According to the information she was a housewife, but if so her house was nearly out of wife. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten for a week and hadn’t slept for a month. Properly fed and rested for a good long stretch, filled in from her hundred pounds to around a hundred and twenty, she might have been a pleasant sight and a very satisfactory wife for a man who was sold on the wife idea, but it took some imagination to realize it. The only thing was her eyes. They were dark, set in deep, and there was fire back of them.
“I ought to tell you,” she said in a low even voice, “that I didn’t want to come here, but Mr. O’Garro said it was absolutely necessary. I have decided I shouldn’t say anything to anybody. But if you have something to tell me —go ahead.”
Wolfe was glowering at her, and I would have liked to tell her that it meant nothing personal, it was only that the sight of a hungry human was painful to him, and the sight of one who must have been hungry for months was intolerable. He spoke. “You understand, Mrs. Wheelock, that I am acting for the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, which is handling the contest for Heery Products, Incorporated.”
“Yes, Mr. O’Garro told me.”
“I do have a little to tell you, but not much. For one item, I have had a talk with one of the contestants, Miss Gertrude Frazee. You may know that she is the founder and president of an organization called the Women’s Nature League. She says that some three hundred of its members have helped her in the contest, which is not an infraction of the rules. She does not say that she has telephoned to them the verses that were distributed last evening, and that they are now working on them, but it wouldn’t be fanciful to assume that she has and they are. Have you any comment?”
She was staring at him, her mouth working.
“Three hundred,” she said.
Wolfe nodded.
“That’s cheating. That’s—she can’t do that. You can’t let her get away with it.”
“We may be helpless. If she has violated no rule and nothing that was agreed upon last evening, what then? This is one aspect of the grotesque situation created by the murder of Louis Dahlmann.”
“I’ll see the others.” The fire behind her eyes was showing through. “We won’t permit it. We’ll refuse to go ahead with those verses. We’ll insist on new ones when we’re allowed to go home.”
“That would suit Miss Frazee perfectly. She would send in her answers before the agreed deadline and demand the first prize, and if she didn’t get it she could sue and probably collect. You’ll have to do better than that if you want to head her off-emulate her, perhaps. Of course you’ve had help too-your husband, your friends; get them started.”
“I’ve had no help.”
She started to tremble, first her hands and then her shoulders, and I thought we were in for it, but she pulled one that I had never expected to see. Women of all ages and shapes and sizes have started to have a fit hi that office. Some I have caught in time with a good shot of brandy, some I have stopped with a smack or other physical contact, and some I have had to ride out—with Wolfe gone because he can’t stand it. I left my chair and started for her, but she stuck her tongue out at me. So I thought, but that wasn’t it. She was only getting the tongue between her teeth and clamping down on it. Its end bulged and curled up and was purple, but she only clamped harder. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. She stopped trembling, opened her fists and closed them and opened them again, and got her shoulders set, rigid. Then she retrieved her tongue. I had a notion to give her a pat before returning to my chair, in recognition of an outstanding performance, but decided that a woman who could stand off a fit like that in ten seconds flat probably didn’t care for pats.
“I beg your pardon,” she said.
“Brandy,” Wolfe told me.
“No,” she said, “I’m all right. I couldn’t drink brandy. I guess what did it was what you said about help. I haven’t had any. The first few weeks weren’t bad, but after that they got harder, and later, when they got really hard . . . I don’t know how I did it. I said I wasn’t going to say anything, but after what you said about Miss Frazee having three hundred women helping her . . . well. I’m thirty-two years old, and I have two children, and my husband is a bookkeeper and makes fifty dollars a week. I was a schoolteacher before I married. I had been going along for years, just taking it, and I saw this contest and decided to win it. I’m going to have a nice home and a car-two cars, one for my husband and one for me—and I’m going to have some clothes, and I’m going to send my husband to school and make him a CPA if he has it in him. That day I saw the contest, I took charge that day. You know what I mean.”
“Indeed I do,” Wdlfe muttered.
“So when they got hard there was no one I could ask for help, and anyway, if I had got help I would have had to share the prize. I didn’t do much eating or sleeping the last seven weeks of the main contest, but the worst was when they sent us five to do in a week to break the tie. I didn’t go to bed that week, and I was afraid I had one of them wrong, and I didn’t get them mailed until just before midnight—I went to the post office and made them let me see them stamp the envelope. After all that, do you think I’m going to let somebody get it by cheating? With three hundred women working at it while we’re not allowed to go home?”
After seeing her handle the fit I didn’t think she was going to let somebody get anything she had made up her mind to have, with or without cheating.
“It is manifestly unfair,” Wolfe conceded, “but I doubt if it can be called cheating, at least in the legal sense. And as for cheating, it’s conceivable that someone else had a bolder idea than Miss Frazee and acted upon it. By killing Mr. Dahlmann in order to get the answers.”
“I’m not going to say anything about that,” she declared. “I’ve decided not to.”
“The police have talked with you, of course.”
“Yes. They certainly have. For hours.”
“And they asked you what you thought last evening when Mr. Dahlmann displayed a paper and said it contained the answers. What did you tell them?”
“I’m not going to talk about it.”
“Did you tell the police that? That you wouldn’t talk about it?”
“No. I hadn’t decided then. I decided later.”
“After consultation with someone?”
She shook her head. “With whom would I consult?”
“I don’t know. A lawyer. A phone call to your husband.”
“I haven’t got a lawyer. I wouldn’t call my husband—I know what he’d say. He thinks I’m crazy. I couldn’t pay a lawyer anyway because I haven’t got any money. They paid for the trip here, and the hotel, but nothing for incidentals. I was late for my appointment with you because I got on the wrong bus. I haven’t consulted anybody. I made the decision myself.”
“So you told the police what you thought when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not tell me? I assure you, madam, that I have only one interest in the matter, on behalf of my clients, to make sure that the prizes are fairly and honestly awarded. You see, of course, that that will be extremely difficult if in fact one of the contestants took that paper from Mr. Dahlmann and it contains the answers. You see that.”
“Yes.”
“However, it is the belief of my clents—and their contention—that the paper did not contain the answers, that Mr. Dahlmann was only jesting; and that therefore the secrecy of the answers is still intact. Do you challenge that contention?”
“No.”
“You accept it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must have told the police that when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper you regarded it as a joke, and the sequel is plain: it would be absurd to suspect you of going to his apartment and killing him to get it. So it is reasonable to suppose that you are not suspected. —Archie, your phone call from the corner. Did you see anyone?”
“Yes, sir. Art Whipple. He was here on the Heller case.”
“Tell Mrs. Wheelock about it.”