The Scarlet Letters

A...

Until the fourth year of their marriage, their friends considered Dirk and Martha Lawrence one of the happiest couples in New York.

The lovebirds were invariably described as “nice, interesting young people.” The temporal part of the description puzzled outsiders at first, since both were in their thirties, not the prime youth of the biologists. Besides, Martha was two years older than Dirk. But after people got to know them the description came easily. Dirk was cast in the dark, romantic mold of Bohemian garrets, and Martha had the plump, exquisite look of the pigeon aperch on the sill. That they were interesting and nice was never questioned at all. Dirk was a writer, and to non-writers — who comprised most of the Lawrences’ friends — writers are curiosities from another world, like movie stars and ax-murderers. And Martha was an absolute darling — that is, she was no threat to the other women in their set.

Still, those who esteemed the Lawrences as interesting and nice would have been astonished, had they ever thought of going back over the statistics, at the amount of evidence to the contrary. There were times, especially in the third year, when Dirk was far from nice — when he lost his temper publicly at nothing visible to the human eye, or when he had had two or three Scotch old-fashioneds too many. And even a writer can become a bore when he makes a scene or gets nastily drunk. There were times when Martha was a very dull pigeon indeed; these were usually the times when Dirk was being far from nice. But no one thought of these dabs of episode as being related to a large canvas. Their only effect was to make the Lawrences seem as human as other people at a time when they were in considerable danger of being dropped for their inhuman felicity.

Ellery got to know the Lawrences through Nikki Porter. He had seen Dirk Lawrence now and then at meetings of the Mystery Writers of America, in the days when Dirk was turning out his dark, unpopular mystery novels, but they had not become friendly until Dirk married Martha Gordon. Martha and Nikki had known each other in Kansas City; when Martha came to New York to live, the two girls met again, liked what they rediscovered, and became inseparable.

Martha Gordon had come to New York not to seek her fortune but to live on it. Her mother had failed to survive Martha’s birth and her father, a meat packer, had died during the war while Martha was touring the Pacific with a USO troupe — she had worked hard in dramatics at Oberlin and she was with a Little Theater group when the war broke out. Mr. Gordon had left her a great many millions of dollars.

Ellery found Martha an intelligent, sensitive girl unspoiled by her money but lonely because of it.

“When they tell me how gorgeous I am,” Martha said grimly during a bull session in the Queen apartment one night, “I point to the plank. And they all tell me.”

“You’re oversuspicious,” Ellery said. “You’re a darned pretty girl.”

“Et tu, Ellery? Do you know how old I’m getting to be?”

“Don’t bother looking around for a plank here,” said Nikki calmly. “This one runs, Martha. I know.”

“And there you are,” said Ellery. “You ought to take Nikki with you on your dates, Martha. Her judgment of men is uncanny.”

“Anyway,” said Martha, “who wants to get married? I’m going to be a Broadway star or die in the attempt.”

Martha was wrong on both counts. She failed to become a Broadway star, and she survived to meet Dirk Lawrence.

By this time Martha had worked out a technique. She lived modestly and her acquaintances were all people of moderate means. When Dirk Lawrence asked her to marry him she was working in the office of a theatrical producer at a salary of sixty dollars a week. He did not learn that his bride was a millionaire until they set up housekeeping in a third-floor walkup in the East 30s.

Ellery knew the Lawrences as well as he knew any of Nikki’s friends, yet he never achieved a solid feeling about their future. The trouble, he suspected, lay not so much in Dirk’s thin royalties and Martha’s fat dividend checks as in Dirk’s psychological economy. Dirk acted as if he had been invented by Emily Bronte — fierce, brooding, a little uncouth, and strange in sudden ways.

But it was this very quality in Dirk’s nature that attracted Martha. To the little blonde wife, her big swarthy scowling husband was an uncredited genius, a great and tragic figure. The truth was, they were drawn to each other because of their oppositeness. Dirk was always preoccupied with his problems, fancied as well as real; there was not a self-centered bone in Martha’s sturdy little body. He demanded, she fulfilled. He sulked, she diverted. He stormed, she soothed. He doubted, she reassured. She satisfied completely his evident needs for a worshipful ear, a bosom to lay his head on, and a pair of soft maternal arms. And Martha was happy to provide the ear, the bosom, and the arms.

It should have been a sound enough basis for a marriage, but apparently it was not. Toward the end of the third year, when the change became noticeable, they seemed unable to stay in one place.

It was usually Martha who started the running. But Ellery had noticed — on the evenings when he and Nikki did the town with the Lawrences, or went to a party, or engaged in any activity which involved mingling with other people — that Martha’s flights were a sort of conditioned reflex, arising out of Dirk’s threat to settle into one of his moods. Dirk’s dark mouth had a trick of turning up very slightly at one corner when he was about to sulk or get angry; the appearance was of a smile, but the effect was unpleasant. At such times, whatever Martha was doing or saying was dropped immediately. She would jump up and say, “I feel like a bowl of vegetables and sour cream at Lindy’s,” or whatever — Ellery felt — happened to pop into her mind at the moment. Then Dirk would pull himself out of it, and off they would go, hauling people along who could see no reason for not staying where they were.

Occasionally, however, Martha’s back was turned when Dirk’s mouth pulled its telltale trick. Then he would either explode with terrifying violence over some trifle or begin to drink like a camel. Those were the occasions when Martha would suddenly develop a sinus headache and have to go right home.

In the fourth year their troubles came to a head. They were seen together less and less. Dirk drank steadily.

That was the year Martha found her place in the theater. She bought a play and produced it with her own money. There were parties which Dirk did not attend. At other times he would show up at rehearsal, or accost Martha in a restaurant, and make a scene. Martha burrowed into production details, seeing no one they had known, not even Nikki. When the play failed, Martha stuck out her little jaw and began to look around for another script. What went on in their home — by this time they had taken a plush apartment on Beekman Place — was no secret to their neighbors. There were quarrels early and late, sounds of breaking furniture, wild sobs and wilder roars.

Their marriage had collapsed. And no one seemed to know why.

Nikki was as baffled as the rest of their crowd.

“I have no idea what’s wrong,” she said, at Ellery’s question.

“But Nikki, you’re her best friend.”

“Even your best friend won’t tell you,” Nikki said unhappily. “Of course, it’s Dirk’s fault. If only he’d stop making like Edgar Allan Poe!”

Then, one beautiful night in the early spring, Ellery and Nikki learned what was wrong with the Lawrences.

It began with a Western Union messenger. He leaned on the Queen buzzer just as Nikki was tucking Ellery’s typewriter into its shroud for the day.

“It’s addressed to you, handwritten,” Nikki said, coming into the study with an envelope. “And if that’s not Martha Lawrence’s handwriting, I’m a monkey’s aunt. Why should she be writing to you?”

“You sound like a wife,” Ellery said, jiggling the cocktail shaker. The day’s dictation had not gone well and he was in no mood to be nice to anyone, especially the lone witness of his frequent exhibitions of anguish. “All right, Nikki, hand it over.”

“Don’t you want me to read it to you while you make the cocktails? After all, what’s a secretary for?”

“The cocktails are made. Give me that!”

“I don’t understand,” said Nikki without rancor as Ellery tore open the envelope. “Something awful must be happening. Of course, if you’d rather I left the room...”

But the note made them both grave.

Nikki was staring at the notepaper, with its uneven scrawl. “Holy matrimony,” she said. She deliberately kicked Ellery’s desk and went over to the couch and sat down. “It’s past working hours, so you can act like a gentleman — if that’s possible of any man. I want a drink and a cigarette... Poor Mar. This marriage was going to last a thousand years, like Hitler’s Reich. You’re going to meet her, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“If it was a case, Nikki, of Dirk’s stealing something or murdering somebody—”

“How do you know it isn’t?” demanded Nikki fiercely.

“My dear child—”

“And don’t ‘my dear child’ me, Ellery Queen!”

