Wife or Death

by Ellery Queen

  "I think he recalled a visitor. Someone he didn't actually see, just took Norm's word for."

  The chief looked puzzled. "You'll have to spell that out for me, Jim."

  Denton eagerly recreated his imaginary scene.

  But the police chief was chuckling. "You missed your calling, Jim. Ought to been a writer for those wild TV crime shows."

  "Don't give me any of your corny sarcasm, Augie," Denton said angrily. "What's wrong with my reconstruction?"

  "A lot of things," Chief Spile said, unruffled. "For instance: George drives up in his car, they either see his lights or hear the engine, and Wyatt goes out to see who it is before George can get out of the car. Trevor ain't got any curiosity. He don't even look out the door."

  "Why should he? It would be natural to figure that whoever it was would walk in with Wyatt any minute."

  "Okay, he don't look out. Wyatt sticks his head in the car window and George accuses him of killing your wife. So Wyatt hits him over the head. Maybe he was carrying a beer bottle. Maybe he picked up a rock. I'll give you a rock."

  "Generous of you!"

  "Then Wyatt shoves George over, backs the car down to the foot of the lane, switches off the lights, goes back up to the lodge and walks in just as though nothing had happened. And all this time Trevor still ain't stuck his head out to see What's keeping Norm?"

  "All what time?" Denton cried. "The whole thing wouldn't have taken more than three or four minutes!"

  "Don't you think it's likely Wyatt and George had a little conversation before Wyatt banged him on the head? Suppose you'd been Norm. Wouldn't you want to know if George had told anybody what he knew? No sense killing a man if he'd already spread the word. For all Norm knew, you or me or the state boys might be right behind George. No, Norm's got to do some probing before he finally bops him. So it seems to me Wyatt would have to be away ten, fifteen minutes before he can come back into the lodge. Yet old man Trevor never once takes a look out to see what's keeping him."

  "All right, he looks out," Denton argued. "What would he see? Norm leaning on a car window talking to somebody Trevor can't make out in the dark. So he goes back to the cribbage board, and when Norm finally returns and says it was some passing motorist asking directions, Trevor thinks nothing more about it. Why should he?"

  "Ill tell you why," the chief said. "Because if you can hear a car stopping, you can hear it going away, too. According to you, Norm didn't take George's car away till later that night."

  "I said Norm took the car down to the end of the lane. That would account for the sound of the car going away. And if Trevor wanted to know why Wyatt hadn't come back in the moment the car began to back down, Norm could always have said he walked down beside it to the road."

  "You argue like a Philadelphia lawyer," Spile said with a grin. "Okay, Jim, Wyatt's got George stashed away, unconscious, and his father-in-law doesn't suspect a thing. Now he's got to dispose of him."

  "We know how that was done."

  "Let's go over it, anyway. After a while both Wyatt and Trevor go to bed. When the old man is asleep Wyatt gets up, dresses, sneaks down to George's car and drives it off. He runs it over to the curve on Rock Hill Road

  , props George under the wheel and lets the car drop over into the ravine."

  "Anything wrong with that?"

  "That lodge is about five and a half miles from the town limits," August Spile drawled. "It's six miles across town east to west. The place George cracked up is three miles beyond the western town limits. So now there's Norm Wyatt out on Rock Hill Road

  , afoot, nearly fifteen miles from the lodge. How'd he get back, Jim?"

  Denton had not thought of that. He said sullenly, Walked," not believing it as he said it.

  "In Norm's physical condition?" Augie Spile jeered. "He's been living so high on the hog, with all that rich food they eat and the booze and all, he'd have about as much chance walking fifteen miles without dropping dead as I would. I don't buy it, Jim."

  "Well, it's possible! Or he took a bicycle along. Or something." When Spile shook his head sorrowfully, Denton said through his teeth, "All right, so it's a silly fantasy. But something happened up at that lodge that night, Augie, and Gerald Trevor figured out what it meant while I was talking to him. You'd better try to pry it out of him."

  "Sure, Jim. Ill talk to the lot of 'em tomorrow."

  "You were going to do that today."

