“No. I’ll laugh too when I get around to it. Does anything else strike you? A motive for him you wouldn’t laugh at?”
“Of course not. It’s ridiculous. You’re just floundering around. Have you finished with me?”
I looked at Wolfe. His eyes were closed. “For now, yes,” I told her, “unless Mr. Wolfe thinks I skipped something.”
“How can he? You can talk in your sleep, but you can’t think.” She stood up. “What are you going to do?”
“Find a murderer and stick pins in him. Or her.”
“Not sitting here you aren’t. Don’t bother, I know the way out. Why don’t you go and tackle Wally Kearns? I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks, I’ll manage.”
“Where did he take Mira?”
“Either to Homicide West, two-thirty West Twentieth, or to the District Attorney’s office, one-fifty-five Leonard. Try Twentieth Street first.”
“I will.” She turned and was off. I followed, to let her out, but she was a fast walker and I would have had to trot to catch up. When I reached the door she had it open. I stepped out to the stoop and watched her descend to the sidewalk and turn west. The floodlights and ropes and police cars were gone, and so was Judy’s cab. My wrist watch said five minutes past midnight as I went in and shut the door. I returned to the office and found Wolfe on his feet with his eyes open.
“I assumed,” I said, “that if you wanted something from her I hadn’t got you would say so.”
“Naturally.”
“Have you any comments?”
“No. It’s bedtime.”
“Yeah. Since you’re with me on this, which I appreciate, perhaps I’d better sleep here. If you don’t mind.”
“Certainly. You own your bed. I have a suggestion. I presume you intend to have a look at that place in the morning, and to see Mr. Kearns. It might be well for me to see him too.”
“I agree. Thank you for suggesting it. If they haven’t got him downtown I’ll have him here at eleven o’clock.” I made it eleven because that was his earliest hour for an appointment, when he came down from his two-hour session up in the plant rooms with the orchids.
“Make it a quarter past eleven,” he said. “I will be engaged until then with Mr. Anderson.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. “Didn’t you phone him not to come?”
“On the contrary, I phoned him to come. On reflection I saw that I had been hasty. In my employ, as my agent, you had made a commitment, and I was bound by it. I should not have repudiated it. I should have honored it, and then dismissed you if I considered your disregard of the rules intolerable.”
“I see. I can understand that you’d rather fire me than have me quit.”
“I said ‘if.’”
I lifted my shoulders and dropped them. “It’s a little complicated. If I have quit you can’t fire me. If I haven’t quit I am still on your payroll, and it would be unethical for me to have Miss Holt as my client. It would also be wrong for you to accept pay from me for helping me with the kind of work you are paying me to do. If you return the twenty-five to me and I return the fifty to Miss Holt, I will be deserting an innocent fellow being in a jam whom I have accepted as a client, and that would be inexcusable. It looks to me as if we have got ourselves in a fix that is absolutely hopeless, and I can’t see—”
“Confound it,” he roared, “go to bed!” and marched out.
VI
By 8:15 Tuesday morning I was pretty well convinced that Mira Holt was in the coop, since I had got it from three different sources. At 7:20 Judy Bram phoned to say that Mira was under arrest and what was I going to do. I said it wouldn’t be practical to tell a suspect my plans, and she hung up on me. At 7:40 Lon Cohen of the Gazette phoned to ask if it was true that I had quit my job with Nero Wolfe, and if so what was I doing there, and was Mira Holt my client, and if so what was she doing in the can, and had she killed Phoebe Arden or not. Since Lon had often been useful and might be again, I explained fully, off the record, why I couldn’t explain. And at eight o’clock the radio said that Mira Holt was being held as a material witness in the murder of Phoebe Arden.
