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Authors: Ellery Queen

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BOOK: Wife or Death
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“Who's the lucky Lothario?”

“You always think some man is involved.” Angel sounded cross. “You don't understand. I'm simply fed up with this town.”

“And me, my Angel?”

She said softly, “I think I'll always sort of love you.”

Amazing gal, Denton grinned to himself. Almost a psychopathic liar. Or, against all reason, she
had
missed her calling. Maybe the stage had lost a natural-born actress at that.

Neither said another syllable during the drive.

The Denton house was a one-story ranch type of three bedrooms, with two baths and an attached garage. Denton drove through his open garage door and cut the engine, automatically glancing at the mileage meter before switching off the lights. It was a new car, and for some time Denton had been keeping a running check on its gas consumption. His mind made a mechanical note that he had put a total of twenty-eight miles on the car since driving out of the garage early in the evening.

Angel disappeared through the garage door to the kitchen while Denton was hauling down the overhead door. By the time he got inside she was in her bedroom, with the door shut.

From the beginning of their marriage Angel had insisted on separate bedrooms, not from coquetry but because the arrangement satisfied her groping sense of status.

For months now, of course, he had not stepped through her doorway.

Denton hesitated, half-tempted to go in and finish their divorce talk.

But then he shrugged and decided it would keep until morning.

Switching off the trail of lights she had left, he shut his own bedroom door and prepared for bed.

It was 3:10 by his wristwatch when he snapped off his bed light.

The next day being Sunday, Denton slept until noon. He showered and shaved, got into robe and slippers, and went to the kitchen. He noticed as he passed Angel's open doorway that her bed was empty.

She was not in the kitchen, either. Must be in her bathroom, he decided, and put a pot of coffee on the range, then stepped out onto the front porch for the Sunday paper. There were traces of last night's storm in the street, but it was drying rapidly under a strong sun.

This time something made him pause before her bedroom door. Something was wrong. Then he knew what it was. There was dead silence from her bathroom. He went into the bedroom and opened the bathroom door and looked in. She was not there.

That was when he saw the note lying on her pillow.

She had written it very carefully on a sheet of her best stationery in her best grade-school handwriting:

Dear James, I am leaving you and Ridgemore for good and please don't try to find me. I will write letting you know where to ship the rest of my things.

Angel

Rather to his surprise, the note made him angry. To sneak off in the middle of the night without even discussing divorce plans! What the devil was she going to do, hang him up? He crushed the note, slammed it into the wastebasket near her vanity and began to check her closet and her dresser drawers.

Both closet and dresser bulged with clothes.

At first Denton was puzzled. She could not have taken much with her; certainly most of her dresses and coats and lingerie were still here.

He poked about at the rear of the closet. She owned a set of matched airline bags he had bought her for their honeymoon. Only one of the pieces was gone, a medium-sized bag.

And then Denton remembered the unidentifiable male whisper of the night before, during the blackout: “Just take a suitcase.” This had all been plotted with her lover, this middle-of-the-night flight. Of course. That would appeal to Angel's sense of romance. One bag … The sonofabitch must be planning to do a complete reoutfitting job on her, he thought sourly.

Denton investigated the garage. The car was still there.

So her lover came by to pick her up, he mused. Probably parked up the street and waited for his Cleopatra to steal out of the house, shaking in his boots for fear that Outraged Husband might come blasting out before they could get away.

You damn fool, he thought. If you'd driven right up to the door I'd have handed her to you.

The coffeepot was perking. He turned the heat down to
Low
, poured himself a cupful, took it into the living room and sat down and calmly began to read the Sunday paper. It was the
Buffalo American
; the
Clarion
did not publish on Sundays.

There was food in the refrigerator, and Denton was not in the mood for dining out. He had still not left the house when the telephone rang at 8 P.M.

“Recovered from last night, Jim?” It was George Guest.

“Hell, yes,” Denton said. “I slept till noon.”

“Feel like some bridge tonight?”

