“She ignores the phone. I suspect she can’t write.” Harrison rummaged in the redwood bar set in one corner. “Damn Tama! I told him to replenish the cellar before he left. A party last night cleaned me out.” He held two bottles up to the light. “There’s a suspicion of vermouth, and the whisky is dangerously near the vanishing point, but I think I can manage a few manhattans. I’ll get some ice.” He disappeared through a swinging door at the dining-room end of the long room.
Ellery waited patiently.
Harrison came back with a pitcher containing some ice cubes and a muddler, and two clean cocktail glasses. He set about mixing the manhattans, whistling bird calls.
“And there we are,” he said cheerily, handing Ellery a glass. “Now. What’s troubling your soul, Queen?”
Ellery put the glass down on an end table, untouched.
“What do you intend to do about Martha?”
Harrison laughed. He drank half his cocktail and said, “None of your unmentionable business. I think that covers all the possible corollary questions, too, old boy. But if you have any doubts, ask away.”
“Do you realize what you’re letting yourself in for?”
A telephone rang. Harrison said, “Excuse me,” politely, and he took his drink over to the big trestle-table standing behind the sofa. He sat on the sofa arm and plucked the phone from its cradle. “Hello?” He took another sip.
The glass remained at his lips for a moment. Then he slowly set it down. “Well, I’ll tell you, darling, I can’t very well just now. I’m not alone.”
Martha?
“Yes, the appointment I mentioned.”
Martha.
“But my sweet—”
She was speaking very rapidly in tones that vibrated the membrane.
“Take it easy, darling,” said Harrison soothingly. “There’s nothing to worry about—”
Again.
“But I can’t very well—”
And again.
“All right.” Harrison’s tone sharpened. “It’ll take me about ten minutes. What’s the number?” He scribbled something on a telephone pad as he listened, tore the top sheet away, stuffed it in his pocket. “Right.” He replaced the phone and rose, smiling. “I take it you insist on making your point, Queen, whatever it is?”
“Yes, I insist.”
“Then you’ll have to indulge me. One of those things — you know our gracious country living. That was the wife of a friend of mine. They’re up the road at some house party or other, and Keith’s fighting drunk. For some reason I’m the only one who can handle him. I’ll run him over to his place in Noroton, put him to bed, and be back here in thirty or forty minutes. That is, if you want to wait.”
“I want to wait.”
Harrison shrugged. He left quickly.
A moment later Ellery heard the Cadillac swivel about and swish up the road.
House party... wife of a friend... Ellery got up to wander about the room.
It was a clumsy lie. Harrison would hardly have asked for a house number on his own road. Besides, the houses on these shore roads had no numbers. That had been Martha. Harrison had phoned her during the day at the theater — she was working her cast overtime to prepare for a scheduled Bridgeport tryout in August — to tell her of the appointment for tonight. Martha had been frightened. So frightened she had risked a call while he was here.
Van, I’ve got to talk to you...
“Well, I’ll tell you, darling, I can’t very well just now. I’m not alone.”
He’s there, isn’t he?...
“Yes, the appointment I mentioned.”
He’s going to pump you, Van. We’d better discuss first what you should say. Get to another phone...
“But my sweet—”
Van, you’ve got to! I’m scared to death. I know you — you’ll start to bait him. You’ll treat it as if it were a big scene in a play...
“Take it easy, darling. There’s nothing to worry about—”
There’s a lot to worry about! Van, he’ll get suspicious if we keep this up. Get to a phone and call me back...
“But I can’t very well—”
Of course you can. Make up some story. A friend up the road in trouble or something. Call me back!...
“All right. It’ll take me about ten minutes. What’s the number?”
That was how it must have gone, what Martha probably said. And the ten minutes was the time it would take Harrison to drive into the business district of Darien to a public phone booth.
So much for Keith, the fighting drunk.
Ellery looked around.
And as he looked around, it came to him in a leap what an incredible opportunity had been handed him by Martha’s call.
He was alone in Harrison’s house, and he had at least a half-hour.
There were three bedrooms upstairs. Two were guest rooms — beds made up, windows latched, closets empty.
The third was the master bedroom.
Harrison’s room took Ellery back to old Hollywood. Here, spread royally, was the great Van Harrison in his heyday. The bed was an immense circular piece with satin sheets and a monogrammed spread that alone must have cost several hundred dollars. The rug was long-haired and black, sewn together from the hides of a great number of unclassifiable animals. The entire ceiling was mirrored. The walls, done in white leather, were covered with photographs of beautiful women, all — from the inscriptions — devoted slaves of the actor. Many were nude. Uninhibited sculptures occupied niches here and there. One recessed shelf was filled with pornographic books.
An oval picture window eight feet across overlooked the terrace and the slough, and before this window stood a striking kneehole desk of ebony. On the polished surface, looking rather forlorn in its magnificent surroundings, there was a portable typewriter.
Ellery went around the desk and sat down in the white leather chair behind it.
There was some typewriter paper on the desk, and he slipped a sheet into the carriage. He typed: Mrs. Dirk Lawrence, and Martha’s address.
They came out red.
The ribbon was the black-and-red type. Ellery looked for the lever that controlled the ribbon-shift. All he found was a raw stub, and this he could not budge.
The black upper half of the ribbon was frayed and worn; the ink had been pounded out of it.
He made a face. There was no significance to Harrison’s red typing after all. The color-shift lever had jammed and in trying to move it Harrison had snapped it off. He had simply neglected to have it repaired. Having worn away the ink of the black half of the ribbon, he had inverted the ribbon and used the red half...
No, there was no significance to the little scarlet letters produced by Harrison’s typewriter, and yet it was not without a meaning. A “satire of circumstance,” Thomas Hardy would have called it. Life was full of such curious tricks, and it took a poet to appreciate them.
Ellery was no poet. Neither, he fancied, was Dirk.
He took from his breast pocket the manila envelope of the Froehm Air-Conditioner Company in which Harrison had enclosed his first message to Martha; Ellery had brought it along with some vague notion that it might prove useful in his tilt with Harrison.
The address on the envelope and the words Ellery had just typed on Harrison’s machine were identical in every distinguishable feature.
He tucked the envelope back in his pocket, together with the sample he had written.
And he began to go through the drawers of the desk.
In the flat middle drawer above his knees he found a revolver.
It was an old Harrington & Richardson, a .22 Special with a six-inch barrel, chambered for nine shots. The blued-finish arm was a discontinued model; it had not been manufactured, Ellery knew, for over a dozen years. But this piece had been well-preserved; it was oiled and clean.