The second-floor hall was narrow, with bare walls, and not carpeted. As I said, not a palace. After following Drew down six paces and through a door, I found myself in a pin-up paradise. All available space on all four walls was covered with women, drawings and prints and photographs, both black-and-white and color, all sizes, and in one respect they were all alike: none of them had a stitch on. It hadn’t occurred to me that a designer of women’s clothes should understand female anatomy, but I admit it might help. The effect was so striking that it took me four or five seconds to focus on the man and woman seated at a table. By that time Drew had pronounced my name and gone.
Though the man and woman were fully clothed, they were striking too. He reminded me of someone, but I didn’t remember who until later: Lord Byron-a picture of Lord Byron in a book in my father’s library that had impressed me at an early age. It was chiefly Gallant’s dark curly hair backing up a wide sweeping forehead, but the nose and chin were in it too. The necktie was all wrong; instead of Byron’s choker he was sporting a narrow ribbon tied in a bow with long ends hanging.
The woman didn’t go with him. She was small and trim, in a tailored suit that had been fitted by an expert, and her face was all eyes. Not that they popped, but they ran the show. In spite of Alec Gallant’s lordly presence, as I approached the table I found myself aiming at Anita Prince’s eyes.
Gallant was speaking. “What’s this? About Sarah Yare?”
“Just a couple of questions.” He had eyes too, when you looked at them. “It shouldn’t take even five minutes. I suppose Mr. Drew told you?”
“He said Nero Wolfe is making an inquiry and sent you. What about? About how she died?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. The fact is, Mr. Gallant, on this I’m just an errand boy. My instructions were to ask if you got any messages or letters from her in the past month or so, and if so will you let Mr. Wolfe see them.”
“My God.” He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and shook it-a lion pestered by a fly. He looked at the woman. “This is too much. Too much!” He looked at me. “You must know a woman was assassinated here yesterday. Of course you do!” He pointed at the door. “There!” His hand dropped to the desk like a dead bird. “And after that calamity, now this, the death of my old and valued friend. Miss Yare was not only my friend; in mold and frame she was perfection, in movement she was music, as a mannequin she would have been divine. My delight in her was completely pure. I never had a letter from her.” His head jerked to Anita Prince. “Send him away,” he muttered.
She put fingers on his arm. “You gave him five minutes, Alec, and he has only had two.” Her voice was smooth and sure. The eyes came to me. “So you don’t know the purpose of Mr. Wolfe’s inquiry?”
“No, Miss Prince, I don’t. He only tells me what he thinks I need to know.”
“Nor who hired him to make it?”
So Drew had covered the ground. “No. Not that either. He’ll probably tell you, if you have what he wants, letters from her, and you want to know why he wants to see them.”
“I have no letters from her. I never had any. I had no personal relations with Miss Yare.” Her lips smiled, but the eyes didn’t. “Though I saw her many times, my contact with her was never close. Mr. Gallant preferred to fit her himself. I just looked on. It seems-” She stopped for a word, and found it. “It seems odd that Nero Wolfe should be starting an inquiry immediately after her death. Or did he start it before?”
“I couldn’t say. The first I knew, he gave me this errand this morning. This noon.”
“You don’t know much, do you?”
“No, I just take orders.”
“Of course you do know that Miss Yare committed suicide?”
I didn’t get an answer in. Gallant, hitting the table with a palm, suddenly shouted at her, “Name of God! Must you? Send him away!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gallant,” I told him. “I guess my time’s up. If you’ll tell me where to find your sister and Miss Thorne, that will-”
I stopped because his hand had darted to an ashtray, a big metal one that looked heavy, and since he wasn’t smoking he was presumably going to let fly with it. Anita Prince beat him to it. With her left hand she got his wrist, and with her right she got the ashtray and moved it out of reach. It was very quick and deft. Then she spoke, to me. “Miss Gallant is not here. Miss Thorne is busy, but you can ask Mr. Drew downstairs. You had better go.”
I went. In more favorable circumstances I might have spared another five minutes for a survey of the pin-ups, but not then, not if I had to dodge ashtrays.
In the hall, having pulled the door shut, the indicated procedure, indicated both by the situation and by Miss Prince’s suggestion, was to take the elevator down and see Drew again, but a detective is supposed to have initiative. So when I heard a voice, female, floating out through an open door, I went on past the elevator, to the door, for a look. Not only did I see, I was seen, and a voice, anything but female, came at me.
“You. Huh?”
I could have kicked myself. While, as I said, my mission couldn’t be called secret with five people on the list, certainly Wolfe had intended it to be private, and there was Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide West, glaring at me.
“Sightseeing?” he asked. Purley’s idea of humor is a little primitive. “The scene of the crime?”
I descended to his level. “Just morbid,” I told him, crossing the sill. “Compulsion neurosis. Is this it?”
Evidently it was. The room was about the same size as Alec Gallant’s, but while his had been dominated by women without clothes, this one ran to clothes without women. There were coats, suits, dresses, everything. They were on dummies, scattered around; on hangers, strung on a pole along a wall; and piled on a table. At my right one dummy, wearing a skirt, was bare from the waist up; she might have blushed if she had had
