“I’m so glad you decided to come out of your shell,” Alice Tierney went on animatedly. “Johnny threatened us with all sorts of punishment if we didn’t let you strictly alone.”
“I’m still not diving back into the drink. As a matter of fact, I came here for only one reason: to ask what may strike you as a peculiar question.”
“Oh?” She did seem puzzled. “What’s that, Mr. Queen?”
Ellery leaned toward her. “Have you missed anything today?”
“Missed? Like what?”
“Something personal. Say an article of clothing.”
“No...”
“You sure?”
“Well, I suppose something could be... I mean, I haven’t taken inventory.” Alice Tierney laughed, but when he did not laugh back she stopped. “You really mean it, Mr. Queen!”
“I do. Would you mind going to your room right now — quietly, Miss Tierney — and checking over your things? I’d rather no one in the house knows what you’re about.”
She rose, drew a breath, smoothed her jacket, then launched herself toward the house rather like an oversized missile.
Ellery waited with the patience of a thousand such interludes, when a puzzle loomed which gave off no immediate meaning, only a promise for the future.
She was back in ten minutes. “That is queer,” she said, plumping back into the lounge chair. “A pair of my gloves.”
“Gloves?” Ellery looked at her hands. They were big and capable-looking. “What kind of gloves, Miss Tierney?”
“Long evening gloves. White. The only such pair I had with me.”
“You’re sure you had them.”
“I wore them to dinner last night.” The red in her cheeks deepened. “Johnny prefers his women to look, oh, untouchable, I suppose it’s what it is at bottom. He hates slobby-gobs.”
“White evening gloves. Is anything else of yours missing?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You checked?”
“I looked through everything. Why in the world should someone steal a pair of gloves? There’s not much use for evening gloves in Wrightsville. Among the class of people who’d steal, I mean.”
“That, of course, is the problem. Miss Tierney, I’m going to ask you to keep this to yourself. About the theft, and about the fact that I’ve been asking questions.”
“If you say so, of course.”
“By the way, where is everybody?”
“They’re getting ready to drive over to the airport to pick up Al Marsh’s secretary, a Miss Smith. She’s due in at the field at five thirty. Annie and Morris are starting dinner in the kitchen.”
“Morris Hunker?”
“Is there more than one?” Alice Tierney grinned. “You know Morris, I take it.”
“Oh, yes. But who’s Annie?”
“Annie Findlay.”
“Findlay...?”
“Her brother Homer used to run the garage down on Plum Street. You know, where High and Low sort of meet.”
“Homer Findlay and his Drive Urself! For heaven’s sake. How is Homer?”
“Peaceful,” Miss Tierney said. “Cardiac arrest. I closed his eyes in the Emergency Room at WGH six years ago.”
Ellery left, shaking his head at Old Mortality. And other things.
Inspector Queen had taken the Cougar down into town and came back chortling over a find. He had stumbled on a store, new to Ellery, which sold fresh fish and shellfish — “not frozen, mind you, son, you freeze fish, shellfish especially, and you wind up losing half the flavor. Wait till you see what I’ve got planned for the menu tonight.”
“What, dad?”
“I said wait, didn’t I? Don’t be so nosy.”
What his father served that evening was, he said, an “Irish bouillabaisse,” which Ellery found indistinguishable from the Mediterranean variety except that it had been made by an Irishman who left out the saffron — “can’t abide that yellow stuff,” the chef declared. It was delicious, and Ellery gave it its due. But after dinner, when the Inspector suggested they go into town to see “one of those naked movies” (Wrightsville had acquired an art cinema), Ellery grew less communicative.
“Why don’t you go see it, dad? I don’t feel much like a movie tonight, even a naked one.”
“Sometimes I wonder! What’ll you do?”
“Oh, listen to some music. Maybe get potted on Johnny’s slivovitz or akvavit or something.”
“May I live to see the day,” his father grumbled; and, surprisingly, he took off.
There’s libido in the old boy yet, Ellery thought, and blessed it.
He had no intention of communing with Mozart or the three Bs, or the international contents of Benedict’s bar. As soon as the sound of the Cougar died, Ellery slipped a dark jacket over his white turtleneck, rousted a flash from the tool room, left several lights burning in the cottage and a stereo cartridge playing, and stole outside.
There was a new moon, and the darkness was as dark only as dark can be in Wrightsville’s woods. He kept his hand over the light as he walked up the path toward the main house. There was a rawness to the night; he would have welcomed a symphony of peepers, but apparently the season was too early or the weather discouraged them, even though spring was officially a week old. If the Inspector had been present to ask him what he was doing, Ellery could not honestly have answered. He had no idea what he was about, except that he could not get the three thefts out of his head. And since they had taken place in Benedict’s house, he was drawn there like a flower child to a pot party.
There was something maddeningly logical about the thefts. An evening gown, a wig à la mode, and evening gloves. They went together like pieces of a jigsaw. The difficulty was, when they were assembled they represented nothing. The three articles had some value, of course; and, value being relative, theft for a material reason could not be dismissed as a possibility, although the monitor who sat deep in Ellery’s brain kept shaking its infallible little head. The obvious reason, that they had been stolen to be worn, was even less appealing: if the thief had been one of the ex-wives, it meant that she had included one of her own things in order to spread the guilty area, an absurd complexity considering the peculiar nature of the thefts; and if the thief had not been one of the ex-wives but some woman from Wrightsville, where could she wear the stolen finery without becoming suspect?
Morris Hunker he eliminated without a doubt; the old Yankee would not have taken a crust from a sparrow if he were dying of hunger. Annie Findlay, of course, was an unknown quantity to him, and the simple answer might be that the roly-poly sleep-out “maid” had been unable to resist the glittery gown, the fantastic wig, and the — to her — unusual gloves. But Ellery had understood that, like Hunker, Annie hired out for her livelihood to special employers like John Benedict; in a small town like this she could hardly have indulged a regular weakness for other people’s belongings without long since being found out. Besides, lightfingered hired help were practically unknown in Wrightsville. No, Annie as the culprit just didn’t scan.
Then who? If it had been a prowler, surely he could have found far more valuable and negotiable pickings in the Benedict house than a second-hand gown, a green wig, and a pair of women’s evening gloves (undoubtedly soiled). Yet the three women had reported nothing else missing. And certainly if Benedict or Marsh had suffered a loss, he would have heard by this time.
It was the kind of trivial-seeming puzzle that always drove Ellery to distraction.