The Last Woman in His Life

3. The Third Life

They dropped into Wrightsville with the setting sun. Inspector Queen telephoned Newby from the tiny airport lounge.

“Meet us at the Benedict house,” the Inspector told him. “Don’t bother with a police car — I mean for us. We’ll take a cab.”

Chief Newby was waiting for them at the door. He had it unlocked and waiting.

“What’s up, Inspector?”

“Ask him. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I’ve had. I couldn’t get a word out of him, and I still can’t.”

The chief looked at Ellery reproachfully.

“I’m not being coy,” Ellery grumbled. “I’ve had considerable to think through. Shall we go in?”

They went in. The house was musty-smelling, and Newby went about throwing windows open. “Anybody want a drink?” Ellery asked. When the older men refused he said, “Well, I do,” and he took an Irish neat, and another, then set the bottle down and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

He vaulted up to Benedict’s bedroom, and waited impatiently in the doorway.

“The answer was here from the start,” he said. “That Saturday night. March twenty-eighth, wasn’t it? Almost two and a half months ago. I could have saved us a lot of wear and tear. And Faulks his miserable life... well, it’s all slops under the bridge. Come in, gents, and be seated. Don’t worry about disturbing the evidence. It isn’t the kind you can disturb.”

“What?” Newby said, vague as a fish.

“Don’t try to make anything out of it,” Inspector Queen advised him. “Not just yet, anyway. He always starts this way. You sit down and you listen. That’s what I’m going to do, Newby. I’ve had to do it a hundred times.” And the Inspector seated himself on the bedroom’s only chair, leaving the edge of the dead man’s bed to the chief, who perched himself on it gingerly with an uneasy eye on the door, as if to orient himself to the nearest exit.

“You weren’t there, Anse,” Ellery said. “I mean in Marsh’s apartment today, when he and Marcia were married. After the ceremony I found myself with the wedding cake, just the three of us—”

“The three of you?”

“The little plastic bride and groom and me.”

“Oh. Oh?”

“They were, as usual, under a canopy at the top of the cake. And the groom fell off. Do you see?”

“No.”

“It left the bride alone up there.”

“Well, sure. So what?”

“So that was wrong, wasn’t it?”

“Wrong?” Chief Newby repeated. “What was?”

“I mean, you look at the bride standing up there by herself, and it’s obvious there’s a missing element.”

“Oh. Well, naturally. The groom. Anybody would know that. Is that what you flew up from New York to tell me?”

“That is correct,” Ellery said. “To tell you that there was something missing.

“From the beginning I’ve felt that there was a crucial clue in this room, a vital element of the murder, only I couldn’t get my finger on it. Of course, when you think you can’t remember something you take it for granted that it’s something you saw, something that was there but slipped your mind. That lone little bride today told me my mistake. The clue in Johnny’s bedroom here wasn’t something I’d seen and forgotten, it was something I had not seen — something that should have been here but wasn’t. Something which my mind unconsciously groped for, failed to find, and whose omission it registered.

“Dad.”

“Yes, son?”

Ellery was at the clothes closet. “The room is exactly as it was on the night of the murder except that Johnny’s body, the contents of the nightstand, and the three women’s stolen articles of clothing aren’t here now. Correct?”

“No,” the Inspector said. “The weapon.”

“And the Three Monkeys, yes. Everything else in the bedroom is as it was. That would include this wardrobe closet of Johnny’s and its contents, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes?” His father was intent.

“So what’s in the wardrobe closet now is what we inspected on the night of the murder. Very thoroughly, I might add. Garment by garment. Remember? Even Johnny’s hats, shoes — everything.”

“Yes?” the old man said again. In the same way. Newby was still imitating a fish.

“Let’s do a repeat. Go through the closet and call out whatever you see. As you did that night. Listen hard, Anse. See if you catch it. It isn’t easy.”

Inspector Queen began with the accessory items, enumerating: neckties, four-in-hands, ascots, bow ties, scarves, in all basic colors and combinations—

“Including browns?” Ellery interrupted.

“Sure including browns. Didn’t I say ‘all’?”

“Go on.”

“Ten hats and caps—”

“Is any of them brown?”

“This brown fedora.”

“Shoes?”

“Cordovans, alligators, suèdes—”

“Never mind the leather. How about the colors?”

“Blacks, browns, grays, tans—”

“Browns and tans noted. Overcoats?”

“Navy blue double-breasted, black with a velvet collar, cashmere—”

“Which color cashmere?”

“Tan.”

“Brown family. Topcoats?”

“Charcoal, tan, chocolate—”

“Brown family again. That’s enough to make my point. Step out of the closet, dad, and go through the drawers of the bureau there, as we did on the night of the murder. Take the shirt drawers first. Do you find any shirts in shades of brown?”

“Sure—”

“How about the hose drawer? That one. Any brown socks?”

“Plenty.”

“You left out his suits.” Newby was fascinated — puzzled, but fascinated.

“We did, didn’t we?” Ellery said. As usual at such times, there was something of the actor about him, enjoying his performance. “All right, dad, start with Johnny’s conventional suits. Which colors are they?”

The Inspector said sharply, “They’re all in shades of blue and gray. Period!”

“Yes,” Ellery said. “No browns or tans. That’s what kept bugging me, Anse, even though I couldn’t identify it: the basic fashion color brown that wasn’t represented in Johnny’s suits, in spite of the fact that practically everything else in his wardrobe included articles in brown and/or tan.”

“Maybe he just didn’t bring a brown suit up here.”

“Unthinkable. Johnny regularly made the Ten Best-Dressed Men’s list. He wouldn’t have worn brown shoes, or a brown hat, or a brown topcoat, or certainly a brown or tan shirt, with anything but a suit in some shade of brown. If he had brown accessories here, they had to be intended for at least one brown or tan suit.

