“Johnny was probably thinking in terms of names only. But assuming he thought of ‘lawyer,’ see what a bind he found himself in. He was intending to marry Laura, a girl he loved; her name was in the will he’d given you to put in your pocket. If he said ‘lawyer,’ we might have mistaken the word for the name — ‘lawyer’ for ‘Laura’! Remember, he had great difficulty pronouncing the letter r. Between the impediment and his dying diction, it was too great a risk to take.”
“Then the word ‘attorney’!”
“Might have sounded like ‘Tierney,’” Ellery said, “because of the same difficulty with his r’s.” He shook his head. “An extraordinary situation that wouldn’t occur once in a million cases. But it did in this one.”
“Wait... a... minute,” the Inspector articulated. “Hold your horses, Professor! There’s one thing Benedict could have said that you wouldn’t — you couldn’t — have misunderstood. Same as if he’d put his finger on Marsh in front of witnesses! Marsh was the only man besides himself in the house — all the rest were women. Why didn’t Benedict simply say the word ‘man’ and take the chance you’d understand he meant Marsh?”
“Just what I asked myself, dad. But he didn’t, and naturally I wondered why. Of course, he might not have thought of it. But suppose he had? The possibility raised a fascinating line of speculation. If he thought of saying ‘man’ and rejected it in those endless few seconds, then — as in the case of the names — there must have been a basis for similar confusion—”
“But no name in the case sounded like ‘man,’” the Inspector objected.
“Yes, but did we know all the names in the case? We did not. There was one conspicuous omission. We didn’t know Laura’s last name! That’s what suggested to me that Laura’s surname might be M-a-n-n or might begin with M-a-n or M-a-double n — Manners, Mannheimer, something like that. It turned out to be Manzoni. That must have been, then, why Johnny didn’t say it. He was afraid that, if he could get out only the first syllable before he died or became unconscious, we’d believe — when we discovered Laura’s family name — that he’d been accusing her of killing him.”
The old man was shaking his head. “I never heard anything like this in my whole life! But Ellery, you said Benedict did identify his killer to you. The old dying-message thing you’re so crazy about.”
“Could it be premature senility?” Ellery made a face. “At the time I didn’t even realize it was a dying message! And then I dismissed it from my alleged mind. Dad, what was it Johnny said to me over the phone when I asked him who had attacked him?”
“He said some stupid thing like he was home, or something like that.”
“It wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t say he was home. He uttered the one word, ‘home.’ In fact, he repeated it three times. I thought he meant he was calling from home, that is, from the main house, in his muddled dying condition answering a ‘who’ question with a ‘where’ answer. I should have taken into account at least the possibility that when I asked ‘Who’ he’d answered ‘who’.”
“Who— ‘Home’? ‘Home’ isn’t a who, Ellery. Unless it was somebody’s name. But there wasn’t anybody named—” The Inspector looked startled. “He didn’t finish,” he said slowly. “It was a longer word — beginning with ‘home’.”
“Yes,” Ellery said, muffled, out of a well of self-disgust. “If Johnny had finished the word, or I’d had the mother wit I was presumably born with — we’d have solved the mystery of this case actually before the victim drew his last breath.”
“Then, Ellery, what Benedict meant to say was the word—”
“Homosexual.”