The Fourth Side of the Triangle

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.