“But I didn’t have to make a deduction about it,” Ellery continued. “Johnny did have a brown suit on the premises. I saw it with my own eyes. On him. The night he was murdered. He was wearing it when I was skulking on the terrace doing my Peeping Tom act while he held forth to his ex-wives about his plans for a new will. He was wearing the brown suit when he left them for the night and went upstairs to go to bed. That means he took the brown suit off up here, in this room, when he undressed and got into his pajamas. But when he phoned us at the guest cottage and we dashed over here and found him dead — no brown suit. No brown suit in his closet, as we’ve noted; no brown suit thrown over a chair or deposited anywhere else in the bedroom as you would expect after he’d undressed to go to bed — dad, you actually remarked on the neatness of the room, how no clothes were strewn about. You even specified what Johnny had deposited in the laundry hamper of the clothing he’d been wearing: socks, you said, underwear, shirt.”

Newby muttered. “Then what happened to his brown suit?”

“That, Anse, is the question. To answer it you obviously must ask yourself first: who do we know was in this room later that night besides Johnny?”

“Who? His killer.”

“Answer: Johnny’s killer took away Johnny’s brown suit. Q.E.D.”

Newby threw an irritated glance at the Inspector. But Richard Queen was peering into the past. Or perhaps it was the future.

“Q.E.D. my Aunt Martha’s hind leg,” Newby said crossly. “It doesn’t Q.E.D. a damned thing to me. Why? Why would his killer take Benedict’s suit away?”

“You’ve just hit pay dirt, Anse. Let’s go back. What do we know the murderer did after he entered the bedroom? He did three things we’re now sure of: He killed Johnny. He left Audrey’s gown, Marcia’s wig, and Alice’s gloves on the floor. And he made his escape with the suit Johnny had taken off in undressing for bed.

“Let’s concentrate on number three — your question, Anse: why did Murderer, in escaping after his crime, take Johnny’s suit with him?

“Was it because the suit contained something he wanted? No, because if that were the case he had only to take it from the suit and leave the suit behind.

“Or was the theft of the man’s suit meant to symbolize ‘a man’? That is, to point suspicion to the only other male in the house that night, Al Marsh? All the others were women — Audrey, Marcia, Alice, Miss Smith.”

“Then why would the killer also leave the three articles of women’s clothing?” the Inspector objected. “Those seemed to point to women.”

“Disposing of that theory — right, dad. And there’s another objection to that: we didn’t even realize a man’s suit was missing. If that had been Murderer’s intention, he would have managed to call the fact of the missing suit to our attention. But he didn’t.”

“Can either of you think of still another reason?”

After a barren interlude Newby said, “You’d think there’d be a dozen possible reasons for a thing like that. But I can’t think of one.”

Inspector Queen confessed, “Neither can I, Ellery.”

“That’s because it’s obvious.”

“Obvious?”

“What was it,” Ellery asked, “that the murderer took away?”

“Benedict’s brown suit.”

“A man’s suit. What are men’s suits used for?”

“What are they used for? What do you mean, son? To wear. But—”

“To wear,” Ellery said. “As clothing. The common, everyday reason. But why should Murderer need clothing in leaving Johnny’s room after the murder? Surely he came there wearing something. Had he been splashed with blood — was that the reason he had to have a change of clothes? But Johnny’s head bled remarkably little — we noted that on the scene, dad. Or even if some blood had got on Murderer’s original clothing, that would hardly have necessitated an entire change — pants as well as jacket — in the middle of the night, in a darkened house. No, it must have been something else about what Murderer was wearing when he came to Johnny’s room that compelled him to discard it and dress in Johnny’s suit as a substitute. Do you see it now?”

Chief Newby looked helpless.

Inspector Queen exploded, “Hell, no!”

“But it’s so clear,” Ellery cried. “What was Murderer wearing when he came into Johnny’s room that he might have felt he could not wear in leaving after the crime? You still don’t see it? Well, what clothing definitely not Johnny’s did we find on the floor — dropped there?”

“Those women’s things.” The Inspector was gaping.

“That is right. If Murderer came to Johnny’s bedroom wearing Audrey’s evening gown, Marcia’s wig, and Alice’s gloves, and for some reason decided to leave them behind, then Murderer would have required other clothes to leave in.”

Chief Newby exclaimed, “One of those three gals, wearing the gown, the wig, and the gloves, came to Benedict’s room, stripped, left them as clues to spread the guilt, and put on the suit Benedict’d been wearing to get back to her own room in.” His face darkened. “That makes no sense at all. She’d have come in a dress or a kimono or something and just carried the three clues in her hand.”

The Inspector asked slowly, “Are you saying it wasn’t one of his ex-wives, Ellery?”

“You’ve answered your own question, dad. Audrey, Marcia, Alice — none of them would have planned to go to Johnny’s room to kill him under such circumstances as to leave herself without clothes for her getaway.”

“But Ellery, they were the only women there!” Newby said.

“No, Chief, wait a minute,” the Inspector said. “There was a fourth woman on the premises. Marsh’s secretary, Miss Smith.” But when he looked at Ellery he said, “Not her, son?”

Ellery was shaking his head. “You’re forgetting, dad, that we’ve postulated Murderer’s going to Johnny’s room wearing the stolen women’s clothing. That means Murderer was the one who stole them in the first place. But when were they stolen? Audrey reported to us that her gown was missing as early as noon that Saturday. Marcia told us that her wig was gone not an hour later. And when I talked to Alice and she couldn’t find her gloves, it was only midafternoon. In fact, it was during that conversation that Alice told me the others were preparing to drive over to the airport to meet Miss Smith’s plane, which was due in, Alice said, at five thirty.

“So Miss Smith couldn’t have been the one who stole the gown, wig, and gloves. Therefore she wasn’t the one who went to Johnny’s room that night wearing them.”

“But there was no other woman in the house,” the Inspector protested.

“Exactly.”

Pauses have shades, like colors. This pause was unrelieved black.

The Inspector fumbled for some light. “But Ellery, there was only one other person there.”

“Exactly.”

“Al Marsh...”

“Exactly.”

And there was the pause again, less dark, more like a lightning-struck sky.

