“Unfortunately, just at the wrong time, along came this man Harrison. The woman in the case has independent means — she’s wealthy. He seduced her. I have reason to believe, quite aside from what I know of his former relationship with... you, let us say, that he charmed her into this affair simply for the money he could get out of her.
“They have been meeting frequently and clandestinely for some time now. I’m convinced that the woman regrets her mistake and that she would like to terminate the relationship, but fear that Harrison might tell her husband about it in retaliation or, more characteristically, see that it got to his ears through someone else, is immobilizing her.
“She’s in a really desperate spot, Mrs. P—. If her husband, with his jealousy phobia, should find out, there will almost certainly be a tragedy. At best it would result in the complete ruin of two lives well worth saving, at the worst in murder.
“Harrison is a criminal. He’s far more of a thief than the man who burgles your safe, far more of a menace to society than the gangster who shoots to kill. He ought to be put where he can’t prey on women and wreck lives like a drunken driver on a crowded street. You have it in your power to see this done. Your friendship with Van Harrison came to an end only a few months ago.
“There’s very little time left to my friend, the wife. Her husband is beginning to sense what’s going on. Once it takes full hold, he won’t sleep until he finds out everything.
“If you prosecute Harrison now, it will take him out of circulation. He will hardly talk about one woman when he is trying to defend himself against the charge of having extorted money from another with whom he had the identical relationship.
“That’s my case, Mrs. P—, presented,” Ellery said wryly, “by a sort of amicus curiae in the interest of common decency. Will you do it?”
Mrs. P— had been listening quietly, with no expression on her face except attentiveness. When Ellery had finished, she smiled.
“What makes you think he extorted money from me?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Ellery.
“And why do you say,” continued Mrs. P—, “that he seduced your friend’s wife? I don’t think you know much about women, Mr. Queen. If my case was a criterion, your friend’s wife went into it with both eyes wide open. Very few women over the age of twenty-one in this year of grace are seduced. Van is giving her something she apparently hasn’t got from her husband — the excitement of knowing that she’s the only woman alive. He has that faculty, Mr. Queen. In a real sense, it can’t even be called false. He’s a great actor and, amusing as it must sound, he lives his roles. I consider myself a lucky woman to have known him.
“As for his wrecking lives, again I have only my case to go on. He didn’t wreck my life, Mr. Queen, he enriched it. If this woman’s life is wrecked, it will be her fault, not Van’s. She knew her husband was emotionally unstable when she agreed to have the affair. If anything happens now, she’ll have brought it on herself. It’s Van I feel sorry for, not her.
“Van extorted nothing from me. The money I gave him was given freely, as a gift. If he were the criminal you make him out to be, he’d have tried to blackmail me afterward. He hasn’t done so. Perhaps it’s because he’s too clever, or because he can always find another woman, I don’t know. But the fact remains he’s taken nothing from me that I wasn’t willing to give. If I have any regret at all, it’s that our affair didn’t last longer. We stopped it by mutual consent because it was growing dangerous. If I thought it could be resumed with safety tomorrow — and Van were willing — I’d be the happiest woman in the world.
“I think, Mr. Queen, that answers your question?”
“Mrs. P—,” said Ellery grimly, “you’re a remarkable woman.” And he rose and waited for her to unlock her drawing-room door.
Perhaps nothing in the Lawrence affair brought Ellery so low as the misfire of the weapon Leon Fields had pressed into his hand. It was a scorching blow. He felt so singed that he did not bother to go out on the night that Martha met Harrison at the elevator storehouse in the middle of the Queensboro Bridge and accompanied the actor from there to some unknown but guessable destination.
Ellery had selected Mrs. P— as his first possibility because, according to the dates on Fields’s list, she had been Martha’s immediate predecessor. From a legal point of view, the more recent the offense the better the case. Pursuing this line, Ellery went after the next nearest woman in point of time. She turned out a dead loss, as she was touring Europe with her husband on “a second honeymoon,” according to his informant, and she was not expected back until the middle of October.
The third woman, famous for her political activities, led him a chase that covered two thousand miles and wasted six days of his time. When he finally caught up with her, she refused to see him. He had come armed with another of Harrison’s playbills, and when he sent it to her hotel suite he expected an immediate reply. He got it. The playbill was returned to him by the same messenger, and on it she had typewritten — and left unsigned — “I don’t know what this means and nothing I can conceive will overcome my ignorance.” She was known as a shrewd judge of character and a very clever woman. Ellery flew back to New York.
He discovered from Nikki that during his absence the lovers had met at the 95th Street terminus of the Reservoir in Central Park; that afternoon Nikki had followed Martha herself, Dirk having gone off to his literary agent’s office on some business involving a reprint publisher. Nikki had followed them out of the park and had lost them to a taxicab.
The fourth woman, Ellery learned, was dead.
By this time he was desperate. He moved in ruthlessly on the fifth woman, who was married to a French count. The countess received him at the point of a sinful-looking .30 Mauser and told him with consummate calmness that, unless he stopped all efforts to involve her, she was prepared to shoot him dead and claim that he had attacked her.
The sixth, seventh, and eighth women were milder in temperament and gave him receptions on a less violent level. But these were the earliest ones and by now they were quite clearly old women. His references to Van Harrison, his noblest indictments and pleas, only brought nostalgic mist to their eyes. One of them said that she would as soon prosecute “that divine boy” as consent to do a strip-tease on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Another wept bitterly for her lost youth and said she “could never face him, looking as I do now.” The last showed Ellery an antique Florentine pin, worth perhaps twenty-five dollars. “No one knows — and you can’t prove — that he gave me this,” she said in a defiant tone. “So I feel free to tell you that my will instructs my husband to bury it with me.”
Ellery threw up his hands, went home, and burned the yellow paper.
S· T· U· V· W·
Ellery was a reluctant passenger the night Martha and the actor met on the Staten Island ferry. He had had no intention of going, despite Nikki’s warning of the time of the meeting — he had run across a Rosetta Stone which unlocked the secrets of the indecipherable notes on his next novel, and he was hard at work transcribing them into recognizable English. “I don’t see the point of it, anyway, Nikki,” he said over the phone. “I can’t learn anything I don’t know already. And there’s nothing, nothing I can do about any of it.”
He changed his mind the next evening, when Nikki phoned in a panic to tell him that Dirk had gone out almost on Martha’s heels, with no explanation to Nikki except that he was “tired of working” and needed some “relaxation.”