  "I forgot about the two funerals. Tomorrow for sure, Jim."

  And tomorrow, I suppose, Denton thought, something else will come up that somehow will crowd out Chief Spile's long-deferred talk with the Wyatts and Trevor. Denton rose.

  "Well, I'll drop by your office in the afternoon, Augie, to see how you made out."

  "You do that," Chief Spile said.

  To cap his miserable day, Jim Denton suffered a final misfortune outside. His car refused to start.

  He went back into the chiefs house and phoned his garage. He had to wait thirty-five minutes for the tow-truck to show up. The mechanic diagnosed his trouble as a defective fuel pump.

  "Can't touch it tonight, Mr. Denton. Have it for you tomorrow afternoon." The man dropped Denton off at his home before towing the car into the garage.

  It was after seven, and he was famished. Denton got a steak and a package of French fries from the freezer and made himself a feast. He left the dishes in the sink for Bridget White to do in the morning.

  Stretched out on the sofa in his living room, sipping

  brandy and espresso coffee, Denton doggedly took stock.

  Norman Wyatt was the man. He was sure of it

  Wyatt's motive would be strong. He had taken Angel away

  from Ralph Crosby, thinking himself merely the latest in her

  long line of casual lovers; but in his case Angel had had an

  original idea. Too late Norm Wyatt must have realized that

  he had walked into a trap. Angel had picked him as her next

  husband, not her next lover. And she had put the pressure on.

  Marriage to Angel would have wrecked his life. His wife had the money; and how long could he expect to remain executive vice-president of Trevor-United Studios when Gerald Trevor found out? Ardis was the tycoon's only child; he worshiped her ... It must have been Norm, Denton thought, who planned the "elopement"—to keep Angel's mouth shut about him until he could get her off somewhere in the middle of the night and end his troubles with a shotgun.

  Opportunity? Wyatt had been out that night until nearly seven o'clock in the morning. By his own admission, Ralph Crosby had been too drunk to know just when Wyatt had dumped him and left

  Means? The hunting lodge housed an arsenal of guns. To Denton's personal knowledge several were shotguns.

  Motive, opportunity, means .., every detective story Denton had ever read gave these as the basics. Norm Wyatt satisfied all three.

  Evidence, however—that was another story. So far he had nothing to give Spile and the district attorney but reasonable guesswork from unsubstantiated theory. If only he could dig up proof that Wyatt had, in fact, been Angel's last lover....

  Denton sat up abruptly. Why hadn't he thought of it before? Just such evidence might be among Angel's effects!

  He dashed into Angel's bedroom and began pulling open bureau drawers.

  In one of the two top drawers he found a huge box of stationery half full of rich, monogrammed white paper edged in exquisite lavender, with envelopes lined to match the edging. Denton recalled having given her the box the previous Christmas, and he was surprised to see how much of it Angel had used. She had been a poor correspondent; even her letters to her mother had been spaced at six-month intervals.

  There was nothing else of interest in the twin top drawers or in two of the three large drawers beneath them.

  At the rear of the bottom drawer, however, under a pile of scented panties, he found a metal candy box, a five-pound size. He pried off the lid, and stared. He had uncovered a treasure house of me
morabilia Angel had evidently hoarded in secrecy.

  The topmost item was a legal-sized envelope fat with news clippings, some yellow with age. He glanced through them curiously.

  The oldest, from a Pittsburgh paper, showed a bathing-suit photograph of a far younger Angel than he had ever known. The caption identified her as "17-year old Angel Varden, local waitress," designated "Miss Apple Butter of Pittsburgh" in a beauty contest sponsored by a national food outfit.

  Denton winced, recalling Angel's frequent nostalgic reminiscences of her teenage beauty-contest days. Miss Apple Butter! She had always claimed to have won a city-wide competition in the selection of Pittsburgh's candidate for Miss Pennsylvania in the Miss America contest, and to have come within a bobby pin of winning the state finals. With Angel the wish had always been mother to the memory.

  The second clipping was a one-column ad from a Rochester night club, its floor show sporting a chorus of "twelve gorgeous girls." On the margin, in Angel's handwriting, was the excited note: "My first job in show business! ! ! !"

