! Anyway, on one of those intime occasions little Davy was conceived. My poor, poor...” And the seas heaved and sloshed, drowning Ellery’s hopes that the blonde would insert before the noun “baby” the traditional adjective “fatherless.”

A general cloud of discomposure moved in to overhang the office. Even Miss Smith, whose mouth had been imitating a fish while she stenographed the proceedings, shut it and kept it shut with considerable compression.

Marsh permitted the nor’easter to blow itself out.

“Audrey. If your attorney won’t tell you this I’ll have to, for old times’ sake if for no other reason. Even if you can show that you and Johnny engaged in sexual intercourse after your divorce, that would not in itself prove that he was the father of your child. You know that; or, if you don’t, Mr. Effing certainly does.

“It’s my belief that you’ve made up the whole story, post-marital coitus and all. I’m reasonably sure I’d have known from Johnny if you and he were sleeping together after the divorce. From some things he confided in me — which I won’t divulge publicly unless you force me to — your story is highly suspect. It simply doesn’t tally with his feelings about you — do I have to say it? — especially sexually.”

“You have no right to make a judgment before all the facts are in!” her lawyer shouted.

“I have every right to my personal opinion, Effing. At any time. However, I see no point in denying it: that’s going to be my professional opinion as well, unless you come up with legal proof of your client’s claim that Mr. Benedict was the father of her child.”

Audrey howled, “You haven’t heard the end of this, you shyster!” She was all the way off-stage now, being Arlene Wilkinson.

Effing rushed her out.

“Bad,” Ellery said. “Very bad.”

“I thought it turned out very well myself,” Marsh said. “Certainly for old Les here.”

“I’m speaking of Audrey’s performance.”

“Oh, I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor thing,” Leslie said. “Call me a square, but she is a mother—”

“A mother,” Marsh said dryly, “who’s trying a con game.”

“You don’t know that, Al. Johnny might have—”

“Not a chance, dear heart. See here, do you want this estate or don’t you? I thought you had all sorts of socially progressive plans for the money.”

“I do!” And the pools blazed from their depths. “What I want to do first—”

“Excuse me, Miss Carpenter,” Inspector Queen said, jumping up. “The New York City police department has all sorts of progressive plans for my services. Mr. Marsh, from now on how about you don’t call me, I’ll call you? Okay? Ellery, you coming?”

“You go on ahead, dad,” Ellery said. “I have all sorts of socially progressive plans myself. May I see you home, Leslie? Or wherever you’re bound?”

But Inspector Queen’s anxiety to get the Benedict case off his back was not yet to be relieved. Nothing was going anywhere — his staff was bogged down in the Faulks investigation, weltering in leads to enemies of Marcia Kemp’s late husband whose name (as predicted) proved to be legion — and the old sleuth had hopes that there it would exhaust itself, so that he could get back to earning his salary for legitimate services rendered the City of New York.

Besides, it was impossible to live with Ellery these days. He went about with a fixed, almost wild, look, something like an acid head on a bad trip, frequently making noises that conveyed little but confusion. When his father asked him what was upsetting him, he would shake his head and become mute. Once he delivered himself of an intelligible reply; or at least a reply composed of intelligible components: “It’s the women’s clothes, and something else. Why can’t I remember that something else? How do you remember what you’ve forgotten? Or did I forget it? You saw it, too, dad. Why can’t you remember?”

But the Inspector had stopped listening. “And why don’t you take that Carpenter girl out again?” the Inspector said. “She seems like good medicine for you.”

“That’s one hell of a reason to take a girl out,” Ellery said, glaring. “As if she were a prescription!”

There matters stood when the call came into Centre Street from Chief of Police Newby. Inspector Queen immediately dialed his home number.

“Ellery? We have to run up to Wrightsville.”

“What for? What’s happened?” Ellery asked, yawning. He had spent a rousing night with Leslie at a series of seminars on the subject of “Economic Solutions to the Problems of Urban Obsolescence.”

“Newby just phoned from up there. He says he’s solved the mystery of those lights old Hunker saw in the Benedict house.”

“Yes? What’s the answer? Mice in the wiring?”

