She would like very much to help.” “No,” Wolfe said positively.
“Wait a minute,” Cramer began, but I ignored him and told the phone, “Mr. Wolfe thanks you for your offer, Mrs. Pine, but he will call your husband tomorrow.” “Then just tell me what it is, Archie, and I can discuss it with him before Mr.
Wolfe calls.” It took me a good three minutes to get it concluded without being impolite.
A childish wrangle started. Cramer adopted the position that I should have persuaded her to wake Pine up, and Wolfe, who hates having his sleep interrupted even more than I do, violently disagreed. They kept at it as if it had been one of the world’s major problems, like what to do with the Ruhr. Neither of them budged an inch, so they ended where they began, stalemated.
“Very well,” Cramer said finally, still belligerent. “So I get nothing for losing two hours of my own sleep and coming clear over here to ask you a favor.”
“Nonsense.” Wolfe was belligerent too. “You haven’t asked a favor. You have called Mr. Goodwin a liar and you have made preposterous demands. Besides, this is on your way home from your office.” That was the intellectual level they had descended to. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Cramer had produced a map of the city, to prove that Wolfe’s house was not on a direct line between his office and his home, but he skipped that and concentrated on the other point—whether he had asked a favor or not. He maintained that he had, and that if it had sounded like a demand that was only on account of his mannerisms, with which we were well acquainted and therefore had no right to misinterpret. At length, by that roundabout route, he got back to his main point: would we or would we not break off relations with Naylor-Kerr, Inc.? Apparently Deputy Commissioner O’Hara had really built a fire under him.
“It isn’t as urgent as all that, is it?” Wolfe asked in his tone of fake concern, which has maddened older men than me, or even than Cramer. “For a long time Mr. Kerr Naylor—” The phone rang. I gave it a glance of distaste before reaching for it, thinking it was certainly Mrs. Pine, with nothing special to do for another two hours till bedtime, calling to ask about my face. But no. A gruff male woice asked to speak to Inspector Cramer and I moved out of my chair to let Cramer take the call at my desk.
It was a one-sided conversation, with Cramer contributing only a few grunts and, at the end, three or four questions. He told someone he would be there in five minutes, hung up, and swiveled to us.
“Kerr Naylor has been found dead on Thirty-ninth Street near Eleventh Avenue.
Four tulocks from here. Apparently run over by a car, with his head smashed.” Cramer was on his feet. “They got his name from papers in his pocket.” He growled at me, “Want to come and identify him?” “Indeed,” Wolfe muttered. “Remarkable coincidence. Mr. Moore died there too. It must be a dangerous street.” “And now,” I complained, “I’ll never be able to make him take back calling me a liar. Sure, glad to help. Come along, Inspector.”
CHAPTER Twenty
Since so far as I knew I was still on the Naylor-Kerr payroll, it was a good thing they didn’t work Saturdays, because Saturday morning I didn’t get out of bed until noon was in plain sight. At that I had been there something short of six hours, having got home just as the sun was taking its first slanting look at Thirty-fifth Street.
Coincidence was right. On Thirty-ninth Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, not thirty feet from the spot where the body of Waldo Wilmot Moore had been found nearly four months before, a car had run over Kerr Naylor, flattening his head and breaking his bones. I had appreciated, better than I had when he had told me about it, the difficulties Kerr Naylor had encountered when he had gone to the morgue to identify the remains of Waldo Moore, but there had been no doubt about it. It was unquestionably Naylor, when you had made the mental adjustment required by the transformation of a sphere into a disk.
To go on with the coincidence, the body, which had been discovered by a taxi driver at twelve-forty A.M., had been there unnoticed for some time, anyway over half an hour, if the guess of the Medical Examiner on the time of death was any good. Not only that—and this was really stretching it too far—the car that had run over him had been found parked on Ninety-fifth Street just west of Broadway, in front of a branch laundry, in the identical spot where the car that had finished Moore had been found. On that one I had to hand it to Inspector Cramer.
One of his first barks on arriving at the scene had been at a squad dick, telling him to beat it to Ninety-fifth Street and go over the cars parked in that block. Showing that an inspector knows a coincidence when he sees one.
Already, before I had left to go home for a nap, the owner of the car had been brought in from Bedford Hills and thoroughly processed. The processing was mostly unnecessary, since it was easily established that he had reported to the police at eleven-eighteen that his car had been stolen from where he had parked it on Forty-eighth Street, having driven to town to go to the theater; and having, as lots of boobs do every day, forgotten to lock the car or even take the key.
It had taken two laboratory men, working with spotlights on the tires of the car where it stood on Ninety-fifth Street, to get the proof that it was the one that had rolled over Naylor, and that was one more detail of the coincidence.
Part of the time I had been a kibitzer, but had been made to feel welcome throughout because Inspector Cramer wanted me handy to answer some more questions when he got a chance to work them in, between other chores. During all the hours he made no reference to Wolfe’s objectionable behavior, and mine, in trying to stir up a murder stink when there had been no murder, and I, knowing he was busy and it would aggravate him, brought it up only eight or nine times.
Even then he didn’t have me bounced because he wanted me around. The first session with him I stalled a little on the ground that it would be outrageous for me to betray the confidence of a client, but when he got to the point of a certain tone I gave him everything that I knew he would soon be getting elsewhere anyway. I told him all, or nearly all, about the folks I had been meeting down at Naylor-Kerr, including, of course, such details as the impression Ben Frenkel had been carrying around since December. When I had tried to loosen Gwynne Ferris up by threatening to tell the cops all and let them take a crack at her I hadn’t dreamed I would actually be doing so within ten hours.
Cramer shifted headquarters three times, taking me along. For half an hour or so he worked outdoors there on Thirty-ninth Street and then moved inside, to the 18th Precinct Station House on Fifty-fourth Street. Around three o’clock he moved again, to his own hangout, the office of the squad on Twentieth Street, and an hour later made another transfer, this time to the office of Deputy Commissioner O’Hara at Centre Street. O’Hara himself was there and things had really started to hum. I was right in the middle of it and was even given the pleasure of an interview with the Deputy! Commissioner himself. From the way he started in on me it was a fair inference that he not only regarded me as a damn liar but also had inside dope to the effect that I had done it all myself, and that when I had got home and joined Wolfe and Cramer in the office at 11:30 I had just come, not from a movie, but from parking the murder car on Ninety-fifth Street. Since I had already given Cramer all the information I had that could help any, I thought I might as well let O’Hara keep his illusions and fed him a peck or more of miscellaneous lies such as I didn’t know how to drive a car and in strict confidence I had not been at a movie, but in a hotel room with the wife of a prominent politician whom I would rather die than name. Eventually O’Hara caught on and there was quite a scene.
Kerr Naylor’s sister had of course been notified, not on the phone, but by dispatching Lieutenant Rowcliff to her house on Sixty-seventh Street. When Rowcliff returned—we were then at the 18th Precinct Station House—Jasper Pine was with him, having had his sleep broken into after all. Pine had been taken by Rowcliff, on their way, to identify the body, and since I knew from having done it myself how jolly that was, I didn’t blame him for looking a little pale. He didn’t have the appearance of a man overcome by grief, but neither did he look like a top executive with everything under control. Cramer, having learned that both he and his wife disclaimed any knowledge of Kerr Naylor’s whereabouts Friday evening and had no idea of what he might have been doing on Thirty-ninth Street, spent only a short time on him and then gave him back to Rowcliff for more talk. I spoke just sixteen words to him. As he started away with Rowcliff he confronted me and demanded, “Did Naylor tell you what you reported to me?