Talk about shutting the barn door after the cow’s escaped...

“We’re not gossips or voyeurs looking for cheap thrills,” Lynda said. “We’re asking for a reason. This could have a bearing on the murder motive.”

“I - I never thought-”

I pressed the issue hard. “Was Renata Chalmers having an affair with Hugh Matheson or wasn’t she?”

Molly closed her eyes. “Yes. Yes, damn it, she was.”

“How do you know?”

“I had the ill-fortune to wander into the bar just before a meeting of the Anglo-Indian Club some months ago. Hugh and Woollcott were in there, arguing so intently they didn’t notice anyone else. It was an ugly scene - Hugh bragging that he’d been bedding Woollcott’s wife right under his nose for six months. He was like... like some hunter holding up a prize catch.”

“Or maybe a collector who’d bested a rival,” I murmured.

“The whole thing was so dehumanizing that I only wanted to run out of there and forget about it. I turned around and bumped smack into Renata. She’d heard it all; I could tell by the look on her face.”

“So her husband knew and she knew that he knew,” Lynda said.

I hadn’t observed any great strain between the Chalmerses and I said so.

“Woollcott is nothing if not a pragmatist,” the judge said. “I suspect he could tolerate the situation as long as he maintained bragging rights in public. Renata is the perfect trophy wife, isn’t she? Beautiful, talented, and intelligent. And her last name is Chalmers. Woollcott wasn’t going to give that up over a little infidelity.”

The delivery was so dry and factual that I couldn’t tell if she were being catty or not. But it was just the sort of thing a jealous and envious woman might say.

“Just for the sake of discussion, Judge,” I said, “where were you around the time of the murder - say an hour in either direction?”

“I don’t know because I don’t know when the murder happened. I presume I was dressing in my hotel room, enjoying the cocktail hour or in transit between the two. At any rate I was with my husband the entire afternoon and evening.”

“Your husband?” Lynda echoed.

Her obvious surprise - and mine, too - put a smile on Molly Crocker’s face.

“You mean you sleuths didn’t know? I’m married to Noah Queensbury.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Key to Everything

The Crocker-Queensbury connection still had me numb some minutes after the distaff side of that combo had returned to the Hearth Room.

“I knew she was married because I noticed her wedding ring yesterday,” I told Lynda, leaning my rear end against the escalator, “but why didn’t somebody tell me her husband was Queensbury?”

“Why should they?” Lynda demanded. “Is that supposed to be the most important thing about her - who her husband is?”

“Maybe not, but it could be important enough, and there was no way for me to know it. Even the hotel room was in the Crocker name.”

“Well, it had to be in one name or the other.”

There was no way to respond to that without digging myself into a deeper hole, so I changed the subject.

“If Maximum Molly is married to Queensbury, she could have been wearing his deerstalker last night,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? When does he ever take it off? I bet he even wears it to bed. Jeff, whoever was wearing that hat could have easily bought it, borrowed it or brought it from home. She or he didn’t have to be married to it.”

“I vote against buying,” I said. “If the deerstalker was a kind of minimal disguise, the killer would have thought of that earlier and wouldn’t have had to buy it here at the colloquium.”

“You’re assuming premeditation?” Lynda asked.

I nodded. “The use of a gun smacks of planning. I know we have a concealed carry law in Ohio, but I can’t see these Sherlockians packing heat to a quiet campus in Erin.”

“Maybe not, but I know who might have.” She paused to give the name the appropriate amount of drama. “Al Kane. He’s always shooting guns on those TV commercials.”

“But he doesn’t have any possible motive!”

“Correction: He doesn’t have any motive that we’ve found out about yet. Don’t dismiss him as a suspect just because you like his sexist, adolescent-”

“Okay, this isn’t getting us anywhere,” I interrupted. “I’m not writing off anybody as a potential suspect. For instance, Molly Crocker still could have been fooling around with Matheson, even though she is married and three months pregnant.”

Molly had offered that last bit of information unsolicited.

It was easy to see Renata Chalmers with her septuagenarian husband as easy pickings for a handsome, charismatic dude like Matheson. She knew his reputation, but I bet all of his other women did, too. So why should Molly Crocker be any less vulnerable than anyone else just because she was a judge and a tough cookie?

“An affair between Molly and Matheson would give Queensbury a hell of a murder motive,” I said. “Maybe Dr. Q. had just caught on to what his wife was up to and that’s what his argument with Matheson was really about - not some Sherlock Holmes silliness, as Queensbury claimed. And as you just pointed out, Queensbury’s been wearing a deerstalker all weekend. Don’t overlook the obvious.”

Lynda shook her head. “You’re spinning this out of whole cloth and your fiction writer’s imagination. Crocker just gave Queensbury an alibi. I hardly think she’d be protective of him if he’d killed Matheson in a fit of jealousy. Anyway, I believe the judge when she said there wasn’t anything between her and Matheson. As a political figure she had too much to lose.”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean? Politicians get caught with their pants down all the time.”

“Sure, men do. But can you think of a single female governor, senator or U.S. Representative who had to resign because of a sex scandal?”

She had me there. Whether that proved anything was beside the point, because Lynda steamed on:

“You can cross both her and Queensbury off your suspect list. The key to everything, Jeff, is something else Crocker said - bragging rights.”

She tore the gold wrapping off of a Werther’s Original caramel and popped the candy into her mouth.

“Remember how Crocker said she thought Chalmers could live with his wife’s infidelity as long as he maintained bragging rights to her?” Lynda continued. “Well, how long do you think that would last? According to Crocker’s account, Matheson was taunting Chalmers with the knowledge that he’d made time with Renata. That was probably the whole point of the affair for him - to take away, in a sense, another one of Chalmers’s prize collectibles.”

“I had that same feeling.”

“Then do you suppose Matheson could be content to tell only Chalmers about it?” She shook her head. “No way. That was just the first step in humiliating the old man. Next he would have spread the word all around, making Chalmers a laughingstock, a comic opera cuckold.”

“Chalmers wouldn’t put up with that.”

Lynda nodded. “That’s my point.”

“No, no, Chalmers as killer doesn’t work. He couldn’t have gone to the Winfield. Mac was with him during the murder hour, remember?”

“But at a cocktail party. You know how packed those things get and how time flies when you’re talking and drinking, especially drinking. Chalmers could have slipped out for a half hour or forty-five minutes without Mac being any the wiser.”

And Renata wouldn’t have seen it, I thought. She’d been back at Mac’s house, still fixing her hair in that elaborate ’do.

“He must have taken a cab to the Winfield,” Lynda said with building excitement. “We can check that out easily enough through the cab company, or at least Oscar’s troops could. Matheson’s unknown visitor wore a deerstalker cap. How many of those do you suppose Chalmers owns?”

“About enough to outfit the Chinese army, I guess.”