The Inspector snorted. “He wouldn’t say. Sounds miffed by what’s going on down here. Or rather what isn’t. He seems to feel that we’re neglecting him. He just said if we wanted to find out what he’s turned up, we know where he is.”

“Doesn’t sound like Anse,” Ellery said; but perhaps it did. What did he know about Anselm Newby, or anyone else, for that matter? Life was but a dream, and so forth.

They got off the plane at a late evening hour of Sunday, May 3, and no Wrightsville police car awaited them.

“Didn’t you notify Newby’s office what plane we’d be on?” Inspector Queen demanded.

“I thought you did.”

“At least Newby didn’t ignore us deliberately. Cab!”

The chief was off duty; the desk man buzzed him at home, and the Inspector thought — aloud — that he took his sweet time getting to headquarters. The chief’s greeting was correct, but unmistakably on the cool side.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet what to do about her,” Newby said. “On the one hand, I can’t see the advantage in charging her—”

“Do about who?” Inspector Queen asked. “Charge who?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Newby asked calmly. “It’s Alice Tierney my man Barlowe caught in the Benedict house late last night. She’s the one who’s been making with the midnight lights. It’s a cockamamie story she tells, just wild enough to make me wonder if it mightn’t be true. Frankly, I don’t know whether she’s gone off her rocker, or what.”

“What story, Anse?” Ellery asked. “You’re being damned enigmatic.”

“Didn’t mean to be,” the chief said, Yankee-style. “Maybe you better hear it from her direct. Joe, buzz Miss Tierney’s place and if she’s home ask her to come down to HQ right off, the Queens want to talk to her. If she’s out, try and find out where we can reach her.”

“Why don’t we go to her?” Ellery suggested. “It might be better tactics.”

“She’ll come,” Newby said grimly. “After that yarn of hers, she owes me.”

Alice stalked in fifteen minutes later.

“When the Queens command, little old commoner Alice obeys,” she said coldly. It seemed to Ellery that she had been drinking. “It’s all right, Chief, you don’t have to stand up with the royalty and be polite. Not after last night.”

“Miss Tierney, you were caught trespassing on private property. What did you expect Officer Barlowe to do, kiss your hand? I could have charged you with breaking and entering. I still can!”

Of the two, Newby was the more obviously agitated. (Ellery guessed why in a moment. Alice Tierney was a nice Wrightsville girl from a nice Wrightsville family. Nice Wrightsville girls from nice Wrightsville families were not caught prowling about other people’s empty houses in the middle of the night. Like most small-town police chiefs, Newby was a defender of the middleclass faith.) Not that Alice was serene. Her normally unheated eyes had acquired a glow not far from ignition. She radiated hostility.

“Sit down, Alice,” Ellery said. “No reason why we can’t talk this over without fireworks. Why have you been going through Johnny’s house when you thought you wouldn’t be seen? What have you been looking for?”

“Didn’t Chief Newby tell you?”

“We just got here. Sit down, Alice. Please?”

She sniffed, then tossed her head and took the chair he offered. “You know by this time, I suppose, that I told Al Marsh about Johnny’s solemn promise to me? That he wanted me to have the Wrightsville property?”

“Marsh told us,” the Inspector said.

“Did he tell you that he laughed in my face, practically?”

“Miss Tierney,” the Inspector said. “Did you expect the attorney in charge of an estate to take a claim like that seriously, backed up by nothing but your unsupported word?”

“I won’t argue with you, Inspector Queen. With anybody. I’m convinced there’s proof!”

“What kind?”

“A note, some paper or other signed by Johnny leaving the property to me. We got along beautifully during our marriage — lots better, he told me, than he got along with Audrey and Marcia. I really don’t understand why he divorced me! He’d keep telling me how much he appreciated the nursing care I gave him after his automobile accident, how — entirely aside from our original agreement — he was going to leave the Wrightsville real estate to me. I naturally expected he would do it in his will. But he didn’t, so I’m convinced he must have done it in some other paper, something he tucked away in the main house somewhere. I knew nobody would believe me — I appealed to Al Marsh against my better judgment. That’s why I said nothing about it at the will session, and why I’ve been looking for the paper by myself late at night.”

For the first time her voice rose.

“I want it. My weekly income is stopped, I haven’t inherited that lump sum from Johnny — I’m entitled to salvage something! He meant that property for me, it’s mine, and I’m going to have it!”

