The Fourth Side of the Triangle (4 page)

Dane's brow wrinkled. These could hardly constitute “special precautions”—a mere change of clothing. What was he up to?

The elder McKell walked past the Bentley and without warning climbed into a black Continental limousine, took the wheel himself, and drove off.

The limousine turned north, east, south, west … Dane lost track of direction in his awkward efforts to keep the other car in sight. The Continental had old-fashioned curtained windows, like a hearse, and the curtains were now drawn. What the devil?

It poked its nose into Central Park and began describing parabolas, for what purpose Dane could not imagine. Not to throw off pursuers—it was going too slowly for that. Was he simply killing time?

Suddenly the limousine pulled up and stopped, and as Dane drove by he saw his father get out of the driver's seat and climb into the curtained rear. Dane parked around a nearby curve and waited with his engine running. He was baffled. Why had his father got into the rear of the car? There was no one else with him, Dane was almost positive. What could he be doing there?

Suddenly the Continental drove past him, heading toward an exit. Dane followed.

The limousine drove east and pulled up at a garage on a side street between Madison Avenue and Park. Dane slammed on his brakes, double-parking. He saw a garage mechanic come out with an orange ticket and reach into the Continental with it, nodding; he saw the driver of the Continental back out from behind the wheel and immediately hail a taxicab and jump in, to be driven off. The taxi had to stop at the corner of Park Avenue for a red light, and Dane pulled up directly behind it.

He was doubly puzzled now. There was something strange-looking about the passenger in the cab, viewed from the rear. But what it was he could not at the moment put his finger on.

The light changed, and the cab turned into Park Avenue. Dane turned, too … It was a very short trip, no more than six or eight blocks. The cab darted in toward the curb, its passenger jumped out, paid the driver, the cab drove off, and the passenger began to walk down Park Avenue.

Dane, creeping along, was utterly confused. His parents lived less than a block away. And the man who had got out of the taxi was not the same man who had driven the Continental away from the Cricket Club.

At least, that was Dane's first impression. The man had gray hair, rather long and untidy at the neck. He wore a gray mustache, a Vandyke beard, and eyeglasses. A stranger.

One hand grasped a walking stick, the other a small black leather bag. The man was dressed all in tan—tan cords, tan straw hat, tan shoes—the same costume, as far as Dan could remember, that his father had worn on emerging from the club. Had there been another man waiting in the Continental after all?—a man who had exchanged clothes with the elder McKell behind the drawn curtains when he had pulled up in Central Park?

But why? And who could he be?

And then Dane knew.

It was not a stranger. It was his father. Disregard the clothes, strip off the mustache, beard, and wig, and the pupa beneath was—had to be—Ashton McKell.

His father in a disguise! He had put on the make-up during the stop in Central Park, behind the drawn curtains.

Dane almost laughed aloud. But there was a pathetic quality about that figure walking stiffly along the street with cane and bag swinging that discouraged levity. What in the name of all that was unholy did he think he was doing? “Special precautions”! He looked like someone out of an old-time vaudeville act.

There was no place to park. Dane double-parked and took up the chase on foot. His face was grim.

It became grimmer.

For the disguised Ashton McKell turned neither right nor left. He stumped up to the entrance of a building and went in.

It was a converted old Park Avenue one-family mansion, originally owned by the haughty Huytenses. The last Huytens had left it to “my beloved pet and friend, Fluffy,” but long before old Mrs. Huytens' cousins succeeded in having Fluffy legally disinherited, the house had begun to decline. Dane's maternal grandfather had made a bargain purchase of it in the latter days of the depression and turned it into an apartment building. It housed three duplex apartments and a penthouse, and Dane knew it intimately.

He had been brought up in it.

It was his parents' home.

The pattern was now clear except for one point … the most important point.

