“Scram.”
“But you want proof. Delia will admit it if you ask her in the right way, Lieutenant. Delia’s a very civilized woman.”
“Get out.”
Wallace laughed. He replaced the phone gently, adjusted his fashion-able hat on his handsome head, and walked out humming.
Keats insisted on driving Ellery home. The detective drove slowly through the five o’clock traffic.
Neither man said anything.
He had seen them for that moment in the Priam hallway, the day he had come at her summons to investigate the plague of dead frogs. Wallace had been standing close to her, far closer than a man stands to a woman unless he knows he will not be repulsed. And she had not repulsed him.
She had stood there accepting his pressure while Wallace squeezed her hand and whispered in her ear... He remembered one or two of Wallace’s glances at her, the glances of a man with a secret knowledge, glances of amused power... “/ always take the line of least resistance... He remembered the night she had hidden herself in his bedroom at the sound of her son’s and Laurel’s arrival. She had come to him that night for the purpose to which her life in the Priam house had accustomed her. Probably she had a prurient curiosity about “celebrities” or she was tired of Wallace. (And this was Wallace’s revenge?) He would have read the signs of the nymph easily enough if he had not mistaken her flabbiness for reserve―
“We’re here, Mr. Queen,” Keats was saying.
They were at the cottage.