  With one exception, the other clippings were newspaper ads also, of night clubs and burlesque theaters in various parts of New York State and New Jersey. The first in which her name appeared gave her fourth billing among four "exotic dancers." Subsequent ads moved her strip-tease career steadily upward until, at one New York City club Denton had never heard of, she was billed as the feature attraction. Then came a parade of obviously second- and third-rate hot spots in different cities which advertised her as the "star."

  The one non-advertisement had been clipped from a New York tabloid column which casually mentioned that "Stripper Angel Varden" had been seen at the Stork with an unnamed "famous producer." This item was heavily underlined in red pencil. The only columnist's mention she had ever received, Denton thought; had there been others, she would certainly have clipped them.

  So this had been her glamorous career in show business. Denton felt a little sick.

  Rummaging through the candy box, he found a litter of small cards, apparently accompaniments to bouquets and corsages, addressed to her with routine endearments and signed with names like "Billy-boy," "Jack—Remember?" and "John Smith Haha!" And there were menus and theater programs, some autographed with male first names.

  And, at last, a bundle of letters tied with pink ribbon.

  Love letters?

  19

  They were, most of them, love letters. Those that were not love letters were requests for assignations.

  Riffling through the pile quickly, Denton decided that they were in chronological order. He set aside the ones that preceded the date of his marriage.

  The first signature he recognized was on a short note:

  Honey:

  Last night at the club was wonderful.

  About the Gay Twenties party there next Saturday. Meet me same place, same time. I can't wait!

  Love, Curt

  It was Curt Oliver; the odd, backward-slanting handwriting was unmistakable. He had grown up with Curt Oliver, now a prosperous insurance broker. Gay Twenties party ... The only Gay Twenties party Denton could recall at the country dub had been held about six months after his marriage.

  So she had begun to share the wealth with his friends while still a bride, he thought wryly. Too bad he hadn't known about Curt. Denton had bought a big life-insurance policy from Curt Oliver at the very time he must have been sleeping with Angel.

  There followed half a dozen passionate notes either unsigned or signed with initials which he was unable to identify. Of this group there was only one from each man. Since it was unlikely that they had expressed their ardor a single time, Angel must have preserved a mere sample in each case as a record of her conquests. This made her conquests easy to count. Their number surprised even him. There had been over two dozen after Curt Oliver.

  He identified another man when he came upon a homemade valentine. It was drawn in India ink on a folded sheet of professional drawing paper, cut into the shape of a heart. Above the hand-lettered words, "Be My Valentine," the heads of a man and a woman were shown with their noses together at the fold and their pursed lips touching. The drawings were caricatures, but they were quite recognizable.

  The woman was Angel, the man was Matthew Fallon.

  Denton allowed himself another grin. Confirmation that he had made no mistake in naming Matt Fallon as a pallbearer.

  With Arnold Long and Ralph Crosby, that made three out ©f the six.

  He was unable to identify the senders of any of the other billets-doux, although one near the bottom of the pile, signed "A," was undoubtedly from Arnold Long.

  The last item was an empty matchbook. A brief message in pencil had been cautiously blocked out in capital letters on the blank inside: "SAT. 12 MID. MY CAR." No salutation, no signature, not even an initial. Noncommittal, undated, un-traceable. The legal mind. That was Ralph Crosby, he was positive. Head over heels he may have been, but a district attorney was sensitive about evidence.

  He could find nothing identifiable as from Norman Wyatt He went through everything once more to make sure.

  The four he was reasonably sure of—the note signed "Curt," the cartoon, the note signed "A" and the match-book—he pocketed. The others he put back in the box, and returned the box to the bottom drawer.

  A search of Angel's closet and dressing table turned up nothing of interest. He glanced at his watch. 9:30.

  Then he remembered that he would have no car in the morning. He phoned Mac's Taxi Service.

  Tim MacPherson operated the only taxicab company in town. He provided 24-hour service; but, while his two cabs were generally busy all day and evening, there was not enough during-the-night business to warrant employing a night driver, consequently Mac himself handled such calls through a special line to his home.

