The Fourth Side of the Triangle

He pulled at his lower lip. Then he cocked his head and his fingers raced over the keys.

The elder McKell left his office promptly at noon as marked on Taylor McKell’s old Seth Thomas clock in the inner sanctum. Judy would quit her desk at 12:10, return at 12:55. Ashton would be back at 1 P.M. sharp.

August 17th, 12:05 P.M.:

“Judy? Dane McKell. My father there?”

“He’s left, Dane. Is your watch slow?”

A rueful laugh. “Damn it, it is.” Then, in a rush: “Look, Judy, I’ve got to see him this afternoon, but I can’t make it till after five. Do you suppose—?”

“That’s far too late, Dane. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Mr. McKell now leaves his office at four. Can’t you make it before then?”

“Never mind, I’ll catch him later, at home. Don’t even bother mentioning my call. How are you, Judykins? But I’m keeping you from your lunch.”

Judy thought as she hung up: That was an odd conversation. But then she shrugged and went off to lunch. She had long ago given up trying to figure out Dane McKell; too much thought about him was no good for her, anyway. The secretary married the boss’s son only in the movies.

Out into the August sun went Dane. He rented a car, a two-year-old Ford. His own little red MG might be spotted.

He picked up the Ford at a quarter past three, and by 3:45 he was parked outside the McKell Building. He thought it unlikely that his father would sneak out through the boiler-room exit or one of the side doors. Sure enough, a few minutes later up drove the big Bentley with Ramon, his father’s chauffeur, at the wheel.

Dane pulled away and circled the block. Now he parked at an observation post across the street, some distance behind the Bentley, and settled down to wait.

Ramon was reading a racing form.

What am I doing here? thought Dane. What in God’s name do I think I’m doing? Suppose I find out who the woman is, “unmask” her? Then what? How would that help Mother?

There was one possibility. Suppose the woman did not know her sugar-daddy was a married man. Suppose he had filled her full of a lot of hop about making an honest woman of her. One flea in her ear, and she might give him his hat.

And what does that make me? the McKell son and heir ruminated. A first-class heel is what!

Still... Dane shrugged. The compulsion was powerful. He had to find out the woman’s name. He would take it — somewhere — from there.

At 4:10 he stiffened. The massive figure of his father came striding through the revolving doors of the McKell Building. Ramon dropped his racing form, jumped out, and held the rear door open. Ashton McKell got in, Ramon ran around to the front, started the Bentley, and the big car swished off into the traffic.

Rather frantically, Dane followed.

The Bentley headed for the West Side Highway. It went north past Washington Market, past the old Sapolio Building, past the docks where the Atlantic liners berthed like comic book monsters, Dane in the hired Ford keeping several lengths behind. Where were they going? Over the George Washington Bridge to some ghastly New Jersey suburb, where Ashton McKell was keeping the widow of some insurance salesman in bourgeois splendor? Or up to 72nd Street and a doxy’s teddy-bear-filled flat?

But the Bentley turned off at a midtown exit, crept east over to Fifth Avenue, and headed north again. Dane had no opportunity to trim his speculations to the wind — he was too busy trying not to lose the other car.

Suddenly the chauffeur-driven car pulled up before a stout stone building of three stories which Dane knew well enough. He was puzzled. If there was one building in New York where his father could not possibly be holding an assignation, it was at this, the Metropolitan Cricket Club, that arch-bastion of ultra-respectable aristocrats.

Cricket itself no longer occupied the energies of the club, which had been founded in 1803 (Dane found himself thinking of Robert Benchley’s After 1903, What? — a good question). For who was left for the Metropolitan Cricketeers to play? The puberts of the Riverdale Country School? No British team would stoop to play them; and if the club membership could have brought themselves to step out onto a bowling pitch against the supple West Indian immigrants who still played cricket up in Van Cortlandt Park, the result would have been mayhem... It was a club, like other exclusive clubs, whose principal virtue was exclusivity. And indeed Dane gazed up at his elderly cousin twice removed, Colonel Adolphus Phillipse, who sat, seemingly growing out of the floor, in his window, with the New York Times, doubtless growling over the dangerous radicalism of Senator Barry Goldwater.

The Bentley drove off; Dane snapped around in time to see his father walking briskly up the worn front steps as if it were Tuesday or Friday, his club days. What was he going to do? Have a drink? Write a letter? Make a phone call?... Dane settled himself.