Dane thought: Damn your girlhood reflections, Mother! You’ll hang yourself.

  Inspector Queen had listened patiently. Whether he found Lutetia’s reminiscence of special interest Dane could not tell. The old man waited for a moment, then he cleared his throat. “How long did you spend on your needlework that evening, Mrs. McKell? Can you recall?” She looked surprised. “I didn’t spend any time at all on my needlework. I said I only thought about doing so.”

  “You did, didn’t you? Excuse me, Mrs. McKell, I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Then you didn’t do any sewing that night. What did you do? - after putting the book down, I mean?” Astonishingly, Lutetia uttered the ghost of a giggle. Inspector Queen looked dumfounded. It was as if Queen Victoria had belched.

  . “I’m ashamed to say, Inspector. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped.

  Oh, dear, now you’ll think me a complete scatter-brain. Dane, you remember I told you when you came in just past midnight -” The Inspector glanced at Dane.

  “Mother was watching television,” Dane said curtly. He was embarrassed. Why did she have to be such a prig? The old policeman would think it was an act. How could he believe she was being herself? How could anyone who didn’t know her?

  “Well, we won’t make a federal case out of that,” Inspector Queen said dryly. “It’s a vice shared by a lot of people, they tell me. Mrs. McKell, how long did you watch TV?”

  “For almost three hours,” Lutetia confessed.

  “Do you remember what you saw?”

  “Oh… dear. I’m afraid I can’t. They’re all sort of the same, aren’t they? I do recall some old motion picture… “ The Inspector pressed her softly. He got little out of her. She had not left the apartment, she had had no visitors.

  “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere,” the old gentleman remarked at last.

  “Because there’s no place to get.” Ashton McKell rose. “My wife stayed home, Inspector. How can she remember the details of an evening in which nothing happened, and during which she was alone? On what ground are you questioning her? Why are you holding her?”

  “Sit down, Mr. McKell,” said Inspector Queen. “This is not a desperate detention - we would hardly take a step like this without a basis in hard fact. Will you sit down? Please?”

  Ashton sat down.

  “Let’s begin with the fundamentals again - motive, opportunity, means. I hate to poke around old sores, but Mrs. McKell certainly had motive against Sheila Grey, in view of the circumstances - the woman her husband was seeing on the sly.”

  Ashton reddened; Lutetia reached over and patted his hand, turning him redder. “She also had opportunity, very good opportunity - living in the same building, able to get up to the penthouse any time she wanted without being spotted, and by her own admission just now, all alone all evening until after midnight, when your son came home. There are only four apartments in the building - the Clementses are on a cruise, no one is occupying the Dill apartment at present, Mr. Dill’s will being contested, with the apartment one of the assets his heirs are wrangling about. And the elevator is self-service.

  “As for means.” The Inspector paused. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t tell you this, Mr. McKell, but considering that you were acquitted today in the same case, you people are entitled to know just why we’ve made this arrest. You see, today we found new evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Dane echoed. “What evidence?”

  The old man took from the bowels of his desk a dainty lace handkerchief, bunched together as if it were wrapped around something. The monogram in the corner lay exposed.

  “ALDeWMcK,” he said, pointing to it. “It would be a pretty remarkable coincidence if anybody else in any way involved with Sheila Grey had this monogram. Anyway, there won’t be any trouble identifying the handkerchief. This is your property, Mrs. McKell, isn’t it?” She swallowed and nodded.

  The Inspector opened the handkerchief as if it held some sacred relic.

  Inside nestled five brass-cased .38 cartridges.

  Ashton McKell gaped at them. “Where did you find those?”

  “In the same place as the handkerchief - in the bottom of a dressing-table drawer in your wife’s dressing room. We did it legally,” he added gently, “with a search warrant.” Yes, thought Dane, and you did it damned fast - after that bartender’s testimony gave you some second thoughts. “Along with the handkerchief and these five cartridges,” and Inspector Queen reached into his drawer again and brought out a small box, “we found this ammo box, which according to the label should contain twenty .38 cartridges. Do you want to count how many are in the box?” He removed the lid; some were missing. “I’ll save you the trouble.

