“I defy Jesse Owens in his prime to do it! I invite the district attorney to try it himself. It simply couldn’t be done. It was a physical and temporal impossibility.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one point for you to consider in judging the guilt or innocence of this defendant: Did Lutetia McKell, at precisely 10:23 p.m. on the night of September 14th, shoot Sheila Grey to death in the Grey apartment, or did she not? She did not. She did not, and you now know she did not. And the reason you know she did not is simply that she could not. She had not time.”

  The case went to the jury at a quarter past eleven on December 23rd, after a brief charge by Judge Hershkowitz (“You are to consider only the question: Did the defendant on the night of September 14th, at 10:23 p.m. fire the shot that killed Sheila Grey? If the defendant did, she is guilty of murder as charged in the indictment. If you find that she did not fire the shot, then you must find that she is not guilty of the crime as charged in the indictment. In making your decision, you must consider the testimony you have heard in this courtroom concerning the accused’s telephone conversation at about that same time. If you hold that testimony to be relevant, you must then consider the matter of timing. This court believes the matter of timing in this case to be all-important… “).

  At half-past noon the jury had reached a verdict, when the defense attorney and the district attorney had not yet returned from their lunch (the judge, an old hand, had lunch sent into his chambers). Barton and De Angelus, notified, scurried back to the courtroom with their lunches half consumed.

  The headline on the tabloid that was first to print the news, FREE LU, was not - as some English - speaking foreigner might have interpreted an imperative; it was a statement of what the jury had in fact done.

  Dane’s mother was acquitted, as her husband before her had been.

  Judge Hershkowitz said to the jury, “Your verdict is justified by the evidence… Two indictments have now been returned for the murder of Sheila Grey, and in each case the jury, having seen and heard the evidence, has refused to convict. The killer is, accordingly, still at large. We do not wish an innocent person to be pronounced guilty; at the same time we do not wish a guilty person to escape unpunished.” This last was taken - accurately - by police, district attorney’s office, and press alike as a juridical nudge to get on with the job, and this time do it right.

  The McKells were too overjoyed to weigh nuances. Ashton exclaimed,

  “What a wonderful Christmas present. We’ll all be together on the Twenty-fifth, and without this nightmare hanging over us. Mr. Barton, how can I express my gratitude?”

  The lawyer shook his head. “Don’t thank me, thank that fellow Lattimoore and his uncashed $500 check. All I did was follow through.

  With that evidence, any kid fresh out of law school could have earned an acquittal.”

  The only one present who was not happily jabbering away was Lutetia herself. When Dane asked her why she was so preoccupied, his mother said, “It will always be on my conscience.”

  “What, Mother?”

  “Replacing the blank cartridges in that revolver with live ones. Why did I do it? She would still be alive -”

  “Stop it, Mother. This instant.”

  It took them a long time to restore her spirits. At one point Dane got the impression that she would have been content to give herself up and stand trial all over again. As he said to his father, “Thank God for the rule of double jeopardy!”

  Henry Calder Barton did not leave the courtroom with them. He went over to talk to the district attorney, who was talking to Inspector Queen.

  “As His Honor would say, Henry, mazel tov,” De Angelus said sourly.

  “What are you congratulating him for?” snarled old man Queen. “A baby could have walked off with this case. Soap!” Barton grinned. “I couldn’t agree more, Inspector. Uh… Mr. D.A. I know this isn’t the best time in the world to ask if you’ll let my client, that Gogarty boy, cop a plea for manslaughter. But it would save everybody time and money. What do you say?”

  De Angelus grunted, “It sure as hell isn’t. Do you realize that lightning has struck me twice in this Grey murder? With Dick Queen here standing under the same tree?”

  “Why take it out on Gogarty?”

  “Talk to me about it tomorrow. Today I wouldn’t make bargains with my own mother.”

  “Why, Teddy, you wouldn’t be disgruntled because two innocent people have been found not guilty, would you?”

