He looked at me. “Buffoon,” he stated.
I shook my head. “No, sir. I sit here not as a gag but to avoid misunderstanding. As a client, the closer to you the better. As an employee, nothing doing until my personal problem is solved. If you meant what you said down there, tell me how much you want for a retainer, and I’ll give you a check. If not, all I can do is bound out of your house like a man obsessed.”
“Confound it, I’m helpless! I’m committed!”
“Yes, sir. How about a retainer?”
“No!”
“Would you care to hear how I spent the day?”
“Care to? No. But how the devil can I escape it?”
I reported in full. Gradually, as he progressed to his third glass of beer and on through it, the wrinkles of his scowl smoothed out some. Apparently he was paying no attention to me, but I had long ago learned not to worry about that. It would all be available any time he needed it. When I finished he grunted.
“How many of those five people could you have here at eleven in the morning?”
“As it stands now? With no more bait?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t bet on one, but I’m ready to try. I might get something useful from Lon Cohen if I buy him a thick enough steak—and by the way, I ought to call him.”
“Do so. Invite him to dine with us.”
On the face of it that suggestion was gracious and generous, and maybe it was, but the situation was complicated. If we had been engaged on the case in the usual manner, and, after dope, I had taken Lon to Pierre’s for a feed, it would of course have gone on the expense account and we would have been reimbursed. But this was different. If I listed it as an expense Wolfe was stuck unless he billed me as client. If I didn’t list it I was stuck and there could be no deduction on an income-tax report, either Wolfe’s or mine, which wouldn’t do at all.
So I phoned Lon, and he came and ate kidney’s mountain style, and carameled dumplings, instead of a Pierre steak, which was convenient and economical but had its drawback—namely, that I usually dispose of six of those dumplings and this time was limited to four; and Wolfe had to be content with seven instead of ten. He took it like a man, filling the gap with an extra helping of salad and cheese.
Back in the office after dinner, I had to hand it to Lon, he was full of food as good as a man can hope for anywhere, and wine to go with it, but he was not blurry. My phoning him twice and the invitation to dine had him set either to take or to give, whichever was on the program, and as he relaxed in one of the yellow chairs, sipping B & B, his eyes darted from Wolfe to me and back again.
Wolfe’s chest billowed with a deep sigh. “I’m in a pickle, Mr Cohen,” he declared. “I am committed to investigate a murder and I have no entree. When Archie told you today that I was not interested in the death of Miss Eads it was the truth, but now I am, and I need a toehold. Who killed her?”
Lon shook his head. “I was intending to ask you. Of course you know it’s out that she was here yesterday, that she left here not long before she was killed, so everybody takes it for granted that you’re working on it. Since when have you needed an entree?”
Wolfe squinted at him. “Are you in my debt, Mr Cohen, or am I in yours?”
“I’ll call it square if you will.”
“Good. Then I assume I have credit. I’ll read your paper in the morning, and others too, but here we are now. Do you mind talking about it?”
Lon said he didn’t mind a bit and proceeded to prove it. He talked for nearly an hour, with some questions from Wolfe and a few from me, and when he finished we may have been better informed but had nothing you could call an entree.
Helmar, Brucker, Quest, Pitkin, and Miss Duday would not only own eighty per cent of the Softdown stock; they would also be in control of the distribution of another ten per cent of it to employees, with power to decide who got what. That made up the ninety per cent disposed of under the will of Priscilla’s father. The remaining ten per cent had been owned by an associate in the business, deceased, and now belonged to his daughter, a Mrs Sarah Jaffee, a widow. Mrs Jaffee had formerly been a close friend of Priscilla Eads. Her husband had been killed a year ago in Korea.
The favorite suspect with male journalists was Oliver Pitkin, for no convincing reason; the favorite with females was Viola Duday. No evidence had been disclosed that any of the five main beneficiaries was in financial difficulties or was excessively rancorous, greedy, or bloodthirsty; but since each of them would get an engraved certificate worth roughly a million and a half, the consensus was that such evidence was not required. As far as the press knew, none of them was eliminated by alibi or other circumstance. Of some sixty reporters, from all papers and wire services, working on the case, at least half were certain that Daphne O’Neil was deeply involved one way or another, and were determined to find out how.
The news that Priscilla had spent seven of her last hours on earth at Wolfe’s house had come through Perry Helmar, who had got it from an assistant DA. Helmar had told an AP City News man in the middle of the afternoon, and an hour later, refusing to see reporters, had issued a statement regarding his own visit to Wolfe and the “cruel deception” that had been practiced on him. The statement had been carried by the evening papers. It did not say, but clearly implied, that if Wolfe had not concealed from Helmar the presence of Priscilla in his house she would not have been killed. Lon’s paper, the Gazette, would give it a box on page three. When Lon mentioned that detail he paused and cocked his head at Wolfe, inviting comment, but got none.
Priscilla Eads’ life had been complicated by a series of phases she had gone through. After her father’s death when she was fifteen, her home had been with the Helmars, but she had spent most of the time away at school, where she had made a brilliant record, including two years at Smith. Then suddenly, a few months before her nineteenth birthday, she had quit in the middle of a semester, announced to friends that she intended to see the world, rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, hired a maid and cook and butler, and started giving parties. In a few months she had had enough of the Village, but Lon’s information on her next move was a little vague. The way a Gazette man had got it, her maid had decided she must go to New Orleans to see her sick mother, and Priscilla, glad of any excuse to get away from the Village, and particularly from her guardian, Perry Helmar, who was pestering her to return to college, bought plane tickets to New Orleans for herself and her maid, and off they went.
Probably in New Orleans, but anyhow somewhere around there, she had met Eric Hagh. On this Lon was even vaguer, but it was definite that she had met him, married him, and gone off with him to some part of South America where he had something to do with something. It was also definite that three months later she had suddenly appeared in New York, accompanied by the maid she had gone away with, but not by a husband; bought a house in the woods not far from Mount Kisco; and started in on men. For two years she had raised some miscellaneous hell with men, apparently with the idea that the higher you jacked up an expectation the more fun it was to watch it crash when you jerked it loose. In time that lost its appeal, and she moved to Reno, stayed the prescribed time, got her divorce, returned to New York, and joined the Salvation Army.
At that detail I had given Lon a stare, thinking that surely he had pulled it out of a hat. Priscilla Eads as I had known her, in the peach-colored dress and tailored jacket, was mighty hard to picture as a consecrated tambourine shaker. But obviously Lon was dealing it straight, with no fancy touches for effect.
Priscilla had actually stuck with the Salvation Army for nearly two years, in uniform, working seven days a week, giving up all her old friends and habits, and living modestly if not frugally. Then abruptly—she had always been abrupt—she had quit the Army, moved to a duplex apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street, and begun to take an active interest, for the first time, in the affairs of Softdown, Incorporated. That had aroused feelings in various quarters. It was known that there had been friction between her and her former guardian, Perry Helmar, still the trustee of the property soon to become hers. Specifically, it was known that some months ago she had fired Daphne O’Neil, told her to leave the premises and not come back, and had been overruled by the officers of the corporation, supported by Helmar, who was legally in control. There was no record of any threat or mortal attack.