  It contains fifteen cartridges.

  “But the five missing cartridges,” the Inspector went on, “are not the five cartridges we found wrapped up in the handkerchief. The missing ones, like these left in the box, were live ammunition. These five in the handkerchief are blanks.”

  “What?” Ashton said feebly.

  “Miss Grey was killed with a Smith and Wesson .38 Terrier revolver.

  An S. & W..38 Terrier holds only five bullets. - Were you going to say something, Mr. McKell?”

  “Are you trying to tell us,” the elder McKell asked out of stiff lips,

  “that the five blanks in that handkerchief are the same blanks I put into the revolver?”

  “Exactly. Somebody removed the five blanks you put into the gun and substituted five live shells - the five missing from this box. And the question is: Who was that somebody?”

  There was a long pause. Lutetia’s eyes were shut again. Judy’s lips had turned pearly. In the silence the old clock on the Inspector’s wall ticked noisily.

  Finally Inspector Queen asked in a very kind voice, “Would you care to answer that question, Mrs. McKell?”

  Lutetia opened her eyes. Her little tongue-tip flicked into view and vanished.

  Ashton said hoarsely, “Don’t answer another question, Lu. Not one more!”

  But Lutetia said, “Why, no, Inspector Queen, I… don’t know that I can.”

  It was a painful moment. Dane wished he were a thousand miles away.

  Judy seemed about to be sick. Ashton’s hand groped for his wife’s and engulfed it.

  “Motive,” said the Inspector. “Opportunity. No alibi. And here are the means. You’ll recall we took a set of everyone’s fingerprints for comparison purposes after your arrest, Mr. McKell. So we had Mrs. McKell’s on file. Well, right after we found these blanks today, we examined them for prints. We found a partial print of Mrs. McKell’s right forefinger and thumb on the jackets of three of these five blanks. And nobody else’s.

  That means that you, Mrs. McKell, and you alone, handled those blanks.

  You removed them from the gun that subsequently killed Miss Grey.” Lutetia nodded a very little, like an old woman in her dotage. Even the Inspector seemed to realize that it was not a nod of acquiescence so much as an uncontrollable tremor.

  “Hold on,” said Ashton McKell hoarsely. “Did you find any fingerprints on the cases of the live shells in the gun at the time Sheila Grey’s body was found?”

  “We did,” Inspector Queen replied, “and if the D.A. knew I’d told you that I’d face departmental charges. Well, I’ve stuck my neck out before. I suppose I want you people to know we’re not making wild charges out of pique. Yes, we found unmistakable prints of Mrs. McKell’s fingers on two of the five live cartridges. Now you know what this is all about. You, you alone, Mrs. McKell, substituted the live shells for the blank ones in the gun that killed Sheila Grey. You, and you alone, Mrs. McKell, turned that harmless gun into a murder weapon. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t come to the conclusion that you did so for the purpose of committing murder with it.

  “So let’s try it again, Mrs. McKell. Do you have anything to tell me?”

  “No, you don’t!” shouted Ashton. He actually clapped his hand over his wife’s mouth. “Don’t breathe another syllable, Lu! You don’t have to say a word till you’ve had a chance to talk to O’Brien. That’s my wife’s right, Inspector!”

  “It certainly is.” The old policeman was on his feet now. “But I’m going to ask you one more question anyway. Mrs. McKell, did you shoot Sheila Grey to death?”

  “She’s not going to answer,” Ashton said furiously.

  The Inspector shrugged. “Get the wheels rolling, Velie,” he said.

  “Drop the suspicion-of-murder charge. I’ve already talked to the district attorney, and he agrees that without satisfactory answers - and they’re not satisfactory - Mrs. McKell is to be formally charged with the murder of Sheila Grey.”

  * * *

  Bail was speedily arranged. Ashton McKell had said, “Let’s have no nonsense about not accepting bond. One fool in the family is enough.” Lutetia was submissive. Had her husband advised it, she would have marched with equal submissiveness to jail, to make her bed with the prostitutes, drug addicts, shoplifters, and drunks in the euphemistically named House of Detention for Women in Greenwich Village.

