He circled the house, choosing his path with stealth. The front and the side where the kitchen and pantry must lie showed no lights; evidently Hunker and the Findlay woman had cleaned up after dinner and gone home. But lights blazed onto the terrace through the French doors Benedict had had installed in the living room’s rear wall during his reconstruction of the farmhouse.
Ellery edged onto the patio, keeping to the shadows beyond the lighted area. He chose a position under the branches of a forty-year-old pink dogwood tree very near the house, from where he could see into the living room without being seen. The room must be warm: one of the French doors was ajar. He heard their voices clearly.
They were all there: Benedict, his ex-wives, Marsh, and a girl who could only be Marsh’s secretary, Miss Smith. The secretary was seated at the edge of a sofa, to one side, legs crossed, with a pad on her knee and a pencil poised; she wore a no-nonsense navy blue skirt of medium length, a tailored white blouse, and a white cardigan thrown about her shoulders and buttoned at the neck. There was nothing youthful or even womanly about her; her mechanical makeup gave her horsy face a circus precision; she was, in fact, quite masculine-looking aside from her legs, which were shaped well and surprisingly feminine. She told Ellery something about Marsh. A man who would select a Miss Smith for private secretarial chores could be relied on to reserve his office hours for business purposes exclusively.
Two of the ex-wives seemed dressed for a race, in evening getups that evoked the yachtsman’s starting gun.
Audrey Weston’s blonde beauty was offset by black evening pajamas and a black crepe tunic, with a broad red satin sash tied high above the waist that underscored her breasts, and needle-heeled red satin shoes that added inches to her mainmast height; she wore a bracelet of gold links that looked heavy enough to secure an anchor, and gold coil earrings.
The generally flappy, full-canvas effect of Audrey’s outfit, exciting as it was, barely held its own with Marcia Kemp’s. The redheaded expatriate from Las Vegas had trimmed down to the bare poles; her turquoise evening sheath was so painted to her body that Ellery wondered how she was able to sit down without cracking her hull... and, as a corollary, whether Benedict’s wives numbers two and one had put their heads together in planning their racing strategy. Was the contest fixed?
By contrast, Alice Tierney’s coloring showed darker against the whiteness of her gown and accessories; she looked pure and chaste in it, and very nearly striking. It was as if she realized that she could not by natural endowment outshine her predecessors and so had shrewdly employed a tactic of simplicity.
But if Audrey’s and Marcia’s calculated art and Alice’s calculated artlessness were designed to stir old passions in Benedict’s libido, the effects were not visible to the Queen eye. Outwardly, at least, he was as unmoved by their bountiful charms as a eunuch. If proof of his general contempt for the trio were needed, Ellery found it in Benedict’s attire. The millionaire being so finical about his women, one would expect consistency, or at least noblesse oblige, in the form of a dinner jacket; but while Marsh was suitably in black tie, Benedict was wearing an ordinary brown suit — as if, being Johnny-B, he could afford to flout the conventions he expected of his ex-wives. It made Ellery see his old friend in a newish light.
Ellery felt no qualms at eavesdropping; he never did when his curiosity was engaged. He had long since had this out with himself. (He did not recommend it as a general practise; only — as in the practise of bugging — when performed by experts for lawful purposes, in which category he felt entitled to place himself.)
What they had been talking about before his arrival, Ellery gathered, was “the new will” Benedict was having Marsh draw up for him “tomorrow.” (So he had not told the ex-Mrs. Benedicts of the holograph document he had signed in the Queens’ presence Thursday night, and which lay in the Inspector’s pocket at this moment.)
“But that’s nothing but fraud,” Audrey Weston snarled.
“Fraud?” The redhead from Vegas uttered a four-letter word with great sincerity. “It’s murder!”
Alice Tierney looked pained.
“You know, Marcia, your vulgarity is so lacking in originality,” Marsh said from the bar, where he was replenishing his drink. “I’ll give you this, though: people know just where they stand with you at all times.”
“You want me to give you a personal reading right now, Al?”
“Heaven forbid, dear heart!” He enveloped his drink hastily.
Ellery found himself bound to his dogwood. Fraud? Murder? But then he decided it had been hyperbole.
“Leeches!” Benedict’s sang-froid was gone. “You know damn w-well what our marriages were. Strictly business. Contracts with a m-mattress thrown in.” He stabbed at them with his arms. “Well, I’m finished with that kind of stupidity!”
“Down, boy,” Marsh said.
“You know our d-deal! The same in each c-case, a thousand a week, payable till your remarriages or my death; then, on my death, each of you under my will, if still not m-married” — which will? — “gets a settlement in a lump sum of one m-million dollars.”
“Yes, but look what we signed away,” Alice Tierney said in a soft and reasonable voice. “You made us sign prenuptial agreements in which we had to renounce all dower and other claims to your estate.”
“Under the threat, if I recall correctly — and, brother, do I! — ” Audrey Weston said caustically, “that if we didn’t sign, the marriage was off.”
“Sweetie,” Marcia Kemp said, “that’s the great Johnny-B’s style.”
Marsh laughed. “Still, girls, not a bad deal for leasing Johnny the use of your bodies, impressive as they are, for a few months.” He had made too many trips to the bar; there was the slightest slur to his speech and a stiffness to his smile.
“Impressive is as impressive does — right, Al?” Benedict brandished a hand graceful as a dagger. “The p-point is, pets, I’ve been thinking a great many things over, and I’ve decided that with you three specimens I didn’t get my m-money’s worth. So I’ve changed my mind about the whole bit. Besides, there’s a new element in the plot I’ll get to in a m-minute. I’m having Al write my new w-will tomorrow, as I told you, and you can be n-nice about it or not, it’s all the s-same to me.
“Hold on, dahling!” Tallu was back. “You can’t change a settlement just like that, you know. A girl scorned has some rights in Uncle Sam country!”
“I do believe you didn’t read the f-fine print, Audrey,” Benedict said. “The agreements in no case made your renunciation of dower rights and other claims against my estate c-contingent on what I chose to leave you in my will. Read it again, Audrey, will you? You’ll save yourself an attorney’s fee. Right, Al?”
“Right,” Marsh said. “Also, the agreements and the will they’re attached to were in no way affected by the decrees.”
“And if I want to change my mind about those three millions, there’s not a b-bloody thing you can do about it.” Benedict displayed his teeth. “I assure you that what we’re planning is p-perfectly legal. Anything that might be iffy — well, I’ll match my beagle against yours on any track in the land.”
“Wuff,” Marsh said.
“In other words, buster,” and the redhead showed her teeth, “you’re going to the muscle.”
“If I must.”
“But you promised,” the ex-nurse said. “Johnny, you gave me your word...”
“Nonsense.”
Marcia had been thinking. She lit a cigaret. “All right, Johnny, what’s the new deal?”
“I’ll continue to p-pay each of you a thousand per week until you remarry or I d-die, but the million-apiece lump-sum payoff on my death, that’s out.”