“No.”
“Was he in trouble of some kind?”
“I don’t know. Bern was pretty uptight about his affairs.”
“Even with you?”
“Especially with me. He says to me — he used to say to me — the less you know the less you’ll worry.”
Ellery said, “Who wanted to kill him, Marcia?”
She had forgotten he was there, or perhaps she had not known. It was he rather than his question that startled her. “Ellery. I don’t know of anybody. I really don’t.”
“Could it be he welshed on a gambling debt?” the Inspector suggested. “Or got in bad some other way with one or another of his playmates?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t.”
“Do you have any idea why he was knifed? Any at all?”
“None at all.”
“Okay, Mrs. Faulks. Velie, take her home — just a minute. Doc?” He took Dr. Prouty’s brisk young staff doctor aside. Ellery strolled along. “What’s the verdict?”
“I set the time of death on a prelim estimate as around two A.M., give or take a half hour.”
“Any reason to suspect the knifing might not have been the cause of death?”
“Didn’t you see that belly of his?” the young man from the M.E.’s office said. “Though of course we’ll find out for sure on the p.m.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not a thing. Anything here?”
“Not so far. If you ask me, Doc, we won’t find so much as a bruised blade of grass. An operator cool enough to leave the sticker on the body for us isn’t going to lose his monogrammed cigaret case on his way out.”
“Okay, Inspector?” asked Sergeant Velie.
The Inspector nodded, and Velie marched the big widow away. The young doctor waved and trudged off.
Ellery said, “She lied in her capped teeth.”
“Your manly intuition?” his father inquired.
“I’m the son of my old man. You didn’t believe her, either.”
“You said it, I didn’t. She knows something, Ellery.”
“We’re communicating again after a gap in the generations. What led you to your conclusion, Inspector Queen?”
“Marcia’s not the type gal to know so little about her hubby’s affairs. She worked Vegas a long time. She knows these bums, and she’d make mighty sure she kept tabs on Foxy.”
“Exactly my reasoning. The only puzzle about Marcia is why she married him in the first place.” Ellery looked after the departed couple. “Could love possibly go so far?”
“I wouldn’t know. Or if I ever did I’ve forgotten.”
“I’d keep her on a short leash, dad.”
“Velie will. We’ll know everything she does and everybody she says hello to.”
“How about Audrey? Alice? Marsh?”
“They’ll be checked right off.” The Inspector shivered. “I’m cold and tired, son. Getting old.”
“He had two hours’ sleep and he’s cold and tired,” Ellery proclaimed to Central Park. “How decrepit can you get? Come on, grandpa, I’ll take you home and tuck you into bed.”
“With a toddy,” his father said, hopefully.
“With a toddy.”
By Friday morning the autopsy report was in from the Medical Examiner’s office, and by Friday evening the little standing army of suspects had been checked off. Audrey Weston had landed a part in an off-Broadway production the previous week — it was tentatively called A, B, C, D, E, F orGy — and she had been home alone Thursday night, she said, hard at work studying her five sides. No confirmation. Alice Tierney, it turned out, had been in New York, not Wrightsville. She had driven down on Thursday and registered at a midtown hotel; she was in Manhattan, she said, to see Al Marsh on a matter connected with Johnny-B, an estate matter. “It’s a long drive and I was tuckered out,” the report quoted Miss Tierney. “So I went to bed very early.” She had attempted to reach Marsh by telephone before turning in, she stated, but had been unsuccessful. (There was a record of her call at the hotel, and it was also confirmed by Estéban.) Marsh had gone out Thursday evening for a big night on the town, he said (he was in bad shape, the report said); his date was a stunning showgirl whose career had been launched in the centerfold of Playboy and who had zoomed from there into millionaire dates; however, in the course of their rounds she had ditched him for a certain Italian movie director who had muscled in on Marsh at a notorious disco — the details were in the Friday morning newspapers, featuring the director with his ample bottom ensconced in a bass drum, throwing up from a right to the solar plexus — after which Marsh had proceeded to go solo pub-crawling. Subsequent details were vague in his memory. Estéban had poured him into bed about 3:30 A.M. An attempt to log his course through the bars of after-midnight Manhattan proved spotty and unsatisfactory.
“It’s just like in one of your books,” Inspector Queen grumbled. “You’d think once one of the suspects would have an alibi that could be proved and eliminate her. Or him, damn it. But no, Foxy Faulks was knifed between one thirty and two thirty, and not one of the three can prove where they were—”
“He was,” Ellery corrected automatically.
“—so we’re back where we started from. Maybe you were right, Ellery.”
“I was? About what? I can’t think of anything recently.”
“About Faulks’s murder having nothing to do with the Benedict case.”
“Nonsense.”
“You brought it up yourself!”
“One has to cover everything,” Ellery said stiffly, and he went back to pulling his nose. He was actually engaged in his favorite exercise in futility these days, trying to solve the mystery of the clothing thefts from Audrey Weston, Marcia Kemp, and Alice Tierney. It all seemed like ancient history by now, and he was beginning to feel like an inadequately funded archeologist; but the dig went on, secretly, in his head, where no one else could trespass.
“You know,” Ellery said to little Leslie Carpenter, “if I hadn’t met you in a case I’d ask you for a date.”
“What a horrid thing to say.”
“Horrid?”
“You imply that I’m a suspect in Johnny’s death.”
“I was only stating a principle,” Ellery said, bathing sybaritically in the blue warm pools of her extraordinary eyes. “It’s bad policy to enter into a personal relationship with someone you’ve met in the course of a continuing investigation. Muddies the thinking. Makes waves where dead calm is called for. By the way, do you consider yourself a suspect in Johnny’s death?”
“Certainly not! I was talking about you.”
“Let’s talk about you. You know, I never thought I could go for a halfpint, speaking femalewise?”
“You are not a groove, Ellery Queen!”
They were in Al Marsh’s outer office, waiting for Audrey Weston. Marsh was trying to get rid of a client who was overstaying his appointment. Inspector Queen sat restively nearby, munching Indian nuts in lieu of lunch.
Ellery was about to launch himself splash into the pools when the client reluctantly departed. Marsh beckoned Leslie and the Queens into his private office.
“What’s this one all about, Mr. Marsh?” the Inspector demanded. “Seems to me I spend more time in your office than in mine.”
“It’s Audrey, as I told Ellery over the phone.” Marsh swung a tier of law books out and it became a bar. “Proving that the law isn’t always as dry as it sometimes seems. Drink, anyone? Don’t usually indulge during office hours — Miss Smith doesn’t approve — but I think I’ll make an exception this afternoon. I’m still not over that hairy night last Thursday, and I have a feeling I’m going to need it.” He poured a long one. “I can recommend the Irish, Inspector.”