The Fourth Side of the Triangle (10 page)

“There's nothing to admit. Of course I knew Miss Grey. I know all the tenants in this building. I own it.”

“You knew her well?”

“Who?”

“Miss Grey,” the sergeant said patiently.

“Quite well.”

“And how well would quite well be, Mr. McKell?”

Dane glanced at his mother. She was absolutely rigid.

“I don't know what you mean, Sergeant.”

Velie said, “You see, sir, we found men's clothing in her apartment. One man's clothing.” The sergeant paused, then repeated, “You want to say something, Mr. McKell?”

The elder McKell nodded with remarkable self-possession. He did not look at his wife. “They're my clothes, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “You must have traced them.”

“That's right, we did. We checked out the tailor's labels and the laundry marks, and so forth. Anything else you have to say to us?”

Lutetia's face was now expressionless. Their hands were still tightly gripped, Dane noticed.

At this moment Ramon came in. “Sir, excuse me,” he said to Ashton McKell, “but the Bentley will not start. Shall I use the Continental, or …?”

“Never mind, Ramon. Wait in the kitchen, please. Mrs. McKell may need you.”

Ramon withdrew in impervious silence. In Spain, where he had been born and trained, servants did not ask questions.

Dane was thinking: His clothing … What kind of relationship
had
they had? It sounded like something out of Havelock Ellis. And how could it have satisfied Sheila? The raging wave stirred. He went to work on it …

“You're leading up to something, Sergeant Velie,” his father was saying steadily. “I'd appreciate your coming to the point.” Dane felt weak and ill.

Sergeant Velie continued to regard Ashton McKell with that same impaling glance. Dane knew what the sergeant was thinking, what had brought him and the other detective to the McKell apartment this morning. Ashton McKell had had the means to commit the murder: it was his revolver that had taken Sheila Grey's life; his story about the blanks was not substantiated by the facts, and in any case it sounded feeble. He had had opportunity: he and Sheila Grey occupied the same building. He had had motive (but here Dane's brain shut down; he refused to think of theoretical motive, kept pushing it back and away, out of sight).

Lutetia's delicate face was cameo-white, cameo-stone.

“Mr. McKell, I'm going to have to ask you to come downtown for further questioning. You won't need your car. We've got a police car at the side entrance.” So much was granted Ashton McKell's position in society. The tumbril awaits … but at the tradesmen's entrance.

Ashton's face was stone, too. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. He disengaged his hand gently. “Lutetia, I'm sorry,” he said in a very low voice. She did not reply, but her eyes flew open wide, very wide. “Son—”

Dane moistened his dried-out lips. “Don't worry, Dad. We'll get you out of this right away.”

“Take care of your mother, son. By the way, I forgot a handkerchief this morning. May I have yours?”

On this absurd note Ashton McKell left between the two policemen. After the apartment door snicked shut with guillotine finality, Dane turned back to his mother. She was no longer there. He went to her bedroom and called out, but there was no response. He tried her door; it was locked. After a moment he went to the phone.

Ashton McKell had a staff of six attorneys at his New York headquarters. Dane called none of them. Richard M. Heaton was the McKell family lawyer.

“Almighty God!” said Richard M. Heaton.

Hanging up, Dane felt himself sweating in the air-conditioned apartment. He felt for his handkerchief and remembered that he had given it to his father. Abstractedly he went to his room and opened the handkerchief drawer of his old bureau.

His hand remained in midair.

His silver cigaret case lay on one of the piles of handkerchiefs.

The silver case had been removed from the penthouse before the police got there. Who could have removed it? Obviously, the same one who had placed it here, in his bureau drawer … his father. That was why Ashton McKell had “forgotten” his own handkerchief (as if he ever forgot an essential article of clothing!) and borrowed Dane's: to make Dane go to his room for a replacement and, as a consequence, to find the cigaret case. His father must have seen it in Sheila's apartment, recognized it, pocketed it, and only now placed it in Dane's bureau.

