“Oh, thirty minutes or thirty hours. When do you want her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me when you do. Of course I’ll have to pry her loose, and I only have one pry. On the way she’ll have plenty of time to decide what line to take.”
He scowled at me. I scowled back, but his face gives him the advantage. Finding that that wasn’t getting us anywhere, he leaned back and closed his eyes, and his lips started working. They pushed out, then drew in, and kept at it — out and in, out and in... man at work, or possibly genius at work. I never interrupt the lip act because I can’t; he’s not there. It may last anywhere from half a minute to half an hour; I always time it, since there’s nothing else to do. That time it was four minutes. He opened his eyes and asked, “Can Saul be here at two o’clock?”
“Yes. I rang him before breakfast. He had a chore for this morning, but he’ll be free around noon and will call.”
“Tell him two o’clock. Get Mr. Whipple.”
Everything pertaining to a current operation is kept in a locked drawer, and I had to use a key to get the extension number at the university. Then there was a wait because he was in another room. When I had him, Wolfe got on. Naturally Whipple had questions about last night’s meeting, and Wolfe tolerated him as much as he would a client who was going to get a fat bill. Not more. He stopped him by saying he hadn’t called to report.
“I report only when there has been progress. I called because I need your help. I need two Negroes, and I assume you have Negro friends. Two men neither too young nor too old, preferably between thirty and fifty. Not too light, the blacker the better. Not elegant in appearance; that’s essential. Rather roughly dressed if possible. Average intelligence will do, or even below average; no acumen or skill is necessary. I need them here by two o’clock, or two-thirty at the latest. I don’t know how long they’ll have to stay, but I think not more than two hours, perhaps less. They will be asked to do nothing reprehensible or hazardous; they will take no risk of any kind. Can you supply them?”
Silence for five seconds, then: “I suppose it’s something about — for my son?”
“Certainly, since I’m asking your help. There may be a development that will show promise.”
“Thank God.”
“He is not its source. Can you supply two such men?”
“I will You’d better repeat the specifications.”
Wolfe did so, but I didn’t listen. I was too busy trying to guess what kind of charade was going to have two roughly dressed middle-aged Negroes in the cast. Plus, apparently, Saul Panzer.
We hung up and he turned to me. “Your notebook. On my letterhead, but not a letter. A document. Dated today. Two carbons. Double-spaced. ‘I hereby affirm that at or about twenty minutes past eight in the evening of Monday, March second, nineteen sixty-four, I took my motor car from the’ — name the garage and its address — ‘and, comma, unaccompanied, comma, drove it to One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, New York City. I parked the car, comma, walked to the entrance of the building at’ — give the address — ‘entered the building, comma, and ascended two flights of stairs. On the third floor I...’”
Chapter 10
At least half of the hallmen in New York apartment houses are either hard of hearing or don’t give a damn. I know how to pronounce my name without mumbling, but I have heard myself announced as Godwin, Gooden, Gordon, Goodman, and variations; and with a message of five words or more they’re hopeless. So that Tuesday afternoon when I entered the lobby of that sixteen-story Park Avenue palace and crossed the maybe-Oriental carpet to meet the hallman, I was prepared. I had it in my hand. Reaching him, I pointed emphatically to my mouth, shook my head, and handed it to him — a slip of paper on which I had typed:
Please tell Mrs. Kenneth Brooke that Mr. Goodwin is here and wants to go up and tell her the answer to the question which Mr. Wolfe refused to answer last Friday evening.
He looked at me suspiciously and asked, “Deaf and dumb?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, you can hear?”
I nodded.
He read it again, went through a door, used a phone, and came out. “Fourteen A,” he said, and I crossed the carpet again, to the elevator. I had saved three minutes and a lot of breath.
I was admitted to Fourteen A, to a foyer bigger than my bedroom, by the lady of the house, the full-sized positive blonde. Since she was now definitely a candidate, she deserved more than mere curiosity. As I disposed of my coat and hat on a chair and followed her through an arch into a room in which a concert-size piano was merely a speck in a corner, I was trying to see a sign of a murderer in her. After all the years I should know better, and I do, but it’s automatic and you can’t control it.
She crossed to one of two divans at right angles to the fireplace, and when she had sat I took a nearby chair. She looked at me with her round blue eyes as a lady of that much house looks at an article like a private detective and said, “Well?”
“It was just a dodge,” I said, “to get up and in.”
“A dodge?”
“Yes. Mr. Wolfe wants to see you. You wouldn’t be impressed by the reason he had for deciding that Dunbar Whipple was innocent because it was strictly personal. The same with me. Whipple was in the office for more than an hour last Tuesday, a week ago today, and from what he said and the way he said it we were convinced that he hadn’t killed Susan Brooke.”
She stared. “Just what he said?”
“Right. But now we have a better reason — maybe not actually better, but a different kind. Now we know. Since you stood at the door a while, listening, and heard nothing, and knocked on the door, and stood some more to listen, and knocked again, and got no response, and still heard nothing; and since when you left the building you watched the entrance, and Susan didn’t arrive but Whipple did, it’s obvious that she wasn’t in the apartment alive when he entered. That’s simple, isn’t it?”
She was fairly good. She had parted her lips, and her frown was okay. But what she said wasn’t so hot. She said, “What on earth do you think you’re saying? Are you crazy?”
Of course people have word habits, she had asked her husband if he was crazy, but she should have done better. “That’s wasted, Mrs. Brooke,” I said. “Peter Vaughn couldn’t handle his conscience, and we have it all from him — that is, his end of it. We have some from others too — people who saw you.”
“You’re crazy! What could you have from Peter Vaughn?”
I shook my head. “Really, it’s no good. For his part, corroboration to burn. The hallman and elevator man who saw him come and go, and you go and come, your eight-year-old son — but it shouldn’t be necessary to drag him in — the man at the garage. Peter’s part is solid. It’s the other part that Mr. Wolfe wants to discuss with you. I go on talking to give you time to swallow it. He wants to see you, now, and I came to escort you. The other time you wanted to see him, to find out if he knew that you had gone there that evening. Now it’s his turn, he wants to see you. Let’s go and get it over with.”
I thought, as I talked, that she was going to go feminine on me, and so she did. She stretched an arm to put her hand out, but I wasn’t close enough for her to touch me without leaving the divan. The feminine was in her eyes, and in her chin as it quivered a little, but that was all, except her saying, “I don’t want to go.” Pure feminine.
“Of course you don’t. So come on.” Masculine. I stood up.
“You said ‘the other part.’ What other part?”
“I’m not sure. It’s what Mr. Wolfe wants to ask you about. I advise you to come and find out.”