The Fourth Side of the Triangle

It was an envelope addressed to “Mrs. Ashton McKell” at the Park Avenue address. The enclosure, on the stationery of The Princess Soap Company, was signed by a Justin A. Lattimoore, Fourth Vice-President.

Ellery smiled as he read it:

My dear Mrs. McKell:

Our Accounting Department advises me that our check in the amount of five hundred dollars ($500.00), which was posted to you more than three months ago as your prize in the Lucky Number segment of our Princess Hour TV program on the night of September 14th last, has never been cashed.

I am accordingly writing to inquire if you have received the above check. If not, or if for some reason you do not wish to cash it, will you please communicate with us at your early convenience?

Yours very truly, etc.

“Well,” Ellery said. “This could be the straw that breaks the district attorney’s back.”

“It is,” said Dane. “It has to be!”

“Now let’s not get our hopes up too high,” his father cautioned excitedly. “What I can’t understand is why Lutetia didn’t tell us.”

“Don’t you know Mother, Dad? She just forgot, that’s all!”

“But a prize?” murmured Ellery. “A check?”

“What is money to her, or she to money?” Dane misquoted happily. “And prizes mean publicity. Her mind recoils reflexively from such things. This could be the break, Mr. Queen. It really could.”

“We’ll see. Get in touch with this Lattimoore fellow and see if you can’t get him up here. We’ve got to find out all we can about this, and right away.”

One telephone call from the eminent Ashton McKell insured the presence of Fourth Vice-President Justin A. Lattimoore in the Queen hospital room that afternoon. Lattimoore proved to be a fastidiously groomed gentleman with a face the precise shade of flesh-colored grease paint, and (Ellery was positive) with a toupee. He could not seem to decide whether to be more honored by the summons of a captain of industry than supercilious at the sight of a mere writer with two legs in a cast; in any event, he contrived to convey the impression that he was in the company of at least one peer.

“...a quarter-hour morning program for Sudsy Chippos,” Mr. Lattimoore was saying, evidently feeling that the occasion called for a recapitulation of The Princess Soap Company’s radio and television schedule, “and another quarter-hour in mid-afternoon for our Princess Belinda and Princess Anita toiletries. In other words, the A.M. show is Doctor Dolly’s Family, and the P.M. show is Life and Laurie Lewis.

“For TV last season The Princess Hour was a variety show emceed by Bo Bunson, the comedian. I will be frank, gentlemen,” Vice-President Lattimoore said handsomely. “The variety show was a bomb, or suds down the drain, as we say at the shop. Rating-wise, it reeked.

“For this season one of our ad agency’s brighter young men came up with a real doozer. We could not scrap the variety show” — Lattimoore coughed — “our Chairman of the Board has great faith in it, and thinks Bunson is the funniest man in show business — but we would add a gimmick to the format. Throughout the show — we’re on Wednesday nights in prime time, ten to eleven P.M. in the East, as you undoubtedly know — throughout the show a battery of telephone operators would call up people picked out of phone books all over the country by a process I won’t bother to describe, and ask them if they were watching The Princess Hour.

“Of course, most of them said yes, and immediately turned to our channel if they weren’t watching already. The yes-answerers were switched onto the air between numbers, Bo Bunson talked to them over the phone personally — on the air — and each one was given the chance to guess the Lucky Number for that night’s show. The Lucky Number, which could be any number between 1 and 10,000, was selected at random by an IBM machine before we went on the air, and no one, not even the emcee, knew what it was — he had it in a sealed envelope and at strategic spots during the show he exhibited the envelope and made wisecracks about it — supposed to be stimulating suspense-wise, you see.”