“—this is chronic. It’s been going on for over a year. It’s simply a case of two people who started out for paradise on a raft finding the damn thing sinking under their bottoms four miles out. It happens every day. What can I do for Martha? Hold her hand? Take Dirk into St. Pat’s by the seat of the pants and read him a fatherly sermon to a playback of the Wedding March?” Ellery shook his head. “The middleman in a situation like this is sure to get it in the neck.”

“Are you through driveling?”

“I’m not driveling. It’s just that instinct tells me to stay out of this.”

“I ask you only one question,” Nikki said, rising so suddenly that part of her cocktail slopped over onto her last pair of nylons. “Are you going to meet Martha tonight, or aren’t you?”

“But it’s not fair,” protested Ellery. “She ought to go to a clergyman. I mean I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Well, I have. I’m through.”

“You’re what?”

“Through. I’m throwing up your pitiful little job. Get somebody else to finish your book. It’s no good, anyway.”

“Nikki!” He caught her at the door. “Of course, you’re right. It reeks. And I’ll go.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad, Ellery,” said Nikki softly. “There are some parts I think are positively brilliant...”

Ellery found Martha on a park bench in a deep shadow. He very nearly missed her, because she was all in black, including a veil. It was as if she had deliberately dressed to blend with the night.

She caught his hands as he sat down.

“Martha, you’re shaking.” Ellery felt that levity might help. “Isn’t that the approved opening line?”

He was wrong. Martha began to cry. She snatched her hands away and put them to her face and cried into them in a deep, dry, horrible way.

Ellery was appalled. He looked around quickly to see if anyone was watching. But the bushes behind their bench were silent and most of the people on the other benches ignored them. Tears in Central Park were no novelty to nature lovers.

“Martha, I’m sorry. I really am. Won’t you tell me what’s the matter? It can’t be as bad as all that. Things seldom are...” He went on in this dismal vein for some time. But Martha only cried more deeply, more dryly, and more horribly.

Ellery began to wish himself elsewhere. A few nearby heads had turned with indignation, then curiosity. And a large figure in a peaked cap, swinging a nightstick, had stopped strolling to stare at them very hard.

“Something wrong, bud?” boomed the large figure.

“No, no, officer,” Ellery called loudly enough for their bench neighbors to hear, too. “We’re just rehearsing a scene from our new play.” He pulled his hat brim lower.

“Yeah?” The park patrolman lumbered over quickly as heads turned everywhere within range. “When do you open? I’m sort of a confirmed theatergoer myself. Me and the wife see every show I can rustle some ducats for—”

“Next month. Broadhurst. Simply mention my name at the box office. Now if you’ll excuse us—”

“Yes, sir. But what name?”

“Alfred Lunt,” said Ellery.

“Yessir!” The patrolman stepped back respectfully. Then he said to Martha, “Good night, Miss Fontanne,” saluted, and marched off whistling.

Ellery said in a hurry, “Now, Martha—”

“I’ll be all right in a minute, Ellery. This is so stupid of me. I hadn’t the slightest intention of... It just happened...” Martha buried her face in his chest.

“Of course,” said Ellery, looking around uncomfortably. Everyone was watching the rehearsal. “You’ve kept this in a long time. Naturally. Now just pull yourself together, honey, and we’ll have a long talk.” Ellery’s left arm began to ache; Martha was jamming it against the slats. To relieve the ache he worked his arm free and draped it along the top of the bench. It touched Martha’s shoulders.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” said a voice.

Martha quivered.

Ellery turned.

Dirk Lawrence stood behind the bench.

Dirk’s hat was plastered to one side of his head and his dark features had the fixed but pendulous set of the very drunk. The reek of whisky surrounded him. The eyes under their thick black overhang were unpleasant-looking pits.

“Hello, Dirk,” said Ellery heartily. “Where’d you come from?”

“Hell,” grinned Dirk. “And I’m looking for company.”

Ellery found himself on his feet. But Martha was already between him and her husband.

“Go home, Dirk,” she said in a shrill voice. “Please go home.”

“Hell of a home. See what I mean?”

“Now look here, Dirk,” said Ellery resentfully. “If that crack about lovers wasn’t a gag, you’re a bigger damn fool than I am. This is the first time I’ve seen Martha in months. She wanted to talk something over with me—”

“In the language of the eyes, no doubt,” said Dirk Lawrence dreamily. “My little Martha. My little nymph. You know something, Brother Q? You kid me not.”

“Martha,” said Ellery, “you’d better go.”

“Yes, Martha my love, you do that,” said Dirk. “On account of I’m going to teach this dirty feist to keep his paws off another man’s wife—”

“Dirk, no!” screamed Martha.

Dirk stepped into a moonbeam. Ellery saw that some bubbles of foam had gathered in the twist of his mouth. His eyes seemed sober and sad. He backhanded Martha’s face across the bench and she disappeared.

Involuntarily, Ellery stooped to look for her.

He never reached his knees. A bomb tore his head off and the back of it went bong! against the cement walk, followed by the rest of him.

The last thing he remembered was an outburst from the nearby benches as of many firecrackers.

It was applause.

“So now you know,” Martha was saying. “Better than I could have told you, Ellery. I tried my best to keep him from following me. But I guess I’m not very good at it, and he doesn’t believe anything I say, anyway.”

“Have some more coffee, darling,” crooned Nikki.

Ellery wished that Nikki would show some appreciation of his performance. His jaw had a green and purple lump on it and the back of his head felt as if it had bounced around in a cement mixer.

He had come to in the park to find his head in Martha’s lap and a crowd of admiring spectators encirling them. Dirk was gone. The theater-loving patrolman was remarking with heat that he’d sure as hell like to run that hambone in for getting so carried away by his part — if Mr. Lunt would tell him the scene-stealing slob’s name, that is — and by the way, here he’d been under the impression that Mr. Lunt was getting gray, or was that one of them there now hair falsies? In the end, hiding his face with his hat, Ellery cajoled the patrolman into putting them in a cab at the 72nd Street entrance, the only address he could think to give in the mushy condition of his brain being that of the Queen apartment. And there was Nikki, who was supposed to have had a date with an obscure but paid-up member of the Authors League, waiting for his return. Martha had fallen into her arms, and the two women had disappeared in Inspector Queen’s bathroom for a half-hour, leaving Ellery to administer his own first aid. Not even his father was home to cluck over him.

“But what’s the matter with Dirk?” Nikki demanded. “Is he off his rocker?”

“I don’t know,” Martha said in the same draggy way. “I don’t know what’s happened to him. I don’t think he knows himself.”

“I felt no particular uncertainty,” said Ellery, trying to move his jaw sidewise.

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Oh, come,” said Ellery. “The brute punches hard, but not that hard.”

“That’s why I was so afraid,” Martha said to her coffee cup. “I was afraid he had a gun with him. He’d threatened to start carrying one.”

“Nikki threatens to quit every hour on the hour, Martha, but she’s still affiliated with the firm.”

“You don’t believe me. I suppose I couldn’t expect you to. I tell you if Dirk had had a gun with him tonight, he’d have killed you.”

“And he’d have had a darned good case, too,” Ellery said. “See here, I don’t want to seem unfeeling, but give the devil his due. Look at it from Dirk’s viewpoint—”

“Suppose you look at it from Dirk’s viewpoint,” said Nikki coldly.

“You told him a pretty feeble story, Martha, about meeting some female play scrivener at a woman’s hotel. So he followed you. He saw you enter the park, pick out a nice dark bench. I came along, obviously by prearrangement. I sat down and the first thing Dirk knew you were cuddling against my manly breast and I had my arm around you. Your tears made it look even worse — as if you and I’d been having ourselves a thing, but I’d found a new chick to play around with and wanted out, and you were trying to hold on to me. What else could he have thought? After all, the man’s only flesh and blood.”

Martha shut her eyes.

“Like you?” said Nikki horridly. “Wives like Martha exist only in Victorian novels, and a husband who doesn’t know it ought to be altered.”

