Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

“My name is Magda Lederer. I am twenty-seven. I am born Hungarian but am an American citizen because my husband was. He was a flyer and was killed flying three years ago. I work for a decorator also on Madison Avenue. I have the afternoon off because we have nothing to decorate and she went home. I too am lonely.” She smiled at him. “But I haff neffer had an avair and do not intend to ’ave one.” Magda’s accent invariably increased with the emotional context of her words.

“Splendid, splendid,” he said. “In ten minutes we know each other and have put our cards, face up, on the table. And I agree with you. Affairs have a way of turning sordid. To my mind, sordid is the most distasteful word in the English language. And if there is one thing I pride myself upon, it is my taste.”

Magda stood up. “We must leave,” she said. “Others need our table.” The figure, under the badly cut dress, was exquisite.

“May I spend your holiday afternoon in your company, Magda?” he asked.

“I would like that,” she said simply. “Let us ride on the carousel. I have never done it here. One feels foolish behaving in a childish way alone. But with a companion, childish ways are fun.”

There are other splendid things to do on a fine early Spring day when one is not alone. They took the sightseeing boat around Manhattan and it was almost empty and, by then, a little cold so that it seemed natural that most of the way he hold her hand. He took her to a tiny, quiet restaurant on Fifty-Eighth Street and convinced her with little trouble that this was the occasion for champagne.

She told him about her husband. It wasn’t as tragic as it should have been. She had been twenty and had fallen for his dash. “Speed,” they called him — Speed Lederer — and he had done everything with speed. Too much speed and dash, not time enough for tenderness. There had been four years, most of the time in separation, usually a day or two together, at most a week, and he would be off, speeding to somewhere. Finally he had run his fighter plane into a mountain and that was that — before she ever really knew him.

And Walter told her about Elsie. He told it well, sadly and courageously, trying in no way to absolve himself from blame. “Of course I was to blame,” he said. “They said she jumped or fell. Ridiculous. When one is alone on the fifteenth floor of the Lord Baltimore Hotel one does not fall from the window. Of course she jumped, and, since she was not ill, it must have been because she was unhappy, desperately unhappy, with me. Why is another matter. In what way I failed her I cannot tell. For twelve years I was a loyal, faithful husband but somehow we grew apart. When she left to visit her mother I thought it a good idea, the change might do her good. I knew she was unhappy — she always had seeds of unhappiness within her. Some people are made that way and one cannot change them. But that she would take her own life — it seemed then and seems now — incredible. And it is deeply on my conscience.”

“I shouldn’t think it would have to be,” she said, feeling sorry for him. “Even husbands and wives know very little about what goes on in the other’s mind. Life is essentially lonely. She may have known people you did not know, had thoughts you never dreamed of. I can conceive of a wife having a tragedy completely separate and unknown to her husband.”

“Perhaps. It is kind of you to say so. And tonight, for the first time in years, I do not feel lonesome.”

“ ’Sank you. Nor I either.”

They fingered long over their dinner and drank a little more champagne than was good for her but Walter was the perfect gentleman. He dropped her at her dingy little apartment on Fourth Avenue and, before he drove grandly off to Forest Hills, he gallantly kissed her hand. She walked up the two long flights of stairs rather unsteadily and had trouble with her key but when she looked in her mirror she was smiling. He had arranged for dinner and the opera, no less, for the following night. She took her lipstick and ringed the date, April 3, 1953, with a big red O.

The opera too was a great success. She always wept at Madame Butterfly and it pleased and warmed her that he also found it necessary to wipe his eyes. Again he dropped her formally, respectfully, and slightly inebriated at her door. But the following Saturday he became more direct. They were seated in his private office, which was beautifully furnished as such offices should be. His two clerks, he had explained, took care of all but the most important sales, for he found buying stimulating and selling unpleasant.

“You may have wondered, my dear, why I have been giving you such a rush.”

“Yes.” Her eyes crinkled. “Yes, I haff, Valter.”

“It is because you are very beautiful.”

“No. I know better than that.”

“You do not know it but it is nevertheless true. To be brutally frank, you have bad taste.”

“Oh, I know that too. Mrs. Webster, for whom I work, has told me often enough. She only hires me because I can draw. She cannot draw.”