“Foster, wasn’t it?” Dane said.

  “His full name.”

  There was another silence. Then Judy said, “I remember. Something about Edgar Allan Poe… Yes! You asked Mr. Winterson how to spell Foster’s first name, which was Allen.”

  “Allen - with an e - Bainbridge Foster,” Ellery nodded. “Allen-an anagram of Nella, the name of her 1958 collection!

  “Another coincidence? Let’s see.”

  Winterson had mentioned three other men’s names, Ellery pointed out, in identifying Sheila’s lovers during the following four years. In 1959 it had been John F. “Jack” Hurt III, speed demon of the raceways. In i960 it had been the high-society polo player, Ronald Van Vester. Winterson had been abroad during 1961 and was able to suggest no lover’s name for that year, but for 1962 he had put the finger on Eddwin Odonnell, the Shakespearean actor.

  “John F. Hurt III, 1959,” Ellery said. “And the name of Sheila’s collection in 1959? Lady Ruth. Hurt-Ruth-anagrams.

  “Ronald Van Vester, i960. And the name of the i960 collection - Lady Lorna D. ‘D’ for ‘Doone’? Not a bit of it. ‘ Ronald’ and ‘Lorna D.’ are anagrams.

  “The pattern is fixed,” said Ellery. “Four years, four anagrams of contemporaneous lovers… I must admit that the absence of 1961, the Lady Dulcea year, piqued me, and still does. Because Dulcea - a very strange name indeed, so strange it sounds forced - when you unscramble it trying to make a man’s name out of it, peculiarly enough yields the name ‘Claude.’ Of course, we don’t know if there was such a man, or if Sheila was simply taking a sabbatical that year -”

  “Wait,” Ashton McKell said. “Claude… Yes, Sheila spoke a great deal about some Frenchman, a playwright, who came to New York in - when was it? - 1961, I think - yes, 1961 - to have a play of his produced on Broadway. The way she spoke of him - now that I realize -”

  “Claude Claudel,” Dane said slowly. “Damn it all, don’t tell me he too -”

  “1961. Claude. Dulcea.” Ellery nodded. “It’s too perfectly fitted into the pattern to be coincidental. I think we have a right to assume that Monsieur Claudel was Number One on Miss Grey’s 1961 hit parade, for part of the year, anyway.”

  “But what about 1962?” Inspector Queen could not help asking. He was as fascinated as the others by the anagrammatical pattern.

  “Well, according to Winterson, in 1962 the favored man was the actor, Odonnell, whose given name, by which no one ever calls him except on theater programs, is ‘Edd’ - two ds - win.’ Odonnell is always called

  ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell, from his tiresome playing of the Shakespearean role.

  And what was Sheila’s 1962 collection named? Lady Thelma.

  ‘Hamlet’ - ’Thelma.’ Anagrams.

  “Every lover of Sheilas anagrammatically inspired the name of The House of Grey’s collection current during his interregnum. Apparently she preferred to use his Christian name as the basis of the anagram, but she would use the surname if she had to.”

  And the room was a pocket of silence again in the celebrating world, with the wind outside adding to the noisy merriment. A clock, which had been ticking all along, sounded as if it had just begun. Someone’s chair creaked, and someone else breathed a snorty breath. In this emphasized silence a strained voice, Lutetia’s, said, “Mr. Queen, do go on. Please.”

  “In a way,” Ellery said, “this completes the record. The last complete showing of The House of Grey was the ‘Hamlet’ Odonnell-Lady Thelma year. But at the time of her death Sheila was working on her new collection. She had drawn roughs and made sketches, and had actually completed at least one design.

  “Since collections and lovers go together in Sheila’s case, who was her last - her most recent - lover? What man was intimate with her during the past year? Forgive me for becoming personal again, Mr. McKell, but that wasn’t you. You fell into a special category in Sheila’s life; besides, your name doesn’t anagrammatize.” Ashton McKell’s face was still set in plaster of Paris. “Was it you, Dane? Yes, but only in the most limited of senses, as far as I can gather. You and Sheila had really not had time to establish a meaningful relationship. You may have been on your way to it; but, in any case, whom were you following? Whose place would you have filled?

