mizing the damage by dealing with your intramural
treachery yourself, and letting the culprit escape his
doom. If you went about it with sufficient resourceful-
ness and ingenuity it is conceivable that the police could
be cheated of their prey, but not that I could be."
The Homicide Trinity 23
"You are making a wholly unwarranted assumption,"
Otis said.
"I am not making an assumption. I am merely telling
you my intention. The police hypothesis, and mine, is
the obvious one: that a member of your firm killed Miss
Aaron. Though the law does not insist that the testi-
mony against him in court must include proof of his
motive, inevitably it would. Will you assert that you
won't try to prevent that? That you will not regard the
reputation of your firm as your prime concern?"
Otis opened his mouth and closed it again.
Wolfe nodded. "I thought not. Then I advise you to
help me. If you do, I'll have two objectives, to get the
murderer and to see that your firm suffers as little as
possible; if you don't, I'll have only one. As for the
police, I doubt if they'll expect you to cooperate, since
they are not nincompoops. They will realize that you
have a deeper interest than the satisfaction of justice.
Well, sir?"
Otis's palms were cupping his knees and his head was
tilted forward so he could study the back of his left
hand. His eyes shifted to his right hand, and when that
too had been properly studied he lifted his head and
spoke. "You used the word 'hypothesis,' and that's all it
is, that a member of my firm killed Miss Aaron. How did
he know she was here? She said that nobody knew."
"He could have followed her. Evidently she left your
office soon after she talked with him. Archie?"
"She probably walked," I said. "Between fifteen and
twenty-five minutes, depending on her rate. At that
time of day empty taxis are scarce, and crosstown they
crawl. It would have been a cinch to tail her on foot."
"How did he get in?" Otis demanded. "Did he sneak in
unseen when you admitted her?"
"No. You have read my statement. He saw her enter
and knew this is Nero Wolfe's address. He went to a
phone booth and rang this number and she answered.
Here." I tapped my phone. "With me not here that
would be automatic for a trained secretary. I had not
pushed the button so it didn't ring in the plant rooms. It
24 Rex Stout
would ring in the kitchen, but Fritz wasn't there. She
answered it, and he said he wanted to see her at once
and would give her a satisfactory explanation, and
she told him to come here. When he came she was at the
front door and let him in. All he was expecting to do was
stall for time, but when he learned that she was alone on
this floor and she hadn't seen Mr. Wolfe he had another
idea and acted on it. Two minutes would have been
plenty for the whole operation, even less."
"All that is mere conjecture."
"Yeah, I wasn't present. But it fits. If you have one
that fits better I do shorthand."
"The police have covered everything here for finger-
prints."
"Sure. But it was below freezing outdoors and I
suppose the members of your firm wear gloves."
"You say that he learned she hadn't seen Wolfe, but
she had talked with you."
"She didn't tell him that she had told me. It wouldn't
take many words for him to learn that she was alone
and hadn't seen Mr. Wolfe. Either that, or she did tell
him but he went ahead anyhow. The former is more
probable and I like it better."
He studied me a while, then he closed his eyes and his
head tilted again. When his eyes opened he put them at
Wolfe. "Mr. Wolfe. I reserve comment on your sugges-
tion that I would be moved by personal considerations
to balk justice. You ask me to help you. How?"
"By giving me information. By answering questions.
Your mind is trained in inquiry; you know what I will
ask."
"I'll know better when I hear you. Go ahead and we'll
see."
Wolfe looked at the wall clock. "It's nearly an hour
past midnight, and this will be prolonged. It will be a
tiresome wait for Miss Paige."
"Of course," Otis agreed. He looked at me. "Will you
ask her to step in?"
I got up and crossed to the door to the front room. As
I entered, words were at the tip of my tongue, but that
The Homicide Trinity 25
was as far as they got. She wasn't there. Through a
wide-open window cold air was streaming in. As I went
to it and stuck my head out I was prepared to see her
lying there with one of my neckties around her throat,
though I hadn't left one in the room. It was a relief to
see that the areaway, eight feet down, was unoccupied.
Chapter 3
A roar came from the office. "Archie! What the
devil are you up to?"