What a bitter night it must have been for him, Dane thought. Finding the evidence of Dane's presence on Sheila's premises, he must have realized in a flash why Sheila was easing him out of her life. His own son …

And the king went to the tower which was by the gate, and as he went, thus he said, My son, my son, Absalom. My son, my son, Absalom. Would God I died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son
.

Absalom had conspired against David, his father.

Suddenly Dane saw Ashton McKell in a very different light from the clownish spectacle of the man who skulked in out-of-the-way places disguising himself in order to visit a woman he could not even embrace. In his blackest hour—an almost-criminal on the brink of scandal, his life in danger—his parting thought had been for the son who had betrayed him, his last directive an unspoken
Don't worry, son, I've retrieved your case from the penthouse, now they can't place you on the scene
.

And Dane sat down in his childhood rocker and wept.

In a city in which murder is hamburgers by the dozen, the McKell arrest was caviar to the general. Not often did a case break in which the accused was tycoon, adviser to presidents, prince of commerce, son of a name who was son of a name untainted for generations, and all rolled into one man.

If Lutetia McKell's anguish at the wild invasion of her privacy by the press was not quite on a level with her horror at Ashton's predicament, it was still powerful enough to dominate her household. She had caught a single glimpse of a single tabloid (left incautiously in the kitchen by old Margaret, whose open vice was the journalism of murder and rape); it was enough. All newspapers, even the
New York Times
, were banned from the premises; and when it became evident that the scavengers of the press, in particular the photographers, were laying siege to the building, Lutetia went into strictest seclusion, like a Hindu widow, and forbade the entrance of the clamoring world by so much as an uncurtained window. To reach his mother, Dane found himself having to follow a route he had not used since his boyhood, entering another building around the corner, descending to its basement, and emerging into the alley from which he could reach the apartment of John Leslie, the doorman, by a window. John or his wife would let him in, and then out by the basement door adjacent to the service elevator. It had been great fun when he was a youngster, but somehow the adventure had lost its savor. When it became necessary to confer with Lawyer Heaton, Lutetia reacted to Heaton's suggestion that she and Dane visit his office as if he had invited her to take a sunbath naked on her roof.

“I shall not set foot outside this apartment,” she said, in tears. “Nothing, nothing can make me!”

So stately Mahomet came to the mountain; and indeed it was almost as traumatic an experience for Richard M. Heaton as it would have been for Lutetia. For Heaton was the very portrait of the trusted family lawyer—elderly, florid, with the dignity of a retired major-general, and as horror-struck by the notion of publicity as Lutetia herself. He gained entry to the McKell building in a slightly disheveled condition after running the gauntlet of newsmen, and from his distress he might have been stripped by their waving hands to his under-clothing.

“Foul beasts,” he muttered, accepting a glass of sherry and a biscuit from Lutetia in great agitation. He wore a resentful look, as if he had been tricked. It took Dane five minutes to calm him.

“This is quite beyond my depth, Lutetia,” he said at last. “I have had no occasion to practice criminal law—haven't appeared in court for any reason in fifteen years. What a dreadful business! A dressmaker!” Dane was tempted to ask him if he would have felt better about the whole mess if Sheila Grey's name had been Van Spuyten, the end result of a long line of patroons. But he did not, for he suspected that his mother felt very much the same way.

“Tell Mother what you told me, Mr. Heaton.”

“Why I haven't been able to pry your father out of the hands of the police? Well, Lutetia, Ashton cannot prove an alibi. He has told the authorities where he was at the time of the—of the event, but they're unable to corroborate it. Therefore, they are continuing to hold him. Now. Although the charge is the most serious one under the law—with the possible exception of treason, of course, and the last treason indictment I can remember anywhere is that against John Brown by the State of Virginia—”

“Mr. Heaton,” said Dane politely, but firmly. He could see that his mother was holding herself together by sheer heroism.

“I'm rambling, forgive me, Lutetia. This has upset me more than I can say. However, even though murder is among the gravest of charges, an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty, thank God, and I do not for one moment suppose such proof can be obtained in this case.”

