“I know the multiplication tables myself. I mean tricks.”
Fox shook his head. “The bag’s empty. If I were going to work on this, which I’m not, thank God, I’d have to start on a blank page.” He returned the pad and pen to his pockets, pushed back his chair, and arose.
“Where you going?”
“That depends. If you’ll give me a passport I’ll go home. If not, I suppose I’ll have to join—”
The inspector snorted in disbelief. “Sure you’d like to go home. And leave this hanging here? Not if I know you. And I do know you. If I send you in there with the crowd — you stay here. Sit down. There by Kossoy.”
Fox smiled at him. “I’m not making any contract. In case I do happen to think of a trick.”
“Neither am I.” Damon turned to a man in uniform who was seated by the door: “Ask Mrs. Pomfret to come here.”
It was a few minutes short of seven o’clock when Mrs. Pomfret entered the library. It was after midnight when the cook’s assistant, the last of the procession, left. When the door had closed behind him, Inspector Damon muttered in weary legato a string of the most impressive and pungent terms of profanity, and, his eyes bloodshot with strain, glared with savage repugnance at the two notebooks in front of Detective Kossoy which were filled with scratches from cover to cover.
“Anyway,” Fox sighed, “the smoked turkey sandwiches were good.”
“One of those people,” Damon growled, “poisoned that man.”
Which certainly was not much of a show for six hours’ hard work, but that was as far as they had got. No one had been able to furnish a conjecture regarding a breast that might have harbored a desire to kill Perry Dunham. Many of them had confessed to various degrees of dislike for him. Though it was now established that the poison had been put in the whisky, not after their return from the library but during their preliminary assemblage in the yellow room, it had not been possible to eliminate anyone from the list; no one was positive that any other one had not gone near the bar. On the other hand, no one had admitted observing any suspicious action by anyone else — any handling of the bourbon bottle, or prolonged lingering at the bar, or telltale tension or agitation. In sum, if anyone had seen anything which might have guided ever so slightly the finger of accusation, he had not disclosed it. Even Garda admitted that there had been nothing furtive or wary about Dora’s movements when she dropped the ball of paper into the bowl; she had merely, openly, gone to the stand and tossed it in.
Three of them — Koch, Dora, and Henry Pomfret — were sure that Perry had not had a drink before they left the yellow room for the library, and that left wide open the question of when the bourbon had been poisoned. It was not even positive, though of course highly probable, that it had been done in the yellow room. The servants stated that the bourbon had been kept, along with other liquors, in an unlocked cupboard in the pantry; and Schaeffer said that he had outfitted the bar there and wheeled it directly to the yellow room. The question of when a drink had last been poured from the bourbon bottle was also open; no one knew with certainty.
The one known and admitted action that would normally have been at least a starting point for a trail had apparently been an incredible and fantastic bizarrerie; by the time it came Hebe’s turn in the library, all memory of throwing the bottle from the window had passed from her mind. That’s what she said. Her session had ended with Damon staring speechless into her glorious eyes, and Fox had mercifully intervened and instructed the policeman to take her out.
The police commissioner had come, stayed an hour, and departed. The district attorney had arrived around nine o’clock and left at midnight. Fuller reports had been received from the laboratory and the morgue; Sergeant Craig and his squad of experts had finished and gone; the gaping jaws of the press had been given bones to close on; men had been sent with a key to Perry’s bachelor apartment on 51st Street to examine his papers and belongings for a possible hint; the police captain who had investigated Tusar’s suicide had been hustled out of bed for a visit to the district attorney’s office.
Still the most that could be said was what Inspector Damon growled from a tired throat at 12:40 A.M., “One of those people poisoned that man.”
Fox abandoned his chair and jerked himself into shape. “Well,” he declared, “if you still think I wouldn’t like to go home, try me. As a matter of fact, I’m ready to give an imitation of an indignant citizen. Would you care to see it?”
Damon shook his head, rubbed his eyes with his fingers, blinked at the incense bowl to recover a focus, and stood up. “Okay,” he said disgustedly. “Bring your notebooks, Kossoy, I guess there’s nothing else in here we want.” He started for the door, speaking to the man in uniform: “Show me where they are.”
Fox followed them, down the corridor and across the reception hall into the vast chamber which Pomfret had called the cathedral. It might, on that occasion, have been better called a mausoleum, or an even more dismal term if there is one. Even the two policemen on guard, one at each end of the room, seemed to have succumbed to the pervasive miasma of gloom. Seven haggard faces — for the Pomfrets were not there — turned to the entrance as the inspector appeared; Koch from a chair near one occupied by Hebe Heath, Diego from a window at the far side where he stood with Felix Beck, Dora from a divan on which she was stretched out, Ted Gill from under a lamp where he sat with a newspaper, Garda from a seat near one of the pianos. Koch started to blurt something, but Damon raised a hand:
“We’re leaving here,” he announced curtly. “You folks can go. I may need one or all of you again in the morning, and I’ll expect you to be available at the addresses you have given. None of you is to leave the city. If you ladies would like to be escorted home...”
Ted’s newspaper had dropped to the floor and he was on his feet. “I’ll take Miss Mowbray,” he said aggressively, striding to the divan. “If I may?”
She was sitting up. She protested feebly, “It isn’t necessary...”
“And me?” Hebe Heath inquired tragically. Disheveled and forlorn, she was more ravishing than ever. “Oh, Ted!”
“If you’ll allow me the pleasure, Miss Heath.” Adolph Koch was bowing to her with admirable social grace, under the circumstances.
“You, Miss Tusar?” Damon asked.
“I’ll take her,” Diego Zorilla offered gruffly, with no social grace whatever.
“No, you won’t,” Garda declared. Blear though her eyes were, they still could flash. “I’ll take a taxi...”
Diego shrugged and turned to Fox. “Are you going? For God’s sake, let’s get out of here.” He headed for the arch.
Fox followed him. In the reception hall a manservant got their things for them while a plain-clothes man looked on. They had to wait a moment for word from Damon to pass them. The elevator man abandoned all decorum and discipline and stared at them all the way down. The night lobby staff also stared, as did the members of a little group under the canopy on the sidewalk: the doorman, two policemen, and two or three young fellows, one of whom pounced on Fox.
“Listen, Mr. Fox, I’ve been waiting for you, this is a natural for two columns with a by-line...”
It took a block of brisk walking and brisk words to shake him off.
“My gloves are in my right pocket,” Diego grumbled. “I always put them in the left.”
“Sure,” Fox nodded, “they went through everything. My car’s around the corner in Sixty-ninth. Can I give you a lift?”