Something over two hundred units of personnel of the stock department were conversed with, anywhere from one to five times. Rosa Bendini and her husband, Gwynne Ferns, Sumner Hoff, Hester Livsey, and Ben Frenkel were among the most popular but were by no means the only ones. The assumption was that the murderer of Naylor had also killed Waldo Moore, but it was not allowed to exclude other possibilities, and since at least half of the people on the thirty-fourth floor might conceivably have felt murderous about either one or the other, there was plenty of territory to move around in. It would have been a good training school, Purley told me, for any rookie wanting to learn how to trace movements and check alibis, there were so many different kinds.
That operation was not confined to the thirty-fourth floor. Up on the thirty-sixth, on the executive and directorial level, the approach was of course somewhat different, since vice-presidents and directors are more sensitive and bleed easier than typists or heads of sections, but the job was actually just as thorough, especially when the days and nights stretched into a week without even one measly little lead. The police elite who worked on it found the normal tangle of jealousies and rivalries, and inclinations to trip and shove, but it all added up to nothing really helpful, including the movement-tracing and alibi-checking. The most promising angle, on the face of it, was Kerr Naylor’s attempt to have Jasper Pine booted out and himself made president, but that too produced no bacon because, first, Naylor had been after the president’s job for years and was getting nowhere, and second, Pine had been in bed asleep the night Naylor was killed, as Wolfe and Cramer and I had learned from Cecily.
Not satisfied with all the wonderful raw material at Naylor-Kerr, the cops had tried other places too. They had broadened out to include everybody either Moore or Naylor had been known to associate with, getting the same amount of nothing that they got on William Street. On Wolfe’s hint that there might be something phony about Sumner Hoff’s account of his movements from six to eight o’clock, they had questioned both Hoff and Hester several times, and had also tried other lines of inquiry, with no result. By Saturday afternoon, eight days after Naylor’s death, they had got so desperate that Lieutenant Rowcliff himself invited me to go along for their third examination of Naylor’s papers and effects, but I found them just as uninteresting as the cops had, except for a document of forty-six handwritten pages in which Naylor had set down his program for the firm of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., if and when he became president. His list of executives and directors that he intended to get rid of might have been helpful if the list hadn’t been so damn long.
Meanwhile all Wolfe was doing was getting upset. True, he was paying five operatives besides me—Panzer, Gore, Durkin, Keems, and Gather—but that wasn’t costing him anything since it would all go on the client’s bill. And what do you suppose the last four were doing? It might be supposed, naturally, that they were developing some subtle and intricate plan which Wolfe had cooked up with his celebrated finesse and imagination. Haha. They were tailing Hester and Sumner, which was exactly what they would have been doing if Naylor-Kerr, wanting to hire an investigator, had picked an agency at random from the Red Book. That was how far Wolfe’s genius had got him on this case. As for Saul Panzer, I had not heard his instructions, but I knew he had the photograph which Hester Livsey had sent us at Wolfe’s request, and I suspected he was going around town asking people to guess who it was.
The reports covering Hester’s and Sumner’s movements from Gore, Durkin, Keems, and Gather weren’t even worth filing. But our four men were having fun, because the subjects were also being tailed by the cops and that made it more sociable.
I am not being snooty. I can’t afford it, because during that long dry spell I was being as futile as everybody else. I performed occasional and miscellaneous errands which aren’t worth telling about, but most of the time I was at William Street, in the stock department, trying to kid somebody. The only meal I ate at home was breakfast because I worked overtime. Monday evening I took Rosa to dine and dance. Tuesday I took Gwynne Ferris. Wednesday I made a try for Hester.
First she said she would go and then a couple of hours later reneged, stating that she had tried to cancel another engagement and couldn’t. My guess was that Sumner Hoff was handling things and that if I tried for the next evening or the next I would only get humiliated and perhaps a start on an inferiority complex, so I passed it up and made a stab at a possible fresh source of gossip which weighed around a hundred and fifty and went by the name of Elise Grimes. She proved to be unprofitable no matter what I was after, and Thursday I repeated with Rosa and Friday with Gwynne. I won’t go so far as to say the time and effort were wasted, but I had to be stern with myself to persuade me that it was entirely proper, nothing but routine really, to put it on the client’s expense account.
Wolfe and I, during that week, had three hot arguments about Hester Livsey and Sumner Hoff. I lost the first one, when I took the stand that we should let the cops have a try at them. Wolfe was dead against it. He said, first, that Cramer would be sore and suspicious because we had held it back so long; second, that Cramer wouldn’t do a real job on them because he wouldn’t be sure we weren’t trying to put something over and Saul was lying; and third, that even if he took Saul for gospel, it would be two against one and Hester and Hoff would probably hold fast. I hated to agree with him but had to.
The other two arguments ended in a tie. I insisted that Hester and Hoff should be got to the office one at a time, offering to do the getting myself no matter how they felt about it, and Wolfe should give them the works. He maintained it was hopeless. He would have nothing to go on, he said, but one little fact regarding which they had agreed to lie, and they knew we knew they were lying.
It was stalemate, and he would have nowhere to start from. I said it was the only crack we had found anywhere and he ought to try to get a wedge in it anyhow. He flatly refused. I thought at the time he was just being contrary, but it may be that he was already considering the experiment that he finally decided to try on Sunday evening and didn’t want to run any risk of spoiling it.
At least it wasn’t laziness. He was really working. With a minimum of pestering from me he agreed that the executives and directors required some attention, and even took my advice where to begin, so I had the satisfaction, Thursday morning, of putting the bee on Emmet Ferguson. At first he was going to sneer me right off the phone, but a few well-chosen dirty insinuations put him where he belonged, and at two o’clock he came tearing into Wolfe’s office with his ten-dollar Sulka tie off center, full of words and ready for war. Wolfe spent two hours on him, and when he finally tore out again two things were perfectly plain: one, Ferguson would always vote against hiring Wolfe or me by anyone for anything, at any time, and two, if Wolfe and I should run short on morals and resort to a frame for the murders, we would heartily agree on who to pick for the victim.
I would say that probably nobody engaged with the investigation of Naylor’s death got a single thing out of that whole week, except me. Not only were there those opportunities to study women, which any detective under eighty should be glad to have, at the client’s expense, but also I got season tickets for both the Giants and the Yankees. And not by mail or messenger; Cecily brought them herself. When I got home Thursday after midnight I found Wolfe still up, reading apparently only one book, at his desk in the office.
He grunted at me. “Where have you been?” “I told you where I was going. With Rosa. At one time, months ago it seems, I thought she thought her husband killed Moore, but I’m beginning to think she did it herself. She has a great deal of vitality.” He shuddered. “The plant records are getting badly behind and Theodore needs them.” “They sure are,” I agreed. “I can’t help it if this case is so tough that I have to work days and nights both.” I yawned. “You got me that job down there. You told me to use my organs as the occasion suggests and my capacities permit.” I yawned. “I guess I’ll go to bed.” “No. Mrs. Pine is coming. She telephoned that she wants to give you your baseball tickets and I told her you would be home shortly.” “My God. Shouldn’t you—let us be alone?” “No. I want to see her. Anyhow, that’s what she really wants. Why the devil should she want to give you baseball tickets?” That, it seemed to me, called for an argument, and I sat down to give it my attention, but before I got a word out I had to get up again because the doorbell rang. I went down the hall, glanced through the one-way panel, opened the door, and invited her in.