“Do you mean to say,” Inspector Queen yipped, “do you mean to say it was Marsh — Al Marsh — who went to Benedict’s bedroom that night all rigged out in a woman’s evening gown, wearing a woman’s wig and a woman’s gloves...”

“It’s where the argument led us.”

“But that would mean,” Newby fretted, “that would mean—”

“—that we’re investigating a case,” Ellery said in a somber voice, “the real nature of which we didn’t suspect until now.

“Al Marsh went to Johnny’s bedroom that night in full drag, and what happened there forced him to leave the feminine clothing behind. He put on Johnny’s suit to get safely back to his own room. Johnny’s brown suit... when we find it, well have him.”

“Find it?” the Inspector mumbled. “Fat chance. He’ll have got rid of it long ago.”

“I don’t think so,” Ellery said. “No, there’s a good chance he may not have. Shall we go see?”

There was no flight out at that hour, and Ellery would not wait. Newby said grimly, “Take my car. I wish I could go with you.”

The Queens drove all night, alternating at the wheel. They had breakfast in an all-night cafeteria on 1st Avenue and were at the door of Marsh’s duplex a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning.

“Mr. Marsh he’s asleep, Mr. Queen,” the houseman said, blinking in the entrance hall. “No can wake him up—”

“Is Mrs. Marsh with him?”

“She no move in here yet.”

“Then you go on about your business, Estéban,” Ellery said. “I’ll take the responsibility of waking Mr. Marsh.”

They barged into Marsh’s bedroom without knocking. It was a spacious place of massive woods, hand-hewn and masculine. An eight-foot reproduction in marble of Michelangelo’s David graced the room.

The lawyer turned over in bed suddenly and opened his eyes.

“Easy, Marsh,” Inspector Queen said.

Marsh remained that way, in a half twisted posture, arrested in mid-movement. He looked formidable. His torso was naked and full of muscles and, surprisingly, hairless, as if he used a depilatory.

“What do you want?”

He sat up then. But he made no move to get out of bed. He drew his legs up under the red silk sheet and folded his heavy forearms over them, as if to hold them in check.

“What do you want?” he asked again.

“Johnny’s suit,” Ellery said gently. “You know, Al. The brown one he was wearing the night he was schlogged.”

“You must be insane.”

“Is it what I am, Al? Or what you are?”

Marsh shut his eyes for the briefest moment, like a child. When he opened them Ellery saw that they were old, bitter, and retreating.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a mechanical way. “I have nothing of Johnny’s here. Go ahead and look. And be damned to you.”

His wardrobe closet was a roomy walk-in, like Benedict’s in Wrightsville. Among the many garments on the racks they found two suits that, to Ellery’s recollection, were approximately the same shade of brown as the missing Benedict suit.

“What size do you wear, Marsh?” Inspector Queen asked. “Never mind. According to the labels these are forty-four longs, Ellery. Benedict couldn’t have worn more than a thirty-eight regular — maybe even a thirty-six. So these are Marsh’s.” None of the other suits was the color of Benedict’s. “Any other suits in the apartment, Marsh?”

“This is your party.” Marsh’s throat sounded dry. He licked his lips. “I don’t have to tell you, incidentally, Inspector, that I’ve seen no sign of a search warrant.”

“There’s one on the way,” the Inspector said. “Sorry we jumped the gun a bit, Marsh. Would you rather we held up till the warrant gets here?”

The lawyer shrugged his heavy shoulders.

“I won’t make an issue of it. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

The Inspector looked the least bit worried. He glanced at Ellery. But if Ellery felt misgivings he did not betray them. He was going through the suitcases that were piled up in a corner of the wardrobe room. The cases were empty.

Ellery straightened up suddenly and stepped out of the closet. “I’m still partly in shock,” he said, and drew his father aside, out of earshot of Marsh. “Of course it wouldn’t be out in the open. He’s hidden it in his clothes-hiding place.”

“His what?”

“Marsh leads a secret life, doesn’t he? That follows from what we’ve found out about him. During the day he acts the part of a normal man. But nights — some nights — and weekends — some weekends — he lives his other life. That means he has to have a hiding place for the clothes he wears when he’s on the prowl.”

The Inspector sprang back into the closet. He found the nearly invisible seam in the panel and the concealed spring in less than three minutes. Half the rear wall of the closet slid open.

Marsh had got out of bed and joined them in the closet. His pajama pants were shocking pink. His eyes were wild.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please don’t go in there. I beg of you.”

“Sorry, Al.”

They were all there — street dresses, smart women’s suits, cocktail gowns, evening gowns, high-heeled shoes, nylon stockings, hip huggers, an assortment of panty hose, panty girdles, silk panties, brassieres, slips. And at least a dozen wigs, in various styles and colors. And a vanity table loaded with a full freight of makeup materials. And a pile of gaudy magazines featuring handsome and muscular young male nudes.

And, among the gowns, the lone intruder, a man’s suit, a brown suit, the brown suit John Levering Benedict III had worn on the last night of his life.

Under the law I have to warn you, Inspector Queen began.

Never mind, I know my rights, but I want to explain, it’s important, Marsh said. Moved by an obscure emotion, Ellery had tossed him a robe from the closet; he was very Marlboro striding about the bedroom, and it deepened Ellery’s somberness. His father had died in an accident when he was very little, he explained; his mother, who never remarried, had been his evil genius.

She ruined me. I was her only child and she had had her heart set on a daughter. So she rejected my sex — not consciously, I’m sure; she was a Victorian throwback. Believe it or not she kept me in dresses, long hair, and dolls almost until I reached school age. And she’d had me christened Aubrey. I hated the name. You can imagine what boys made of it. At school I fought and licked every boy who made fun of me. I was big and strong enough to do it. I kept at them till they called me Al. Al it’s been ever since.

