1. If she was toting a grievance against Bess
Huddleston, it would take a smarter man than me
to find out what it was.
2. There was nothing fundamentally wrong
with her except that she would rather live in the
country than the city.
3. She had no definite suspicion about who had
sent the anonymous letters or anyone’s motive for
sending them.
Wolfe said, “Try Miss Timms for a change.”
I didn’t try to date Maryella for Saturday or Sunday, because Janet had told me they were all going to Saratoga for the weekend. Monday morning, I thought, was no time to start a romance, so I waited until afternoon to phone, got Maryella, and got the news. I went up to the plant rooms, where Wolfe was a sight to behold in his undershirt, cutting the tops from a row of vandas for propagation, and told him:
“Bess Huddleston is dead.”
“Let me alone,” he said peevishly. “I’m doing all I can. Someone will probably get another letter before long, and when-”
“No, sir. No more letters. I am stating facts. Friday evening tetanus set in from that cut on her toe, and about an hour ago she died. Maryella’s voice was choked with emotion as she told me.”
Wolfe scowled at me. “Tetanus?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That would have been a five thousand dollar fee.”
“It would have been if you had seen fit to do a little work instead of-”
“It was no good and you know it. I was waiting for another letter. File it away, including the letter to Mrs. Horrocks, to be delivered to her on request. I’m glad to be rid of it.”
I wasn’t. Down in the office, as I checked over the folder, consisting of the Horrocks letter, the snapshot of Janet, a couple of reports I had made and some memos Wolfe had dictated, I felt as if I was leaving a ball game in the fourth inning with the score a tie. But it looked as if nothing could be done about it, and certainly there was no use trying to badger Wolfe. I phoned Janet to ask if there was anything I could do, and she told me in a weak tired voice that as far as she knew there wasn’t.
According to the obit in the Times the next morning, the funeral service was to be Wednesday afternoon, at the Belford Memorial Chapel on 73rd Street, and of course there would be a big crowd, even in August, for Bess Huddleston’s last party. Cordially invited to meet death. I decided to go. Not merely, if I know myself, for curiosity or another look at Janet. It is not my custom to frequent memorial chapels to look at girls even if they’re good dancers. Call it a hunch. Not that I saw anything criminal, only something incredible. I filed past the casket with the throng because from a distance I had seen it and couldn’t believe it. But when I got close there it was. Eight black orchids that could have come from nowhere else in the world, and a card with his initials the way he scribbled them, “N.W.”
When I got home, and Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, I didn’t mention it. I decided it wasn’t advisable. I needed to devote some thought to it.
It was that evening, Wednesday evening after the funeral, that I answered the doorbell, and who should I see on the stoop but my old colleague Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad. I hailed him with false enthusiasm and ushered him into the office, where Wolfe was making more marks on the map of Russia. They exchanged greetings, and Cramer sat in the red leather chair, took out a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his exposed surfaces, put a cigar between his lips and sank his teeth in it.
“Your hair’s turning gray,” I observed. “You look as if you weren’t getting enough exercise. A brain-worker like you-”
“God knows why you keep him,” he said to Wolfe.
Wolfe grunted. “He saved my life once.”
“Once!” I exclaimed indignantly. “Beginning-”
“Shut up, Archie. What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“You can tell me what you were doing for Bess Huddleston.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a shade. “You? The Homicide Bureau? Why do you want to know?”
“Because a guy is making himself a pest down at Headquarters. Her brother. He says she was murdered.”
“He does?”
“Yes.”
“Offering what evidence?”
“None at all.”
“Then why bother me about it? Or yourself either?”
“Because we can’t shut him up. He’s even been to the Commissioner. And though he has no evidence, he has an argument. I’d like to tell you his argument.”
Wolfe leaned back and sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Well. He started on us last Saturday, four days ago. She got tetanus the day before. I don’t need to tell you about that cut on her toe, since Goodwin was there-”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“I’ll bet you have. The brother, Daniel, said she couldn’t have got tetanus from that cut. He said it was a clean piece of glass that dropped into her slipper when the tray of glasses fell on the terrace. He saw it. And the slipper was a clean house slipper, nearly new and clean. And she hadn’t been walking around barefooted. He claimed there couldn’t possibly have been any tetanus germs in that cut, at least not enough to cause so violent an attack so soon. I sent a man up there Saturday night, but the doctor wouldn’t let him see her, and of course he had no evidence-”
“Dr. Brady?”
“Yes. But the brother kept after us, especially when she died, and yesterday morning I sent a couple of men up to rub it off. I want to ask you, Goodwin, what was the piece of glass like? The piece in her slipper that cut her?”
“I knew you really came to see me,” I told him genially. “It was a piece from one of the thick blue glasses that they had for old-fashioneds. Several of them broke.”
Cramer nodded. “So they all say. We sent the slippers to the laboratory, and they say no tetanus germs. Of course there was another possibility, the iodine and the bandage. We sent all the stuff on that shelf to the laboratory, and the gauze was sterile, and it was good iodine, so naturally there were no germs in it. Under the circum-”
“Subsequent dressings,” Wolfe muttered.
“No. The dressing Brady found on it when he was called up there Friday night was the one he had put on originally.”
“Listen,” I put in, “I know. By God. That orangutan. He tickled her feet. He rubbed germs on her-”
Cramer shook his head. “We went into that too. One of them suggested it-the nephew. That seems to be a possibility. It sounds farfetched to me, but of course it’s possible. Now what the doctor says. Brady.”
“Excuse me,” Wolfe said. “You talked to those people.
Had Miss Huddleston nothing to say to them before she died? Any of them?”
“Not much. Do you know what tetanus does?”
“Vaguely.”
“It does plenty. Like strychnine, only worse because there are no periods of relaxation and it lasts longer. When Brady got there Friday night her jaw was already locked tight. He gave her avertin to relieve her, and kept it up till the end. When my man was there Saturday night she was bent doubje backwards. Sunday she told Brady through her teeth she wanted to tell people good-bye, and he took them in one at a time. I’ve got their statements. Nothing significant, what you’d expect. Of course she only said a few words to each one-she was in bad shape. Her brother tried to tell her that her approaching death wasn’t an accident, it was murder, but Brady and the nurse wouldn’t let him.”
“She herself had no such suspicion?”
“Not in evidence. You realize what she was like.” Cramer shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What Brady says about the tetanus, one three-hundredth of a grain of the toxin is fatal. The bacilli and spores are more or less around everywhere, but of course especially in the neighborhood of horses. The soil around a barnyard reeks with it. I asked Brady what about his infecting the cut or the bandage with his own fingers when he dressed it, since he had just been riding, but he said he had washed his hands, and so had the Nichols girl, and she corroborated it. He said it was highly unlikely that there should have been tetanus bacilli on the piece of glass or her slipper or the skin of her toe or that animal’s paw, at least enough of them to cause such a quick and virulent attack, but he said it was also unlikely that when a man walks across a street at a corner with a green light he should get run over, but sometimes he does. He says that he deeply regrets he didn’t return Tuesday evening or Wednesday and give her an injection of antitoxin, but he doesn’t blame himself because no doctor alive would have done so. After the poison reached the nerve centers, as it had when Brady arrived Friday night, it was too late for antitoxin, though he tried it. Everything Brady said has been checked with the Examiner and is okay.”