the door to the hall so she couldn’t wander around and
hear things she wasn’t supposed to, so when she got
tired waiting the window was the only way out.”
“She climbed out a window?” Otis demanded.
“Yes, sir. It’s a mere conjecture, but it fits. The
window was wide open, and she’s not in the room, and
she’s not outside. I looked.”
“I can’t believe it. Miss Paige is a level-headed and
reliable—” He bit it off. “No. No! I no longer know who
is reliable.” He rested his elbow on the chair arm and
propped his head with his hand. “May I have a glass of
water?”
Wolfe suggested brandy, but he said he wanted wa-
ter, and I went to the kitchen and brought some. He got
a little metal box from a pocket, took out two pills, and
washed them down.
“Will they help?” Wolfe asked. “The pills?”
26 Rex Stout
“Yes. The pills are reliable.” He handed me the glass.
“Then we may proceed?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any notion why Miss Paige was impelled
to leave by a window?”
“No. It’s extraordinary. Damn it, Wolfe, I have no
notions of anything! Can’t you see I’m lost?”
“I can. Shall we put it off?”
“No!”
“Very well. My assumption that Miss Aaron was
killed by a member of your firm, call him X, rests on a
prior assumption, that when she spoke with Mr. Good-
win she was candid and her facts were accurate. Would
you challenge that assumption?”
Otis looked at me. “Tell me something. I know what
she said from your statement, and it sounded like her,
but how was she—her voice and manner? Did she seem
in any way . . . well, out of control? Unbalanced?”
“No, sir,” I told him. “She sat with her back straight
and her feet together, and she met my eyes all the
time.”
He nodded. “She would. She always did.” To Wolfe:
“At this time, here privately with you, I don’t challenge
your assumption.”
“Do you challenge the other one, that X killed her?”
“I neither challenge it nor accept it.”
“Pfui. You’re not an ostrich, Mr. Otis. Next: if Miss
Aaron’s facts were accurate, it must be supposed that X
was in a position to give Mrs. Sorell information that
would help her substantially in her action against her
husband, your client. That is true?”
“Of course.” Otis was going to add something, de-
cided not to, and then changed his mind again. “Again
here privately with you, it’s not merely her action at
law. It’s blackmail. Perhaps not technically, but that’s
what it amounts to. Her demands are exorbitant and
preposterous. It’s extortion.”
“And a member of your firm could give her weapons.
Which one or ones?”
Otis shook his head. “I won’t answer that.”
The Homicide Trinity 27
Wolfe’s brows went up. “Sir? If you pretend to help
at all that’s the very least you can do. If you’re rejecting
my proposal say so and I’ll get on without you. By noon
tomorrow—today—the police will have that elemen-
tary question answered. It may take me longer.”
“It certainly may,” Otis said. “You haven’t men-
tioned a third assumption you’re making. You are as-
suming that Goodwin was candid and accurate in
reporting what Miss Aaron said.”
“Bah.” Wolfe was disgusted. “You are gibbering. If
you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed for-
lorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties
later and wish to communicate with me I’ll be here.” He
pushed his chair back.
“No.” Otis extended a hand. “Good God, man, I’m
trapped! It’s not my faculties! I have my faculties.”
“Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a
position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?”
“They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain
respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and
we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of
course, my three partners. It could have only been one
of them, partly because none of our associates was in
our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss
Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She
wouldn’t have used that phrase, ‘member of the firm,’
loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted applica-
tion. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles
Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that’s incredible!”
“Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbe-
lieve Miss Aaron—or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin?
Here with me privately?”
“No.”
Wolfe turned a palm up. “Then let’s get at it. It is
equally incredible for all three of those men, or are
there preferences?”
During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen
times, and on some details—for instance, the respects
in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable—he clammed
28 Rex Stout
up absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my
notebook.
Frank Edey, fifty-five, married with two sons and a
daughter, wife living, got twenty-seven per cent of the
firm’s net income. (Otis’s share was forty per cent.) He
was a brilliant idea man but seldom went to court. He
had drafted the marriage agreement which had been
signed by Morton Sorell and Rita Ramsey when they
got yoked four years ago. Personal financial condition,
sound. Relations with wife and children, so-so. Interest
in other women, definitely yes, but fairly discreet. In-
terest in Mrs. Sorell casual so far as Otis knew.
Miles Heydecker, forty-seven, married and wife liv-
ing but no children, got twenty-two per cent. His fa-
ther, now dead, had been one of the original members
of the firm. His specialty was trial work and he handled
the firm’s most important cases in court. He had ap-
peared for Mrs. Sorell at her husband’s request two
years ago when she had been sued by a man who had
formerly been her agent. He was tight with money and
had a nice personal pile of it. Relations with his wife,
uncertain; on the surface, okay. Too interested in his
work and his hobbies, chess and behind-the-scene poli-
tics, to bother with women, including Mrs. Sorell.
Gregory Jett, thirty-six, single, had been made a firm
member and allotted eleven per cent of the income
because of his spectacular success in two big corpora-
tion cases. One of the corporations was controlled by
Morton Sorell, and for the past year or so Jett had been
a fairly frequent guest at the Sorell home on Fifth
Avenue but had not been noticeably attentive to his
hostess. His personal financial condition was one of the
details Otis balked on, but he allowed it to be inferred
that Jett was careless about the balance between in-
come and outgo and was in the red in his account with
the firm. Shortly after he had been made a member of
the firm, about two years ago, he had dropped a fat
chunk, Otis thought about forty thousand dollars, back-
ing a Broadway show that flopped. A friend of his,
female, had been in the cast. Whether he had had other
The Homicide Trinity 29
expenses connected with a female friend or friends Otis
either didn’t know or wasn’t telling. He did say that he
had gathered, mostly from remarks Bertha Aaron had
made, that in recent months Jett had shown more at-
tention to Ann Paige than their professional association
required.
But when Wolfe suggested the possibility that Ann
Paige had left through a window because she sus-
pected, or even knew, what was in the wind, and had
decided to take a hand, Otis wouldn’t buy it. He was
having all he could do to swallow the news that one of
his partners was a snake, and the idea that another
of his associates might have been in on it was too much.
He would tackle Ann Paige himself; she would no doubt
have an acceptable explanation.
On Mrs. Morton Sorell he didn’t balk at all. Part of his
information was known to everyone who read newspa-
pers and magazines: that as Rita Ramsey she had daz-
zled Broadway with her performance in Reach for the
Moon when she was barely out of her teens, that she
had followed with even greater triumphs in two other
plays, that she had spumed Hollywood, that she had
also spumed Morton Sorell for two years and then
abandoned her career to marry him. But Otis added
other information that had merely been hinted at in
gossip columns: that in a year the union had gone sour,
that it became apparent that Rita had married Sorell
only to get her lovely paws on a bale of dough, and that
she was by no means going to settle for the terms of the
marriage agreement. She wanted much more, more
than half, and she had carefully begun to collect evi-
dence of certain activities of Scroll’s, but he had got
wise and consulted his attorneys, Otis, Edey, Hey-
decker and Jett, and they had stymied her—or thought