  Because there is someone - someone you don’t suspect.” Ellery sounded as weary as his audience looked startled.

  He reminded them, from Winterson’s account and from what Sheila herself had told Dane, that she dropped her lovers as suddenly as she took them. If at the time of Dane’s appearance in her life she had already dropped her most recent lover - assuming such an unknown existed - or if he had somehow learned that he was about to be dropped by this unpredictable one-man-at-a-time woman, as she had called herself, then a perfect motive for murder could be expected. Hell might have no fury like a woman scorned, Ellery pointed out, but as a matter of statistical fact more murders of frustrated passion and love-revenge were committed in the United States by men than by women.

  “We have one feasible way,” he said, “to check the theory that another lover existed in Sheila’s life - the lover Dane was in the process of displacing. Had she named the new collection she was working on at the time of her death?” Ellery started to rise, but he sank back in the chair with a grimace.

  “These damned legs of mine,” he said. “Ramon, would you mind? The tubular package on the mantelpiece.”

  The chauffeur brought it to him, and Ellery unwrapped it, disclosing a roll of heavy paper. He unrolled it, glanced over it, nodded, and held it up for all to see.

  It was the beautifully finished fashion drawing of a model in a sports outfit. The clothes were sketched in exquisite detail.

  “This is the only design Sheila Grey had time to finish,” Ellery said.

  “And it tells us the name Sheila had selected for the collection. Here it is at the bottom: Lady Norma, in block lettering.

  “Lady Norma,” Ellery went on swiftly, with no sign of weariness now,

  “and I point out to you that ‘Norma’ is an anagram of the name of the fifth person who was in a position to know of the Sheila - Ashton rendezvous - the fifth person who, the other four having been eliminated, must have been the blackmailer - and Sheila’s killer. For who else could have known that Ashton McKell visited Sheila Grey? His chauffeur, who dropped him off at the club Wednesday after Wednesday and picked him up again late every Wednesday night, and who was uniquely situated to suspect the nature of those Wednesday excursions - and to verify them.

  His chauffeur, who somehow became Dane’s predecessor in Sheila’s affections and then murdered her for throwing him over - Dad, watch Ramon!” Ramon had backed toward the foyer. Hi^ skin had turned a putty color; his nostrils were pinched white with surprise, anger, and fear; the line-up of his teeth glittered in his swarthy face. And as Inspector Queen, Dane, and Ashton McKell closed in on him, Ramon seized a heavy chair, flung it at them, and was gone through the apartment door.

  The Inspector half caught the chair; part of it banged against Ashton McKell’s legs and tripped him; and Dane tripped over his father. For a moment the three men were an impossible tangle of arms and legs. Then, shouting, the McKells regained their feet and plunged toward the foyer.

  But Inspector Queen roared, “No! He may be armed! Let him go!” And as they stopped, panting, he said, “He can’t get away. I have detectives posted at every exit of the building. He’ll run straight into their arms.”

  * * *

  Later, over restorative brandy - although Ashton McKell was still too shocked by the revelation to regain his natural florid color - Ellery said,

  “Yes, Ramon, whose name inspired Sheila Grey to label her new collection Norma, was her last lover.” Out of pity he did not glance at the elder McKell. “It was Ramon whom she dropped when she became interested in you, Dane, and his Spanish pride brought on a homicidal rage.” He forbore to go into the question of Sheila’s taste in men, knowing that part of Ashton’s shock resulted from the fact that his own chauffeur had been sleeping with the woman of his dreams; her lovers had been a heterogeneous lot, and he supposed that the Spaniard - Ramon was handsome in a Mediterranean way - had struck her fancy.

  “It was Ramon who came to Sheila’s apartment that night, sneaked into the bedroom to get the revolver he knew was in the night-table drawer - forgive me again, but he had had plenty of opportunity to become acquainted with that bedroom - and, entering Sheila’s workroom, shot her dead as she sat telephoning the police. It was Ramon, of course, who replaced the phone on the cradle, found Sheila’s letter to the police, pocketed it, and escaped.

  “He took the letter to use for blackmailing Dane; or, if that failed, as it did, to draw suspicion away from himself by pointing it toward Dane… as it also did.