In a blink it occurred to Ellery — in the way a film shifts from scene to scene — that Alice Tierney was not the starched and stable angel of mercy of his comfortable characterization. The people who held feelings in as a matter of training and even nature were the ones who had most, under stress, to let out; and Alice was not far from the bursting point.

“My men and I went all through that house,” Chief Newby said wearily. “You’re not going to find what we couldn’t, Miss Tierney.”

“How about the guest cottage?” Ellery suggested. “Any chance that Johnny left something there, Anse?”

Newby shook his head. “Barl — Barlowe — and I searched the cottage today. Nothing doing.”

“And if Marsh had found anything like that in Benediet’s papers,” Inspector Queen remarked, “he’d have to have mentioned it.”

“I suppose I ought to check with him... maybe you ought to do it, Inspector.” Newby added, not without a gleam in his eye, “New York, y’know,” as if Manhattan Island were Richard Queen’s personal property.

The Inspector found Marsh at home entertaining, from the background sounds of revelry. Ellery gathered from his father’s end of the conversation that Marsh was not exactly overjoyed at the interruption. The Inspector hung up scowling.

“He says no such paper exists anywhere in Benedict’s effects or he’d have let us know right away. He’s sore that I even questioned him about it. Awfully touchy all of a sudden.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Al Marsh I knew,” Ellery said. “Could he have fallen in love?”

“Then some girl is lucky,” Alice said bitterly. “Outside of his damned sense of professional ethics Al is a pretty wonderful guy. He’d never promise a girl something and then forget.”

“Forget is the word, Miss Tierney,” Newby said. “That’s what I’m going to do. Why don’t you do likewise and run along? I’m not charging you with anything, so you’re in the clear.” He rose. “Do you have your own car, or do you want one of my boys to run you home?”

“I’ll manage, thank you.”

When she was gone Inspector Queen remarked, “That was a big nothing.”

“Well,” the chief said, “I’m sorry I dragged you gentlemen up here.”

“I didn’t mean it that way! Look, Newby, we seem to have got off on the wrong four feet—”

“It just seemed to me you ought to talk to her yourselves, Inspector, that’s all.”

“You were perfectly right. If police work was a success a hundred percent of the time, what fun would it be?”

“Plenty!” Newby said; and he grinned and they shook hands all around.

It was too late to book a flight back to Boston and New York, so the Queens plodded across the Sunday-night-deserted Square (which was round) and checked into the Hollis for the night. They bought toothbrushes and toothpaste at the cigar counter, washed up, and went down to the main dining room. It was late, the restaurant held about six other people, the Chefs Special (which from experience Ellery maintained was the only dish on the menu that was ever edible) was all gone, and they had to settle for two almost snorting steaks, which the Inspector’s dentures could not negotiate. They got back to their room scarcely on speaking terms.

They were just taking their shoes off in the silence when the phone rang. Ellery said, “Big deduction coming up: Newby. Who else knows where we are?” and answered it.

It was Newby.

“If you’re undressed, dress. If you’re still dressed, stay that way. I’ll pick you up in front of the Hollis in two and a half minutes.”

“What now, Anse?”

“Tierney Rides Again. Barlowe just spotted her sneaking into the Benedict grounds. He radiophoned in.”

“You know what that kook is doing?” the young officer exclaimed when they pulled up at the Benedict house; he had been waiting for them in a rhododendron bush. “She’s trying to break into the whozis — that little stone house where Benedict is buried. I’d have stopped her, Chief, but you said not to do anything till you got here—”

“The mausoleum?” Ellery said; and they all ran, led by Barlowe with his oversized flashlight.

It was like something out of Wuthering Heights in the cloudy night.

She had pried the heavy mausoleum door open with a crowbar, and she was inside, in the light of a kerosene lantern, among the withered flowers, struggling with the lid of the bronze casket. It took Barlowe and Ellery to wrench her away, and Newby had to jump in to help hold her.

“Alice, please, you mustn’t do anything like this,” Ellery panted. “Why don’t you be a good girl and calm down? We can go outside and talk this over—”

“Let — go — of me!” she screeched. “I know my rights! He promised me! The note has got to be in the coffin. It’s the only other place it could be...”

