Read Online McNally's Bluff by Lawrence Sanders, Vincent Lardo - Free Book Online

newscast. (Hayes is famous for his sense of timing.) Knowing I was a guest there, she thought father would be interested in the breaking story.
    “Thankfully mother had retired,” father said.
    I mentioned that mother is a bit forgetful these days. She also suffers from hypertension. For this reason we tend to protect her from the more worrisome aspects of modern life which isn’t easy given the modern media’s obsession with doom and gloom. Knowing that her favorite son was in a house to which an ambulance and half the Palm Beach police department had been summoned would not help her cause.
    Father put on the telly; as I had imagined, a camera crew had been dispatched to Le Maze and was giving viewers live coverage of the chaotic spectacle on Ocean Boulevard.
    “It looked like a scene from a movie,” father told me. “I tuned in after the arrival of the ambulance but just as someone from inside the house began communicating with the crew outside. He said that Mrs. Hayes was first reported missing, then found dead in that maze. I must say it was very confusing to say the least—and very distressing knowing you were there.”
    I didn’t acknowledge his concern for my safety as I knew it would only embarrass him. We McNallys are not a demonstrative clan. We are there for each other but do so without getting in each other’s way. I told him the reporter was Joe Gallo.
    “You know him?”
    “Quite well,” I said. “He and Georgia were once an item, as Lolly Spindrift would put it.”
    Father tugged on his guardsman mustache, silently saying he would rather not be privy to the more intimate details of my love life, past or present. Prescott McNally is a gentleman who identifies more with the Victorian or Edwardian ages than the new millennium. In his three-piece suit, regimental tie (which he has no right to wear), starched collar, French cuffs with onyx links and pricey brogues, he resembles an actor waiting for his cue to enter the scene as the pompous Mr. Rich with a heart of gold.
    I explained, yet again, the events that led to the discovery of Marlena Marvel’s body.
    “Amazing,” father repeated, shaking his head thoughtfully. “And you were a witness to all this?”
    “I was, sir, and so were at least fifty other people.”
    Playing the devil’s advocate, which is a lawyer’s prerogative, he asked, “Tell me, Archy, if you were in the witness box would you swear you saw this woman posing as Venus at approximately nine last evening?”
    Suspecting where this would lead I answered without hesitating, “I would, sir.”
    “Based on what evidence?” my father, the lawyer, probed.
    “Based on previous knowledge that she was famous for portraying the ancient statue and on the many posters on display which depicted her in the role.”
    “Both circumstantial,” he concluded.
    “I think you’re implying the possibility that someone was impersonating Marlena Marvel.”
    “Exactly, Archy.”
    “So, where did the impersonator go after the performance? Remember, a search party went upstairs to hunt for Marlena. They searched every room, including the attic, and found no one. And, no one, except for the maid, came down those stairs. Whether it was Marlena or an impersonator on that balcony, how did either disappear after the show?”
    Father leaned back in his leather upholstered swivel chair and looked at the ceiling. “Could the maid be the impersonator?”
    “No, sir. The maid, Tilly, is a few inches taller than Hayes, who’s about five-feet-four in his heels. Marlena is, or was, a big woman, and the statue, as you may recall, is totally nude.
    “But, for argument’s sake, say there was an impersonator and the real Marlena was never upstairs but outside the house all the while. Okay, but how did she get into the goal of the maze? We were all over every passage and finally into the goal itself. When we left the maze not everyone came directly back into the house. About a dozen of the guests stood