“Marcia’s the only one I know of who for a long time had had suspicions about me,” the lawyer said. “She’s very shrewd and perceptive about such things, with her show business background and the years she’s knocked about places like Las Vegas. At any rate, what she saw in the hall that night, she told me later, confirmed what she’d always suspected. If she had testified what she’d seen when Chief Newby and you people were questioning us, she’d have blown the case sky high the night of the murder.”
But Marcia had foreseen an advantage in silence, and events soon repaid her perspicacity. The death of Benedict cut off her weekly income, and his failure to specify the expected lump-sum settlement in his holograph will left her without a penny. She confided Marsh’s secret to the petty hood she had married after her divorce from Benedict, and Foxy Faulks grabbed the opportunity.
“Sweet setup for blackmail,” Inspector Queen said, nodding. “She’d spotted you in drag, she certainly guessed that you were the one who had murdered Benedict, and you’re a rich man. No wonder you killed Faulks. You did, didn’t you?”
“What else could I do?” Marsh said, and he shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you people how blackmailers operate. They’d have bled me white, and I’d never have been out of danger of exposure.” He had arranged to meet Faulks behind the Museum of Art in Central Park late at night, presumably for a payoff, and instead had given Marcia’s husband a knife in the abdomen.
“I figured that would scare Marcia off my back,” Marsh went on, “out of just plain self-preservation. She’d have to realize that if I was willing to kill Faulks, I wouldn’t shrink from killing her as well. Therefore she’d fade out of the picture.
“But Marcia came up with a very smart counter-ploy. She proposed that we get married. She pleaded a persuasive case. Our marriage would give her the financial security she wanted, and it would give me the smokescreen I needed to hide what I was. A lot of us, by the way, marry for precisely that reason. And she didn’t have to remind me that a wife can’t be made to testify against her husband, if it ever came to that. Well, we never got really started, thanks to you, Ellery. She’s still preparing to move in here.”
Ellery said nothing.
To which Marsh said a curious thing. “I wonder what you’re thinking.”
“Not what you think I’m thinking, Al,” Ellery said.
“Then you’re an exception. If only people stopped regarding us as some sort of monsters... let us live our lives out as we’re constituted, in decent privacy and without prejudice, I don’t believe this would have happened. It would have been possible for me to propose, and Johnny to reject, without disgust and vitriol on his part or panic on mine. He wouldn’t have castigated or threatened me. I wouldn’t have lost my head. We might even have remained friends. Certainly he’d still be alive.
“Poor Johnny,” Marsh said, and was silent.
The Queens were quiet, too. A great change had come over Marsh in the past few minutes. He looked juiceless, squeezed dry of his vital constituents; he looked old.
Finally Inspector Queen cleared his throat.
“You’d better get dressed, Marsh. You’ll have to come downtown with us.”
The lawyer nodded, almost agreeably.
“I’ll wash up.”
He went into the bathroom.
They had to break through the door.
Marsh was lying on the tiled floor.
He had swallowed cyanide.
In the middle of the night after Marsh’s suicide Ellery popped up out of sleep like a smoking piece of toast, groped for the nightlight, kicked the sheet, and ran to his father’s bedroom.
“Dad!”
The Inspector stopped snoring to open one eye. “Unnh?”
“Vincentine Astor!”
“Wha’?”
“Vincentine Astor!”
“Unnh.”
“Nobody would have a name like that legitimately. It’s got to be a take-on, a phony — somebody’s idea of class. I’m betting she’s Laura! Laura Man-something!”
“Go back to sleep, son.” The old man took his own advice.
But Laura Man-something the vanished hatcheck girl of Manhattan’s Boy-Girl Club turned out to be. They found Miss Manzoni in her native Chillicothe, Ohio, in the shadow of Mt. Logan among the mysterious mounds, putting books back in the stacks of the Carnegie Library. She was living with her father, stepmother, and a mixed brood of original and acquired Manzonis in a pleasant frame house on a street of dying elms. Her father, Burton Stevenson Manzoni, had been employed in one of Chillicothe’s paper mills for twenty-seven years.
Laura Manzoni was a surprise. She was not the bold, platinum-and-enamel gum-chewer they had expected. Pretty and stacked she was; but otherwise Laura was softly chestnut-haired, soft-eyed, soft-spoken, and a gentleman’s lady. She had majored in drama at Oberlin, and she had gone off to New York for the predictable reason, with the predictable result.
For eating and sleeping money, when her grubstake ran out, she had dyed her hair, bought a mini-miniskirt and peekaboo stockings, applied a thick coat of theatrical makeup to her fresh Midwestern face, and bluffed her way into the hatcheck job at the nightclub. There she had met Johnny Benedict.
He claimed, Laura said, to have seen through her masquerade “to the essential me” immediately. She resisted his invitations for three weeks. Then they began to meet after hours, discreetly; this was as much, she said, at Benedict’s insistence as at hers.
“Finally he told me he was serious about me,” Laura said, “and then that he loved me. Of course I didn’t believe him; I knew his reputation. But Johnny was such a charmer. He really was. He knew how to make a woman feel she was the center of everything. And the most he ever tried to do was kiss me. Still, something about him held me back...
“I suppose I wanted very much to be convinced, but I kept putting him off. It’s hard for a girl like me to believe what a man like Johnny tells her — a young and handsome multimillionaire — even, or maybe especially, if he doesn’t make passes or propositions. What made it harder... he kept talking about our getting married. As if it were all settled. Johnny couldn’t believe any girl he was rushing would turn him down. I kept telling him I wasn’t sure, I needed time, and he kept saying that time was for clock punchers, that we were going to be married right away, that he’d made all his plans, and that sort of thing.”
“Did Mr. Benedict ask you to sign any sort of agreement?” asked the plainclothesman whom Chief Newby had sent to Chillicothe to question her.
“Agreement?” Laura shook her head. “I wouldn’t even if he had, regardless of what it was. As I say, I just wasn’t sure of myself. Or, for that matter, of Johnny. In fact, when he told me he had to go up to Wrightsville—”
“Then you knew about Mr. Benedict’s get-together with his ex-wives the weekend of March twenty-eighth?”
“He didn’t say why he was going specifically, or who’d be there. Just that he had some unfinished business, as he called it, to clean up. That was the trouble.”
“Trouble, Miss Manzoni? What trouble?”
It then came out. Laura’s uncertainty about Benedict’s sincerity and motives trapped her into an act that had preyed on her conscience ever since. His vagueness about the purpose of his Wrightsville weekend had fed her misgivings; with Laura’s middleclass, Midwestern upbringing — in spite of what she had always considered her emancipation from it — all she could think of was a “love nest” and “another woman.” Hating her suspicions, but telling herself that it was a test that would decide the issue of Johnny Benedict for her one way or the other, she had rented a car that Saturday and driven up to Wrightsville.