“Will you stop interrupting? Besides, Martha, Dirk was tight. Probably if he’d been sober—”

Martha opened her eyes. “When he’s sober it’s worse.”

“Worse? How do you mean?”

“When he’s sober, I can’t keep telling myself that he’s saying those horrible things because he’s drunk.”

“You mean Dirk actually believes you’re sleeping around?”

“He tries not to. But it’s become an obsession, something he can’t control.”

“May I say nuts?” inquired Nikki.

“Nikki, you aren’t in love with him. I am.”

“If he were my husband, I’d give him something to have an obsession about!”

“He’s sick...”

“This is going to hurt,” said Ellery. “Either he’s sick, Martha — or he’s right.”

Nikki leaped. “Martha, I’m taking you over to my place this minute. This minute.”

“Sit down, Nikki, and shut up. Or go into the next room. If Martha wants my help, I’ve got to know what the problem is. I’m not going to deliver a sermon — I’ve seen worse crimes than adultery. So first, Martha, tell me: Are you what Dirk called you tonight — a nymph?”

“If I am, he hasn’t caught me at it yet.” Martha’s face continued to show nothing. “Look, boys and girls, I’m a gal who’s trying to save her marriage. If I weren’t, I shouldn’t be here.”

“Touché,” said Ellery. “Now tell me everything you know about Dirk that might explain this jealousy complex of his.”

About Dirk’s childhood Martha was largely in the dark. He also had been an only child. The Lawrences were East Shore Marylanders, Southern sympathizers during the Civil War. Dirk’s mother’s family were South Carolina Fairleighs, with a distinguished history of slaveholding and aristocratic poverty.

Whatever Dirk had lacked as a boy, it was not material. The Lawrence wealth was inherited from his Great-grandfather Lawrence, who had gone West after Appomattox, made millions in mines and railroads, and returned to Maryland to restock the family coffers.

“Dirk’s father never did a lick of work in his life,” Martha said. “And neither did Dirk till he put on a uniform. His father sent him to VMI, but he was kicked out after a year for chronic insubordination. He decided he wanted to be a writer. Pearl Harbor caught him living in Greenwich Village, wearing a beard and trying to make like a poor man’s Hemingway on an allowance of a mere ten thousand a year. He enlisted — in relief, I think — and he was an officer with the paratroopers in Belgium when he got the news that his parents had both been killed in an automobile accident.

“It wasn’t till he got home after the war that Dirk learned two things: One, that the police suspected Mr. Lawrence of having deliberately run the car, with himself and Mrs. Lawrence in it, off the road—”

“Why?” asked Ellery.

“I don’t know, unless it had something to do with the other thing Dirk found out when he got back. His father had run through every penny of the Lawrence fortune and had left nothing but debts.

“Dirk went back to New York, broke except for what he had on his back. He tried writing again, but after a few months of starvation he looked for a job. A publishing house took him on in the editorial department, and he was with the firm over two years. The job lasted till 1948, when he was twenty-eight years old.

“I’ve met some of the people he worked with there,” said Martha, “and they all paint the same picture. Dirk was skinny and intellectual-looking — from not getting enough to eat — and he’d developed a black Russian attitude towards life. His long suit was irony, and of course he’s brilliant. But he didn’t get along with the other people in the office, women especially.”

“Any particular reason?” asked Ellery.

“It might be this: Shortly after he landed the job, he began going out with a girl in the office. All I know about her is that her name was Gwladys, which she spelled with a w. She fell head over heels in love with him, they had an affair, and she soon became a nuisance. They quarreled and he stopped seeing her. And then she committed suicide. Of course, she was a hopeless neurotic, and it wasn’t Dirk’s fault, but from that time on he had nothing to do with women.”

Dirk’s editorial job had required him to read a great many mystery stories. They stirred his imagination, so he began to write again, this time attempting a detective novel. To his surprise, his own firm accepted it for publication. It sold just under four thousand copies, but the notices were good.

“That was the one he called Dead Is My Love,” Martha said. “Ellery, what did you really think of it?”

“For the work of a new hand, it was surprising. The plotting was amateurish in spots, and the story had a wry quality, but it was different. I questioned Dirk about the morbidity of his writing when I first met him at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America. His only comment was that murder is a morbid subject. That’s when he quit his job and devoted all his time to the typewriter, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Martha. “He turned out three more detective stories in the next twelve months.”

“I remember,” Ellery nodded, “that Dirk would open up to me in that period when at MWA gatherings he’d utter hardly a word to anyone else. He was hurt at the small sales of his books while what he felt to be inferior products earned two and three times as much. He covered up by being defiant. When I suggested a brighter, less Gothic, approach, some compromise with popular taste, Dirk replied that that was the kind of stuff he wanted to write, and if people didn’t like if they didn’t have to buy his books. I thought at the time it wasn’t a very grown-up reaction. I wasn’t surprised when he stopped writing detective stories.”

“That was my doing, I’m afraid,” Martha said with a slight tightness. “You know, I chased Dirk. I decided to marry him three days after we met.”

“You never told me that,” said Nikki accusingly.

“There’s lots I’ve never told you, Nikki. I used to write him daily mash-notes. I was perfectly shameless about it. I was the one who encouraged him, after we were married, to try a serious novel.

“And maybe that was my big mistake,” Martha said. “He was so happy, he worked so hard. And when the book came out and got an even smaller sale than his detective stories, and most of the critics panned it brutally...”

“The Sound of Silence was a bad book, Martha,” said Ellery gently. “Souped-up realism that only succeeded in being slick melodrama.”

Martha was silent. Then she said: “We had a time of it for a few weeks, but I finally loved some self-confidence back into him and he started on the next novel. And that turned out even worse...

“After the second book there wasn’t a thing I could do to snap Dirk out of his depression. The harder I tried, the more I seemed to irritate him. When he went to work on his third novel, he locked himself in the study. And that was when I suppose I made my second mistake. Instead of hammering the lock off and pounding some sense into his thick head, I... well, I looked around for something to do. That’s when I produced All Around the Mulberry Bush. The flop it took taught me a lot, and I knew I’d found the spot in the theater I’d been groping for before I met Dirk.

“I also thought,” continued Martha in that dreadful calm, “that my fiasco would bring Dirk and me together again, on the theory of the sociability of misery. It only seemed to shove us farther apart. He accused me of going the route of all rich dilettantes, and we had a really bang-up row. I suppose I was terribly hurt for the second time... Anyway, back he went to his typewriter to sulk, and I bought my second play. And that’s when this jealousy business showed up.”

“Exactly how,” asked Ellery, “did Dirk first manifest it?”

“You’ve met Alex Conn. It was my second production and Alex’s first. There’s never been an author more respectful of his producer. Poor Alex wouldn’t dream of making love to me; he’d sooner try to embrace the Sphinx. Besides, he has a broad streak of lavender.

“Alex’s play had to be rewritten before we went into rehearsal. I had definite ideas about how I wanted certain scenes to run, and I got into the habit of dropping into the hotel where Alex was working, a dirty flytrap off Times Square. Alex works best in his undershirt, with his shoes off, and one night Dirk burst in on us and, to my absolute amazement — and Alex’s — accused us of having an affair. We thought he was joking. But the beating he gave poor Alex in that horrible hotel room was no joke...

“Nothing Alex or I said to assure Dirk he was imagining things had the least effect. He was — he looked — well, you saw him tonight, Ellery. Only that night he wasn’t tight.”

“I hope you told him off!” said Nikki.

“Well, I told him I wasn’t going to act as if I’d committed a crime, because I hadn’t, and I said a lot of other things, too, about mutual trust and faith and love, and the result was we wound up with our arms around each other and what seemed like the dawn of a new understanding. But the very next week, when I was talking over the role of Michael in Alex’s play with Rory Burke, who eventually played it, Dirk made another scene — and that one got into the columns. And that’s the way it’s been ever since, and I don’t know why, why, why!”

