Didn’t he? He did. But she wouldn’t. She was stuck tight again, and I never saw Wolfe try harder and get nowhere. Finally he pulled the bluff of phoning Cramer, and even that didn’t budge her. Then he gave up and rang for Fritz to bring beer.
At that point the phone rang and I answered it, and heard a familiar voice:
“Archie? Saul Panzer. May I speak to Mr. Wolfe?”
Wolfe took it on his phone, and I learned that during my absence he had got hold of Saul and sent him to the Flower Show. After getting a report he told Saul to drop the line he was on and come to the office. He hung up and leaned back and heaved a sigh, and regarded Rose with no sign of esteem.
“That,” he said, “was a man I sent to collect facts about Mr. Gould. I’d rather get them from you. I’ll allow you until tomorrow to jog your memory about what you saw in that corridor this afternoon, but you’ll tell me about him now. We’ve got all night. How long had you known him?”
“About two years,” she said sullenly.
“Are you his wife? His widow?”
She flushed and her lips tightened. “No. He said he wasn’t the marrying kind. That’s what he said.”
“But he lived on Morrow Street with you?”
“No, he didn’t. He only came there. He had a room in one of the houses on the Dill place on Long Island. No one ever knew about Morrow Street-I mean no one out there.” She suddenly perked forward and her eyes flashed, and I was surprised at her spunk. “And no one’s going to know about it! You hear that? Not while I’m alive they’re not!”
“Do you have relatives on Long Island? Do your folks live there?”
“None of your business!”
“Perhaps not,” Wolfe conceded. “I wouldn’t want it to be. When and where did you meet Mr. Gould?”
She shut her mouth.
“Come,” Wolfe said sharply. “Don’t irritate me beyond reason. The next time I tell Mr. Goodwin to get Mr. Cramer on the phone it won’t be a bluff.”
She swallowed. “I was clerking in a store at Richdale and he-I met him there. That was nearly two years ago, when he was working at Hewitt’s.”
“Do you mean Lewis Hewitt’s.”
“Yes, the Hewitt estate.”
“Indeed. What did he do there?”
“He was a gardener and he did some chauffeuring. Then he got fired. He always said he quit, but he got fired.”
“When was that?”
“Over a year ago. Winter before last, it was. He was a good greenhouse man, and it wasn’t long before he got another job at Dill’s. That’s about two miles the other side of Richdale. He went to live there in one of the houses.”
“Did you live there with him?”
“Me?” She looked shocked and indignant. “I certainly didn’t! I was living at home!”
“I beg your pardon. How long have you been living at the place on Morrow Street?”
She shut her mouth.
“Come, Miss Lasher. Even the janitor could tell me that.”
“Look here,” she said. “Harry Gould was no good. He never was any good. I knew that all the time. But the trouble is you get started, that’s what makes the trouble, you get started and then you keep it up-even if I knew he was no good there was something about him. He always said he wasn’t the marrying kind, but when he took me to that place on Morrow Street one day-that was last June, June last year-and said he had rented it, that looked like he wanted a home and maybe to get married after a while, so I quit my job and went there to live. That’s how long I’ve been living there, nine months. At first I was scared, and then I wasn’t. There wasn’t much money, but there was enough, and then I got scared again on account of the money. I didn’t know where he got it.”
The seam had ripped and the beans were tumbling out, and Wolfe sat back and let them come.
“He came there one night-he came four or five nights a week-that was one night in December not long before Christmas-and he had over a thousand dollars. He wouldn’t let me count it, but it must have been, it might have been two or three thousand. He bought me a watch, and that was all right, but all the money did to me, it scared me. And he began to act different and he didn’t come so often. And then about a month ago he told me he was going to get married.”
Her lips went tight and after a moment she swallowed.
“Not to you,” Wolfe said.
“Oh, no.” She made a noise. “Me? Not so you could notice it. But he wouldn’t tell me her name. And he kept having money. He didn’t show it to me any more, but several times at night I looked in his pockets and he had a bankbook with over three thousand dollars in it and he always had a big roll of bills. Then yesterday I saw a picture of him in the paper, at the Flower Show with that girl. He hadn’t said a word to me about it, not a word. And he hadn’t been to Morrow Street for nearly a week, and he didn’t come last night, so I went there today to see, and there he was in there with her. When I saw him in there with her I wanted to kill him, I tell you that straight, I wanted to kill him!”
“But you didn’t,” Wolfe murmured.
Her face worked. “I wanted to!”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t.”
“But someone did.” Wolfe’s voice was silky. “He was murdered. And naturally you are in sympathy with the effort to find the murderer. Naturally you intend to help-”
“I do not!”
“But my dear Miss Lasher-”
“I’m not your dear Miss Lasher.” She leaned to him from the edge of the chair. “I know what I am, I’m a bum, that’s what I am and I know it. But I’m not a complete dumbbell, see? Harry’s dead, ain’t he? Who killed him I don’t know, maybe you did, or maybe it was that ten-cent Clark Gable there that thinks he’s so slick he can slide uphill. Whoever it was, I don’t know and I don’t care, all I care about now is one thing, my folks aren’t going to know anything about all this, none of it, and if it gets so I can’t help it and they find out about it, all they’ll have left to do with me is bury me.”
She straightened up. “It’s my honor,” she said. “It’s my family’s honor.”
Whether that came from the movies or wherever it came from, that’s exactly what she said. I suspected the movies, considering her cheap crack about me being a ten-cent Clark Gable, which was ridiculous. He simpers, to begin with, and to end with no one can say I resemble a movie actor, and if they did it would be more apt to be Gary Cooper than Clark Gable.
Anyhow, that’s what she said. And apparently she meant it, for although Wolfe went on patiently working at her he didn’t get much. She didn’t know why Harry had been fired from Hewitt’s, or where his sudden wealth had come from, or why he had carefully saved that garage job-card, or why he had been interested in the Kurume yellows, which she had never heard of, and above all she couldn’t remember anyone or anything she had seen while she was hiding in the corridor. Wolfe kept at her, and it looked as if she was in for a long hard night.
Around eleven o’clock an interruption arrived in the shape of Saul Panzer. I let him in and he went to the office. With one glance of his sharp gray eyes he added Rose to his internal picture gallery, which meant that she was there for good, and then stood there in his old brown suit-he never wore an overcoat-with his old brown cap in his hand. He looked like a relief veteran, whereas he owned two houses in Brooklyn and was the best head and foot detective west of the Atlantic.
“Miss Rose Lasher, Mr. Saul Panzer,” Wolfe said. “Archie, get me the atlas.”
I shrugged. One of his favorite ways of spending an evening was with the atlas, but with company there? Muttering, “Mine not to reason why,” I took it to him, and sat down again while he went on his trip. Pretty soon he closed it and shoved it aside, and addressed Rose:
“Was Mr. Gould ever in Salamanca, New York?”
She said she didn’t know.
“Those letters, Archie,” Wolfe said.
I got the pile and gave him half and kept half for myself and ran through the envelopes. I was nearly at the bottom when Wolfe emitted a grunt of satisfaction.