Calamity Town by Ellery Queen

women found themselves constrained to defend her, which was hard, considering that secretly they agreed to the truth of all the charges.
    â€˜I wish she’d leave,’ said Pat to Ellery a few days after Rosemary’s arrival. ‘Isn’t that a horrid thing to say? But I do. And now she’s sent for her trunks!’
    â€˜But I thought she didn’t like it here.’
    â€˜That’s what I can’t understand, either. Nora says it was supposed to be a “flying” visit, but Rosemary acts as if she means to dig in for the winter. And Nora can’t very well discourage her.’
    â€˜What’s Jim say?’
    â€˜Nothing to Nora but—’ Pat lowered her voice and looked around—’apparently he’s said something to Rosemary, because I happened in just this morning and there was Nora trapped in the serving pantry while Jim and Rosemary, who evidently thought Nora was upstairs, were having an argument in the dining room. That woman has a temper!’
    â€˜What was the argument about?’ asked Ellery eagerly.
    â€˜I came in at the tail end and didn’t hear anything important, but Nora says it was…well, frightening. Nora wouldn’t tell me what she’d heard, but she was terribly upset—she looked the same way as when she read those three letters that tumbled out of the toxicology book.’
    Ellery muttered: ‘I wish I’d heard that argument. Why can’t I put my finger on something? Pat, you’re a rotten assistant detective!’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ said Pat miserably.
    Rosemary Haight’s trunk arrived on the fourteenth. Steve Polaris, who ran the local express agency, delivered the trunk himself—an overgrown affair that looked as if it might be packed with imported evening gowns. Steve lugged it up Nora’s walk on his broad back and Mr Queen, who was watching from the Wright porch, saw him carry it into Nora’s house and come out a few minutes later accompanied by Rosemary, who was wearing a candid red, white, and blue negligee. She looked like an enlistment poster. Ellery saw Rosemary sign Steve Polaris’s receipt book and go back into the house. Steve slouched down the walk grinning—Steve had the most wolfish eye, Pat said, in all of Low Village.
    â€˜Pat,’ said Ellery urgently, ‘do you know this truckman well?’
    â€˜Steve? That’s the only way you can know Steve.’
    Steve tossed his receipt book on the driver’s seat of his truck and began to climb in. ‘Then distract him. Kiss him, vamp him, do a striptease—anything, but get him out of sight of that truck for two minutes!’
    Pat instantly called: ‘Oh, Ste-e-e-eve!’ and tripped down the porch steps. Ellery followed in a saunter. No one was in sight anywhere on the Hill.
    Pat was slipping her arm through Steve’s and giving him one of her quick little-girl smiles, saying something about her piano, and there wasn’t a man she knew strong enough to move it from where it was to where she wanted it, and of course when she saw Steve…Steve went with Pat into the Wright house, visibly swollen. Ellery was at the truck in two bounds. He snatched the receipt book from the front seat. Then he took a piece of charred paper from his wallet and began riffling the pages of the book…When Pat reappeared with Steve, Mr Queen was at Hermione’s zinnia bed surveying the dead and dying blossoms with the sadness of a poet. Steve gave him a scornful look and passed on.
    â€˜Now you’ll have to move the piano back,’ said Pat. ‘I am sorry—I could have thought of something not quite so bulky…Bye, Steve!’ The truck rolled off with a flirt of its exhaust.
    â€˜I was wrong,’ mumbled Ellery.
    â€˜About what?’
    â€˜About Rosemary’
    â€˜Stop being cryptic! And why did you send me to lure Steve away from his truck? The two are connected, Mr