And suddenly everything gave way and Martha was sobbing. “If Dirk doesn’t stop... I can’t take it much longer! He needs help, Ellery. I need help. Is there anything you can see to do? Anything?”

Ellery took her hand. “I’ll try. I’ll try, Martha.”

Ellery put Martha Lawrence into a cab — she insisted on going home alone — and he went back upstairs to find Nikki filling the coffeepot from the kitchen tap viciously.

They had their coffee like two strangers in a cafeteria.

But then Nikki put her cup down with a bang. “I know I’ll hate myself in the morning, but I’ve got to sit up and beg.” After a moment, Nikki said, “Ellery. I’m begging.”

“For what?”

“Oh, don’t be obtuse! What can you do?”

“How should I know? You know the idiot as well as I do. Better.”

Nikki frowned. “Personally, I think Martha’s the idiot. But then, as she said, I’m not in love with him. Mar’s done a lot for me, Ellery — things I’ve never told you and probably never will. And I not only love her, I like her. There’s something so awfully clean about Martha. Like a little girl in a starched pinny...

“Maybe that’s it. She’s the last woman in the world, I should think, whom anyone would accuse of sleeping around. Especially her husband! That’s why I’m so worried, Ellery. It isn’t natural. There’s something wrong with Dirk.”

“Of course there is.”

“And I’m scared.”

“With reason.” Ellery fingered his jaw unhappily. “But what can I do? It’s a doctor Dirk needs, not a detective.”

“Doctors don’t know everything.”

“They know more about this sort of thing than I.”

“He’s committing a crime!”

“So is the soda jerk who doesn’t wash the glasses properly, but I’m not expected to solve that kind of mystery. Nikki, I’d like to help, but it’s not my kind of problem.”

“It might turn into your kind of problem!”

“All I can do is see Dirk tomorrow and try to help him help himself. Although, after tonight, I don’t think I’m qualified to do even that!... Nikki, would you see if there’s any codeine in the medicine chest?”

But it was Dirk who came to see Ellery.

He showed up at the Queen apartment just as Inspector Queen was sitting down to breakfast.

“Ellery?” The Inspector eyed Dirk suspiciously. “He’s still in bed, Mr. Lawrence. Someone hung one on his chin last night, and he was up half the night feeling sorry for himself. You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”

“I hung it,” said Dirk Lawrence.

The Inspector stared at him. Dirk needed a shave, his clothes were damp and wrinkled, and his dark strong face was lumpy with fatigue. “Well, you don’t look very dangerous this morning. Through that door and to your left.”

Dirk said, “Thank you,” and went through Ellery’s study to the bedroom beyond. Ellery was lying on his stomach, nuzzling an icebag.

Dirk lowered his big body into a chair beside the bed and he said, “Don’t be alarmed. My intentions this morning are strictly to crawl on my belly.”

“This is a dream,” said Ellery in a muffled voice. “At least I hope it is. It would mean I’m getting some sleep for a change. What do you want?”

“To apologize.”

“Good. Get me some coffee, will you?”

Dirk raised himself and went out. He came back with the coffeepot and two cups and saucers. He poured for both of them, lit Ellery’s cigaret, and sat down again.

“I wouldn’t say,” remarked Ellery, looking him over, “that you passed a restful night, either.”

“I walked the streets.”

“All night? In the rain?”

Dirk looked down at himself with some surprise. “Say, it rained, at that.”

“Then you haven’t been home?”

“No.”

“Haven’t you even phoned Martha?”

“She wouldn’t talk to me if I did.”

“You underestimate Martha’s capacity for being kicked in the rear. That woman is too good for you, Lawrence.”

“I know,” said Dirk humbly. “She has the patience of a setting hen. I realize now she only met you to talk about me. But that’s this morning. Last night I was plotzed.”

“I have it on the best authority,” said Ellery, sipping his coffee, “that you do pretty well when you’re not plotzed, too.”

Dirk did not answer at once. His dark skin was gray under the stubble and his eyes looked trapped. He leaned back and shut them, as Martha had done the night before.

“Have you ever had a real set-to with yourself, Ellery?” His voice was a faraway rumble.

“Yes.”

“And lost it?”

“Yes.”

“And kept losing it?”

“No,” said Ellery.

“Well, that’s the spot I’m in. I can’t explain this in rational terms, and yet I’m not irrational... at least I don’t feel I’m deluded... It sneaks in. I can’t keep it from sneaking in, Ellery. And once it’s there I can’t seem to dislodge it. It sticks, no matter how hard I try. I see Martha with another man, and I feel myself blowing. Am I making any sense?”

“Not much,” said Ellery, “but then sense isn’t the word. Call it nonsense, and I get it. What reason have you for continually questioning Martha’s fidelity? Because there must be a reason.”

“I always think there’s a reason — at the moment. This thing generates its own reasons.”

“What thing? Let’s name names.”

“This jealousy... phobia.”

“Too simple, Dirk. Call it a cuckold phobia, and you’ve got something. I don’t mean to pry, but what’s the matter with your sex life?”

Dirk’s eyes flew open, and Ellery blinked in their flash. But then the flash died, and the big man sank back in the chair again.

“That hurt?” inquired Ellery

Dirk passed his hand over his face in a curious lavatory gesture. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry for smacking you last night. Let’s leave it at that.”

He got up.

“Down,” said Ellery. “Down, Dirk. I’m not finished with you. I happen to like your wife, and you’re giving her a rough time. This thing has to have some roots. Let’s dig... Thank you,” he said, when Dirk suddenly sat down again. “I pumped Martha last night, and between what I got out of her and what I’ve gathered from personal observation, I think what’s wrong with you, Dirk — and it’s not restricted to this jealousy business by any means! — goes way back. Do you mind if we talk about your childhood?”

“I’ll save you wear and tear,” said Dirk. “I’ll give you the facts, and if you want the medical terms I’ll give you the conclusions, too—”

“Oh, then, you’ve had psychiatric treatment.” Ellery tried not to look disappointed.

Dirk laughed. “I’ve tried analysis twice. But it didn’t do a damn thing for me but make matters worse. Oh, it wasn’t their fault. I couldn’t cooperate. Don’t ask me why. That’s part of it, I suppose.”

“Then there’s no need to go into it.” Ellery set his cup down.

“Wait, I don’t mind telling you. It makes some sort of sense.” Dirk planted his elbows on his knees and addressed the rug. “I don’t have what you’d call a normal background. No sweet dreams for me about my childhood. They’re nightmares. It can do things to you, no doubt about it.

“When I was twelve years old my father caught my mother in bed with another man. He beat the guy’s brains out with a solid brass lamp he grabbed up from the night table next to the bed.

“He was tried for murder and of course acquitted — any juror would have done the same thing under the same circumstances.

“So that was all right — for him.

“But what happened after wasn’t, especially for her and for me. Father had reserved a characteristic punishment for my mother. He refused to divorce her. He made her keep on living with him. In the same community — the same house. And he didn’t let a day go by for the rest of their lives without reminding her of what she’d done to him. Her friends wouldn’t have anything to do with her, naturally. Her own family threw her over.”

Dirk sat back and smiled. “He wasn’t going to let her go, you see. That would have been too easy on her — like killing her quick. She had to suffer slow death, à la chinoise. She’d dishonored his precious name, disgraced his seminal manhood, and betrayed their codified class... He was quite a guy, my father. I doubt to this day if the embalmer found any blood in his veins. He had that quiet kind of cruelty that’s really nasty. Everything under control, you understand, and the amenities of the Southern gentleman observed under all circumstances. When one of that kind gets his knife into you, Brother Elk, you feel pain.”

Dirk lit a cigaret and then spent some time crushing it in his saucer. “She tried suicide twice and flubbed it both times. She’d never been taught to do anything right, you see. Finally she became a lush, and that’s the way I remember my dear mother — a glassy-eyed hag reeking of lavender and old bourbon, staggering around the big house falling-down drunk.

“That’s what I grew up with.