  “He almost got away with it.”

  There was very little conversation until someone rapped at the door and Inspector Queen opened it to find Sergeant Velie there, grinning massively.

  “You got him, I take it,” the Inspector said.

  “We got him, Inspector. He’s quiet now, being a real good boy. You coming downstairs with us?”

  “As soon as I get my coat and hat.”

  When the door closed on them, as if on signal a babble of exclamations broke out.

  Its over, its over.

  “How can we ever thank you, Mr. Queen?”

  “By God, he did it. Mr. Queen - Ellery -”

  “This calls for another toast!”

  “What a New Year’s gift,” cried Ashton McKell. “Are there the fixings for another toast?”

  Three more bottles of champagne were found in the kitchen. Glasses chimed joyously. After a while, Ashton was singing a song of his college youth. (“Oh, we’ll sing of Lydia Pinkham/ And her love for the human race,/ How she makes her Vegetable Compound,/ And the papers publish her face.”) And Lutetia hiccupped ever so slightly and burst into slightly raffish laughter; and Judy danced a jig to the humming by the assembled company of “The Irish Washerwoman.”

  And when Ellery said, “I don’t mind telling you that my self-esteem has been restored,” it was Lutetia McKell who cried, “To the armchair detective and his restored self-esteem!” and they drank the toast in the last of the champagne, while Ellery smiled and smiled.

  * * *

  The fact that “the chauffeur done it,” as the man on the street put it, seemed to take the zing out of the Sheila Grey murder case. It was as if the case-hardened mystery buff, reading a new work of fiction, were to follow the red herring through 250 pages and find, on page 251, that the criminal was the butler. Other news began to crowd the Grey case into corners of the front pages, and soon it was being reported on page 6, and beyond.

  The McKells dropped out of the news entirely.

  It was a wonderful relief. Ashton threw himself back into his business with something very like fury. He had neglected his affairs for a long time, and he was not a man to be satisfied with the work of subordinates. The cocoa bean crop in Ghana, the sugar shipments from Peru, the problem of substitutes for Havana tobacco, the efforts of half a dozen new nations to create merchant marines - he dealt with such matters like a juggler confident of his prowess. Judy was lunching with him at the office these days because of the heavy work-load he piled on her.

  Lutetia was happily back at her charity sewing, even (for the first time in two decades) engaging a seamstress to help her with the backlog of illegitimate layettes.

  Dane set out to finish his novel, secretly doubting that it would ever be accomplished. It held too many associations for him of the summer.

  Summer of probing Sheila, dating Sheila, wooing Sheila, loving Sheila… summer of Sheila; he knew it would never be anything else in his mind.

  Except that it was also the summer of having lost Sheila forever.

  Half-heartedly he toyed with the idea of abandoning the novel-in-progress and starting another, but he put it off, promising himself that he would embark on a profitable schedule as soon as the indictment against him was formally dropped. The only word he had had since Ramon’s arrest was that his lawyers had procured an indefinite postponement of his trial, pending the quashing of the indictment. But as the days passed and he heard nothing, he grew irritated.

  He phoned police headquarters.

  At first Inspector Queen, who sounded peculiar, suggested that he get in touch with the district attorney’s office. Then suddenly he said, “Maybe it’s just as well. Wait, Mr. McKell. As long as you’ve phoned me -”

  “Yes?”

  “Some questions have come up. Maybe I’d better discuss them with you. I was intending to call you later, but I guess this is as good a time as any.”

  “What questions?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the Inspector said. “I’d like my son to be present.

  Suppose we make it my apartment at two o’clock, all right?” Dane showed up with his parents and Judy in tow. “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said to the Queens, “but I told my father about it, and he seemed to feel that all of us ought to be present.”

  “I don’t know what it’s about, either,” Ellery said, regarding the Inspector with narrowed eyes. “So, Dad, how about laying it on the line?” Inspector Queen said, “We’ve been questioning this Ramon Alvarez day and night for - it seems to me - an eternity. He’s a funny one.”

  “How do you mean, Dad?”

