A Fine and Private Place

“Why did he have me read his new will the other day? Why did he ask me to dinner tonight?”

“Worrywart.” Virginia laughed. “That will is all right, isn’t it, Peter? No gimmicks or weenies?”

“No conditions at all. At his death you’ll come into ownership and control of half a billion dollars. Some people have all the luck.”

“Don’t we?” Virginia drew a long, long breath. “Woo-eee! But Peter.”

“Yes, baby.”

“We’ll have to be extra careful from now on.”

“Why extra?”

“Wills can be changed.”

“Oh,” said Peter Ennis. “Well, don’t worry about it, little chicken. I think we’re over the hump.”

TERM

It is born.

The next morning, quite late, as Crump held her chair in the breakfast room, Virginia Whyte Importuna asked, “Where is Mr. Importuna?”

“He hasn’t appeared this morning as yet, madam, from his bedroom.”

“Nino still asleep? At this hour? That’s not like him.”

“I presume the excitement and so on of yesterday, madam.”

“It’s true he didn’t feel well at dinner last night and went straight to bed,” Virginia said. She frowned. “Hasn’t Vincenzo said anything?”

“Mr. Importuna’s man has strict orders never to disturb the master, madam, until he’s rung for.”

“I know that! But orders are made to be broken, Crump. That’s what distinguishes people from robots!”

“Yes, madam. Do you wish me to look in on Mr. Importuna?”

“I’ll do it myself.”

She was dressed in a billowing morning gown, and as she swept through the vast museum of her home she thought, If I had a candle in my hand I’ll bet I’d be mistaken for Lady Macbeth.

Importuna’s bedroom door was closed.

She tried the knob and it turned. She raised her hand, hesitated, then knocked lightly.

“Nino?”

They had had separate bedrooms since very early in their marriage, when Virginia first faced one of the bitterer truths of her bargain. You blackmailed me into marrying you, she had told him, and you’re keeping me married to you by the stick and the carrot, and as your wife I have to endure your bestialities, but there is nothing in our contract that says I must occupy your bedroom after you’ve been slaked. I demand sleeping quarters of my own.

He had supplied them instantly. So long as you understand your duties, sposa, he had said with a mock bow of his squat-to her, grotesque-figure.

“Nino?” Virginia knocked again.

And yet, she thought, no physical violence, ever. Merely humiliations. Merely! Often she would have preferred the violence. To the abasement, the cruel degradation of her womanhood. As if she were in her own person responsible for his deficiency as a man and must be made to pay and suffer for it.

“Nino!”

From beyond the door still nothing.

So Virginia flung it aside and opened her mouth and was surprised that her shriek came out in a puff of silence. But she persisted, and eventually the shrieking had a sound to it. Then Crump came running as if for his stately, superior life, and Editta to add to the noise, and Vincenzo, and other servants, even the magnificent Cesar, and at last Peter, from his workroom. Peter, who glanced for a full five stricken seconds into Importuna’s bedroom. Then he reached in and grasped the handle of the door and pulled it viciously to. And grabbed the shrieker by both arms, cast her bodily at Crump, and shouted, “Do something human for once in your life, will you? Take care of Mrs. Importuna. The police-I’ve got to call the police.”

AFTERBIRTH

The placenta is a spongy oval structure in the mother through which the fetus is nourished during pregnancy.

It is expelled immediately after the child is born.

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1967

The fantasia of the Importuna-Importunato case (all involved in the investigation agreed that the murder- suicide-murder sequence of the brothers’ fate constituted three links in the same chain) was, for Ellery, only beginning. Its incredibilities induced the kind of ratiocinative headache he normally enjoyed looking back on in the pain-free aftermath of success; but during the migraine of the Importuna affair, with its brain-cell-smashing bombardment by a veritable ammo dump of number 9s, he found himself wishing at times that he had chosen a simpler avocation, like pursuing the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction to the infinite end of the finite universe or inventing a convincing explanation of the Mobius strip.

The immediate facts of Nino Importuna’s murder were unpromising enough to please the most passionate partisan of lawlessness and disorder. The industrialist had dined a casa with his wife and confidential secretary at the conclusion of a happy holiday, his combined 68th birthday and fifth wedding anniversary; during dinner he had suddenly complained of dizziness and stomach pains, but he had shaken off a suggestion to call his physician, saying that his indisposition was not serious enough for medical treatment; he had refused assistance and retired to his private quarters under his own power after promising to take a home remedy and go to bed.

In his bedroom he had summoned his valet, Yincenzo Ricci, and told the man to get him out of his clothes and turn down his bed. He had then dismissed Ricci for the night. As Vincenzo was leaving he had seen his employer, in the bathroom, reach into the medicine chest. The valet was apparently the last person, aside from the murderer, to have seen Importuna alive. No, Mr. Importuna had not seemed very sick, merely in a little distress.

Mrs. Importuna said that she had not entered her husband’s bedroom that night, or even looked in on him, for fear of awakening him. “If he were feeling worse,” she told the first detectives to reach the scene, the men who were officially carrying the case, “he would either have rung for Vincenzo or called me. As I heard nothing I assumed he was asleep and feeling all right.”

Peter Ennis, the secretary, had left the penthouse immediately after Mrs. Importuna and he finished their dessert, he said, and he had gone home to his bachelor pad; he occupied an apartment in a converted brownstone a few blocks west.

A small bottle of aspirin, a large bottle of milk of magnesia with the cap off, and a tablespoon coated white with the dried antacid-laxative, were standing on the marble counter beside the washbasin in the bathroom.

The body, dressed in the silk pajamas which Vincenzo Ricci testified to having laid out for him the previous evening, was lying in the king-size bed covered by a light summer silk comforter. Only the head was exposed, what remained of it. There was a great deal of blood on the bedclothes and headboard, very little elsewhere. Unlike the case of Julio Importunato, his brother’s head had been the target of repeated blows; the medical examiner counted 9 different skull fractures. Apparently Importuna had been bludgeoned to death in his sleep. There was no sign of a struggle, and nothing-according to the valet-was missing or out of place.