“I hated her, and I hated him.

“So maybe Martha is my mother, and I’m my father, or something. And I say to you, as I said to the gentlemen with the couches, ‘So what?’ Knowing where it comes from hasn’t changed a thing. I still get these uncontrollable attacks of jealousy. And I don’t mind admitting they scare the hell out of me.”

Ellery got out of bed. He said, “Wait, Dirk, till I take my shower,” and he went into the bathroom.

When he came out, rubbing his hair, he said, “How are you coming on your new novel?”

Dirk stared. “I’m not.”

Ellery began to dress. “Aren’t you working at all?”

“I sit there eying my typewriter, and it eyes me right back, if that answers your question.”

“Much done?”

“I got paralyzed on the excavation.”

“What’s the matter, isn’t it any good?”

“Lordy, no. It’s colossal.” Dirk laughed.

“Are you still interested in it?”

“What is this, an offer for the first North American serial rights? The idea is as stimulating as it ever was. But I can’t seem to get back to it.”

“How about professional help?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dirk, your personal problem is beyond me.” Ellery tied the second shoe. “If the skull doctors can’t do anything about it, I certainly can’t. All I can do is suggest a treatment I’ve found therapeutic in my own lunacies. It’s to get out of yourself. A writer does it by writing. Get all wrapped up in a writing problem and drive yourself day and night to fix it on paper.”

“I can’t, I tell you. I’ve tried.”

“Let’s have some breakfast,” said Ellery cheerfully. “I have an idea.”

Nikki arrived for her secretarial day to find Inspector Queen gone, as usual, and Ellery staring out the window, not as usual.

“Was that Dirk Lawrence I saw shuffling up 87th Street,” asked Nikki, “or an unreasonable facsimile thereof?”

“Nikki, grab yourself some coffee and sit down.”

“Yes?” said Nikki, not doing either.

“Dirk came up this morning to apologize for last night, and we had a long talk.” Ellery gave her a résumé of their conversation. Nikki was silent. “It’s obvious that he’s in the grip of a dangerous neurosis. I don’t like it, Nikki. I don’t like it at all.”

“Poor Martha,” was all Nikki said.

“Yes.” Ellery began to stuff a pipe slowly. “For Martha, I’m afraid, the prospects are dim. I’m not sure that even if she left him she’d be in any better case. It might make matters worse at this stage of his phobia. But that’s academic. She won’t leave him, and we’ve got to jump off from that.”

“Yes,” said Nikki. “But what exactly are you afraid of?”

“Violence, especially if Martha gives him provocation.”

“He wouldn’t!” Nikki sat down with clenched hands.

“Nikki, I’ve resorted to subterfuge. I’ve convinced Dirk that his most sensible course is to get back to work on his book.”

“He’ll never do it.”

“That’s what he said. But I think he will do it — or keep trying — if there’s someone with him constantly whom he likes and trusts, who’ll flatter and encourage him, take a living interest in what he’s doing. In other words, if there’s someone at his side to help with his work. The way, for instance, you help me.”

Nikki said quietly, “You’re farming me out to Dirk Lawrence.”

“We’ve got to have someone on hand when trouble starts, Nikki. Before it starts.” Ellery sucked on his pipe. “Nikki Porter, undercover agent. Of course, I neglected to tell Martha that when I phoned her, just before you came in. Dirk was sluggishly interested and rather grateful, and Martha sounded as if I were her patron saint. As far as they’re concerned, this is an experiment in trying to get Dirk back to work. You’re to act in a Girl Friday capacity, typing for Dirk, telling him what a deathless passage he just dictated, holding his hand when the Muse fails, mixing his cocktails for him — keeping his mind on himself as a writer and off Martha and her imaginary love affairs. “No, wait till I finish, Nikki. Martha insists on your living in. She’s going to turn her dressing room into a spare bedroom for you. That’s a break, because it puts us on the scene twenty-four hours a day instead of eight. If you agree to do it, you’ll have to keep watching for danger signals and make immediate reports to me. If we can keep Dirk harmlessly occupied for long enough, maybe a more permanent course of action will suggest itself.

“And one thing more before you say anything,” said Ellery, going over to her. “I wouldn’t have cooked this up if I thought I was sending you into personal danger. But that’s only one man’s guess, and a layman’s at that. I’ve got to leave it up to you, Nikki. In fact, I find myself sort of hoping you’ll turn it down.”

“All I was trying to say,” said Nikki, “was: When do I start?”

Ellery kissed her soberly. “Get into a cab and go right over there.”

That was a Tuesday. By Friday evening Dirk Lawrence’s new secretary was able to report that all was well. In fact, said Nikki, all was so well that she was beginning to wonder if Martha hadn’t exaggerated.

“I went over there on Tuesday and Dirk was snoring his head off, catching up on his sleep. So Martha helped me bring some things over from my apartment, and we fixed up the dressing room for me. By that time Dirk had had a shower and changed into clean clothes, and the three of us had a nice objective talk about work and domestic arrangements, and then Martha kissed him and left us in his study, where he works, and we got going.

“He’s a dynamo, Ellery. The whole thing seems to have given him a shot in the arm. He had a folder full of notes and we went through them the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday, reorganizing his material, discarding a lot of it, making notes of new ideas — I’m really quite impressed. It’s going to be a sensational book if it’s ever finished. By Wednesday night I was so fagged Martha put her foot down and we knocked off at a reasonable hour. But I didn’t let myself fall asleep until I heard Dirk snoring.

“Then yesterday morning we went at it again, and this is the first chance I’ve had to call. Dirk and Martha are in the tub having a high old time splashing each other, and the three of us are going out to dinner.”

“You’ve seen no sign of anything, Nikki?”

“Not a ripple. He’s really thrown himself into this, Ellery. He’s trying hard. Martha has her fingers crossed, but she’s beginning to look happy again. Oh, I hope this works out.”

“Try to arrange a foursome for dinner tomorrow night.”

On Saturday night they went to a penthouse restaurant on 59th Street, overlooking Central Park. Dirk ordered breast of guinea hen under glass and French champagne; he was in high spirits. Martha was radiant.

It was Dirk who brought up the subject of the novel. “It’s going great,” he said. “I never realized before what a difference a skilled literary secretary makes. This must be a real sacrifice for you, Ellery. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Dedicate the book to me,” said Ellery solemnly.

“How about to me?” demanded Nikki.

There was much laughter at their table, in a rather soprano key. Ellery watched Dirk with care. He did not like what he saw, and when they separated in the Lawrence lobby he managed to whisper to Nikki, “Watch out for squalls.”

Dirk insisted on working all day Sunday, and on Monday morning, in a new hat and with a light step, Martha left for the theater “to find out,” as she grimaced to Nikki, “how much money we lost last week.” The Alex Conn play was tapering off after a fairish run, and Martha was looking around for a fall production.

The squall threatened that very morning.

Dirk’s exhilaration left the apartment with Martha. His dictation floundered and sank. Nikki tried desperately to resuscitate him. Years of working for a writer had taught her a whole manual of first-aid tricks. She finally gave up.

“You couldn’t expect to keep this pace indefinitely, Dirk,” she said matter-of-factly. “Let’s knock off and take a walk by the river for an hour. I walk Ellery regularly, like a dog.”

But Dirk’s only response was a mutter as he turned to his portable bar. “I’ll be all right. What I need is a drink.”

At noon Martha phoned and Nikki felt a great fear. Dirk’s mood was unrelieved black by now, and the slow turn of his head as Nikki said, “It’s Martha, Dirk,” seemed to her to be moved by something lethal.

“Where are you?” Dirk growled.

“At the theater, darling. How are things going?”

“What are you doing?”

“Going over the treasurer’s report. Dirk, I think we ought to close— What’s the matter?”

“Matter? Nothing. When are you coming home?”

“Right now, darling, if you want me to.”

“I don’t want you to do anything. You have your work—”

“I’m on my way,” said Martha.