  “Look, Henry, I’m unhappy, Inspector Queen’s unhappy, everybody’s unhappy except you and the McKells. So let’s leave it at Merry Christmas, huh?”

  * * *

  Ellery was unhappy, too, the impending Christmas never having seemed less Merry. For one thing, he would have to spend it in the hospital; and the half-promise of his doctor that he might be home and hobbling around before the New Year carried exactly as much conviction as half-promises usually do.

  He was now mobile to the extent of wheeling himself about the corridors, so he helped the ravishing blond nurse decorate the Christmas tree on their floor, and he almost enjoyed the Swedish julotta celebration afterward. But the only real pleasure he took was in the joy of the McKell family.

  His unhappiness had a broader base, a disdainful disappointment in himself. Armchair detective! What satisfaction he had taken in his role in the case of Ashton McKell - Phase One, as he had come to think of it - was erased by his nonexistent role in Phase Two. By himself he had come up with nothing whatever to help Lutetia. The letter from The Princess Soap Company, from which her subsequent acquittal stemmed, had simply turned up one morning through the courtesy of the ineffable Lattimoore. Its import would have been obvious to a rookie policeman.

  And the killer of Sheila Grey was still at large, as Judge Hershkowitz had pointed out, and the great man hadn’t a clue in his head that might be called promising.

  Oh, well, Ellery thought with a sigh. At least the McKells’ troubles are over.

  * * *

  The McKells’ troubles were over for exactly one weekend. Father, mother, and son had had a pleasant, if not joyous, Christmas together.

  They had attended services at the great unfinished cathedral on Christmas Eve, mingling unnoticed with the crowds of worshipers. In the morning they attended services at a chapel in a poor neighborhood whose congregation was almost entirely foreign-born and whose “language” newspaper had run no photograph of the McKell family. The remainder of Christmas Day they spent quietly at home. They had exchanged gifts, listened to the Missa Solemnis on the hi-fi, read the newspapers.

  On Monday, Lutetia expressed a desire to see the ocean. Ramon had been given the day off, for Ashton was at home - the McKell enterprises, like most companies, were keeping Monday as part of the holiday - so Dane drove his parents down to Long Beach, where for almost two hours they strolled beside the gray Atlantic sweeping endlessly in from Europe.

  The walk made them hungry, and when they returned home Lutetia took pleasure in preparing a hearty supper of soup and sirloin steak with her own hands. Ashton read aloud from Matthew, they listened to the enchanting music of Buxtehude’s Missa Brevis and the majestic Mendelssohn Elijah sung ineffably by the Huddersfield Choral Society, and then they called it a day.

  Dane was still eating breakfast as well as dining with his parents; he supposed this would stop when he could slip his life back into its independent groove once more, an opportunity he was on the lookout for these days. He was at breakfast in his parents’ apartment, then, two days after Christmas, when Ramon - waiting to drive Ashton to his office - brought in the mail containing the bulky brown envelope.

  Ashton, shuffling through the mail, handed the brown envelope to Dane. It was a long one made of kraft paper. Dane slit 4t open, removed its contents, glanced over them - and the cup he set down in the saucer rattled.

  “Dane?” said Lutetia. “Is something the matter?” He continued to read; his complexion had turned gluey.

  “Son, what is it?” Ashton asked.

  Dane muttered, “Now it will have to come out.”

  “What will have to come out?”

  Dane rose. “I’ll tell you, Dad. But first I’ve got to make a phone call.” Automatically he went to his old room, sat down at his old desk. For a moment he buried his face in his hands. Then he got a grip on himself and dialed a number.

  “Judy?”

  “Dane.” She sounded remote.

  “Judy, I can tell you now what I wasn’t able to tell you before.” The words came tumbling out. “About what’s been worrying me - making me act toward you the way I… Please. Would you - can you - meet me right away in Ellery Queen’s room at the hospital?”

  Judy said uncertainly, “All right.” She hung up.

  “Dane,” Ashton McKell said from the doorway; Lutetia was peering anxiously from behind him. “You said you’d tell me.”