I shut the window, glanced around to see if
there were any signs of violence or if she had left a note,
saw neither, and rejoined the conference.
"She's gone," I said. "Leaving no message. When
I—"
"Why did you open a window?"
"I didn't. I closed it. When I took her in there I locked
the door to the hall so she couldn't wander around and
hear things she wasn't supposed to, so when she got
tired waiting the window was the only way out."
"She climbed out a window?" Otis demanded.
"Yes, sir. It's a mere conjecture, but it fits. The
window was wide open, and she's not in the room, and
she's not outside. I looked."
"I can't believe it. Miss Paige is a level-headed and
reliable—" He bit it off. "No. No! I no longer know who
is reliable." He rested his elbow on the chair arm and
propped his head with his hand. "May I have a glass of
water?"
Wolfe suggested brandy, but he said he wanted wa-
ter, and I went to the kitchen and brought some. He got
a little metal box from a pocket, took out two pills, and
washed them down.
"Will they help?" Wolfe asked. "The pills?"
26 Rex Stout
"Yes. The pills are reliable." He handed me the glass.
"Then we may proceed?"
"Yes."
"Have you any notion why Miss Paige was impelled
to leave by a window?"
"No. It's extraordinary. Damn it, Wolfe, I have no
notions of anything! Can't you see I'm lost?"
"I can. Shall we put it off?"
"No!"
"Very well. My assumption that Miss Aaron was
killed by a member of your firm, call him X, rests on a
prior assumption, that when she spoke with Mr. Good-
win she was candid and her facts were accurate. Would
you challenge that assumption?"
Otis looked at me. "Tell me something. I know what
she said from your statement, and it sounded like her,
but how was she—her voice an
d manner? Did she seem
in any way . . . well, out of control? Unbalanced?"
"No, sir," I told him. "She sat with her back straight
and her feet together, and she met my eyes all the
time."
He nodded. "She would. She always did." To Wolfe:
"At this time, here privately with you, I don't challenge
your assumption."
"Do you challenge the other one, that X killed her?"
"I neither challenge it nor accept it."
"Pfui. You're not an ostrich, Mr. Otis. Next: if Miss
Aaron's facts were accurate, it must be supposed that X
was in a position to give Mrs. Sorell information that
would help her substantially in her action against her
husband, your client. That is true?"
"Of course." Otis was going to add something, de-
cided not to, and then changed his mind again. "Again
here privately with you, it's not merely her action at
law. It's blackmail. Perhaps not technically, but that's
what it amounts to. Her demands are exorbitant and
preposterous. It's extortion."
"And a member of your firm could give her weapons.
Which one or ones?"
Otis shook his head. "I won't answer that."
The Homicide Trinity 27
Wolfe's brows went up. "Sir? If you pretend to help
at all that's the very least you can do. If you're rejecting
my proposal say so and I'll get on without you. By noon
tomorrow—today—the police will have that elemen-
tary question answered. It may take me longer."
"It certainly may," Otis said. "You haven't men-
tioned a third assumption you're making. You are as-
suming that Goodwin was candid and accurate in
reporting what Miss Aaron said."
"Bah." Wolfe was disgusted. "You are gibbering. If
you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed for-
lorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties
later and wish to communicate with me I'll be here." He
pushed his chair back.
"No." Otis extended a hand. "Good God, man, I'm
trapped! It's not my faculties! I have my faculties."
"Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a
position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?"
"They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain
respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and
we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of
course, my three partners. It could have only been one
of them, partly because none of our associates was in
our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss
Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She
wouldn't have used that phrase, 'member of the firm,'
loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted applica-
tion. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles
Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that's incredible!"
"Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbe-
lieve Miss Aaron—or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin?
Here with me privately?"
"No."
Wolfe turned a palm up. "Then let's get at it. It is
equally incredible for all three of those men, or are
there preferences?"
During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen
times, and on some details—for instance, the respects
in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable—he clammed
28 Rex Stout
up absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my
notebook.