With Martha’s return, Dirk’s mood melted. He dictated at high speed for the rest of the day.

Tuesday was a repetition of Monday.

On Wednesday the inevitable happened. Martha could not come home at the psychological moment. She was tied up at the theater in a tangle of conferences preparatory to closing the play. And this time Dirk’s mood froze hard. By the time Martha got back to the apartment he was drunk — so drunk the two women had to help him to bed.

“Poor Nikki,” Martha said. The old dead calm had settled over her. “I don’t know why you should have to go through all this. It’s hopeless.”

“It’s not hopeless!” Nikki said hysterically. “Not so long as I can get him so drunk he passes out. I’m not going to give up, Martha, I’m not!”

She managed to struggle through the rest of the week.

On Sunday Martha and Dirk drove up to Connecticut for dinner with Dirk’s publisher, and Nikki felt as if she had been released from a psychopathic ward.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with him,” she told Ellery as they wandered down lower Fifth Avenue towards Washington Square Park in the quiet sun. “He’s like two people of opposite temperaments in one body. He’ll be way up one minute and in the blackest depths the next. He’ll race along dictating really good stuff for fifteen minutes, then all of a sudden he peters out, nothing comes, and he sinks into a kind of witless sluggishness, as if he were doped. Sometimes he’s enthusiastic and naive, like a little boy, and in the next breath he’s as bitter and disillusioned as a sick old man. I thought you were hard to live with, Ellery, but compared with Dirk you’re Little Merry Sunshine.”

“I care for this less and less,” mumbled Ellery. “How about you pulling out?”

“I can’t quit on Martha now, Ellery. And I do have one consolation — I’m not married to him.”

Ellery was awakened by his bedside telephone at two o’clock that morning. It was Nikki, and her voice was a quivery whisper. “They got in from Greenwich just after midnight. They were having a terrible fight, Ellery. It seems some other guest — a Book-of-the-Month Club author — was too attentive to Martha, and Dirk got tight and took a poke at him. He’s back at the old stand.”

“It’s hardly credible, but did Martha give him any cause?”

“Martha swears to me she was barely civil to the man. After all, it was in Dirk’s publisher’s house, and the other man was a guest there, too. He was being terribly gallant — acting like the hero of his book, Martha said — but she thought he was making a jackass of himself.”

“Where is Dirk now?”

“In bed, asleep. He smashed that gorgeous Wedgwood teapot of Martha’s as his exit. If I hadn’t ducked, it would have conked me. Martha and I are doubling up in the dressing room tonight. I gave her a pill and finally got her to sleep.” Nikki sounded very low.

“Give it up, Nik. You’ve done your level best. Martha’s going to have to work it out for herself.”

“No,” said Nikki, and he could almost see her chin, “not yet.”

The next few days taxed even Nikki’s capacity for friendship. She reported that Dirk had stopped work altogether. Nikki would spend an hour or two reading back to him what he had previously got down on paper, trying to “autointoxicate” him, as she put it, into the will to continue. But he would barely pay attention, prowling about the study as if it were a corner of the forest, making frequent stops at the bar, jumping every time the phone rang. Finally he would jam his hat on and stalk from the apartment, to be seen no more until the early hours of the following morning, when Martha would have to undress him and clean him up and haul him into bed with what assistance Nikki could decently provide.

And then the quarrels began again, on the old theme. Martha was seeing too much of her treasurer. Or she had left the apartment half an hour earlier than usual; who was the man? Or—” I stopped into the theater at four-thirty this afternoon and you weren’t there. What cocktail bar were you playing footsie in?”

“Martha tries not to lose her temper,” said Nikki to Ellery over the phone, “but he keeps needling her until she answers back, and then there’s a row. If it were me, I’d break the typewriter over his head. Ellery, I’m afraid I can’t give this much more than another day or so — I’ll start climbing walls. Would you take one slightly used secretary back tomorrow?”

But tomorrow never came. Nikki failed to appear at the Queen apartment all of the next day. Ellery called the Lawrence apartment several times; there was no answer.

Nikki did not phone until one o’clock the following morning.

She kept her voice low. “I haven’t had a minute, Ellery—”

“What’s happened, Nikki? I’ve been worried.”

“Yesterday morning — it was yesterday, wasn’t it? I find myself losing track of time — Martha and I had a long talk. I told her I had every intention of staying as long as I could be of the slightest use, but unless Dirk went back to his novel my position would become impossible. It’s a small apartment and when they start fighting I scurry from one hole to another, trying to make myself vanish. I think Martha expected it. She didn’t ask me to stay, just kissed me and said that whatever I decided she’d understand, and then she left on some appointment or other without even saying goodbye to Dirk.

“I waited for Dirk to crawl out of bed. It never occurred to me that he was already up and had heard Martha leave. When I got tired of waiting and couldn’t find him in the bedroom, I looked in the study and there he was, all dressed, doing something, with his back to me. I was about to deliver my ultimatum, when he turned around and I saw what he was doing.”

“What?”

“Cleaning a gun.”

Ellery was quiet. Then he said, “What kind of gun?”

“It was a big heavy-looking automatic. It looked a foot long to me. I asked him — laughingly, you understand — what he thought he was doing, and he said something about its being his old Army pistol—”

“A forty-five.”

“—and he was cleaning and oiling it, he said, because he’d just got an idea for another detective story and its main plot point had something to do with shooting an automatic from various distances, and a lot of other doubletalk I frankly didn’t pay much attention to, I was so petrified. I asked him what about the novel we’d been working on, and he said he was going to drop that for a while and follow this mystery idea of his through — he wasn’t sure, he said, if it could be done... whatever ‘it’ was. Then he crammed the gun in his pocket — he was wearing an old hunting jacket — and got up and started to leave.”

“Poor kid,” murmured Ellery.

“You can imagine the thoughts that went through my mind. I could hardly walk out on Martha if Dirk was starting to tote a gun around. Of course, I didn’t believe his story about a new mystery idea for a second. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ and he mumbled something about some friend of his extending the courtesies of a gun club the friend belongs to up in Westchester, and he was going to drive up for some target practice in line with his ‘idea’. I thought that was a wild one, too, and more to test him than anything else I asked if I hadn’t better go along — to take notes, in case he felt like ‘developing’ his idea during the day. To my surprise, he said that was a good idea; and — to digest it — we just got in from northern Westchester, where Dirk shot holes in targets at various distances the whole horrible day.”

“How was he tonight?”

“Fine. Practically cheerful. Martha was waiting up for us when we got in. He kissed her, asked how her day had been, we all had a nightcap, they went to bed as if nothing had happened, and here I am — and I ask you, Mr. Anthony: Where am I?”

“Did he give you any dictation today on this alleged mystery idea?”

“Yes, notes on a plot. Interesting ones, too. What’s my ethical position? After all, you’re competitors.”

“Did he — or you — tell Martha anything about the day’s activities?”

“He did. She went pale, but I don’t think he noticed. I managed to talk to her for a couple of minutes in the bathroom before she went to bed. She confirmed the fact that it’s his old Army pistol. He hasn’t touched it for years, Martha said. She’s frightened, Ellery.”

“I’d be, too. How good a shot is he?”

“I thought he was Deadeye Dick, but he said he’s rusty and his ‘tests’ weren’t ‘conclusive’ and wouldn’t be till he got back his old marksmanship. It seems he was a crack shot in the Army. We’re going out to the gun club again tomorrow.”

Ellery was silent. Then he said, “Just how determined are you on staying, Nikki?”

“Ellery, how can I leave now? Anyway, maybe it’s just what he says. Maybe that’s all it is.”

“Yes.” There was another silence. “If you feel you’ve got to stick it out, Nikki,” he said at last, “don’t let him out of your sight. Force him along this new mystery line, whether he wants to follow it up or not. Maybe you can channelize this gun thing off harmlessly. And call me every chance you get.”

Ellery was still walking the floor of his study when Inspector Queen turned his alarm off.

