The Fourth Side of the Triangle

But just as suddenly as he had begun making love to Judy, he stopped, pushed her aside, and hurried from her apartment. She was more puzzled than hurt, more tired than puzzled. As she sank into sleep the thought drifted through her head: He feels guilty about being happy while his father is in a mess, that’s why. Dane was such a strange man...

They established a routine. During the day they attended the trial; the evening and night were dedicated to the hunt for the elusive bar and the invisible bartender. They took their hasty meals together. Judy was aware of a restraint on Dane’s part — a hint of wariness, a drawing away. And yet there were times when he seemed to recapture something of those few minutes in her apartment that night. But these were mere glimpses into what had already become a misty remembrance of things past. It was almost as if she had dreamed the whole episode.

A chill invaded the city. The tang of hot chestnut smoke hung about Manhattan street corners, the city’s equivalent of suburbia’s burning leaves. Through streets fashionable and down-at-heel, clean and dirty, through areas of high-rent apartments and melting-pot neighborhoods and garbage-littered slums, they pressed their search. And still the search went unrewarded.

The trial approached its climax. Few defendants against a charge of murder had had so distinguished a group of character witnesses as paraded to the stand to testify to the probity and non-lethal nature of Ashton McKell. But Dane knew, and Judith Walsh knew, and Richard M. Heaton knew, and most of all Robert O’Brien knew — the highly capable criminal lawyer associated with Heaton for the defense — for how little all this counted. The district attorney had only to paraphrase the prosecution’s words in the Richard Savage case of long ago (“Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a much greater man than you or I; that he wears much finer clothes than you or I; and that he has much more money in his pocket than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that he should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?”) for everyone to see how very little all the fine words by all the fine people added up to.

“What are my father’s chances?” Dane asked O’Brien. And O’Brien looked him in the eye and said, “Very poor indeed.” Had his answer been anything else, Dane would not have believed him.

Judy wept. “There has to be something else we can do,” she wailed, “before it’s too late. Couldn’t you hire a private detective, Dane?”

“To do what?” His laugh was more of a bark. “Show them anything out of the ordinary and they’re afraid to touch it. Oh, it wouldn’t be hard to find one who’d take the money, but...” And just then something slipped to the surface of his mind.

It was the name of a man he had met once at a literary cocktail party in the Algonquin. A man who wrote detective stories for a living, and for a hobby... there were some impressive, if incredible, stories in circulation about his hobby. And wasn’t his father connected with the New York police?

“By God!” Dane exclaimed. “His father is that old man I talked to at police headquarters!”

“Whose father?” Judy asked, puzzled.

“I know just the fellow!”

So they went to look for Ellery Queen.

They found Ellery in the private pavilion of the Swedish-Norwegian Hospital in Murray Hill.

“We squareheads are very adept at patching up ski accident cases,” genial Dr. Johanneson had said, patting the casts in which Ellery was immobilized.

“You ought to be,” Ellery growled, “you invented the damned things. And don’t look so pleased with yourself. I’ll have you know the Queens were breaking their bones in civilized ways when your barbarian ancestors were still chiseling runes in the forests of Gothland!”

It was a pleasant enough room, the walls painted a tonic yellow-sand. Ellery regarded his two young visitors quizzically. “This just isn’t my year,” he complained. “I’d gone up to Wrightsville to get in some early skiing. It was my luck that a movie outfit was shooting winter scenes in the Mahoganies and the director, a man I know, wheedled me into the act. The crew had rigged a camera on a bobsled, the bobsled broke loose, and next thing I knew, as I came downslope the sled and I had an argument. You know, I don’t so much mind the leg that was broken by the sled. It’s the one my own skis broke that bugs me! How’s your latest novel coming along, McKell? — I seem to recall you were planning one when we met” — this last in a different tone.

Ellery sat enthroned in an armchair, both legs in their bulky casts stretched out before him, resting on a hassock. Each morning he was hoisted out of bed, and each evening he was hoisted back in. Books, magazines, tobacco, fruit, writing materials, a bottle of wine, the telephone, were within reach. There was even a remote-control device for the television set.

“I didn’t come here to talk about my novel,” Dane said.