  Robert O’Brien was hors de combat - this combat, at any rate. The legal warrior was occupied with another case, also a murder indictment, for the trial of which he had exhausted his last legal delay. “The guy is a professional hood,” he told Ashton. “I’m positive he’s committed at least two gangland executions with which he’s never even been charged, and he’ll sure as hell commit more if he gets the opportunity. But he didn’t commit this one, and this is the one I’m concerned with. Of course, as soon as we get Falconetti’s trial out of the way I’ll be back with you, Mr. McKell. But I can’t predict just when that will be. You’d better get another lawyer.” The tapestries that had graced the walls of the Chateau de Saint-Loy

  - unicorns, vainly coursed by hounds and hunters, captured and gentled by comely virgins; Helen, not yet of Troy, and her retinue departing for Cytherea; King Louis confuting the heathen - looked down upon a scene that was certainly not the least strange they had viewed in their long centuries.

  There was Lutetia McKell presiding over her tea service as if nothing had happened. “Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea, Judy? You look chilled.

  I’ve some of your favorite keemun. Ashton? Dane?” They exchanged despairing glances. “I don’t think any of us wants tea at the moment, Mother,” Dane said. “Dad was saying something.”

  “Forgive me, dear. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening closely.” Her husband inhaled. “Lutetia. Did you substitute the live cartridges for the blanks?”

  “Yes, dear,” said Lutetia.

  Dane cried, “Why?”

  “Well, darling, you see, when your father lent Miss Grey the revolver, because she was nervous about being alone in the penthouse, he told me about it.” Of course. Didn’t his father tell her everything? Well, Dane thought grimly, not everything. “He’d said he was afraid, however, Miss Grey not being accustomed to firearms and so on, that there might be an accident. So, he told me, he’d put blank bullets in the revolver instead of real ones, although he’d bought live shells at the time he purchased the revolver. That’s how I knew, Ashton, that the live cartridges were on the top shelf of your wardrobe.”

  Ashton groaned.

  Lutetia continued in the same bright tone. One day, she said, she had telephoned the penthouse. Sheila Grey’s maid, who came in daily, answered. Miss Grey, she had told Lutetia, was out. Lutetia had hung up without giving her name.

  She had then dressed properly for a neighborly visit and gone up to the penthouse and rung the bell. The maid answered the door.

  “Is Miss Grey in?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t expect her for sure till six.”

  “You mean she may return before then? In that case, I believe I’ll wait.

  I’m Mrs. McKell, who lives downstairs.”

  The maid had hesitated only for a moment. “I guess it’ll be all right, ma’am. I recognized you. Come in.”

  Lutetia had sat clown in a chair in Sheila’s living room (not a very comfortable one, she said: “I don’t care for Swedish Modern, do you, Judy?”) and the maid had excused herself. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’ve got my work to do.”

  Although Lutetia had never been in the penthouse apartment during Sheila Grey’s occupancy, she was familiar with the apartment’s layout.

  There were only two bedrooms, one a guest room; any woman could tell at a glance which was which, and both lay at the side of the apartment away from the kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a hall. Lutetia waited a few moments, then quietly got up and walked through the door on the other side.

  She was wrong about the guest room; there was none. Sheila had converted her second bedroom into a workroom; here was where she plotted her fashions, the GHQ of her organization. With all deliberate speed Lutetia proceeded to the master bedroom.

  Logic demanded that the revolver be kept in the night-table drawer.

  And there it was. She took the weapon, removed its blanks, inserted the live ammunition, returned the revolver to the drawer, and left the bedroom with the blanks clutched in her handkerchief.

  She had summoned the maid, said she would not wait after all, and returned to her apartment.

  “Then I put the box of bullets in my dressing-table drawer,” Lutetia concluded conversationally, “along with the blank ones in the handkerchief. That’s all there was to it, darling.”

  Ashton pounded his palm in frustration. “But why, Lutetia, why?”

  “I couldn’t think what else to do with them.”

  “I don’t mean that.” Her husband passed his hand over his face. “I mean the whole thing. Why did you switch cartridges at all? What on earth did you have in mind? Didn’t you realize the danger?”

