The Fourth Side of the Triangle

“Lady Sheila? It was Sheila’s idea to call each year’s collection by some sort of name, and she chose the Lady Sheila label for 1957. Sheila, by the way, wasn’t her own name.”

“It wasn’t?” the McKells cried out together.

“Her original first name was Lillian, and her last name was spelled G-r-a-y. When we organized The House of Grey, it was her decision to change the a to an e in Grey; and when the Lady Sheila collection was such a smash hit, she had her name legally changed from Lillian G-r-a-y to Sheila G-r-e-y.”

“That was also in 1957?”

“Yes, Mr. Queen.”

“How long did your association last?”

“Which association?”

“Both.”

“Well.” Winterson looked coy. “We were lovers for just a few months. I was very happy and assumed she was, too. We were compatible, you know?” Dane closed his eyes. The picture of this scrubbed little creature in Sheila’s arms was almost too much to bear. “We went about together everywhere, enjoyed our love and labors with the gusto of teenagers — oh, it was marvelous. Then...

“I shan’t forget that day.” Winterson was no longer smiling. “It was just before she began designing the 1958 collection, the Lady Nella. I’d worked up some roughs and brought them into her office — laid them on her desk and stooped over to kiss her.” He had turned quite pink. “She drew back and kept on with her work. I was upset, and asked her what was the matter. She looked up and said as calmly as if she were talking about the weather, ‘It’s over between us, Lish. From now on we’re partners, nothing more.’ Just like that. No transition. The way she’d begun.”

He had asked her why, what he had done. “‘You haven’t done anything,’” she had told him. “‘It’s just that I don’t want you any more.’”

Winterson shrugged, but the pink remained. “That’s the way it was with Sheila. All or nothing. When she gave herself, it was fully. When she got tired of it — slam. Shut, locked and bolted the door... Well, that’s the way she was. But I wasn’t. I was in love with her; I wasn’t able to turn it off like a faucet. I’m afraid it became a strain for both of us. Of course, we couldn’t go on. We split up in a matter of months — three months, I think it was.”

She had bought Winterson out and become sole proprietor of The House of Grey. “Of course, my disappearance from the business made absolutely no difference to its continuing success,” he said, with a remarkable absence of bitterness. “I’ve never had any illusions about myself, especially by contrast with a great designer like Sheila. She went on to become one of the world’s top couturières. Rolling in money. Not that money ever meant much to her.”

“Let’s go back a bit, Mr. Winterson,” Ellery suggested. “You remarked that she was a one-man-at-a-time woman. Are you sure of that?”

Elisha Winterson was taking a long drag on his Spahi. He let the thick white smoke dribble out of his mouth before he replied. “I’m sure,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why I’m sure.” His little face suddenly turned foxy. “After she kicked me out of her bed, I kept wondering who was taking my place. I’m not especially proud of myself now — it was a caddish trick — but you know, a lover scorned...” He laughed. “I hired a private detective. I even remember his name. Weirhauser. Face all angles, like Dick Tracy. Had an office on 42nd Street, off Times Square. He watched her for me, and I kept getting full reports — what she did, where she went, with whom. There wasn’t anyone. She hadn’t ditched me for another man. She’d simply ditched me, period.

“Later that year,” said Elisha Winterson, “there was another man. I’m certain that shortly after they met he was parking his shoes where I’d been parking mine, if you’ll pardon the crudity.”

“Who was he?” Ellery asked.

“Well.” Winterson ran the tip of his tongue along his lips. “A gentleman never tells, they say. But these are unusual circumstances, I take it? If it will help you, Mr. Queen—”

“It might.”

Winterson looked around at his silent audience. What he saw made him go on quickly. Sheila had begun to advertise widely, he said. She had selected to do her advertising the Gowdy-Gunder Agency, because of its familiarity with the world of fashion.

“At the same time The House of Grey hired a business manager, a production manager, began to do its own manufacturing, moved out of the rather poky little place we’d had in the East 50s and into the Fifth Avenue salon. Naturally, Sheila Grey was a plum to the agency people, and they turned their Brightest Young Man over to her account.

“Like catnip to a cat,” Winterson said grimly, “though I’m sure the experience did him a world of good. His name was Allen Bainbridge Foster, and she ate him up hide, hair, and whiskers. By the end of the year—”

“Allan as in Edgar Allan Poe?” Ellery had reached for a pad and was taking notes.

“No, Allen with an e.”

“Bainbridge Foster?”

“That’s right. As I started to say, by the end of the year she’d had enough of Mr. Foster, and she gave him his walking papers, too.”