by Rex Stout
“I don’t know. It’s rather long.”
Wolfe’s head moved. “You’ve seen that play, Archie?”
“Yes, sir. I would say a quarter to ten, maybe twenty to.”
“Have you seen it, Saul?”
“Yes, sir. Twenty to ten.”
“You know that?”
“Yes, sir. Just my habit of noticing things.”
“Don’t disparage it. The more you put in a brain, the more it will hold-if you have one. How long would it take to get from One-seventy-one East Fifty-second Street to that theater?”
“After nine o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“With luck, if you were in a hurry, eight minutes. That would be a minimum. From that up to fifteen.”
Wolfe turned. “Mrs. Molloy, I wonder that you haven’t considered the possible significance of this. The anonymous call to the police, saying that a shot had been heard, was at nine-eighteen. The police arrived at nine-twenty-three. Even if he waited to see them arrive, and he probably didn’t, he could have reached the theater before the first act ended. Didn’t that occur to you?”
She was squinting at him. “If I understand you-you mean didn’t it occur to me that Jerry or Tom might have killed Mike?”
“Obviously. Didn’t it?”
“No!” She made it a little louder than it had to be, and I hoped Wolfe understood that she was raising her voice not at him, but at herself. It hadn’t occurred to her because the minute she had learned, on getting home that January night, that her husband had been found with a bullet in his head, and that P.H., with a gun in his pocket, had tried to force his way out, she thought she knew what had happened, and it had settled in her like a lump of lead. But she wasn’t going to tell Wolfe that. She told him instead, “There was no reason for Jerry to kill him. Or Tom. Why? And they had been in the bar across the street. Tom came not long after Rita and I went in, and said he needed a drink, and they went and had one.”
“Which one of them told you that?”
“Both of them. They told Rita and me, and we said they must have had more than one.”
Wolfe grunted. “Go back a little. Wouldn’t it have been the natural thing for Mr. Arkoff to leave the ticket at the box office instead of waiting in the lobby?”
“Not the way it was. Rita didn’t ask him to leave it at the box office, she told him to, and he doesn’t like to have her tell him to do things. So she does.” She came forward in her chair. “Listen, Mr. Wolfe,” she said earnestly. “If that man getting killed, if that means what you think it does, I don’t care what happens to anybody. I haven’t been caring what happened to me, I’ve just been feeling I might as well be dead, and I’m certainly not going to start worrying about other people, not even my best friends. But I think this is no use. Even if they lied about being in the bar, neither of them had any reason!”
“We’ll see about that,” he told her. “Someone had reason to fear Johnny Keems enough to kill him.” He glanced up at the clock. “Luncheon will be ready in seven minutes. You’ll join us? You too, Saul. Afterward you’ll stay here to be on hand if Mr. Parker needs you. And Mrs. Molloy, you’ll stay too and tell me everything you know about your friends, and you’ll invite them to join us here at six o’clock.”
“But I can’t!” she protested. “How can I? Now?”
“You said you weren’t going to worry about them. Yesterday morning Peter Hays, talking with Mr. Goodwin, used the same words you have just used. He said he might as well be dead. I intend that both of you-”
“Oh!” she cried, to me. “You saw him? What did he say?”
“I was only with him a few minutes,” I told her. “Except that he might as well be dead, not much. He can tell you himself when we finish this job.” I went to Wolfe. “I’ve got to call Purley. What do I tell him?”
He pinched his nose. He has an idea that pinching his nose makes his sense of smell keener, and a faint aroma of cheese dumplings was coming to us from the kitchen. “Tell him that Mr. Keems was working for me last evening, investigating a confidential matter, but I don’t know whom he had been just prior to his death; and that we’ll inform him if and when we get information that might be useful. I want to speak with those people before he does.”
As I turned to dial, Fritz entered to announce lunch.