Her face was rigid, a mask of flesh, the eyes hardly human.

Officer Barlowe stripped off his blue coat and they wrapped it about her as a makeshift restraining sheet, lashing the sleeves at her back.

The four men carried her from the mausoleum on the top of the hill, across the meadow in the dappled dark, to the radio car. The chief relayed a call for an ambulance from Wrightsville General through the headquarters switchboard; and they held her down and waited.

There was little conversation. Her screams were too demanding.

May dragged by, going nowhere.

The hunt for the elusive Laura limped, hesitated, and finally came to a halt. Whoever the mysterious woman named in Johnny Benedict’s will was, she had either taken refuge in a mountaintop cave or decided she wanted no truck with a murder case.

“In which event,” Ellery said, “Johnny never married her, as we’ve maintained all along. So she gets nothing out of revealing herself except publicity, which she evidently wants none of.”

“Unless...,” and Inspector Queen stopped.

“Unless what, dad?”

“Nothing. What thoughts I get these days are pretty wild.”

“You mean unless Laura killed Johnny for a motive we have no lead to yet?”

“I told you it was wild.”

“Maybe not so wild. It would explain why she hasn’t turned up... I wish I knew,” Ellery groaned. “Then I could get some work done.” His novel-in-being felt like the cliffhanger of the old movie-serial days; it was tied helplessly to the track while his deadline came hurtling down on it like Old 77.

A, B, C, D, E, F orGy opened in a converted pizzeria on Bleecker Street to a scathing review in the Post, a series of witticisms in the News, silence from the Times, and a rave notice in the Village Voice. All went into detail about the third-act nude scene (the Voice’s description was matter-of-factly explicit about Miss Audrey Weston’s blonde charms, which apparently overshadowed those of the rest of the ladies of the cast out of sheer volume). The play began to do an SRO business. Miss Weston, interviewed by one of the East Village papers, said: “Until now I have as a matter of professional as well as personal integrity rejected any role that called on me to appear in the nude. But Ali-Bababa’s production is a different kettle of fish, dahling. (Sure, the interviewer interjected, it stinks.) It positively shines in this dull theatrical season. (That’s what stinking fish do, all right, the interviewer interpolated.) I’m proud to be a part of it, clothes or no clothes.” (Stay in your pad and have your chick do a strip-tease, the interviewer advised. It’s cheaper.)

Marsh heard nothing more from Miss Weston, nee Arlene Wilkinson, or from her attorney, Sanford Effing, about the alleged paternity of Johnny-B in re Davy Wilkinson, infant, adoptive surname unrevealed. The consensus of Marsh, the Queens, and an assistant from the District Attorney’s office was that said Attorney Effing must have advised his client either, (1) that she had no case that stood a chance in the hell of the courts; or, (2) regardless of the juridical odds, that she did not have the scratch to finance what could only be a long-drawn-out litigation (meaning chiefly the attorney’s fee). For Miss Weston’s sole source of income these days, it appeared, was her salary from A, B, C, D, E, F orGy.

The case of Alice Tierney took an unexpected turn for the better. From her action and appearance that Sunday night at Benedict’s mausoleum, Ellery would have sworn that she had gone off the deep end beyond rescue; he had seen psychotics in the “dilapidated” cells of mental hospitals with the same liverish lips and wild-animal glare. But she made a remarkable recovery in the psychiatric ward of the Wrightsville General Hospital. She was a patient there, behind bars, for two weeks under the care of Dr. P. Langston Minikin, chief of the hospital’s psychiatric service, after which he had her transferred to a nursing home in Connhaven, where she remained for another two weeks and was then discharged in the custody of her parents and elder sister Margaret, who was also a registered nurse. Dr. Minikin diagnosed Alice as a schizophrenic personality, but the episode itself, he said, was a hysteric seizure, probably isolated, and not likely to be repeated except under very extreme pressure.

Dr. Minikin told Chief Newby, “She seems resigned now to the fact that Benedict either forgot his promise or changed his mind — at any rate, that he left no written authorization or other record for the transfer of the property at his death. She’s a bit withdrawn over what she considers the raw deal he gave her, but in my opinion she’s already managed a good adjustment, and in amazingly fast time. I don’t believe Alice will do any more prowling, Anse.” He hedged his bet. “She may do other things, but not that.” It was not conducive to Newby’s peace of mind.

