The Fourth Side of the Triangle

“Yes, he told us something else. He told us that Dane McKell’s been visiting that penthouse with great regularity. That’s one your friend almost slipped over on us. With his old man involved with Sheila, we never pictured the son was, too. We did a quick check tonight, enough to tell us he’d been running around with her in a way that means only one thing. So there’s the motive. He was having an affair with her, but this lady’s affairs seem to have been jumpy transactions — the man was here today and gone tomorrow. She must have given your friend Dane the old gate and he wouldn’t or couldn’t take it. So blam! first he starts to strangle her, has second thoughts, leaves, then comes back in about a half hour and lets her have it with the gun his mother thoughtfully loaded with live ammo.”

“And the blackmailer?” Ellery asked, not strongly.

“I know all about the blackmailer. You’ll say he had to have been on the premises about the same time in order to have got his mitts on the letter. Right. I agree. How about at the same time?”

“What do you mean?” Ellery asked, puzzled.

“I mean Dane McKell hooked that letter after he whopped Sheila with the blaster. That this whole business of blackmail is so much happy dust he’s flung into our eyes!”

“No,” Ellery said. “No, that would have been pure idiocy. That would mean he sent you the original of the letter. To accomplish what? His own arrest for murder, when before that you didn’t even suspect him? You’ll have to do better than that, Dad.”

“Maybe he felt the collar tightening around his neck. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not our worry, it’s his. You know, my son? We’ve got a case, and this one is going to stick.”

So on the morning of December 29th Sergeant Velie and the speechless Detective Mack, herded by Inspector Queen in person, visited the apartment of the three McKells while they were at breakfast (it always seemed to come, Dane afterward thought, at breakfast) and Ashton McKell said frigidly, “Don’t you people know any other family in this city? What is it this time?”; and Inspector Queen showed his dentures in a feral grin and said, “I have a warrant for the arrest of Dane McKell.”

IV The Fourth Side Dane

The grand jury, the arraignment, the bail — it was beginning to feel like a well-used merry-go-round; as Dane said, “Here we go again.”

Some uniformed policemen in the corridor were discussing him as if he were not present, or were made of wood.

“Think he’ll beat it, too?”

“Well, the D.A.’s got two strikes against him now, the father and mother. One more whiff and he’s out. He can’t afford to strike out.”

“Nah, the son will beat it the way his daddy and ma did. I’ll bet money on it.”

“They’ve got the dough to do it.”

“I don’t think so. Not this time. This time he can paper the hot seat with his money.”

Dane passed on, not comforted.

Part of the carrousel by now was the council of war in the hospital room, with Ellery dourly presiding. The medical conferees had decided at the last moment to keep him in the hospital an extra few days until he became accustomed to crutches. He was not comforted, either.

He had accepted the contract, so to speak, but he was not exactly bursting with confidence. This time he was profoundly certain that the same modus which had saved Dane’s parents would not work. There could be no alibi for Dane. At the critical moment, where Ashton had been in an identifiable bar, talking to an identifiable bartender; where Lutetia had been talking over the telephone on a coast-to-coast TV hook-up... by his own admission Dane was virtually on the scene of the shooting, standing before the penthouse apartment door, separated from slayer and slain by the thickness of the door panel. And in that tiny penthouse elevator foyer he had been standing alone and unobserved — indeed, unobservable, for there were no windows in the foyer. Consequently, there could be no witness to his allegation that he had simply stood there for a few moments and then left without entering the apartment.

No, this time they would have to do what they should have done from the outset, Ellery said.

“I’d have done it if I’d been on my toes and feet,” he told Dane, Ashton McKell, and Judy. “The only way to get Dane off — the only sure way — is to find Sheila’s killer.

“If we had been able to do that when you were under indictment, Mr. McKell, we would have been spared all that followed, including Mrs. McKell’s ordeal, and now Dane’s. Well, we couldn’t; I’ll stop bemoaning it and get down to cases.”

Ellery shifted his aching legs to an equally uncomfortable position. “Up to now we’ve been working from the outside in, trying to prove why the accused couldn’t have done it — the negative approach. This time we’ve got to work from the inside out. Positively. Agreed?”