He leaned back and joined his finger tips at the apex of his central magnificence. “Miss Timms, we’ll start with you. Talk, please.”
Maryella said nothing. She seemed to be meeting his gaze, but she didn’t speak.
“Well, Miss Timms?”
“I don’t know—” she tried to clear the huskiness from her voice— “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nonsense,” Wolf said sharply. “You know quite well. You are an intelligent woman. You’ve been living in that house two years. It is likely that ill feeling or fear, any emotion whatever, was born in one of these people and distended to the enormity of homicide, and you were totally unaware of it? I don’t believe it. I want you to tell me the things that I would drag out of you if I kept you here all afternoon firing questions at you.”
Maryella shook her head. “You couldn’t drag anything out of me that’s not in me.”
“You won’t talk?”
“I can’t talk.” Maryella did not look happy. “When I’ve got nothing to say.”
Wolfe’s eyes left her. “Miss Nichols?”
Janet shook her head.
“I won’t repeat it. I’m saying to you what I said to Miss Timms.”
“I know you are.” Janet swallowed and went on in a thin voice, “I can’t tell you anything, honestly I can’t.”
“Not even who tried to kill you? You have no idea who tried to kill you this morning?”
“No — I haven’t. That’s what frightened me so much. I don’t know who it was.”
Wolfe grunted, and turned to Larry. “Mr. Huddleston?”
“I don’t know a damn thing,” Larry said gruffly.
“You don’t. Dr. Brady?”
“It seems to me,” Brady said coolly, “that you stopped before you were through. You said you know who murdered Miss Huddleston. If—”
“I prefer to do it this way, doctor. Have you anything to tell me?”
“No.”
“Nothing with any bearing on any aspect of this business?”
“No.”
Wolfe’s eyes went to Daniel “Mr. Huddleston, you have already talked, to me and to the police. Have you anything new to say?”
“I don’t think I have,” Daniel said slowly. He looked more miserable than anyone else. “I agree with Dr. Brady that if you—”
“I would expect you to,” Wolfe snapped. His glance swept the arc. “I warn all you, with of course one exception, that the police will worm it out of you and it will be a distressing experience. They will make no distinction between relevancies and irrelevancies. They will, for example, impute significance to the fact that Miss Timms has been trying to captivate Mr. Larry Huddleston with her charms—”
“I have not!” Maryella cried indignantly. “Whatever—”
“Yes, you have. At least you did on Tuesday, August 19th. Mr. Goodwin is a good reporter. Sitting on the arm of his chair. Ogling him—”
“I wasn’t! I wasn’t trying to captivate him—”
“Do you love him? Desire him? Fancy him?”
“I certainly don’t!”
“Then the police will be doubly suspicious. They will suspect that you were after him for his aunt’s money. And speaking of money, some of you must know that Miss Huddleston’s brother was getting money from her and dissatisfied with what he got. Yet you refuse to tell me—”
“I wasn’t dissatisfied,” Daniel broke in. His face flushed and his voice rose. “You have no right to make insinuations—”
“I’m not making insinuations.” Wolfe was crisp. “I am showing you the sort of thing the police will get their teeth into. They are quite capable of supposing you were blackmailing your sister—”
“Blackmail!” Daniel squealed indignantly. “She gave it to me for research—”
“Research!” his nephew blurted with a sneer. “Research! The Elixir of Life! Step right up, gents...”
Daniel sprang to his feet, and for a second I thought his intention was to commit mayhem on Larry, but it seemed he merely was arising to make a speech.
“That,” he said, his jaw quivering with anger, “is a downright lie! My motivation and my methods are both strictly scientific. Elixir of Life is a romantic and inadmissible conception. The proper scientific term is ‘catholicon.’ My sister agreed with me, and being a woman of imagination and insight, for years she generously financed—”
“Catholicon!” Wolfe was staring at him incredulously. “And I said you were capable of using your brains!”
“I assure you, sir—”
“Don’t try. Sit down.” Wolfe was disgusted. “I don’t care if you wasted your sister’s money, but there are some things you people know that I do care about, and you are foolish not to tell me.” He wiggled a finger at Brady. “You, doctor, should be ashamed of yourself. You ought to know better. It is idiotic to withhold facts which are bound to be uncovered sooner or later. You said you had nothing to tell me with any bearing on any aspect of this business. What about the box of stable refuse you procured for the stated purpose of extracting tetanus germs from it?”
Daniel made a noise and turned his head to fix Brady with a stare. Brady was taken aback, but not as much as might have been expected. He regarded Wolfe a moment and then said quietly, “I admit I should have told you that.”
“Is that all you have to say about it? Why didn’t you tell the police when they first started to investigate?”
“Because I thought there was nothing to investigate. I continued to think so until this morning, when you phoned me. It would have served no useful purpose—”
“What did you do with that stuff?”
“I took it to the office and did some experiments with two of my colleagues. We were settling an argument. Then we destroyed it. All of it.”
“Did any of these people know about it?”
“I don’t” Brady frowned. “Yes, I remember — I discussed it. Telling them how dangerous any small cut might be—”
“Not me,” Daniel said grimly. “If I had known you did that—”
They glared at each other. Daniel muttered something and sat down.
The phone rang, and I swiveled and got it. It was Doc Vollmer, and I nodded to Wolfe and he took it. When he hung up he told them:
“The bottle from which Miss Nichols treated her wound this morning contained enough tetanus germs to destroy the population of a city, properly distributed.” He focused on Brady. “You may have some idea, doctor, how the police would regard that episode, especially if you had withheld it. It would give you no end of trouble. In a thing like this evasion or concealment should never be attempted without the guidance of an expert. By the way, how long had you known Miss Huddleston?”
“I had known her casually for some time. Several years.”
“How long intimately?”
“I wouldn’t say I knew her intimately. A couple of months ago I formed the habit of going there rather often.”
“What made you form the habit? Did you fall in love with her?”
“With whom?”
“Miss Huddleston.”
“Certainly not.” Brady looked not only astonished but insulted. “She was old enough to be my mother.”
“Then why did you suddenly start going there?”
“Why — a man goes places, that’s all.”
Wolfe shook his head. “Not in an emotional vacuum. Was it greed or parsimony? Free horseback rides? I doubt it; your income is probably adequate. Mere convenience? No; it was out of your way, quite a bother. My guess, to employ the conventional euphemism, is love. Had you fallen in love with Miss Nichols?”
“No.”
“Then what? I assure you, doctor, I am doing this much more tactfully than the police would. What was it?”
A funny look appeared on Brady’s face. Or a series of looks. First it was denial, then hesitation, then embarrassment, then do or die. All the time his eyes were straight at Wolfe. Suddenly he said, in a voice louder than he had been using, “I had fallen in love with Miss Timms. Violently.”