Chapter 10
NOT LONG AGO I got a letter from a woman who had read some of my accounts of Nero Wolfe’s activities, asking me why I was down on marriage. She said she was twenty-three years old and was thinking of having a go at it herself. I wrote her that as far as I knew there was absolutely nothing wrong with marriage; the trouble was the way people handled it, and I gave her a couple of examples. The examples I used were Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Arkoff and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas L. Irwin, though I didn’t mention their names, and I had got my material from what I saw and heard in the first five minutes after they arrived at Wolfe’s place that Thursday at six o’clock.
They all arrived together, and there was a little bustle in the hall, getting their things off and disposed of. That was finished and I was ready to herd them down the hall and into the office when Rita Arkoff touched her husband’s elbow, pointed to a chair against the wall, and told him, “Your hat, Jerry. Hang it up.”
No wonder he hadn’t left the ticket at the box office. Before he could react normally, like making a face at her or telling her to go to hell, I got the hat myself and put it on the rack, and we proceeded to the office, where the Irwins immediately contributed their share. I had the chairs spaced comfortably to give everyone elbow room, but Tom Irwin pushed his close to his wife’s, sat, and took her hand in his and held onto it. I am not by any means against holding hands, in wedded bliss or unwedded, but only if both hands want to, and Fanny Irwin didn’t. She didn’t actually try to pull it away, but she sure would have liked to. I hope the examples I gave her will keep my twenty-three-year-old correspondent from developing into an order-giver or a one-way hand-holder, but leave it to her, she’ll find some kind of monkey wrench to toss into the machinery, and if she doesn’t her husband will.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before six o’clock came, and brought the two couples, there were other happenings. My lunch was interrupted twice. Fred Durkin phoned to say that he had seen the soda jerk who had moved to Jersey, and got nothing, and had worn out his welcome at all places with phone booths within two blocks of 171 East 52nd Street. I told him to come in. Orrie Cather phoned to ask if we had an administrator yet, and I told him also to come in. They arrived before we finished lunch, and, back in the office, Wolfe told them about Johnny Keems.
They agreed with Saul and me that the odds were big that the car that had hit enough of him to kill him had been not careless but careful. They hadn’t had much love for him, but they had worked a lot with him. As Fred Durkin said, “Lots of worse guys are still walking around.” Orrie Cather said, “Yes, and one of them has got something coming.” No one mentioned that until he got it they had better keep an eye out when crossing a street, but they were all thinking it.
They were given errands. Saul was to go to Parker’s office to be at hand. Orrie, armed with Selma Molloy’s keys, was to go to her apartment and inspect the contents of the three cartons. Fred, supplied by Mrs. Molloy with descriptions of Jerome Arkoff and Tom Irwin, was to go to the Longacre Theatre and the bar across the street and see if he could find someone who could remember as far back as January 3. Fred was getting the scraps.
When they had gone Wolfe tackled Mrs. Molloy again, to get the lowdown on her friends. Using the telephone in the kitchen while he was busy with the staff, she had asked them to come to Wolfe’s office at six o’clock. I don’t know what she had told them,, since she couldn’t very well say that Wolfe wanted to find out which one of them had killed Mike Molloy, but anyhow they had said they would come. I had suggested that she could tell them that Wolfe was working with Freyer and was trying to find some grounds for an appeal, and probably she did.
&
nbsp; Of course Wolfe had her cornered. If there were any chance of springing her P.H. she was all for it, but friends are friends, for people who are entitled to have any, until shown to be otherwise. If you want to take the word of one bewitched, she handled it very nicely. She stuck strictly to facts. For instance, she did not say that Fanny Irwin and Pat Degan were snatching a snuggle; she merely said that Rita Arkoff thought they were.
Jerome Arkoff, thirty-eight, a husky six-footer with a long solemn face, gray-blue eyes, a long nose, and big ears, according to the description she had given Fred Durkin, was a television producer, successful enough to have ulcers. She had met him through Rita, who had been a model when Selma was, and who had married Arkoff about the time Selma had quit modeling and gone to work for Molloy. Arkoff and Molloy had met through their wives’ friendship, and there had been nothing special in their relations, either of harmony or of hostility. If there had been anything between them that could possibly have led to murder, Selma knew nothing of it. She conceded it was conceivable that Molloy and Rita had put horns on Arkoff without her ever suspecting it, and Arkoff had removed the blot by blotting out Molloy, but not that he had also framed Peter Hays. Arkoff had liked Peter Hays.
