The Fourth Side of the Triangle (20 page)

Here Judy's voice faltered altogether. Ellery said harshly, “Go on, please.”

“‘He then tried to strangle me,'” Judy whispered. “‘This is not hysteria on my part—he actually tried to strangle me. He took my throat … in his hands and … squeezed and seemed to be out of his mind with an … with an insane rage.' I can't, Mr. Queen, I just
can't
go on!”

Ellery read the rest of it himself, rapidly. “‘As he choked me he screamed that he was going to kill me and he called me many obscene names. Then he dropped me to the floor and ran out of the apartment. In another minute I would have been dead of strangulation. I am convinced that he is a dangerous person and I repeat his name, Dane McKell. He definitely tried to kill me. Signed, Sheila Grey.'”

“And I thought the McKell tribe was out of the woods,” Dane said hollowly. He laughed.

No one laughed with him. Judy was blinking back tears as she stared out the hospital window; Ashton was frowning at Ellery, but not as if he could see him. Ellery set the letter down.

“First,” he said. “Assuming Sheila Grey to have written the original of this letter—Dane, is what she wrote true?”

Dane stared at his hands. “When I was a kid at school there was a boy named Philbrick, a stupid kid, I don't even recall any more what he looked like, only that his nose was always running. He said to me, ‘If your father's name is Ashton, yours ought to be Ashcan.' Just silly kid talk, nonsense. But he kept at it. ‘Ashcan.' Every time he saw me, ‘Ashcan.' He knew I hated it. One night we were getting ready to go to bed. As he'd said a hundred times before, he jeered, ‘Ashcan, you left your towel in the shower.' I went wild. Jumped him, knocked him down, got my hands around his throat, began to throttle him. I'd certainly have succeeded if some of the other boys hadn't pulled me off. You remember, Dad. I was almost kicked out.

“Yes, it's all true, Mr. Queen, what Sheila wrote,” Dane muttered. “If sanity hadn't returned in time …”

“Dane's always had a terrible temper, Mr. Queen,” Ashton said. “We had considerable trouble about that when he was a boy.” He stopped as if to digest the past, made a little gesture of bewilderment. “I thought that was all over, son.”

“So did I, God damn it! Well, it isn't.”

“I surely thought you'd conquered it. I surely thought so.”

Ellery was staring at the photographic paper. “I wonder just when that night she wrote this.”

“It must have been after I left,” Ashton said. “You remember I got there just a shade before ten o'clock, and there was no indication that she'd been writing. She was crying.”

“So she wrote it in the fifteen minutes or so between your leaving,” Ellery mused, “and her killer's arrival.” He was poking about in the small envelope. “What's this?”

“Read it,” growled Dane, “and weep.”

Ellery took from it a note written in anonymous block capital lettering, with an ordinary pencil, on a ragged-edged sheet apparently torn out of a cheap memorandum book.

The note read:

MR. DANE MCKELL. SHEILA GREY'S LETTER WON'T BE SENT TO POLICE
IF
. MAKE UP PLAIN PACKAGE 100 $20 BILLS NOT MARKED AND MAIL TO MR. I.M. ECKS CARE GENERAL DELIVERY MAIN POST OFFICE CITY. IMMEDIATE. THEN PACK OF $1000 IN $20 BILLS, NOT MARKED, TO BE SENT 15TH OF EVERY MONTH WITHOUT FAIL SAME ADDRESS. OR POLICE WILL BE INFORMED. I MEAN THIS.

“Mr. I. M. Ecks. A comedian,” Ellery commented. “I must say I don't blame you for not finding him funny.”

“Blackmail.” Dane let out the same bitter laugh. “What do I do?”

“What I did,” his father said quietly.

“What?” Dane said.

“You paid someone blackmail, too, Mr. McKell?” Ellery turned quickly back from the etched trees he had been studying through his window.

“I got a similar letter—I'm sure the same person sent it, from the kind of note it is, the wording, the paper and so on—shortly after, well, I began visiting Miss Grey.” Ashton McKell swallowed. “It was foolish of me, I know. But I just couldn't face a scandal. So I paid—$2,000 down, $1,000 a month. It was worth that to me to keep my name and family from being dragged through the newspapers.”

