Miss Smith: You made that mistake purposely. You’re pulling my leg.
Mr. Queen: No, but is it permitted? I might add that I have admired your limbs, Miss Smith, from the moment I laid eyes on them. Ah, you’re smiling. We advance. The note?
Al Marsh came out for a moment, glancing at Miss Smith in a puzzled way.
“Miss Smith seems all of a flutter, Ellery. Charm, or an emergency?”
“Hardly the first, and no to the second. It’s just that I wanted to ask you something about Johnny. It won’t take a minute—”
“I don’t have a minute. The old gent in my office takes a dim enough view of me as it is. His point is that keeping a man of his age waiting — he’s ninety — constitutes a felonious act. How about meeting me at my place? Sevenish? Dinner, if you’ve no other plans. Louis used to cook at Le Pavilion. Miss Smith will give you my address if you don’t know it.”
It proved to be a duplex penthouse high over Sutton Place. Above the dismal city — in spite of calendars, not quite out of winter, not fully into spring — Ellery found himself luxuriating. A houseman named Estéban ushered him into a man’s huge habitat of feudal oak, Spanish iron, velvets, brass, copper; a place of lofty ceilings, hunter’s trophies, and weapons. While he waited for Marsh to appear Ellery strolled about taking his peculiar inventory, totting up the stock that declared the man.
There was not a trace of modernism about the apartment, such of it as he could see; it might have come out of an exclusive men’s club of the Nineties. The small private gymnasium off the living room (the door was open) displayed weights, barbells, exercycles, parallel bars, a punching bag setup, and other paraphernalia of the aging ex-athlete; that was to be expected of Marlboro Man. But there were surprises.
Half a short wall was taken up with stereophonic equipment for the high fidelity reproduction of a large collection of LPs and cassettes. There was a great deal of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, he noted, struck by the romanticism he had not associated with Marsh. The hi-fi was playing “Prince Gremin’s Air” from Eugen Onegin; Ellery recognized the Russian-singing basso as Chaliapin, whose great masculine voice he often sought for his own reassurance.
A leaded-glass bookstack enchanted him. It contained rare American, French, and British editions of Melville, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Henry James, Proust, Wilde, Walt Whitman, Gide, and Christopher Marlowe, among many others — rank on rank of literary giants, many in first editions the sight of which made Ellery’s wallet itch. There were rare art books of enormous size illustrated with the paintings and sculptures chiefly of da Vinci and Michelangelo. A row of niches in the oak walls held busts of historical figures whom Marsh evidently admired — Socrates, Plato, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Frederick the Great, Lord Kitchener, Lawrence of Arabia, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
“I see you’re casing my treasury,” Marsh said, turning off the stereo. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but that old fellow has had me hopping all afternoon. Drink?” He had changed to a lounge suit with an open silk shirt; he wore huaraches.
“Anything but bourbon.”
“You don’t go for our native elixir?”
“I once got myself beastly drunk on it. Why do I malign the beasts? Humanly. I haven’t been able to sniff it since.”
Marsh went behind his taproom-sized bar and began with energy to make like a bartender. “You? Got drunk?”
“You make it sound like a capital crime. I’d just been extinguished by the then light of my life.”
“You? Had an affair with a girl?”
“It certainly wasn’t with a man. What do you take me for, Al?”
“Well, I don’t know. Here’s your gin on the rocks. That’s as far from bourbon and branch as you can get.” Marsh sank into a chair that dwarfed him, nuzzling a concoction of unguessable ingredients. “I’ve never thought of you as really human, Ellery. I must say I’m relieved.”
“Thank you,” Ellery said. “I envy you those first editions. I’m beginning to grasp the full advantages of wealth.”
“Amen,” Marsh said. “But you didn’t drop into my office this afternoon, or here tonight, to admire my etchings. What’s on your mind?”
“Do you recall that Saturday night in Wrightsville, Al?”
“It’s written in acid.”
“As you know, I was eavesdropping from the terrace while Johnny was delivering that spiel about his new-will intentions.”
“Yes?”
“Something I overheard him say that night has been bothering me. I’m not clear about what he meant. He remarked that his three marriages had been ‘strictly business.’ Just what did he mean by that?”
Marsh settled back with his glass and a menthol cigaret. “By the terms of his father’s will, contrary to popular belief, the Benedict fortune was left in trust and all Johnny received was three hundred thousand dollars per annum out of the income from the estate. Well, I don’t have to tell you that to a lad of Johnny’s tastes, upbringing, and habits three hundred thousand a year didn’t begin to provide for his standard of living.”
“He broke his father’s will?”
“Unbreakable. But not unshakable.” Marsh shrugged. “Johnny asked me what, if anything, could be done to raise the ante. I studied Benedict Senior’s will and found what looked like a possible loophole. More in jest than anything else I pointed it out to Johnny — a looseness of expression in one of the provisions that might yield an interpretation Mr. Benedict had never intended.”
“Sounds fascinating. What was it?”
“One clause in the will gave Johnny the sum of five million dollars out of the principal estate quote “when my son John marries’ unquote.”
Ellery laughed.
“Of course you’d see it. Johnny certainly did. “When my son John marries’ could reasonably be construed to mean ‘whenever my son John marries’ — in other words, every time he married he was entitled to collect another five million from the estate. I actually wasn’t serious when I called the wording of the clause to Johnny’s attention, and I didn’t dream he would rearrange his life to revolve around it. But that’s just what he did. He insisted on going into court with our argument about construing the ‘when’ as ‘whenever,’ and it was typical Johnny-B luck that the court upheld our interpretation. So then he launched his series of marriages, divorces, and remarriages.”
Ellery was shaking his head. “‘Strictly business’ is right. His marriages were keys to the strongbox. Another key, another haul.”
“Exactly. There was no misrepresentation to the women. They understood just why he was marrying them and just what they could expect to get out of it. I might add, Ellery, that I was completely against Johnny’s change of heart about those million-dollar settlements.” Marsh’s big hand tightened about his glass. “I suppose it’s silly of me to admit this, but the fact is I had a considerable row with Johnny about that intention of his to change from the million to the hundred-thousand-dollar settlements. I told him it would be an act of bad faith, a cop-out, really, certainly unethical, and I wanted no part in it. In the end we left it unresolved — I mean my participation in it.”
“When did this row take place?”
“On the jet coming back from England, when he first broached his plan.”
“You sounded pretty much on Johnny’s side that night, Al. Are you sure you aren’t trying to snow me?”
“I’m not snowing you. Johnny made it clear to me that last weekend in Wrightsville that, friends or no friends, if I didn’t do it for him he’d get some other lawyer to. It forced me to do some weighing and balancing. I’d known Johnny since we were teenagers — hell, I loved the guy. And I could hardly defend the ethical conduct of three girls who’d walked into a cold-blooded money deal under the guise of romance with their eyes wide open. In the end I picked Johnny, as of course he knew I would. Although I confess I’ve had qualms since.”