The next step, presumably, was to acquire additional equipment, preferably at wholesale, and proceed to take the prints of everyone on the floor. Granted that they would all be eager to co-operate, it would keep me busy for four or five eight-hour days, working alone. That had drawbacks. I went and stooped for the phone, having deposited it on the floor when I moved the desk, and told it I wished to speak to Mr. Pine.
It took a while to get him. When he was on I said, “I need an answer to a question I don’t like to ask anyone else. I know some of the big corporations have adopted the custom of getting fingerprints of all their employees, and I wonder if Naylor-Kerr is one of them. Is it?”
“Yes,” he said, “we started that during the war. Why?”
“I’d like to have permission to take a look at them. I mean go over them.”
“What for?”
“Someone has been monkeying around my room, nosing into my papers, and it would be fun to know who.”
“That seems a little farfetched, doesn’t it? By the way, I got that report. It will be discussed at a meeting of some of the executives this afternoon. And Mr. Hoff insisted on seeing me; he just left a few minutes ago. He says your presence is demoralizing the whole department. Damn it, I tell you frankly, I could run a car over Mr. Naylor myself. At least you have prodded him along a little. Perhaps you should have a talk with Mr. Hoff whether he likes it or not.”
“I’d love to. What about the fingerprints?”
“Certainly, if you think it’s worth the trouble. See Mr. Cushing and tell him I said so.”
Mr. Cushing was the assistant vice-president who had introduced me around when I started to work. I got him on the phone. It might have been expected that he would show some curiosity as to what a personnel expert expected to accomplish by inspecting fingerprints, but he didn’t, so evidently the news of my real status had got beyond the stock department. He was anxious to please, even to the extent of sending me a boy with an empty carton and a supply of tissue paper for the safe transport of my specimens.
I wasn’t left alone with the prints, which were filed in a locked cabinet of their own in a room on the thirty-fifth floor. A middle-aged woman with dyed brown hair and a flat chest who had apparently eaten onions for breakfast never got more than ten feet from me. She had an uncertain moment when I sent for the boy and asked him to bring me sandwiches and milk, but she fielded it nicely by phoning a pal to come and relieve her for a lunch period.
I knew what I was doing, but was by no means an expert, and I had to go slow if I didn’t want to miss it and have to start all over again. I had the advantage of having an ample collection of good specimens, but even so it was a long uphill climb. A couple of times during the afternoon the onion eater offered to help, but I politely declined, with my eyes smarting and my neck developing a crick.
It was well past four o’clock when I rang the bell. Even before I put it under the magnifying glass I knew that was it, and five minutes with the glass comparing it with a dozen of the best specimens on the folders and reports, settled it good enough for any jury. Either I had let out a grunt of triumph or my manner had betrayed me, for the onion eater came to my elbow and asked:
“Found what you were after, didn’t you?”
Not to waste a lie I told her yes, which was feasible since my hand was covering the name on the card. When she had backed off again I returned the card to the file, closed the drawer, repacked my stuff in the carton with the tissue paper, told her I was through for the day and was grateful for the pleasant hours I had spent with her, and went back to the thirty-fourth floor and my office with the carton under my arm. I put the carton on the floor between the window and the desk, which was back in place, got the head of the reserve pool on the phone, and asked him:
“How about Miss Gwynne Ferris? Can I see her now?”
“I’m afraid not.” He was apologetic. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Truett, but she still has a lot—”
“Excuse me,” I broke in. “I’m sorry too, but so have I got a lot. I have asked for her three times now, and of course if I have to go to Mr. Naylor or Mr. Pine—”
“Not at all! Certainly not! I didn’t know it was important!”
“It may be.”
“Then I’ll send her right in! She’ll be there right away!”
I told him I appreciated it, hung up, arose to move the visitor’s chair to a better position at the end of the desk, and resumed my seat. The door was closed. I was idly considering getting up to open it, to save her the trouble, when it swung open itself and she entered, shut the door behind her, and approached.
I haven’t Wolfe’s stock excuse, over three hundred pounds to manipulate, for not rising to my feet when a caller enters the room, and besides, I am not a lout. But that time I was glued to my chair at least three seconds beyond the courtesy limit, until after she had asked in a sweet musical voice:
“Did you want me? I’m Gwynne Ferris.”
It was the non-speller who had rested her lovely fingers on my knee before I had been in the place an hour.
18.
The psychological moment had passed for rising on the entrance of a lady, so I skipped it and told her, “There’s a chair. C-H-A-I-R. Sit down, D-O-W-N.”
She did so gracefully with no flutter, got one knee over the other with the nylons nearly parallel the twentieth-century classic pose, gave the ordained tug to the hem of her green woolen skirt, covering an additional sector of knee the width of a matchstick, and smiled at me both with her pretty red lips and her clear blue eyes.
“This is Friday,” I stated. “So this is your fifth and last day here. Huh?”
“Well—” she looked demure.
