“By God,” Cramer said, “you were lying after all.”
“Yes? Why?”
“Because that’s dumb and you’re not dumb. He goes in and finds a corpse, and he’s nervous. It makes people nervous to find a corpse. He wants to turn and run like hell, they all do, especially if there’s the slightest reason for them to be suspected, but he makes himself get the wallet from the corpse’s pocket. He may even intend to take the paper and put the wallet back and start looking for the paper, but he thinks of fingerprints. Maybe he can wipe the wallet off before he puts it back, but he might miss one. Even so, he might try, if he calmly considered all the consequences of taking the wallet, but he’s not calm and there’s no time and he has to get out of there. So he gets, with the wallet. Excuse me for taking up your valuable time with kindergarten stuff, but you asked for it.”
He stood up, looked at the cigar in his hand, threw it at my wastebasket, and missed. He glared at it and then at Wolfe. “If that’s the best you can do I’ll be going.” He turned.
“Manifestly,” Wolfe said, “you don’t believe Mr. Hansen and the others when they profess their conviction that Mr. Dahlmann’s display of the paper was only a hoax?'”
Cramer turned at the door long enough to growl, “Nuts. Do you?”
When I returned to the office after seeing him out Wolfe was still at his desk, pinching the lobe of his ear with a thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. I put my empty milk glass on one of the beer trays, took them to the kitchen, washed and wiped the glasses, disposed of the bottles, and put the trays away. Fritz goes to bed at eleven unless he has been asked not to. Back in the office, the ear massage was still under way. I spoke. “I can finish the typing tonight if there are other errands for the morning. Have I got a program?”
“No.”
“Oh well,” I said cheerfully, “there’s no rush. April twentieth is a week off. You can read twenty books in a week.”
He grunted. “Get Saul and ask him to breakfast with me in my room at eight o’clock. Give me two hundred dollars for him—no, make it three hundred—and lock the safe and go to bed. I want some quiet.”
I obeyed, of course, but I wondered. Could he be tossing a couple of C’s—no, three—of LBA money to the breeze just to make me think he had hatched something? Saul Panzer was the best man in the city of New York for any kind of a job, but what was it? Tailing five people, hardly. If tailing one, who and why? If not tailing, then what? For me, nothing we had heard or seen had pointed in anyone’s direction. For him, I didn’t believe it. He wanted company for breakfast, and not me. Okay.
I got Saul at his apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, signed him up for the morning, got the money from the cash drawer in the safe and locked the safe, gave Wolfe the dough, and asked him, “Then I don’t do the typing tonight?”
“No. Go to bed. I have work to do.”
I went. Up one flight I stopped on the landing, thinking it might help if I tiptoed back down and went in and caught him with his book up, but decided it would only make him so stubborn he’d read all night.
Chapter 11
My morning paper is usually the Times, with the Gazette for a side dish, but that Thursday I gave the Gazette a bigger play because it has a keener sense of the importance of homicide. Its by-line piece on the career and personality of the brilliant young advertising genius who had been shot in the back did not say that there were at least a hundred beautiful and glamorous females in the metropolitan area who might have had reason to erase him, but it gave that impression without naming names.
However, that was only a tactful little bone tossed to the sex hounds for them to gnaw on. The main story was the contest, and they did it proud, with their main source of information Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles. There was a picture of her on page three which made her unique combination of rare features more picturesque than in the flesh, and harder to believe. She had briefed the reporter thoroughly on the Women’s Nature League, told him all about the dinner meeting Tuesday evening, including Dahlmann’s display of the paper and what he said, and spoken at length of her rights as a contestant under the rules and the agreement.
Of the other contestants, Susan Tescher of Clock magazine had been inaccessible to journalists, presumably after consulting her three windbags. Harold Rollins had been reached but had refused any information or comment; he hadn’t even explained why winning half a million bucks would be a fatal blow to him. Mrs. Wheelock, who was living on pills, and Philip Younger, who had paroxysms to contend with, had apparently been almost as talkative as Miss Frazee. They were both indignant, bitter, and pugnacious, but on one point their minds had not met. Younger thought that the only fair way out of the mess was to split the prize money five ways, whereas Mrs. Wheelock did not. She was holding out for the big one, and said the five verses should be scrapped and five new ones substituted, under circumstances that would give each of them an equal opportunity.
Perhaps I should have confined my reading to the contest part, since we hadn’t been hired for the murder, but only Fritz was in the kitchen with me and he wouldn’t blab. There were a lot of facts that Cramer hadn’t furnished-that Dahlmann was wearing a dark blue suit; that he had taken a taxi from the Churchill to his apartment and arrived a little before 11:30; that the woman who found him when she came to get his breakfast was named Elga Johnson; that his apartment was two rooms and bath; that the bullet had hit a rib after passing through the heart; and many other details equally helpful. The name of the murderer wasn’t given.
Having got an early start, I was through with breakfast and the papers and was in the office at the typewriter when Saul Panzer came. Saul is not a natural for Mr. America. His nose is twice as big as he needs, he never looks as if he had just shaved, one shoulder is half an inch higher than the other and they both slope, and his coat sleeves are too short. But if and when I find myself up a tree with a circle of man-eating tigers crouching on the ground below, and a squad of beavers starting to gnaw at the trunk of the tree, the sight of Saul approaching would be absolutely beautiful. I have never seen him fazed.
He came at eight sharp and went right upstairs, and I went back to the typewriter. At five to nine he came back down but I didn’t hear him until he called to me from the door to the hall. “Want to come and bolt me out?”
I swiveled. “With pleasure. That’s what the bolt’s for, such as you.” I arose. “Have a good breakfast?”
“You know I did.”
I was with him. “Need any professional coaching?”
“I sure do.” He was at the rack getting his things. “I’ll start at the bottom and work down.”
“That’s the spirit.” I opened the door. “If you get your throat cut or something just give me a ring.”
“Glad to, Archie. You’d be the one all right.”
“Okay. Keep your gloves on.”
He went, and I shut the door and went back to work. There had been a day when I got a little peeved if Wolfe gave Saul a chore without telling me what it was, and also told him not to tell me, but that was long past. It didn’t peeve me any more; it merely bit me because I couldn’t guess it. I sat at my desk a good ten minutes trying to figure it, then realized that was about as useful as reading a novel in verse, and hit the typewriter.
My speed at typing notes of interviews depends on the circumstances. Once in a real pinch I did ten pages an hour for three hours, but my average is around six or seven, and I have been known to mosey along at four or five. That morning I stepped on it, to get as much done as possible before Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock, since he would certainly have some errands ready for me. I was interrupted by phone calls— one from Rudolph Hansen, wanting a progress report, one from Oliver Buff, wanting the same, one from Philip Younger, wanting me to arrange an appointment for him with the LBA crowd and getting sore when I stalled him, and one from Lon Cohen of the Gazette, wanting to know if I felt like giving him something hot on the Dahlmann murder. Being busy, I didn’t start an argument by saying we weren’t working on the murder; I just told him he’d have to stand in line, and didn’t bother to ask him how he knew we were in the play. Probably Miss Frazee. In spite of the interruptions, I had finished Wheelock and Younger and Tescher by eleven o’clock, and started on Rollins.