“It’s a tough, tough world for poor old Laura,” Marcia said with a laugh that was more of a bray. “Whoever knocked Johnny off did her out of a load of rice, Russian sable, square-cut emeralds, and Paris originals.”
“Absolutely correct,” Ellery said. “She won’t inherit now, whoever she is. The estate goes to Johnny’s cousin. Who is Leslie, Al, do you know?”
“Leslie Carpenter. Everyone else in both the Benedict and Carpenter families is gone. I’ll have to notify Leslie about this right away.”
“Read the part about our hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Newby,” Alice said.
Newby glanced at the will in his hand. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“This will doesn’t mention you or Miss Kemp or Miss Weston. There’s nothing in it about leaving you a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Or ten dollars.” After the shrieks died the chief said, “It figures. He wasn’t going to commit himself on paper to you ladies for one red cent beforehand.”
“That was smart of Johnny,” Marsh said with a laugh.
“Shrewd would be the word,” Ellery said. “He meant to propose a deal, as he subsequently did, and he saw no reason to settle his part of the bargain before you had a chance to settle yours. Also, at the time he wrote this will out I imagine his only concern was the protection of Laura or Leslie.”
“In other words,” said the Inspector’s dry voice, “if one of you ladies knocked Benedict off, all you’re going to get out of it is a choice of your last meal.”
Newby’s tech men and the coroner’s physician drove up then, with the lightening sky, and the chief sent the ex-Mrs. Benedicts, Miss Smith, and Marsh back to their rooms and sought the phone to notify the Wright County prosecutor and the sheriffs office. The Queens left for a few hours’ sleep.
Driving slowly back to the cottage in the damp dawn, Ellery said with a scowl, “I wonder how right Marsh is about that holograph will standing up.”
“You told me he knows his business,” the Inspector said, “so his opinion ought to be worth something. But you know how these multimillion will cases go, Ellery. Those three are sure to find hungry lawyers who for a big contingency fee will tie the case up for years.”
Ellery shrugged. “Marsh and that other law firm Benedict had wished on him wield an awful lot of clout. Well, we have to assume the holograph knocks out the earlier will and, as you said back there, whoever pulled the homicide committed a murder for nothing. This Leslie Carpenter fellow picks up all the marbles.”
“You can imagine how those vultures are feeling right now. Especially the one who beat Benedict to death... Something wrong, son?”
Ellery looked vague.
“You’re all of a sudden a hundred miles away.”
“Oh. Something’s been bugging me ever since we left Johnny’s bedroom.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. A feeling. That we’ve overlooked something.”
“Overlooked what?”
Ellery braked the Cougar in the carport and switched off the ignition.
“If I could answer that, dad, I wouldn’t be bugged. Out. Sack time.”
Benedict’s cousin Leslie drove in during the early afternoon of Monday.
To the surprise of everyone but Marsh, it was a woman who got out of the airport taxi. “It never occurred to me you’d assume the name Leslie meant a man,” Marsh said to the Queens. “I’ve known her through Johnny since she was in deep orthodontia. How are you, Les?”
She turned a glad smile on Marsh. She was years younger than Johnny-B, and the Queens soon perceived that she was not only of a different sex from her late cousin, she was of a different species. Where Benedict had been the child of fortune, Leslie had had to scrimp all her life.
“My mother, who was Johnny’s aunt — Johnny’s father’s sister — got the heave from my grandfather. In the good old Victorian-novel style, he disinherited her. It seems that mother was too much of a rebel and didn’t have the proper reverence for capital. And worst of all she insisted on falling in love with a man who had no money and no social standing.” Leslie smiled mischievously. “Poor grandfather, he couldn’t understand mother, and he accused daddy to his face of being — oh, dear — a ‘fortune hunter.’ Dad a fortune hunter! He thought less of money than even mother did.”
“You paint a filial picture,” Ellery smiled.
“Thank you, sir. Dad was the typical absent-minded professor who taught in a country school at a starvation salary, tyrannized by a school board who thought anybody who had read more than two books was a dues-paying Communist. He died at the age of forty-one of cancer. Mother was sickly, had a rheumatic heart... if this sounds like soap opera, don’t blame me, it actually happened... and I had to go to work to support us. That meant leaving school. It was only when mother died that I was able to go back and get my degree. In sociology. I’ve been working in the fields of welfare and education ever since.
“Johnny evidently nursed a guilt feeling because mother had been kicked out, so that his father inherited everything and passed it along to him. Poor old John. He kept looking us up and pressing money on us. Mother and dad would never take any. Me, I wasn’t the least bit proud. I gratefully accepted John’s financial help after mother passed away, or I’d never have been able to go back to college at all, I had too many debts to pay off. The way I saw it,” Leslie said thoughtfully, “Johnny’s making it possible for someone like me to complete her education was encouraging him to do something useful with his money instead of throwing it away on a lot of gimme girls. And if that’s a rationalization, so be it.” And Leslie’s little chin grew half an inch.
Inspector Queen (concealing a smile): “Miss Carpenter, did your cousin John ever indicate to you that he was going to make you the principal beneficiary of his estate under certain circumstances?”
“Under no circumstances, never! I didn’t dream he’d leave me so much as grandfather’s watch. We used to argue our social and political differences — remember, Al? Al will tell you I never pulled my punches with John.”
“She certainly did not,” Marsh said. “Johnny took a great deal from you, Les, more than from anybody. He was crazy about you. Maybe in love with you.”
“Oh, come, Al. I don’t think he ever even liked me. I was the bone in his throat — I kept telling him I was the voice of his superego. As far as I was concerned, John Levering Benedict the Three was a nonproductive, useless, all-wrapped-up-in-his-own-pleasures parasite, and I was the only one with the nerve to tell him so. There’s so much he could have done with his money!”
“Aren’t you overlooking something?” Marsh asked dryly. “He has done it, Les. Now.”
Leslie Carpenter looked amazed. “Do you know, I’d forgotten! That’s true, isn’t it? Now I can do all the wonderful things...”
There was something about the capsule autobiographer that tickled Ellery, and he surveyed her with an interest not altogether professional. On the outside she was a porcelain bit of femininity, looking as if you could see through her if you held her up to the light, but experience in reading character told him she was made of tough materials. There was a tilt to her little head, a glint in her eyes, that signified Sturm und Drang for anyone she disapproved of.
But what he perceived in her, or thought he did, went deeper than a strength developed through the exercise of poverty and the need to fight back in a world that crushed pacifists. There was a womanliness in her, a sweet underlying honesty, a lack of guile, that drew him. (And she possessed that paradox of nature, blue eyes that were warm.)