“I am naturally magnanimous,” I went on, “and how would you like to spell that one? And I don’t mind a little kidding, some of my best friends are kidders, including me. Besides, my suddenly sitting on the corner of your desk and firing questions at you about Waldo Moore must have given you a jolt, considering that you had been—well, I don’t want to be outspoken about it—say you and he had been propinquitous. P-R-O-P-I—”
“Don’t spell it,” she said, with her voice a little less musical and not at all sweet. “Just tell me what it means. If it means what I think it does it’s a lie and I know who told you.”
“Prove it. Who?”
“Hester Livsey. And you believed her! You wouldn’t stop to consider my reputation, a girl’s reputation, oh no, that wouldn’t matter! Not if Hester Livsey told you, because she’s a section head’s secretary and she wouldn’t lie, oh no! What did she say? Exactly what words did she say?”
I was shaking my head. “Nope. Bad guess. Miss Livsey hasn’t mentioned you, and anyhow I want no part of the idea that a section head’s secretary never tells a lie.” I looked at her as man to woman. “Why don’t I forget that anyone has told me anything, and let you straighten me out? You did know Moore, didn’t you?”
“Certainly, everybody did.” Her voice was back to normal. It changed as often and as fast as the weather. “No matter what a girl’s character was she stood a fat chance of not knowing him!”
“Yeh, I understand he was very sociable. Did you go out with him much?”
“No, not—” She bit that off. A tiny wrinkle appeared on her lovely smooth forehead. “Oh, he took me to a couple of shows, that was about all. Once we were out in his car, out on Long Island, and there was an accident and I got a little cut on a part of my body. Of course everyone heard about that.”
“I’ll bet they did. But you weren’t especially intimate with him?”
“Good lord no, intimate? I should say not!”
“Then I suppose his death wasn’t a particularly hard blow for you.”
“No, I scarcely noticed it.” She caught herself up. “Of course I don’t mean—I mean, I noticed it. But more on account of my character than on account of him. What I mean about my character, I mean I don’t like death. I just don’t like it, no matter who it is.”
She jerked her chin up, and, as though it had been synchronized, her skirt simultaneously jerked itself back above the knee. She demanded, “Who the hell mentioned Ben Frenkel?”
“I did. Just now. He came to see me yesterday and we had a talk. Isn’t he a friend of yours?”
“We’re not intimate,” she said defiantly. “Did he say we are?”
“No no, he’s not that kind of guy. I was just using him as an illustration of how little you noticed the death of Moore. What’s your opinion of this gossip that’s going around, about Moore being murdered?”
“I think it’s terrible and I won’t listen to it. Gossip is so cheap!”
“But of course you’ve heard it?”
“Mighty little. I just won’t listen!”
“Aren’t you interested? Or curious? I thought intelligent women were curious about everything, even murder.”
She shook her angelic head. “Not me. I guess it isn’t a part of my character.”
“That’s funny. It really surprises me, because when I found out it was you who came in here on the sly and went through that cabinet, and looked through my folders, and read my reports about Moore, I said to myself, sure, I might have expected that, all it means is that Gwynne Ferris is a beautiful and intelligent young woman who got so curious about it that she couldn’t resist the temptation. And now you say you’re not curious at all. It certainly is funny.”
I am no Nero Wolfe at reading faces, but I know what I see, and it was a bet that during my brief speech she had decided three times to call me a liar, and had thrice changed her mind and made a grab for some better idea. When I stopped purposely without asking a question, and sat and waited for her to bat it back, what she said was:
“It certainly is.”
I nodded. “So since you’re not curious I suppose you had some special reason for wanting to know how far I had got. The reason I’m speaking to you about it like this, alone with you, is because I think it’s much better this way than it would be if I made a report of it and you got a bunch of nitwits barking at you—you know what police are like …”
I let it fade out because she had made up her mind. With a charming impulsive movement she was out of her chair and standing in front of me, leaning over, getting my hands in hers. In the close little room with the door shut she smelled like a new name for a perfume, but there was no time to invent one then and there.
“You don’t believe that,” she said, not much more than a whisper, into my face. “Do you honestly think I’m that sort of girl, honestly? Do my hands feel like the kind of hands that would do mean things like that? Are you going to believe everything mean you hear about me? Just because someone says they saw me coming in your room or going out again—can you honestly look at me and tell me you believe it? Can you?”
“No,” I said. “Impossible.”
I was going on, but couldn’t for the moment, because she thought I had earned a citation and was proceeding to bestow it when the door of the room swung open, and with my right eye, the only one that could see anything past her ear, I observed Kerr Naylor walking in.
At the sound my seducer jerked away and whirled to face the door.
“It’s past quitting time, Miss Ferris,” Naylor said.
I batted for her. “I sent for Miss Ferris,” I told the glint in his eyes, “and we’re having a talk which has at least an hour to go and maybe more. She was taking a mote out of my eye. Can I help you with something?”
Naylor smiled, stepped to the chair that was still warm from Gwynne, and sat down. “Perhaps I can help you instead,” he piped. “I’ll be glad to take part in the talk if you’ll limit it to an hour.”
