“Of course.”
“We are looking into it a little, and I would like very much to ask your wife if she can supply any information that might help. Naturally she wants the murderer of her sister caught and punished, but she wouldn’t want it to be Orrie Cather if he’s innocent. You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Of course not.” He was puckering his lips and frowning at me. He was about my height, narrow-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a long face that showed the cheekbones. He went on, “I wouldn’t want an innocent man punished for anything, certainly not for murder. But I doubt very much if my wife can give you any information that would help. She’s not – she’s taking it pretty hard.”
“Sure. Believe me, I don’t want to make it any harder for her.”
“Well – where’s your coat?”
“There.” I pointed to it, on the floor by the wall.
“Get it. There’s no sense in waiting out here.” With a key ring in his hand, he went to the door of 7D. When I came with my coat he was holding the door open and I entered. The foyer was about the size of a pool table. He hung my coat in the closet before he took his off, and as he was hanging his up the door opened and a woman entered. At the sight of me she gawked a second, then whirled to him.
“Barry! You let him in?”
From her tone I knew then and there that I had had a break, him coming first.
“Now, dear.” He put an arm across her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. “He only wants some information, if we have any. He thinks –”
“We have no information for anybody! You know that!”
I spoke up. “But you must have a preference, Mrs. Fleming. If an innocent man is convicted of murdering your sister, the trouble is that the guilty man goes free. Do you want that?”
She focused up at me. Up, because she wasn’t more than an inch over five feet. “It’s none of your business what I want,” she said, and meant it.
“No,” I said, “but it’s your business. I’m not a newshound trying to get a headline, I’m a private detective trying to dig up some facts. I already have some. I know why you won’t see reporters, why you have no information for anybody. Because your sister was a doxy, and you –”
“My sister was a what?”
“D,O,X,Y, doxy. I happen to like that better than concubine or paramour or mistress. I don’t –”
I stopped because I had to, to protect my face. When a woman flies at you to claw, what you do depends on the woman. If she has real tiger in her you may even have to plug her, but with Stella Fleming, with her short reach, all I had to do was stiff-arm her, with my palm flat on her mouth. Then the husband got her shoulders from behind and pulled her back and told me, “You’d better go.”
I was inclined to agree, but it was just as well that Wolfe couldn’t read my mind by short-wave because he thinks I understand women. She turned and drummed on his chest with her fists and squeaked, “I don’t want him to go,” and then calmly, no hurry, started to shed her coat. When he had it she told me, “Come on inside,” perfectly polite, and headed through an archway. When he had the closet door shut he motioned me on, and I moved.
She had turned on lights and gone to a couch and sat and was biting her lip. I hadn’t really seen her, too busy, and as I crossed to a nearby chair I noted that she resembled her sister not at all, with her brown hair and brown eyes and round filled-out face. As I approached she demanded, “Why did you say that?”
“To jar you.” I sat. “I had to. Either that or –”
“I mean why do you lie like that about my sister?”
I shook my head. “That line is wasted with me, Mrs. Fleming. We both know it’s not a lie, so skip it. It’s not important, not to me. I only said it to –”
“Did you know my sister?”
“No. I had never heard of her until yesterday.”
“Then how could you know …”
I gave her three seconds, but she let it hang. I flipped a hand. “It’s obvious. A showgirl leaves –”
“She was an actress.”
“Okay. An actress leaves the theater, takes a three-hundred-dollar apartment, has no job, eats well, dresses well, has a car, uses thirty-dollar perfume. Who wouldn’t know? Who doesn’t know? That’s not important, not now. What’s –”
“It is to me. It’s the most important thing in the world.”
“Now, dear,” Fleming said. He was beside her on the couch.
“Well,” I said, “if it’s that important to you, that’s what you want to talk about. Go ahead.”
“She was twenty-eight years old. I’m thirty-one. She was only twenty-five when she … stopped work. She was six and I was nine when our mother died, and she was twelve and I was fifteen when our father died. That’s why it’s so important.”
I nodded. “Certainly.”
“You’re not a newspaper reporter. William told me your name, but I don’t remember.”
“William’s the elevator man,” Fleming said.
To him: “Thank you.” To her: “My name is Archie Goodwin. I’m a private detective, I work for Nero Wolfe, and I came –”
“You’re a detective.”
“Yes.”
“Then you know about things. You said I wouldn’t want the man that killed my sister to go free, and no, I wouldn’t, but if he’s arrested and there’s a trial, no one is going to say about my sister what you said about her. If anyone said that at the trial it would be in the newspapers. If anyone is going to say that there mustn’t be any trial. Even if he goes free. So you didn’t know what I want.”
That made the second woman in one day who didn’t want a trial, though for a different reason. “I do now,” I told her, “and from your standpoint there’s no argument. I even agree with you, at least part way. You don’t want a trial even if they get the right man. What I don’t want is a trial of the wrong man, and that’s what is going to happen unless someone stops it. Of course you read the papers.”
“I read all of them.”
“Naturally. Then you know they are holding a man named Orrie Cather and that he has worked for Nero Wolfe. Had you ever heard or seen that name before? Orrie Cather?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Didn’t your sister ever mention him?”
“No. I’m sure she didn’t.”
“Mr. Wolfe and I know him very well. We do not believe he killed your sister. I don’t say we know all about him. He may have had, he may have, some – uh – connections that we don’t know about. I will even concede that he may have been the one who was paying the rent for your sister’s apartment, and her other – You’re shaking your head.”
“She didn’t shake her head,” Fleming said.
“Sorry, I thought you did. Anyway, whether he was paying the rent or not, we do not believe he killed her, and that’s why Mr. Wolfe sent me to see you. If they bring him to trial – you know what will happen. Everything they have found out about your sister will be on record. As you know, a jury is supposed to acquit a man if there’s a reasonable doubt. We want to establish a reasonable doubt for the police so it won’t get in a courtroom for a jury, and we thought you might help. You saw your sister fairly often, didn’t you?”
“That’s pretty clever,” Fleming said. “But I must remind you that for my wife a trial of the right man might be just as bad as a trial of the wrong man. I don’t agree with her, not at all, but Isabel was her sister.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not being clever. All we need is a reasonable doubt. For instance, what if we can show the police that there’s another man, or woman, who had a good motive? Or what if they learn that Isabel told someone – it could be your wife – that someone had threatened to kill her? If and if and if. For our purpose, Mr. Wolfe’s and mine, it doesn’t have to be strong enough to charge him and try him, just the doubt. But even if they nailed him, his trial might not be as bad, for your wife, as Orrie Cather’s trial is sure to be. We know something about the line they think they have on Orrie.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you that. We got it in confidence.”