But the really astonishing development of the month was the announcement that Marcia Kemp Benedict Faulks was taking unto herself a fourth surname.

It was not so much the fact itself that was to be marveled at in this age of multiple marriages as the identity of the lucky man. Ellery hardly believed the evidence of his eyes as he read the daily reports of his father’s detectives and their confirmation in the gossip and society columns.

A romance was burgeoning between the ex-Vegas redhead and Al Marsh.

“Not that it’s any of my affair,” Ellery said at a three-way dinner in a hideaway East Side restaurant one night toward the end of May, “but how in Cupid’s name did it happen? I never caught even a glimpse between you and Marcia of any romantic interest. On the contrary, I thought you disliked each other.”

Marcia’s hand groped, and Marsh engulfed it.

“You learn to hide things,” the lawyer smiled. “Especially when you’re the attorney in the triangle, and more especially when what you have to cover up is the McCoy.”

“Triangle?” Ellery said. “You and Marcia — behind Johnny’s back?”

Marsh’s smile widened.

“Hardly,” Marcia said. “I found out that Al ought to be carrying an Equity card. I thought he detested me. That’s why I always tried to give him a hard time. You know how broads are.”

“Look,” Marsh said. “I couldn’t cut in on Johnny either for personal or professional reasons. I had to suppress my feelings. I shoved them so deep I was hardly aware I had them, or I’d have married Marcia soon after Johnny divorced her. He met her through me, you know. I was in love with her when to Johnny all she was was a marriage of convenience.”

The redhead squeezed his hand. “I know it’s only a few weeks since Bernie died, but that marriage was from hunger — I was on the rebound from Johnny, I’d known Bernie Faulks in the Vegas crowd, and you’ve got to admit Bern was loaded with S.A...”

“You don’t have to apologize, dear heart,” Marsh said. “It was a mistake, Ellery, and Marcia and I see no reason to waste any more of our lives. Dessert, baby?” he asked her as the waiter hovered.

“Gawd, no! A bride has to think of her architecture, especially when she’s built like the George Washington Bridge to start with.”

Further prying was obviously futile. Ellery gave up.

It was to be a private wedding in Marsh’s Sutton Place duplex; even the date was kept from the press. The few friends Marsh invited — Marcia said she had none she could trust — were pledged to secrecy and asked to come quietly to the apartment at two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, June 7. At the last moment Marcia decided to ask Audrey Weston and Alice Tierney — “I know it’s bitchy of me,” Marcia said, “but I do want to see their faces when Al and I are hitched!” (To her chagrin Alice declined on the excuse of her recent illness; Audrey did not bother even to respond.) The only other wedding guests were Leslie Carpenter, Miss Smith, and the Queens.

The knot was tied by Mr. Justice Marascogni of the State Supreme Court, an old friend of the Marsh family. (Ellery felt an extraordinary relief on being introduced to the judge; he had been half expecting — when he heard that a judge was to perform the ceremony — the appearance of old Judge McCue, whose similar role in the nuptials that climaxed his last investigation had concluded on such a cataclysmic note.) But this time the marriage-maker came, performed, and left with no cataclysm at all.

Until, of course, about forty-five minutes later.

It was curious how it happened, the accumulating clichés of all such affairs — “Isn’t it June today? She’s a June bride!” — the June bride’s hilarity when someone exclaimed over the first champagne toast after the man-and-wife pronouncement, “Why, now your name is Marcia Marsh. How quaint!” — and the acting out of the small roles: Judge Marascogni’s unfortunate lisp, through which “Marcia” sounded uncomfortably like “Martha,” as if the groom were marrying another woman entirely, and the sibilants in the marriage service seemed increased a hundredfold, making everyone nervous anticipating the next one; the peaceful, almost imperceptible, way in which Miss Smith got smashed on her boss’s champagne and eventually salted her glass over the death of her hopes (was there ever a homely secretary to a man as Marlboro-handsome as Al Marsh who did not secretly cherish such hopes?) — collapsing in Ellery’s arms weeping her lost love, having to be laid on the groom’s bed (by the bride) making Ellery wonder just how smashed she really was; the merriment over the wedding cake (not a creation of the great Louis, who was not a baker but a chef; an ex-colleague of his, who was a baker, had created it at Louis’s command), the traditional awkwardness of the first bride-and-groom two-handed slice, and the bride’s quite expert subsequent solo performance with the cake knife... until, as it has been noted, some forty-five minutes later, when the cake was one-third gone and Ellery found himself, through no conscious design he could recall, alone with it. Alone with it, the others having eaten their fill and scattered throughout the duplex.

