It didn't seem essential to give the precise circumstances of the recognition of Baird Archer's name. If Wolfe had been there he would have told it his way, but he wasn't, and I was. Glancing around to see that coffee refills were being attended to and that cigarettes and matches were at hand for everyone, I resumed.
"Next I'm going to spill something. If it gets printed the cops won't like it, and they sure won't like me, but they don't anyhow. A girl named Rachel Abrams was a public stenographer and typist with a little one-room office on the seventh floor of a building up on Broadway. Day before yesterday she went out the window and smashed to death on the sidewalk. More excitement for me as a detective, which is what I'm supposed to be talking about. It would probably have been called suicide or an accident if I hadn't happened to walk into her office two or three minutes after she had gone out the window. In a drawer of her desk I found a little brown book in which she had kept a record of her receipts and expenses. Under receipts there were two entries showing that last September she had been paid ninety-eight dollars and forty cents by a man named Baird Archer."
"Ah," Dolly Harriton said. There were other reactions.
"I'll be dreaming about Baird Archer," Nina Perlman muttered.
"I am already," I told her. "As you can see, here's a job for a detective if there ever was one. I won't try to tell you how the cops are going at it, of course one or more of them has talked with all of you the past two days, but here's how we see it, and how we'll go on seeing it unless something shows we're wrong. We believe that Dykes's death was somehow connected with the manuscript of that novel. We believe that Joan Wellman was killed because she had read that manuscript. We believe that Rachel Abrams was killed because she had typed that manuscript. So naturally we want Baird Archer, and we want the manuscript. We've got to find one or both, or we're licked. Any suggestions?"
"Good lord," Sue Dondero said.
"Get a copy of the novel," Portia Liss offered.
Someone snickered.
"Look," I said impulsively, "unless you object I'm going to do something. There are a couple of people connected with this case upstairs now, waiting to see Mr. Wolfe. I think it would be interesting if they came down and told you about it." I pressed the floor button with my toe. "Unless you've had enough?"
"Who are they?" Mrs. Adams wanted to know.
"The father of Joan Wellman and the mother of Rachel Abrams."
"It won't be very gay," Dolly Harriton commented.
"No, it won't. Things and people mixed up with detectives are seldom gay."
"I want to see 'em," Helen Troy said loudly. "It's human nature."
Fritz had entered, and I spoke to him. "Where are Mrs. Abrams and Mr. Wellman, Fritz? In the south room?"
"Yes, sir."
"Will you please ask them to be good enough to come down here?"
"Yes, sir."
He went. I inquired about drinks and got three orders.
9
BLANCHE DUKE darned near ruined it. When Wellman and Mrs. Abrams were ushered in by Fritz, ten pairs of eyes were focused on them, though in two or three cases the focusing required a little effort. I arose, performed the introductions, and brought them to the two chairs I had placed, one on either side of me. Mrs. Abrams, in a black silk dress or maybe rayon, was tight-lipped and scared but dignified. Wellman, in the same gray suit or its twin, was trying to take in all their faces without seeming to. He sat straight, not touching the back of the chair. I had my mouth open to speak when Blanche beat me to it.
"You folks need a drink. What'll you have?"
"No, thanks," Wellman said politely. Mrs. Abrams shook her head.
"Now listen," Blanche insisted, "you're in trouble. I've been in trouble all my life, and I know. Have a drink. Two jiggers of dry gin, one jigger of dry vermouth -"
"Be quiet, Blanche," Mrs. Adams snapped.
"Go to hell," Blanche snapped back. "This is social. You can't get Corrigan to fire me, either, you old papoose."
I would have liked to toss her out a window. I cut in. "Did I mix that right, Blanche, or didn't I?"
"Sure you did."
"Call me Archie."
"Sure you did, Archie."
"Okay, and I'm doing this right too. I do everything right. Would I let Mrs. Abrams and Mr. Wellman go without drinks if they wanted them?"
"Certainly not."
"Then that settles it." I turned to my right, having promised Mrs. Abrams that Wellman would be called on first. "Mr. Wellman, I've been telling these ladies about the case that Mr. Wolfe and I are working on, and they're interested, partly because they work in the office where Leonard Dykes worked. I told them you and Mrs. Abrams were upstairs waiting to see Mr. Wolfe, and I thought you might be willing to tell them something about your daughter Joan. I hope you don't mind?"
"I don't mind."
"How old was Joan?"
"She was twenty-six. Her birthday was November nineteenth."
"Was she your only child?"
"Yes, the only one."
"Was she a good daughter?"
"She was the best daughter a man ever had."
There was an astonishing interruption - at least, astonishing to me. It was Mrs. Abrams' voice, not loud but clear. "She was no better than my Rachel."
Wellman smiled. I hadn't seen him smile before. "Mrs. Abrams and I have had quite a talk. We've been comparing notes. It's all right, we won't fight about it. Her Rachel was a good daughter too."
"NO, there's nothing to fight about. What was Joan going to do, get married or go on with her career, or what?"
He was still a moment. "Well, I don't know about that. I told you she graduated from Smith College with honors."
"Yes."
"There was a young fellow from Dartmouth we thought maybe she was going to hitch up with, but she was too young and had sense enough to know it. Here in New York - she was here working for those publishers nearly four years - she wrote us back in Peoria about different -"
"Where's Peoria?" Blanche Duke demanded.
He frowned at her. "Peoria? That's a city out in Illinois. She wrote us about different fellows she met, but it didn't sound to us like she was ready to tie up. We got to thinking it was about time, anyway her mother did, but she thought she had a big future with those publishers. She was getting eighty dollars a week, pretty good for a girl of twenty-six, and Scholl told me just last August when I was here on a trip that they expected a great deal of her. I was thinking of that yesterday afternoon. I was thinking that we expected a great deal of her too, her mother and me, but that we had already had a great deal."
He ducked his head forward to glance at Mrs. Abrams and came back to me. "Mrs. Abrams and I were talking about that upstairs. We feel the same way about it, only with her it's only been two days, and she hasn't had so long to think it over. I was telling her that if you gave me a pad of paper and a pencil and asked me to put down all the different things I can remember about Joan, I'll bet there would be ten thousand different things, more than that - things she did and things she said, times she was like this and times she was like that. You haven't got a daughter."
"No. You have much to remember."
"Yes, I have. What got me to thinking like that, I was wondering if I deserved what happened because I was too proud of her. But I wasn't. I thought about it this way, I thought there had been lots of times she did something wrong, like when she was little and told lies, and even after she grew up she did things I didn't approve of, but I asked myself, can I point to a single thing she ever did and honestly say I wish she hadn't done that? And I couldn't."