“Then why haven't you been able to get Ashton's release on bond?” Lutetia asked timidly. “Dane tells me you said that New York State allows bond even in a charge of first—in a first-degree charge.”

“It's complicated,” sighed Richard M. Heaton. “We have fallen afoul of a very poor climate, politically speaking, on the bail question, I mean here in the city. Of course, you don't follow such things, but only a few months ago there was the case of another, ah, of a very prominent man who shot his wife to death. He was released on $100,000 bail, and he promptly fled the country. It has made the courts and the district attorney's office extremely shy where bond in capital cases is concerned, especially since the newspapers have raked up the other case and are asking quite maliciously if this will prove a repetition.”

“But Ashton wouldn't do a thing like that,” Lutetia moaned. “Richard, he's
innocent
. Only guilty men flee. It isn't
fair.
”

“I'm afraid we don't live in as ideal a democracy as we sometimes boast,” the old lawyer said sadly. “The rich and socially prominent are very often discriminated against in our society. We could probably force the issue in the courts, but the trouble is …” He hesitated.

“The trouble is what, Mr. Heaton?” Dane asked sharply.

“Your father seems reluctant to battle it out legally. In fact, he's all but forbidden me to.”

“What!”

“But why?” asked Lutetia blankly.

“Why indeed? In view of the state of public opinion, he seems to feel that it would be wiser not to press for bail. He actually told me, ‘Perhaps the public is right. If I were a poor man I wouldn't be able to raise the kind of bail that would be set in a case like this. Let it go.' I must confess I hadn't expected such a thoroughly unrealistic attitude from Ashton McKell, and I told him so. A martyr's attitude will avail him nothing, nothing at all.”

Lutetia sniffed into her tiny bit of cambric. “Ashton has always been so principled. But I do wish …” Then she cried quietly.

Dane comforted her, thinking that neither she nor the lawyer had caught the point. Perhaps Ashton himself was not aware of it. Though his father continued to insist quite rationally on his innocence of the murder charge, he was carrying a heavy load of guilt around for another crime; and of this one he was guilty as hell—consorting, as Lutetia would have termed it, with another woman. It was not as if he despised his wife and, in despising her, sought a more loving pair of arms, bought or offered gratis. Ashton did not despise Lutetia; he loved her. It was like loving a piece of fragile chinaware, the slightest jar to which would crack it. He had been responsible for cracking the delicate image, and he must be feeling the same sort of shame and guilt as if, in fact, he had been contemptuous of it.

Dane went to see his father. The elder McKell looked like a hollow reproduction of himself—as if he had had his stuffing scooped out. Dane could hardly bear to look at him.

Ashton asked, in tones softer than Dane could remember, “Son, how are you? How is your mother?”

“We're fine. The question is, Dad, how are you?”

“This is all a dream, and I'll soon wake up. But then I know I'm awake—that the past was the dream. It's something like that, son.”

They chatted awkwardly for a while, about Lutetia chiefly, how she was reacting to her overturned world. Finally Dane got around to the object of his visit. “Dad, I want you to tell me all about that night—what you did, where you went. In detail. Just as you told the police.”

“If you want me to, Dane.” The elder man considered for a moment, sighing. “I got to the penthouse just before ten o'clock—the cab was held up by an accident on the highway, or it would have been sooner. The traffic from the airport isn't very heavy at that hour.”

About ten o'clock. It would have been mere minutes after he himself had left her alive in the penthouse.

“I didn't stay long. She was terribly upset. By what she wouldn't say.”

Dane bent over the pad, on which he was taking notes, to cover his wince. “How long were you there, Dad? As exactly as you can recall.”

“She asked me to leave almost at once, so I did. I couldn't have been there more than several minutes. I'd say I left at 10:03 at the latest.”

“Where did you go from there?”

Ashton said quietly, “I was rather upset myself. I walked.”

“Where? For how long?” And why didn't I ask him why he was upset? Dane thought. Because I know, that's why …

“I just don't remember. It couldn't have been too long, I suppose. I do remember being in a bar—”