Wolfe looked at me. I nodded, “Her brother.” He told Fritz he could bring the cheese and we would have coffee there instead of in the office, and forked a bite of soufflé. Oster asked, “Susan’s brother?” and I said yes. He asked Wolfe, “You weren’t expecting him?”
Wolfe swallowed the bite. “Not him specifically. I was rather expecting someone, this evening or tomorrow. The hook I baited.” In the office he would have been smug, but not with guests, at the table. “I need another hour or so with you and Mr. Whipple, but it will have to wait. Perhaps Mr. Goodwin could call at your office in the morning?”
“I want to sit in on this. With these people.”
“No, sir. We would probably start bickering in front of them. I’ll report it to you — at my discretion.”
Fritz came with the cheese.
Chapter 7
I stood in the alcove at the rear end of the hall, looking through the hole in the wall. On the alcove side it’s just a hole, a rectangle with a sliding panel. On the office side it’s covered by a picture of a waterfall which you can see through from the alcove. I was seeing through, for a preview of the two men and a woman whom Fritz had conducted to the office after Whipple and Oster had left. Wolfe, standing beside me, had already looked. Kenneth Brooke, in the red leather chair, had his head turned to face the other two, talking with them. He was chunky and solid, not slim like his sister. His wife, in the chair Paul Whipple had occupied before dinner, was a full-sized, positive blonde. I mean positive not as opposed to negative, but as opposed to vague. The other man, Peter Vaughn, of whom I had never heard, in a chair Fritz had moved up, was long and lanky, with a narrow bony face. Wolfe and I had been there, looking and listening, for six or seven minutes, but the listening hadn’t helped any. They were discussing a picture on the wall back of Wolfe’s desk, not the waterfall. Vaughn thought it was an unsigned Van Gogh, which it wasn’t. It had been painted by a man named McIntyre whom Wolfe had once got out of a scrape.
Wolfe wiggled a finger, and I slid the noiseless panel shut. He looked a question at me, had I ever seen any of them? I shook my head, and he led the way to the office. Entering, he detoured around Brooke to his desk, and I passed behind the other two to mine. Before he sat he spoke. “I’m sorry you had to wait. Usually I see callers only by appointment, but I make exceptions. You are Susan Brooke’s brother?”
Brooke nodded. “I am. My wife. Mr. Vaughn. Peter Vaughn. We came — uh — on the spur of the moment. We appreciate—”
“That piece in the Gazette” Mrs. Brooke said. She talked positive too. “We think you’re right. We know you’re right!”
“Indeed. That’s gratifying.” Wolfe moved a hand to indicate me. “Mr. Goodwin, my confidential assistant. We are both gratified. We thought you were probably going to say we are wrong. How do you know we’re right?”
They all spoke at once, or started to. Mrs. Brooke won. “You tell us” she said, “how you know. Then we’ll tell you.” She was making eyes at him. “They say ladies first, but we can make exceptions too. This time gentlemen first.”
Wolfe’s lips were tight. I thought he was going to cut loose, but he held it. He was almost polite. “But madam,” he said, “consider my position. I am engaged on behalf of a man who may be put on trial for murder. He may be compelled to present his defense to a judge and jury. To disclose particulars of that defense now to you, to anyone, would be to betray him.” He looked at the man beside her. “Who and what are you, Mr. Vaughn? Are you on the staff of the district attorney?”
“No,” Vaughn said, “nothing like that. I’m just a... a friend. I sell automobiles — Herons.” He got a case from a pocket, extracted a card, and got up to hand it to Wolfe.
I gave myself a black mark. I had not only heard of him, I had seen him, casually. His father was Sam Vaughn, owner and operator of Heron Manhattan, Inc., which I visited at least once a year, to trade in Wolfe’s sedan for a new one.
Wolfe’s head turned. “And you, Mr. Brooke?”
“Does that matter? I’m Susan’s brother. I’m an engineer by profession. Electronics. I assure you, we don’t want you to betray anyone — quite the contrary.”
“We want to know,” his wife said, “if you know the truth, the truth about Susan.”
Wolfe grunted. “So do I. I certainly don’t know all of it. Perhaps you can help me. What fragment of the truth about her would you like me to know?”
“What she was like,” Mrs. Brooke said.
“Her character, her personality,” Brooke said.
“Her quality,” Vaughn said. “She couldn’t possibly have been... with a black man... that apartment. I was going to marry her.”
“Indeed. She was engaged?”
“Well... it was understood. It had been for nearly two years. I was waiting until she had had enough of her — kink.”
“Kink?”
“Well — caprice. Do-gooding.”
“It wasn’t just do-gooding,” Mrs. Brooke declared. “I flatter myself that I do a little good myself sometimes. But Susan had to go all-out. Giving them money wasn’t enough, and even working with them wasn’t enough. She had to have that place right in the middle of the Harlem slums and even eat and sleep there sometimes.”
Wolfe asked, “Were you ever there — that apartment?”
“Yes, I went with Mother Brooke — her mother. She insisted on seeing it. It was terrible — the neighborhood, the dirt and the smell, and the awful people. They don’t want to be called niggers, but that’s what they are. But the idea that Susan could be... with one of them... could have one of them with her in that apartment, that’s absolutely absurd. She was a lady. She had a kink all right, but she was a lady. So you’re perfectly right, that Dunbar Whipple didn’t kill her. She was killed by some black hoodlum. Heaven knows there’s enough of them.”
Wolfe nodded. “Your logic seems sound. I understand the police have considered that possibility and reject it because valuables were there in plain sight, not taken, and Miss Brooke had not been sexually assaulted.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. Something scared him, some noise or something. Or he hadn’t intended to kill her, and that scared him.”
“Quite possible. As a conjecture, certainly admissible. But it will take more than a conjecture to clear Mr. Whipple; he was in the apartment; he had been there more than half an hour when the police arrived. The hoodlum theory is futile unless he is found and established. I’m not sure I understand your position. If, as you said, the idea that Miss Brooke ‘could have one of them with her in that apartment’ is absurd, how do you account for Mr. Whipple being there?”
“He went to ask her something or tell her something about her work. He lives only a few blocks away.”
“But I understand that he went there frequently, that he has told the police that he and Miss Brooke were planning to be married.”