  Denton arranged for a cab to pick him up at 7:30 A.M.

  He went back to Angel's bedroom. Funny, he thought, how little sense of loss he felt. The bedrooms of the freshly dead were supposed to give off the effluvium of the vanished personality, a subtle spoor to trouble the living. This room did nothing of the sort. It was more like a storeroom, a mere place of things, things that had belonged to a faceless stranger.

  He wandered over to the closet and opened the door and stood surveying her clothes. I'll have to dispose of them, he thought. Give them away. But to whom? He could always, of course, donate them to some organization, domestic or foreign. Or did he have to hold on to them? There was the question of her estate, such as it was . . . He smiled without joy. He had long ago fixed that, when he first realized just what he had married. Nothing was in Angel's name; no part of anything. So all she had left in the world was her personal belongings. I'll have to see a lawyer, he thought vaguely, and find out how to proceed; but meanwhile I'm going to get rid of these damn things—why should I continue to live with them? If there's any legal tangle, I can always make up the value in cash.

  That was when he remembered the Koblowskis. Of course!

  Three minutes later he was listening to a telephone ring somewhere in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Then it stopped and a tired voice with a faint European accent said, "Hello?"

  "Mrs. Koblowski?"

  "Yes?"

  "This is Jim Denton." He hesitated. "Angel's husband."

  "Oh!" He thought the swift intake of breath at the other end of the line was the result of fear. He was sure of it when she said in a much lower, almost furtive, tone, "Yes. Yes, Mr. Denton..."

  "Mrs. Koblowski, I have all this clothing and stuff of Angel's . . . Would you be able to use them? Like me to send them to you? I know you have a number of grown daughters—"

  "I—" She stopped, this time with an unmistakably frightened gasp. He heard a gruff male voice asking something in a foreign language. Polish, no doubt. And her quavering reply. And then the man was speaking to him in accented English. "Mr. Denton, I am Stanislaus Koblowski. We thank you. But we want nothing from her." And the click in his ear made Denton hang up.


  There was a man with a one-track mind, he thought, and shrugged.

  Corinne? She was only a bit smaller than Angel; the stuff ought to fit her. But then he shook his head, imagining what Ellen Wright and Olive Haber would make out of Corinne's wearing Angel's clothes.

  Denton was still chewing on the problem along with his breakfast the next morning when Bridget White arrived.

  Bridget! She herself was out—those shoulders of hers would explode the seams of anything Angel had been able to wear. But . . .

  "Bridget, I'm trying to clean out my wife's clothing. Know anyone who wears her size?"

  "Do I!" The cleaning woman's broad face split in a grin. "I got a teenage daughter no bigger than Mrs. Denton was. I saw your wife two or three times at houses where I was cleaning."

  Don't look a gift horse under the tail, Denton thought Aloud, he said with relief, "That's fine. Suppose you go through the closet and bureau drawers and lay out on the bed some things you think your daughter can use. Ill look them over tonight, and you can take them tomorrow."

  "I sure appreciate that, Mr. Denton. My Elsie can use any clothes she can get."

  Tim MacPherson himself showed up in the cab at 7:15. He was a weatherbeaten man in his late fifties with a lipless mouth and unsmiling eyes. His greatest asset as a taxi driver in Denton's view was his taciturnity; he rarely uttered an unnecessary word.

  "Where to, Mr. Denton?"

  "Clarion, Mac."

  That was the extent of their conversation until Denton got out in the square. Then MacPherson grunted, "Sixty-five cents," which was the zone rate, Denton handed him a dollar bill, MacPherson returned three dimes and a nickel and drove off. Nobody tipped in Ridgemore.

  Thank God for the Scots, Denton thought piously, and unlocked the door. The pile of mail under the slot was unusually large. Denton gathered it up and made for his desk.

  He was slitting open envelopes when Amos Case trudged in.

  "Morning, Jim."

  "Morning, Amos." Denton slit the last of the envelopes open, nodded glumly, and slammed its enclosure on top of a separate pile. "Well, that makes thirty-four."