“Say what, Mr. McKell?”
“That Miss Grey was shot with my gun?”
“Yes.”
“But it was loaded with blanks! I loaded it myself!”
“It was no blank,” Sergeant Velie said, “that killed her.”
“I don’t know how it could have been replaced,” Ashton McKell said in a calm voice — was there the slightest tremor? — “or by whom. For all I know Miss Grey may have done it herself. I don’t know how much she knew about firearms.”
Sergeant Velie was looking at him with great steadiness. “Let’s skip the gun and bullets for now. You admit you knew the woman?”
“There’s nothing to admit. Of course I knew Miss Grey. I know all the tenants in this building. I own it.”
“You knew her well?”
“Who?”
“Miss Grey,” the sergeant said patiently.
“Quite well.”
“And how well would quite well be, Mr. McKell?”
Dane glanced at his mother. She was absolutely rigid.
“I don’t know what you mean, Sergeant.”
Velie said, “You see, sir, we found men’s clothing in her apartment. One man’s clothing.” The sergeant paused, then repeated, “You want to say something, Mr. McKell?”
The elder McKell nodded with remarkable self-possession. He did not look at his wife. “They’re my clothes, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “You must have traced them.”
“That’s right, we did. We checked out the tailor’s labels and the laundry marks, and so forth. Anything else you have to say to us?”
Lutetia’s face was now expressionless. Their hands were still tightly gripped, Dane noticed.
At this moment Ramon came in. “Sir, excuse me,” he said to Ashton McKell, “but the Bentley will not start. Shall I use the Continental, or...?”
“Never mind, Ramon. Wait in the kitchen, please. Mrs. McKell may need you.”
Ramon withdrew in impervious silence. In Spain, where he had been born and trained, servants did not ask questions.
Dane was thinking: His clothing... What kind of relationship had they had? It sounded like something out of Havelock Ellis. And how could it have satisfied Sheila? The raging wave stirred. He went to work on it...
“You’re leading up to something, Sergeant Velie,” his father was saying steadily. “I’d appreciate your coming to the point.” Dane felt weak and ill.
Sergeant Velie continued to regard Ashton McKell with that same impaling glance. Dane knew what the sergeant was thinking, what had brought him and the other detective to the McKell apartment this morning. Ashton McKell had had the means to commit the murder: it was his revolver that had taken Sheila Grey’s life; his story about the blanks was not substantiated by the facts, and in any case it sounded feeble. He had had opportunity: he and Sheila Grey occupied the same building. He had had motive (but here Dane’s brain shut down; he refused to think of theoretical motive, kept pushing it back and away, out of sight).
Lutetia’s delicate face was cameo-white, cameo-stone.
“Mr. McKell, I’m going to have to ask you to come downtown for further questioning. You won’t need your car. We’ve got a police car at the side entrance.” So much was granted Ashton McKell’s position in society. The tumbril awaits... but at the tradesmen’s entrance.
Ashton’s face was stone, too. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. He disengaged his hand gently. “Lutetia, I’m sorry,” he said in a very low voice. She did not reply, but her eyes flew open wide, very wide. “Son—”
Dane moistened his dried-out lips. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll get you out of this right away.”
“Take care of your mother, son. By the way, I forgot a handkerchief this morning. May I have yours?”
On this absurd note Ashton McKell left between the two policemen. After the apartment door snicked shut with guillotine finality, Dane turned back to his mother. She was no longer there. He went to her bedroom and called out, but there was no response. He tried her door; it was locked. After a moment he went to the phone.
Ashton McKell had a staff of six attorneys at his New York headquarters. Dane called none of them. Richard M. Heaton was the McKell family lawyer.
“Almighty God!” said Richard M. Heaton.
Hanging up, Dane felt himself sweating in the air-conditioned apartment. He felt for his handkerchief and remembered that he had given it to his father. Abstractedly he went to his room and opened the handkerchief drawer of his old bureau.
His hand remained in midair.
His silver cigaret case lay on one of the piles of handkerchiefs.
The silver case had been removed from the penthouse before the police got there. Who could have removed it? Obviously, the same one who had placed it here, in his bureau drawer... his father. That was why Ashton McKell had “forgotten” his own handkerchief (as if he ever forgot an essential article of clothing!) and borrowed Dane’s: to make Dane go to his room for a replacement and, as a consequence, to find the cigaret case. His father must have seen it in Sheila’s apartment, recognized it, pocketed it, and only now placed it in Dane’s bureau.
What a bitter night it must have been for him, Dane thought. Finding the evidence of Dane’s presence on Sheila’s premises, he must have realized in a flash why Sheila was easing him out of her life. His own son...
And the king went to the tower which was by the gate, and as he went, thus he said, My son, my son, Absalom. My son, my son, Absalom. Would God I died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.
Absalom had conspired against David, his father.
Suddenly Dane saw Ashton McKell in a very different light from the clownish spectacle of the man who skulked in out-of-the-way places disguising himself in order to visit a woman he could not even embrace. In his blackest hour — an almost-criminal on the brink of scandal, his life in danger — his parting thought had been for the son who had betrayed him, his last directive an unspoken Don’t worry, son, I’ve retrieved your case from the penthouse, now they can’t place you on the scene.
And Dane sat down in his childhood rocker and wept.
In a city in which murder is hamburgers by the dozen, the McKell arrest was caviar to the general. Not often did a case break in which the accused was tycoon, adviser to presidents, prince of commerce, son of a name who was son of a name untainted for generations, and all rolled into one man.
If Lutetia McKell’s anguish at the wild invasion of her privacy by the press was not quite on a level with her horror at Ashton’s predicament, it was still powerful enough to dominate her household. She had caught a single glimpse of a single tabloid (left incautiously in the kitchen by old Margaret, whose open vice was the journalism of murder and rape); it was enough. All newspapers, even the New York Times, were banned from the premises; and when it became evident that the scavengers of the press, in particular the photographers, were laying siege to the building, Lutetia went into strictest seclusion, like a Hindu widow, and forbade the entrance of the clamoring world by so much as an uncurtained window. To reach his mother, Dane found himself having to follow a route he had not used since his boyhood, entering another building around the corner, descending to its basement, and emerging into the alley from which he could reach the apartment of John Leslie, the doorman, by a window. John or his wife would let him in, and then out by the basement door adjacent to the service elevator. It had been great fun when he was a youngster, but somehow the adventure had lost its savor. When it became necessary to confer with Lawyer Heaton, Lutetia reacted to Heaton’s suggestion that she and Dane visit his office as if he had invited her to take a sunbath naked on her roof.