It was ten minutes past four when, having found a space on 81st Street I could squeeze the Heron into, I entered the vestibule of the four-story stone mansion at 994 Fifth Avenue and pushed the button. The door was opened by a square-faced woman in uniform with a smudge on her cheek. I suppose the Tedder who had had the house built, Harold F.’s father, wouldn’t have dreamed of letting that door be opened by a female, so it was just as well he wasn’t around. She had a surprise for me, though she didn’t know it. When I gave my name and said I wanted to see Mrs Vail, she said Mrs Vail was expecting me, and made room for me to enter. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find once again that Wolfe thought he knew me as well as I thought I knew him, but I was. What had happened, of course, was that Mrs Vail had phoned to ask if I had identified the body, and he had told her that I would stop at her house on the way back from White Plains, though that hadn’t been mentioned by him or me. That was how well he thought he knew me. Some day he’ll overdo it. As I have said, I hadn’t known I was going to stop at her house until I found myself on the Thruway.
As the female door-opener took my coat, a tenor voice came from above, “Who is it, Elga?” and Elga answered it, “It’s Mr Goodwin, Mr Tedder,” and the tenor called, “Come on up, Mr Goodwin.” I went and mounted the marble stairs, white, wide, and winding, and at the top there was Noel Tedder. I’ve mentioned that I had seen him a few times, but I had never met him. From hearsay he was a twenty-three-year-old brat who had had a try at three colleges but couldn’t make it, who had been forced by his mother to stop climbing mountains because he had fallen off of one, and who had once landed a helicopter on second base at Yankee Stadium in the fifth inning of a ball game; but from my personal knowledge he was merely a broad-shouldered six-footer who didn’t care how he dressed when he went to the theater or the Flamingo and who talked too loud after two drinks. The tenor voice was one of those mistakes that get made when the hands are being dealt.
He took me down a wide hall to an open door and motioned me in. I crossed the sill and stopped, thinking for a second I had crashed a party, but then I saw that only five of the people in the room were alive, the rest were bronze or stone, and I remembered a picture I had seen years ago of Harold F. Tedder’s library. This was it. It was a big room, high-ceilinged, but it looked a little crowded with a dozen life-sized statues standing around here and there. If he liked company he sure had it. Mrs Vail’s voice came, “Over here, Mr Goodwin,” and I moved. The five live ones were in a group, more or less, at the far end, where there was a fireplace but no fire. As I approached, Mrs Vail said, “Well?”
“It was Dinah Utley,” I said.
“What-how-”
I glanced around. “I’m not intruding?”
“It’s all right,” Jimmy Vail said. He was standing with his back to the fireplace. “They know about it. My wife’s daughter, Margot Tedder. Her brother, Ralph Purcell. Her attorney, Andrew Frost.”
“They know about Nero Wolfe,” Mrs Vail said. “My children and my brother were asking questions, and we thought we had better tell them. Then when this-Dinah-and we’ll be asked where we were last night… I decided my lawyer ought to know about it and about Nero Wolfe. It was Dinah?”
“Yes.”
“She was run over by a car?” From Andrew Frost, the lawyer. He looked a little like the man of bronze who was standing behind his chair, Abraham Lincoln, but he had no beard and his hair was gray; and on his feet probably he wasn’t quite as tall. Presumably he had learned how Dinah had died by phoning White Plains, or from a broadcast.
“She was run over by her car,” I said.
“Her own car?”
I faced Mrs Vail, who was sitting on a couch, slumped against cushions. “On behalf of Mr Wolfe,” I told her, “I owe you two pieces of information. One, I looked at the corpse and identified it as Dinah Utley. Two, I told the District Attorney that I saw her yesterday afternoon when she came to Mr Wolfe’s office in connection with a matter you had consulted him about. That’s all. I refused to tell him what the matter was or anything about it. That’s all I owe you, but if you want to know how and when and where Dinah died I’ll throw that in. Do you want it?”
“Yes. First when.”
“Between nine o’clock last evening and three o’clock this morning. That may be narrowed down later. It was murder, because her own car ran across her chest and was there, nosed into a roadside opening, when the body was found. There was a bruise on the side of her head; she was probably hit with something and knocked out before the car was run over her. Then the-”
I stopped because she had made a sound, call it a moan, and shut her eyes. “Do you have to be utterly brutal?” Margot Tedder asked. The daughter, a couple of years younger than her brother Noel, was at the other end of the couch. From hearsay, she was a pain in the neck who kept her chin up so she could look down her nose; from my personal knowledge, she was a nice slender specimen with real possibilities if she would round out a little and watch the corners of her mouth, and, seeing her walk or dance, you might have thought her hips were in a cast.
“I didn’t do it,” I told her. “I’m just telling it.”
“You haven’t said where,” Jimmy Vail said. “Where was it?”
Mrs Vail’s eyes had opened, and I preferred to tell her, since she was the client. “Iron Mine Road. That’s a narrow rocky lane off of Route One Twenty-three. Route One Twenty-three goes into Route Thirty-five seven miles east of Katonah, not far from the state line.”
Her eyes had widened. “My God,” she said, staring at me. “They killed her.” She turned to Andrew Frost. “The kidnapers. They killed her.” Back to me. “Then you were right, what Mr Wolfe said about suspecting her. That’s where-”
“Wait a minute, Althea,” Frost commanded her. “I must speak with you privately. This is dangerous business, extremely dangerous. You should have told me Monday when you got that note. As your counselor, I instruct you to say nothing more to anyone until you have talked with me. And I don’t- Where are you going?”
She had left the couch and was heading for the door. She said over her shoulder, “I’ll be back,” and kept going, on out. Jimmy moved. He went halfway to the door, stopped and stood, his back to us, and then came back to the fireplace. Ralph Purcell, Mrs Vail’s brother, said something to Frost and got no response. I had never seen Purcell and knew next to nothing of him, either hearsay or personal knowledge. Around fifty, take a couple of years either way, with not much hair left and a face as round as his sister’s, he had a habit I had noticed: when someone started to say something he looked at someone else. If he was after an effect he got it; it made you want to say something to him and see if you could keep his eye.
Noel Tedder, who was leaning against George Washington, asked me, “What’s this about suspecting her? Suspecting her of what?” The lawyer shook his head at him, and Margot said, “What’s the difference now? She’s dead.” Purcell was looking at me, and I was deciding what to say to him and try to hold his eye when Mrs Vail came in. She had an envelope in her hand. She came back to the couch, sat on the edge, and took papers from the envelope. Frost demanded, “What have you got there? Althea, I absolutely insist-”
“I don’t care what you insist,” she told him. “You’re a good lawyer, Andy, Harold thought so and so do I, and I trust your advice on things you know about, you know I do, but this is different. I told you about it because you could tell me about the legal part of it, but now I don’t need just legal advice, now that I know Dinah was killed there on Iron Mine Road. I think I need something more than legal advice, I think I need Nero Wolfe.” She turned to me. “Would he come here? He wouldn’t, would he?”