“No.”
“Then how did you know she had hired me?”
“The brother told me about Goodwin being there, and that led me to question him. But he doesn’t seem to know what your job was about.”
“Neither do I.”
Cramer took the cigar from his mouth and said vehemently, “Now look! How’s it going to hurt you? Loosen up for once! I want to cross this off, that’s all. I’ve got work to do! All I want to know—”
“Please!” Wolfe said curtly. “You say you are satisfied that the death was accidental. You have no shred of evidence of a crime. Miss Huddleston hired me for a confidential job. Her death does not release me, it merely deprives me of the job. If you had an action you could summon me, but you haven’t. Will you have some beer?”
“No.” Cramer glared. “My God, you can be honorable when you want to be! Will you answer a plain question? Do you think she was murdered?”
“No.”
“Then you think it was purely accidental?”
“No.”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Nothing at all. About that. I know nothing about it. I have no interest in it. The woman died, as all women do, may she rest in peace, and I lost a fee. Why don’t you ask me this: if you knew what I know, if I told you all about the job she hired me for, would you feel that her death required further investigation?”
“Okay. I ask it.”
“The answer is no. Since you have discovered no single suspicious circumstance. Will you have some beer?”
“Yes, I will,” Cramer growled.
He consumed a bottle, got no further concessions either in information or in hypothetical questions, and departed.
I saw him to the door, returned to the office and remarked:
“Old Frizzle-top seems to be improving with age. Of course he has had the advantage of studying my methods. He seems to have covered the ground up there nearly as well as I could.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe pushed the tray aside to make room for the map. “Not that I don’t agree with you. Nearly as well as you could, yes. But either he didn’t have sense enough to learn everything that happened that afternoon, or he missed his best chance to expose a crime, if there was one. It hasn’t rained the past week, has it? No.”
I cocked an eye at him. “You don’t say. How many guesses can I have?”
But he left it at that and got busy with the map, ignoring my questions. It was one of the many occasions when it would have been a pleasure to push him off of the Empire State Building, if there had been any way of enticing him there. Of course there was a chance that he was merely pulling my leg, but I doubted it. I know his tones of voice.
It ruined my night for me. Instead of going to sleep in thirty seconds it took me thirty minutes, trying to figure out what the devil he meant, and I woke up twice with nightmares, the first time because it was raining on me through the roof and each raindrop was a tetanus germ, and the second time I was lost in a desert where it hadn’t rained for a hundred years. Next morning, after Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms at nine o’clock, I got stubborn. I sat at my desk and went over that party at Riverdale in my mind, second by second, as I had reported it to Wolfe. And I got it. I would have hit it sooner if it hadn’t been for various interruptions, phone calls and so on, but anyway finally there it was, as obvious as lipstick.
Provided one thing. To settle that I phoned Doc Vollmer, whose home and office were in a house down the street, and learned that tetanus, which carried death, had a third as many lives as a cat — one as a toxin, one as a bacillus, and one as a spore. The bacillus or the spore got in you and manufactured the toxin, which did the dirty work, traveling not with the blood but with the nerves. The bacillus and spore were both anaerobic, but could live in surface soil or dust for years and usually did, especially the spore.
And now what? Just forget it? Wolfe had, but then he wasn’t human, whereas I was and am. Besides, it would be very neat if it got results, and it would teach Wolfe a lesson. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and I wanted to get out before he came downstairs, so I phoned up to him that I was leaving on an errand, and walked to the garage on Tenth Avenue and got the roadster. Heading uptown, I stopped at a hardware store near 42nd Street and went in and bought a long-bladed kitchen knife, a narrow garden trowel, and four paper bags. Then I went to a phone booth in a drug store at the corner and called the Huddleston number.
Maryella’s voice answered, and I asked to speak to Miss Nichols. In a minute she was on, and I told her I was thinking she might be leaving there soon and I’d like to have her address.
“It’s nice of you to call,” she said. “It’s a — pleasant surprise. Naturally I thought you — last week, I mean — I thought you were just being a detective.”
“Don’t kid me,” I told her. “Anyone that dances the way you do being surprised at a phone call. Not that I suppose you’re doing any dancing at present.”
“Not now. No.”
“Will you be leaving there soon?”
“Not this week. We’re trying to help Mr. Huddleston straighten things up.”
“Will you send me your address when you go?”
“Why — yes. Certainly. If you want it.”
“I do you know. How would it be if I drove up there? Just to say hello?”
“When? Now?”
“Right now. I can be there in twenty minutes. I’d kind of like to see you.”
“Why—” Silence. “That would be all right. If you want to take the trouble.”
I told her it would be no trouble at all, hung up, went out to the roadster, and made for the entrance to the West Side Highway at 46th Street.
I admit my timing was terrible. If I had arrived, say, between twelve thirty and one, they might have been in the house having lunch, and I could have said I had already eaten and waited for Janet on the terrace, which would have been a perfect opportunity. Of course as it turned out that would have made a monkey of me, so it was just as well that I dubbed it. As it was, leaving the car outside the fence, with the knife in one hip pocket and the trowel in the other, and the folded paper bags in the side pocket of my coat, I walked across the lawn to where Larry stood near the pool, glowering at it. When he heard me coming he transferred the glower to me.
“Hello,” I said amiably. “What, no alligators?”
“No. They’re gone.”
“And Mister? And the bears?”
“Yes. What the hell are you doing here?”
I suppose it would have been sensible to appease him, but he was really quite irritating. Tone and look both. So I said, “I came to play tag with Mister,” and started for the house, but Janet appeared, cutting across the lawn. She looked prettier than I remembered her, or maybe not so much prettier as more interesting. Her hair was done differently or something. She said hello to me and let me have a hand to shake, and then told Larry:
“Maryella says you’ll have to help her with those Corliss bills. Some of them go back before she came, and she doesn’t seem to trust my memory.”
Larry nodded at her, and, moving, was in front of me. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“Nothing special,” I said. “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom—”
“If you’ve got a bill, mail it. You’ll get about three percent.”
I suppressed impulses and shook my head. “No bill. I came to see Miss Nichols.”
“Yes you did. You came to snoop—”
But Janet had her hand on his arm. “Please, Larry. Mr. Goodwin phoned and asked to see me. Please?”
I would have preferred smacking him, and it was irritating to see her with her hand on his arm looking up at him the way she did, but when he turned and marched off towards the house I restrained myself and let him go.
I asked Janet, “What’s eating him?”