Everything about his father's extraordinary precautions smacked of secrecy. The elder McKell on Wednesday afternoons had his chauffeur drive him in the Bentley to the Cricket Club. The Bentley was left in the garage behind the club, and Ramon, given a few hours off, discreetly vanished. Meanwhile Ashton McKell changed clothes in his room at the club. He sneaked out through the rear entrance, picked up the Continental, and drove away. In Central Park, at a secluded spot, he stopped the car, got into the rear of the tonneau, and applied his disguise. Then he drove over to a garage—he probably uses different ones, Dane thought—left the Continental, and took a taxi to the corner of the Park Avenue block where the McKell apartment building stood. And it was all so timed that he would enter the building while the doorman was at his dinner—a precaution against being recognized, in spite of the disguise, by John. He ran a lesser risk on leaving the building, when the doorman was back on duty, for John would not pay as much attention to a departing visitor as to an incoming one. The medical bag alone gave him some of the invisibility of Chesterton's postman.

And when he left, he simply went back to the garage where he had parked the Continental, drove down to the Cricket Club after removing his make-up—probably in Central Park again—changed back into his ordinary clothes in his room at the club, and had Ramon, back on duty, drive him home in the Bentley.

The unexplained question was: Whom was he doing all this for? Whom was he visiting in his own apartment building?

Dane waited for the tall gray-uniformed figure of the doorman to reappear under the canopy.

“Oh, Mr. Dane,” the doorman said. “Mrs. McKell isn't in.”

“Any notion where she went, John, or when she'll be back?”

“She went to that Mr. Cohen's gallery to see some rugs, she said.” The doorman, as usual, transformed Mir Khan from Pakistani to a more comfortable New York name. “I don't know when she'll be back.”

The doorman's “I don't know” sounded rather like
I dawn't knaw
. John Leslie was a “Geordie,” or Tynesider, from the north of England; and his speech came out both Irish and Scottish, with rich overtones of South Carolina. In his teens Dane had smoked forbidden cigarets in Leslie's basement apartment, left and received messages there which presumably would have been frowned upon by his parents.

“Well,” Dane said with deliberate indecisiveness. Then, with a laugh: “Incidentally, John, I noticed a man going into the building a while ago whom I'd never seen here before. While you were at dinner. Gray hair, chin whiskers, wearing glasses, and carrying a medical bag. Is somebody sick?”

“That would be Miss Grey's doctor,” said John Leslie. “I saw him leave a few times and asked Miss Grey once who he was, and she said Dr. Stone. How are you coming along with your book, Mr. Dane? You must tell us when they print it, now. The missus and me have your other books, and we like them champion.”

“Thanks, John.” Dane knew that his two books lay in the Leslies' cabinet beside their picture of the Royal Family. “Oh, don't mention to Mother that I've been by. She'd feel bad about missing me.”

Dane made his way to Lexington Avenue and a bar that advertised
No Television
. The interior was cool and smelled of malt, as a proper bar should, and not of spaghetti sauce and meat balls, as a proper bar should not. He ordered a gin and tonic and drank it and ordered another.

Miss Grey. Sheila Grey.

So she was “the other woman.”

It was a proper shock.

Sheila Grey, rated on anyone's list, was among the Top Ten of international
haute couture
. And she was not much older than Dane (old enough, he thought, to be the old bull's daughter). In the United States her reputation as a fashion designer made her one of the Top Three; there were some who acclaimed her first among equals. She had the penthouse.

Dane reorganized his emotions. Whatever this was, it was no longer an ordinary liaison. Ash McKell certainly was not “keeping” Sheila Grey, who could well afford half a dozen penthouses; this could not be an affair of love-for-money. Could it be—he felt a chill—love? In that case, God help Mother!

And now the theatricalism made a little more sense. You couldn't meet a woman like Sheila Grey in a motel somewhere, or tuck her out of sight in the Westchester countryside. She would be strongly independent; as far as Dane knew, she was not married; if a lover were to rendezvous with her, it would have to be in her apartment. Since her apartment happened to be in the same building occupied by her lover and his wife, he could only visit her surreptitiously. Ash McKell had chosen disguise.

It must make him wriggle, Dane thought. His father's conservatism was constantly embattled with his zest for living; in this, as in other respects, he was a paradox. He would writhe at the necessity of making a fool of himself, at the same time that he mastered the technique of theatrical make-up. It was really rather skillfully done.

