Dr. Minikin told Chief Newby, “She seems resigned now to the fact that Benedict either forgot his promise or changed his mind — at any rate, that he left no written authorization or other record for the transfer of the property at his death. She’s a bit withdrawn over what she considers the raw deal he gave her, but in my opinion she’s already managed a good adjustment, and in amazingly fast time. I don’t believe Alice will do any more prowling, Anse.” He hedged his bet. “She may do other things, but not that.” It was not conducive to Newby’s peace of mind.
But the really astonishing development of the month was the announcement that Marcia Kemp Benedict Faulks was taking unto herself a fourth surname.
It was not so much the fact itself that was to be marveled at in this age of multiple marriages as the identity of the lucky man. Ellery hardly believed the evidence of his eyes as he read the daily reports of his father’s detectives and their confirmation in the gossip and society columns.
A romance was burgeoning between the ex-Vegas redhead and Al Marsh.
“Not that it’s any of my affair,” Ellery said at a three-way dinner in a hideaway East Side restaurant one night toward the end of May, “but how in Cupid’s name did it happen? I never caught even a glimpse between you and Marcia of any romantic interest. On the contrary, I thought you disliked each other.”
Marcia’s hand groped, and Marsh engulfed it.
“You learn to hide things,” the lawyer smiled. “Especially when you’re the attorney in the triangle, and more especially when what you have to cover up is the McCoy.”
“Triangle?” Ellery said. “You and Marcia — behind Johnny’s back?”
Marsh’s smile widened.
“Hardly,” Marcia said. “I found out that Al ought to be carrying an Equity card. I thought he detested me. That’s why I always tried to give him a hard time. You know how broads are.”
“Look,” Marsh said. “I couldn’t cut in on Johnny either for personal or professional reasons. I had to suppress my feelings. I shoved them so deep I was hardly aware I had them, or I’d have married Marcia soon after Johnny divorced her. He met her through me, you know. I was in love with her when to Johnny all she was was a marriage of convenience.”
The redhead squeezed his hand. “I know it’s only a few weeks since Bernie died, but that marriage was from hunger — I was on the rebound from Johnny, I’d known Bernie Faulks in the Vegas crowd, and you’ve got to admit Bern was loaded with S.A...”
“You don’t have to apologize, dear heart,” Marsh said. “It was a mistake, Ellery, and Marcia and I see no reason to waste any more of our lives. Dessert, baby?” he asked her as the waiter hovered.
“Gawd, no! A bride has to think of her architecture, especially when she’s built like the George Washington Bridge to start with.”
Further prying was obviously futile. Ellery gave up.
It was to be a private wedding in Marsh’s Sutton Place duplex; even the date was kept from the press. The few friends Marsh invited — Marcia said she had none she could trust — were pledged to secrecy and asked to come quietly to the apartment at two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, June 7. At the last moment Marcia decided to ask Audrey Weston and Alice Tierney — “I know it’s bitchy of me,” Marcia said, “but I do want to see their faces when Al and I are hitched!” (To her chagrin Alice declined on the excuse of her recent illness; Audrey did not bother even to respond.) The only other wedding guests were Leslie Carpenter, Miss Smith, and the Queens.
The knot was tied by Mr. Justice Marascogni of the State Supreme Court, an old friend of the Marsh family. (Ellery felt an extraordinary relief on being introduced to the judge; he had been half expecting — when he heard that a judge was to perform the ceremony — the appearance of old Judge McCue, whose similar role in the nuptials that climaxed his last investigation had concluded on such a cataclysmic note.) But this time the marriage-maker came, performed, and left with no cataclysm at all.
Until, of course, about forty-five minutes later.
It was curious how it happened, the accumulating clichés of all such affairs — “Isn’t it June today? She’s a June bride!” — the June bride’s hilarity when someone exclaimed over the first champagne toast after the man-and-wife pronouncement, “Why, now your name is Marcia Marsh. How quaint!” — and the acting out of the small roles: Judge Marascogni’s unfortunate lisp, through which “Marcia” sounded uncomfortably like “Martha,” as if the groom were marrying another woman entirely, and the sibilants in the marriage service seemed increased a hundredfold, making everyone nervous anticipating the next one; the peaceful, almost imperceptible, way in which Miss Smith got smashed on her boss’s champagne and eventually salted her glass over the death of her hopes (was there ever a homely secretary to a man as Marlboro-handsome as Al Marsh who did not secretly cherish such hopes?) — collapsing in Ellery’s arms weeping her lost love, having to be laid on the groom’s bed (by the bride) making Ellery wonder just how smashed she really was; the merriment over the wedding cake (not a creation of the great Louis, who was not a baker but a chef; an ex-colleague of his, who was a baker, had created it at Louis’s command), the traditional awkwardness of the first bride-and-groom two-handed slice, and the bride’s quite expert subsequent solo performance with the cake knife... until, as it has been noted, some forty-five minutes later, when the cake was one-third gone and Ellery found himself, through no conscious design he could recall, alone with it. Alone with it, the others having eaten their fill and scattered throughout the duplex.
The slices had all been taken from the two lowest tiers of the cake, leaving the upper tiers intact.
Highest of all, on the eminence, like triumphant mountain-climbers, stood the stiff little plastic figures of the bride and groom in their sugar-frosted canopy.
The little couple stared up at him crookedly. In slicing the cake Marcia had accidentally touched them and the canopy had slipped; they stood a bit askew.
Something popped in Ellery’s head.
Like a tiny smoke-bomb.
The smoke drifted about, brushing his thoughts, dissipating, vanishing — the same elusive thing he had failed to grasp in Benedict’s Wrightsville bedroom and elsewhere, later, in annoying retrospect. The something he had seen but failed to notice. The something he had not been able to grasp.
But this time he grasped it.
He grasped it when, in an act not really of volition, Ellery reached out in an absent way to straighten the surrogate bride and groom in their canopy. Perhaps he was thinking too hard, or not thinking at all, or alternating between desperation and despair. In any event, the plastic couple jiggled out of their base and the little groom fell to the rug.
Leaving the bride alone in the canopy.
Ellery frowned his displeasure.
This is wrong, he thought. He hoped, for Al Marsh’s sake, that the fall was not symbolic. There had been marriage failures enough in this case.
That was Ellery’s first thought.
His second was to bring the couple together again. Naturally. Was there ever a more sinful moment for separation and disruption? The little bride stood so bravely forlorn in her canopy. And the little groom looked so doleful and deserted lying on the floor, so out of things, so robbed of the spirit of nuptial joy.
Therefore Ellery stooped to pick up the groom and restore him to his rightful place.
That was when the lightning struck; the lightning that — as on past occasions, if he was lucky — ripped through the overcast of the long dry spell and shattered the air clear.