him?'
She said without hesitation, 'Small took it from the car.'
My heart jumped the way it did when I saw Wolfe's lips push out. She was going to spill it! I went right on without giving her time to consider, 'Where did he take it to?'
'Upstairs. To Father's room.'
'Who took it away from there?'
'I did. Saturday evening, after Mr. Anderson came. It was Sunday that the men searched the house for it.'
'Where did you put it?'
'I drove to Tarrytown and got on the ferry and dropped it in the middle of the river. I filled it full of stones.'
'You're lucky they weren't tailing you. Of course you examined the driver. Did you take it apart?'
'I didn't examine it. I was in a hurry.'
'You didn't examine it? You mean you didn't even take it out and look at it?'
'No.'
I stared at her. 'I've got a better opinion of you. I don't believe you're such an awful fool. You're stringing me.'
'No. No, I'm not, Mr. Goodwin.'
I still stared. 'You mean you actually did all that? Without even looking at the driver? Leave it to a woman! What were your brother and Bradford doing, playing billiards?'
She shook her head. 'They had nothing to do with it.'
'But Bradford says that your mother will be all right now that your father's dead.'
'Well? If that is his opinion-' She stopped; the mention of her mother had been a mistake, it had her down again. After a minute she looked up at me, and for the first time I saw tears in her eyes. Two hung there. 'You wanted me to go fifty-fifty, Mr. Goodwin. That's my share.'
Something about her, the tears maybe, made her look like nothing but a kid, trying to be brave. I reached down and patted her on the shoulder and said: 'You're a good sport, Miss Barstow. I'll let you alone.'
I went to the hall and got my hat and left.
But, I thought, in the roadster again headed south down the highway. Plenty of But. Part of it was that as much as I respected filial devotion and as much as I liked Sarah Barstow, it would have been a real satisfaction to put her across my knees and pull up her skirts and giver her a swell fanning, for not taking a look at that driver. I had to believe her and I did believe her. She hadn't made that up. Now the driver was gone for good. With a lot of luck and patience it might have been grappled out of the river, but it would have cost more money than Nero Wolfe was apt to let go of. It was just simply good-bye driver. As I went through White Plans it was a temptation to leave the Parkway and run over to the District Attorney's office and say to Anderson, 'I'll bet you ten dollars that the golf bag containing the driver that killed Barstow is at the bottom of the Hudson River halfway between Tarrytown and Nyack.' It wouldn't have been a bad idea at that, for he might have sent a couple of boats out and found it. But as things turned out it was just as well I didn't.
I had had it in mind to go back to New York by another route, Blueberry Road, and just for curiosity take a look at the spot where Carlo Maffei's body had been found; not that I expected to discover that the murderer had left his scarfpin or automobile license lying around, just thinking that it never hurts a spot to look at it. But dropping in on Sarah Barstow had used up some time, and I wanted to make a call in the city. So I took the quickest way in.
On upper Park Avenue I stopped at a drugstore and phoned Wolfe. He had called Bradford's office once more, around eleven-thirty, but it had been the same story, too busy to come to the phone. He told me to go to it. I thought to myself, if he's busy now he's going to be positively rushed before we get through with him. It took me less than ten minutes to get to Sixty-ninth Street, and I parked around the corner.
Dr. Nathaniel Bradford certainly had an office. The entrance hall was wide enough to have a row of Brazilian ferns along each side, and the anteroom was big and grand. The lights and rugs and pictures and chairs made it plain, but not noisy, that everything done in that place was on a high level, including making out the patients' bills. But the chairs were all empty. The girl in starched white at a desk over in a corner told me that Dr. Bradford was not in. She seemed surprised that I didn't know that, just as I would know that Central Park begins at Fifty-ninth Street, and asked if I was a former patient. Then she said that the doctor was never in his office in the afternoon before four-thirty, and that he never saw anyone except by appointment. When I said that that was what I wanted to see him for, to make an appointment, she raised her eyebrows. I went back to the street.
At first I thought I would wait around for him, but it was only a little after three, so I went and sat in the roadster and let my mind out for a stroll to see if it would run across an idea for passing the time. In a few minutes it did, a pretty one. I went to a restaurant on Park Avenue to look at a telephone book, and then went back to the car and stepped on the starter and started along Sixty-ninth Street, and at Fifth Avenue turned downtown. At Forty-first Street I headed east.
As usual every car along the curb was laying its head on the next one's tail, and I had to go nearly to Third Avenue to find a space where I could edge the roadster in. I walked back almost two crosstown blocks, and found that the number I was looking for was one of the new office buildings a mile high. The directory said that my meat was on the twentieth floor. The elevator shot me up and I found it on a door down the corridor: Metropolitan Medical Record.
It was a young man, not a girl, at the desk in the outside room; that was nice for a change. I said to him: 'I'd like to ask a favor, if you're not too busy to help me out a little. Would you have any record showing the meetings of medical associations and so on held in New York on June fifth?'
He grinned. 'The Lord knows I'm not busy. Yes, sir, we have. Of course. Just a minute. June
