“Right,” I agreed.
“Okay.” Cramer folded the statement and put it in his pocket. “Then you had never heard Bianca Voss’s voice before and you couldn’t recognize it on the phone.”
“Of course not.”
“And you can’t hear it now, since she’s dead. So you can’t swear it was her talking to you.”
“Obviously.”
“And that raises a point. If it was her talking to you, she was killed at exactly half past eleven. Now there are four important people in that organization who had it in for Bianca Voss. They had admitted it. Besides Flora Gallant, there is Anita Prince, fitter and designer, been with Gallant eight years; Emmy Thorne, in charge of contacts and promotion, been with him four years; and Carl Drew, business manager, been with him five years. None of them killed Bianca Voss at half past eleven. From eleven-fifteen on, until the call came from a man who said he was John H. Watson, Carl Drew was down on the main floor, constantly in view of four people, two of them customers. From eleven o’clock on Anita Prince was on the top floor, the workshop, with Alec Gallant and two models and a dozen employees. At eleven-twenty Emmy Thorne called on a man by appointment at his office on Forty-sixth Street, and was with him and two other men until a quarter to twelve. And Flora Gallant was here with you. All airtight.”
“Very neat,” Wolfe agreed.
“Yeah. Too damn neat. Of course there may be others who wanted Bianca Voss out of the way, but as it stands now those four are out in front. And they’re all-”
“Why not five? Alec Gallant himself?”
“All right, five. They’re all in the clear, including him, if she was killed at eleven-thirty. So suppose she wasn’t. Suppose she was killed earlier, half an hour or so earlier. Suppose when Flora Gallant phoned her from here and put you on to talk with her, it wasn’t her at all, it was someone else imitating her voice, and she pulled that stunt, the groan and the other noises, to make you think you had heard the murder at that time.”
Wolfe’s brows were up. “With the corpse there on the floor.”
“Certainly.”
“Then you’re not much better off. Who did the impersonation? Their alibis still hold for eleven- thirty.”
“I realize that. But there were nineteen women around there altogether, and a woman who wouldn’t commit a murder might be willing to help cover up after it had been committed. You know that.”
Wolfe wasn’t impressed. “It’s very tricky, Mr. Cramer. If you are supposing Flora Gallant killed her, it was elaborately planned. Miss Gallant phoned here yesterday morning to make an appointment for eleven this morning. Did she kill Miss Voss, station someone there beside the corpse to answer the phone, rush down here, and maneuver me into ringing Miss Voss’s number? It seems a little far-fetched.”
“I didn’t say it was Flora Gallant.” Cramer hung on. “It could have been any of them. He or she didn’t have to know you were going to ring that number. He might have intended to call it himself, before witnesses, to establish the time of the murder, and when your call came, whoever it was there by the phone got rattled and went ahead with the act. There are a dozen different ways it could have happened. Hell, I know it’s tricky. I’m not asking you to work your brain on it. You must know why I brought it up.”
Wolfe nodded. “Yes, I think I do. You want me to consider what I heard-and Mr. Goodwin. You want to know if we are satisfied that those sounds were authentic. You want to know if we will concede that they might have been bogus.”
“That’s it. Exactly.”
Wolfe rubbed his nose with a knuckle, closing his eyes. In a moment he opened them. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Cramer. If they were bogus they were well executed. At the time, hearing them, I had no suspicion that it was flummery. Naturally, as soon as I learned that they served to fix the precise moment of a murder, I knew they were open to question, but I can’t challenge them intrinsically. Archie?”
I shook my head. “I pass.” To Cramer: “You’ve read the statement, so you know that right after I heard it my guess was that something hit her and she dragged the phone along as she went down and it struck the floor. I’m not going to go back on my guess now. As for our not hearing the blow, read the statement. It says that it started out as if it was going to be a scream but then it was a groan. She might have seen the blow coming and was going to scream, but it landed and turned it into a groan, and in that case we wouldn’t hear the blow. A chunk of marble hitting a skull wouldn’t make much noise. As for supposing she was killed half an hour or so earlier, I phoned within three minutes, or John H. Watson did, and in another six or seven minutes Carl Drew was talking to me, so he must have seen the body, or someone did, not more than five minutes after we heard the groan. Was she twitching?”
“No. You don’t twitch long with a scarf as tight as that around your throat.”
“What about the ME?”
“He got there a little after twelve. With blood he might have timed it pretty close, but there wasn’t any. That’s out.”
“What about the setup? Someone left that room quick after we heard the sounds. If it was the murderer, he or she had to cradle the phone and tie the scarf, but that wouldn’t take long. If it was a fill-in, as you want to suppose, all she had to do was cradle the phone. Whichever it was, wasn’t there anyone else around?”
“No. If there was, they’re saving it. As you know, Bianca Voss wasn’t popular around there. Anyway, that place is a mess, with three different elevators, one in the store, one at the back for services and deliveries, and one in an outside hall with a separate entrance so they can go up to the offices without going through the store.”
“That makes it nice. Then it’s wide open.”
“As wide as a barn door.” Cramer stood up. To Wolfe: “So that’s the best you can do. You thought the sounds were open to question.”
