When I entered the office Wolfe was there alone, no Orrie on Sunday, and one glance at him was enough. He had a book in his hand, with a finger inserted to keep his place, but he wasn’t reading, and a good caption for a picture of the face he turned to me would have been The Gathering Storm.
“So,” I said, crossing to his desk, “I see I don’t bring news. You’ve already heard it.”
“I have,” he growled. “Where were you?”
“Watching television with Susan. We heard it together. I notified Jarrell and his wife and Wyman and Nora Kent. Lois and Roger Foote weren’t here. Nobody screamed. Then I beat it to come and get instructions. If I had stayed I wouldn’t have known whether the time has come to let the cat out or not. Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you mean you don’t know or the time hasn’t come?”
“Both.”
I swiveled my chair around and sat. “That’s impossible. If I said a thing like that you’d say I had a screw loose, only you never use that expression. I’ll put it in its simplest terms. Do you wish to speak to Cramer?”
“No. I’ll speak to Mr. Cramer only when it is requisite.” The gathering storm had cleared some. “Archie. I’m glad you came. I confess I needed you, to say no to. Now that I have said it, I can read.” He opened the book. “I will speak to no one on the phone, and no one will enter my door, until I have more facts.” His eyes went to the book and he was reading.
I was glad he was glad I had come, but I wasn’t glad, if I make myself clear. I might as well have stayed up there and twisted Rowcliff’s ear.
Chapter 11
I slept in my own bed that night for the first time in nearly a week.
That was a very interesting period, Sunday evening and part of Monday. I suppose you noticed what Wolfe said, that he would see no one and hear no one until he had more facts. Exactly how he thought he would get facts, under the conditions he imposed, seeing or hearing no one, I couldn’t say. Maybe by ESP or holding a séance. However, by noon on Monday it had become evident that he hadn’t meant it that way. What he had really meant was that he wanted no facts. If he had seen a fact coming he would have shut his eyes, and if he had heard one coming he would have stuck fingers in his ears.
So it was a very interesting period. There he was, a practicing private detective with no other source of income except selling a few orchid plants now and then, with a retainer of ten grand in cash in the safe, with a multi-millionaire client with a bad itch, with a fine fat fee in prospect if he got a move on and did some first-class detecting; and he was afraid to stay in the same room with me for fear I would tell him something. He wouldn’t talk with Jarrell on the phone. He wouldn’t turn on the radio or television. I even suspected that he didn’t read the Times Monday morning, though I can’t swear to that because he reads the Times at breakfast, which is taken up to his room by Fritz on a tray. He was a human ostrich with his head stuck in the sand, in spite of the fact that he resembles an ostrich in physique less than any other human I know of with the possible exception of Jackie Gleason.
All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn’t rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or putting horseradish on oysters.
I understood how he felt, and I even sympathized with him. On the phone with Jarrell, both Sunday evening and Monday morning, I did my best to string him along, telling him that Wolfe was sitting tight, which he was, God knows, and explaining why it was better for me to be out of the way, at least temporarily. It wasn’t too bad. Lieutenant Rowcliff had called on the Jarrell family, as I had expected, but hadn’t been too nasty about the coincidence that two of Jarrell’s associates, his former secretary and a close friend, had got it within a week. He had been nasty, of course — Rowcliff would be nasty to Saint Peter if he ever got near him; but he hadn’t actually snarled.
But although I sympathized with Wolfe, I’m not a genius like him, and if I was sliding into a hole too deep to crawl out of I wanted to know about it in time to get a haircut and have my pants pressed before my appearance in the line-up. Of the half a dozen possible facts that could send me over the edge there was one in particular that I wanted very much to get a line on, but it wasn’t around. None of the newscasts mentioned it, Sunday night or Monday morning. It wasn’t in the Monday morning papers. Lon Cohen didn’t have it. There were four guys — one at headquarters, one on the DA’s staff, and two on Homicide — for whom I had done favors in the past, who could have had it and who might have obliged me, but with two murders in the stew it was too risky to ask them.
So I was still factless when, ten minutes before noon, the phone rang and I got an invitation to call at the DA’s office at my earliest convenience. Wolfe was still up in the plant rooms. He always came down at eleven o’clock, but hadn’t shown that morning — for fear, as I said, that I would tell him something. I buzzed him on the house phone to tell him where I was going, went out and walked to Ninth Avenue, and took a taxi to Leonard Street.
That time I was kept waiting only a few minutes before I was taken in to Mandelbaum. He was polite, as usual, getting to his feet to shake hands. I was only a private detective, true, but as far as he knew I had committed neither a felony nor a misdemeanor, and the only way an assistant DA can get the “assistant” removed from his title is to have it voted off, making it DA, and I was a voter. The chair for me at the end of his desk was of course placed so I was facing a window.
What he wanted from me was the same as before, things I had seen and heard at Jarrell’s place, but this time concentrating on Corey Brigham instead of James L. Eber. I had to concede that that had now become relevant, and there was more ground to cover since Brigham had been there for dinner and bridge on Monday, and again on Wednesday, and also I might have heard comments about him at other times. Mandelbaum was patient, and thorough, and didn’t try to be tricky. He did double back a lot, but doubling back has been routine for so many centuries that you can’t call it a trick. I didn’t mention one of my contacts with Brigham, the conference at Wolfe’s office Friday afternoon, and to my surprise he didn’t either. I would have thought they would have dug that up by now, but apparently not.
After he told the stenographer to go and type the statement, and she went, I stood up. “It will take her quite a while,” I said. “I have to run a couple of errands, and I’ll drop in later and sign it. If you don’t mind.”
“Quite all right. Certainly. If you make it today. Say by five o’clock.”
“Oh, sure.” I turned to go, and turned back, and grinned at him. “By the way, you may have noticed that I didn’t live up to my reputation for wisecracks.”
“Yes, I noticed that. Maybe you’re running out.”
“I hope not. I’ll do better next time. I guess my mind was too busy with something I had just heard — about the bullets.”
“What bullets?”
“Why, the two bullets. Haven’t you got that yet? That the bullet that killed Eber and the one that killed Brigham were fired by the same gun?”