But the damage was done. With no male figure to counterbalance my mother’s influence — ours was a completely female household — whatever causes these things took hold and dominated me. I found out the truth about myself in my freshman year at Harvard. I’d long since wondered why I felt no particular yen for girls, like my friends, and had to fake interest; now I came to the realization that what I was feeling for Johnny couldn’t be palmed off as ordinary man-to-man friendship... I never let Johnny know. The concealment, the need to watch myself, to pretend, cost me dear. It had to find an outlet somewhere. Inevitably there was an episode in a bar, well away from the Yard... then another, and another. It became an addiction, like heroin. I fought it with all my strength, feeling such shame and guilt afterward that I threw myself into college sports, especially wrestling. Until I realized why I had gone into contact sports. And gave them up.

Marsh went to the wall beside his bed and pressed something. A section of the wall slid away to disclose a fully stocked bar. He seized a bottle of bourbon and filled a water glass. He downed half its contents without lowering his head.

It wasn’t only Johnny who never suspected. You didn’t, Ellery — no one did. I was ludicrously careful. I never cruised anyone connected with the college, even the ones I knew would be approachable. All my pickups were made far off campus, like the first one, mostly in downtown Boston. My great fear was that I’d be found out. I suffered more than I can describe... from the agony of alienation... the effort to disguise my real wants... the need, the craving, to be in the life.

Oh, God, Marsh said, you can’t imagine what it’s like, the nervous tension, the inner turmoil, the loneliness — particularly the loneliness when I was putting on my act in the straight world. And the persistent overdrinking — it’s a wonder I didn’t become an alcoholic, but I suppose my fear of self-betrayal acted as a brake... I never considered for a moment going to a psychiatrist... I know I should have adjusted, as other people have; accepted what I was. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. For every hour of peace — why do I call it peace? it was merely a truce — I fought an eternity of all-out war.

When my mother died and I came into the family fortune, I was even worse off. I now had the independence and the means to widen the area of my secret life, but the dangers of discovery were also multiplied, therefore the fears and shames and guilts. Also, no matter how much I engaged in the life, I felt incomplete — what someone has termed “unfulfilled and unfulfillable.” It’s like compulsive eating, or any other symptom of something wrong... the disgust I felt cruising for a trick, the demeaning deals with hustlers, the sordid hanging around public washrooms in hotels, railroad stations, airport terminals, bus depots, angling for a pickup... a marine, a drunken sailor, offering money for an hour in some cheap hotel... and the greatest dread of all, that while I was cruising at a gay bar or beach or in some park — wherever people in the life congregated — someone I knew in the straight world would run into me and spread the word... most hideous thought of all, some reporter who’d recognize me... Do you know what the first commandment in the gay life is? “Thou shalt not be found out.” You’ve got to understand that. I mustn’t be found out. I could bear almost anything but exposure... I said a reporter would be the worst. That’s not true. The worst would be a detective from the Vice Squad, playing the role of pickup...

Marsh’s delivery, which had begun in halting fashion, began to pick up smoothness and speed, like a partially clogged drain that had cleared. The purge of confession reddened and convulsed his face; his fists flailed away almost joyously at the pain of cleansing himself.

Forgive me for going into such detail, he said, and downed the rest of his drink. I’ll get right to what you want to hear. He set the glass down on the bar quietly and turned to face them.

From the moment Johnny and I flew to that art auction in London, I had the exciting feeling that he’d suddenly guessed my secret. It wasn’t for any reason I could put my finger on. Now that I have some perspective on it, it was an illusion brought on by the intensity of my desire for him. I talked myself into believing that all these years, while I’d been hiding what I was from him, Johnny had been hiding from me that he was secretly in the life, too.

It sounds absurd to me now, when I say it; there was really no basis for it. But, so powerful was the need, that’s what I convinced myself of. I convinced myself that Johnny was giving me suggestive looks... inviting me to make advances... cruising me to come to his bedroom that weekend in Wrightsville after everyone else was asleep so that we could make love.

From the start of the weekend I felt a kind of crisis in identity that turned physiological with great rapidity. It sapped my usual control. That Friday night, when Audrey, Marcia, and Alice came downstairs all dressed up, something happened to me. Audrey’s stunning evening gown with the sequins, Marcia’s silly “fun” wig, Alice’s elbow-length gloves... all of a sudden I was madly attracted to them. I had to have them... put them on... parade around in them. If we’d been in the city I could have used one of my own drag outfits, but we were in that damned backwoods town... And there was my beloved Johnny — the unsatisfied passion of my life — practically in my arms... signaling to me, as I thought, giving me the come-on...

I slept hardly a wink that night.

By Saturday morning I was beyond reason or caution. While the women were out of the house or downstairs somewhere, I stole the gown, the wig, the gloves from their bedrooms.

I hid the gown and the gloves under the mattress of my bed, and the wig in the bottom of my wastebasket under a camouflage of crumpled tissues.

Marsh seemed scarcely conscious of them now, and the Queens settled themselves with great caution for the next few crucial minutes.

By late Saturday night I had no defenses left. My will power was gone. All I could think of was Johnny and how much I wanted him. I don’t know how I got through that endless evening, Johnny’s dreary spiel to those three. It was especially bad after he went to bed. I thought the women would never go up to their rooms. Finally, the last one did.

You have to realize I’d had a great deal to drink. I’d tried to hold the drinking down, but it had got to me. Maybe it was because of the excitement building up.

Marsh began striding again. Hands clasped, at one time wringing, another knuckle-cracking. Head lowered; rushing toward his denouement like a lemming.

I waited till I thought everyone must be asleep. Then I got the gown and gloves out from under my mattress, and the wig from the wastebasket. I opened the secret pocket in my two-suiter bag — I’d had it specially made — and took out the supply of makeup I keep handy there — a liquid powder base, rouge, face and body powder, false eyelashes, lipstick, mascara. The works. And I... changed.

His voice faltered before the last word. After he uttered it he was silent for so long that the Queens disciplined their breathing. Finally, he shook himself like a dog.

It wasn’t a bad fit — you know how big they are, with Johnny’s yen for women twice his size. Though I had to pass up shoes. Their shoes wouldn’t have gone on my feet, and of course I couldn’t put on my men’s shoes, I’d have looked ridiculous...

