Death of A Doxy (5 page)

“According to the newspaper, when you went there day before yesterday you got no answer to your ring and the superintendent let you in. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“That was an important moment, when you entered the bedroom. I don’t want to jar you again, Mrs. Fleming, I truly don’t, but it’s important. What was your first thought when you saw your sister’s dead body there on the floor?”

“I didn’t ' it wasn’t a thought.”

“First there was the shock, of course. But when you saw the ' when you realized she had been murdered, it would have been natural to have the thought He killed her or She killed her, something like that. That’s why it’s important; a first thought like that is often right. Who was the he or the she?”

“There wasn’t any he or she. I didn’t have any such thought.”

“Are you sure'At a time like that your mind jerks around.”

“I know it does, but I didn’t have a thought such as that then or any other time, that he killed her or she killed her. I couldn’t even try to guess who killed her. All I know is there mustn’t be a trial.”

“There will be a trial, of Orrie Cather, unless we can find a way to stop it. Did your sister ever show you her diary?”

She frowned. “She didn’t keep a diary.”

“Yes, she did. The police have it. But since -“

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. Since -“

“She shouldn’t have done that. That makes it worse. She didn’t tell me. She must have kept it in that drawer she kept locked. Don’t I have a right to it'Can’t I make them give it to me?”

“Not now. You can later. If there’s a trial it will be evidence. It’s called an exhibit. Since you never saw it, we’ll have to skip it. It looks pretty hopeless, because I don’t know of anyone but you who can give me any information. Of course a good prospect would be the man who paid the rent for the apartment, and the car and the perfume and so on, but I don’t know who he is. Do you?”

“No.”

“That surprises me. I thought you would. You were close with your sister, weren’t you?”

“Certainly I was.”

“Then you must know who else was. Since you say you couldn’t even try to guess who killed her, I’m not asking that, just who knew her well. Of course you have told the police.”

“No, I haven’t.”

I raised a brow. “Are you refusing to talk to them too?”

“No, but I couldn’t tell them much because I don’t know. It was& ” She stopped, shook her head, and turned to her husband. “You tell him, Barry.”

He squeezed her hand. “You could almost say,” he said, “that Isabel lived two lives. One of them was with my wife, her sister, and to a much less extent me. The other one was with her ' well, call it her circle. My wife and I know very little about it, but we sort of understood that her friends were mostly from the world of the theater. You will realize that in the circumstances my wife preferred not to associate with them.”

“It wasn’t what I preferred,” she corrected. “It was what was.”

That helped a lot, another whole circle, but I might have expected it. “All right,” I told her, “you can’t give me names you don’t know. Isn’t there anyone, anyone at all, that you know and she knew?”

She shook her head. “Nobody.”

“Dr. Gamm,” Fleming said.

“Oh, of course,” she said.

“Her doctor?” I asked.

Fleming nodded. “Ours too. An internist. He’s ' you might say ' a friend of mine. He plays chess. When Isabel had a bad case of bronchitis a couple of years ago I -“

“Nearly three years ago,” she said.

“Was it'I recommended him. He’s a widower with two children. We have had him and Isabel here two or three evenings for bridge, but she wasn’t very good at it.”

“She was terrible,” Stella Fleming said.

“No card sense,” Fleming said. “His name is Theodore Gamm with two Ms. His office is on Seventy-eighth Street in Manhattan.”

Presumably he was helping with the problem, and I fully appreciated it; at least, by gum, I had one name and address. I got my notebook out and wrote it down to show that I was on the ball.

“He can’t tell you anything,” she said, perfectly calm, but suddenly she was on her feet, trembling, her hands tight fists, her eyes hot. “Nobody can! They won’t, they won’t! Get out! Get out!”

Fleming, up too, had an arm across her shoulders, but she didn’t know it. If I had sat tight she would probably have soon got organized again, but I hadn’t had a bite since breakfast. I nodded at Fleming, and he nodded back, and I went to the foyer for my hat and coat and let myself out. As I entered the elevator, William said, “So you got in, huh?” and I said, “Thanks to you, pal, telling both of them I was there.” Outside it was even colder, but the Heron started like an angel, as it damn well should, and I headed for the Grand Concourse.

When I entered the office, a little after half past six, Wolfe was at his desk, scowling at a document two inches thick ' part of the transcript of the Rosenberg trial, which he had sent for after reading the first three chapters of Invitation to an Inquest. My desk was clean, no memos or messages about phone calls. I yanked a sheet from my pocket notebook and sat studying it until Wolfe cleared his throat, whereupon I rose and handed it to him.

