Эллери Куин - Blow Hot, Blow Cold

“He had had a bad time, and you were a doctor and his ‘friend.’ You persuaded him to take a sedative and you prepared it yourself. But it was no sedative. You gave him a highly undoctorish Mickey Finn, in a lethal dose, to confuse the trail back to you. You then set the office scene to indicate suicide, did three further things, and hurried back to the hospital before you could be missed.

“The three things you had to do constituted the heart of your plan. Lila Connor, not her husband, was your primary target. Therefore you had to make it appear that Larry died after Lila died — in spite of the fact that at this point Lila was still alive. You accomplished the first part of this deception by turning Larry’s office air-conditioning up as high as it would go, to slow the rate of decomposition; this meant, of course, that you had to return to the office early Sunday morning, before Larry’s body could be discovered, to turn the air-conditioner off , thereby establishing the presumption that it had never been on at all; otherwise, allowance would have been made for the air-conditioning factor and negated your deception. Secondly, the weapon which was to kill Lila had to bear his fingerprints. This was simple: you took the metal letter-opener from his desk, pressed the fingers of his right hand to the haft, carefully wrapped the letter-opener so as not to erase the prints, and carried it off with you in your medical bag. Thirdly, you took Connor’s back-door house key from his key-case, so that you could be sure of access to the Connor house — and Lila Connor — after you got through with your patient at the hospital and could drive home.”

“That’s a beautiful reconstruction, Lieutenant,” said Dr. Richmond. “Do you do your homework with detective stories? Fortunately, real life requires evidence.”

“You let me worry about that, will you, Doctor?” said Masters with a smile. “Even at that, it’s not all theorizing. I can prove that the air-conditioner in Larry Connor’s office was turned on and, much later, off. The night watchman heard the conditioner working when he made his second rounds of the night, and he’ll swear to it. I myself can testify, with the landlord of the building to bear me out, since he was with me, that the air-conditioner was off when we discovered Connor’s body. Meaning that the murderer had to have come back to the office, as I ‘theorized.’

“As for the weapon, Connor was strictly left-handed. On that score alone he’s cleared of the murder of his wife. It was a bad mistake to forget that fact in salting the letter-opener with the prints of Connor’s right hand — even allowing for the natural tensions of the night, the need to hurry, and so on. Yet the letter-opener came from Connor’s office desk — his secretary will positively identify it as such. Obviously, somebody other than Connor took the letter-knife from the office to the Connor house, and since we found it buried in Lila Connor’s breast, it was just as obviously taken by the murderer from the office for that purpose.”

Jack Richmond was thoughtfully examining his empty beer can. Then he looked up. “Actually, Lieutenant, you make out a beautiful case, but not against me necessarily. You haven’t demonstrated a single piece of direct evidence to link me to either death. It’s all circumstantial.”

“A lot of people have found themselves at the end of a rope, or in some equally unpleasant place,” said Masters dryly, “as a result of circumstantial evidence. Also, there’s the little matter of motive.”

Jack Richmond stirred, and Masters fell silent. He was silent for so long that he seemed to them to have been sidetracked by some faint far thought that switched on unexpectedly in the twilight.

“Do you want me to go into your motive, Dr. Richmond?” he said at last.

“You have been busy, Lieutenant, haven’t you?” murmured Jack. He laughed harshly. “All right, I was fool enough to let myself get involved with Lila. It was all over quite a while before she died. Don’t expect me to go into the details. You probably know most of them, anyhow.”

“I’ve made some run-producing hits,” nodded Masters. “See here, Doctor, if you’d rather not discuss this before your wife—”

“Don’t let Mrs. Richmond’s presence embarrass you, Lieutenant. My wife has known all about Lila and me for a long time. I’m happy to say that Vera knows because I told her, not because she caught me. So why should I have killed Lila? What price motive now?”

Masters blinked. He turned to Vera Richmond. “Is that the truth, Mrs. Richmond? And please don’t say it is if your husband is lying. It wouldn’t do either him or you any good, and if repeated officially it could have nasty consequences for you.”

“Jack told me voluntarily,” Vera said steadily. “And I decided not to let it break us up. For two reasons, Lieutenant. One, I love him. Two, I know he loves me, in spite of an occasional lapse of fidelity. It seemed to me ridiculous to allow our marriage to be ruined because of a tramp who didn’t mean anything to him but a fling.”

“That makes you out a rather remarkable woman, Mrs. Richmond. Wasn’t it pretty rough on you, having to live next door to the woman your husband confessed he’d been sleeping with?”

Vera flushed. But her voice did not quiver. “Yes, Lieutenant, it was rough, especially since for the sake of appearances we had to maintain a social relationship with the Connors. But what would you have had me do? Run? Tell Jack we had to move? It would only have given Lila a satisfaction she didn’t deserve. And after all, any way you look at it, I won and she lost.”

“Very refreshing attitude,” snapped Masters. “But it sounds a little too superhuman to suit me. I still think your husband’s affair with Lila Connor gave him a motive to kill her.”

“But how?” asked Vera, and this time it was a cry of protest. “He was through with her — I knew about it—”

“Was any man ever finished with Lila Connor,” said Masters in a deliberately brutal tone, “until she was ready to let go?”

His tone, his phrasing, seemed to bring Lila back, as by obscene invocation, from the dead. In the shadows Jack Richmond sighed.

“Apparently,” he said, “you investigated Lila thoroughly.”

“Yes, Doctor. The night of your party Larry Connor was reported to have made some harsh and startling comments about his wife. You surely didn’t expect me to ignore them? I checked on them, and they were all true. Lila had had three husbands in rapid succession before her marriage to Connor, and she played hell with all three. As she continued to do in the Connor marriage. She seems to have been driven by a hatred of men. She apparently got her kicks by entangling men emotionally, then dropping them with a thud. The only thing she couldn’t take was being dropped. Then she became really dangerous. Exactly what kind of threat did she pose when you went sour on her, Doctor? Scandal? Professional ruin? What did she want from you? Money? Divorce and remarriage?”

“I didn’t have enough money to satisfy her, and I would rather have married an octopus.”

“You admit, then, that she threatened you!”

“I don’t admit a thing. As for my reputation and professional career, important as they are to me, I wouldn’t kill because of a threat to them, expressed or implied.”

“Wouldn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. You haven’t got a case, Lieutenant, admit it. It’s all based on what I could have done, not on what I did. As for that two hours or so at the hospital, I repeat that I was in that private room napping every second of the unaccounted-for time, and I challenge you to prove otherwise.”