“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“No, I don’t.”
I gave him a friendly smile. “That’s not fifty cents’ worth, let alone five bucks’.” I got my wallet again and took out a ten. “What floor is she on?”
“Seven. Seven D.”
“I need to see her, and she needs to see me. Take me up, and I’ll wait there. You have my card. If you want to, get an inkpad and take my fingerprints.”
He surprised me. He had a heart in him somewhere. He actually said, “She might be gone all day, and there’s no place to sit.”
“There’s always the floor.”
He gave me his eyes, looked straight at me for the first time. “No funny business, mister. The doors have got pretty good locks.”
“I don’t know anything about locks. There’s nothing there for me until she comes.” I went to the elevator and pressed my fingertips, all ten, against the metal frame, at eye level. “There. You’ve got me.” I offered the sawbuck. He took it, followed me into the elevator, shut the door, and pushed the handle.
There are a lot of interesting things to do while you’re waiting in an upper hall of an apartment house for four hours and twenty minutes. You can count spots and decide which has more, the left wall or the right wall. You can try to sort out smells and decide how many different flavors there are in the over-all effect. You can listen to the wails coming through the door of 7B and decide whether the little lamb is male or female and how old it is, and what steps you would take if you were inside. When people arrive or leave you can look straight at them and notice which ones look back and which ones pretend they haven’t seen you. When a hefty, broad-shouldered woman turns after inserting a key into the lock of 7C and asks, “Are you waiting for someone?” you can say pleasantly and distinctly, “Yes,” and see how she reacts. On the whole, it was time well spent. My one regret was that I hadn’t brought along a chocolate bar, five or six bananas, and a quart of milk.
I admit I frequently glanced at my watch. It was ten minutes to five when the elevator door opened and a man emerged. When he kept coming down the hall I assumed he was headed for E or F, but he stopped to face me and spoke.
“I understand you’re waiting for my wife.”
Of course I had to concede it. “Yes, sir, I am, if you’re Barry Fleming.”
“She won’t see you. You’re wasting your time. She won’t see anybody.”
I nodded. “I know, but I think she’ll see me if she lets me explain why.”
I sent a hand to my pocket for the case, but before I had a card out he said, “I know who you are. I should say, I have seen the card you gave the elevator man. Are you Archie Goodwin?”
“I am. In person. Look, Mr. Fleming, why not leave it to her? When she comes I’ll tell her what I want to talk about, and it will be up to her. I won’t insist, I’ll just ask her.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
I would have preferred to tell her, but a husband is a husband. “About a man,” I said. “His name is Orrie Cather, and the police think he killed Isabel Kerr. He has worked off and on for Nero Wolfe, and Mr. Wolfe and I know him very well, and we don’t think he did. You know I work for Nero Wolfe?”
“Of course.”
“We are looking into it a little, and I would like very much to ask your wife if she can supply any information that might help. Naturally she wants the murderer of her sister caught and punished, but she wouldn’t want it to be Orrie Cather if he’s innocent. You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Of course not.” He was puckering his lips and frowning at me. He was about my height, narrow-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a long face that showed the cheekbones. He went on, “I wouldn’t want an innocent man punished for anything, certainly not for murder. But I doubt very much if my wife can give you any information that would help. She’s not — she’s taking it pretty hard.”
“Sure. Believe me, I don’t want to make it any harder for her.”
“Well — where’s your coat?”
“There.” I pointed to it, on the floor by the wall.
“Get it. There’s no sense in waiting out here.” With a key ring in his hand, he went to the door of 7D. When I came with my coat he was holding the door open and I entered. The foyer was about the size of a pool table. He hung my coat in the closet before he took his off, and as he was hanging his up the door opened and a woman entered. At the sight of me she gawked a second, then whirled to him.
“Barry! You let him in?”
From her tone I knew then and there that I had had a break, him coming first.
“Now, dear.” He put an arm across her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. “He only wants some information, if we have any. He thinks—”
“We have no information for anybody! You know that!”
I spoke up. “But you must have a preference, Mrs. Fleming. If an innocent man is convicted of murdering your sister, the trouble is that the guilty man goes free. Do you want that?”
She focused up at me. Up, because she wasn’t more than an inch over five feet. “It’s none of your business what I want,” she said, and meant it.
“No,” I said, “but it’s your business. I’m not a newshound trying to get a headline, I’m a private detective trying to dig up some facts. I already have some. I know why you won’t see reporters, why you have no information for anybody. Because your sister was a doxy, and you—”
“My sister was a what?”
“D,O,X,Y, doxy. I happen to like that better than concubine or paramour or mistress. I don’t—”
I stopped because I had to, to protect my face. When a woman flies at you to claw, what you do depends on the woman. If she has real tiger in her you may even have to plug her, but with Stella Fleming, with her short reach, all I had to do was stiff-arm her, with my palm flat on her mouth. Then the husband got her shoulders from behind and pulled her back and told me, “You’d better go.”
I was inclined to agree, but it was just as well that Wolfe couldn’t read my mind by short-wave because he thinks I understand women. She turned and drummed on his chest with her fists and squeaked, “I don’t want him to go,” and then calmly, no hurry, started to shed her coat. When he had it she told me, “Come on inside,” perfectly polite, and headed through an archway. When he had the closet door shut he motioned me on, and I moved.
She had turned on lights and gone to a couch and sat and was biting her lip. I hadn’t really seen her, too busy, and as I crossed to a nearby chair I noted that she resembled her sister not at all, with her brown hair and brown eyes and round filled-out face. As I approached she demanded, “Why did you say that?”
“To jar you.” I sat. “I had to. Either that or—”
“I mean why do you lie like that about my sister?”
I shook my head. “That line is wasted with me, Mrs. Fleming. We both know it’s not a lie, so skip it. It’s not important, not to me. I only said it to—”
“Did you know my sister?”
“No. I had never heard of her until yesterday.”
“Then how could you know...”
I gave her three seconds, but she let it hang. I flipped a hand. “It’s obvious. A showgirl leaves—”
“She was an actress.”
“Okay. An actress leaves the theater, takes a three-hundred-dollar apartment, has no job, eats well, dresses well, has a car, uses thirty-dollar perfume. Who wouldn’t know? Who doesn’t know? That’s not important, not now. What’s—”
“It is to me. It’s the most important thing in the world.”
“Now, dear,” Fleming said. He was beside her on the couch.
“Well,” I said, “if it’s that important to you, that’s what you want to talk about. Go ahead.”