But the Inspector had stopped listening. “And why don’t you take that Carpenter girl out again?” the Inspector said. “She seems like good medicine for you.”
“That’s one hell of a reason to take a girl out,” Ellery said, glaring. “As if she were a prescription!”
There matters stood when the call came into Centre Street from Chief of Police Newby. Inspector Queen immediately dialed his home number.
“Ellery? We have to run up to Wrightsville.”
“What for? What’s happened?” Ellery asked, yawning. He had spent a rousing night with Leslie at a series of seminars on the subject of “Economic Solutions to the Problems of Urban Obsolescence.”
“Newby just phoned from up there. He says he’s solved the mystery of those lights old Hunker saw in the Benedict house.”
“Yes? What’s the answer? Mice in the wiring?”
The Inspector snorted. “He wouldn’t say. Sounds miffed by what’s going on down here. Or rather what isn’t. He seems to feel that we’re neglecting him. He just said if we wanted to find out what he’s turned up, we know where he is.”
“Doesn’t sound like Anse,” Ellery said; but perhaps it did. What did he know about Anselm Newby, or anyone else, for that matter? Life was but a dream, and so forth.
They got off the plane at a late evening hour of Sunday, May 3, and no Wrightsville police car awaited them.
“Didn’t you notify Newby’s office what plane we’d be on?” Inspector Queen demanded.
“I thought you did.”
“At least Newby didn’t ignore us deliberately. Cab!”
The chief was off duty; the desk man buzzed him at home, and the Inspector thought — aloud — that he took his sweet time getting to headquarters. The chief’s greeting was correct, but unmistakably on the cool side.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet what to do about her,” Newby said. “On the one hand, I can’t see the advantage in charging her—”
“Do about who?” Inspector Queen asked. “Charge who?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Newby asked calmly. “It’s Alice Tierney my man Barlowe caught in the Benedict house late last night. She’s the one who’s been making with the midnight lights. It’s a cockamamie story she tells, just wild enough to make me wonder if it mightn’t be true. Frankly, I don’t know whether she’s gone off her rocker, or what.”
“What story, Anse?” Ellery asked. “You’re being damned enigmatic.”
“Didn’t mean to be,” the chief said, Yankee-style. “Maybe you better hear it from her direct. Joe, buzz Miss Tierney’s place and if she’s home ask her to come down to HQ right off, the Queens want to talk to her. If she’s out, try and find out where we can reach her.”
“Why don’t we go to her?” Ellery suggested. “It might be better tactics.”
“She’ll come,” Newby said grimly. “After that yarn of hers, she owes me.”
Alice stalked in fifteen minutes later.
“When the Queens command, little old commoner Alice obeys,” she said coldly. It seemed to Ellery that she had been drinking. “It’s all right, Chief, you don’t have to stand up with the royalty and be polite. Not after last night.”
“Miss Tierney, you were caught trespassing on private property. What did you expect Officer Barlowe to do, kiss your hand? I could have charged you with breaking and entering. I still can!”
Of the two, Newby was the more obviously agitated. (Ellery guessed why in a moment. Alice Tierney was a nice Wrightsville girl from a nice Wrightsville family. Nice Wrightsville girls from nice Wrightsville families were not caught prowling about other people’s empty houses in the middle of the night. Like most small-town police chiefs, Newby was a defender of the middleclass faith.) Not that Alice was serene. Her normally unheated eyes had acquired a glow not far from ignition. She radiated hostility.
“Sit down, Alice,” Ellery said. “No reason why we can’t talk this over without fireworks. Why have you been going through Johnny’s house when you thought you wouldn’t be seen? What have you been looking for?”
“Didn’t Chief Newby tell you?”
“We just got here. Sit down, Alice. Please?”
She sniffed, then tossed her head and took the chair he offered. “You know by this time, I suppose, that I told Al Marsh about Johnny’s solemn promise to me? That he wanted me to have the Wrightsville property?”
“Marsh told us,” the Inspector said.
“Did he tell you that he laughed in my face, practically?”
“Miss Tierney,” the Inspector said. “Did you expect the attorney in charge of an estate to take a claim like that seriously, backed up by nothing but your unsupported word?”
“I won’t argue with you, Inspector Queen. With anybody. I’m convinced there’s proof!”
“What kind?”
“A note, some paper or other signed by Johnny leaving the property to me. We got along beautifully during our marriage — lots better, he told me, than he got along with Audrey and Marcia. I really don’t understand why he divorced me! He’d keep telling me how much he appreciated the nursing care I gave him after his automobile accident, how — entirely aside from our original agreement — he was going to leave the Wrightsville real estate to me. I naturally expected he would do it in his will. But he didn’t, so I’m convinced he must have done it in some other paper, something he tucked away in the main house somewhere. I knew nobody would believe me — I appealed to Al Marsh against my better judgment. That’s why I said nothing about it at the will session, and why I’ve been looking for the paper by myself late at night.”
For the first time her voice rose.
“I want it. My weekly income is stopped, I haven’t inherited that lump sum from Johnny — I’m entitled to salvage something! He meant that property for me, it’s mine, and I’m going to have it!”
In a blink it occurred to Ellery — in the way a film shifts from scene to scene — that Alice Tierney was not the starched and stable angel of mercy of his comfortable characterization. The people who held feelings in as a matter of training and even nature were the ones who had most, under stress, to let out; and Alice was not far from the bursting point.
“My men and I went all through that house,” Chief Newby said wearily. “You’re not going to find what we couldn’t, Miss Tierney.”
“How about the guest cottage?” Ellery suggested. “Any chance that Johnny left something there, Anse?”
Newby shook his head. “Barl — Barlowe — and I searched the cottage today. Nothing doing.”
“And if Marsh had found anything like that in Benediet’s papers,” Inspector Queen remarked, “he’d have to have mentioned it.”
“I suppose I ought to check with him... maybe you ought to do it, Inspector.” Newby added, not without a gleam in his eye, “New York, y’know,” as if Manhattan Island were Richard Queen’s personal property.
The Inspector found Marsh at home entertaining, from the background sounds of revelry. Ellery gathered from his father’s end of the conversation that Marsh was not exactly overjoyed at the interruption. The Inspector hung up scowling.
“He says no such paper exists anywhere in Benedict’s effects or he’d have let us know right away. He’s sore that I even questioned him about it. Awfully touchy all of a sudden.”