The Blue Movie Murders by Ellery Queen

waking at the scenes of lust intermingled with the touches of poetry and true romance. If the imagery was sometimes trite—as when a quick cut from a climactic love scene showed the engineer’s train plunging into a darkened tunnel—more often it rang with a trueness and beauty that astonished him. McCall had seen a good many blue movies in his day, but never one of such quality and essence.
    He became aware, as the film progressed, of the heavy breathing on the other side of the table. He wanted to chuckle, or crack a joke—anything to break the swelling tension—but he could not. His eyes were riveted to the screen, as were those of Suzanne Walsh. They saw the leading man, sunlight glinting off his nude body, and the girl he loved running naked through the woods to join her lover at the edge of a pool, and it might have been Adam and Eve meeting for the first time. As they made love, rolling over and over on the ground, the girl threw back her head in moments of pure ecstasy. The scene came on again, and again, as the director repeated himself, reprinting the same strip of film with dazzling effect.
    Finally it ended, and McCall rubbed his sweating palms against his trouser legs. A simple story, of love and loss, but surely it was something of the masterpiece Ben Sloane had claimed it to be. Suzanne Walsh switched on the lights and stood facing him. Her round face was flushed with something like embarrassment, and her eyes were shimmering.
    â€œIt’s quite a film,” she said.
    â€œIt’s all of that,” McCall agreed. “I can’t imagine what they made out of it on the stag-smoker circuit.”
    â€œIt’s after six. I have to be going.”
    â€œLet me buy you dinner for your trouble. You’ve been a great help to me.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œYes, really. I don’t suppose Sloane had any leads on the actor and actress in that film.”
    â€œNo, none. You probably saw a glimpse of the Mann Photo plant in one scene, though, as the train went by.”
    â€œI caught it.”
    But McCall was not interested at that moment in the setting for The Wild Nymph . Rather, he was pondering the faces and bodies of the two young people he’d watched on the screen for more than an hour. The face of the man, who was bronzed and muscular and the very image of a character out of Lawrence, was something of a blur, a face that to the best of his memory he’d never seen before.
    But the girl was something else again. Twenty years was a long time, and people changed, but he’d be willing to make a small wager that the face and body of the girl he’d watched on that screen belonged to Mrs. Xavier Mann.

TEN
    Friday, May 14 and Saturday, May 15
    Over dinner and a bottle of lightly chilled white wine, McCall asked about the chronology of events prior to Ben Sloane’s death. Suzanne Walsh sipped her wine, touched a napkin to her lips, and told him about it.
    â€œAs you know, we left Dora Pringle’s party in the capital at about 6.30 or seven o’clock. Mr. Sloane was driving, and he drove fast. We chatted a little about the party and the people we’d met there, the way people always do. It must have taken us nearly two hours to drive up to Rockview that night. I know we checked into our rooms around nine.”
    â€œThere was some confusion about that. Apparently the motel misunderstood my phone call for reservations and they’d only saved one room for us. Mr. Sloane thought it was pretty funny, but we got it straightened out finally. He left me in the reserved room and took another for himself. The deskman thought he was in the original room and I was in the second one.”
    McCall nodded. “That explains the confusion of room numbers. Go on.”
    â€œWell, we ate dinner and then he told me he was going to telephone some of the men we’d sent letters to, and I suppose he did. But I’d had a long day and I went right to