“But you kept seeing her,” Dane said slowly.

“Sheila was important to me in a way which I doubt I could make anyone understand.” His father spoke with difficulty. “Anyway, I kept sending this dirty hound, whoever he is, the thousand a month until I was arrested. Naturally, after that he had no further hold over me, and I stopped paying him. I haven't heard a word about it since.”

“Do you have any of the notes you received?”

“I got just that first one—the one like this, Mr. Queen. I burned it.”

Ellery brooded. “Dane, let's go over the ground again, in the light of this new information. You left Sheila before ten o'clock that night. You left her alive. You didn't show up at your parents' apartment until after midnight. All right. What did you do in those two hours?”

“I took a little walk first, to cool off. I was horrified at myself, at what I'd almost done. I knew I must have hurt her badly, then I'd run as if I'd murdered her. Finally I decided to go back—”

“You went back?” cried Ellery. Dane's father and Judy were open-mouthed.

“I'm on one hell of a spot, hey?” Dane said with a wry smile. “That's what I did, all right. I figured I owed her an explanation, the story of these rages, to ask her forgiveness if nothing else. So I went back to the building—”

“Did anyone see you?”

“I don't believe so, but I can't be sure.”

“Go on.”

“I took the elevator up to the penthouse and stood before her door. I raised my hand—I actually raised it—to ring her bell. And … I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to. To ring it, or knock, or use my key, or anything. I chickened out. I couldn't face her.”

Oddly, he addressed this last to Judy in a pleading way, as if soliciting her understanding. Her face softened.

“Dane, pay attention. This could be important. You say you took a short walk, then returned to the penthouse—at least to her vestibule. Think now. How long were you gone? Can you tell me?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“No idea at all?”

“If I had to guess, I'd say I was gone about fifteen minutes.”

“Then it's possible you were outside Sheila's door at 10:23, the time she was shot.”

“I suppose so.”

“Level with me, Dane. If I'm to help you, I need straight answers. Did you hear a shot from inside the apartment?”

“No. I'd remember if I did.”

“I doubt if a shot could be heard, Mr. Queen,” the elder McKell said. “The apartments are solidly soundproofed.”

Ellery murmured, “Dane stood outside that penthouse apartment just about the time Sheila was shot. Do you see what that means? In all likelihood, you were standing in that vestibule
while the killer was inside
. Didn't you see or hear anything? How long did you stand there?”

Dane shook his head. “A very short time. I couldn't ring or knock, so I went away. I didn't hear or see anything at all.”

“You went away. Where?”

“Walked some more.”

“Did anyone see you leave? Did you meet anyone you knew, Dane? Say, in the building?”

“I can't remember anybody. I was in a fog. I do recall being in a movie theater—”

“That's something,” his father exclaimed. “Which movie theater, son?”

“I don't know. Some neighborhood house. Probably around Lexington or somewhere.”

“What was the title of the picture?”

“How should I know? I tell you I was half off my rocker!” Dane was growing angry. “I sat there watching a Western, I remember that, in color, all the fixings, but when the shooting started and the bodies began flying around I got up, sick to my stomach, and walked out. And back to the house and apartment. That's all I can tell you, Dad.”

“Do you have the ticket stub, son?”

“I've looked for it in all my suits. I can't find it. Must have thrown it away. Who holds on to movie theater ticket stubs?”

“None of this matters in the least,” Ellery said, frowning. “The essential fact is that Dane was at the door of the penthouse just about the time the murder was committed. What difference does it make where he went afterward?”

There was silence. Ellery began to pull at an invisible beard; his eyes went perceptibly far, far away. Dane, his father, Judy, sat uncomfortably still while he reflected. A truck backfired somewhere, startling them. A dressing cart clashed by in the corridor. Someone laughed. In the distance a police siren went off.

After a long time Ellery returned from wherever he had been. “All right, that's past,” he said slowly. “What's the present situation? First, the blackmailer. His identity? Well, there have been two blackmailing letters of which we know, each demanding $2,000 down and $1,000 a month thereafter. Each has specified that the payments were to be in $20 bills. Each has been written in block capitals—yours was in pencil, too, Mr. McKell?—and each used the alias ‘Mr. I. M. Ecks,' care of General Delivery, main post office. And so on. The similarities are too striking to be coincidence. I agree with you, Mr. McKell, both blackmail notes were written by the same person. So—we're dealing with a single blackmailer.”

