The Fourth Side of the Triangle by Ellery Queen

Dane’s: to make Dane go to his room for a replacement and, as a consequence, to find the cigaret case. His father must have seen it in Sheila’s apartment, recognized it, pocketed it, and only now placed it in Dane’s bureau.
    What a bitter night it must have been for him, Dane thought. Finding the evidence of Dane’s presence on Sheila’s premises, he must have realized in a flash why Sheila was easing him out of her life. His own son …
    And the king went to the tower which was by the gate, and as he went, thus he said, My son, my son, Absalom. My son, my son, Absalom. Would God I died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son .
    Absalom had conspired against David, his father.
    Suddenly Dane saw Ashton McKell in a very different light from the clownish spectacle of the man who skulked in out-of-the-way places disguising himself in order to visit a woman he could not even embrace. In his blackest hour—an almost-criminal on the brink of scandal, his life in danger—his parting thought had been for the son who had betrayed him, his last directive an unspoken Don’t worry, son, I’ve retrieved your case from the penthouse, now they can’t place you on the scene .
    And Dane sat down in his childhood rocker and wept.
    In a city in which murder is hamburgers by the dozen, the McKell arrest was caviar to the general. Not often did a case break in which the accused was tycoon, adviser to presidents, prince of commerce, son of a name who was son of a name untainted for generations, and all rolled into one man.
    If Lutetia McKell’s anguish at the wild invasion of her privacy by the press was not quite on a level with her horror at Ashton’s predicament, it was still powerful enough to dominate her household. She had caught a single glimpse of a single tabloid (left incautiously in the kitchen by old Margaret, whose open vice was the journalism of murder and rape); it was enough. All newspapers, even the New York Times , were banned from the premises; and when it became evident that the scavengers of the press, in particular the photographers, were laying siege to the building, Lutetia went into strictest seclusion, like a Hindu widow, and forbade the entrance of the clamoring world by so much as an uncurtained window. To reach his mother, Dane found himself having to follow a route he had not used since his boyhood, entering another building around the corner, descending to its basement, and emerging into the alley from which he could reach the apartment of John Leslie, the doorman, by a window. John or his wife would let him in, and then out by the basement door adjacent to the service elevator. It had been great fun when he was a youngster, but somehow the adventure had lost its savor. When it became necessary to confer with Lawyer Heaton, Lutetia reacted to Heaton’s suggestion that she and Dane visit his office as if he had invited her to take a sunbath naked on her roof.
    â€œI shall not set foot outside this apartment,” she said, in tears. “Nothing, nothing can make me!”
    So stately Mahomet came to the mountain; and indeed it was almost as traumatic an experience for Richard M. Heaton as it would have been for Lutetia. For Heaton was the very portrait of the trusted family lawyer—elderly, florid, with the dignity of a retired major-general, and as horror-struck by the notion of publicity as Lutetia herself. He gained entry to the McKell building in a slightly disheveled condition after running the gauntlet of newsmen, and from his distress he might have been stripped by their waving hands to his under-clothing.
    â€œFoul beasts,” he muttered, accepting a glass of sherry and a biscuit from Lutetia in great agitation. He wore a resentful look, as if he had been tricked. It took Dane five minutes to calm him.
    â€œThis is quite beyond my depth, Lutetia,” he said at last. “I have had no occasion to practice criminal law—haven’t