The Fourth Side of the Triangle Read Online Free PDF

the cab turned into Park Avenue. Dane turned, too … It was a very short trip, no more than six or eight blocks. The cab darted in toward the curb, its passenger jumped out, paid the driver, the cab drove off, and the passenger began to walk down Park Avenue.
    Dane, creeping along, was utterly confused. His parents lived less than a block away. And the man who had got out of the taxi was not the same man who had driven the Continental away from the Cricket Club.
    At least, that was Dane’s first impression. The man had gray hair, rather long and untidy at the neck. He wore a gray mustache, a Vandyke beard, and eyeglasses. A stranger.
    One hand grasped a walking stick, the other a small black leather bag. The man was dressed all in tan—tan cords, tan straw hat, tan shoes—the same costume, as far as Dan could remember, that his father had worn on emerging from the club. Had there been another man waiting in the Continental after all?—a man who had exchanged clothes with the elder McKell behind the drawn curtains when he had pulled up in Central Park?
    But why? And who could he be?
    And then Dane knew.
    It was not a stranger. It was his father. Disregard the clothes, strip off the mustache, beard, and wig, and the pupa beneath was—had to be—Ashton McKell.
    His father in a disguise! He had put on the make-up during the stop in Central Park, behind the drawn curtains.
    Dane almost laughed aloud. But there was a pathetic quality about that figure walking stiffly along the street with cane and bag swinging that discouraged levity. What in the name of all that was unholy did he think he was doing? “Special precautions”! He looked like someone out of an old-time vaudeville act.
    There was no place to park. Dane double-parked and took up the chase on foot. His face was grim.
    It became grimmer.
    For the disguised Ashton McKell turned neither right nor left. He stumped up to the entrance of a building and went in.
    It was a converted old Park Avenue one-family mansion, originally owned by the haughty Huytenses. The last Huytens had left it to “my beloved pet and friend, Fluffy,” but long before old Mrs. Huytens’ cousins succeeded in having Fluffy legally disinherited, the house had begun to decline. Dane’s maternal grandfather had made a bargain purchase of it in the latter days of the depression and turned it into an apartment building. It housed three duplex apartments and a penthouse, and Dane knew it intimately.
    He had been brought up in it.
    It was his parents’ home.
    The pattern was now clear except for one point … the most important point.
    Everything about his father’s extraordinary precautions smacked of secrecy. The elder McKell on Wednesday afternoons had his chauffeur drive him in the Bentley to the Cricket Club. The Bentley was left in the garage behind the club, and Ramon, given a few hours off, discreetly vanished. Meanwhile Ashton McKell changed clothes in his room at the club. He sneaked out through the rear entrance, picked up the Continental, and drove away. In Central Park, at a secluded spot, he stopped the car, got into the rear of the tonneau, and applied his disguise. Then he drove over to a garage—he probably uses different ones, Dane thought—left the Continental, and took a taxi to the corner of the Park Avenue block where the McKell apartment building stood. And it was all so timed that he would enter the building while the doorman was at his dinner—a precaution against being recognized, in spite of the disguise, by John. He ran a lesser risk on leaving the building, when the doorman was back on duty, for John would not pay as much attention to a departing visitor as to an incoming one. The medical bag alone gave him some of the invisibility of Chesterton’s postman.
    And when he left, he simply went back to the garage where he had parked the Continental, drove down to the Cricket Club after removing his