“That doesn’t sound like the Al Marsh I knew,” Ellery said. “Could he have fallen in love?”
“Then some girl is lucky,” Alice said bitterly. “Outside of his damned sense of professional ethics Al is a pretty wonderful guy. He’d never promise a girl something and then forget.”
“Forget is the word, Miss Tierney,” Newby said. “That’s what I’m going to do. Why don’t you do likewise and run along? I’m not charging you with anything, so you’re in the clear.” He rose. “Do you have your own car, or do you want one of my boys to run you home?”
“I’ll manage, thank you.”
When she was gone Inspector Queen remarked, “That was a big nothing.”
“Well,” the chief said, “I’m sorry I dragged you gentlemen up here.”
“I didn’t mean it that way! Look, Newby, we seem to have got off on the wrong four feet—”
“It just seemed to me you ought to talk to her yourselves, Inspector, that’s all.”
“You were perfectly right. If police work was a success a hundred percent of the time, what fun would it be?”
“Plenty!” Newby said; and he grinned and they shook hands all around.
It was too late to book a flight back to Boston and New York, so the Queens plodded across the Sunday-night-deserted Square (which was round) and checked into the Hollis for the night. They bought toothbrushes and toothpaste at the cigar counter, washed up, and went down to the main dining room. It was late, the restaurant held about six other people, the Chefs Special (which from experience Ellery maintained was the only dish on the menu that was ever edible) was all gone, and they had to settle for two almost snorting steaks, which the Inspector’s dentures could not negotiate. They got back to their room scarcely on speaking terms.
They were just taking their shoes off in the silence when the phone rang. Ellery said, “Big deduction coming up: Newby. Who else knows where we are?” and answered it.
It was Newby.
“If you’re undressed, dress. If you’re still dressed, stay that way. I’ll pick you up in front of the Hollis in two and a half minutes.”
“What now, Anse?”
“Tierney Rides Again. Barlowe just spotted her sneaking into the Benedict grounds. He radiophoned in.”
“You know what that kook is doing?” the young officer exclaimed when they pulled up at the Benedict house; he had been waiting for them in a rhododendron bush. “She’s trying to break into the whozis — that little stone house where Benedict is buried. I’d have stopped her, Chief, but you said not to do anything till you got here—”
“The mausoleum?” Ellery said; and they all ran, led by Barlowe with his oversized flashlight.
It was like something out of Wuthering Heights in the cloudy night.
She had pried the heavy mausoleum door open with a crowbar, and she was inside, in the light of a kerosene lantern, among the withered flowers, struggling with the lid of the bronze casket. It took Barlowe and Ellery to wrench her away, and Newby had to jump in to help hold her.
“Alice, please, you mustn’t do anything like this,” Ellery panted. “Why don’t you be a good girl and calm down? We can go outside and talk this over—”
“Let — go — of me!” she screeched. “I know my rights! He promised me! The note has got to be in the coffin. It’s the only other place it could be...”
Her face was rigid, a mask of flesh, the eyes hardly human.
Officer Barlowe stripped off his blue coat and they wrapped it about her as a makeshift restraining sheet, lashing the sleeves at her back.
The four men carried her from the mausoleum on the top of the hill, across the meadow in the dappled dark, to the radio car. The chief relayed a call for an ambulance from Wrightsville General through the headquarters switchboard; and they held her down and waited.
There was little conversation. Her screams were too demanding.
May dragged by, going nowhere.
The hunt for the elusive Laura limped, hesitated, and finally came to a halt. Whoever the mysterious woman named in Johnny Benedict’s will was, she had either taken refuge in a mountaintop cave or decided she wanted no truck with a murder case.
“In which event,” Ellery said, “Johnny never married her, as we’ve maintained all along. So she gets nothing out of revealing herself except publicity, which she evidently wants none of.”
“Unless...,” and Inspector Queen stopped.
“Unless what, dad?”
“Nothing. What thoughts I get these days are pretty wild.”
“You mean unless Laura killed Johnny for a motive we have no lead to yet?”
“I told you it was wild.”
“Maybe not so wild. It would explain why she hasn’t turned up... I wish I knew,” Ellery groaned. “Then I could get some work done.” His novel-in-being felt like the cliffhanger of the old movie-serial days; it was tied helplessly to the track while his deadline came hurtling down on it like Old 77.
A, B, C, D, E, F orGy opened in a converted pizzeria on Bleecker Street to a scathing review in the Post, a series of witticisms in the News, silence from the Times, and a rave notice in the Village Voice. All went into detail about the third-act nude scene (the Voice’s description was matter-of-factly explicit about Miss Audrey Weston’s blonde charms, which apparently overshadowed those of the rest of the ladies of the cast out of sheer volume). The play began to do an SRO business. Miss Weston, interviewed by one of the East Village papers, said: “Until now I have as a matter of professional as well as personal integrity rejected any role that called on me to appear in the nude. But Ali-Bababa’s production is a different kettle of fish, dahling. (Sure, the interviewer interjected, it stinks.) It positively shines in this dull theatrical season. (That’s what stinking fish do, all right, the interviewer interpolated.) I’m proud to be a part of it, clothes or no clothes.” (Stay in your pad and have your chick do a strip-tease, the interviewer advised. It’s cheaper.)
Marsh heard nothing more from Miss Weston, nee Arlene Wilkinson, or from her attorney, Sanford Effing, about the alleged paternity of Johnny-B in re Davy Wilkinson, infant, adoptive surname unrevealed. The consensus of Marsh, the Queens, and an assistant from the District Attorney’s office was that said Attorney Effing must have advised his client either, (1) that she had no case that stood a chance in the hell of the courts; or, (2) regardless of the juridical odds, that she did not have the scratch to finance what could only be a long-drawn-out litigation (meaning chiefly the attorney’s fee). For Miss Weston’s sole source of income these days, it appeared, was her salary from A, B, C, D, E, F orGy.
The case of Alice Tierney took an unexpected turn for the better. From her action and appearance that Sunday night at Benedict’s mausoleum, Ellery would have sworn that she had gone off the deep end beyond rescue; he had seen psychotics in the “dilapidated” cells of mental hospitals with the same liverish lips and wild-animal glare. But she made a remarkable recovery in the psychiatric ward of the Wrightsville General Hospital. She was a patient there, behind bars, for two weeks under the care of Dr. P. Langston Minikin, chief of the hospital’s psychiatric service, after which he had her transferred to a nursing home in Connhaven, where she remained for another two weeks and was then discharged in the custody of her parents and elder sister Margaret, who was also a registered nurse. Dr. Minikin diagnosed Alice as a schizophrenic personality, but the episode itself, he said, was a hysteric seizure, probably isolated, and not likely to be repeated except under very extreme pressure.