“There,” I said. “The name and address of the doctor who treated Isabel Kerr when she had bronchitis nearly three years ago.”

He grunted. “And?”

“You’ll appreciate it more if I lead up to it. I spent an hour with Mr. and Mrs. Barry Fleming. Now or after dinner?”

He looked at the clock. Thirty-five minutes to anchovy fritters. “Is it urgent?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then it can wait. Saul called twice. Nothing. Fred will join him in the morning. I rang Mr. Parker, and he came after lunch and I described the situation, everything relevant except the name of Avery Ballou. He telephoned later. He had seen Orrie, and he has arranged for you to see him in the morning at ten o’clock. He thinks it advisable.”

“Has Orrie been charged'Homicide?”

“No.”

“But no bail?”

“No. Mr. Parker doesn’t wish to press it.” He glanced at the sheet I had handed him. “What’s this'Did this man kill her?”

“No, he cured her. I’m very proud of it. It’s the crop.”

“Pfui.” He dropped it and resumed with the transcript.

Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.

He let up only when we were back in the office and had finished with coffee. He pushed the tray aside and asked if it had to be verbatim, and I said yes and proceeded. When I told about the deal with William he pursed his lips, not objecting, merely reacting to the fact that the fifteen bucks was down the drain, since we couldn’t expect to bill Orrie. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes and quit reacting, as usual, until I had finished.

He opened his eyes and demanded, “You had no lunch'None at all?”

I shook my head. “If I had gone out it might have cost a C to get back up. William is a mooch.”

He straightened up. “Never do that.”

“It’s good for me. I was nine ounces overweight. Do you comment or do I?”

“You.”

I took a minute. “First, did Stella kill her sister'Two to one she didn’t. She -“

“Only two?”

“That’s the best I’ll give. The most important thing in the world, she said. If it’s still that important when she’s dead, what was it when she was alive'She left the rails twice in my presence. She just can’t stand it. If she went there Saturday morning and ' do I need to spell it?”

“No. Why two to one'Why not even or less?”

“Because, on the record, a woman kills her sister only if she hates her or is afraid of her. Stella didn’t. She loved her and wanted to ' well, save her. Make it three to one. Anyway, even if she did it, she’s hopeless. Try and prove it. Even if we got enough to satisfy us, Cramer and the DA would never buy it, let alone a jury. So forget her. As for him, no bet. He could have had an elegant motive, anybody could, but as of now the only one visible is that he killed her to stop his wife worrying about her, which is a little farfetched. One thing, though, why did he let me in?”

“So she wouldn’t encounter you in the hall.”

“Possibly, but he could have ordered me out and called a cop if he had to. It’s just a comment; maybe it was because he likes problems, or maybe he thought it would be good for her. More than a comment, a conclusion: if they’re out, they have no idea who is in. She said she couldn’t even try to guess, and I believe her. She’s no good at covering. When I pulled an obvious little dodge, saying that it might have been Orrie who was paying the rent, it wasn’t only her expression, she actually shook her head. Later she said she didn’t know who, but she does. What the hell, so do we.”

“If Orrie was candid.”

“He was. He had the lid off. For comments, I have saved the best for the last. Isabel’s other life. The circle.”

He grunted. “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“That expands it. That was to be expected, as soon as you learned that her relations with her sister were restricted. A woman who eats by sufferance, without a contract, would of course prefer not to eat alone. You laugh?”

“I do. Most men wouldn’t put it all on eating. All right, so we have a circle too ' as expected. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Godalmighty. I suggest again that we consider Avery Ballou.”

“I am considering him. I wanted first ' no matter. We’ll discuss it in the morning after you see Orrie.” He reached for the transcript.

Where you go to see a man in custody in Manhattan depends partly on why he’s there. It can be a precinct station, a room in the City Prison, a room in the District Attorney’s office, or the paddock. I don’t know how many cops call it the paddock, but Sergeant Purley Stebbins does. It is a bare, smelly room about twelve yards long, split along the center by a steel grill which extends from the middle of a wide wooden counter up to the ceiling, and there are a dozen or so wooden chairs strung along each side of the counter, the same kind of chairs for the visitors and visitees. Democracy.