Neither Lon nor the radio supplied any items that helped, nor did the morning papers. The Star had a picture of the taxi parked in front of Wolfe’s house, but I had seen that for myself. It also had a description of the clothes Phoebe Arden had died in, but what I needed was a description of the clothes the murderer had killed in. And it gave the specifications of the knife—an ordinary kitchen knife with a five-inch blade and a plastic handle—but if the answer was going to come from any routine operation like tracing the knife or lifting prints from the handle, it would be Cramer’s army who would get it, not me.
I made one phone call, to Anderson, to ask him to postpone his appointment because Wolfe was busy on a case, and he said sure, it wasn’t urgent; and, since Fritz takes Wolfe’s breakfast to his room and I seldom see him before he comes down to the office at eleven, I put a note on his desk. I wanted to make another call, to Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer, but vetoed it. For getting Mira out on bail he would have charged about ten times what she had paid me, and there was no big hurry. It would teach her not to drive a hack without a license.
At a quarter past eight I left the house and went to Ninth Avenue for a taxi, and at half past I dismissed it at the corner of Carmine and Ferrell, and walked down Ferrell Street to its dead end. There were only two alternatives for what had happened during the period—call it ten minutes—when Mira had been away from the cab: either the murderer, having already killed Phoebe Arden, had carried or dragged the body to the cab and hoisted it in, or he had got in the cab with her and killed her there. I preferred the latter, since you can walk to a cab with a live woman in much less time than you can carry her to it dead, and also since, even in a secluded spot like that and even after dark, there is much less risk of being noticed. But in either case they had to come from some place nearby.
The first place to consider was Kearns’s house, but it only took five minutes to cross it off. The alley that led to it was walled on both sides, Mira had been parked at its mouth, and there was no other way to get from the house to the street. On the left of the alley was a walled-in lumber yard, and on the right was a dingy old two-story warehouse. On inspection neither of them seemed an ideal spot for cover, but across the street was a beaut. It was an open lot cluttered with blocks of stone scattered and piled around, some rough and some chiseled and polished. A whole company could have hid there, let alone one murderer and one victim. As you know, I was already on record that Mira hadn’t killed her, but it was nice to see that stoneyard. If there had been no place to hide in easy distance … Three men were there, two discussing a stone and one chiseling, but they wouldn’t be there at eight in the evening. I recrossed the street and entered the alley, and walked through.
By gum, Kearns had a garden, a sizable patch, say forty by sixty, with flowers in bloom and a little pool with a fountain, and a flagstone path leading to the door of a two-story brick house painted white. I hadn’t known there was anything like it in Manhattan, and I thought I knew Manhattan. A man in a gray shirt and blue jeans was kneeling among the flowers, and half way up the path I stopped and asked him, “Are you Waldo Kearns?”
“Do I look it?” he demanded.
“Yes and no. Are you Morton?”
“That’s my name. What’s yours?”
“Goodwin.” I headed for the house, but he called, “Nobody there,” and I turned.
“Where’s Mr. Kearns?”
“I don’t know. He went out a while ago.”
“When will he be back?”
“I couldn’t say.”
I looked disappointed. “I should have phoned. I want to buy a picture. I came last evening around half past eight and knocked, but nothing doing. I knocked loud because I heard the radio or TV going.”
“It was the TV. I was watching it. I heard you knock. I don’t open the door at night when he’
s not here. There’s some tough ones around this neighborhood.”
“I don’t blame you. I suppose I just missed him. What time did he leave last evening?”
“What difference does it make when he left if he wasn’t here?”
Perfectly logical, not only for him but for me. If Kearns hadn’t been there when Mira arrived in the cab it didn’t matter when he had left. I would have liked to ask Morton one more question, whether anyone had left with him, but from the look in his eye he would have used some more logic on me, so I skipped it, said I’d try again, and went.
There was no use hanging around because if Kearns had gone to call at the District Attorney’s office by request, which was highly probable, there was no telling when he would be back. I had got Gilbert Irving’s business address from the phone book, on Wall Street, but there was no use going there at that early hour. However, I had also got his home address, on East 78th Street, and I might catch him before he left, so I hoofed it along Ferrell Street back to civilization and flagged a taxi.