Marsh paused again, and Ellery thought how bright Einstein had been to insist on relativity. Marsh said he would have looked ridiculous in men’s shoes. True, but how did he think he looked in a woman’s dress? For the first time, as a result of Marsh’s comment, Ellery truly saw him as not the Marlboro man but the transvestite.

I opened my door and listened. Marsh said it liturgically, as if he were in communion with some deep, ineffable force. The house was so still it sang — you know how they are sometimes in the middle of the night. I can remember my throat, how there was a gong pounding at the base of it. It was almost pleasant. I could even see pretty well; there was a good night-light burning in the upper hall.

Nobody I could see.

Nothing.

I felt wonderful.

So alive.

I walked up the hall to Johnny’s bedroom. I half expected the door to open for me as I came up and Johnny to be standing there waiting.

But it didn’t, and he wasn’t. I tried the knob and it turned and the door swung with a creak like a haunted house, and I went in and shut it and it creaked again, and Johnny’s voice said, “Who’s that? Who’s there?” in a mumble, and I felt around on the wall for the switch and then the room lit up and there was my darling sitting up in bed all sleepy and blinky, not naked as I had imagined he’d be, but in his pajamas.

Marsh’s rhapsodic monotone, which had had the devotional quality, fell so low it became a mutter. They had to strain to hear him.

I think at first he thought I was Audrey, or Marcia, because he rolled out of bed and snatched his robe and put it on.

But then his pupils must have adjusted, because he recognized me. You could see his eyes do it.

They scarcely heard him at all now. He was clenching air with his fists and, feeling nothing, opening his big hands in a curiously supplicating way.

Could you speak a little louder? Inspector Queen asked softly. Marsh looked at him, frowning.

I’ve seen his eyes many times since, he said with more volume. At night. Even daytimes. I could read them like a neon sign. Recognition. Comprehension. And then shock.

They stayed shocked just long enough for me to compound my mistake. That stupid mistake. I wasn’t thinking at all at that moment. It was sheer feeling.

The flowering, you might say. The bursting point.

I stripped off the gloves and wig. I tore the gown off. Stood there naked. And I took a step toward him and held out my arms, and that was when I saw the shock in his eyes turn to revulsion, absolute revulsion.

He said to me, “You filthy, filthy pig. Get out of my house.”

Marsh turned his back to them and made little throat-clearing noises. When he spoke again it was to unoccupied space, as if he had wished them away and they had obediently disappeared.

I found myself saying some things to him then... I remember... about my love... my years of fighting to hide it from him...

I knew it was worse than useless — his eyes told me that — but I couldn’t stop myself, it all came out, everything, and all the time I knew it was a fatal mistake... that he wasn’t capable of understanding... any more than you... although I hope... I hoped...

He never raised his voice. It was brutal. He was cruel, viciously so. The things he called me... unforgivable things from an intelligent, civilized man... even if he couldn’t share my feelings, he’d known me so long, we’d been such friends. If I’d been a leper and deliberately infected him out of malice he couldn’t have shown more hate, as if I were his enemy... All the time he was cutting me to bits, the shame, the guilt, the fear — the panic — grew. All my years of being careful — successfully — thrown away in one uncontrollable act. In one night.

He was threatening to expose me.

I don’t know why Johnny reacted so violently to what he’d found out about me. I hadn’t really done anything to him except reveal myself for what I was. He couldn’t handle the revelation. Maybe he had a deep-seated hangup about inversion. A lot of men do... as if they’re afraid the same thing is buried in them, and by attacking it in others... I don’t know.

I had no time to analyze Johnny then. I was too busy panicking.

He was threatening to expose me; and that would be the end of me. At that moment that was all I could think of — that, and shutting his mouth. The cast-iron Three Monkeys thing was on his bureau and the next thing I knew I found myself smashing him over the head with it. It was like a reflex. No rational thought behind it. He mustn’t tell. I must keep him from talking.

That’s all I knew.

Marsh turned around and they saw the surprise in his eyes at the sight of them, and then the distaste, almost the contempt, as if he had caught them eaves-dropping. But even that drained rapidly out of his eyes, leaving them empty.

It never occurred to me that Johnny wasn’t dead. I simply took it for granted. He looked dead... sprawled there... his pale, almost green, face... the blood...

I opened the door a crack and looked out and my heart jumped. There was a tall girl on the landing in a dressing gown, about to go downstairs. She turned her head a bit, and I saw it was Audrey Weston.

Paralyzed, I watched her go down.

She was down there only a couple of minutes. She came back up with a book and went to her room.

I looked down at myself. I was naked. I’d forgotten. I began to shake. Suppose she’d seen me?

I’d hardly had time to feel relieved when Marcia came out of her bedroom — I knew instantly it was Marcia, because I saw her red hair as she passed under the nightlight — and she headed for downstairs, too.

I suppose desperation calmed me down. I hadn’t dreamed that people would be wandering about the house in the middle of the night.

All I could think of now was getting safely back to my room. Marcia was downstairs — she might come back at any moment, as Audrey had. I didn’t dare go the way I was, without a stitch on — that would be a dead giveaway if I were seen... and the thought of getting back into drag, the way I had come, was even worse. Suppose one of the women saw me in women’s clothes? In their clothes?

Yet I had to get out of Johnny’s bedroom.

There was only one thing I could think of, and that was to put on something of Johnny’s. The brown suit he’d been wearing was lying on the chair. I managed to squeeze into it...

Ellery nodded. Both shoulder seams of Benedict’s suit were split open, a fact the District Attorney was going to appreciate.

At the last moment it came to me — fingerprints. My brain was working independently; it wasn’t mine. No panic now. I felt nothing. I used the handkerchief I found in Johnny’s pocket — it’s still there — and wiped off everything I’d touched... the Three Monkeys where I’d held it, the doorknob, whatever I’d come in contact with.

I ran back to my own room.

I locked the door, took off the suit and packed it at the bottom of my suitcase. And washed...

