Эллери Куин - Blow Hot, Blow Cold

“I think so. Yes, it is.”

He reached up and with index finger slowly turned the dial which regulated the temperature. After a moment, through the air ducts, came a faint click of mechanism and whir of fan.

“It works,” Masters said.

“Of course it works. What did you expect?”

“I thought something might have gone wrong with it. But it’s working.” He turned the dial back to where it had been, and the faint sounds stopped. “The thermostat must have been deliberately set so the air-conditioner wouldn’t come on.”

“Of course. Last night so was mine. They intended to open windows.”

“Very logical explanation, too, Doctor. Well, we may as well go down.”

On the Connor terrace Jack Richmond performed proper introductions, and Masters filed each away in his head with identifying tags. Stanley Walters was a jellyfish; he probably had a high susceptibility to pressure, malign or benign, and would cling and yield. His formidable wife, Mae Walters, had a low tolerance level; her influence on Stanley, with its system of restraints, gave their union little chance of permanence. David Howell was a likable guy with an open, scoured-looking face, but this was a good disguise for a man who might be quite otherwise. Nancy Howell, already tagged as a scatterbrain, nevertheless possessed an innocent sort of curiosity that, coupled with acumen, made her useful as well as a nuisance; a charmer, she was already a threat to Masters’s objectivity. Vera Richmond, handsome and hefty in the hips, impressed him as a woman who accepted things as they were; she probably preferred being amused to being shaken up; her tolerance level must be as high as Mae Walters’s was low. As for her husband, the doctor, he was simply too handsome to suit Masters, whose personal ugliness made him allergic to handsome men. In his experience such men were trouble-prone.

“I believe you said there was a party here last night,” Masters said.

“Not here,” Dr. Richmond said. “At my house, next door. On our back terrace, to be exact. Just a few neighbors in for a barbecue.”

“Which ones?”

“Those present here, plus Larry and Lila Connor.”

“Did anything happen at the party that might explain what happened later?”

“Certainly nothing to make any of us think Larry would go home and do Lila in. No one would have been surprised to see them split up, but murder’s another matter.”

“So it is. You seem to have a reservation, though, Dr. Richmond. Please level with me — it may save us all a lot of time and trouble. Did the Connors have a fight at the party?”

“No. There was a delicate moment right at the beginning, but it didn’t develop into anything.”

“What was it, Doctor?”

Jack Richmond fumbled. Mae Walters promptly picked up the ball.

“What Jack means,” Mae said, “is that Lila made a pass at my husband Stanley. She was perfectly shameless. She made a pass at Stanley every time he came close to her.”

Conceding the maximum to Stanley Walters, and making allowance to women in general for their unpredictability in glandular affairs, Masters still found this charge incredible. He suspected that Stanley had merely been a jellyfish means of goading Mae Walters.

“Is that so?” Masters said mildly. “In front of seven other people, including her own husband, Mrs. Walters?”

“Lila was shameless, I tell you. She had the morals of an alley cat. I’m surprised Larry didn’t kill her long ago.”

“Please, Mae.” Stanley spoke impulsively, certainly against his better judgment. “It’s all right for you to make a fool of me, because I guess I am, but you needn’t make Lila out to be worse than she was. It was just her way, that’s all. It didn’t mean a thing.”

“Yes, darling,” said Vera Richmond, “you mustn’t exaggerate. You know perfectly well that all Lila did was to give Stanley a meaningless kiss. As a matter of fact, Lieutenant, it started us all off kissing one another immediately; and I must say, Mae, you seemed to enjoy it as much as the rest of us.”

Mae Walters glared.

“Did anything else happen I ought to know about?” asked Masters.

“Nothing at all, Lieutenant,” Vera said. “It was just a little backyard cookout. We didn’t ask any gangsters.”

“Apparently,” Masters said, “you asked a murderer.”

“Larry?” Vera frowned. “It may turn out that Larry killed Lila, but I for one refuse to think of him as a murderer.”

This was such an arbitrary, if not downright preposterous, point of view that Masters was momentarily silenced. Nancy jumped into the breach with a certain air of reluctant necessity, as if she were doing an unpleasant duty.

“It isn’t quite true that nothing else happened,” Nancy said. “I mean, almost anything might turn out to be important in a situation like this, mightn’t it?”

“It’s a question, Nancy, of whether it’s more important to talk about it or to keep quiet,” Vera Richmond said.

“I’d prefer that Mrs. Howell talk about it,” Masters said. “Yes? Go on.”

“I was just thinking about what Larry told me on the bench,” Nancy said. “Don’t you remember, Jack?”

“I remember,” said Jack. “I was hoping you didn’t.”

“Well, it was pretty grim when you and Lila came creeping up behind us and overheard part of what Larry said.”

“We didn’t creep. We walked.”

“What I would like to know,” Masters said, “is what was said.”

“To tell the truth,’” Nancy said, “Larry was a little high on beer, and so was I. I didn’t want to listen, but he insisted on talking, and there I was on the bench, trapped. What he said was that Lila was a psychopathic liar. He said she had lied when he married her — that he was actually her fourth husband instead of her second, which was what she had led him to believe. Her first and third husbands, he said, had divorced her. The second had committed suicide. She almost ruined him in Kansas City, where they lived before moving here, by her deliberate extravagance. That’s why they moved here. Larry thought they could start over, but she was only doing here what she had done there.”

“How much of this did Mrs. Connor hear?” Masters asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Most of it,” Jack Richmond said.

“What was her reaction?”

“That’s the odd part of it,” Nancy said. “She didn’t create a scene or even seem mad. Neither did Larry. They were both quiet and rather deadly, as if they’d finally come to the end of something.”

“As,” said Masters, “they had.”

He turned away abruptly, tired of them all. But he turned back immediately, rubbing his hands on his thighs, and sat down on a redwood bench beside a table.

“I’ll need to know, just for the record,” he said, “what each of you did last night after leaving the party.”

“As for me,” said David Howell promptly, “that’s no problem. I went directly to bed and to sleep.”

“So did Stanley and I,” Mae Walters said. “Isn’t that right, Stanley?”

“Well, no,” said Stanley. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?” Mae demanded.

“He means,” Masters said, “that he didn’t go to bed directly. Mr. Walters, what did you do?”

“As a matter of fact,” Stanley said, “I did go to bed immediately, but I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and went down to the backyard to smoke a cigaret. Nancy can verify this, because she saw me there.”

“That’s true,” Nancy said. “I was dying for a cigaret, and I saw Stanley’s glowing in the dark and thought he might have an extra one. I went over to the alley and called to him, and he gave me the cigaret, and we stood there talking and smoking for a few minutes. That was after I’d seen Larry leaving in his car.”