He glowered at me, then turned to let her have it. She was coming up from the chair, slow and stiff. When she was erect she said, “No. No. It isn’t possible.”
“I’m only quoting Carl Drew,” I told her.
“It isn’t possible. He said that?”
“Distinctly.”
“But how—” She let it hang. She said, “But how—” stopped again, turned, and was going. When Wolfe called to her, “Here, Miss Gallant, your money,” she paid no attention but kept on, and he poked it at me, and I took it and headed for the hall. I caught up with her halfway to the front door, but when I offered it she just kept going, so I blocked her off, took her bag and opened it and dropped the bills in and closed it, handed it back, and went and pulled the door open. She hadn’t said a word. I stood on the sill and watched, thinking she might stumble going down the seven steps of the stoop, but she made it to the sidewalk and turned east, toward Ninth Avenue. When I got back to the office Wolfe was sitting with his eyes closed, breathing down to his big round middle. I went to my desk and put the phone book away.
“She is so stunned with joy,” I remarked, “that she’ll probably get run over. I should have gone and put her in a taxi.”
He grunted.
“One thing,” I remarked. “Miss Voss’s last words weren’t exactly généreux. I would call them catty.”
He grunted.
“Another thing,” I remarked, “in spite of the fact that I was John H. Watson on the phone, we’ll certainly be called on by either Sergeant Stebbins or Inspector Cramer or both. When they go into whereabouts Flora will have to cough it up for her own protection. And we actually heard it. Also we’ll have the honor of being summoned to the stand. Star witnesses.”
He opened his eyes. “I’m quite aware of it,” he growled. “Confound it. Bring me the records on Laelia gouldiana.”
No orchid ever called a genius a slimy little ego in a big gob of fat. I remarked on that too, but to myself.
Chapter 2
Sure I appreciate it,” Cramer declared. “Why shouldn’t I? Very thoughtful of you. Saves me time and trouble. So it was eleven-thirty-one when you heard the blow?”
Inspector Cramer, big and brawny with a round red face and all his hair, half of it gray, had nothing to be sarcastic about as he sat in the red leather chair at six-thirty that Tuesday afternoon, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help it. It was his reaction, not to the present circumstances, but to his memory of other occasions, other experiences he had undergone in that room. He had to admit that we had saved him time and trouble when I had anticipated his visit by typing out a complete report of the session with Flora Gallant that morning, including the dialogue verbatim, and having it ready for him in duplicate, signed by both Wolfe and me. He had skimmed through it first, and then read it slowly and carefully.
“We heard no blow, identifiably,” Wolfe objected. His bulk was comfortably arranged in his oversize chair back of his desk. “Mr. Goodwin wrote that statement, but I read it, and it does not say that we heard a blow.”
Cramer found the place on page four and consulted it. “Okay. You heard a groan and a crash and rustles. But there was a blow. She was hit in the back of the head with a chunk of marble, a paperweight, and then a scarf was tied around her throat to stop her breathing. You say here at eleven-thirty-one.”
“Not when we heard the groan,” I corrected. “After that there were the other noises, then the connection went, and I said hello a few times, which was human but dumb. It was when I hung up that I looked at my watch and saw eleven-thirty-one. The groan had been maybe a minute earlier. Say eleven-thirty. If a minute is important.”
“It isn’t. But you didn’t hear the blow?”
“Not to recognize it, no.”
He went back to the statement, frowning at it, reading the whole first page and glancing at the others. He looked up, at Wolfe. “I know how good you are at arranging words. This implies that Flora Gallant was a complete stranger to you, that you had never had anything to do with her or her brother or any of the people at that place, but it doesn’t say so in so many words. I’d like to know.”
“The implication is valid,” Wolfe told him. “Except as related in that statement, I have never had any association with Miss Gallant or her brother, or, to my knowledge, with any of their colleagues. Nor has Mr. Goodwin. Archie?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“Okay.” Cramer folded the statement and put it in his pocket. “Then you had never heard Bianca Voss’s voice before and you couldn’t recognize it on the phone.”
“Of course not.”
“And you can’t hear it now, since she’s dead. So you can’t swear it was her talking to you.”
“Obviously.”
“And that raises a point. If it was her talking to you, she was killed at exactly half past eleven. Now there are four important people in that organization who had it in for Bianca Voss. They had admitted it. Besides Flora Gallant, there is Anita Prince, fitter and designer, been with Gallant eight years; Emmy Thorne, in charge of contacts and promotion, been with him four years; and Carl Drew, business manager, been with him five years. None of them killed Bianca Voss at half past eleven. From eleven-fifteen on, until the call came from a man who said he was John H. Watson, Carl Drew was down on the main floor, constantly in view of four people, two of them customers. From eleven o’clock on Anita Prince was on the top floor, the workshop, with Alec Gallant and two models and a dozen employees. At eleven-twenty Emmy Thorne called on a man by appointment at his office on Forty-sixth Street, and was with him and two other men until a quarter to twelve. And Flora Gallant was here with you. All airtight.”
“Very neat,” Wolfe agreed.
“Yeah. Too damn neat. Of course there may be others who wanted Bianca Voss out of the way, but as it stands now those four are out in front. And they’re all—”
“Why not five? Alec Gallant himself?”
“All right, five. They’re all in the clear, including him, if she was killed at eleven-thirty. So suppose she wasn’t. Suppose she was killed earlier, half an hour or so earlier. Suppose when Flora Gallant phoned her from here and put you on to talk with her, it wasn’t her at all, it was someone else imitating her voice, and she pulled that stunt, the groan and the other noises, to make you think you had heard the murder at that time.”
Wolfe’s brows were up. “With the corpse there on the floor.”
“Certainly.”
“Then you’re not much better off. Who did the impersonation? Their alibis still hold for eleven-thirty.”
“I realize that. But there were nineteen women around there altogether, and a woman who wouldn’t commit a murder might be willing to help cover up after it had been committed. You know that.”
Wolfe wasn’t impressed. “It’s very tricky, Mr. Cramer. If you are supposing Flora Gallant killed her, it was elaborately planned. Miss Gallant phoned here yesterday morning to make an appointment for eleven this morning. Did she kill Miss Voss, station someone there beside the corpse to answer the phone, rush down here, and maneuver me into ringing Miss Voss’s number? It seems a little far-fetched.”
“I didn’t say it was Flora Gallant.” Cramer hung on. “It could have been any of them. He or she didn’t have to know you were going to ring that number. He might have intended to call it himself, before witnesses, to establish the time of the murder, and when your call came, whoever it was there by the phone got rattled and went ahead with the act. There are a dozen different ways it could have happened. Hell, I know it’s tricky. I’m not asking you to work your brain on it. You must know why I brought it up.”