Marsh shut his eyes again.

He said in an exhausted, final way, There was Johnny’s blood on me.

That was the body of it.

There were appendages. Why had he hung onto Benedict’s suit?

“Was it because it had belonged to Johnny?” Ellery asked.

“Yes.”

Queen fils regarded Queen père. The Inspector could only shake his head.

“You realize, Al, there’s blood inside the jacket? Undoubtedly Johnny’s, which got on your bare hide when you struck him and then smeared the lining when you put the jacket on for your escape. Didn’t it occur to you that, with the blood types matching — Johnny’s and the stains’ — and the suit found in your possession, it was the most damaging kind of evidence against you?”

“I didn’t think it would be found. Nobody, not even Estéban, knew about the hidden closet. Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to part with the suit. It was Johnny’s.”

Ellery found himself turning away.

Inspector Queen wanted to know about the marriage. “It doesn’t add up, Marsh. Not in view of what you’ve just told us about yourself.”

But it did.

On the night of the murder Marcia, who was occupying the room next to Marsh’s, heard his door open and peeped out. He was in the full flight of his obsession and he neither heard nor saw her. As Marsh passed under the nightlight in the hall, bound for Benedict’s room, Marcia got a full view of his face and, in spite of the woman’s outfit and makeup he was wearing, she recognized him.

“Marcia’s the only one I know of who for a long time had had suspicions about me,” the lawyer said. “She’s very shrewd and perceptive about such things, with her show business background and the years she’s knocked about places like Las Vegas. At any rate, what she saw in the hall that night, she told me later, confirmed what she’d always suspected. If she had testified what she’d seen when Chief Newby and you people were questioning us, she’d have blown the case sky high the night of the murder.”

But Marcia had foreseen an advantage in silence, and events soon repaid her perspicacity. The death of Benedict cut off her weekly income, and his failure to specify the expected lump-sum settlement in his holograph will left her without a penny. She confided Marsh’s secret to the petty hood she had married after her divorce from Benedict, and Foxy Faulks grabbed the opportunity.

“Sweet setup for blackmail,” Inspector Queen said, nodding. “She’d spotted you in drag, she certainly guessed that you were the one who had murdered Benedict, and you’re a rich man. No wonder you killed Faulks. You did, didn’t you?”

“What else could I do?” Marsh said, and he shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you people how blackmailers operate. They’d have bled me white, and I’d never have been out of danger of exposure.” He had arranged to meet Faulks behind the Museum of Art in Central Park late at night, presumably for a payoff, and instead had given Marcia’s husband a knife in the abdomen.

“I figured that would scare Marcia off my back,” Marsh went on, “out of just plain self-preservation. She’d have to realize that if I was willing to kill Faulks, I wouldn’t shrink from killing her as well. Therefore she’d fade out of the picture.

“But Marcia came up with a very smart counter-ploy. She proposed that we get married. She pleaded a persuasive case. Our marriage would give her the financial security she wanted, and it would give me the smokescreen I needed to hide what I was. A lot of us, by the way, marry for precisely that reason. And she didn’t have to remind me that a wife can’t be made to testify against her husband, if it ever came to that. Well, we never got really started, thanks to you, Ellery. She’s still preparing to move in here.”

Ellery said nothing.

To which Marsh said a curious thing. “I wonder what you’re thinking.”

“Not what you think I’m thinking, Al,” Ellery said.

“Then you’re an exception. If only people stopped regarding us as some sort of monsters... let us live our lives out as we’re constituted, in decent privacy and without prejudice, I don’t believe this would have happened. It would have been possible for me to propose, and Johnny to reject, without disgust and vitriol on his part or panic on mine. He wouldn’t have castigated or threatened me. I wouldn’t have lost my head. We might even have remained friends. Certainly he’d still be alive.

“Poor Johnny,” Marsh said, and was silent.

The Queens were quiet, too. A great change had come over Marsh in the past few minutes. He looked juiceless, squeezed dry of his vital constituents; he looked old.

Finally Inspector Queen cleared his throat.

“You’d better get dressed, Marsh. You’ll have to come downtown with us.”

The lawyer nodded, almost agreeably.

“I’ll wash up.”

He went into the bathroom.

They had to break through the door.

Marsh was lying on the tiled floor.

He had swallowed cyanide.

In the middle of the night after Marsh’s suicide Ellery popped up out of sleep like a smoking piece of toast, groped for the nightlight, kicked the sheet, and ran to his father’s bedroom.

“Dad!”

The Inspector stopped snoring to open one eye. “Unnh?”

“Vincentine Astor!”

“Wha’?”

“Vincentine Astor!”

“Unnh.”

“Nobody would have a name like that legitimately. It’s got to be a take-on, a phony — somebody’s idea of class. I’m betting she’s Laura! Laura Man-something!”

“Go back to sleep, son.” The old man took his own advice.

But Laura Man-something the vanished hatcheck girl of Manhattan’s Boy-Girl Club turned out to be. They found Miss Manzoni in her native Chillicothe, Ohio, in the shadow of Mt. Logan among the mysterious mounds, putting books back in the stacks of the Carnegie Library. She was living with her father, stepmother, and a mixed brood of original and acquired Manzonis in a pleasant frame house on a street of dying elms. Her father, Burton Stevenson Manzoni, had been employed in one of Chillicothe’s paper mills for twenty-seven years.

Laura Manzoni was a surprise. She was not the bold, platinum-and-enamel gum-chewer they had expected. Pretty and stacked she was; but otherwise Laura was softly chestnut-haired, soft-eyed, soft-spoken, and a gentleman’s lady. She had majored in drama at Oberlin, and she had gone off to New York for the predictable reason, with the predictable result.

For eating and sleeping money, when her grubstake ran out, she had dyed her hair, bought a mini-miniskirt and peekaboo stockings, applied a thick coat of theatrical makeup to her fresh Midwestern face, and bluffed her way into the hatcheck job at the nightclub. There she had met Johnny Benedict.

