He wheeled and entered the office. Following, I used my foot to swing the door nearly shut, leaving no crack but not latching it. When I turned Vollmer was standing, facing Wolfe’s scowl.
“Well?” Wolfe demanded.
“Dead,” Vollmer told him. “With asphyxiation from strangling sometimes you can do something, but it wasn’t even worth trying.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know, but not more than an hour or two. Two hours at the outside, probably less.”
Wolfe looked at the thing on the floor, with no change in his scowl, and back at Doc. “You say strangling. Finger marks?”
“No. A constricting band of something with pressure below the hyoid bone. Not a stiff or narrow band; something soft like a strip of cloth — say a scarf.”
Wolfe switched to me. “You didn’t notify the police.”
“No, sir.” I glanced at Vollmer and back. “I need a word.”
“I suppose so.” He spoke to Doc. “If you will leave us for a moment? The front room?”
Vollmer hesitated, uncomfortable. “As a doctor called to a violent death I’d catch hell. Of course I could say—”
“Then go to a corner and cover your ears.”
He did so. He went to the farthest corner, the angle made by the partition of the bathroom, pressed his palms to his ears, and stood facing us.
I addressed Wolfe with a lowered voice. “I was here, and she came in. She was either scared good or putting on a very fine act. Apparently it wasn’t an act, and I now think I should have alerted Saul and Fritz, but it doesn’t matter what I now think. Last October a woman named Doris Hatten was killed — strangled — in her apartment. No one got elected. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“She said she was a friend of Doris Hatten’s and was at her apartment that day and saw the man that did the strangling, and that he was here this afternoon. She said he was aware that she had recognized him, that’s why she was scared, and she wanted to get you to help by telling him that we were wise and he’d better lay off. No wonder I didn’t gulp it down. I realize that you dislike complications and therefore might want to scratch this out, but at the end she touched a soft spot by saying that she had enjoyed my company, so I prefer to open up to the cops.”
“Then do so. Confound it!”
I went to the phone and started dialing Watkins 9-8241. Doc Vollmer came out of his corner and went to get his black case from the floor and put it on a chair. Wolfe was pathetic. He moved around behind his desk and lowered himself into his own oversized custom-made number, the only spot on earth where he was ever completely comfortable, but there smack in front of him was the object on the floor, so after a moment he made a face, got back onto his feet, grunted like an outraged boar, went across to the other side of the room to the shelves, and inspected the backbones of books.
But even that pitiful diversion got interrupted. As I finished with my phone call and hung up, sudden sounds of commotion came from the hall. Dashing across, getting fingernails on the edge of the door and pulling it open, and passing through, I saw trouble. A group was gathered in the open doorway of the dining room, which was across the hall. Saul Panzer went bounding past me toward the front. At the front door Colonel Percy Brown was stiff-arming Fritz Brenner with one hand and reaching for the doorknob with the other. Fritz, who is chef and housekeeper, is not supposed to double in acrobatics, but he did fine. Dropping to the floor, he grabbed the colonel’s ankles and jerked his feet out from under him. Then I was there, and Saul with his gun out; and there with us was the guest with the mop of black hair.
“You damn fool,” I told the colonel as he sat up. “If you’d got outdoors Saul would have winged you.”
“Guilt,” said the black-haired guest emphatically. “The compression got unbearable and he exploded. I was watching him. I’m a psychiatrist.”
“Good for you.” I took his elbow and turned him. “Go back in and watch all of ’em. With that wall mirror you can include yourself.”
“This is illegal,” stated Colonel Brown, who had scrambled to his feet and was short of breath.
Saul herded them to the rear. Fritz got hold of my sleeve. “Archie, I’ve got to ask Mr. Wolfe about dinner.”
“Nuts,” I said savagely. “By dinnertime this place will be more crowded than it was this afternoon. Company is coming, sent by the city. It’s a good thing we have a cloakroom ready.”
“But he has to eat; you know that. I should have the ducks in the oven now. If I have to stay here at the door and attack people as they try to leave, what will he eat?”
“Nuts,” I said. I patted him on the shoulder. “Excuse my manners, Fritz, I’m upset. I’ve just strangled a young woman.”
“Nuts,” he said scornfully.
“I might as well have,” I declared.
The doorbell rang. I reached for the switch and turned on the stoop light and looked through the panel of one-way glass. It was the first consignment of cops.
III
In my opinion Inspector Cramer made a mistake. Opinion, hell, of course he did. It is true that in a room where a murder has occurred the city scientists — measurers, sniffers, print-takers, specialists, photographers — may shoot the works, and they do. But except in rare circumstances the job shouldn’t take all week, and in the case of our office a couple of hours should have been ample. In fact, it was. By eight o’clock the scientists were through. But Cramer, like a sap, gave the order to seal it up until further notice, in Wolfe’s hearing. He knew damn well that Wolfe spent as least three hundred evenings a year in there, in the only chair and under the only light that he really liked, and that was why he did it. It was a mistake. If he hadn’t made it, Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as Wolfe saw it himself, and Cramer would have been saved a lot of trouble.
The two of them got the fact at the same time, from me. We were in the dining room — this was shortly after the scientists had got busy in the office, and the guests, under guard, had been shunted to the front room — and I was relating my conversation with Cynthia Brown. They wanted all of it, or Cramer did rather, and they got it. Whatever else my years as Wolfe’s assistant may have done for me or to me, they have practically turned me into a tape recorder, and Wolfe and Cramer didn’t get a rewrite of that conversation, they got the real thing, word for word. They also got the rest of my afternoon, complete. When I finished, Cramer had a slew of questions, but Wolfe not a one. Maybe he had already focused on the fact above referred to, but neither Cramer nor I had. The shorthand dick seated at one end of the dining table had the fact too, in his notebook along with the rest of it, but he wasn’t supposed to focus.
Cramer called a recess on the questions to take steps. He called men in and gave orders. Colonel Brown was to be photographed and fingerprinted and headquarters records were to be checked for him and Cynthia. The file on the murder of Doris Hatten was to be brought to him at once. The lab reports were to be rushed. Saul Panzer and Fritz Brenner were to be brought in.
They came. Fritz stood like a soldier at attention, grim and grave. Saul, only five feet seven, with the sharpest eyes and one of the biggest noses I have ever seen, in his unpressed brown suit, and his necktie crooked — he stood like Saul, not slouching and not stiff. He would stand like that if he were being awarded the Medal of Honor or if he were in front of a firing squad.
Of course Cramer knew both of them. He picked on Saul. “You and Fritz were in the hall all afternoon?”
Saul nodded. “The hall and the front room, yes.”