“I'm afraid I can't, George. No partner, for one thing.”

“Oh? Where's Angel?”

Denton hesitated. For the first time it struck him that Angel's running off with some unknown Casanova was going to be the cherry on the cheesecake for Ridgemore. Now the tongues would really wag. Why give them the chance? The hell with them all—even George, he thought with a grin.

“She's gone off to visit her parents. You know. Titusville.”

“Oh. Going to be gone long?”

“A couple of weeks, she said.”

“Well, that's that.” George said. “How about me sending Corinne to a show and getting up a poker game?”

“Give me a raincheck, George. I have a big day on tap.”

“Okay,” said George cheerfully. “I tried. Drop by the store tomorrow, Jim, and I'll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Denton got to bed early. He was up at 6:30. Forty-five minutes later he was climbing into his car.

He had turned on the ignition and was about to pull out of the garage when, automatically as usual, he checked the mileage meter. That was funny. Or had he made a mistake in the last tally? The total was different. Fifteen miles had been added since he put the car away at 3 o'clock Sunday morning, on their return from the Wyatts'.

He sat there frowning. The more he thought, the surer he was that he had
not
mistaken the mileage total. And he certainly hadn't used the car Sunday; it had stood here in the garage all day.

The only possible explanation was that, after he had fallen asleep when they got home from the Wyatts' on the night of Saturday-Sunday, Angel had moused the car out of the garage and driven somewhere and back. Somewhere seven and a half miles away. Or, say, between seven and eight.

She's waiting for her hot-pants swain to pick her up, Denton thought, and while she's waiting she makes a round trip of fifteen miles—to do what? see whom? It sounded too kooky even for Angel.

Denton shrugged. Why break his head over another of her vagaries? Let the other guy have the headaches now.

He backed from the garage, grinning, and drove downtown to work.

6

Jim Denton was sole owner, publisher and editor of the Ridgemore
Clarion
. A weekly with a circulation of nearly 6000, more than half of it rural, it was the only local newspaper in the county. While Denton subscribed to a national wire service, the
Clarion
's news columns were chiefly devoted to events of local interest. A speech by the Ridgemore member of the State Conservation Commission before the County Grange was likely to pull more space than the latest flare-up in U.S.-Soviet relations.

The paper was housed in an old two-story frame building in the town square. It was a maverick three-man operation. Amos Case, a moody man in his grizzled sixties, was classified officially as a printer, and young Ted Winchester had been hired as a reporter and ad salesman. But in practice there was no clear division of duties among the three. Old Case not merely set type and ran the press, he acted as rewrite man and proofreader as well. When young Wincheser was not legging it, he pitched in at the shop. And Denton himself published, edited, dug up news, proofread, sold space, even helped with the typesetting at times.

From 7:30 to 9 A.M., when the stores opened and the business district came alive, Denton and his two-man staff could work uninterrupted. It was during this ninety minutes that he and Ted Winchester sorted through the mass of copy that had come in from correspondents—Denton had one in every village and town in the county, whose news items he paid for by the line if and when used—culled those of most interest and rewrote them in publishable form. As fast as the copy came from their typewriters Amos Case set type. At 9 o'clock the three took their habitual break, young Winchester fetching coffee from the restaurant next door.

And, this morning for the first time, Jim Denton had time to chew over his wife's decampment.

Analyzing his anger, he decided that it was rooted in pique. His manhood was offended. Not by the fact that she had left him for another man, God knew, but that the initiative for their final break had been hers. By the right of eminent cuckoldry, he reflected,
he
had been entitled to make the break, not Angel.

At this point Denton recognized the true object of his anger. It was himself. After all, he could not blame Angel for walking out on him when for months he had been thinking of walking out on her. It was his own procrastination that had placed him in this absurd position.

This should have been the end of it; oddly, it was not. He found himself speculating about the identity of the man with whom she had run off. Was it possible he was still in love with her? Denton laughed to himself. Love-shove. It was plain old-fashioned curiosity. He was a newspaperman, wasn't he?