  “Come with me to see Ellery Queen, Dad. Mother, not you.”

  “Your mother will stay here.”

  “Whatever you think best, dear.”

  Left alone, Lutetia frowned out her picture window. The world outside was hurrying so. Trouble, always trouble. Ever since… But Lutetia shut her mind down very firmly. That way lay unpleasantness.

  There was always one’s duty, no matter how trifling, for relief. She rang for her maid. “Margaret, I shall want my needlework. Tell Helen she may begin clearing off the breakfast things.”

  * * *

  Ellery greeted them with ebullience. “It’s official,” he chortled. “I’ll be out of this Bastille in a few days.” Then he said, in a different tone,

  “What’s up now?”

  Dane handed him the kraft envelope. He peered in. Inside lay a smaller envelope, which he took out; pasted to the smaller envelope was a photograph of three written words: For the Police. Inside the smaller envelope, as in a Chinese puzzle box, there was an envelope smaller still, and on it was pasted a photo of a complete handwritten sentence: To be opened only in the event I die of unnatural causes. And inside the innermost envelope he found the photograph of a holograph statement about three-quarters of an ordinary page long.

  Ellery’s head shot up.

  “Sheila Grey,” he said sharply. “Is this her handwriting?” Dane nodded bitterly. Ashton said, “I’ve examined it, compared it with, well, some letters I have. It’s her handwriting without a doubt.” There was nothing in his expression at all, nothing. Only his voice betrayed him.

  Ellery glanced over the letter. Every jot of the photographed hand-script stood out starkly.

  “Miss Walsh.” He held the photo out to her. “Read this aloud. I want to hear it in a woman’s voice.”

  “Mr. Queen.”

  “Please.”

  Judy took it from him as if it were smeared with filth. She began to read; twice she had to pause to swallow.

  “‘Dane McKell tonight asked if he could come up to my apartment for a nightcap,’” Judy read. “ 1 told him I had work to do, but he insisted. In the apartment he refused to leave and nothing I could say made him do so.

  I lost my temper and slapped him. He then tried to… “‘

  Here Judy’s voice faltered altogether. Ellery said harshly, “Go on, please.”

  “‘He then tried to strangle me,’” Judy whispered. “‘This is not hysteria on my part - he actually tried to strangle me. He took my throat… in his hands and… squeezed and seemed to be out of his mind with an… with an insane rage.’ I can’t, Mr. Queen, I just can’t go on!” Ellery read the rest of it himself, rapidly. “‘As he choked me he screamed that he was going to kill me and he called me many obscene names. Then he dropped me to the floor and ran out of the apartment. In another minute I would have been dead of strangulation. I am convinced that he is a dangerous person and I repeat his name, Dane McKell. He definitely tried to kill me. Signed, Sheila Grey.’”

  “And I thought the McKell tribe was out of the woods,” Dane said hollowly. He laughed.

  No one laughed with him. Judy was blinking back tears as she stared out the hospital window; Ashton was frowning at Ellery, but not as if he could see him. Ellery set the letter down.

  “First,” he said. “Assuming Sheila Grey to have written the original of this letter - Dane, is what she wrote true?”

  Dane stared at his hands. “When I was a kid at school there was a boy named Philbrick, a stupid kid, I don’t even recall any more what he looked like, only that his nose was always running. He said to me, £If your father’s name is Ashton, yours ought to be Ashcan.’ Just silly kid talk, nonsense. But he kept at it. ‘Ashcan.’ Every time he saw me, ‘Ashcan.’ He knew I hated it. One night we were getting ready to go to bed. As he’d said a hundred times before, he jeered, ‘Ashcan, you left your towel in the shower.’ I went wild. Jumped him, knocked him down, got my hands around his throat, began to throttle him. I’d certainly have succeeded if some of the other boys hadn’t pulled me off. You remember, Dad. I was almost kicked out.

