The Fourth Side of the Triangle

It had not occurred to him that he would require identification. “Look, Mrs. Donnelly, I’m in an awful hurry.” He explained his mission.

But Bridey Donnelly was not to be rushed.

“You called up me sister Margaret,” she said, “and you asked her about something important for your father, may the saints deliver him from harm; ain’t I been praying for him night and day? — and Maggie said, ‘Go to Bridey,’ and you think that means she give it to me. Well, and what might it be you think she give to me, Mr. Dane McKell-Maybe-You-Are-and-Maybe-You-Ain’t?”

Her concern over his father was plainly not going to get in the way of her Irish caution. “Tan suit?” Dane said.

She shook her head. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Claim check? Baggage? Grand Central?”

“Still don’t. Keep talking.”

By this time he could have throttled her. “A black bag, then!”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than she waddled off, beckoning him to follow. Down past the dark chain of bedrooms in the railroad flat she plodded, and stopped in the last but one, where she switched on the light. The little bedroom mirror was still decorated with desiccated fronds from Palm Sunday seven months before.

“You’re younger than me, and a lot skinnier,” Bridget Donnelly said. “You get it. ’Tis under the bed.”

The only thing he could find under the bed was an ancient horsehair trunk with an Ould Sod look. He dragged it out. “But it’s locked.”

She rapped him on the forehead with her knuckles as he turned his head. “You look the other way a minute now,” directed Mrs. Donnelly, “for all you’re a boy and I’m an old widow woman.” Petticoats rustled. “Here.” She thrust a trunk key, fastened to a safety pin, over his shoulder. He got the trunk open, flung back the lid. “Leave me do it,” the widow said, taking out a Douay Bible that must have weighed twenty pounds. Under the Bible lay a tightly packed wad of clothing. And under the clothing there was a black leather bag.

He got to his feet, stammering his thanks.

“And you can save your thanks, young man. We know whose bread and salt we’ve et these thirty years, Maggie and me and me dead Tom. And now go on about your business, and let me hear over the radio that your blessed father’s okay.”

Dane kissed her. She boxed his ear, grinning. It rang halfway back to the hospital.

He had been gone less than forty minutes. The detectives in the corridor glanced at the bag he was carrying, but neither of them said anything, and he went into Ellery’s room with a sigh of relief.

Ellery’s silvery eyes lighted up at sight of the bag. “Good for you, Dane! All right, Mr. McKell.”

Dane’s father opened the bag and quickly set its contents on Ellery’s dresser. He began to apply grease paint and spirit gum to his face.

“What the devil?”

Ellery chuckled at Dane’s cry. He glanced at Judy, but that young lady was busy with a small camera, adjusting a flash bulb.

“Let me sum it up for you, Dane,” said Ellery. “You, Judy and the police have been searching for the wrong man. Of course no one in any of those bars recognized Ashton McKell. He wasn’t Ashton McKell that night. He was Dr. Stone.”

Ashton began to pluck at a bundle of gray fibers. He arranged them on his chin in Vandyke fashion, working with the sureness of long practice.

“What a chump I’ve been,” Dane groaned. “That’s what comes of trying to play detective. Dad, where did you make the change that night?”

“In one of the men’s rooms at the airport when I got off the plane,” replied his father. “Then after I left Sheila’s and wandered off, eventually winding up at Grand Central, I removed the make-up in the Grand Central men’s room, although I didn’t bother to change out of the tan suit. Then I checked the black bag and went home. It’s all come back. Mr. Queen’s acted as a sort of oxygen tent. The fresh air’s cleared the cobwebs out of my head.”

When he turned from the mirror Ashton McKell was no longer Ashton McKell but gray-haired, gray-bearded Dr. Stone. It was remarkable how the false hair and the really skillful touches he had applied to his eyes and face transformed his appearance.

Judy sat him down and circled him with her camera, searching for the best angle. The bulb flashed, Judy said, “One or two more, just to be sure,” she took a second shot, then a profile, and then said, “Come back, Mr. McKell — I feel funny looking at you,” and Ashton McKell even laughed as he removed the false hair and make-up and became himself again. But then they heard him mutter, “How did I ever get mixed up in this foolishness?”

“The classic question, Mr. McKell,” Ellery remarked dryly. “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ and so on. Are we ready? Call them in, Dane.”