The Fourth Side of the Triangle Read Online Free PDF Page B

make-up—probably in Central Park again—changed back into his ordinary clothes in his room at the club, and had Ramon, back on duty, drive him home in the Bentley.
    The unexplained question was: Whom was he doing all this for? Whom was he visiting in his own apartment building?
    Dane waited for the tall gray-uniformed figure of the doorman to reappear under the canopy.
    â€œOh, Mr. Dane,” the doorman said. “Mrs. McKell isn’t in.”
    â€œAny notion where she went, John, or when she’ll be back?”
    â€œShe went to that Mr. Cohen’s gallery to see some rugs, she said.” The doorman, as usual, transformed Mir Khan from Pakistani to a more comfortable New York name. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
    The doorman’s “I don’t know” sounded rather like I dawn’t knaw . John Leslie was a “Geordie,” or Tynesider, from the north of England; and his speech came out both Irish and Scottish, with rich overtones of South Carolina. In his teens Dane had smoked forbidden cigarets in Leslie’s basement apartment, left and received messages there which presumably would have been frowned upon by his parents.
    â€œWell,” Dane said with deliberate indecisiveness. Then, with a laugh: “Incidentally, John, I noticed a man going into the building a while ago whom I’d never seen here before. While you were at dinner. Gray hair, chin whiskers, wearing glasses, and carrying a medical bag. Is somebody sick?”
    â€œThat would be Miss Grey’s doctor,” said John Leslie. “I saw him leave a few times and asked Miss Grey once who he was, and she said Dr. Stone. How are you coming along with your book, Mr. Dane? You must tell us when they print it, now. The missus and me have your other books, and we like them champion.”
    â€œThanks, John.” Dane knew that his two books lay in the Leslies’ cabinet beside their picture of the Royal Family. “Oh, don’t mention to Mother that I’ve been by. She’d feel bad about missing me.”
    Dane made his way to Lexington Avenue and a bar that advertised No Television . The interior was cool and smelled of malt, as a proper bar should, and not of spaghetti sauce and meat balls, as a proper bar should not. He ordered a gin and tonic and drank it and ordered another.
    Miss Grey. Sheila Grey.
    So she was “the other woman.”
    It was a proper shock.
    Sheila Grey, rated on anyone’s list, was among the Top Ten of international haute couture . And she was not much older than Dane (old enough, he thought, to be the old bull’s daughter). In the United States her reputation as a fashion designer made her one of the Top Three; there were some who acclaimed her first among equals. She had the penthouse.
    Dane reorganized his emotions. Whatever this was, it was no longer an ordinary liaison. Ash McKell certainly was not “keeping” Sheila Grey, who could well afford half a dozen penthouses; this could not be an affair of love-for-money. Could it be—he felt a chill—love? In that case, God help Mother!
    And now the theatricalism made a little more sense. You couldn’t meet a woman like Sheila Grey in a motel somewhere, or tuck her out of sight in the Westchester countryside. She would be strongly independent; as far as Dane knew, she was not married; if a lover were to rendezvous with her, it would have to be in her apartment. Since her apartment happened to be in the same building occupied by her lover and his wife, he could only visit her surreptitiously. Ash McKell had chosen disguise.
    It must make him wriggle, Dane thought. His father’s conservatism was constantly embattled with his zest for living; in this, as in other respects, he was a paradox. He would writhe at the necessity of making a fool of himself, at the same time that he mastered the technique of theatrical make-up. It was really rather skillfully