  “Yes, it’s all true, Mr. Queen, what Sheila wrote,” Dane muttered. “If sanity hadn’t returned in time… “

  “Dane’s always had a terrible temper, Mr. Queen,” Ashton said. “We had considerable trouble about that when he was a boy.” He stopped as if to digest the past, made a little gesture of bewilderment. “I thought that was all over, son.”

  “So did I, God damn it! Well, it isn’t.”

  “I surely thought you’d conquered it. I surely thought so.” Ellery was staring at the photographic paper. “I wonder just when that night she wrote this.”

  “It must have been after I left,” Ashton said. “You remember I got there just a shade before ten o’clock, and there was no indication that she’d been writing. She was crying.”

  “So she wrote it in the fifteen minutes or so between your leaving,” Ellery mused, “and her killer’s arrival.” He was poking about in the small envelope. “What’s this?”

  “Read it,” growled Dane, “and weep.”

  Ellery took from it a note written in anonymous block capital lettering, with an ordinary pencil, on a ragged-edged sheet apparently torn out of a cheap memorandum book.

  The note read:

  MR. DANE MCKELL. SHEILA GREY’S LETTER WON’T

  BE SENT TO POLICE IF. MAKE UP PLAIN PACKAGE

  100 $20 BILLS NOT MARKED AND MAIL TO MR. I.M.

  ECKS CARE GENERAL DELIVERY MAIN POST OFFICE

  CITY. IMMEDIATE. THEN PACK OF $1000 IN $20 BILLS, NOT MARKED, TO BE SENT 15TH OF EVERY MONTH

  WITHOUT FAIL SAME ADDRESS. OR POLICE WILL BE

  INFORMED. I MEAN THIS.

  “Mr. I. M. Ecks. A comedian,” Ellery commented. “I must say I don’t blame you for not finding him funny.”

  “Blackmail.” Dane let out the same bitter laugh. “What do I do?”

  “What I did,” his father said quietly.

  “What?” Dane said.

  “You paid someone blackmail, too, Mr. McKell?” Ellery turned quickly back from the etched trees he had been studying through his window.

  “I got a similar letter - I’m sure the same person sent it, from the kind of note it is, the wording, the paper and so on - shortly after, well, I began visiting Miss Grey.” Ashton McKell swallowed. “It was foolish of me, I know. But I just couldn’t face a scandal. So I paid - $2,000 down, $1,000 a month. It was worth that to me to keep my name and family from being dragged through the newspapers.”

  “But you kept seeing her,” Dane said slowly.

  “Sheila was important to me in a way which I doubt I could make anyone understand.” His father spoke with difficulty. “Anyway, I kept sending this dirty hound, whoever he is, the thousand a month until I was arrested. Naturally, after that he had no further hold over me, and I stopped paying him. I haven’t heard a word about it since.”

  “Do you have any of the notes you received?”

  “I got just that first one - the one like this, Mr. Queen. I burned it.” Ellery brooded. “Dane, let’s go over the ground again, in the light of this new information. You left Sheila before ten o’clock that night. You left her alive. You didn’t show up at your parents’ apartment until after midnight. All right. What did you do in those two hours?”

  “I took a little walk first, to cool off. I was horrified at myself, at what I’d almost done. I knew I must have hurt her badly, then I’d run as if I’d murdered her. Finally I decided to go back -”

  “You went back?” cried Ellery. Dane’s father and Judy were open-mouthed.

  “I’m on one hell of a spot, hey?” Dane said with a wry smile. “That’s what I did, all right. I figured I owed her an explanation, the story of these rages, to ask her forgiveness if nothing else. So I went back to the building

  - “Did anyone see you?”

  “I don’t believe so, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Go on.”

  “I took the elevator up to the penthouse and stood before her door. I raised my hand - I actually raised it - to ring her bell. And… I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to. To ring it, or knock, or use my key, or anything.

  I chickened out. I couldn’t face her.”

  Oddly, he addressed this last to Judy in a pleading way, as if soliciting her understanding. Her face softened.