De Jong continued imperturbably: “She never knew he could sail a boat, though she knows he was good with engines and things. She never knew he had rich friends; their friends — the few they have in Philly, she says — are poor people like themselves. Wilson had no vices, she says — didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or take dope. They’d go picnicking when he was home — when he was home — or drive out to Willow Grove of a Sunday, or stay home” — his eyes were mocking as he glanced at her sidewise — “making love. That right, Mrs. Wilson?”
Bill whispered, “You damned—”
Ellery seized his arm. “Now, look here, De Jong. What have you up your sleeve? I see no point in innuendo.”
Lucy did not move. Her eyes were infinitely remote now, deep with tears. De Jong chuckled. He went to the door and shouted: “Let those newspaper bastards in!”
Time passed, and they were buffeted about in a sea of noise. In many ways it was nightmare: the air in the low-ceilinged cabin was soon thick and foul with cigaret smoke, blazing occasionally to the lightning of photographers’ flashlamps; the walls re-echoed with laughter and shouted conversation. Every few minutes someone jerked the newspaper De Jong had placed there off the dead man’s face and photographed it from a new angle... Ella Amity flew from group to group like a red-haired harpy, but she always returned to the black-eyed woman enthroned like an unwilling queen in the armchair. She hovered over Lucy in a proprietary way, whispering to her, holding her hand, smoothing her hair tenderly. Bill watched from behind, raging in silence.
Eventually the room cleared. “All right folks,” said De Jong as the sound of the last departing motor died away. “That’s all for tonight. You’ll keep available, of course, Mrs. Wilson. We’ve got to take your husband’s body to the morgue—”
“De Jong,” said Ellery from the corner. “Wait.”
“Wait? For what?”
“It’s inconceivably important.” Ellery’s voice was grave. “Wait.”
Ella Amity gurgled from the doorway: “Always play hunches. Something up your sleeve, Mr. Queen? Nobody puts anything over on Little Ella.” Her red hair was wild and her teeth gleamed. She leaned against the wall, watchful as a cobra. They were still for so long that the random sounds of the river began to creep into the shack again, after hours of being drowned out.
Then De Jong said, “All right,” with a peculiar irritation, and went out. Lucy sighed. And Bill shut his mouth tight. After a long time De Jong came back, accompanied by two uniformed men carrying a stretcher. They dumped it by the corpse.
“No,” said Ellery. “Not yet. Let the body alone, please.”
De Jong snapped, “Wait outside,” and eyed him hostilely, chewing at a cigar. Eventually he stopped pacing and sat down. Nobody moved. They sat stupefied by inaction, too weary to speak or protest.
And then, at two o’clock in the morning, as if by prearrangement, a motor came roaring down Lamberton Road. Ellery flexed his arms a little. “Come outside, De Jong,” he said in a flat tone, and went to the door. De Jong followed, lips drawn back. And Ella Amity’s red-tipped fingers curved in triumph... Bill Angell hesitated, glanced at his sister, and quietly went out, too.
Three people stepped out of a long chauffeur-driven limousine onto the tarry road. Conducted by detectives, they walked slowly along the boards placed over the main driveway, their feet curiously reluctant. All three were of a height, tall and somehow, despite everything, poised — a middle-aged woman, a young woman, and a middle-aged man. They were in evening clothes: the older woman in a sable coat over a white sequined gown, the younger in a short ermine wrap over a flaming chiffon that swept the ground, the man carrying a silk hat in his hand. The women had been weeping; the man’s stern, rugged face was set in hard and angry lines.
Ellery said soberly in the driveway, “Mrs. Gimball?”
The older woman raised eyes underscored with leaden sacs, brittle blue eyes whose self-assurance had recently been shattered. “And you, I suppose, are the gentleman who ’phoned my father. Yes. This is my daughter Andrea. And this is a very dear friend, Mr. Grosvenor Finch. Where—?”
“So what?” said De Jong softly.
Bill drifted away from the lighted doorway into a deep shadow. His eyes, narrowed a little, were on the slender fingers of the young woman’s beautiful left hand. He stood so close to her that he could have touched her ermine wrap. To his ears the deep suspicious tones of De Jong, the silk-hatted man’s cultured voice, the older woman’s harassed quaver were blurred and half-unheard. In his shadow he hesitated, and his eyes went from the young woman’s hand to her face.
Andrea Gimball, he thought. So that was her name. And he saw that her face was young and unspoiled, not at all like the faces of the young women he knew, not remotely resembling the faces of the young women who were habitually pictured on society pages. It was a good face, delicate, soft, and somehow it touched a responsive chord. Singularly, he wanted to talk to her. A sharp corner of his brain buzzed warning, but he ignored it. He extended his hand from the shadow and touched her bare arm.
She turned her head slowly toward him, and he saw that her blue eyes were deep with alarm. Under his fingers her skin felt suddenly cold. He knew that he should not be touching her; he felt her instinctive withdrawal. And yet something made his hand tighten about her arm and draw her, quiet and only half-resisting, into his shadow.
“You — you—” she said and stopped, straining to search his face. She could only dimly make it out, but it seemed to reassure her, for her skin warmed against his fingers and the alarm became simply fatigue in her eyes. With a guilty feeling he released her. “Miss Gimball,” he whispered. “I have only a moment. Please listen to me...”
“Who are you?” she asked softly.
“It doesn’t matter. Bill Angell. It might have been anyone.” But he knew that to be untrue as he said it. “Miss Gimball, for a moment I meant to expose you. I thought — Now, I don’t know.”
“Expose me?” she faltered. “What do you mean?”
He came closer in the shadow, so close that he could smell the faint aroma in her hair and skin. And he lifted her left hand suddenly and said, “Look at your ring.”
From the start she gave, from the odd way in which she jerked her hand to the level of her eyes and stared, he knew he had been right. And curiously, he wished now that he had not been right. She was so different from the woman he had visualized.
“My ring,” she said with difficulty. “My ring. The — the stone’s gone.”
The ring was on the fourth finger of her left hand, an incredibly delicate circlet of platinum with naked uplifted prongs, two of them a little bent. Where the stone had been there was a hole.
“I found the stone,” whispered Bill, “in there.” And he nodded in the direction of the shack. Suddenly he looked around, and she caught something of the caution in his manner, for the alarm came back into her eyes and she crept a little closer to him. “Quickly,” he whispered. “Tell me the truth. You were the woman in the Cadillac?”
“Cadillac?” He could barely hear her voice. For a maddening moment her aroma filled his nostrils with increased insistence.
“Tell me the truth,” he muttered. “I could have told the police. You came here earlier tonight in a Cadillac roadster. You were dressed differently — in dark clothes. You came out of this house. What were you doing here, Miss Gimball? Tell me!”
She was silent for so long that he thought she had not heard him. Then she said, “Oh, Bill Angell, I’m so frightened I–I don’t know what to say. I never thought... If I could only trust you—”