Seated on one of the chairs on the visitors’ side at ten minutes past ten Tuesday morning, I was not chipper. I had supposed I would see Orrie in a room at the DA’s office until Parker had phoned to say it would be the City Prison, and then I had taken it for granted it would be in a room. But I had been escorted to the paddock, and there I was, with four other visitors spread along the line, the nearest one, a middle-aged fat woman with red eyes, only seven feet away. I would have liked to think they were merely showing what they thought of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but I didn’t. They had decided that Orrie Cather was a murderer, though they hadn’t charged him yet, and were taking no chances. Try to make them eat it.

A door opened in the back wall, the other side of the grill and counter, and Orrie entered, cuffed, with a dick right behind. The dick steered him to a chair opposite me, watched him sit, said, “Fifteen minutes,” and went back to the wall, where another dick was standing. My eyes and Orrie’s met as well as they could through the grill. The rims of his were puffy. He had once admitted to me that he brushed his hair ten minutes every morning, but he hadn’t that morning.

“It could be bugged,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. His cuffed hands were on the counter. “Too risky. Too big a stink.”

“Well, all we can do is keep it low. Parker has told you that Mr. Wolfe and Saul and Fred and I have decided that you didn’t kill her and we’re on it.”

“Yeah, I knew he’d have to. I’m not his Archie Goodwin, but even me he’d have to.”

“I prefer to regard myself as my Archie Goodwin, but we won’t go into that now. I have a couple of questions, but Parker says you wanted to see me. Well?”

“I want you to do me a favor, Archie, a big favor. I want you to see Jill Hardy and tell her -“

“I’ve already seen her. She came to the office yesterday morning, don’t interrupt, and we had a talk. I didn’t know how much you had told her about Isabel Kerr, so I -“

“I have never told her anything about Isabel Kerr. She didn’t know there was an Isabel Kerr. Goddammit, what did you tell her?”

“Same as you, nothing. Of course that’s the favor you were going to ask, and it’s already done. I told her that the cops thought you killed her, and we thought you didn’t, and we were going to investigate, and we knew nothing about Isabel Kerr. Now I have -“

“You’re wonderful, Archie. Wonderful.”

“Put it in writing and I’ll frame it. I have questions, and we haven’t much time. Have you opened up at all?”

“No. I’m a dummy.”

“Stay that way. As you know, Parker agrees. What have they got'We know they got your license and the other objects, since you didn’t get them and I didn’t, and your prints, and her diary, but is that -“

“Her diary?”

“Yeah. You didn’t know she kept one?”

“My God, no.”

“She did, and they have it, so Cramer says. He didn’t say what’s in it. Probably you are, but we want your opinion on another point: would she put his name in it'The name I had to pry out of you.”

“Oh.” He looked at it a few seconds. “I see. That might be a point. I don’t think she would. Of course she had the diary stashed, but even so I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t. She was too cagey. It’s more than just an opinion. I say no.”

I looked at my wrist. Six minutes to go. “Now the question. How many people knew about you and her?”

“Nobody.”

“Nuts. You can’t know that.”

“As far as I know, nobody. You’ve heard me blow, Archie, but you never heard me blow about her. After just a few times with her she scared me. I had had women cotton to me before, but she was hipped. I liked her all right, she was good all right, but she was hipped. After we got started we were never together anywhere except her place. She wanted it that way, and that suited me. But I completely misjudged her. I told her about meeting Jill, you know, just that I had met an airline stewardess, and then like a damn fool I thought I could ease her along to the idea that since I wasn’t her only contact she couldn’t expect to be my only contact. Then I got hipped, for the first time in my life. On Jill. And she ' I’ve told you how she took it. She was absolutely going to marry me herself, for God’s sake. I told her my income was about half of what he was spending on that setup, and she said just a room and bath would do us even after the baby came. That kind of crap. I don’t for a minute believe there was going to be a baby, and even if there was, whose would it be'I’m answering your question. I told nobody about her, and I doubt if she told anyone about me.”

“But she told you about other people, didn’t she?”

“Some, yes. You know, just talk, sure.”

“Which one of them killed her'Who had a reason to?”