Thomas L. Irwin, forty, was slender, handsome, and dark-skinned, with a skimpy black mustache. He was an executive in a big printing company, in charge of sales. Selma had met him shortly after her marriage, about the same time she had met Patrick Degan. His company did printing for Degan’s organization, the Mechanics Alliance Welfare Association, MAWA for short. Fanny Irwin called Degan “Mawa.” Irwin and Molloy had got on each other’s nerves and had had some fairly hot exchanges, but Selma had never seen any indication of serious enmity.
It was a thin crop. Wolfe poked all around, but the only real dirt he found was Rita Arkoff’s suspicion about Fanny Irwin and Pat Degan, and that wasn’t very promising. Even if it was true, and even if Irwin had been aware of it or suspected it, he could hardly have expected to relieve his feelings by killing Molloy. Wolfe abandoned it as fruitless and had gone back to the relationships among the men when a phone call came from Saul Panzer, from Parker’s office. Some papers were ready for Mrs. Molloy to sign before a notary and would she please come at once. She left, and five minutes later it was four o’clock and Wolfe went up to the plant rooms.
With a couple of hours to go before company was expected, I would have liked to take a trip up to 52nd Street and help Orrie paw through the cartons, but I had been instructed to stay put, and it was just as well. There were phone calls-one from Lon Cohen, one from our client in Omaha, and one from Purley Stebbins, wanting to know if we had got a line on Johnny Keems’s movements and contacts Wednesday evening. I told him no and he was skeptical. When the doorbell rang a little after five o’clock I expected to find Purley on the stoop, come to do a little snarling, but it was a stranger-a tall, slim, narrow-shouldered young man, looking very grim. When I opened the door he was going to push right in, but I was wider and heavier than he was. He announced aggressively, “I want to see Archie Goodwin.”
“You are.”
“I are what?”
“Seeing Archie Goodwin. Who am I seeing?”
“Oh, a wise guy.”
We were off to a bad start, but we got it straightened out that he meant that I was a wise guy, not that I was seeing one; and after I had been informed that his name was William Lesser and he was a friend of Delia Brandt I let him in and took him to the office. When I offered him a chair he ignored it.
“You saw Miss Brandt last night,” he said, daring me to try to crawl out of it.
“Right,” I confessed.
“About a piece about Molloy for some magazine.”
“Right.”
“I want to know what she told you about her and Molloy.”
I swiveled the chair at my desk and sat. “Not standing up,” I told him. “It would take too long. And besides, I’d want-”
“Did she mention me?”
“Not that I remember. I’d want some kind of a reason. You don’t look like a city detective. Are you her brother or uncle or lawyer or what?”
He had his fists on his hips. “If I was her brother my name wouldn’t be Lesser, would it? I’m a friend of hers. I’m going to marry her.”
I raised the brows. “Then you’re off on the wrong foot, brother. A happy marriage must be based on mutual trust and understanding, so they say. Don’t ask me what she told me about her and Molloy, ask her.”
“I don’t have to ask her. She told me.”
“I see. If that’s how it is you’d better sit down. When are you going to be married?”
The chair I had offered was right beside him. He looked at the seat of it as if he suspected tacks, looked back at me, and sat. “Listen,” he said, “it’s not the way you make it sound. I told her I was coming to see you. It’s not that I don’t trust her, it’s having it come out in a magazine. Haven’t I got a right to find out what’s going to be printed about my wife and a man she used to work for?”
“You certainly have, but she’s not your wife yet. When is the wedding?”
“Right away. We got the license today. Next week.”
“Congratulations. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Lesser. How long have you known her?”
“About a year. A little over. Now are you going to tell me what I asked?”