It was 9:15 when I climbed out in front of the number on 78th Street, a tenement palace with a marquee and a doorman. In the lobby another uniformed sentry sprang into action, and I told him, “Mr. Gilbert Irving. Tell him a friend of Miss Holt.” He went and used a phone, returned and said, “Fourteen B,” and watched me like a hawk as I walked to the elevator and entered. When I got out at the fourteenth floor the elevator man stood and watched until I had pushed the button and the door had opened and I had been invited in.
The inviter was no maid or butler. She might have passed for a maid in uniform, but not in the long, flowing, patterned silk number which she probably called a breakfast gown. Without any suggestions about my hat she said, “This way, please,” and led me across the hall, through an arch into a room half as big as Kearns’s garden, and over to chairs near a corner. She sat on one of them and indicated another for me.
I stood. “Perhaps the man downstairs didn’t understand me,” I suggested. “I asked for Mr. Irving.”
“I know,” she said. “He isn’t here. I am his wife. We are friends of Miss Holt, and we’re disturbed about the terrible—about her difficulty. You’re a friend of hers?” Her voice was a surprise because it didn’t fit. She was slender and not very tall, with a round little face and a little curved mouth, but her deep strong voice was what you would expect from a female sergeant. Nothing about her suggested the claws Judy Bram had mentioned, but they could have been drawn in.
“A new friend,” I said. “I’ve known her twelve hours. If you’ve read the morning paper you may have noted that she was sitting on the stoop of Nero Wolfe’s house with a man named Archie Goodwin when a cop found the body in the taxi. I’m Goodwin, and she has hired me to find out things.”
She adjusted the gown to cover a leg better. “According to the radio she has hired Nero Wolfe. She was arrested in his house.”
“That’s a technical point. We’re both working on it. I’m seeing people who might have some information, and Mr. Irving is on my list. Is he at his office?”
“I suppose so. He left earlier than usual.” The leg was safe, no exposure above the ankle, but she adjusted the gown again. “What kind of information? Perhaps I could help?”
I couldn’t very well ask if her husband had told her that Mira had told him she was going to drive Judy’s cab. But she wanted to help. I sat down. “Almost anything might be useful, Mrs. Irving. Were you and your husband also friends of Phoebe Arden?”
“I was. My husband knew her, of course, but you couldn’t say they were friends.”
“Were they enemies?”
“Oh, no. It was just that they didn’t hit it off.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Four days ago, last Friday, at a cocktail party at Waldo Kearns’s house. I was thinking about it when you came. She was so gay. She was a gay person.”
“You hadn’t seen her since?”
“No.” She was going to add something, but checked it.
It was so obvious that I asked, “But you had heard from her? A letter or a phone call?”
“How did you know that?” she demanded.
“I didn’t. Most detective work is guessing. Was it a letter?”
“No.” She hesitated. “I would like to help, Mr. Goodwin, but I doubt if it’s important, and I certainly don’t want any notoriety.”
“Of course not, Mrs. Irving.” I was sympathetic. “If you mean, if you tell me something will I tell the police, absolutely not. They have arrested my client.”
“Well.” She crossed her legs, glancing down to see that nothing was revealed. “I phoned Phoebe yesterday afternoon. My husband and I had tickets for the theater last evening, but about three o’clock he phoned me that a business associate from the West Coast had arrived unexpectedly, and he had to take him to dinner. So I phoned Phoebe and we arranged to meet at Morsini’s at a quarter to seven for dinner and then go to the theater. I was there on time, but she didn’t come. At a quarter past seven I called her number, but there was no answer. I don’t like to eat alone at a place like Morsini’s, so I waited a little longer and then left word for her and went to Schrafft’s. She didn’t come. I thought she might come to the theater, the Majestic, and I waited in the lobby until after nine, and then I left a ticket for her at the box office and went in. I would tell the police about it if I thought it was important, but it doesn’t really tell anything except that she was at home when I phoned around three o’clock. Does it?”
