“I don’t believe I’d even thought through what I was going to do when I got there,” the girl said. “Maybe some grandiose visions of finding him there with a chick, telling him off in a curtain speech, and making a glorious exit. When I did get there — I was actually turning into Johnny’s driveway — I was suddenly overwhelmed with shame. I saw how wrong the whole thing was in a kind of reverse rush of feeling, the way you do sometimes. I hadn’t trusted Johnny, I didn’t trust him then, and I knew I never would or could. So I turned the car around and drove right back to New York. And that Sunday morning — I was too upset to go to bed — I heard over the radio that Johnny’d been murdered during the night.”
Fear — that she might have been seen outside the house or in Wrightsville or the vicinity and at once involved in the murder — sent Laura fleeing to Chillicothe and home. She had never told her family about her link to the young society man whose name and photograph were in the newspapers and newscasts. When the story broke about the mysterious Laura named as Benedict’s beneficiary in his holograph will in the event of their marriage, she had needed no attorney to tell her that she had no claim on the Benedict estate, since the event had never taken place.
She would have fought identification as the missing Laura, Laura said, with tooth and nail if Benedict’s murder had not been solved.
“I’ve had a boy friend here in Chillicothe — on the next block, in fact — since childhood,” Laura Manzoni said to Newby’s emissary, “who’s wanted to marry me since we graduated from high school. We’re on the verge of setting the date. But his folks are real hardshell Baptists and, while Buell would stick by me if I were dragged through the papers and TV, they’d make things very unpleasant for us. Can you keep my name out of this? Please?”
They kept her name out of it... “the last woman in Benedict’s life,” Inspector Queen repeated. “Isn’t that what he called her that Saturday night?”
“He was wrong,” Ellery said dourly. “Laura Manzoni wasn’t the last woman in Johnny’s life.”
“She wasn’t?”
“She wasn’t.”
“But then who was?”
Ellery held his drink up to the light and squinted at it. It was straight sour-mash bourbon. He made a face and tossed it down like medicine.
“Al Marsh.”
“Marsh,” Inspector Queen said, dropping the news magazine. He had been reading about Marsh’s funeral, and the recapitulation of the events that had led up to it. In the new freedom of expression enjoyed by the press, the story was explicit, too much so to the Inspector’s old-fashioned taste. “I still can’t get a feeling of reality about it.”
“Why not?” Ellery demanded. “In your time you’ve investigated whole botanical gardens of men like Marsh, dad. Every police officer has. You know that.”
“But it’s the first time I was involved in a case with one on a personal basis. Marsh looked and acted like such a man of a man, if you know what I mean. Maybe if he’d been the obvious kind—”
“In his own way he was.”
The old man stared.
“His apartment,” Ellery said. “He practically threw his secret in your face.”
“If so, I didn’t get it.”
“There’s an excuse for you. You weren’t entertained there.”
“You mean all that manly type furniture, and the athletic equipment and so forth? Coverups?”
Ellery smiled faintly. “They were coverups in Marsh’s case, certainly, but hardly clues, or society would really have a problem! No, it was a clue like a sequoia — so tall and broad I missed it entirely. His music library — more Tchaikovsky and Beethoven than anyone else. His rare and first editions — Proust, Melville, Chris Marlowe, Gide, Verlaine, Henry James, Wilde, Rimbaud, Walt Whitman. His art books — chiefly da Vinci and Michelangelo. The busts he had on display — Alexander the Great, Plato, Socrates, Lawrence of Arabia, Virgil, Julius Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Frederick the Great, von Humboldt, Lord Kitchener.”
“So what?” his father said, bewildered.
“You Victorian innocent! All those historic gentlemen had, or are reputed to have had, one thing in common... along with Aubrey alias Al Marsh.”
The Inspector was silent. Then he said feebly, “Julius Caesar? I didn’t know it about him.”
“We don’t know it about most. An Englishman named Bryan Magee wrote a book a few years ago that he called One in Twenty. In it he makes the statement that the idea that deviates can necessarily be recognized as such is a myth. The overwhelming majority of them, of both sexes, Magee says — and he did a vast job of research in preparation for two TV documentaries he presented on the subject — are outwardly indistinguishable from normally sexed people. It can be anybody — the brawny fellow working beside you in the office, your bartender, the guy next door, the friend you play bridge with every Thursday night, the cop on your beat, or your mousy Cousin Horace. One in twenty, dad — that’s the current statistic. And that figure may be far too conservative. Kinsey claimed it was one in ten... Anyway, there it was, the clue in Marsh’s living room. Staring me in the mandibles. Like the figleafless David he enshrined in his bedroom, eight feet tall and naked as the day Michelangelo lovingly made the original... I can’t say I’m proud of my role in this caper, dad. And not only for that reason.”
“You mean there was another clue, too?”
“Clue is hardly the word. It was — excuse the pun — almost a dead giveaway. Johnny told me who’d done it.”
“Told you?” Inspector Queen scratched his mustache angrily. “Told you, Ellery? How? When?”
“As he was dying. When he came to from the beating, after Marsh left him for dead, Johnny realized he had only a short time to live. In those last few moments preceding death he experienced one of those infinities of clarity, when time stretches beyond its ordinary limits and the dying brain performs prodigies of thought in what we three-dimensional air-breathers call seconds.
“He knew there were no writing materials handy — you’ll recall you and I searched when we got there and failed to find any. Yet he wanted desperately to let us know who had attacked him, and why. So he managed somehow to use the extension phone to the cottage.”
Ellery frowned into the past. “Johnny knew my first question — anyone’s first question under the circumstances — would be: who did it? But in that timeless flash of brilliance, as he was groping for the phone, he found himself in a fantastic situation.”
“Fantastic situation?” The Inspector frowned into the present. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is,” Ellery said, “how could he tell me who had murdered him?”
“How could he tell you? What are you talking about, Ellery? All he had to do was say the killer’s name.”
“All right,” Ellery said. “Say it.”
“Al.”
“Oh, but that could have been an uncompleted attempt to say ‘Alice.’ How would we have known it wasn’t?”
“Oh,” the Inspector said. “Well, then Marsh.”
“Could have been the unfinished start of ‘Marcia.’”
The old man began to look interested. “I see what you mean!.. Then Marsh’s christening name, Aubrey. You’d have understood that.”
“Would I, dad? In light of Johnny’s speech impediment? How could I ever have been sure he hadn’t meant to say ‘Audrey’?”
“Huh.” The Inspector thought deeply. “Huh!” he said. “Funny problem, at that... How about the word ‘lawyer’? No possible mixup there. Marsh was the only lawyer Benedict could have meant.”