“I have no objection.” I crossed my legs and leaned back. “This may ease your mind a little, the fact that the magazine wouldn’t dream of printing anything Miss Brandt disapproved of, or anything her husband disapproved of. Invasion of privacy. And you’ve given me an idea. The article would be a lot better with some real love interest. You know what the slant is, the last ten months of a murder victim as seen by his secretary. Well, all the time she is working for him, and letting him take her out to dinner because she feels sorry for him, her heart is already in bond to another. She is deeply in love with a young man she intends to marry. That would make it a masterpiece-the contrast between the tragedy of the man who is going to die but doesn’t know it, and the blush and promise of young love. Huh?”
“I guess so. What did she tell you?”
“Don’t worry about that.” I waved it away. “When it’s written you and she can change anything you don’t like, or take it out. When were you engaged?”
“Well-it was understood quite a while ago.”
“Before the murder?”
“Formally engaged, no. Does that matter?”
“Maybe not. While she’s being sorry for Molloy she can either be promised to another or just hoping she soon will be. It would be swell if we could work in some reference, a sort of minor key, to the murderer. We could call him that, since he’s been convicted. Only I don’t suppose you knew Peter Hays.”
“No.”
“Did you know about him? Did you know he was in love with Mrs. Molloy?”
“No. I never heard of him until he was arrested.”
“It doesn’t really matter. I thought perhaps Miss Brandt had mentioned him to you. Of course Molloy told her about him.”
“How do you know he did? Did she say so?”
“I don’t remember.” I considered. “I’d have to look at my notes, and they’re not here. Did she tell you about Molloy asking her to go to South America with him?”
“No, she didn’t.” Lesser was looking aggressive again. “I didn’t come to tell you what she told me, I came to ask you what she told you.”
“I know you did.” I was sympathetic. “But you have my word that nothing will be printed that you don’t like, and that’s what you were concerned about. I can’t tell you about my talk with Miss Brandt because I was working for a client and my report of that talk is his property. But I think-”
“Then you’re not going to tell me.”
“I’d like to, but I can’t. But I think-”
He got up and walked out. From the back he looked even thinner than from the front. I went to the hall to be polite, but he alre
ady had his coat off the rack and was reaching for the doorknob. He banged the door shut behind him, and I returned to the office. The wall clock said twenty-five to six. Delia Brandt might have got home from work, or, since she had gone with Lesser to get their marriage license, she might have taken the day off. I got at the phone and dialed the number of her apartment. No answer.
I thought him over. There was one nice thing about him, he had had the makings of a motive, which was more than I could say for anyone else on the list. And he might easily have known enough about Peter Hays to get the idea of framing him for it. But how could he have arranged for Fanny Irwin to have a headache and stay home, and for Rita Arkoff to invite Selma Molloy to use the ticket? Even if that wasn’t essential, if he was merely waiting for an opportunity to knock, how did he know it was knocking? How did he know Mrs. Molloy was away from the apartment and would stay away? It was worth looking for answers to those questions, because there was another nice thing about him: a wife cannot be summoned to testify against her husband.
I dialed Delia Brandt’s number again, and got her.
“I’ve just heard a piece of news,” I told her. “That you’re going to be married. I’m calling you to wish you luck, and happiness, and everything that goes with it.”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you very much. Is Bill there with you?”
“No, he left a few minutes ago. A fine young man. It was a pleasure to meet him. Apparently he was a little worried about the magazine article, but I promised him he would have a chance to veto anything he didn’t like. So you knew he was coming to see me?”
“Oh, sure. He said he wanted to, and I thought since he was going to be my husband it was only natural. Did you tell him everything-what did you tell him?”
It didn’t look like paradise to me, him wanting to know what she had told me, and her wanting to know what I had told him, and they weren’t even married yet. “Nothing much,” I assured her. “Really nothing. After the promise I gave him it wasn’t necessary. Oh, by the way, now that I have you on the phone, I missed one bit entirely last night. At the end of the article, a sort of a climax, you ought to tell where you were and what you were doing the evening of January third. At the very minute Molloy was murdered, just after nine o’clock, if you remember. Do you?”
