'More or less. Maybe a little more.'
'Very well. You will be admitted.'
As I hung up, Wolfe growled, 'That creature has been so reduced to chronic subservience that he was deferential even to you. I would like to deal with Mr. Jarrett. I am almost minded to go along.'
Just chatter. Before leaving I typed the resume of the life of Carlotta Vaughn as we knew it, which I had arranged in my mind on the way. You have seen it.
Now, as I put my raincoat on a bench and followed Oscar across a reception hall, along a wide corridor, and around a turn into a narrower hall that took us to an open door at the end, I forgot to observe things because I was too busy looking forward to dealing with Mr. Jarrett. One would have got you ten that this time I would get a reaction. But I did observe the room I entered. It had a fifteen-foot ceiling, a rug twice the size of Lily Rowan's 19-by-34 Kashan, a big desk that was presumably Colonial handiwork, and more books than Wolfe owned, on shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling. Not one of the chairs
was occupied. Oscar turned on some lights and said Mr. Jarrett would come shortly, and this time 'shortly' was more like it, only a couple of minutes. As he entered by another and narrower door between two tiers of shelves, a
'It might be better,' I said, 'for me to tell you first what I already know, or some of it. She was your wife's secretary from May nineteen forty-two untl your wife died. She lived here-and at your house in town. You kept her on. She stopped living with you in March nineteen forty-four, and I can't prove that you still kept her, with a different meaning for 'kept,' but there's no law against guessing, and we've only been on this five days.' I got something from a pocket. 'Here are two photographs of her, taken in nineteen forty-six, but she wasn't Carlotta Vaughn then, she was Elinor Denovo, and her daughter Amy was a year old. Take a look.'
I offered them, but he didn't take them. He said, 'Who's paying you, Goodwin? Just McCray? He's probably only the errand boy for them-he would be-but you must have their names. If I could prove conspiracy to defame… Would you like to pocket ten thousand dollars?'
'Not particularly. That's peanuts. Only last week I took home a box that contained two hundred and forty-four grand-and by the way, it had come from you.' I put the photographs back in my pocket. 'The checks you sent Elinor Denovo, formerly Carlotta Vaughn-'
'That's enough!' He was reacting. Not the eyes, but the voice. He fired those two words at me as if they were bullets. 'This is ridiculous. The brainless idiots. You're expecting to show that I am the father of a girl named Amy, that her mother is the Carlotta Vaughn who once worked for my wife and me and is now known as Elinor Denovo. Is that correct?'
'That's obvious.'
'When was this girl Amy born?'
'Two weeks before you sent the first check to Elinor Denovo. April twelfth, nineteen forty- five.'
'Then she was conceived in the summer of nineteen forty-four. July, unless the birth was abnormally premature or delayed. I suppose you have a notebook. Get it out.'
I wasn't subservient enough yet. I tapped my skull. 'I file things here.'
'File this. In late May nineteen forty-four I went to
England on a mission for the Production Allotment Board
to consult with Eisenhower's staff and the British. Seven
days after the landing in Normandy I flew to Cairo for
more consultations, and then to Italy. On July first I was
put to bed with pneumonia in an army hospital in Naples.
On July twenty-fourth I was still shaky and I was flown
to Marrakech to recuperate. My room in the villa was
the one Churchill had once occupied. On August twen
tieth I flew to London and was there until September
sixth, when I returned to Washington. If you had got
your notebook when I told you to you'd have those dates.'
He turned his head and called, 'Oscar!' '
The door, the big one, opened and Oscar entered and stood with a hand on the knob.
'Brainless idiots,' Jarrett said. 'Especially McCray; he
was born an idiot. If they didn't know how and where I
spent that summer they could have found out. Anyone
with a spoonful of brains would have. Oscar, this man's
going and he isn't coming back.' He turned and left by
the door he had come in at.,
