“I have told you he is dead.”
“Okay. You ought to know better. You do know better. We’re stuck. They wouldn’t ask us questions at home, they’d haul us back out here. They’d be waiting for us on the stoop and you wouldn’t get inside the house.” I returned the keys to my pocket. “Running out when you’re next on the program, that would be nice. The only question is do we report it now or do you make your speech and let someone else find it, and you can answer that.”
He had stopped glaring. He took in a long, deep breath, and when it was out again he said, “I’ll make my speech.”
“Fine. It’d be a shame to waste it. A question. Just now when you lifted the flap to come out I didn’t see you untie the tape fastening. Was it already untied?”
“Yes.”
“That makes it nice.” I turned and went to the steps, mounted, raised the flap for him, and followed him into the tent. He crossed to the front and on out, and I stepped to the cot. Philip Holt lay facing the wall, with the blanket up to his neck, and I pulled it down far enough to see the handle of the knife, an inch to the right of the point of the shoulder blade. The knife blade was all buried. I lowered the blanket some more to get at a hand, pinched a fingertip hard for ten seconds, released it, and saw it stay white. I picked some fluff from the blanket and dangled it against his nostrils for half a minute. No movement. I put the blanket back as I had found it, went to the metal box on the table and lifted the lid, and saw that the shortest knife, the one with the six-inch blade, wasn’t there.
As I went to the rear entrance and raised the flap, Dick Vetter’s lather or whipped cream, whichever you prefer, came to an end through the loudspeakers, and as I descended the five steps the meadowful of picnickers was cheering.
Our sedan was the third car on the right from the foot of the steps. The second car to the left of the steps was a 1955 Plymouth, and I was pleased to see that it still had an occupant, having previously noticed her — a woman with careless gray hair topping a wide face and a square chin, in the front seat but not behind the wheel.
I circled around to her side and spoke through the open window. “I beg your pardon. May I introduce myself?”
“You don’t have to, young man. Your name’s Archie Goodwin, and you work for Nero Wolfe, the detective.” She had tired gray eyes. “You were just out here with him.”
“Right. I hope you won’t mind if I ask you something. How long have you been sitting here?”
“Long enough. But it’s all right, I can hear the speeches. Nero Wolfe is just starting to speak now.”
“Have you been here since the speeches started?”
“Yes, I have. I ate too much of the picnic stuff and I didn’t feel like standing up in that crowd, so I came to sit in the car.”
“Then you’ve been here all the time since the speeches began?”
“That’s what I said. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just checking on something. If you don’t mind. Has anyone gone into the tent or come out of it while you’ve been here?”
Her tired eyes woke up a little. “Ha,” she said, “so something’s missing. I’m not surprised. What’s missing?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. I’m just checking a certain fact. Of course you saw Mr. Wolfe and me come out and go back in. Anyone else, either going or coming?”
“You’re not fooling me, young man. Something’s missing, and you’re a detective.”
I grinned at her. “All right, have it your way. But I do want to know, if you don’t object.”
“I don’t object. As I told you, I’ve been right here ever since the speeches started, I got here before that. And nobody has gone into the tent, nobody but you and Nero Wolfe, and I haven’t either. I’ve been right here. If you want to know about me, my name is Anna Banau, Mrs. Alexander Banau, and my husband is a captain at Zoller’s—”
A scream came from inside the tent, an all-out scream from a good pair of lungs. I moved, to the steps, up, and past the flap into the tent. Flora Korby was standing near the cot with her back to it, her hand covering her mouth. I was disappointed in her. Granting that a woman has a right to scream when she finds a corpse, she might have kept it down until Wolfe had finished his speech.
Chapter 3
It was a little after four o’clock when Flora Korby screamed. It was 4:34 when a glance outside through a crack past the flap of the tent’s rear entrance, the third such glance I had managed to make, showed me that the Plymouth containing Mrs. Alexander Banau was gone. It was 4:39 when the medical examiner arrived with his bag and found that Philip Holt was still dead. It was 4:48 when the scientists came, with cameras and fingerprint kits and other items of equipment, and Wolfe and I and the others were herded out to the extension, under guard. It was 5:16 when I counted a total of seventeen cops, state and county, in uniform and out, on the job. It was 5:30 when Wolfe muttered at me bitterly that it would certainly be all night. It was 5:52 when a chief of detectives named Baxter got so personal with me that I decided, finally and definitely, not to play. It was 6:21 when we all left Culp’s Meadows for an official destination. There were four in our car: one in uniform with Wolfe in the back seat, and one in his own clothes with me in front. Again I had someone beside me to tell me the way, but I didn’t put my arm across his shoulders.
There had been some conversing with us separately, but most of it had been a panel discussion, open air, out on the platform extension, so I knew pretty well how things stood. Nobody was accusing anybody. Three of them — Korby, Rago, and Griffin — gave approximately the same reason for their visits to the tent during the speechmaking: that they were concerned about Philip Holt and wanted to see if he was all right. The fourth, Dick Vetter, gave the reason I had guessed, that he thought Griffin might bring Holt out to the platform, and he intended to stop him. Vetter, by the way, was the only one who raised a fuss about being detained. He said that it hadn’t been easy to get away from his duties that afternoon, and he had a studio rehearsal scheduled for six o’clock, and he absolutely had to be there. At 6:21, when we all left for the official destination, he was fit to be tied.
None of them claimed to know for sure that Holt had been alive at the time he visited the tent; they all had supposed he had fallen asleep. All except Vetter said they had gone to the cot and looked at him, at his face, and had suspected nothing wrong. None of them had spoken to him. To the question, “Who do you think did it and why?” they all gave the same answer: someone must have entered the tent by the rear entrance, stabbed him, and departed. The fact that the URWA director of organization had got his stomach into trouble and had been attended by a doctor in the tent had been no secret, anything but.
I have been leaving Flora out, since I knew and you know she was clear, but the cops didn’t. I overheard one of them tell another one it was probably her, because stabbing a sick man was more like something a woman would do than a man.
Of course the theory that someone had entered by the back door made the fastening of the tent flap an important item. I said I had tied the tape before we left the tent, and they all agreed that they had seen me do so except Dick Vetter, who said he hadn’t noticed because he had been helping to arrange the blanket over Holt; and Wolfe and I both testified that the tape was hanging loose when we had entered the tent while Vetter was speaking. Under this theory the point wasn’t who had untied it, since the murderer could have easily reached through the crack from the outside and jerked the knot loose; the question was when. On that none of them was any help. All four said they hadn’t noticed whether the tape was tied or not when they went inside the tent.