He claimed, Laura said, to have seen through her masquerade “to the essential me” immediately. She resisted his invitations for three weeks. Then they began to meet after hours, discreetly; this was as much, she said, at Benedict’s insistence as at hers.

“Finally he told me he was serious about me,” Laura said, “and then that he loved me. Of course I didn’t believe him; I knew his reputation. But Johnny was such a charmer. He really was. He knew how to make a woman feel she was the center of everything. And the most he ever tried to do was kiss me. Still, something about him held me back...

“I suppose I wanted very much to be convinced, but I kept putting him off. It’s hard for a girl like me to believe what a man like Johnny tells her — a young and handsome multimillionaire — even, or maybe especially, if he doesn’t make passes or propositions. What made it harder... he kept talking about our getting married. As if it were all settled. Johnny couldn’t believe any girl he was rushing would turn him down. I kept telling him I wasn’t sure, I needed time, and he kept saying that time was for clock punchers, that we were going to be married right away, that he’d made all his plans, and that sort of thing.”

“Did Mr. Benedict ask you to sign any sort of agreement?” asked the plainclothesman whom Chief Newby had sent to Chillicothe to question her.

“Agreement?” Laura shook her head. “I wouldn’t even if he had, regardless of what it was. As I say, I just wasn’t sure of myself. Or, for that matter, of Johnny. In fact, when he told me he had to go up to Wrightsville—”

“Then you knew about Mr. Benedict’s get-together with his ex-wives the weekend of March twenty-eighth?”

“He didn’t say why he was going specifically, or who’d be there. Just that he had some unfinished business, as he called it, to clean up. That was the trouble.”

“Trouble, Miss Manzoni? What trouble?”

It then came out. Laura’s uncertainty about Benedict’s sincerity and motives trapped her into an act that had preyed on her conscience ever since. His vagueness about the purpose of his Wrightsville weekend had fed her misgivings; with Laura’s middleclass, Midwestern upbringing — in spite of what she had always considered her emancipation from it — all she could think of was a “love nest” and “another woman.” Hating her suspicions, but telling herself that it was a test that would decide the issue of Johnny Benedict for her one way or the other, she had rented a car that Saturday and driven up to Wrightsville.

“I don’t believe I’d even thought through what I was going to do when I got there,” the girl said. “Maybe some grandiose visions of finding him there with a chick, telling him off in a curtain speech, and making a glorious exit. When I did get there — I was actually turning into Johnny’s driveway — I was suddenly overwhelmed with shame. I saw how wrong the whole thing was in a kind of reverse rush of feeling, the way you do sometimes. I hadn’t trusted Johnny, I didn’t trust him then, and I knew I never would or could. So I turned the car around and drove right back to New York. And that Sunday morning — I was too upset to go to bed — I heard over the radio that Johnny’d been murdered during the night.”

Fear — that she might have been seen outside the house or in Wrightsville or the vicinity and at once involved in the murder — sent Laura fleeing to Chillicothe and home. She had never told her family about her link to the young society man whose name and photograph were in the newspapers and newscasts. When the story broke about the mysterious Laura named as Benedict’s beneficiary in his holograph will in the event of their marriage, she had needed no attorney to tell her that she had no claim on the Benedict estate, since the event had never taken place.

She would have fought identification as the missing Laura, Laura said, with tooth and nail if Benedict’s murder had not been solved.

“I’ve had a boy friend here in Chillicothe — on the next block, in fact — since childhood,” Laura Manzoni said to Newby’s emissary, “who’s wanted to marry me since we graduated from high school. We’re on the verge of setting the date. But his folks are real hardshell Baptists and, while Buell would stick by me if I were dragged through the papers and TV, they’d make things very unpleasant for us. Can you keep my name out of this? Please?”

They kept her name out of it... “the last woman in Benedict’s life,” Inspector Queen repeated. “Isn’t that what he called her that Saturday night?”

“He was wrong,” Ellery said dourly. “Laura Manzoni wasn’t the last woman in Johnny’s life.”

“She wasn’t?”

“She wasn’t.”

“But then who was?”

Ellery held his drink up to the light and squinted at it. It was straight sour-mash bourbon. He made a face and tossed it down like medicine.

“Al Marsh.”

“Marsh,” Inspector Queen said, dropping the news magazine. He had been reading about Marsh’s funeral, and the recapitulation of the events that had led up to it. In the new freedom of expression enjoyed by the press, the story was explicit, too much so to the Inspector’s old-fashioned taste. “I still can’t get a feeling of reality about it.”

“Why not?” Ellery demanded. “In your time you’ve investigated whole botanical gardens of men like Marsh, dad. Every police officer has. You know that.”

“But it’s the first time I was involved in a case with one on a personal basis. Marsh looked and acted like such a man of a man, if you know what I mean. Maybe if he’d been the obvious kind—”

“In his own way he was.”

The old man stared.

“His apartment,” Ellery said. “He practically threw his secret in your face.”

“If so, I didn’t get it.”

“There’s an excuse for you. You weren’t entertained there.”

“You mean all that manly type furniture, and the athletic equipment and so forth? Coverups?”

Ellery smiled faintly. “They were coverups in Marsh’s case, certainly, but hardly clues, or society would really have a problem! No, it was a clue like a sequoia — so tall and broad I missed it entirely. His music library — more Tchaikovsky and Beethoven than anyone else. His rare and first editions — Proust, Melville, Chris Marlowe, Gide, Verlaine, Henry James, Wilde, Rimbaud, Walt Whitman. His art books — chiefly da Vinci and Michelangelo. The busts he had on display — Alexander the Great, Plato, Socrates, Lawrence of Arabia, Virgil, Julius Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Frederick the Great, von Humboldt, Lord Kitchener.”

“So what?” his father said, bewildered.

“You Victorian innocent! All those historic gentlemen had, or are reputed to have had, one thing in common... along with Aubrey alias Al Marsh.”

The Inspector was silent. Then he said feebly, “Julius Caesar? I didn’t know it about him.”