Frank Edey, fifty-five, married with two sons and a
daughter, wife living, got twenty-seven per cent of the
firm's net income. (Otis's share was forty per cent.) He
was a brilliant idea man but seldom went to court. He
had drafted the marriage agreement which had been
signed by Morton Sorell and Rita Ramsey when they
got yoked four years ago. Personal financial condition,
sound. Relations with wife and children, so-so. Interest
in other women, definitely yes, but fairly discreet. In-
terest in Mrs. Sorell casual so far as Otis knew.
Miles Heydecker, forty-seven, married and wife liv-
ing but no children, got twenty-two per cent. His fa-
ther, now dead, had been one of the original members
of the firm. His specialty was trial work and he handled
the firm's most important cases in court. He had ap-
peared for Mrs. Sorell at her husband's request two
years ago when she had been sued by a man who had
formerly been her agent. He was tight with money and
had a nice personal pile of it. Relations with his wife,
uncertain; on the surface, okay. Too interested in his
work and his hobbies, chess and behind-the-scene poli-
tics, to bother with women, including Mrs. Sorell.
Gregory Jett, thirty-six, single, had been made a firm
member and allotted eleven per cent of the income
because of his spectacular success in two big corpora-
tion cases. One of the corporations was controlled by
Morton Sorell, and for the past year or so Jett had been
a fairly frequent guest at the Sorell home on Fifth
Avenue but had not been noticeably attentive to his
hostess. His personal financial condition was one of the
details Otis balked on, but he allowed it to be inferred
that Jett was careless about the balance between in-
come and outgo and was in the red in his account with
the firm. Shortly after he had been made a member of
the firm, about two years ago, he had dropped a fat
chunk, Otis thought about forty thousand dollars, back-
ing a Broadway show that flopped. A friend of his,
female, had been in the cast. Whether he had had other
The Homicide Trinity 29
expenses connected with a female friend or friends Otis
either didn't know or wasn't telling. He did say that he
had gathered, mostly from remarks Bertha Aaron had
made, that in recent months Jett had shown more at-
tention to Ann Paige than their professional association
required.
But when Wolfe suggested the possibility that Ann
Paige had left through a window because she sus-
pected, or even knew, what was in the wind, and had
decided to take a hand, Otis wouldn't buy it. He was
having all he could do to swallow the news that one of
his partners was a snake, and the idea that another
of his associates might have been in on it was too much.
He would tackle Ann Paige himself; she would no doubt
have an acceptable explanation.
On Mrs. Morton Sorell he didn't balk at all. Part of his
information was known to everyone who read newspa-
pers and magazines: that as Rita Ramsey she had daz-
zled Broadway with her performance in Reach for the
Moon when she was barely out of her teens, that she
had followed with even greater triumphs in two other
plays, that she had spumed Hollywood, that she had
also spumed Morton Sorell for two years and then
abandoned her career to marry him. But Otis added
other information that had merely been hinted at in
gossip columns: that in a year the union had gone sour,
that it became appare
nt that Rita had married Sorell
only to get her lovely paws on a bale of dough, and that
she was by no means going to settle for the terms of the
marriage agreement. She wanted much more, more
than half, and she had carefully begun to collect evi-
dence of certain activities of Scroll's, but he had got
wise and consulted his attorneys, Otis, Edey, Hey-
decker and Jett, and they had stymied her—or thought
they had. Otis had been sure they had, until he had read
the copy of my statement. Now he was sure of nothing.
But he was still alive. When he got up to go, at two
hours past midnight, he had bounced back some. He
wasn't nearly as jittery as he had been when he asked
for a glass of water to take the pills. He hadn't accepted
30 Rex Stout
Wolfe's offer in so many words, but he had agreed to
take no steps until he had heard further from Wolfe,
provided he heard within thirty-two hours, by ten
o'clock Wednesday morning. The only action he would
take during that period would be to instruct Ann Paige
to tell no one that he had read my statement and to
leam why she had skedaddled. He didn't think the
police would tell him the contents of my statement, but
if they did he would say that he would credit it only if
it had corroboration. Of course he wanted to know
what Wolfe was going to do, but Wolfe said he didn't
know and probably wouldn't decide until after break-
fast.
Homicide Trinity Page 4