A touch of color had invaded Ellery's face, paled by several months of exile from the sun.

“The obvious question is: Having a killer at large on the one hand, and a blackmailer at large on the other, what connection—if any—exists between the two?”

“Why, that's so, isn't it?” said Judy thoughtfully. “I didn't think of that.”

“A connection very probably exists. The blackmailer's hold on Dane is based on his possession of the original of the letter Sheila Grey wrote just before she was killed. How did the blackmailer get hold of the letter? Well, let's see if we can reconstruct what must have happened on the night of the shooting.”

They were sitting forward in their chairs now. Ellery went on deliberately.

“Dane and Sheila had a bitter quarrel. He began to choke her, caught himself in time, ran out of the apartment. He left her alive. A very few minutes later you, Mr. McKell, arrived. You were there just about long enough for Miss Grey to ask you to leave, which you did. That was a few minutes past ten o'clock. It has not been challenged by anyone, through two trials, and we can accept it as a fact, that the shot the precinct officer heard over the phone was the shot that killed Sheila Grey; and the time of the shot, the officer noted officially, was 10:23
P.M
. According to the medical examiner's finding, she died instantly. The conclusion has to be that she wrote the letter about Dane, intended for the police, between a few minutes past ten—your departure, Mr. McKell—and 10:23.”

“We've been all through that,” said Dane impatiently.

“We may have to go through it a great many more times before you're out of the woods, Dane,” Ellery said dryly. “Now, then. The first officers on the scene, the radio car men, arrived at the penthouse within minutes of the fatal shot. From their arrival forward, the police were in charge of the premises. Yet, in spite of the police search, which we have a right to assume was thorough, especially in view of the sensational nature of Sheila's letter, the letter was not found. Conclusion: the letter was no longer there. Further conclusion: it had been taken from the premises before the arrival of the police. Still further conclusion: since we know it came into possession of the blackmailer, the weight of the evidence is on the side of the blackmailer's having found it. He found it, he photographed it, he still has it.

“How did the blackmailer come to find it?”

Ellery shrugged. “Who was the one person we know was in the penthouse between the time Sheila finished writing the letter and the time the police got there? Her murderer. Unless we are willing to credit the theory that between the departure of the murderer—which could not have been before 10:23—and the arrival of the police a mere handful of minutes later, still another person—the blackmailer—came on the scene, searched it, found the Grey letter, and left without being detected by anyone, including the police … unless, as I say, we are willing to credit a theory so far-fetched, only one conclusion is permissible:
the murderer of Sheila and the finder of the letter—that is, the blackmailer—are one and the same
.

“If we can lay our hands on this mysterious blackmailer, then, Mr. Ecks,” Ellery said softly, “we'll have caught the killer of Sheila Grey. That job is too much for amateurs. We'll need professional help, and that means my father.”

“You can't do that, Mr. Queen!” cried Judy.

“I agree with Judy. It would mean revealing the contents of Sheila's letter.” Ashton McKell shook his head. “And that would plunge my son deep into the case, Mr. Queen.”

“All I intend to tell my father,” Ellery said, “is that Dane is being blackmailed, not the basis for it. Leave Inspector Richard Queen to an expert, won't you? I know how to handle him; I've had enough practice! Agreed? Dane?”

Dane was quiet. Then he threw up his hands. “I'm ready to be guided by whatever you say, Mr. Queen.”

Judy Walsh came away from the hospital meeting in a sweet euphoria. How poor Dane must have suffered! How unreasonably, blindly female she had been! But from now on … ah, things would be different between them. She was so very sure her love, her compassion, her active assistance, would help him overcome the frightening problem of his rages. If necessary, she would get him to seek psychiatric help. And then, with the homicidal blackmailer caught and eliminated from their lives, the case would be closed forever, Sheila Grey would become an ebbing if always unpleasant memory, they would find peace, would carve out new lives for themselves … in short, they would live happily ever after.