“You up at six A.M.?” yawned the Inspector. Then he inhaled. “The millennium! You’ve already made the coffee.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“Do me a favor this morning. Check up on a pistol permit.”

“Whose?”

“Dirk Lawrence.”

“That fellow?” The Inspector glanced sharply at Ellery, but Ellery’s face told nothing. “I’ll call you from downtown.” The Inspector waited, but Ellery said not another word, and the old gentleman left.

Ellery was awakened by his father’s call.

“He has one.”

“When was it issued?”

“Last week. Shouldn’t it have been? After all, he’s a friend of yours.” Inspector Queen sounded sarcastic.

“I don’t know,” said Ellery.

“Think it ought to be revoked?” When Ellery did not reply, the Inspector said, “Ellery, you there?”

“I was just thinking,” said Ellery. “If a man is bent on securing possession of a gun, the fact that his license has been revoked isn’t going to stop him. And there’s no nourishment in jailing a man for using a gun without a license after he’s used it. No, Dad, let it ride.”

For three days Nikki accompanied Dirk Lawrence to the Westchester gun club, developing a bulky notebook and a slight case of deafness in both ears. Dirk’s behavior toward Martha was impeccable, and Martha, reported Nikki, seemed content with small favors. She was very bright and gay when they saw her. The Alex Conn play was in its last week, and she was busy reading manuscripts. At the theater, she explained. She didn’t want to drag her work into Dirk’s working quarters; the apartment was too small.

“Sounds good,” said Ellery.

“It sounds better than it looks,” replied Nikki with grimness. “After all, Martha’s had training as an actress. But she can’t fool me. Her shoulders are developing a permanent hunch. She’s waiting for that next blow to fall.”

The next blow fell from an unexpected direction, and it struck an unexpected target. For a few days Nikki transcribed her notes and organized them. There was no return to the gun club and the Army automatic vanished. Then, after the weekend, Dirk began visiting the New York Public Library at 42nd Street to read up on background for his story. He spent most of Monday and Tuesday away from home. Late on Tuesday afternoon Nikki dropped in to the Queen apartment.

Ellery was shocked. She was haggard; her eyes were wild.

“Nikki, what’s the matter?”

“How can you tell?” Nikki laughed hollowly. “Dirk’s still at the library and Martha’s due home any minute. I can’t stay long... Ellery, I did something today I’ve never done in my life. I deliberately eavesdropped on a telephone conversation.”

“Dirk?”

“Martha.”

“Martha?”

“It was this morning,” said Nikki, leaning back. “I was up early — I’ve suffered stupidly from insomnia lately — and I’d just taken my coffee and toast into the study to start typing Dirk’s library notes of yesterday when the phone rang. Charlotte — the maid who comes in every day — hadn’t got there yet, and Dirk and Martha were still asleep, so I answered. I said hello, and a man’s voice said, ‘Good morning, Martha darling.’”

Nikki opened her eyes and looked at Ellery as if she expected a suitable response.

But Ellery said irritably, “What am I supposed to do, phone for the reserves? There must be a hundred men who call Martha darling. I do myself. Who was he?”

Nikki’s head rolled. “Give me credit for some sense, Ellery. This wasn’t an ordinary, garden-variety darling. This was a darling of a different hue. Rose-colored, if you know what I mean.”

“Sorry,” said Ellery wearily. “Go on.”

“I explained that I wasn’t Martha, that Martha was still in bed, and that if he’d leave his number I’d have Martha call back when she woke up. He said never mind, he’d call back himself, and he hung up. And there were no roses in his voice any more when he said it.”

“It could have a dozen explanations—”

“Wait. Martha got up about twenty minutes later; I was watching for her. I made sure Dirk was still asleep, then I shut the kitchen door and told her a man had called who wouldn’t leave his name and who’d said he was going to call back.

“She went white. When I asked her what was the matter she said it was just nerves, she didn’t want to set Dirk off on one of his jealousy tantrums again. She said she thought she knew who it was — some agent who’d been pestering her about a playscript — and that she’d call him back while Dirk was asleep.

“I knew she was lying from the way she waited for me to leave the kitchen before making the call — they have an extension in every room. So I went back to the study, closed the door, and very carefully lifted the receiver on the desk and listened in.”

Nikki stopped to moisten her lips.

Ellery said tenderly, “Oh, for the life of a spy. And what did you overhear?”

“The same man’s voice answered. Martha said in a low voice, ‘Did you call me just now?’ and he said, ‘Of course, sweetheart.’ Martha told him he shouldn’t have phoned, she’d begged him never to phone her apartment. There was absolute terror in her voice, Ellery. She was almost hysterical with fear that Dirk might wake up and listen in. The man kept soothing her, calling her ‘dearest’ and ‘darling,’ and he promised that ‘from now on’ he’d write, not phone.”

“Write?” said Ellery. “Write?”

“That’s what he said. Martha hung up in such a hurry she dropped the phone — I heard the bang.”

“Write,” muttered Ellery. “I don’t get that at all. Unless he is an agent, and Martha was telling the truth.”

“If he’s an agent,” said Nikki, “I’m a soubrette.”

“His name wasn’t mentioned?”

“No.”

“What about his voice? Could it have been anyone we’ve met with or through the Lawrences?”

“It’s possible. I thought it sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it.”

“What sort of voice was it?”

“Very deep and masculine. A beautiful voice. One of those voices women call sexy.”

“Then you shouldn’t have had any trouble identifying the body that went with it!”

“Oh, stop being so male, Ellery. The point is, I think Mr. Dirk Lawrence has pushed little Mar into a romance. I’m all for it, mind you, but not while Dirk parks that cannon in the apartment. What do I do now?”

“Did you try talking to Martha again?”

“She didn’t give me the chance. She showered, dressed, and was out of there before my hands stopped shaking... I’ve been wondering why Martha’s acted so strange lately! It was bad enough when Dirk had no grounds. I can imagine what she’s going through now.”

“So he’s going to write,” Ellery was mumbling.

“That’s what he said. What do I do, snitch the letter?” Nikki sounded bitter.

“You can’t do that. But watch for it, Nikki. If possible, find out who the man is. And, of course, do your level best to keep it from Dirk.”

Each morning Charlotte, the maid, stopped in the apartment-house lobby to pick up the Lawrence mail from the switchboard and mailbox cubby. On the morning after the mysterious phone call, Nikki beat Charlotte to the cubby by half an hour.

Nikki went through the pile of mail in the elevator. There were five envelopes addressed to “Mrs. Dirk Lawrence” and to “Martha Lawrence.” One was a flossy handwritten number from a Park Avenue post-deb friend of Martha’s family, but this, Nikki knew, contained nothing more lethal than an invitation to a society wedding. The other four envelopes were typewritten and bore business address imprints in their upper left-hand corners; one was from Bergdorf Goodman.

Nikki riffled through Dirk’s mail automatically. One, postmarked Osceola, Iowa, and forwarded by his publisher, was unmistakably a fan letter; there was a bill from Abercrombie & Fitch Company, and a large grand envelope from the Limited Editions Club.

But that was all.

Nikki dropped the letters in the catchall salver on the foyer table, where Charlotte usually left them, and hurried to the study, grateful that the post office still limited itself to a single delivery per day. She felt mean and dirty.

She was to feel dirtier.

Dirk, always a late riser, was still in bed when Nikki finished transcribing his Tuesday’s library notes and found herself with nothing to do. Wondering if Martha was awake, she wandered out of the study. Charlotte was in the foyer, vacuuming.

“Mrs. Lawrence? She just got up.” Charlotte poked the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner in the direction of the kitchen.

The pile of mail on the foyer table had dwindled.

Nikki went through the swinging kitchen door with a thump. Martha cried out, whirling.

“Nikki!” She tried to laugh. “You startled me.”

She had been standing by the dinette table, holding a letter. Unopened envelopes lay on the table.

“I... I thought it was Dirk.”

Color came back to her cheeks.

