“Oscar talked to you as part of his investigation?” I asked Molly.
“Yes. I found him a rather unpolished personality.”
That was Oscar, all right.
I should have expected this. We’d left the notepad where we’d found it, like good citizens. Any idiot would have tried to find out whose number that was, and Oscar is no idiot. He just acts like it sometimes.
“Do you have any idea why Matheson had your number?” Lynda asked.
The judge turned to her. “I know exactly why, but I see no reason to tell you - on or off the record. As an officer of the court I’ve already told the proper authorities.”
“It’s really not that hard to figure out,” I said. “Matheson was a notorious womanizer. That’s an old-fashioned word that Chalmers used, but I don’t know of a better one. The two of you must have had a liaison at the hotel. The only real question is whether you left his room before or after the murder.”
Molly stood up, her body trembling. “That accusation is totally baseless.”
Fortunately, I wasn’t within slapping range.
“Jeff isn’t accusing you of anything,” Lynda said in a soothing tone. “He just got carried away for a minute. What he means is, did you go to Matheson’s room yesterday afternoon? And if you did, did he give you any indication that he was expecting another visitor?”
“Those are questions quite proper for the police to ask, Ms. Teal, and they already did.”
I gave up. “If you choose to stonewall us, Judge, I know there’s nothing we can do about it. Legally, whatever you had going with the victim is none of our business.”
“I had nothing ‘going’ with Hugh Matheson.”
Unexpectedly, she sat back down and went on in a more collected voice. “I’ve known Hugh for years, since law school. Apparently he tried to call me at the hotel a couple of times Friday night, but I was at Mac’s party. Anyway, on Saturday he missed me again because I was out to an early breakfast, so he followed me into the corridor after Kate McCabe’s presentation.”
“He just wanted to talk to you?” I said.
She nodded. “It was about a case he was involved in, a case that’s going to reach my court.”
“But that isn’t ethical, is it?” Lynda objected.
“Totally inappropriate,” the judge agreed with a shake of her head. “I told Hugh in the strongest terms possible that it was only our long friendship that kept me from reporting him to the ethics committee of the Cincinnati Bar Association.”
It was as neat an explanation for an embarrassing circumstance as I’d ever seen, maybe too neat.
“I find it hard to believe that a man with a five-speed libido like Matheson could resist putting the moves on an attractive woman like you,” I told Molly.
She laughed. “Thanks, I guess, but I never said he didn’t try. I turned him down years ago, before I even had my first gray hair. I wasn’t interested in being added to his list of conquests. And these days he prefers - preferred - younger women, so I was safe from his attentions.”
Lynda must have read something significant in that - is that a woman thing? - because she said, “How young?”
“How young is Renata Chalmers?”
It took a second or two for that to penetrate. But when it did, it hit hard. I gripped the arm of my chair. “Are you telling us that Renata and Matheson-”
Molly Crocker rose to her feet, looking away from me as I stood up at the same time. “I’m sorry. I’ve already said far more than I had any business saying.”
“Maybe so, but you did say it,” Lynda pointed out, leaving her chair as well. “Now you at least have a responsibility to make sure we don’t misinterpret and imagine the situation as any worse than it is.”
“The situation is bad enough,” the judge said, “at least by my rather traditional standards of morality. I really don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
Talk about shutting the barn door after the cow’s escaped...
“We’re not gossips or voyeurs looking for cheap thrills,” Lynda said. “We’re asking for a reason. This could have a bearing on the murder motive.”
“I - I never thought-”
I pressed the issue hard. “Was Renata Chalmers having an affair with Hugh Matheson or wasn’t she?”
Molly closed her eyes. “Yes. Yes, damn it, she was.”
“How do you know?”
“I had the ill-fortune to wander into the bar just before a meeting of the Anglo-Indian Club some months ago. Hugh and Woollcott were in there, arguing so intently they didn’t notice anyone else. It was an ugly scene - Hugh bragging that he’d been bedding Woollcott’s wife right under his nose for six months. He was like... like some hunter holding up a prize catch.”
“Or maybe a collector who’d bested a rival,” I murmured.
“The whole thing was so dehumanizing that I only wanted to run out of there and forget about it. I turned around and bumped smack into Renata. She’d heard it all; I could tell by the look on her face.”
“So her husband knew and she knew that he knew,” Lynda said.
I hadn’t observed any great strain between the Chalmerses and I said so.
“Woollcott is nothing if not a pragmatist,” the judge said. “I suspect he could tolerate the situation as long as he maintained bragging rights in public. Renata is the perfect trophy wife, isn’t she? Beautiful, talented, and intelligent. And her last name is Chalmers. Woollcott wasn’t going to give that up over a little infidelity.”
The delivery was so dry and factual that I couldn’t tell if she were being catty or not. But it was just the sort of thing a jealous and envious woman might say.
“Just for the sake of discussion, Judge,” I said, “where were you around the time of the murder - say an hour in either direction?”
“I don’t know because I don’t know when the murder happened. I presume I was dressing in my hotel room, enjoying the cocktail hour or in transit between the two. At any rate I was with my husband the entire afternoon and evening.”
“Your husband?” Lynda echoed.
Her obvious surprise - and mine, too - put a smile on Molly Crocker’s face.
“You mean you sleuths didn’t know? I’m married to Noah Queensbury.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Key to Everything
The Crocker-Queensbury connection still had me numb some minutes after the distaff side of that combo had returned to the Hearth Room.
“I knew she was married because I noticed her wedding ring yesterday,” I told Lynda, leaning my rear end against the escalator, “but why didn’t somebody tell me her husband was Queensbury?”
“Why should they?” Lynda demanded. “Is that supposed to be the most important thing about her - who her husband is?”
“Maybe not, but it could be important enough, and there was no way for me to know it. Even the hotel room was in the Crocker name.”
“Well, it had to be in one name or the other.”
There was no way to respond to that without digging myself into a deeper hole, so I changed the subject.
“If Maximum Molly is married to Queensbury, she could have been wearing his deerstalker last night,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? When does he ever take it off? I bet he even wears it to bed. Jeff, whoever was wearing that hat could have easily bought it, borrowed it or brought it from home. She or he didn’t have to be married to it.”
“I vote against buying,” I said. “If the deerstalker was a kind of minimal disguise, the killer would have thought of that earlier and wouldn’t have had to buy it here at the colloquium.”
“You’re assuming premeditation?” Lynda asked.
I nodded. “The use of a gun smacks of planning. I know we have a concealed carry law in Ohio, but I can’t see these Sherlockians packing heat to a quiet campus in Erin.”
“Maybe not, but I know who might have.” She paused to give the name the appropriate amount of drama. “Al Kane. He’s always shooting guns on those TV commercials.”