Wolfe’s head was tilted back to squint up at her. “I decline your invitation, Miss Jackson,” he said, “but I wish you well. I have the impression that your opinion of our fellow beings and their qualities is somewhat similar to mine.” He got to his feet. He almost never stands for comers or goers, male or female. And he actually repeated it. “I wish you well, madam.”
“Big man,” she said. She turned. “You come, Archie. That Panzer’s a rat.”
Chapter 9
Forty-seven hours later, at nine o’clock Thursday evening, Wolfe put his coffee cup down and said, “Four days and nights of nothingness.” I put my cup down and said, “No argument.” Actually there could have been one. There had been plenty of nothingness in results, but not in efforts. Somewhere in the nine notebooks here on my table – I write these reports on my own machine up in my room, not in the office – are the names of four males and six females, supplied by Jaquette-Jackson when she came to look at the orchids Wednesday afternoon, who had been seen by Saul and Fred. For something to bite on, hopeless. Of course anything is possible. It was possible that one of the women had thought that Isabel had pinched her lipstick and had gone to get it and got mad and bopped her, or that one of the men hated Rudyard Kipling and couldn’t stand a woman who had him bound in leather, but you need something better than ten billion possibles to get your teeth into. Any little piece of straw will do, but you have to have something.
For instance, statistics. There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
I admit this is the second kind: out of every thousand murders committed by amateurs, eighty-three are a woman killing another woman because she has taken her husband, or part of him. Therefore, from the statistical point of view, on the list of names we had collected the only one with a worthy known motive was Mrs. Avery Ballou, and that automatically gave her top billing. The difficulty was the approach. If I went and asked her if she had known that her husband had for three years been reading Kipling’s poems to the woman who had been murdered last week, Ballou would never speak to us again, and we might need him for something. So after breakfast Wednesday morning I rang Lily Rowan and asked her if she had ever met Mrs. Avery Ballou, and she said no, and from the little she knew about her she didn’t particularly care to.
“Then I won’t insist,” I said. “But I need to find out if I want to meet her. This is strictly private. I don’t need a detailed résumé, just a sketch, especially what her main interests are. For instance, if she collects autographs of famous private detectives, that would be perfect.”
“She can’t be that sappy.”
I said she might do worse and it was a rush order, and an hour later she called me back. She had more than I needed, and I’ll omit most of it. Mrs. Ballou had been Minerva Chadwick of the steel and railroad Chadwicks. She had married Ballou in 1936. Their son and two daughters were married. Her friends called her Minna. She never gave big parties but liked to have a few friends in for dinner. She was an Episcopalian but seldom went to church. She didn’t like Paris much and she hated Florida. She liked horses and had four Arabians, but her special interest was Irish wolfhounds, and she had either twelve or fourteen…
I have wasted my space and your time, since obviously it was Irish wolfhounds. About all I knew about them was that they are big, so I called a man I know who knows dogs and got a few facts, and then rang the listed number of the Ballou house on 67th Street. When a voice like a butler said, “Mrs. Ballou’s residence,” I told him my name was Archibald Goodwin and I would like to make an appointment with Mrs. Ballou to ask her advice about an Irish wolfhound. He said she was not then available and he would give her the message, and I gave him my phone number. Toward noon a call came, a businesslike female voice who said she was Miss Corcoran, Mrs. Ballou’s secretary, and what kind of advice did I want about an Irish wolfhound. I told her I was thinking of buying one, and I didn’t know which of the commercial kennels had the best ones, and a friend had told me that Mrs. Ballou knew more about it than anyone else in the country; and she said if I came at five o’clock Mrs. Ballou would see me. That was okay, since Jackson-Jaquette was due at two-thirty to look at orchids.
You probably have no strong desire to spend another couple of hours with either Julie Jaquette or Miss Jackson, and I have already reported on the ten names I got from her, so I’ll skip it and give you the pleasure of meeting Minna Ballou. The setting and supporting cast were fully up to expectations: the butler who let me in, with keen, careful eyes that sized me up in two seconds; the mat that protected the first six feet of the rug in the reception hall, bigger than the 14-by-26 Keraghan in Wolfe’s office; the uniformed maid who turned her nose up as she took my hat and coat; the wide marble stairs; the elevator with red lacquered panels; the middle-aged gray-haired gray-eyed Miss Corcoran, who was there when I stepped out on the fourth floor; the room she took me to, with a desk and typewriter and cabinets to the left, and a couch and soft chairs and a coffee table to the right. Pictures of dogs and horses were spotted around, but my glance caught no picture of Avery Ballou. His wife was stretched out on the couch, on her back, with what I would call a faded red bathrobe reaching down nearly to her ankles. As we entered she turned her head and said, “I hoped you wouldn’t come. I’m tired.” She pointed to a chair near the foot of the couch. “Sit there.”
I obeyed the order and was facing her. She had thin lips and a thin nose, and a twist of her dyed brown hair straggled down her forehead. She was barefooted and her toes bulged. I smiled at her cordially.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demanded.
“If you’re not too tired,” I said, “I suppose Miss Corcoran told you what I said on the phone. Actually it’s a friend of mine who wants to get an Irish wolfhound. She has a place up in Westchester. I live in town, and I guess a city apartment is no place for an Irish wolfhound.”
“It certainly isn’t.”
“Somebody told her she should get one from Ireland.”
“Who told her that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whoever it was, he’s a fool. Commercial breeders in Ireland have very inferior stock. The best wolfhound breeder in the world is Florence Nagle in England, but she’s not commercial, and she’s very particular whom she sells to. All good breeders are. Of course I’m not commercial either, I sell only as a very special favor. I love wolfhounds and they love me. When I’m there, eight of them sleep in my bedroom.”
I smiled nicely. “Does your husband like that?”
“I doubt if he even knows it. He wouldn’t know a wolfhound from an ostrich. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Lily Rowan. Her place is near Katonah.”
“Why does she want a wolfhound?”
“Well, partly for protection. There are no close neighbors.”
“That reason’s not good enough. You have to love them. You have to like it when a tail knocks over a vase or a lamp. Does she know that a good male weighs up to a hundred and thirty pounds, and when he rears up he’s six feet six? Does she know that when he leaps at you because he loves you, you go down? Does she know that he has to run three miles a day and you have to tailgate him behind a station wagon? Tell her to get just a dog, a Great Dane or a Doberman.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s very smart, Mrs. Ballou.”
“I do. Why not?”
“Because you ought to realize that Miss Rowan is all set to love an Irish wolfhound. Look at the trouble she’s taking. She finds out about kennels, but that doesn’t satisfy her, and she hears that the person who knows most about it is you, and she gets me to try to see you, because she thinks a man would stand a better chance with you than another woman. I told her she could do it herself by seeing your husband, but she didn’t know if he was interested in wolfhounds. Apparently he isn’t.”