“I feel as rotten about it as you, Anse,” Ellery said, pumping the delicate hand. “Rottener. I purposely kept our visit quiet—”
“Our? Who’d you come up with?”
“My dad. He’s upstairs keeping an eye on Benedict’s room and the body. We’re here on a rest cure. On Johnny Benedict’s invitation.”
“Father or not, he probably doesn’t know your Wrightsville record as well as I do, or he’d never have come. For a cop to take a vacation with you is a busman’s holiday for sure. And look what Benedict’s invite got him. Well, tell me about this one, you hoodoo.”
“Let’s go up.”
Upstairs, the Inspector and Newby shook hands like adversaries; they had never met. But when the old man said, “I hope you don’t mind our poking around while we waited for you, Chief. I don’t care much myself for police officers who stick their noses into other men’s territory,” Newby warmed perceptibly. “Mighty lucky for me you were here, Inspector,” he said, and Ellery let his breath go.
It took the best part of forty-five minutes to brief the Wrightsville chief on the marital and testamentary situations that had presumably led to Benedict’s murder, while Newby examined the body and the premises.
“I left orders to get my tech men out of bed,” Newby said. “Where the hell are they? Ellery, d’ye mind? Fetch those five people down here while I notify the coroner’s doc to climb out of his sack and bring his tail over here. We just don’t have the kind of setup and manpower you’re used to, Inspector,” he said in what sounded like an apology, and he made for the telephone in the foyer.
“He seems to think he has to put a show on for me,” the Inspector remarked to Ellery.
Ellery grinned, “I didn’t realize Anse was that human,” and hurried upstairs.
The five trooped into the living room in a symbiosis of reluctance and relief. None of them had been told more than the unembellished fact of Benedict’s murder; each having been isolated from the others, they had had no opportunity to exchange speculations or recriminations or to compare stories; they were all, in the flamboyant word of the times, uptight. Even more interesting, the ex-wives tended to cluster together where before Benedict’s death they had staked out independent territories in the living room.
As for Miss Smith, not unexpectedly after her exhibition of secretarial aloofness, she showed signs of strain. The bout with her stomach had left her pale and ill. She mewed for a brandy, at which Marsh, even in his preoccupation, looked astonished. And she kept babbling away in a complaining voice, principally to Marsh, as if the predicament in which she found herself was all her employer’s fault. At least four times she whined, “I’ve never had anything to do with a murder before,” as if he had dragged her into something very common in his set; until Marcia Kemp tossed her red locks and said grimly, “Oh, for chrissake, shut up,” at which Miss Smith looked frightened, clutched her brandy, and subsided.
“Now look, folks,” Newby said when the Inspector had identified the five. “I know darned little about this setup, though I guarantee you I’ll know a lot more about it before I’m through. But as of this minute I have no notion who killed Mr. Benedict. So that’s our first order of business. Anybody here got anything to tell me that’s going to cut our work down?”
No one seemed able or prepared to do so. Until finally Marsh said in a voice as gray as his face, “Surely, Chief, you can’t believe anyone here had anything to do with Johnny’s death?”
“All right, that formality’s out of the way. Anybody hear anything after getting to bed? An argument, a fight? Or even just footsteps?”
No one had. Deep sleep had been the order of the night during the period of the murder (they claimed at first), in the main induced by bourbon and vodka. Except, again, in Miss Smith’s case. (Miss Smith did not “drink” — she placed audible quotation marks around the word. The brandy in her clutch was for restorative purposes.)
The ex-Mrs. Benedicts, it seemed, had originally found sleep elusive. Freshly bedded, they said, they had been wakeful.
“I tossed and tossed,” Audrey Weston said. “So I thought if maybe I did some reading. You know.” (Ellery waited for her to add “dahling,” but the blonde seemed to realize that Chief Newby would not take kindly to the endearment.) “I came downstairs and got a book.”
“Where downstairs, Miss Weston?” Newby asked.
“This room. From those bookshelves there.”
“Was anybody down here while you were?”
“No.”
“How long did you stay?”
“Just long enough to pick out a book.”
“Then you went back upstairs?”
“That’s right.”
“How long did you read, Miss Weston, before you tried to get to sleep again?”
“I found I couldn’t. The type began swimming before my eyes.”
“Which book was it?” Ellery asked.
“I don’t recall the title,” the blonde said haughtily. “Something — the latest — by that Roth person.”
“Philip Roth?”
“I think that’s his Christian name.”
“Harry Golden will be delighted to hear it. The title wasn’t Portnoy’s Complaint, was it?”
Miss Weston grew haughtier. “I’d forgotten.”
“Miss Weston, if you’d begun Portnoy’s Complaint, I don’t believe the type would have swum before your eyes. The fact is you read for some time, didn’t you?”
“The fact is, dahling,” Audrey Weston spat, “I was so absolutely revolted I threw the disgusting thing across the room! Then I went downstairs for another book, and I got one, and started to read that, but that was when the sauce hit me and I got very sleepy all of a sudden, so I put out the light and the next thing I knew I was out of this world. And don’t ask me what the other book was, Mr. Queen, because I haven’t any recollection. It’s still in my room if you think it’s important.”
“So you made two trips downstairs during the night.”
“If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem.”
“It may well be yours,” Ellery said thoughtfully, and stepped back with a wave to Newby. “Didn’t mean to monopolize, Anse. Go ahead.”
“What time was it, Miss Weston, when all this happened?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
“No idea at all?”
“I wasn’t watching clocks.”
“Not even your wristwatch when you undressed?”
“I just didn’t.”
“Can’t you make a guess what time it was? One? Two? Three?”
“I don’t know, I tell you. Marcia, what time did I go up to bed?”
“You answer your questions, dearie,” Marcia Kemp said, “and I’ll answer mine.”
“I’ll tell you what time it was when you went up to bed,” Alice Tierney said suddenly. “It was just about two.”
“It couldn’t have been that late!” Audrey cried.
“Well, it was.”
“You tossed and tossed,” Newby said, “then you went downstairs for Portnoy’s Complaint, which you read for how long?”
“Really,” the blonde said. “I wasn’t counting. A short while.”
“Fifteen minutes? A half hour?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Or an hour?” Ellery murmured.
“No! Closer to a half hour.”
“In other words, Mr. Roth’s opus revolted but held you for a half hour or more. I got the impression from what you said before that you’d hardly begun reading when you flung the book aside in disgust. You’re really not making very responsive answers.”