Photo Finish

To her from indoors came Mr. Reece in his custom-built outfit straight from pages headed “Rugged Elegance: For Him” in the glossiest of periodicals. He wore a peaked cap, which he raised ceremoniously to Miss Dancy, who immediately engaged him in conversation, clearly of an emotional kind. But he’s used to that, thought Alleyn, and noticed how Mr. Reece balanced Miss Dancy’s elbow in his pigskin grasp as he squired her on her promenade.

He had thought they completed the number of persons in the landscape until he caught sight, out of the corner of his eye, of some movement near one of the great trees near the Lake. Ned Hanley was standing there. He wore a dark green coat and sweater and merged with his background. He seemed to survey the other figures in the picture.

One thing they all had in common, and that was a tendency to halt and stare across the Lake or shade their eyes, tip back their heads, and look eastward into the fast-thi

Mr. Ben Ruby spied him, waved his cigar energetically, and made toward him. Alleyn advanced and at close quarters found Mr. Ruby looking the worse for wear and self-conscious.

“ ’Morning, old man,” said Mr. Ruby. “Glad to see you. Brightening up, isn’t it? Won’t be long now. We hope!”

“We do indeed.”

“You hope, anyway, I don’t mind betting. Don’t envy you your job. Responsibility without the proper backing, eh?”

“Something like that,” said Alleyn.

“I owe you an apology, old man. Last evening. I’d had one or two drinks. You know that?”

“Well—”

“What with one thing and another — the shock and that. I was all to pieces. Know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“All the same — bad show. Very bad show.” said Mr. Ruby, shaking his head and then wincing.

“Don’t give it another thought.”

“Christ, I feel awful,” confided Mr. Ruby and threw away his cigar. “It was good brandy, too. The best. Special cognac. Wonder if this guy Marco could rustle up a corpse-reviver.”

“I daresay. Or Hanley might.”

Mr. Ruby made the sound that is usually written: “T’ss” and after a brief pause said in a deep voice and with enormous expression, “Bella! Bella Sommita! You can’t credit it, can you? The most beautiful woman with the most gorgeous voice God ever put breath into. Gone! And how! And what the hell we’re going to do about the funeral’s nobody’s business. I don’t know of any relatives. It’d be thoroughly in character if she’s left detailed instructions and bloody awkward ones at that. Pardon me, it slipped out. But it might mean cold storage to anywhere she fancied or ashes in the Adriatic.” He caught himself up and gave Alleyn a hard if bloodshot stare. “I suppose it’s out of order to ask if you’ve formed an idea?”

“It is, really. At this stage,” Alleyn said, “we must wait for the police.”

“Yeah? Well, here’s hoping they know their stuff.” He reverted to his elegiac mood. “Bella!” he apostrophized. “After all these years of taking the rough with the smooth, if you can understand me. Hell, it hurts!”

“How long an association has it been?”

“You don’t measure grief by months and years,” Mr. Ruby said reproachfully. “How long? Let me see? It was on her first tour of Aussie. That would be in ’72. Under the Bel Canto management in association with my firm — Ben Ruby Associates. There was a disagreement with Bel Canto and we took over.”

Here Mr. Ruby embarked on a long parenthesis explaining that he was a self-made man, a Sydneysider who had pulled himself up by his own boot-strings and was proud of it and how the Sommita had understood this and had herself evolved from peasant stock.

“And,” said Alleyn when an opportunity presented itself, “a close personal friendship had developed with the business association?”

“This is right, old man. I reckon I understood her as well as anybody ever could. There was the famous temperament, mind, and it was a snorter while it lasted, but it never lasted long. She always sends — sent — for Maria to massage her shoulders, and that would do the trick. Back into the honied-kindness bit and everybody loving everybody.”

“Mr. Ruby — have you anything to tell me that might in however farfetched or remote a degree help to throw light on this tragedy?”

Mr. Ruby opened his arms wide and let them fall in the classic gesture of defeat.

“Nothing?” Alleyn said.

“This is what I’ve been asking myself ever since I woke up. When I got round, that is, to asking myself anything other than why the hell I had to down those cognacs.”

“And how do you answer yourself?”

Again the gesture. “I don’t,” Mr. Ruby confessed. “I can’t. Except—” He stopped, provokingly, and stared at Signor Lattienzo, who by now had arrived at the lakeside and contemplated the water rather, in his Tyrolean outfit, like some poet of the post-Romantic era.

“Except?” Alleyn prompted.

“Look!” Mr. Ruby invited. “Look at what’s been done and how it’s been done. Look at that. If you had to say — you, with your experience — what it reminded you of, what would it be? Come on.”

“Grand opera,” Alleyn said promptly.

Mr. Ruby let out a strangulated yelp and clapped him heavily on the back. “Good on you!” he cried. “Got it in one! Good on you, mate. And the Italian sort of grand opera, what’s more. That fu

Alleyn had to give himself a moment or two before he was able to respond to this declaration.

“What you are saying,” he ventured, “in effect, is that the murderer must be one of the Italians on the premises. Is that right?”

“That,” said Mr. Ruby, “is dead right.”

“It narrows down the field of suspects,” said Alleyn dryly.

“It certainly does,” Mr. Ruby portentously agreed.

“Marco and Maria?”

“Right.”

During an uncomfortable pause Mr. Ruby’s rather bleary regard dwelt upon Signor Lattienzo in his windblown cape by the lakeside.

“And Signor Lattienzo, I suppose?” Alleyn suggested.

There was no reply.

“Have you,” Alleyn asked, “any reason, apart from the grand opera theory, to suspect one of these three?”

Mr. Ruby seemed to be much discomforted by this question. He edged with his toe at a grassy turf. He cleared his throat and looked aggrieved.

“I knew you’d ask that,” he said resentfully.

“It was natural, don’t you think, that I should?”

“I suppose so. Oh, yes. Too right it was. But listen. It’s a terrible thing to accuse anyone of. I know that. I wouldn’t want to say anything that’d unduly influence you. You know. Cause you to — to jump to conclusions or give you the wrong impression. I wouldn’t like to do that.”

“I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“No? You’d say that, of course. But I reckon you’ve done it already. I reckon like everyone else you’ve taken the old retainer stuff for real.”

“Are you thinking of Maria?”

“Too bloody right I am, mate.”

“Come on,” Alleyn said. “Get it off your chest. I won’t make too much of it. Wasn’t Maria as devoted as one was led to suppose?”

“Like hell she was! Well, that’s not correct either. She was devoted all right, but it was a flaming uncomfortable sort of devotion. Kind of dog-with-a-bone affair. Sometimes when they’d had a difference you’d have said it was more like hate. Jealous! She’s eaten up with it. And when Bella was into some new ‘friendship’—know what I mean? — Maria as likely as not would turn plug-ugly. She was even jealous in a weird sort of way, of the artistic triumphs. Or that’s the way it looked to me.”