“Sure it does. Did she agree definitely to meet you at Morsini’s or was it tentative?”
“It was definite. Quite definite.”
“Then it was certainly something that happened after three o’clock that kept her from meeting you. It was probably something that happened after six-thirty or she would have phoned you—if she was still alive. Have you any idea at all what it might have been?”
“None whatever. I can’t guess.”
“Have you any ideas about who might have killed her?”
“No. I can’t guess that either.”
“Do you think Mira Holt killed her?”
“Good heavens, no. Not Mira. Even if she had—”
“Even if she had what?”
“Nothing. Mira wouldn’t kill anybody. They don’t think that, do they?”
Over the years at least a thousand people have asked me what the police think, and I appreciate the compliment though I rarely deserve it. Life would be much simpler if I always knew what the police think at any given moment. It’s hard enough to know what I think. After another ten minutes with her I decided that I thought that Mrs. Irving had nothing more to contribute, so I thanked her and departed. She came with me to the hall, and even picked up my hat from the chair where I had dropped it. I had yet to get a glimpse of her legs.
It was ten minutes to ten when I emerged to the sidewalk and turned left for Lexington Avenue and the subway, and a quarter past when I entered the marble lobby of a towering beehive on Wall Street and consulted the building directory. Gilbert Irving’s firm had the whole thirteenth floor, and I found the proper bank of elevators, entered one, and was hoisted straight up three hundred feet for nothing. In a paneled chamber with a thick conservative carpet a handsome conservative creature at a desk bigger than Wolfe’s told me in a voice like silk that Mr. Irving was not in and that she knew not when he would arrive or where he was. If I cared to wait?
I didn’t. I left, got myself dropped back down the three hundred feet, and went to another subway, this time the west side; and, leaving at Christopher, walked to Ferrell Street and on to its dead end and through the alley. Morton, still at work in the garden, greeted me with reserve but not coldly, said Kearns had not returned and there had been no word from him, and, as I was turning to go, suddenly stood up and asked, “Did you say you wanted to buy a picture?”
I said that was my idea but naturally I wanted to see it first, left him wagging his head, walked the length of Ferre
ll Street the fourth time that day, found a taxi, and gave the driver the address which might or might not still be mine. As we turned into 35th Street from Eighth Avenue, at five minutes past eleven, there was another taxi just ahead of us, and it stopped at the curb in front of the brownstone. I handed my driver a bill, hopped out, and had mounted the stoop by the time the man from the other cab had crossed the sidewalk. I had never seen him or a picture of him, or heard him described, but I knew him. I don’t know whether it was his floppy black hat or shoestring tie, or neat little ears or face like a squirrel, but I knew him. I had the door open when he reached the stoop.
“I would like to see Mr. Nero Wolfe,” he said. “I’m Waldo Kearns.”
VII
Since Wolfe had suggested that I should bring Kearns there so we could look at him together, I would just as soon have let him think that I had filled the order, but of course that wouldn’t do. So when, having taken the floppy black hat and put it on the shelf in the hall, I escorted him to the office and pronounced his name, I added, “I met Mr. Kearns out front. He arrived just as I did.”
Wolfe, behind his desk, had been pouring beer when we entered. He put the bottle down. “Then you haven’t talked with him?”
“No, sir.”
He turned to Kearns, in the red leather chair. “Will you have beer, sir?”
“Heavens, no.” Kearns was emphatic. “I didn’t come for amenities. My business is urgent. I am extremely displeased with the counsel you have given my wife. You must have hypnotized her. She refuses to see me. She refuses to accept the services of my lawyer, even to arrange bail for her. I demand an explanation. I intend to hold you to account for alienating the affections of my wife.”
“Affections,” Wolfe said.
“What?”
“Affections. In that context the plural is used.” He lifted the glass and drank, and licked his lips.
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