“What was the argument about?” asked Ellery eagerly.
“I came in at the tail end and didn’t hear anything important, but Nora says it was . . . well, frightening. Nora wouldn’t tell me what she’d heard, but she was terribly upset¯she looked the same way as when she read those three letters that tumbled out of the toxicology book.”
Ellery muttered: “I wish I’d heard that argument. Why can’t I put my finger on something? Pat, you’re a rotten assistant detective!”
“Yes, sir,” said Pat miserably.
Rosemary Haight’s trunk arrived on the fourteenth. Steve Polaris, who ran the local express agency, delivered the trunk himself¯an overgrown affair that looked as if it might be packed with imported evening gowns. Steve lugged it up Nora’s walk on his broad back; and Mr. Queen, who was watching from the Wright porch, saw him carry it into Nora’s house and come out a few minutes later accompanied by Rosemary, who was wearing a candid red, white, and blue negligee. She looked like an enlistment poster.
Ellery saw Rosemary sign Steve Polaris’s receipt book and go back into the house. Steve slouched down the walk grinning¯Steve had the most wolfish eye, Pat said, in all of Low Village.
“Pat,” said Ellery urgently, “do you know this truckman well?”
“Steve? That’s the only way you can know Steve.”
Steve tossed his receipt book on the driver’s seat of his truck and began to climb in.
“Then distract him. Kiss him, vamp him, do a striptease¯anything, but get him out of sight of that truck for two minutes!”
Pat instantly called: “Oh, Ste-e-e-eve!” and tripped down the porch steps. Ellery followed in a saunter. No one was in sight anywhere on the Hill.
Pat was slipping her arm through Steve’s and giving him one of her quick little-girl smiles, saying something about her piano, and there wasn’t a man she knew strong enough to move it from where it was to where she wanted it, and, of course, when she saw Steve . . .
Steve went with Pat into the Wright house, visibly swollen.
Ellery was at the truck in two bounds. He snatched the receipt book from the front seat. Then he took a piece of charred paper from his wallet and began riffling the pages of the book . . .
When Pat reappeared with Steve, Mr. Queen was at Hermione’s zinnia bed surveying the dead and dying blossoms with the sadness of a poet. Steve gave him a scornful look and passed on.
“Now you’ll have to move the piano back,” said Pat. ”I am sorry¯I could have thought of something not quite so bulky . . . Bye, Stevie!” The truck rolled off with a flirt of its exhaust.
“I was wrong,” mumbled Ellery.
“About what?”
“About Rosemary.”
“Stop being cryptic! And why did you send me to lure Steve away from his truck? The two are connected, Mr. Queen!”
“I had a flash from on high. It said to me: ‘This woman Rosemary doesn’t seem cut from the same cloth as Jim Haight. They don’t seem like brother and sister at all¯’ “
“Ellery!”
“Oh, it was possible. But my flash was wrong. She is his sister.”
“And you proved that through Steve Polaris’s truck? Wonderful man!”
“Through his receipt book, in which this woman had just signed her name. I have the real Rosemary Haight’s signature, you’ll recall, my dear Watson.”
“On that charred flap of envelope we found in Jim’s study¯the remains of his sister’s letter that he’d burned!”
“Precisely, my dear Watson. And the signature ‘Rosemary Haight’ on the flap of the letter and the signature ‘Rosemary Haight’ in Steve’s receipt book are the work of the same hand.”
“Leaving us,” remarked Pat dryly, “exactly where we were.”
“No,” said Mr. Queen with a faint smile. ”Before we only believed this woman was Jim’s sister. Now we know it. Even your primitive mind can detect the distinction, my dear Watson?”
* * *
The longer Rosemary Haight stayed at Nora’s, the more inexplicable the woman became. Jim was busier and busier at the bank; sometimes he did not even come home to dinner. Yet Rosemary did not seem to mind her brother’s neglect half so much as her sister-in-law’s attentions. The female Haight tongue was forked; more than once its venom reduced Nora to tears . . . shed, it was reported to Mr. Queen by his favorite spy, in her own room, alone. Toward Pat and Hermione, Rosemary was less obvious. She rattled on about her “travels”¯Panama, Rio, Honolulu, Bali, Banff, surf riding and skiing and mountain climbing and “exciting” men¯much talk about exciting men¯until the ladies of the Wright family began to look harried and grim, and retaliated.
And yet Rosemary stayed on.
Why? Mr. Queen was pondering this poser as he sat one morning in the window seat of his workroom. Rosemary Haight had just come out of her brother’s house, a cigarette at a disgusted angle to her red lips, clad in jodhpurs and red Russian boots and a Lana Turner sweater. She stood on the porch for a moment, slapping a crop against her boots with impatience, at odds with Wrightsville. Then she strode off into the woods behind the Wright grounds.
Later, Pat took Ellery driving; and Ellery told her about seeing the Haight woman enter the woods in a riding habit.
Pat turned into the broad concrete of Route 16, driving slowly. ”Bored,” she said. ”Bored blue. She got Jake Bushmill the blacksmith to dig her up a saddle horse from somewhere¯yesterday was her first day out, and Carmel Pettigrew saw her tearing along the dirt road toward Twin Hill like¯I quote¯one of the Valkyries. Carmel¯silly dope!¯thinks Rosemary’s just too-too.”
“And you?” queried Mr. Queen.
“That panther laziness of hers is an act¯underneath, she’s the restless type and hard as teak. A cheap wench. Or don’t you think?” Pat glanced at him sidewise.
“She’s terribly attractive,” said Ellery evasively.
“So’s a man-eating orchid,” retorted Pat; and she drove in silence for eight tenths of a mile. Then she said: “What do you make of the whole thing, Ellery¯Jim’s conduct, Rosemary, the three letters, the visit, Rosemary’s staying on when she hates it . . . ?”
“Nothing,” said Ellery. But he added: “Yet.”
“Ellery¯look!”
They were approaching a gaudy bump on the landscape, a one-story white stucco building on whose walls oversized red lady-devils danced and from whose roof brittle cut-out flames of wood shattered the sky. The tubing of the unlit neon sign spelled out vie carlatti’s Hot Spot. The parking lot to the side was empty except for one small car.
“Look at what?” demanded Ellery, puzzled. ”I don’t see anything except no customers, since the sun is shining and Carlatti’s patrons don’t creep out of their walls until nightfall.”
“Judging from that car on the lot,” said Pat, a little pale, “there’s one customer.”
Ellery frowned. ”It does look like the same car.”
“It is.”
Pat drove up to the entrance, and they jumped out.
“It might be business, Pat,” said Ellery, not with conviction.
Pat glanced at him scornfully and opened the front door.
There was no one in the chrome-and-scarlet leather interior but a bartender and a man mopping the postage-stamp dance floor. Both employees looked at them curiously.
“I don’t see him,” whispered Pat.