“Let’s say you were looking over the registration cards and began muttering to yourself?”
“Yes.” The clerk coughed and moved over to the card file hanging on the wall beside the desk. “Six-thirty-two... Checked in at one-five P.M. today...” He looked around. “You won’t care for this, Mr. Queen. He’s registered as George T. Spelvin, East Lynne, Oklahoma.”
“Typical actor’s humor. Come on, Ernie, you know who he is. You know every actor in the Lambs.”
The desk clerk straightened the pen in its holder. “You flatter me,” he murmured, “and I like it. The Westphalian is Van Harrison. What’s the lay, chief?”
“Guard your language. No, it’s nothing you can peddle to the columns, worse luck. I spotted him, thought he looked familiar, and wondered who he was. Thanks a lot.” Ellery grinned and went out.
But on the street his grin faded.
“Van Harrison.” He found himself saying it aloud.
He stopped in a Sixth Avenue drugstore to phone Nikki. Dirk Lawrence answered.
“Hi, there. How’s it coming?”
“Pretty good, pretty good.” Dirk sounded absent.
“Any chance of my borrowing my secretary for this evening, chum?”
“You’re damn decent to do this for me, Ellery. How much will you take for her contract?”
“That isn’t answering my question.”
“I guess it can be arranged, old boy — Martha and I are invited to the Le Fleurs’ for dinner, and that means black tie, a butler with palsy, and Charades in the drawing room afterward. I’m beginning to hope Martha doesn’t come home at all.”
“That’s a switch,” laughed Ellery. “Let me speak to Nikki.”
Nikki said, “And how has your day been?”
“Surprisingly surprising. How about meeting me for dinner?”
“Why, Mr. Q.”
“Make it Louis and Armand’s as close to seven as you can get away. Don’t keep me waiting too long, because I’ll be at the bar, and you know how conscientious Pompeia is.”
“No, but I know you. Three drinks and you’re the Human Fly.”
“I’m climbing no walls this night. It’s serious business, Nikki.”
Nikki said fervently, “I can hardly wait,” and hung up.
Nikki said, “Van Harrison,” as if it were the name of a loathsome disease. “What can she see in him? I thought he was dead.”
“Unkind, Nikki,” murmured Ellery. “I can testify that Mr. Harrison is no corpse. And — I’m afraid — so can Martha.”
“But he’s an old man.”
“Not so old. It wasn’t more than a dozen or so years ago that he was jamming the theaters with standees and having to fight his way out of the stage door. That profile still packs a wallop, Nikki. Terrific personality.”
“I could strangle him,” said Nikki, panting. “Martha in a hotel room! Where’d she ever meet him?”
“Broadway is a small town. Maybe he applied for a part in one of her productions. I made a few inquiries at the Lambs after I phoned and I’m told he’s seen every once in a while still trying to break down the Broadway ban on him. I don’t suppose you remember that. He went on a prolonged drunk in his last starring play for Avery Langston, and Langston had to close down at the height of a run. Harrison hasn’t had a job on Broadway since. That must have been ten or twelve years ago.”
“Then what’s he living on, his old press notices?”
“He doesn’t have to work at all. He made a fortune in his lush years, but you know actors. He still takes an occasional radio and TV job, and once in a while he gets a character part in some film. It’s probably keeping him alive. That magic voice and romantic profile of his will lure women of Martha’s age when he’s tripping over his beard.”
“But Martha.”
“What about Martha?” said Ellery coldly. “What’s so different about Martha? She’s in her middle thirties, she has a husband who’s making her life hell with his crazy jealousy, she has no children and no family to hold her back, and she’s stagestruck. Why, Martha’s duck soup for an operator like Harrison! He can give her what Dirk can’t, or won’t — flattery, attention, mastery, glamor. He can give her happiness, Nikki, even if it’s only a cheap substitute in a hotel room.”
“But Martha’s always been so level-headed. Can’t she see he’s a phony?”
“Who’s real in this world? And maybe he’s in love with her. Martha isn’t so hard to take.”
Nikki was silent.
“In other words,” said Ellery after a while, “it’s one hell of a mess, and I’m for getting out.”
“Not now.”
“Now is the only time. Later we may not be able to.”
“Not while it’s going on.” Nikki shivered. “Not while there’s a chance of Dirk’s finding out.”
“I take it, then, you’re for continuing to hole up at the Lawrences’.”
“Ellery, I have to.”
Ellery grunted. “Why did I ever let myself be conned into this?” He kept drumming on the cloth. Nikki watched him anxiously. “Of course, the sensible thing is a girl-to-girl talk. After all, there is the basis for it, Nikki. We came into this because Martha said Dirk was being jealous for no reason. The situation has changed. He now — fortunately still unknown to him — has the best reason in the world. She’s cut the ground away from under us. If we’re to continue to help her—”
“We’ll have to do it in spite of her.”
Ellery threw up his hands. “Every time I make a constructive suggestion—!”
“Look, dear,” said Nikki, “I know women and you don’t. If I told Martha what we know and pleaded with her to stop before something drastic happens, she’d deny the whole thing. She’d deny it because she thinks she’s madly in love. Besides making up some embarrassing fairy tale to explain why she’s meeting this Harrison man in hotel rooms, she’d hate me for knowing it, I’d have to leave, and that would be that.”
Ellery grumbled something.
“If Martha were ready to come clean, Ellery, she’d have walked into that hotel room a free woman instead of sneaking in like a tart. The fact is, she’s decided to have an affair while maintaining the fiction that she’s trying to save her marriage.”
“But that’s illogical!”
“When a good woman falls, Mr. Queen, you can throw your logic down the johnny. Ellery, I’m sorry I dragged you into this. Why don’t you just forget it and let me blunder along in my own way?”
“Very clever,” snarled Ellery. “All right, we try to save them in spite of themselves. And we’ll wind up right where we belong, behind the nearest eight-ball!”
Nikki pressed his hand below the table. “You darling,” she said tenderly.
So after they had eaten the salad that was not on the menu, Ellery complained further: “The thing that bothers me most is that we can’t plan ahead. There’s nothing to plan. It’s like being asked to watch for a firebug loose in an ammunition dump on a moonless night. All I can do is stumble after Martha in the dark and hope I’ll be there to step on the match before everything goes boom.”
“I know, dear heart...”
“You hijack that next letter, Nik. You’ll have to read it this time before Martha does — she won’t be so obliging as to drop it on the kitchen floor again. It will probably be in a business envelope, too. It’s a good dodge and the kind of pattern that, once established, is pretty sure to be followed.”
“But he wouldn’t use the envelope of that air-conditioner company again,” objected Nikki. “That would be dangerous.”
“It would,” said Ellery, “therefore the second note will come in an altogether different envelope.”
“But how will I know which one?”
“I can’t help you. You may have to steam open every business letter addressed to Martha. And, since we’ve agreed to play blindman’s buff all around, I suppose I’d better warn you not to get caught at it, even by the maid.”