“Where were you on Tuesday, say from mid-morning on?”
“Well, I—” She recoiled as if she’d been slapped. “Why are you asking?”
“Just my native curiosity.”
Her face went pale with anger, one of the better performances of outrage I’ve witnessed. “Listen, Mr. Goodwin, I’d hardly be encouraging your investigation if I were the killer, now, would I?”
“Probably not. But in my line of work, Ms. Mitchell, I’ve gotten in the habit of asking nosy questions. Do you have a problem with that one?”
Her face softened, but only slightly. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m still somewhat off-balance over this whole thing. Actually, I worked at home on Tuesday, editing press releases my staff had done for shows that we’ll be running during the summer. I do that sometimes — work at home, I mean. I can get so much more done away from the phones. I live in a co-op on Park near Sixty-eighth.”
“Did anyone see you during that time?”
“You really do ask nosy questions, don’t you? Well, I guess you have to. No, nobody saw me. Wait — I’m wrong. I went out just before noon. I needed some air, so I took a long walk and ended up doing some grocery shopping at a deli in the neighborhood. Our doorman, Jake, saw me go, and he saw me come back.”
“When was that?”
“I think it must have been close to two o’clock. I remember that I’d been home for about an hour and a half and I was thinking Charles would be phoning me soon. He had planned to spend some time at the library in the afternoon doing research on Pennsylvania for his next book. He had said he would call and tell me when he was picking me up — we were supposed to go to a cocktail party that the head of our news division was having in his place on Park. Well, I got a call, all right, but it wasn’t from Charles. It was from my office, telling me about Charles.” She fingered an ashtray on the coffee table, then looked up. “And that’s it,” she said, spreading her hands.
“But nobody can vouch for you between noon and two?”
She shrugged. “Maybe the clerk in the deli, but I didn’t get there until after my walk, maybe about one-forty-five. Does that make me a suspect?” she demanded with a toss of the head.
“It might,” I answered in a light tone. We were nothing if not civilized. “One more thing. Would you mind showing me the key to your apartment?”
Debra Mitchell started to frown but quickly erased it, smiling without warmth and tossing her head again. She knew that made her hair fall across her cheek. If I hadn’t been so intent on getting something accomplished, the gesture might have impressed me no end. “If this is some sort of come-on that I’m not familiar with, call me naive,” she said, narrowing her eyes and wrinkling her nose.
“I am by no means above a come-on,” I conceded, “but only after hours. I only want to see your key — I won’t even touch it.”
She shook her head as if indulging a child and went to her desk, reaching into a drawer and pulling out a patent leather purse. “All right, here it is,” she said, holding one key between her thumb and forefinger as she thrust her key chain at me with a flourish. “What does it tell you?”
“All that I want to know,” I said. Even from two feet away, I could see that her key was not even a distant cousin of the one I had pocketed earlier in the Village. I thanked her for seeing me and started to rise. “Before you go,” she said sheepishly, “I wonder if I can change the subject?” I nodded and she went on.
“You might have heard me on the phone when you arrived. A program of ours, Entre Nous, is an interview show — maybe you’ve seen it. It’s on weeknights at seven. Anyway, we lost our guest for next Tuesday, an inventor from the Dakotas, and I wondered if we could get Nero Wolfe in his place. I know he doesn’t like to leave home, but he won’t have to. Belle Corliss, she’s our interviewer, would come to his house along with a crew, and do the conversation right there. It would take—”
“Forget it,” I told her with a smile. “Mr. Wolfe guards his privacy like a Doberman. And he has a powerful aversion to television. Call the latter a character defect on his part, but that’s the way he is, eccentric through and through.” I didn’t bother to tell her that Wolfe also has a powerful aversion to having women in the brownstone.
“One more thing,” I said, stopping just short of the doorway and reaching into my pocket, pulling out the key I had found above Childress’s door. “Does this look familiar to you?”
Debra Mitchell took it and held it up. “No... It’s not one of mine,” she said, looking puzzled. “Why?”
“Just wondered. Well, thanks for your time.”
She pressed me again about Wolfe being on Entre Nous like a good TV executive, but I held fast, and she finally surrendered gracefully. I thanked her again for her time and patience, and she gave me a firm handshake. As I walked down the hall toward the elevator, I found myself musing on two things: Debra Mitchell’s beauty and her hardness, the latter underscored by what seemed to be a total lack of grief over the death of the man she had been going to marry.
Five
Wolfe had not stipulated the order in which I was to conduct my interviews after I had seen Debra Mitchell, so, in light of La Mitchell’s comments, I opted to call next on Patricia Royce, which meant a trip back downtown. First, though, I stopped for lunch at a little diner on Seventh Avenue near Forty-eighth that I’ve patronized off and on for years. It’s had the same counterman, a gravel-voiced guy named Bennie who’s almost as heavy as Wolfe, since the days when you could ride the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel. The Reuben sandwich was as good as ever, and so was the mince pie, which I chased with a glass of ice-cold milk.
Vinson had given me Patricia Royce’s address, on one of the east-west streets in the East Village between Second and Third Avenues. My watch read twelve-forty-five when the cab dropped me in front of a four-story brick building, which suffered by comparison to recently rehabbed neighbors on either side.
I climbed the seven steps to the dingy foyer and pressed the buzzer next to ROYCE 2-B. After a few seconds, I got a muffled “Yes?”
“My name is Archie Goodwin,” I said into the speaker. “I am here to talk about Charles Childress.” There was a pause, followed by something that might have been “I’ll be down.” The entrance buzzer didn’t sound, so I had no option but to stand in the foyer. While I waited, I tried to slip the key I’d found in Childress’s apartment into the lock, but it didn’t fit. After what probably was two minutes but seemed like ten, a very pale woman with dark blue eyes, sandy hair parted in the center and wearing jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt appeared at the inner door. She could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. “What do you want?” she asked through the glass.
“Are you Patricia Royce?”
She nodded, but made no move to open the door.
“I’m investigating Charles Childress’s death,” I said, talking more loudly than I needed to. “May I come in?”
“Are you with the police? I’ve already had one of their Homicide people come to see me.”
“No, I’m a private detective working for Nero Wolfe.” I pulled my laminated P.I.’s license out of my billfold and held it up to the glass.
Patricia Royce shrugged. Then she pulled the door open with a sigh. “I’ve heard of Nero Wolfe, and I guess I might have heard of you, too,” she said. “I don’t know what there is to investigate, but all right. Come on up.” Her tone was hardly enthusiastic, although I didn’t give her a chance to change her mind.