Frederick M. Cutler, M.D., with an office on East 65th and a residence on Park Avenue.
It was ten blocks away, so I went for the car and drove it. parked on the avenue a polite distance from the canopy with the number on it, and went
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in. The lobby was all it should have been in that locality, and the night man took exactly the right attitude toward a complete stranger. On my way I had decided what would be exactly the right attitude for me.
“Dr. Frederick M. Cutler,” I said. “Please phone up.”
“Name?”
“Tell him a private detective named Goodwin has an important question to ask him about the patient he was visiting forty minutes ago.”
I thought that would do. If that got me to him my hunch would already have an attractive fuzz on its bare pink skin. So when, after finishing at the phone, he crossed to the elevator with me and told his colleague I was to be conveyed to i2C, my heart had accelerated a good ten per cent.
At i2C I was admitted by the man I had seen leaving the Whitten house with his black case. Here, with a better view of him, I could note such details as the gray in his hair, his impatient gray-blue eyes, and the sag at the comers of his wide full mouth. Also I could see, through an arch, men and women at a couple of card tables in the large room beyond.
“Come this way, please,” my victim said gruffly, and I followed him down a hall and through a door. This was a small room, its walls solid with books, and a couch, a desk, and three chairs, leaving no space at all. He closed the door, confronted me, and was even gruffer.
“What do you want?”
The poor guy had already given me at least half of what I wanted, but of course he would have had to be very nifty on the draw not to.
“My name,” I said, “is Archie Goodwin, and I work for Nero Wolfe.”
“So that’s who you are. What do you want?”
“I was sent to see Mrs. Floyd Whitten, and while I was parking my car in front I saw you leaving her house. Naturally I recognized you, since you are pretty well known.” I thought he might as well have a lump of sugar. “I went in and had a little talk with Mrs. Whitten up in her bedroom. Her son said, and she said, that the trouble was her heart. But then how come? There is a widespread opinion that she is in splendid health and always has been. At her age she plays tennis. She walks up two flights to her bedroom. People who know her admire her healthy complexion. But when I saw her, there in bed, she was as pale as a corpse, in fact she was pale like a corpse, and she kept taking long sighing breaths. I’m not a doctor, but I happen to know that those two symptoms—that kind of pallor and that kind of breathing—go with a considerable loss of blood, say over a pint. She didn’t have a cardiac hemorrhage, did she?”
Cutler’s jaw was working. “The condition of my patient is none of your business. But Mrs. Whitten has had an extremely severe shock.”
“Yeah, I know she has. But the business I’m in, I have seen quite a few people under the shock of the sudden death of someone they loved, and
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I’ve seen a slew of reactions, and this one is brand new. The pallor possibly, but combined with those long frequent sighs?” I shook my head. “I will not settle for that. Besides, why did you let me come up after the kind of message I sent, if it’s just shock? Why did you let me in and herd me back here so private? At this point I think you ought to either toss me out or invite me to sit down.”
He did neither. He glared.
“Lookit,” I said, perfectly friendly. “Do some supposing. Suppose you were called there and found her with a wound and a lot of blood gone. You did what was needed, and when she asked you to keep it quiet you decided to humor her and ignore your legal obligation to make a report to the authorities in such cases. Ordinarily that would be nothing for a special broadcast; doctors do it every day. But this is far from ordinary. Her husband was murdered, stabbed to death. A man named Pompa has been charged with it, but he’s not convicted yet. Suppose one of the five people hid in the dining room killed Whitten? They could have, easily, while Pompa and Mrs. Whitten were in the living room—a whole half-hour. Those five people are in Mrs. Whitten’s house with her now, and two of them live there. Suppose the motive for killing Whitten is good for her too, and one of them tried it, and maybe tonight or tomorrow makes another try and this time it works? How would you feel about damming up on the first try? How would others feel when it came out, as it would?”
“You’re crazy,” Cutler growled. “They’re her sons and daughters!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I growled back at him. “And you a doctor who sees inside people? The parents who have been killed by sons and daughters would fill a hundred cemeteries. I’m not crazy, but I’m good and scared. I guess I scare easier than you. I say that woman has lost blood, and you’re not denying it, so one of two things has to happen. Either you give me the lowdown confidentially, and it will have to sound right, or I suggest to the cops that they send a doctor to have a look at her. Then if my supposes all come true I won’t have to feel that I helped to kill her. How you will feel is your affair.”
“The police have no right to invade a citizen’s privacy in that manner.”
“You’d be surprised. In a house where a murder was committed, and she was there and so were they?”
“Your suppositions are contrary to the facts.”
“Fine. That’s what I’m after, the facts. Let me have a look at them. If they appeal to us, Mr. Wolfe and I can ignore obligations as easy as you.”
He sat down, rested his elbows on the arms of the chair with his hands dangling, and thoroughly inspected a comer of a rug. I inspected him. He stood up again, said, “I’ll be back shortly,” and started for the door.
“Hold it,” I snapped. “This is your place and I can’t keep you from going
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to another room to phone, but if you do, any facts you furnish will need a lot of checldng. It all comes down to which you like better, giving it to me straight or having a police doctor go over your patient.”
“I ought to kick you the hell out of here,” he said grimly.
I shook my head. “Not now. If you had taken that attitude when that message was phoned up to you I would have had to think again, but now it’s too late.” I gestured at the desk. “Use that phone, if all you want is to tell Mrs. Whitten that a skunk named Goodwin has got you by the tail and you’ve got to break your promise to keep it quiet.” I took a step and held his eye with mine. “You see, brother, when I said I was scared I meant it. Sons and daughters phooey. If Pompa is innocent, and he is, there’s a murderer in that house, and an animal that has killed can kill again, and often does. What is going on there right now? I’d like to know, and I’m getting tired of talking to you. And what’s more, something’s biting you too or you wouldn’t have let me up here.”
Cutler went and sat down again, and I sat on the edge of the couch, facing him. I waited.
“It couldn’t be,” he declared.
“What couldn’t be?”
“Something biting me.”
“Something bit Mrs. Whitten. Or was it a bite or a bullet or what?”
“It was a cut.” His voice was weary and precise, not gruff at all. “Her son Jerome phoned me at a quarter to ten, and I went at once. She was upstairs on the bed and things were bloody. They had towels against her, pressing the wound together. There was a cut on her left side, five inches long and deep enough to expose the eighth rib, and a shallow cut on her left arm above the elbow, two inches long. The cuts had been made with a sharp blade. Twelve sutures were required in the side wound, and four in the arm. The loss of blood had been substantial, but not serious enough to call for more than iron and liver, which I prescribed. That was all. I left.”