Free The Fourth Side of the Triangle by Ellery Queen Page A

her lips were moving.
    â€œI don’t want to hurt you, Dane. I don’t want to say things about—”
    â€œYou’d better not,” he heard himself growl.
    â€œâ€”about your mother. But apparently I offer your father a … a scope, an experience, that makes it possible for him to talk to me in a way in which he could never talk to his wife. We have a very special and wonderful relationship. It helps him to come here every Wednesday night, Dane. And I’m terribly fond of him.”
    â€œWhy am I bothering? Helps him! How? Come on, spin a few more of your lies to me!”
    She flared up at that. “It helps his feelings about himself as a man, if you must know—a man in relation to women. I tell you, Dane, he’s my friend, not my lover! He couldn’t be my lover even if he wanted to! There! Are you satisfied now? Now do you understand?”
    Dane stood dumb. He couldn’t be my lover even if he wanted to …
    â€œYou mean you won’t let him be? Is that your yarn?”
    She said, white-lipped, “I mean he’s physically incapable of it. Now you know.”
    He could not—could not—believe it. Ashton McKell, big, hairy, strapping, vigorous, virile Ashton McKell, incapable of physical relations with a woman?
    He sank onto the ottoman, dazed. The very shock of the thought generated its own believability. Nobody, not even a witch, would invent a story like that about Ash McKell. It had to be true. And suddenly he saw how far this went toward explaining the thrusting McKell drive in business, his tapeworm hunger for commercial expansion. A compensation!
    But if that were the case, why hadn’t his mother said anything? The question answered itself. Lutetia McKell could not have brought herself to mention a thing like that, to her son above all people.
    â€œSo now you know the truth,” Sheila was saying, and she sounded urgent. “Dane, please, won’t you go? I’ve been trying to find a way to tell your father about you and me without hurting him. Let me work this out my own way. Help me spare him.”
    He shook his head violently. “I’m going to tell him myself. I’ve got to know whether this is all true or not.”
    She clapped her hands in sheer exasperation. “You’d do that? You’d leave him not one shred of self-respect? His own son! Don’t you know how ashamed he is of his impotence? Dane, if you do that, you’re a rotten, despicable—”
    He flung out his arm. “You bitch! Don’t call me names!”
    â€œ Bitch? ” Sheila screamed. “Get out of my apartment! Now!”
    â€œNo!”
    She slapped him with all her might.
    And then it came. With a rush.
    She was not aware at first what her slap had loosed. For she had started for the house phone. “You leave me no choice. I’m calling John Leslie up here to get you out. I never want to see you again.”
    From childhood the great flaw in his make-up had been his temper. It had been a hair-trigger thing, exploding at his governess, the servants, other children, his mother—although never his father. Ashton had blamed Lutetia (“You’ve spoiled him”) and hoped that the other boys in boarding school would whip him regularly enough to cure him. But his rages had seemed to feed on violence; and it was not until he was an upperclassman at college that Dane had taught himself restraint. But the lava of his temper was always boiling under his skin.
    Now Sheila’s hot words, his own guilts, the underlying fear of the confrontation with his father, made him erupt. He leaped at Sheila, whirled her about, and seized her by the throat. He felt, rather than heard, his own voice rumbling, jeering, cursing, choking with hate.
    Sheila struggled; her resistance fed his fury. His fingers tightened … It was not until her face turned livid, her cries became gurgles, her eyes glassed over and she went