I glanced at the screen again and examined the results of my search on Judi Dench. One link jumped right out at me—an Internet database devoted to movies. Maybe it had what I needed?

I found the entry for Miss Dubois, and there it was. Height 5' 6". I laughed with relief. Whether a court would accept it as evidence was one thing, but it might be enough to convince Kanesha.

At our first meeting I noticed that Mrs. Cartwright—or rather Eugene Marter—was the same height as Teresa Farmer. My friend and colleague was around five foot six as well. There was no way the real Electra Barnes Cartwright had grown a good four inches in the past sixty-odd years.

Now that I had identified the murderer, I considered how that fact fit into the odd incidents that had occurred, starting with the murder itself.

Kanesha’s witness, Mr. Andrews, claimed to have seen a man arrive around the time of Carrie Taylor’s phone message to Melba. Carrie Taylor had said something like, “What does he want?” About twenty minutes later Mr. Andrews saw a woman carrying a large box leaving the house.

Two possibilities occurred to me. The first—Carrie Taylor had two guests in close succession. I really didn’t think so. The second—Eugene Marter arrived as a man, somehow secreting his wig about his person. After he committed murder, he donned the wig to confuse things. That worked for me. I figured Eugene was doing his best to muddy the waters.

Next odd incident—the alleged theft of the five manuscripts and their discovery under the mattress in Winston Eagleton’s suite. When Marcella and Eugene first arrived at Eagleton’s party, they went immediately to the bathroom. The bedroom was only a few feet away, and one of them could easily have placed the manuscripts where they would quickly be found after Eugene reported the theft. I recalled the large handbag Eugene carried. He had not carried one in his role as his grandmother before, as far as I could remember.

What about the phone call reporting the theft? Didn’t it occur around the time of the party when Eugene would have been at the hotel?

Easily resolved—a cell phone call from the car or even from the lobby of the hotel before Eugene and Marcella came upstairs.

My excitement built as I put the pieces of the crime together.

What about the theft, however? Why had Eugene set it up? Had he seriously thought he could implicate Winston Eagleton in the murder? Or had he simply wanted to make everything more complicated in hopes that the authorities would be too confused to see the truth?

That was the likeliest answer—intentional confusion. It had certainly worked, up to a point. Eugene had even set it up by coming to me with his story of Eagleton’s threats against Mrs. Cartwright over the right to publish the manuscripts.