He did neither. He glared.
“Lookit,” I said, perfectly friendly. “Do some supposing. Suppose you were called there and found her with a wound and a lot of blood gone. You did what was needed, and when she asked you to keep it quiet you decided to humor her and ignore your legal obligation to make a report to the authorities in such cases. Ordinarily that would be nothing for a special broadcast; doctors do it every day. But this is far from ordinary. Her husband was murdered, stabbed to death. A man named Pompa has been charged with it, but he’s not convicted yet. Suppose one of the five people hid in the dining room Wiled Whitten? They could have, easily, while Pompa and Mrs. Whitten were in the living room — a whole half-hour. Those five people are in Mrs. Whitten’s house with her now, and two of them live there. Suppose the motive for killing Whitten is good for her too, and one of them tried it, and maybe tonight or tomorrow makes another try and this time it works? How would you feel about clamming up on the first try? How would others feel when it came out, as it would?”
“You’re crazy,” Cutler growled. “They’re her sons and daughters!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I growled back at him. “And you a doctor who sees inside people? The parents who have been killed by sons and daughters would fill a hundred cemeteries. I’m not crazy, but I’m good and scared. I guess I scare easier than you. I say that woman has lost blood, and you’re not denying it, so one of two things has to happen. Either you give me the lowdown confidentially, and it will have to sound right, or I suggest to the cops that they send a doctor to have a look at her. Then if my supposes all come true I won’t have to feel that I helped to kill her. How you will feel is your affair.”
“The police have no right to invade a citizen’s privacy in that manner.”
“You’d be surprised. In a house where a murder was committed, and she was there and so were they?”
“Your suppositions are contrary to the facts.”
“Fine. That’s what I’m after, the facts. Let me have a look at them. If they appeal to us, Mr. Wolfe and I can ignore obligations as easy as you.”
He sat down, rested his elbows on the arms of the chair with his hands dangling, and thoroughly inspected a corner of a rug. I inspected him. He stood up again, said, “I’ll be back shortly,” and started for the door.
“Hold it,” I snapped. “This is your place and I can’t keep you from going to another room to phone, but if you do, any facts you furnish will need a lot of checking. It all comes down to which you like better, giving it to me straight or having a police doctor go over your patient.”
“I ought to kick you the hell out of here,” he said grimly.
I shook my head. “Not now. If you had taken that attitude when that message was phoned up to you I would have had to think again, but now it’s too late.” I gestured at the desk. “Use that phone, if all you want is to tell Mrs. Whitten that a skunk named Goodwin has got you by the tail and you’ve got to break your promise to keep it quiet.” I took a step and held his eye with mine. “You see, brother, when I said I was scared I meant it. Sons and daughters phooey. If Pompa is innocent, and he is, there’s a murderer in that house, and an animal that has killed can kill again, and often does. What is going on there right now? I’d like to know, and I’m getting tired of talking to you. And what’s more, something’s biting you too or you wouldn’t have let me up here.”
Cutler went and sat down again, and I sat on the edge of the couch, facing him. I waited.
“It couldn’t be,” he declared.
“What couldn’t be?”
“Something biting me.”
“Something bit Mrs. Whitten. Or was it a bite or a bullet or what?”
“It was a cut.” His voice was weary and precise, not gruff at all. “Her son Jerome phoned me at a quarter to ten, and I went at once. She was upstairs on the bed and things were bloody. They had towels against her, pressing the wound together. There was a cut on her left side, five inches long and deep enough to expose the eighth rib, and a shallow cut on her left arm above the elbow, two inches long. The cuts had been made with a sharp blade. Twelve sutures were required in the side wound, and four in the arm. The loss of blood had been substantial, but not serious enough to call for more than iron and liver, which I prescribed. That was all. I left.”
“How did she get cut?”
“I was proceeding to tell you. She said she had gone in the late afternoon to a conference in her business office, made urgent by the death of her husband and the arrest of Pompa. It had lasted longer than expected. Riding back uptown, she had dismissed her chauffeur, sent him home in a taxi, and had driven herself around the park for a while. Then she drove to her house. As she got out of her car someone seized her from behind, and she thought she was being kidnaped. She gouged with her elbows and kicked, and suddenly her assailant released her and darted away. She crossed the sidewalk to her door, rang, and was admitted by Borly, the butler. Only after she was inside did she learn that she had been stabbed, or cut. The sons and daughters were there, and they phoned me and got her upstairs. They also, directed by her, cleaned up; indoors and out. The butler washed the sidewalk with a hose. He was doing that when I arrived. Mrs. Whitten explained to me that the haste in cleaning up was on account of her desire to have no hullabaloo, as she put it. Under the circumstances the episode would naturally have been greatly — uh, magnified. She asked me to do her the favor of exercising professional discretion, and I saw no sufficient reason to refuse. I shall explain to her that your threat to have a police doctor see her left me no choice.”
He turned up his palms. “Those are the facts.”
I nodded. “As you got them. Who was it that jumped her?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Man or woman?”
“She doesn’t know. She was attacked from behind, and it was after dark. When her assailant dashed off, by the time she got straightened and turned he — or she — was the other side of a parked car. Anyway, she was frightened, and her concern was safety.”
“She didn’t see him before he jumped her? As she drove up?”
“No. He could have been concealed behind the parked car.”
“Were there no passers-by?”
“None. No one appeared.”
“Did she scream?”
“I didn’t ask her.” He was getting irritated. “I didn’t subject her to an inquisition, you know. She had been hurt and needed attention, and I gave it to her.”
“Sure.” I stood up. “I won’t say much obliged because I squeezed it out. I accept your facts — that is, what you were told — but I ought to warn you that you may get a phone call from Nero Wolfe. I can find my way out.”
He stood up. “I think you used the word ‘confidential.’ May I tell Mrs. Whitten that she need not expect a visit from a police doctor?”
“I’ll do my best. I mean it. But if I were you I wouldn’t give her any more quick promises. They’re apt not to stick.”
I reached for the doorknob, but he was ahead of me and opened it. He took me back down the hall and let me out, and even told me good night. The elevator man kept slanted eyes on me, evidently having been told of the vulgar message I had sent up to a tenant, so I told him that his starting lever needed oil, which it did. Outside I climbed in the car and rolled downtown a little faster than I was supposed to. The clock on the dash said ten minutes to midnight.