Who could the guy be? He was positively somebody who had attended the Wyatts' party after the club dance.

Denton ran through the candidates. Matthew Fallon seemed the likeliest.

He phoned the cartoonist's home; Fallon worked at home.

The voice answering the phone was Fallon's.

“Oh, hi, Jim,” the cartoonist said. “What's up?”

“Just looking for news. Heard you're taking off for New York.”

“Me?” Fallon said in surprise. “That's news, all right. To me.”

“You're not going anywhere?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, Matt. Just checking it out. See you.”

“Sure,” Fallon said, and hung up.

Denton's call to Arnold Long apparently caught the young man still asleep.

“Sorry to get you up,” Denton said.

“It's all right. Mom fusses about me sleeping late anyway.” Long yawned. “What's on your mind?”

“I called you to settle an argument. You just got out of the Army, so I figured you'd know.”

“What's the argument?”

“Isn't master sergeant the highest enlisted rank in the Army? Fellow here says there are now two higher.”

“He's right and he's wrong,” the young playboy said. “There are three grades of master sergeant: classes seven, eight and nine. Nine's top, but they're all called master.”

“That makes it a standoff,” Denton laughed. “Thanks, Arnold.”

“For what?” Long said, and yawned again and hung up.

Denton thought it over. The only other unattached males at the Wyatts' had been Ralph Crosby and old Gerald Trevor. Of course, Angel could have taken off with a married man, but in view of her record it seemed unlikely. Besides, while as Mrs. James Denton she would sleep with anybody, the man she chose to run away with would have to be able to restore her marital status.

Ralph Crosby … Could Crosby's and Angel's conduct Saturday night have been an act to fool everybody? Denton decided to check—just, he told himself, for the hell of it.

“Ted,” he said to his young reporter. “Run over to the D.A.'s office and see if anything popped over the weekend.”

The district attorney's office was in the county courthouse across the square. Winchester was back in fifteen minutes. There had been no serious criminal activity anywhere in the county over the weekend.

“Talk to Crosby himself?”

“Sure. Boy, does he look hung over.”

Leaving, Denton mused, Gerald Trevor.

Something was wrong somewhere.

Nevertheless, Denton phoned the Wyatt house. Trevor's daughter answered.

“This is Jim Denton, Ardis. Either Norm or your pa around?”

“Why, no, Jim. They've gone up to the lodge to shoot grouse.”

“There's no phone up there, is there?”

“Well, I'm planning to drive up this evening. Can I deliver a message?”

“Nothing like that. It's just that I'm short of news.”

Ardis Wyatt laughed. “How's this? They left here at five-thirty A.M. and weren't gone two and a half hours when, lo and behold, they were back. Norm brought dad home for a change of clothes—he'd slipped fording a creek. Is that news, Jim?”

“This week it is,” Denton chuckled. “Thanks, Ardis. Let me know if anything else dramatic happens.”

Now thoroughly challenged, Denton made a list from memory of every man who had been at the party. There had been nineteen, including himself and the five he had eliminated. He went over the list several times until he was satisfied he had left no one out. Then, since he had talked to George Guest on the phone some sixteen hours after the probable time of Angel's elopement, he crossed the name Guest off the list.

During the day, whenever he could snatch a moment, Denton phoned the men on his list. By quitting time he had managed to reach every one.

Not a man of the remaining twelve who had attended the Wyatts' party was absent from town.

Starting the work day so early in the morning had one compensation: the
Clarion
office closed at 3 P.M. Denton walked over to the north side of the square to the Guest Hardware Store. George Guest, just finishing with a customer, signaled Denton to stand by. When the customer left, Guest nodded to his clerk and the two friends went over to Jordan's.

Coffee at Jordan's Pik-U-Up was almost a daily ritual with Denton and Guest. As they dropped into their favorite booth a waitress automatically brought them two cups of coffee, Denton's black, Guest's with cream.

BOOK: Wife or Death
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