Unbalanced?'
'No, sir,' I told him. 'She sat with her back straight and her feet together, and she met my eyes all the time.'
He nodded. 'She would. She always did.' To Wolfe:
'At this time, here privately with you, I don't challenge your assumption.'
'Do you challenge the other one, that X killed her?'
'I neither challenge it nor accept it.'
'Pfui. You're not an ostrich, Mr. Otis. Next: if Miss Aaron's facts were accurate, it must be supposed that X was in a position to give Mrs. Sorell information that would help her substantially in her action against her husband, your client. That is true?'
'Of course.' Otis was going to add something, de- cided not to, and then changed his mind again. 'Again here privately with you, it's not merely her action at law. It's blackmail. Perhaps not technically, but that's what it amounts to. Her demands are exorbitant and preposterous. It's extortion.'
'And a member of your firm could give her weapons. Which one or ones?'
Otis shook his head. 'I won't answer that.' Wolfe's brows went up. 'Sir? If you pretend to help at all that's the very least you can do. If you're rejecting my proposal say so and I'll get on without you. By noon tomorrow-today-the police will have that elemen- tary question answered. It may take me longer.'
'It certainly may,' Otis said. 'You haven't men- tioned a third assumption you're making. You are as- suming that Goodwin was candid and accurate in reporting what Miss Aaron said.'
'Bah.' Wolfe was disgusted. 'You are gibbering. If you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed for- lorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties later and wish to communicate with me I'll be here.' He pushed his chair back.
'No.' Otis extended a hand. 'Good God, man, I'm trapped! It's not my faculties! I have my faculties.'
'Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?'
'They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of course, my three partners. It could have only been one of them, partly because none of our associates was in our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She wouldn't have used that phrase, 'member of the firm,' loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted applica- tion. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that's incredible!'
'Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbe- lieve Miss Aaron-or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin? Here with me privately?'
'No.'
Wolfe turned a palm up. 'Then let's get at it. It is equally incredible for all three of those men, or are there preferences?'
During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen times, and on some details-for instance, the respects in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable-he clammed up absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my notebook.
Frank Edey, fifty-five, married with two sons and a daughter, wife living, got twenty-seven per cent of the firm's net income. (Otis's share was forty per cent.) He was a brilliant idea man but seldom went to court. He had drafted the marriage agreement which had been signed by Morton Sorell and Rita Ramsey when they got yoked four years ago. Personal financial condition, sound. Relations with wife and children, so-so. Interest in other women, definitely yes, but fairly discreet. In- terest in Mrs. Sorell casual so far as Otis knew.
Miles Heydecker, forty-seven, married and wife liv- ing but no children, got twenty-two per cent. His fa- ther, now dead, had been one of the original members of the firm. His specialty was trial work and he handled the firm's most important cases in court. He had ap- peared for Mrs. Sorell at her husband's request two years ago when she had been sued by a man who had formerly been her agent. He was tight with money and had a nice personal pile of it. Relations with his wife, uncertain; on the surface, okay. Too interested in his work and his hobbies, chess and behind-the-scene poli- tics, to bother with women, including Mrs. Sorell.
Gregory Jett, thirty-six, single, had been made a firm member and allotted eleven per cent of the income because of his spectacular success in two big corpora- tion cases. One of the corporations was controlled by Morton Sorell, and for the past year or so Jett had been a fairly frequent guest at the Sorell home on Fifth Avenue but had not been noticeably attentive to his hostess. His personal financial condition was one of the details Otis balked on, but he allowed it to be inferred that Jett was careless about the balance between in- come and outgo and was in the red in his account with the firm. Shortly after he had been made a member of the firm, about two years ago, he had dropped a fat chunk, Otis thought about forty thousand dollars, back- ing a Broadway show that flopped. A friend of his, female, had been in the cast. Whether he had had other expenses connected with a female friend or friends Otis either didn't know or wasn't telling. He did say that he had gathered, mostly from remarks Bertha Aaron had made, that in recent months Jett had shown more at- tention to Ann Paige than their professional association required.
But when Wolfe suggested the possibility that Ann Paige had left through a window because she sus- pected, or even knew, what was in the wind, and had decided to take a hand, Otis wouldn't buy it. He was having all he could do to swallow the news that one of his partners was a snake, and the idea that another of his associates might have been in on it was too much. He would tackle Ann Paige himself; she would no doubt have an acceptable explanation.
On Mrs. Morton Sorell he didn't balk at all. Part of his information was known to everyone who read newspa- pers and magazines: that as Rita Ramsey she had daz- zled Broadway with her performance in Reach for the Moon when she was barely out of her teens, that she had followed with even greater triumphs in two other plays, that she had spumed Hollywood, that she had also spumed Morton Sorell for two years and then abandoned her career to marry him. But Otis added other information that had merely been hinted at in gossip columns: that in a year the union had gone sour, that it became apparent that Rita had married Sorell only to get her lovely paws on a bale of dough, and that she was by no means going to settle for the terms of the marriage agreement. She wanted much more, more than half, and she had carefully begun to collect evi- dence of certain activities of Scroll's, but he had got wise and consulted his attorneys, Otis, Edey, Hey- decker and Jett, and they had stymied