  “You don’t understand, Ashton. The danger, as you call it, was the whole point. Some night when that woman - girl - would be all alone, I intended to visit her and tell her that I knew all about you and her. I was going to threaten her, don’t you see?”

  “Threaten her?” repeated Ashton, blankly.

  “And taunt her, too.”

  “Mother,” rasped Dane, “what are you talking about?”

  “And make her so angry that she’d shoot me.”

  Had Lutetia broken out in Swahili, or Urdu, they could not have regarded her with more bafflement.

  “Shoot you,” her husband repeated. The words evidently meant nothing to him. “Shoot you,” he said again.

  “Shoot you, Mother?”

  “Don’t you see? It was all my fault, your father’s consorting with that woman, turning his back on his wife. If I had been a better, more understanding wife to your father, he would never have taken up with another woman. It was my doing, really. I was the guilty one.”

  “You’re lying!” cried Ashton McKell. “What kind of story is that? Do you expect any grown person to believe such a yarn? Lutetia.” He glared at her. “Did you shoot Sheila?”

  She was staring at him in horror, like a child who, having told the exact truth, is still accused of fibbing. Her lower lip trembled.

  “Ashton, no. How can you think such a thing? I changed those bullets for the reason I told you. Don’t you believe me?”

  “No,” he flung at her. Then he muttered, “I don’t know.” She’s insane, Dane thought, with the creeping kind of insanity that just touches the edge of another world, and he doesn’t see it. He’s still trying to judge her rationally.

  The thought was so acute that Dane almost groaned aloud. He had never realized it; now, in the flash of the revelation, it was as if he had known it all his life. Everything was illuminated by it - his mother’s unnatural selflessness, her timidities resting on a bedrock of Victorian stubbornness, her self-isolation, her clinging to a past that for her must always be the present. How long has this been coming on? he wondered; and, looking back, it was impossible for him to judge just when she had crossed the line.

  Whenever it had been, there was no spark to convert it into action until she became aware of her husband’s “spiritual infidelity.” Then, in her system of twisted values, she moved; she took the blame on herself by seeking punishment, at the same time that she “protected” her beloved husband and master and laid the onus of punishment on the other woman’s shoulders.

  What his father must be thinking, Dane could not imagine. The whole concept was so extraordinary - the guilty man shriven of guilt, but feeling guilt still - that probably his thoughts were one boiling confusion. The elder McKell’s trapdoor mouth was half open, his commanding eyes glossy, his breathing labored. He looked like a man in shock.

  It was Judy Walsh who said gently, “But didn’t you realize, Mrs.

  McKell, that what you did might lead to the accidental death of someone else?” Judy knew.

  Lutetia shook the head that now rested on the lacy jabot of her bosom.

  “I’m so sorry. I never thought of that. How stupid of me. I was so sure it could only happen to me. But it didn’t .. , The nights came and went, and they were lonely nights… I could never bring myself to carry out my plan.”

  Judy turned away; her eyes were filled with tears.

  “No,” Lutetia said slowly. “Somehow, I never went back there.”

  * * *

  In Robert O’Brien’s unavailability, and on his recommendation, Ashton McKell engaged the services of Henry Calder Barton, a well - known criminal lawyer of the old school. Barton, assisted and advised by Heaton, indicated his line of defense.

  “They can certainly show that Mrs. McKell could have done it,” Barton said. He was a heavy-set old man with a crop of white hair above a turkey-red face. “But they just as certainly can’t prove that she did do it.

  We’ll play the unknown-prowler bit for all it’s worth.”

  “And how much, Mr. Barton,” asked Ashton bleakly, “is that?”

  “Quite a lot. After all, Sheila Grey was no frightened little old lady seeing burglars under her bed at the shifting of every shadow. As I understand it, she was a shrewd, clearheaded businesswoman, a woman of spirit and action. If a woman like that became suddenly afraid to be alone, it’s a reasonable assumption that she had cause, or thought she had. There has been a rash of cases of forcible nocturnal entry in Park Avenue apartments this past year, many of them unsolved, and some very near your building.