Where Is Bianca?

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Authors: Ellery Queen
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and—well—cried.”
    You’re a weeper, all right, Corrigan thought. He glanced over at Chuck Baer, who was making signs, thumb jerks, toward the door, with a scowl that said, “Get rid of this broad or I’ll throw up right here.”
    So, after eliciting the further information that, on reading the papers about the unknown girl found in the sewer, Peggy Simpson had decided to come to the police with her story, Corrigan got rid of her.

7
    During her short residence in New York, Bianca Fielding Lessard had occupied a town house on the upper East Side.
    Corrigan turned Car 40, NYPD, off Park Avenue onto a side street where a few genuine trees actually cast a little shade. Oh for a million bucks, he thought, as he nosed around a curbed brute of a Mercedes being worked over with a dust cloth by a uniformed chauffeur. Corrigan parked the police car before the entrance, and he and Chuck Baer got out and looked the building over.
    The pile of gray stone looked like turn-of-the-century. Its façade had had a recent scrubdown. It oozed riches.
    They walked over to the street-level door, a black, brassstudded monster, and Corrigan fingered the bell. A manservant in a white coat promptly opened the door.
    â€œI’m Captain Corrigan. Mr. Lessard is expecting me.”
    â€œThis way, sir.”
    They followed the man through a foyer displaying a few pieces of 19th century sculpture, and into a high-ceilinged living room. This room, too, had been done over, in cheerful colors, with light modern furniture. There were flowers on the mantel above the Italian marble fireplace. Even with the shutters closed and the artificial lighting, there was a feeling of airiness about it, and no pretentiousness at all. Corrigan was quite ready to leap to the conclusion that this was a reflection of Bianca Fielding Lessard, not the beautiful-eyed husband who rose to meet them. Lessard cheapened the room. He didn’t belong here, Corrigan thought. He still doesn’t.
    â€œDrink?” Lessard said. When Corrigan and Baer declined, the man said, “If you don’t mind.… Sit down, gentlemen.”
    He opened a lowboy cabinet, took out a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch, and poured himself a long one, neat He was sweating lightly. He drank the whiskey as if it were his best friend.
    â€œThis thing about the identification … Mr. Baer told me last night.… Quite a jolt, Captain.”
    â€œBecause your wife may not be dead?” Corrigan said.
    He expected a hot denial. But Lessard had evidently prepared himself. “Of course we pay you people to be suspicious. No, that’s not why. There are pleasant shocks, too, you know. Have you turned up anything on this Nancy Gavin?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    Baer said to his client, “Captain Corrigan passed the assignment along to the experts this morning. They’ll start by finding out where and when she was born, and the sawbones who yanked her into the world. Eventually they’ll be able to report what size shoe she wore and if she preferred chop suey to Bok Choy.”
    â€œAnd, I hope, the name of the maniac who dropped Nancy Gavin into that sewer.”
    â€œIf she is Nancy Gavin,” Corrigan said.
    Lessard looked blank. Then he paled slightly. He glanced from Corrigan to Baer and back again. “What do you mean, if? Is there any question about it?”
    â€œIn a case like this,” Corrigan said, “there are always questions, Mr. Lessard.”
    Lessard’s pretty face went from pallor to flush. “See here, Corrigan, I don’t know that I can take much more of this! I went through the horrible ordeal of viewing that—that thing in your morgue and believing it once belonged to my Bianca. Then I was told that maybe a mistake had been made, that it wasn’t Bianca’s. Now you aren’t sure it was Nancy Gavin’s. What’s the matter with you people?”
    â€œWe’re not magicians,

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