“We don’t know it about most. An Englishman named Bryan Magee wrote a book a few years ago that he called One in Twenty. In it he makes the statement that the idea that deviates can necessarily be recognized as such is a myth. The overwhelming majority of them, of both sexes, Magee says — and he did a vast job of research in preparation for two TV documentaries he presented on the subject — are outwardly indistinguishable from normally sexed people. It can be anybody — the brawny fellow working beside you in the office, your bartender, the guy next door, the friend you play bridge with every Thursday night, the cop on your beat, or your mousy Cousin Horace. One in twenty, dad — that’s the current statistic. And that figure may be far too conservative. Kinsey claimed it was one in ten... Anyway, there it was, the clue in Marsh’s living room. Staring me in the mandibles. Like the figleafless David he enshrined in his bedroom, eight feet tall and naked as the day Michelangelo lovingly made the original... I can’t say I’m proud of my role in this caper, dad. And not only for that reason.”

“You mean there was another clue, too?”

“Clue is hardly the word. It was — excuse the pun — almost a dead giveaway. Johnny told me who’d done it.”

“Told you?” Inspector Queen scratched his mustache angrily. “Told you, Ellery? How? When?”

“As he was dying. When he came to from the beating, after Marsh left him for dead, Johnny realized he had only a short time to live. In those last few moments preceding death he experienced one of those infinities of clarity, when time stretches beyond its ordinary limits and the dying brain performs prodigies of thought in what we three-dimensional air-breathers call seconds.

“He knew there were no writing materials handy — you’ll recall you and I searched when we got there and failed to find any. Yet he wanted desperately to let us know who had attacked him, and why. So he managed somehow to use the extension phone to the cottage.”

Ellery frowned into the past. “Johnny knew my first question — anyone’s first question under the circumstances — would be: who did it? But in that timeless flash of brilliance, as he was groping for the phone, he found himself in a fantastic situation.”

“Fantastic situation?” The Inspector frowned into the present. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is,” Ellery said, “how could he tell me who had murdered him?”

“How could he tell you? What are you talking about, Ellery? All he had to do was say the killer’s name.”

“All right,” Ellery said. “Say it.”

“Al.”

“Oh, but that could have been an uncompleted attempt to say ‘Alice.’ How would we have known it wasn’t?”

“Oh,” the Inspector said. “Well, then Marsh.”

“Could have been the unfinished start of ‘Marcia.’”

The old man began to look interested. “I see what you mean!.. Then Marsh’s christening name, Aubrey. You’d have understood that.”

“Would I, dad? In light of Johnny’s speech impediment? How could I ever have been sure he hadn’t meant to say ‘Audrey’?”

“Huh.” The Inspector thought deeply. “Huh!” he said. “Funny problem, at that... How about the word ‘lawyer’? No possible mixup there. Marsh was the only lawyer Benedict could have meant.”

“Johnny was probably thinking in terms of names only. But assuming he thought of ‘lawyer,’ see what a bind he found himself in. He was intending to marry Laura, a girl he loved; her name was in the will he’d given you to put in your pocket. If he said ‘lawyer,’ we might have mistaken the word for the name — ‘lawyer’ for ‘Laura’! Remember, he had great difficulty pronouncing the letter r. Between the impediment and his dying diction, it was too great a risk to take.”

“Then the word ‘attorney’!”

“Might have sounded like ‘Tierney,’” Ellery said, “because of the same difficulty with his r’s.” He shook his head. “An extraordinary situation that wouldn’t occur once in a million cases. But it did in this one.”

“Wait... a... minute,” the Inspector articulated. “Hold your horses, Professor! There’s one thing Benedict could have said that you wouldn’t — you couldn’t — have misunderstood. Same as if he’d put his finger on Marsh in front of witnesses! Marsh was the only man besides himself in the house — all the rest were women. Why didn’t Benedict simply say the word ‘man’ and take the chance you’d understand he meant Marsh?”

“Just what I asked myself, dad. But he didn’t, and naturally I wondered why. Of course, he might not have thought of it. But suppose he had? The possibility raised a fascinating line of speculation. If he thought of saying ‘man’ and rejected it in those endless few seconds, then — as in the case of the names — there must have been a basis for similar confusion—”

“But no name in the case sounded like ‘man,’” the Inspector objected.

“Yes, but did we know all the names in the case? We did not. There was one conspicuous omission. We didn’t know Laura’s last name! That’s what suggested to me that Laura’s surname might be M-a-n-n or might begin with M-a-n or M-a-double n — Manners, Mannheimer, something like that. It turned out to be Manzoni. That must have been, then, why Johnny didn’t say it. He was afraid that, if he could get out only the first syllable before he died or became unconscious, we’d believe — when we discovered Laura’s family name — that he’d been accusing her of killing him.”

The old man was shaking his head. “I never heard anything like this in my whole life! But Ellery, you said Benedict did identify his killer to you. The old dying-message thing you’re so crazy about.”

“Could it be premature senility?” Ellery made a face. “At the time I didn’t even realize it was a dying message! And then I dismissed it from my alleged mind. Dad, what was it Johnny said to me over the phone when I asked him who had attacked him?”

“He said some stupid thing like he was home, or something like that.”

“It wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t say he was home. He uttered the one word, ‘home.’ In fact, he repeated it three times. I thought he meant he was calling from home, that is, from the main house, in his muddled dying condition answering a ‘who’ question with a ‘where’ answer. I should have taken into account at least the possibility that when I asked ‘Who’ he’d answered ‘who’.”

“Who— ‘Home’? ‘Home’ isn’t a who, Ellery. Unless it was somebody’s name. But there wasn’t anybody named—” The Inspector looked startled. “He didn’t finish,” he said slowly. “It was a longer word — beginning with ‘home’.”

“Yes,” Ellery said, muffled, out of a well of self-disgust. “If Johnny had finished the word, or I’d had the mother wit I was presumably born with — we’d have solved the mystery of this case actually before the victim drew his last breath.”

“Then, Ellery, what Benedict meant to say was the word—”

“Homosexual.”