Wife or Death by Ellery Queen

roadside restaurant. He limited his empty stomach to one martini, then ordered and consumed a steak. There were only about a dozen other diners, all strangers. He had a leisurely brandy with his coffee; it tasted good, and he ordered another. It was well past 8 P.M. when he started for home.
    It was not until he passed a road sign saying LEAVING CATTARAUGUS COUNTY—ENTERING ALLEGANY COUNTY that he realized he had violated Crosby’s order not to leave the county. He had very nearly left the state, he thought with wry amusement; Loch City was almost on the Pennsylvania line.
    For the first time, as he drove at the legal speed along the winding mountain road, Denton allowed himself to wonder why his wife had been murdered, and by whom.
    She had run off that night with her latest lover. No trace of the man—whoever he was—or of his car had been found at or near the scene of the crime, or surely Augie Spile would have mentioned it. If this had been a crime of jealousy, wouldn’t the thrown-over lover have murdered the new lover, too? Such crimes were almost always double killings. Of course, a body might still turn up somewhere. But crimes of jealousy were crimes of passion, and Denton could not see such a criminal murdering the two offenders in separate places—not when they were together to begin with. There was a wrong feel to the theory. No, the new lover was still alive.
    There was a much simpler answer. Since Angel had driven away with her latest conquest and her body had been found a mere ten miles out of town, it was the new man who had killed her. But why? That was not simple at all. Why should a man make plans to run off with a desirable woman and, in the very act of doing so, murder her? It seemed to make no sense. But then Denton saw that it might make all sorts of sense. Suppose the man had assumed that his affair with Angel would follow her usual pattern, a few weeks or months and then goodbye—and found, to his consternation, that this time Angel intended it to be permanent? That he had fallen in with her elopement plan unwillingly, in other words, and taken the first safe opportunity to rid himself of her?
    Denton soon concluded that such speculations would get him nowhere. He didn’t have enough facts. He turned his thoughts to the identity of the killer.
    He saw at once that his former conclusions about Angel’s new lover no longer stood up. The fact that none of the males attending the Wyatts’ party after the Hallowe’en Ball had left Ridgemore coincidentally with Angel’s disappearance now meant nothing. Of course Angel’s lover was still in town. He had not left town because Angel had not left town, so to speak, either. He had had to take her no further than ten miles away.
    So the men he had diligently eliminated were all back in the running … the four unattached males—Ralph Crosby, old Gerald Trevor, young Arnold Long and the cartoonist, Matthew Fallon.
    Or was it necessary now to re-examine the possibility that she had run off with a married man? Denton re-examined it briefly and again dismissed the theory. Angel cared too much for status to run away with a man who could not marry her. (It’s too bad, Denton thought; if the man were married he’d have had a powerful motive for using the shotgun—fear of scandal, perhaps; perhaps even love for his wife.)
    Crosby. Trevor. Long. Fallon.
    Old Trevor? In Angel’s eyes, the disadvantage of Trevor’s age might well have been counterbalanced by his Hollywood connections. He could make her a “star”—or promise to. And the old fellow was handsome and in pretty good shape physically. Still … Denton shook his head.
    Ralph Crosby? On the jealousy theory the district attorney was certainly at the top of the list—he had been the unknown’s immediate predecessor and he had given a convincing demonstration of his feelings on the night of Angel’s decampment.