Tingley groaned. Miss Yates’s shrewd eyes met mine. “What questions do you want to ask?”
“All I can think of. Preferably starting with you two.”
“I’m busy. I ought to be out in the factory right now. Did you say you had an appointment, Arthur?”
“Yes.” Tingley shoved back his chair and got up. “I have — I have to go somewhere.” He got his hat from a hook on the wall beside his desk, and his coat from another one. “I’ll be back by four-thirty.” He struggled into his coat and confronted me. His hat was on crooked. “If Miss Yates wants to talk to you, she can tell you as much as I could. I’m about half out of my senses. If this is an infernal trick of that P. & B. outfit—” He darted to his desk, turned a key in a bottom drawer, pocketed the key, and made for the door. On the threshold he turned: “You handle it, Gwen.”
So her name was Gwendolyn, or maybe Guinevere. It certainly must have been given to her when she was quite young — say sixty years ago. She was imperturbably and efficiently collecting an assortment of papers Tingley had left scattered on his desk and anchoring them under a cylindrical chunk of metal with a figure 2 on it, a weight from an old-fashioned balance scale. She straightened and met my gaze:
“I’ve been after him to get a detective, and he wouldn’t do it. This thing has got to be stopped. It’s awful. I’ve been here all my life — been in charge of the factory for twenty years — and now—” She squared her jaw. “Come along.”
I followed her. We left by another door than the one I had entered by, traversed a hall, passed through a door at the end, and there we were, in the Tidbits maternity ward. Two hundred women and girls, maybe more, in white smocks, were working at tables and benches and various kinds of vats and machines. Miss Yates led me down an aisle and she stopped beside a large vat. A woman about my age who had been peering into the vat turned to face us.
“This is Miss Murphy, my assistant,” Miss Yates said brusquely. “Carrie, this is Mr. Goodwin, a detective. Answer any questions he wants to ask, except about our formulas, and show him anything he wants to see.” She turned to me. “I’ll talk with you later, after I get some mixes through.”
I caught a flicker of something, hesitation or maybe apprehension, in Miss Murphy’s eyes, but it went as fast as it came, and she said quietly, “Very well, Miss Yates.”...
Wolfe was sticking to his accustomed daily schedule, in a sort of stubborn desperation in spite of the catastrophe of Fritz’s grippe. Mornings from 9 to 11 and afternoons from 4 to 6 he spent up in the plant rooms. When he came down at six that afternoon I was in the office waiting for him.
He stopped in the middle of the room, glanced around, frowned at me, and said, “Dr. Vollmer states that Fritz can get up in the morning. Not today. Not for dinner. Where is Mr. Tingley?”
“I don’t know.”
“I told you to bring him here.”
He was using his most provocative tone. I could have put quinine in his food. I said, “It’s a good thing Fritz will be up tomorrow. This couldn’t go on much longer. Tingley is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He went out soon after I got there. Miss Yates, whose name is Gwendolyn, the factory superintendent, and her assistant, Miss Carrie Murphy, showed me around. I have just finished typing a detailed report, but there’s nothing in it but facts. Tingley returned about four-thirty, but when I tried to see him he was having a talk with his son and I was thrown out on my ear. I’m going back in the morning if I’m still working for you. Those in favor of my resigning, raise their hand.” I stuck my hand up high.
“Pfui!” Wolfe said. “A man sells poisoned food—”
“Quinine is not poison.”
“A man sells poisoned food and you leave him sitting comfortably in conversation with his son. Now I’m going to the kitchen and try to prepare something to eat. If you care to join—”
“No, thanks. I’ve got a date. Don’t wait up for me.”
I went to the hall and got my hat and coat and beat it. From the garage on Tenth Avenue I took the sedan instead of the roadster, drove to Pietro’s on 39th Street, and operated on a dish of spaghetti and half a bushel of salad. That made me feel better. When I reached the sidewalk again it was raining, with cold November gusts whipping it around, so I skedaddled around the corner into a newsreel theater. But I was not at peace. There had been enough justification for Wolfe’s crack — say one percent — to make it rankle.
My watch said a quarter to eight. I went to the lobby and got out my memo book and turned to the page where, following habit, I had entered the names and addresses of persons connected with the current proceeding. Tingley lived at 691 Sullivan Street. There was no point in phoning, since the idea was to get him and deliver him. I went to the sedan and headed downtown in the rain.
It was an old brick house, painted blue, probably the residence of his father and grandfather before him. A colored maid told me that he wasn’t home, hadn’t shown up for dinner, and might be at his office. It began to look like no soap, but it was only a little out of the way, so when I got to 26th Street I turned west. Rolling to the curb directly in front of the Tingley Building, it looked promising; lights showed at a couple of the upstairs windows. I dived through the rain across the sidewalk, found the door unlocked, and entered.
A light was on there in the hall, and I started for the stairs. But with my foot on the first step I stopped; for I had glanced up, and saw something so unexpected that I goggled like a fish. Standing there halfway up, facing me, was Amy Duncan. Her face was white, her eyes were glassy, and she was clinging to the rail with both hands and swaying from side to side.
“Hold it!” I said sharply, and started up. Before I could reach her she lost it. Down she came, rolling right into me. I gathered her up and went back down and stretched her out on the floor. She was out cold, but when I felt her pulse it was pretty good. Routine faint, I thought, and then took it back when I saw a large lump on the side of her head above her right ear.
That made it different. I straightened up. She had unquestionably been conked.
I ascended the steps one at a time, looking for the birdie. There was a light in the upper hall, also in the anteroom. I called out, and got no reply. The door leading within was standing open, and I marched through and kept going through more open doors and down the inside hall to the entrance to Tingley’s office. That door too stood open and the room was lit, but from the threshold no one was in sight. It occurred to me that the screen, at right angles to the wall, would do nicely for an ambush, so I entered sideways, facing it, and circled around the end of it for a survey just in case.
A mouse ran up my backbone. Tingley was there on the floor alongside the screen, his head toward the marble washstand, and if the head was still connected with the body it must have been at the back, which I couldn’t see. There was certainly no connection left in front.
I took a couple of breaths and swallowed saliva, as a sort of priming for my internal processes, which had momentarily stopped.
The blood from the gash in his throat had spread over the floor, running in red tongues along the depressions in the old warped boards, and I stepped wide of it to get around to the other end of him. Squatting beside him for an inspection, I ascertained two facts: He had a lump at the back of his skull and the skin had been broken there, and he was good and dead. I straightened up and collected a few more items with my eyes:
1. A bloody towel on the floor by the washstand, sixteen inches from the wall.
2. Another bloody towel on the rim of the basin, to the right.
3. A knife with a long, thin blade and a black composition handle on the floor between the body and the screen. In the factory that afternoon I had seen girls slicing meat loaves with knives like it.