  “Well, I’ve grilled murder suspects by the hundreds in my time, and I’ve never run across one with just this combination of frankness and mulishness. He’s made some important admissions, such as being in the penthouse during the general crime period, but he keeps insisting he left her there alive. He won’t budge from it.”

  “Why would you expect him to admit it?” asked the elder McKell.

  “Don’t murderers always deny their guilt?”

  “Not as often as people think. Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s telling the truth.”

  “That’s nonsense, Dad,” Ellery said. “The man is guilty. I proved -”

  “Maybe you didn’t, son.”

  Ellery gaped at him.

  “In any event, Inspector,” growled Ashton McKell, “all this is your problem, not ours. Why have you brought Dane back into it?”

  “Because he may be able to help us clear this up once and for all.

  “Let’s go back over this,” the old man said in a head-on, plodding sort of way. And he ticked off the time elements of the crime. Sheila Grey had sent Ashton away at a few minutes past ten - at 10:03 p.m. Then she had sat down and written her letter about Dane to the police. “We’ve had people write out the letter in longhand, as she did, trying to time the writing at the pace she must have used - it was fresh on her mind, a matter of urgency and fear, so she couldn’t have written slowly.

  “Five policewomen tried it. The quickest time ran a few seconds over four minutes, the longest just under six. Let’s take the longest time. She had to go to her desk after you left, Mr. McKell, she had to sit down, take paper and pen from her drawer, write - and let’s even say she read the letter over, which she may not have done - seal it in the first envelope, write on it ‘To be opened in the event I die of unnatural causes,’ place the first envelope into the larger envelope, and write on that, ‘For the Police.’

  “Now we’ve gone all through this, and no matter how we figure it, she simply couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes at the outside for the whole procedure. I think ten minutes is away over - eight would be far more likely. But let’s even call it ten. So she was finished with the letter and the sealing and so on by 10:13 at the latest. But she was shot at 10:23.

  What happened during those ten minutes? Okay, the killer came. But did it take him ten minutes to get the revolver out of the bedroom drawer and shoot her?”

  “They talked,” Dane suggested.

  “And she picked up the phone and called the precinct with the killer standing over her? It won’t wash. Remember what she said to the operator

  - that it was an emergency. When she got the precinct sergeant, she told him, ‘Someone is in my apartment,’ and you’ll recall he said she was whispering, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. No, she didn’t spend any of the time talking to the murderer. Still - there it is. We don’t have a full picture of that ten minutes, between the time she finished the letter and the shot the sergeant heard over the phone.”

  “I don’t understand what’s bugging you, Dad,” Ellery said testily. “It’s simple. Part of the ten minutes was consumed by Ramon’s coming in and shooting her. The rest of it was just nothing - before he came she sat there, or worked on a sketch, or did something else inconsequential but time-consuming.”

  “But Ramon got there, he says, at 10:15,” Inspector Queen retorted.

  “He insists he only stayed four to five minutes at the most. That would bring us to, say, 10:20. If Ramon is telling the truth, there was enough time for somebody else to get into the penthouse after he left.”

  “If he’s telling the truth,” remarked Ellery caustically. “Or if his calculation of the time was accurate, which seems highly unlikely to me. What was he doing, holding a stopwatch on himself? We’re dealing with minutes, Dad, not hours! I don’t know what’s the matter with you today.” The Inspector said nothing.

  And Ellery looked at him very hard indeed. “And another thing,” he said. “Ramon denies killing her. Did he say what he was doing up there?”

  “Collecting a blackmail payment.”

  “What!”

  “Ramon was blackmailing Sheila, too?” Ashton cried.

  “That’s right. He was playing both sides of the street.”

  “But why should Sheila have paid him money?”

  “He says because of you, Mr. McKell. She didn’t care about her reputation, but she did about yours, and she was willing to pay Ramon to keep his mouth shut.”

  Ashton fell silent.

  “Incidentally, she was smarter than you were,” the old man said dryly.

  “Ramon says she figured out right off that he was the blackmailer - that he’d probably followed you one Wednesday to find out what you were doing those afternoons and evenings, and learned that you were visiting her apartment in disguise. But she paid him anyway, to protect you.” Dane’s father turned away. Lutetia’s profile set. But then it softened, and she leaned over and took her husband’s hand.