Ellery sipped his gin. Marsh rose to freshen his drink, whatever it was.
“All right,” Ellery said at last. “I suppose it’s easy to make value judgments in a vacuum. About this Laura everybody’s looking for, Al. You really have no notion who she might be?”
“No. I’ve begun to think — along with a great many others, I understand — that Laura existed only in Johnny’s fertile mind. Although what motive he could have had for writing an imaginary beneficiary into a will is beyond me.”
“She exists, Al. One other thing. What was the state of Johnny’s financial health around the time of his death?”
“He was ailing again. You know, Johnny was the world’s softest touch. He was a lifelong victim of his guilt for having come into so much money. He especially couldn’t turn down a friend. One of his last exploits — which is typical — was to build a catsup factory in Maryland somewhere to produce a new kind of goo for an old pal, so-called, whose wife came up with the recipe one night — you won’t believe this — in a dream. Johnny tasted it, pronounced it divine, and before he — and it — were through he sank eight hundred thousand in it, an almost total loss. Do you want a few hundred cases? We couldn’t sell any, and the last I heard Johnny was giving it away, with few takers.”
“I meant, Al, was he due for another five-million-dollar marriage deal? Could that have been his reason for intending to make this Laura number four?”
“Well, according to his own words he was going to remarry,” Marsh said dryly, “and he certainly could use the five million. Draw your own conclusion.”
“Then you believe that all that talk of his about the Laura romance being the real thing at last was a lot of self-deluding nonsense?”
Marsh shrugged again. “I wish I knew. It’s conceivable that he may have thought he was in love for the first time in his life — for all his knocking about Johnny in some ways was still an adolescent. Yes, Estéban?”
“Louis say you and guest come now,” Estéban said in considerable agitation. “Louis say you and guest no come now, he quit.”
“My God.” Marsh jumped to his feet, looking stricken. “Ellery, vite, vite!”
Louis’s dinner warranted Marsh’s haste. It opened with an Icre Negre caviar from Romania and a Stolichnaya vodka; the soup was a petite marmite, served with an 1868 Malmsey Madeira. Then Estéban brought a heavenly quenelles with sauce Nantua accompanied by an estate-bottled Montrachet, Marquis de Laguiche 1966; for the pièce Louis had prepared a delectable noisettes de veau sautées, each serving crowned with a blackish, toothsome cèpe which could only have come from a French boletus bed (the small round veal steaks, Ellery learned, had been flown in from Paris; the proper cut, according to the word as transmitted from Louis, was unobtainable in the United States and, even assuming it could be procured locally somewhere, Louis turned his culinary thumb down in advance. “He has nothing but contempt for the chefs in les États-Unis,” Marsh explained, “who substitute loin or kidney veal chops for the noisettes véritables and call them the real thing. In fact, Louis has nothing but contempt for practically everything not French.” “Forgive him, Al,” Ellery pleaded, “for at least at the range your paragon of les pots et pans knoweth precisely what he doeth”); with the noisettes came, in magnificent simplicity, garnished new potatoes, a Château Haut Brion of the 1949 vintage, and a braised Romaine salad; followed by a delicate fromage de Brie (airmailed by Fauchon) and a Château Cheval Blanc St. Emilion 1949; a Dobos Torta which decided Ellery to make Bucharest his next continental port of call; a champagne sherbet; and finally an espresso with a thirty-year-old private-stock Monnet cognac.
“This has been one of Louis’s lighter dinners, whipped up more or less on the spur,” Marsh said slyly. “Nevertheless, agréable au goût, non?”
Ellery whispered, “Vive la France!”
“It’s a question of professional pride, I guess,” Chief Newby grumbled, leaning back in his swivel chair and tonguing a fresh cigar. “Have one?”
“I’m not smoking this week,” Ellery said. “What is?”
“I’ve never had a homicide this important. I’d hate to flub it.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You don’t know what I mean, Ellery. You’ve got too blame good a statistical record. But I’m a back-country cop who all of a sudden gets hit with a big-time case, and it’s got me uptight, like the kids say. You know, I’ve been thinking.”
“You have company, Anse. What exactly about in your case?”
“We’ve been going on the assumption that the motive for Benedict’s killing ties in to the will situation and the three ex-wives.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe no.”
“Anse,” Ellery said severely, “I don’t appreciate anyone’s cryptic remarks except my own.”
“I mean, suppose the motive had nothing to do with Benedict’s wills?”
“All right. For instance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you, Chief Newby. You have now joined a very select group.”
“No kid, there could be something.”
“Of course, but what?”
“You haven’t struck anything in New York?”
“We haven’t struck anything anywhere. Dad’s people have failed to turn up anything or anyone in Johnny’s life that provides a possible reason for someone to break into his Wrightsville house and kill him. And by the way, Anse, did your tech men find any trace — any at all — of a B. and E.?”
“No. It was either an inside job, like we’ve been figuring, or an outsider who got in and out without leaving a trace. Go on, Ellery.”
“Go on where? I’ve just completed my statement. Nobody. Not even a theory about anyone. For a while we fumbled around with a Vegas contract theory, possibly tied in somehow to Marcia Kemp — those boys hit on contract with no respect for caste or class, true democracy in action. Although the whole trend in their set these days is away from violence. But we drew a blank. No evidence that Johnny-B ever welshed on a betting loss, in Vegas or anywhere else for that matter, according to — believe me, Anse — highly reliable sources. We’ve turned up no involvement with the Corporation, or the Combine, or whatever the Mafia’s calling itself this month. Anyway, the pro touch is missing in this murder. Contract killers come equipped with their own working tools; they certainly don’t depend on picking up a Three Monkeys on the scene to beat their victim’s brains out.”
“Then it could have been an amateur job for a personal reason, like somebody had a grudge against him for something.”
“I told you, Anse. Nothing like that has turned up.”
“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.”
Ellery shrugged. “I have long had a convenient murderer for cases that stall. I call him, as I pull him out of my hat, The Man From Missing Forks, Iowa. Sure it could be, Anse. Anything could be. But you know and I know that most homicides are committed not out of the blue for obscure or bizarre reasons by the pop-up gent from Missing Forks, but by someone connected directly or obliquely to the victim for a reason that, to the killer at least, seems perfectly sensible, if not inevitable. The problem is to put your finger on him and/or it. So far we’ve been surveying the terrain for all the possibles, with no luck. What you do is, you keep plugging away with the hope that sooner or later, preferably sooner, your luck is going to change.”