“I don’t understand,” Dane mumbled. “Five? I can’t think of a fifth.”
“We’ll get to that later, Dane. Meanwhile, what else do we know about the identity of this Janus — this individual with two faces, one of blackmail, the other of murder? Curiously, we know a great deal, but to get to it we must dig a rather deep hole.
“Follow me.
“We begin with the gold mine of information deeded to us by Winterson, Sheila’s original partner in The House of Grey.
“What did Winterson tell us?
“That Sheila had a succession of lovers, beginning with himself. (If there were earlier ones, as I suppose there were, they are irrelevant to the issue.)
“What else did Winterson say? That Sheila was not her original name. She was born ‘Lillian.’ When did she change Lillian to Sheila? After the great success of her first important showing, the collection she named Lady Sheila. Why Lady Sheila? Why Sheila at all — which wasn’t her name at the time, yet which so captivated her that she subsequently took it as her legal name?
“I kept puzzling over this. But the answer came to me in one flash. What’s Winterson’s given name?”
“Elisha,” said Judy, wonderingly.
“Elisha.” Ellery waited. No one said anything. “Doesn’t any of you see the relationship between ‘Elisha’ and ‘Sheila’?”
Judy cried, “They’re anagrams!”
“Yes. ‘Sheila’ is a rearrangement of the letters of ‘Elisha.’
“When I saw that, of course,” Ellery said, “I also saw that it could have been coincidence. So I went on to her next year’s collection, the 1958 one. That one she named Lady Nella. What else was significant in Sheila Grey’s life during the year 1958? Well, she had dropped Elisha Winterson both as partner and lover by that time. Did she take a new partner? No. A new lover? Winterson said yes, and named him. Remember his name?”
“Foster, wasn’t it?” Dane said.
“His full name.”
There was another silence. Then Judy said, “I remember. Something about Edgar Allan Poe... Yes! You asked Mr. Winterson how to spell Foster’s first name, which was Allen.”
“Allen — with an e — Bainbridge Foster,” Ellery nodded. “Allen — an anagram of Nella, the name of her 1958 collection!
“Another coincidence? Let’s see.”
Winterson had mentioned three other men’s names, Ellery pointed out, in identifying Sheila’s lovers during the following four years. In 1959 it had been John F. “Jack” Hurt III, speed demon of the raceways. In 1960 it had been the high-society polo player, Ronald Van Vester. Winterson had been abroad during 1961 and was able to suggest no lover’s name for that year, but for 1962 he had put the finger on Eddwin Odonnell, the Shakespearean actor.
“John F. Hurt III, 1959,” Ellery said. “And the name of Sheila’s collection in 1959? Lady Ruth. Hurt — Rath — anagrams.
“Ronald Van Vester, 1960. And the name of the 1960 collection — Lady Lorna D. ‘D’ for ‘Doone’? Not a bit of it. ‘Ronald’ and ‘Lorna D.’ are anagrams.
“The pattern is fixed,” said Ellery. “Four years, four anagrams of contemporaneous lovers... I must admit that the absence of 1961, the Lady Dulcea year, piqued me, and still does. Because Dulcea — a very strange name indeed, so strange it sounds forced — when you unscramble it trying to make a man’s name out of it, peculiarly enough yields the name ‘Claude.’ Of course, we don’t know if there was such a man, or if Sheila was simply taking a sabbatical that year—”
“Wait,” Ashton McKell said. “Claude... Yes, Sheila spoke a great deal about some Frenchman, a playwright, who came to New York in — when was it? — 1961, I think — yes, 1961 — to have a play of his produced on Broadway. The way she spoke of him — now that I realize—”
“Claude Claudel,” Dane said slowly. “Damn it all, don’t tell me he too—”
“1961. Claude. Dulcea.” Ellery nodded. “It’s too perfectly fitted into the pattern to be coincidental. I think we have a right to assume that Monsieur Claudel was Number One on Miss Grey’s 1961 hit parade, for part of the year, anyway.”
“But what about 1962?” Inspector Queen could not help asking. He was as fascinated as the others by the anagrammatical pattern.
“Well, according to Winterson, in 1962 the favored man was the actor, Odonnell, whose given name, by which no one ever calls him except on theater programs, is ‘Edd’ — two ds — ‘win.’ Odonnell is always called ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell, from his tiresome playing of the Shakespearean role. And what was Sheila’s 1962 collection named? Lady Thelma. ‘Hamlet’ — ‘Thelma.’ Anagrams.
“Every lover of Sheila’s anagrammatically inspired the name of The House of Grey’s collection current during his interregnum. Apparently she preferred to use his Christian name as the basis of the anagram, but she would use the surname if she had to.”
And the room was a pocket of silence again in the celebrating world, with the wind outside adding to the noisy merriment. A clock, which had been ticking all along, sounded as if it had just begun. Someone’s chair creaked, and someone else breathed a snorty breath. In this emphasized silence a strained voice, Lutetia’s, said, “Mr. Queen, do go on. Please.”
“In a way,” Ellery said, “this completes the record. The last complete showing of The House of Grey was the ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell — Lady Thelma year. But at the time of her death Sheila was working on her new collection. She had drawn roughs and made sketches, and had actually completed at least one design.
“Since collections and lovers go together in Sheila’s case, who was her last — her most recent — lover? What man was intimate with her during the past year? Forgive me for becoming personal again, Mr. McKell, but that wasn’t you. You fell into a special category in Sheila’s life; besides, your name doesn’t anagrammatize.” Ashton McKell’s face was still set in plaster of Paris. “Was it you, Dane? Yes, but only in the most limited of senses, as far as I can gather. You and Sheila had really not had time to establish a meaningful relationship. You may have been on your way to it; but, in any case, whom were you following? Whose place would you have filled? Because there is someone — someone you don’t suspect.”
Ellery sounded as weary as his audience looked startled.
He reminded them, from Winterson’s account and from what Sheila herself had told Dane, that she dropped her lovers as suddenly as she took them. If at the time of Dane’s appearance in her life she had already dropped her most recent lover — assuming such an unknown existed — or if he had somehow learned that he was about to be dropped by this unpredictable one-man-at-a-time woman, as she had called herself, then a perfect motive for murder could be expected. Hell might have no fury like a woman scorned, Ellery pointed out, but as a matter of statistical fact more murders of frustrated passion and love-revenge were committed in the United States by men than by women.
“We have one feasible way,” he said, “to check the theory that another lover existed in Sheila’s life — the lover Dane was in the process of displacing. Had she named the new collection she was working on at the time of her death?” Ellery started to rise, but he sank back in the chair with a grimace. “These damned legs of mine,” he said. “Ramon, would you mind? The tubular package on the mantelpiece.”
The chauffeur brought it to him, and Ellery unwrapped it, disclosing a roll of heavy paper. He unrolled it, glanced over it, nodded, and held it up for all to see.