But then everything Ash McKell set out to do he did skillfully. Dane had never known that his father knew karate until the night they caught a sneak thief in the McKell apartment. His father had broken the man's wrist and three of his ribs with no more than a few blurred gestures.

Dane ordered a third gin and tonic, and over this one he felt anger return. It was all very complex, no doubt, but there was nothing complex about Ashton McKell's romance. To commit adultery almost directly over his wife's head! It was plain vulgarity, mean as hell.

Did his mother know that her rival occupied the penthouse?

Dane tossed off his drink. Whether she knew or not (and if he were betting on it, he would have bet that she knew), something had to be done.

He did not attempt to rationalize the compulsion, any more than he could have rationalized his feelings toward his mother. She was silly, arbitrary, hopelessly old-fashioned, out of place and time, and he adored her. Whether he adored her because of what she was or in spite of it did not matter. Her reason for being was threatened, and who else was there to remove the threat?

Now a rather leering interloper crept into his thoughts.

What to do next … break up the affair, certainly, but how? He asked the question, not rhetorically—he had no doubt that it could be done—but in order to organize his
modus operandi …
That was when the intruder crept in.

For the first time, under the liberating influence of the alcohol, Dane admitted to himself that his feelings were not unmixed. He did feel sorry for his mother. He did feel angry with his father. But why was he also feeling enjoyment? Self-satisfaction, really?

Dane ordered another gin and tonic.

First, there had been the ridiculous ease with which he had uncovered the identity of his father's paramour, and their trysting place. Small as the triumph was, it gratified him. We all like to think we're so noble, he reflected, when what really pleases us in our relationships with others is
our
little part in events, not theirs.

To self-satisfaction he had to add excitement. The emotion was definitely there, his personal response to a challenge. It derived from the nature of the situation. It was a story situation—one of the oldest in literature, true; still, it might have come from anyone's typewriter. It raised plot questions. How would I handle it if it were a situation in one of my stories? Could people be manipulated in life as handily as on paper? If they could … Here was real creation!—the creation of action and reaction in context with a cast of flesh-and-blood characters, one of whom was himself.

And the delicious, the best part of it was that it would be done without any of the principals being in the least aware that they were puppets!

Am I a monster? Dane wondered, sipping moodily at his fourth gin and tonic. But then aren't all writers monsters? Cannibals feeding off the flesh of friends and enemies alike, converting them into a different form of energy for the sheer joy of digestion? (And how much of it, Dane thought ruefully, followed the human economy and went down the drain!) The truth was, any writer worth his salt would give a year off his life for a chance like this. (Thackeray coming downstairs, weeping. “What is the matter, Henry? “I have just killed Colonel Newcombe!” How the old boy would have risen, like a trout to the lure, to such an opportunity!) It was commonplace for authors to make lemonade out of the lemons handed them by life, and poor pink stuff it became, too. How would the real thing look and taste …?

By his sixth gin Dane was drawing bold lines on the table with the condensation from his glass. Thus, thus, and thus:

He would contrive to meet Sheila Grey.

He would make love to her.

He would make her love him.

He would displace his father in her life.

That should do it.

How would his father react to being deposed by his son? Or by having to “share the latchkey” with him (Dane's writing mind foresaw the possibility that this Sheila, still uncomprehended, might be the sort of woman to whom the notion of sleeping with father and son on alternate nights was amusing)? Of course, he felt sorry for the old man (how old is old, Dane?). The blow to his ego would be shattering. Well, serve him right. Send him back where he belongs, to Mother.

After that, what? Drop her, go back to work? Why not? Serve
her
right, breaking up a solid 'Murrican home, Episcopal yet! Dane chuckled, the chuckle turning giggly.

There was no doubt in his mind, after the seventh gin and tonic, that he could pull it off. What the deuce 'd she look like? He tried vainly to recall. He had passed her in the lobby on three or four occasions, but each encounter had happened to coincide with a love affair, when other women hardly existed for him. He had seen her photo in
Vogue
and the Sunday papers several times, but her face remained a blank. She couldn't be outstandingly ugly, or some impression would have lingered. So she must be relatively pleasant to look at, thank heaven.