'Certainly. That’s why I took the trouble to go to see him. To observe. There were other ways of getting to Mrs Irwin of Grantham House.'
'But you have formed no conclusion.'
'No, sir. Question mark.'
'Very well. Pfui. Afraid of a woman.' He lifted his book, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
At eight-twenty the next morning, Thursday, I was steering the 1957 Heron sedan up the Forty-sixth Street ramp to the West Side Highway. Buying the sedan, the year before, had started an argument that wasn’t finished yet. Wolfe pays for the cars, but I do the driving, and I wanted one I could U-turn when the occasion arose, and that clashed with Wolfe’s notion that anyone in a moving vehicle was in constant deadly peril, and that the peril was in inverse ratio to the size of the vehicle. In a forty-ton truck he might actually have been able to relax. So we got the Heron, and I must say that I had nothing against it but its size.
I soon had proof of what I had been hearing and reading, that the forty-eight-hour rain in New York had been snow a little to the north. At Hawthorne Circle it was already there at the roadside, and the farther I rolled on the Taconic State Parkway the more there was of it. The sun was on it now, glancing off the slopes of the drifts and banks, and it was very pleasant, fighting the hardships of an old-fashioned winter by sailing along on the concrete at fifty-eight m.p.h. with ridges of white four and five feet high only a step from the hubcaps. When I finally left the parkway and took a secondary road through the hills, the hardships closed in on me some for a few miles, and when I turned in at an entrance between two stone pillars, with 'Grantham House' on one of them, and headed up a curving driveway climbing a hill, only a single narrow lane had been cleared, and as I rounded a sharp curve the hubcaps scraped the ridge.
Coming out of another curve, I braked and stopped. I was blocked, though not by snow. There were nine or ten of them standing there facing me, pink-faced and bright-eyed in the sunshine, in an assortment of jackets and coats, no hats, some with gloves and some without. They would have been taken anywhere for a bunch of high-school girls except for one thing: they were all too bulky around the middle. They stood and grinned at me, white teeth flashing.
I cranked the window down and stuck my head out. 'Good morning. What do you suggest?'
One in front, with so much brown hair that only the middle of her face showed, called out, 'What paper are you from?'
'No paper. I’m sorry if I ought to be. I’m just an errand boy. Can you get by?'
Another one, a blonde, had advanced to the fender. 'The trouble is,' she said, 'that you’re right in the centre. If you edge over we can squeeze past.' She turned and commanded, 'Back up and give him room.'
They obeyed. When they were far enough away I eased the car forward and to the right until the fender grazed the snowbank, and stopped. They said that was fine and started down the alley single file. As they passed the front fender they turned sidewise, every darned one, which seemed to me to be faulty tactics, since their spread fore and aft was more than from side to side. Also they should have had their backs to the car so their fronts would be against the soft snow, but no, they all faced me. A couple of them made friendly remarks as they went by, and one with a sharp little chin and dancing dark eyes reached in and pulled my nose. I stuck my head out to see that they were all clear, waved good-bye, and pressed gently on the gas.
Grantham House, which had once been somebody’s mansion, sprawled over about an acre, surrounded by evergreen trees loaded with snow and other trees still in their winter skeletons. A space had been cleared with enough room to turn around, barely, and I left the car there, followed a path across a terrace to a door, opened it, entered, crossed the vestibule, and was in a hall about the size of Mrs Robilotti’s drawing-room. A man who would never see eighty again came hobbling over, squeaking at me, 'What’s your name?'
I told him. He said Mrs Irwin was expecting me, and led me into a smaller room where a woman was sitting at a desk. As I entered she spoke, with a snap. 'I hope to goodness you didn’t run over my girls.'
'Absolutely not,' I assured her. 'I stopped to let them by.'
'Thank you.' She motioned to a chair. 'Sit down. The snow has tried to smother us, but they have to get air and exercise. Are you a newspaperman?'
I told her no and was going to elaborate, but she had the floor. 'Mr Byne said your name is Archie Goodwin and you’re a friend of his. According to the newspaper there was an Archie Goodwin at that party at Mrs Robilotti’s. Was that you?'
I was at a disadvantage. With her smooth hair, partly grey, her compact little figure, and her quick brown eyes wide apart, she reminded me of Miss Clark, my high-school geometry teacher out in Ohio, and Miss Clark had always had my number. I had waited until I saw her to decide just what line to take. First I had to decide whether to say it was me or it was I.
'Yes,' I said, 'that was me. It also said in the paper that I work for a private detective named Nero Wolfe.'
'I know it did. Are you here as a detective?'
She certainly liked to come to the point. So had Miss Clark. But I hoped I was man enough not to be afraid of a woman. 'The best way to answer that,' I told her, 'is to explain why I came. You know what happened at that party and you know I was there. The idea seems to be that Faith Usher committed suicide. I have got the impression that the police may settle for that. But on account of what I saw, and what I didn’t see, I doubt it. My personal opinion is that she was murdered, and if she was, I would hate to see whoever did it get away with it. But before I start howling about it in public I want to do a little checking, and I thought the best place to check on Faith Usher herself was here with you.'
'I see.' She sat straight and her eyes were straight. 'Then you’re a knight with a plume?'
'Not at all. I’d feel silly with a plume. My pride is hurt. I’m a professional detective and I try to be a good one, and I believe that someone committed murder right before my eyes, and how do you think I like that?'
'Why do you believe it was murder?'