The slices had all been taken from the two lowest tiers of the cake, leaving the upper tiers intact.

Highest of all, on the eminence, like triumphant mountain-climbers, stood the stiff little plastic figures of the bride and groom in their sugar-frosted canopy.

The little couple stared up at him crookedly. In slicing the cake Marcia had accidentally touched them and the canopy had slipped; they stood a bit askew.

Something popped in Ellery’s head.

Like a tiny smoke-bomb.

The smoke drifted about, brushing his thoughts, dissipating, vanishing — the same elusive thing he had failed to grasp in Benedict’s Wrightsville bedroom and elsewhere, later, in annoying retrospect. The something he had seen but failed to notice. The something he had not been able to grasp.

But this time he grasped it.

He grasped it when, in an act not really of volition, Ellery reached out in an absent way to straighten the surrogate bride and groom in their canopy. Perhaps he was thinking too hard, or not thinking at all, or alternating between desperation and despair. In any event, the plastic couple jiggled out of their base and the little groom fell to the rug.

Leaving the bride alone in the canopy.

Ellery frowned his displeasure.

This is wrong, he thought. He hoped, for Al Marsh’s sake, that the fall was not symbolic. There had been marriage failures enough in this case.

That was Ellery’s first thought.

His second was to bring the couple together again. Naturally. Was there ever a more sinful moment for separation and disruption? The little bride stood so bravely forlorn in her canopy. And the little groom looked so doleful and deserted lying on the floor, so out of things, so robbed of the spirit of nuptial joy.

Therefore Ellery stooped to pick up the groom and restore him to his rightful place.

That was when the lightning struck; the lightning that — as on past occasions, if he was lucky — ripped through the overcast of the long dry spell and shattered the air clear.

“We’ve got to go up to Wrightsville right away,” he said to Inspector Queen. “Or I’ve got to go if you can’t.”

He had drawn the Inspector onto Marsh’s terrace, away from the others. New York sparkled in the sun. It was one of the city’s rarely beautiful days. Marsh — or Marcia — had picked a good one, all right.

“I’ll go, too,” Inspector Queen said.

“No questions?”

His father shrugged.

“Am I that transparent?”

“I’m your old man.”

“It’s a wise father. What did Johnny call her?”

“What did Johnny call who?”

His failure to correct the Inspector’s grammar was significant. “Laura. The last woman in his life, wasn’t that how he put it? No, you didn’t hear him. Poor Johnny.”

“I suppose you’ll tell me what you’re talking about,” the Inspector said, “in your own sweet time, as usual.”

“I think I can suggest a lead,” Ellery said.

The old man’s ears twitched. “To Laura?”

“At least I can tell you what her last name is. Or may be.”

“Ellery, don’t play games! Plow could you possibly know her last name? All of a sudden like this?”

“Try Mann — M-a-n-n. It might be a longer name, dad — Manning, Manners, Mannheim, Mandeville, Mannix. Something like that.”

The Inspector squinted at him in absolute disbelief. Then, shaking his head, he went off to find a phone.

Ellery became conscious of his hand. There was something in it. He looked down. It was the little plastic groom. He stepped off the terrace and made for the wedding cake. Esteban was alone there, collecting used champagne glasses.

“Where are Mr. and Mrs. Marsh going on their honeymoon, Esteban?” Ellery asked. “Do you know?”

“They no go, Mr. Queen.” The houseman looked around conspiratorially. “Till next week, I think. Mrs. Marsh she’s got to close up her apartment. She do much other thing, I think. You no tell nobody?”

“Not a breathing soul,” Ellery said, and very carefully he restored the little groom to its lawful place beside its bride.