“My goodness, does he affect you that way?” said Nikki cheerily. But she was not feeling at all cheery. Martha had been alone, reading her mail. Why should she have jumped so at an interruption? They were just business letters. Or were they? “I think,” said Nikki rather faintly, “I’ll have a cup of coffee.”

As she went to the electric range she saw Martha stuff the envelopes from the table and the letter she had been reading into the pocket of her robe. Martha’s movements were hasty and blundering.

“I’d better snag the bathroom before Dirk monopolizes it,” Martha said with a shrill laugh. “Once he gets in there...” The rest was lost in the roar of Charlotte’s vacuum cleaner as Martha fled.

And there was the letter, on the floor under the dinette table, where it had fallen from Martha’s pocket.

Nikki drew a deep breath and pounced.

It was not a business letterhead. There was nothing on the sheet of white paper but a single line of typing. The line had been typed in red.

There was nothing to indicate what the typewritten words meant or who had typed them.

The back of the sheet was blank.

At the sound of Martha’s voice from the foyer Nikki dropped the letter under the dinette table and ran to the cupboard. She was taking down a cup and saucer when the door banged open.

Martha was terrified again. She looked frantically about.

“Nikki, did you happen to see a letter? I must have dropped it—”

“Letter?” said Nikki as casually as she could manage. “Why, no, Mar.” She went to the range and picked up the coffeepot.

“Here it is!” The relief in Martha’s voice was almost too much to bear. Nikki did not trust herself to turn around. “It fell under the table. It’s a — it’s a bill I don’t want Dirk to know about. You know how he acts when I buy something expensive out of my own money...”

Nikki murmured something female.

Martha hurried out again.

Nikki telephoned Ellery from the public phone booth in the lobby.

“Now, Nikki,” said Ellery, “what’s the point of crying?”

“If you could only have seen her, Ellery. Frightened, lying... It’s not like Martha at all. And me, spying on her — lying right back...”

“You’re doing this to help Martha, not hurt her. Tell me what happened.”

Nikki told him.

“You didn’t see the envelope?”

“I must have, when I looked over the mail in the elevator this morning. But I have no way of telling which one the letter was in.”

“Too bad. The envelope might have—”

“Wait,” said Nikki. “I do know.”

“Yes?” said Ellery eagerly.

“The message on the sheet of paper — the enclosure — was typed on the red part of a black-and-red ribbon. I remember now that on one of the envelopes I handled this morning Martha’s name and address were typed in red, too.”

“Red typing on the envelope?” Ellery sounded baffled. “You don’t happen to recall the name of the business firm imprinted on the upper left corner?”

“I think it was an air-conditioning company, but I don’t remember the name.”

“Air-conditioning company... Not a bad dodge. Any envelope like that would naturally be taken to contain an advertising mailing piece. So if Dirk happened to get to the mail first—”

“Ellery, I’ve got to get back upstairs. Dirk may be up.”

“You say, Nikki, this took place in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“I seem to recall a wastepaper basket near the dinette alcove. Is the basket still there?”

“Yes.”

“She may have dropped the envelope into it. She’d have no reason to be careful about the envelope. Did you look in the basket?”

“I didn’t look for the envelope at all!”

“Naturally,” soothed Ellery. “But it won’t hurt to look, Nikki. I’d very much like to examine that envelope.”

“All right,” said Nikki, and she used the phone for punctuation.

She brought him the envelope at noon.

“We needed some more carbon paper, so I told Dirk I’d have lunch out today. I’ll have to cab right back, Ellery, or they may suspect something. It was in the wastepaper basket.”

“Lucky!”

The manila envelope was of the clasp type, about five inches by eight. A strip of heavy adhesive paper had been used for sealing above the clasp. On the face, typed in red, were the words “Mrs. Dirk Lawrence” and the Beekman Place address. The inscription in the upper left corner was THE FROEHM AIR-CONDITIONER COMPANY; the address was The 45th Street Building, 547 Fifth Avenue, New York. The entire left side of the envelope was decorated with a cartoonical drawing of a heat-prostrated family, over the legend: Why Live in a Turkish Bath This Summer?

“This is a current city-wide promotion campaign,” Ellery said, turning the envelope this way and that. “Dad received a similar envelope last week, enclosing a mailing piece on the new Froehm air-conditioner.”

“Was the address in red?”

“Black. This is a puzzler, Nikki.”

“How do you mean?”

“There was more in this envelope than that single sheet of paper you saw Martha reading.”

Nikki stared at it. “It does look as if it had contained something bulky.” The empty envelope was not flat. A rectangle of creases back and front held it in a three-dimensional shape. “Maybe the pamphlet about the air-conditioner, although how he got a letter into a business firm’s envelope—”

“The Froehm brochure was one of those unfolding broadsides, which fold down into a flat piece. Nothing that flat ever made these creases, Nikki. These were made by something about three eighths of an inch thick.”

“Sounds almost like a book—”

“A booklet. In fact, these dimensions suggest a twenty-five-cent reprint edition, a paperback. You saw nothing like that in Martha’s hand, or on the table, while she was reading the message?”

“No. But she might have slipped it into the pocket of her robe when she opened the envelope. The robe she was wearing has big patch pockets, and they’re usually full of things.”

“Are you up to a little more snoopery, Nikki?”

Nikki looked at him. “You want me to search for the booklet.”

“It would help.”

“All right,” said Nikki.

“Look for a paperback about four inches by seven, and about three eighths of an inch thick.”

“Martha’s hardly likely to leave it lying around. That means I may have to go into her purse... her bureau...”

Ellery said nothing.

“I wish,” began Nikki, but she bit off the rest of it; and after a moment she said, “Do you really think it’s a — it’s an affair?”

“Looks like it,” said Ellery.

“Thursday, 4 P.M. That’s tomorrow afternoon.” Nikki clenched her gloved hands. “Why does she take such a foolish chance? Hasn’t she had enough of Dirk’s jealousy? Why doesn’t she divorce him and then do what she pleases? I’d like to get my hands on that ‘A’ — whoever he is!”

“A?” said Ellery.

“The ‘A’ that signed the message, Ellery. I’ve been beating my brains out trying to think of some man she knows whose first name begins with an A, but I can’t come up with anyone but Alex Conn and Arthur Morvyn. And Alex is a fairy and Art Morvyn has been directing Broadway plays for forty years and must be seventy if he’s a day. It can’t be either of them.”

“The A isn’t the initial of a name, Nikki.”

“It isn’t?”

“Signatures are almost invariably dropped below the message, on a line to themselves. It’s true this is a short message and the writer might have added his initial on the same line because there’s so little to it. But then he’d probably have separated the m of p.m. from the A by a dash. You told me there was a comma after p.m.”

“That’s right.”

“Then the A was part of the message, not a sign-off.” Ellery shrugged. “That’s confirmed by inference. The message undoubtedly refers to an appointment. There are two major elements to any meeting — the time and the place. The time is given as tomorrow at four. The likelihood, then, is that the A refers to the place.”

“I’m relieved,” said Nikki dryly. “I thought you were going to say it’s symbolism.”

“Symbolism?”

“A nice scarlet letter A à la Nathaniel Hawthorne. I just don’t know what to make of it, Ellery. It’s so hard to see Martha in the role of Hester Prynne! She’s just not the adulteress type.”

“Is there one?” inquired Ellery. “Anyway, we’ll know soon enough what A stands for. Probably a primitive code. What you’ve got to do tomorrow, Nikki, is tie Dirk in knots for the whole afternoon. Keep him in that apartment if you have to make love to him. If he insists on going out, delay him on some pretext to make sure Martha gets away.”

“What are you going to do, Ellery?”

“Make like a private eye and trail Martha to A — wherever A is.”

“Suppose she leaves the house in the morning?”

“We’ll have to prearrange a code of our own. Do your best to find out about when she intends to leave the apartment. Phone me forty-five minutes before. It doesn’t matter what you say to me when you call. The mere fact that you’re phoning will be my tipoff.”