I shook my head at him emphatically. “Much obliged, but if’s strictly private.—No, Miss Ferris, don’t leave. You stay here.—So if all you came for was to say good night, good night.”
“This is my department, Mr. Truett.”
“Not the part of it I’m in at any given moment. Yours is the stock department. Mine is the murder department. Good night—unless you came for something else.”
He was speechless with fury. Not that it showed on his little wax face, but he was speechless, and nothing short of fury could have done that to him. He stood up, stared at Gwynne, who did not stare back, and finally transferred it to me.
“Very well. The question of your status here can be settled on Monday—if you are here Monday. I came to tell you something, and while Miss Ferris is not ideal for the purpose, it is just as well to have a witness. I am told you have reported that I told you I know the name of the person who murdered Waldo Moore. Is that true?”
“Yep, that’s true.”
“Then you reported a lie. I have not made that statement to you, nor any statement that could possibly be so construed. I have no idea why you reported such a lie, and I don’t intend to waste time trying to find out.” He walked to the door, turned, and smiled at us. “You can now resume the conversation I interrupted. Good night.”
He was gone, closing the door behind him. I sat still to listen, and in the silence of the depopulated arena heard his footsteps receding, fading into the silence.
Gwynne approached and began. “You see? No matter who said they saw me sneaking into your room, you wouldn’t believe it, and no matter who said you had told a lie, I wouldn’t believe—”
“Shut up, pet. Shut up and sit down while I sharpen a wit.”
She did so. I gazed at the neighborhood of her chin, found that distracting and switched to something neuter. On a quick and concentrated survey, this latest impetuosity of Kerr Naylor looked like the beginning of his big retreat. Once started backward he would probably keep going, and by the middle of the next week would be taking the position that Moore hadn’t been killed at all, maybe not even hurt.
I spoke to Gwynne. “What makes it chilly in here is the cold feet of Mr. Kerr Naylor. They are practically frozen. To go back to you, or should I say us, when Naylor came I was about to tell you that you were wasting a lot of ammunition, and damn good ammunition, because nobody told me they saw you coming in here or going out. It’s fingerprints. You left about five dozen scattered all over, on the folders and the reports. I’m going to keep them to remember you by. Now what? Were you walking in your sleep? Try that.”
She was wrinkling her forehead in profound concentration, as if I had been giving instructions for an intricate typing job and she was deeply anxious to get it straight. My free-for-nothing suggestion about walking in her sleep didn’t appeal to her, or more probably she didn’t even hear it. At length she spoke.
“Fingerprints?”
Her tone implied that it must be a Russian word and unfortunately she didn’t know that language.
“That’s right. Little lines on the tips of your fingers that make pretty patterns when you touch something. F-I-N-G—”
“Don’t be offensive,” she said in a hurt tone. “Anyway, you said it would be impossible for you to believe I could do such a thing!”
“No you don’t,” I said firmly. “In the first place, I didn’t say that. In the second place, one of my favorite rules is never to let a woman start an argument about what she said or what I said. You’ve had time now to think up something. What will it be?”
She was still hurt. “I don’t have to think up something,” she declared indignantly. “All I have to do is tell you the truth even if I think you don’t deserve it. Yesterday you said you wanted to see me, and I couldn’t come because I had a pile of work for Mr. Henderson, because his secretary is home sick, and I had to stay overtime, and when I got through I came here because I thought you might still be waiting for me, and you were gone, and I thought perhaps you had left some work for me in your cabinet, so I looked in it to see, and of course I had to look in the folders because that was where you would leave it. And now you accuse me of somethin
g underhanded just because I tried to do my duty even if it was nearly seven o’clock!”
My head was moving slowly up and down, with my eyes maintaining focus on hers, “Not bad,” I conceded. “It would really be good, although loony, if you hadn’t denied it at first and come clear here to my chair with your perfume and other attributes. Why did you deny it, precious?”
“Well—I guess I just can’t help kidding people. I guess it’s part of my character.”
“And that’s your story and you like it, huh?”
“Of course it is, it’s the truth!”
I would have liked to use assorted tortures on her in a well-equipped underground chamber. “This room is not suitable,” I admitted reluctantly, “for giving you the kind of attention merited by your character and abilities. But there are other rooms. Policemen get sore at accomplished and fantastic liars much quicker than I do. Tomorrow will be Saturday and this office will be closed, but policemen work seven days a week. It will be nice meeting you in other surroundings. Go on home.”
“You’re not a policeman,” she stated, as if she were contradicting me. She got out of her chair. “You’re too handsome and cultured.”
When I had just got through saying, or at least plainly implying, that I was not a policeman!
I took the carton home with me, not caring to leave its contents there even with the cabinet locked.
19.
That evening after dinner Wolfe was going on with his three books. Since there was wide variation in the number of pages it looked to me as if he was going to run into trouble when the shortest one suddenly petered out on him, unless he had forseen the difficulty and was adjusting his installments accordingly.
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