He nodded. “Naturally I’ve thought about it. If she ever said a single damn thing about anyone that might give a hint I can’t dig it up. I realize that there’s only one way you can spring me, and God knows I wish I could give you a steer, but I swear I can’t. Sure, she told me about people, men who made passes at her, women she liked and some she didn’t like, but I have gone over it and over it and came up with nothing. I know you have to start somewhere, and that’s the other thing, besides Jill, I wanted to tell you. The woman she liked best, and saw the most of, is a night-club singer named Julie Jaquette. Her real name is Amy Jackson. She was at the Ten Little Indians week before last and may still be there. She would probably be the best bet. Have you got anything yet'Anything at all?”

“No. Did you ever meet the sister, Stella Fleming?”

“No. Isabel talked about her. She said that when we were married not only would she be happy, her sister would be too. I was supposed to get a kick out of that, making two women happy at once.”

“You should have. Did she ever mention -” I stopped because we were about to be interrupted. The dick was coming. He touched Orrie on the shoulder, which was unnecessary, and said time was up. I raised my voice. “What’s your name?”

He looked down his nose at me. “My name?”

“Yes. Your personal name.”

“My name is William Flanagan.”

“Another William.” I rose. “I’m going to report you for brutality. Mr. Cather is merely detained as a material witness. You didn’t have to grab his shoulder.” I turned and headed for the door, and the dick who had brought me in joined me as I reached for the knob.

William Flanagan hadn’t stopped anything important; I had only been going to ask if Isabel had ever mentioned Dr. Gamm.

In the taxi, going uptown, I touched bottom. I had hoped to get some little lead out of Orrie, at least a glimmer, but as we turned west at 35th Street I realized that I was going over how he had looked and what he had said for indications about him, which was plain silly, since he was supposed to be definitely out. Of course the trouble was that the only way to get something out of your mind is to get something else in. The idea that Orrie might have conked Isabel Kerr with that ashtray had popped into my head as soon as I saw the dent in her skull, and it was going to stay there, no matter what, until I had an X or Y to substitute for Orrie; and after three days and nights there was still no X or Y anything like good enough. If you say, even so, I shouldn’t have been considering Orrie because we had barred him, you’re perfectly right but you don’t know much.

To show how I was taking it, when I entered the office I did not open the top left drawer of my desk to get the pad on which I enter items for my weekly expense account. The $3.75 cab fare would be on me. Wolfe had told us the undertaking was his, but until we brought him something he would have nothing to undertake, and he had no corner in self-esteem. Since it was only a couple of minutes past eleven, he had just come down from the plant rooms and was taking a look at the mail. When he found there was nothing interesting, no checks and no lists from orchid collectors, he pushed it aside and said good morning. I said it wasn’t, and to prove it gave him a verbatim report of my talk with Orrie, ending with the comment that he had better take on the next one himself, since I had got nowhere with the three I had tackled, Jill Hardy and the Flemings.

“Anyway,” I said, “it’s a man. I admit that Julie Jaquette would probably be too much for you, but she can wait until you have had a go at Avery Ballou.”

He frowned. “Dr. Gamm.”

I frowned back. “You can’t put it off forever. As you know, I agree with you on jobs like divorce evidence, they’re too grubby. Any job is apt to be if the main point is who has been, or is, or will be, sleeping with whom. But while it’s true that Ballou was probably not paying her rent so he could read poetry to her, that presumably sex was a factor, that’s not the main point and you can ignore it. You can pretend that he might have killed her because she snickered when he pronounced a word wrong.”

His lips were tight. He breathed three times before he said, “Very well. Bring him.”

I nodded. “Okay, but I don’t know when or how. I looked him up a little last night. He is not only president of the Federal Holding Corporation, he’s also a director of nine other big outfits. He has a house on Sixty-seventh Street, one at Rhinebeck, and one at Palm Beach. He’s fifty-six years old. He has one married son and two married daughters. I would have to call the bank to learn the size of his stack, and we don’t want to advertise that you have any curiosity about him, but it -“

“I said bring him.”

“I heard you. I am explaining that it wouldn’t be advisable to tell the receptionist at his office, and the underling she would pass me to, that a private detective named Nero Wolfe wants to consult him about a matter that is too confidential for any ears but his. Phoning would be even worse. Therefore I must arrange something, and Julie Jaquette will have to be postponed.”

He grunted. “Any word from Saul?”

“He phoned at nine o’clock. Fred was with him and they were proceeding. He’ll call around one.”

“Pfui. A prodigy on a treadmill. Take him off. Give him Miss Jaquette. He will get names from her, and Fred will help with them.” He reached for the mail. “Your notebook. This letter from that ass in Paris will have to be answered.”