Wife or Death

by Ellery Queen

  She made no flutter or twitch of movement. Her complexion, never high, was bloodlessly yellow. There was a marbled quality about her patrician face and figure that made Denton think incongruously of a statue in a town square, fixed in time and space.

  Then she stirred. The tip of her tongue appeared and touched her upper lip. "Daddy says he murdered that woman? He?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Sergeant Harley said.

  "You're lying."

  "No, ma'am," Sergeant Harley said.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them, and in a perfectly normal voice she said, "Well, he didn't, you know."

  "Yes, Ardis," Denton said, "I do know. Now. I know everything now."

  "You do?" But there was more statement to it than question.

  "I know that he's a troubled, broken old man. I know that he has nothing left but his fatherhood. I know that he's trying to make the supreme paternal sacrifice. It's pathetic, and it's noble, and you can't let him do it, Ardis."

  But she seemed not to be listening.

  "Don't go away from me, Ardis," Denton said. "If not for my sake, then for your father's. Won't you tell us what really happened?"

  But she had closed her eyes again.

  "Then suppose I tell you. At the get-together here, after the Hallowe'en Ball, you overheard Angel and some man planning the final details of their elopement. I caught just a snatch of it in the dark, during the power failure, but I remember you were right near me, and I'm sure now you heard the whole conversation. You must have learned, or guessed, where they planned to meet. The only thing is, they were whispering, and the man's voice especially was distorted. You didn't realize it was your father whispering to Angel about running away that night. You thought it was your husband."

  The club she had made of the magazine slipped from her fingers, unrolling as it fell. She opened her eyes and, mechanically, she leaned over and picked the magazine up.

  "I don't know why you jumped to the conclusion that Angel's new boy was Norm instead of someone else," Denton went on in the same quiet way. "Maybe you'd been watching for a long time, wondering when Norm would take his place in the ranks of Angel's lovers. She'd been successful with nearly everyone else. And she was younger than you and— forgive me, Ardis—physically far more attractive. You might well have worked your way into a suspension of common sense, ready to believe any imagined sign that Norm had fallen for her. I don't think he ever did, Ardis. I've found no real evidence of it. Although, God knows, I myself have been hot on Norm's trail for some time now."

  He thought he heard her sigh, but he could not be sure.

  "You must love Norm very much, Ardis. At the least you weren't going to stand by and let him make a fool of himself—and of you—over the tart who had jumped into the beds of half the men in town. At the most you'd do anything to put her out of his reach and save your marriage. Anything. Even murder."

  She looked directly at Denton then, and he almost recoiled. He had never seen such emptiness in human eyes.

  But there was no turning back now. "When Norm offered to drive Ralph Crosby home, you must have assumed he was seizing the excuse of Crosby's drunken helplessness to get out of the house and meet Angel and run off with her. I suppose after everyone left you waited for your father to go upstairs to bed, and then quietly left the house, let your station wagon roll down the steep grade of the driveway so the noise of the engine wouldn't disturb your father, and drove up to the lodge. You must have got to the lodge long before Angel did. There was no one there, and you waited for her with one of the shotguns from the rack in your lap. Did you blast her as she walked in the door?"

  And the empty-eyed woman in the chair said in an empty voice, "Yes."

  Denton was surprised to feel something wet fall on his hand. And then he became conscious that sweat was rolling down his nose and off the tip. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose, his chin, his cheeks, his forehead, behind his ears. Sergeant Harley was hitched forward on the edge of the sofa, his big hand clutching the arm, staring at Ardis Wyatt with his mouth slightly open.

  "So there you were, Angel at your feet, the smoking shotgun in your hands, with the lights out waiting for Norm to walk in. You never dreamed that, when your father went up to his room back in town here, he had changed his clothes and packed a suitcase and waited until he thought you were asleep. He went to a lot of trouble, Ardis, to sneak himself and his bag out of the house, completely ignorant of the fact that instead of being in your room asleep you'd already left and were at the lodge. I wonder which of you was more stunned when, after Tim MacPherson dropped him at the lodge, he walked in and snapped on the lights and found waiting, not only his blasted lady-love, but the daughter who had blasted her."

  The faintest sound escaped from Ardis Wyatt's lips. It might have been a moan.

  "I can imagine how you both felt. You, because you never would have shot Angel if you'd thought that the man she was running away with was your father—daughters don't murder their fathers* women. And Mr. Trevor, because his woman was dead with her midsection blown out and his daughter, his beloved daughter, facing the murder charge. Well, he couldn't get Angel back. But he could save you, Ardis. And that's exactly what your father proceeded to do. He became your accomplice after the event."

  And now her voice was not lifeless as she cried, "No!"

  "Yes," Denton said gently. "And isn't this how it went? Your father drove my car back to town—the car in which Angel had driven to the lodge—and returned it to my garage, accounting for the fifteen extra miles on my meter. You followed him in your station wagon so that he'd have an un-traceable way of getting back to the lodge. Back at the lodge the two of you went frantically to work cleaning up the blood and the mess and the shotgun, and stowing Angel's body and traveling bag in the station wagon. After which Mr. Trevor and you drove south out of town, dumped the body and bag over the embankment, and then scurried home to bed—probably just before Norm pulled in from his all-night session trying to sober up Ralph Crosby.

  "And that takes care of Angel's murder. Now we get to George."

  She was listening with fascination, as if Denton were spinning a tale that had no personal meaning, only interest for its own sake.

  "George had happened to see Mr. Trevor and Angel making love in a parked car the night of the ball. I convinced him of my completely wrong theory that the man he had seen in the car, the new lover, subsequently killed Angel rather than go through with the elopement. So George thought it was your father who had murdered her.

  "Last Friday night," Denton said, "after dropping young Emmet Taylor off, George drove over here, Ardis. I don't believe now that he had any intention of going to the lodge. I think he knew Mr. Trevor and Norm were up there and that you were home alone. I think he came here to talk over with you what he knew, or suspected, before going to the police. George was that kind of guy. And of course he didn't know that, in confiding to you what he knew, he was—-as they say in detective stories—signing his own death warrant. Because George couldn't have dreamed that in confiding in you, Ardis, he was confiding in the actual killer of Angel. That rather than risk letting him go to the police and implicate your father—and eventually you—you would decide you had to kill George, too.

  "But this time, Ardis, your father wasn't in it at all. He had no idea you were responsible for George Guest's death. You undoubtedly didn't say a word to Mr. Trevor—or Norm—about George's having stopped in here Friday night. It was only when I started discussing the matter with the three of you that your father suddenly realized—knowing that George had not gone up to the lodge—that you must have been lying when you said he hadn't stopped in here—that you must have killed George, too. What did you hit him with, Ardis?"

  "What?" Ardis Wyatt said.

  "I said," Denton said distinctly, "what did you hit George Guest on the head with? And how did you handle him—a heavy man—all by yourself?"

  "Oh," she said. "I told George I wanted him to drive
me to the lodge so that he could confront daddy with the story he had just told me. He didn't want to go. But I talked him into it. I took along my big handbag, and I put the short-handled fireplace poker in it. Outside town I asked George to stop for a minute, I wanted to talk some more. He stopped in a side road. I hit him with the poker and knocked him out. I pushed him over in the seat and got behind the wheel and drove his car to Rock Hill Road

  . That's how I did it, Jim. Wasn't that clever of me?"

  "My God," Sergeant Harley said.

  But Denton nodded. "And you parked the car on the downgrade with the wheel turned to carry it over and into the ravine, and you got out of George's car and reached in and released the emergency and slammed the door shut and let 'er roll—didn't you, Ardis? With George in it, still alive. Is that right, Ardis?"