The Scarlet Letters Read Free

off another man’s wife–”
    â€œDirk, no!” screamed Martha.
    Dirk stepped into a moonbeam. Ellery saw that some bubbles of foam had gathered in the twist of his mouth. His eyes seemed sober and sad. He backhanded Martha’s face across the bench and she disappeared.
    Involuntarily, Ellery stooped to look for her.
    He never reached his knees. A bomb tore his head off and the back of it went bong ! against the cement walk, followed by the rest of him.
    The last thing he remembered was an outburst from the nearby benches as of many firecrackers.
    It was applause.
    â€œSo now you know,” Martha was saying. “Better than I could have told you, Ellery. I tried my best to keep him from following me. But I guess I’m not very good at it, and he doesn’t believe anything I say, anyway.”
    â€œHave some more coffee, darling,” crooned Nikki.
    Ellery wished that Nikki would show some appreciation of his performance. His jaw had a green and purple lump on it and the back of his head felt as if it had bounced around in a cement mixer.
    He had come to in the park to find his head in Martha’s lap and a crowd of admiring spectators encirling them. Dirk was gone. The theater-loving patrolman was remarking with heat that he’d sure as hell like to run that hambone in for getting so carried away by his part–if Mr. Lunt would tell him the scene-stealing slob’s name, that is–and by the way, here he’d been under the impression that Mr. Lunt was getting gray, or was that one of them there now hair falsies? In the end, hiding his face with his hat, Ellery cajoled the patrolman into putting them in a cab at the 72nd Street entrance, the only address he could think to give in the mushy condition of his brain being that of the Queen apartment. And there was Nikki, who was supposed to have had a date with an obscure but paid-up member of the Authors League, waiting for his return. Martha had fallen into her arms, and the two women had disappeared in Inspector Queen’s bathroom for a half-hour, leaving Ellery to administer his own first aid. Not even his father was home to cluck over him.
    â€œBut what’s the matter with Dirk?” Nikki demanded. “Is he off his rocker?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Martha said in the same draggy way. “I don’t know what’s happened to him. I don’t think he knows himself.”
    â€œI felt no particular uncertainty,” said Ellery, trying to move his jaw sidewise.
    â€œYou’re lucky to be alive.”
    â€œOh, come,” said Ellery. “The brute punches hard, but not that hard.”
    â€œThat’s why I was so afraid,” Martha said to her coffee cup. “I was afraid he had a gun with him. He’d threatened to start carrying one.”
    â€œNikki threatens to quit every hour on the hour, Martha, but she’s still affiliated with the firm.”
    â€œYou don’t believe me. I suppose I couldn’t expect you to. I tell you if Dirk had had a gun with him tonight, he’d have killed you.”
    â€œAnd he’d have had a darned good case, too,” Ellery said. “See here, I don’t want to seem unfeeling, but give the devil his due. Look at it from Dirk’s viewpoint–”
    â€œSuppose you look at it from Dirk’s viewpoint,” said Nikki coldly.
    â€œYou told him a pretty feeble story, Martha, about meeting some female play scrivener at a woman’s hotel. So he followed you. He saw you enter the park, pick out a nice dark bench. I came along, obviously by prearrangement. I sat down and the first thing Dirk knew you were cuddling against my manly breast and I had my arm around you. Your tears made it look even worse–as if you and I’d been having ourselves a thing, but I’d found a new chick to play around with and wanted out, and you were trying to hold on to me. What else could he have thought? After all, the