Finally Wolfe opened his eyes and spoke. “You understand, madam, that the circumstances — particularly the finding of Mr. Aubry’s card, bearing his fingerprints, on the body — warrant an explicit assumption: that your husband was killed by one of the six persons present at the conference in Mr. Beebe’s office Friday afternoon; and, eliminating Mr. Aubry, five are left. You know them all, if not intimately at least familiarly, and I ask you: is one of them more likely than another? For any reason at all?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Do we have to — is this the only way?”
“It is. That’s our assumption until it’s discredited. I want your best answer.”
“I don’t know,” she insisted.
I decided to contribute. “I doubt,” I put in, “if this would be a good buy at a nickel, but this morning at the DA’s office I met the whole bunch. I had a little chat with Mrs. Horne, who seems to like gags, and when the others appeared she introduced me to them. She told them I was going to give her the third degree, and she added, I quote, ‘I expect I’ll go to pieces and confess—’ Unquote. At that point Horne put his hand on her mouth and told her she talked too much. Mrs. Savage said it was her sense of humor.”
“That’s like Ann,” Caroline said. “Exactly like her, at her worst.”
Wolfe grunted. “Mr. Goodwin has a knack for putting women at their worst. He’s no help, and neither are you. You seem not to realize that unless I can expose one of those five as the murderer of your husband, Mr. Aubry is almost certainly doomed.”
“I do realize it. It’s awful, but I do.” Her lips tightened. In a moment she spoke. “And I want to help! All night I was trying to think, and one thing I thought of — what Sidney said in his letter about something that would shock me. You said yesterday it’s not simple to disinherit a wife, but couldn’t he have done it some other way? Couldn’t he have signed something that would give someone a claim on the estate, perhaps the whole thing? Isn’t there some way he could have arranged for the — shock?”
“Conceivably,” Wolfe admitted. “But there would have had to be an authentic transfer of ownership and possession, and there wasn’t. Or if he established a trust it would have had to be legally recorded, and the estate would never have been distributed. You’ll have to do better than that.” He cleared his throat explosively and straightened up. “Very well. I must tackle them. Will you please have them here at six o’clock, madam? All of them?”
Her eyes widened at him. “Me? Bring them here?”
“Certainly.”
“But I can’t! How? What could I say? I can’t tell them that you think one of them killed Sidney, and you want — No! I can’t!” She came forward in the chair. “Don’t you see it’s just impossible? Anyhow, they wouldn’t come!”
Wolfe turned. “Archie. You’ll have to get them. I prefer six o’clock, but if that isn’t feasible after dinner will do.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “Phone Mr. Parker and make an appointment for Mrs. Karnow. Phone Saul and tell him I want him here as soon as possible. Then lunch. After lunch, proceed.” He turned to the client. “Will you join us, madam? Fritz’s rice-and-mushroom fritters are, if I may say so, palatable.”
IV
Since this is a democracy, thank God, please prepare to vote. All those in favor of my describing in full detail my efforts to the utmost, lasting a good five hours, to fill Wolfe’s order for three males and two females, say aye. I hear none. Since my eardrums are sensitive I won’t ask for the noes.
Then I’ll sketch it. James M. Beebe, I found, was not one of the machines in one of the huge legal factories that occupy so many floors in so many of New York’s skyscrapers. He was soloing it in a modest space on the tenth floor of a midtown building. The woman in the little anteroom, the only visible or audible employee, with a typewriter on her left and a telephone on her right, said Mr. Beebe would be back soon, and, if you call thirty-five minutes soon, he was.
The inner room he led me to must have been a little cramped with a conference of six people. Its furniture was adequate but by no means ornate. Beebe, who had looked runty alongside Mrs. Savage, could not be called impressive seated at his desk, with a large percentage of the area of his thin face taken up by the black-rimmed glasses. When I showed him my credentials, a note signed by Caroline Karnow saying that Nero Wolfe was acting for her, and told him that Wolfe would like to discuss the situation with those chiefly concerned at his office that afternoon or evening, he said that he understood that the police investigation was making progress, and that he questioned the wisdom of an investigation of a murder by a private detective.
Wise or not, I said, Mrs. Karnow surely had the right to hire Wolfe if she wanted to. He conceded that. Also surely the widow of his former friend and client might reasonably expect him to cooperate in her effort to discover the truth. Wasn’t that so?
He looked uncomfortable. He saw that a pencil on his desk was not in its proper place, and moved it, and studied it a while to decide if that was the best spot after all. At length he came back to me.
“It’s like this, Mr. Goodwin,” he piped. “I sympathize deeply with Mrs. Karnow, of course. But any obligation I am under is not to her, but to my late friend and client, Sidney Karnow. I certainly will do anything I can to help discover the truth, but it is justifiable to suppose that in employing Nero Wolfe Mrs. Karnow’s primary purpose, if not her sole purpose, is to save Paul Aubry. As an officer of the law I cannot conscientiously participate in that. I am not Aubry’s attorney. I beg you to understand.”
I kept after him. He stood pat. Finally, following instructions from Wolfe, I put a question to him.
“I suppose,” I said, “you won’t mind helping to clear up a detail. At a conference in this room last Friday afternoon Aubry left one of his business cards on your desk. It was there when he left. What happened to it?”
He cocked his head and frowned. “Here on my desk?”
“Right.”
The frown deepened. “I’m trying to remember — yes, I do remember. He suggested I might phone him later, and he put it there.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you phone him?”
“No. As it turned out, there was no occasion to.”
“Would you mind seeing if the card is around? It’s fairly important.”
“Why is it important?”
“That’s a long story. But I would like very much to see that card. Will you take a look?”
He wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but he obliged. He looked among and under things on top of his desk, including the blotter, in the desk drawers, and around the room some — as, for instance, on top of a filing cabinet. I got down on my knees to see under the desk. No card.
I scrambled to my feet. “May I ask your secretary?”
“What’s this all about?” he demanded.
“Nothing you would care to participate in. But the easiest way to get rid of me is to humor me on this one little detail.”
He lifted the phone and spoke to it, and in a moment the door opened and the employee entered. He told her I wanted to ask her something, and I did so. She said she knew nothing about any card of Paul Aubry’s. She had never seen one, on Beebe’s desk or anywhere else, last Friday or any other day. That settled, she backed out, pulling the door with her.
“It’s a little discouraging,” I told Beebe. “I was counting on collecting that card. Are you sure you don’t remember seeing one of the others pick it up?”
“I’ve told you all I remember — that Aubry put a card on my desk.”