Keats was flabbergasted. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll put arsenic in your soup?”
“Why should he?” Ellery asked reasonably. “I’m paying him to take dictation and type my manuscript. And talking about soup, Wallace makes a mean sopa de aim en dras, a Mallorquina. From Valldemosa ― perfectly delicious. How about sampling it tomorrow night?”
Keats said thanks a lot but he didn’t go for that gourmet stuff himself, his speed was chicken noodle soup, besides his wife was having some friends in for television, and he hung up hastily.
To the press Mr. Queen was lofty. He had never been one to hound a man for past errors. Wallace needed a job, and he needed a secretary, and that was that.
Wallace merely smiled.
Delia Priam sold the hillside property and disappeared.
The usual guesses, substantiated by no more than “a friend of the family who asks that her name be withheld” or “Delia Priam is rumored,” had her variously in Las Vegas at the dice tables with a notorious under-world character; in Taos, New Mexico, under an assumed name, where she was said to be writing her memoirs for newspaper and magazine syndication; flying to Rome heavily veiled; one report insisted on placing her on a remote shelf in India as the “guest” of some wild mountain rajah well-known for his peculiar tastes in Occidental women.
That none of these pleasantly exciting stories was true everyone took for granted, but authoritative information was lacking. Delia Priam’s father was not available for comment; he had stuffed some things in a duffel bag and gone off to Canada to prospect, he said, for uranium ore.
And her son simply refused to talk to reporters.
To Ellery, privately, Crowe Macgowan confided that his mother had entered a retreat near Santa Maria; he spoke as if he never expected to see her again.