sir.”
Wolfe got up. “If you’ll join us, Mr. Freyer? There’ll be enough to go around. Chicken livers and mushrooms in white wine. Rice cakes. Another place, Fritz.”
Chapter 6
AT FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon I left the house, bound for 171 East 52nd Street, to keep an appointment, made for me by Freyer, with Mrs. Michael M. Molloy.
After lunch we had returned to the office and taken up where we had left off. Freyer had phoned his office to send us the complete file on the case, and it had arrived and been pawed over. I had summoned Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather, and Johnny Keems to report to the office at six o’clock. They were our four main standbys, and they would call for a daily outlay of $160, not counting expenses. If it lasted a month, 30 times 160 equals 4800, so Wolfe’s self-esteem might come high if he found he couldn’t deliver.
Nothing had come of any of the leads suggested by what Mrs. Molloy had told Freyer about her deceased husband, and no wonder, since they had been investigated only by a clerk in Freyer’s office and a sawbuck squirt supplied by the Harland Ide Detective Agency. I will concede that they had dug up some relevant facts: Molloy had had a two-room office in a twenty-story hive on 46th Street near Madison Avenue, and it said on the door MICHAEL M. MOLLOY, REAL ESTATE. His staff had consisted of a secretary and an errand boy. His rent had been paid for January, which was commendable, since January 1 had been a holiday and he had died on the third. If he had left a will, it had not turned up. He had been a fight fan and an ice-hockey fan. During the last six months of his life he had taken his current secretary, whose name was Delia Brandt, to dinner at a restaurant two or three times a week, but the clerk and the squirt hadn’t got any deeper into that.
Mrs. Molloy hadn’t been very helpful about his business affairs. She said that during her tenure as his secretary he had apparently transacted most of his business outside the office, and she had never known much about it. He had opened his own mail, which hadn’t been heavy, and she had written only ten or twelve letters a week for him, and less than half of them had been on business matters. Her chief function had been to answer the phone and take messages when he was absent, and he had been absent most of the time. Apparently he had been interested almost exclusively in rural properties; as far as she knew, he had never had a hand in any New York City real-estate transactions. She had no idea what his income was, or his assets.
As for people who might have had a motive for killing him, she had supplied the names of four men with whom he had been on bad terms, and they had been looked into, but none of them seemed very promising. One of them had merely got sore because Molloy had refused to pay on a bet the terms of which had been disputed, and the others weren’t much better. It had to be a guy who had not only croaked Molloy but had also gone to a lot of trouble to see that someone else got hooked for it, specifically Peter Hays, and that called for a real character.
In the taxi on my way uptown, if someone had hopped in and offered me ten to one that we had grabbed the short end of the stick, I would have passed. I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Number 171 East 52nd Street was an old walk-up which had had a thorough job of upgrading, inside and out, along with the houses on either side. They had all been painted an elegant gray, one with yellow trim, one with blue, and one with green. In the vestibule I pushed the button at the top of the row, marked MOLLOY, took the receiver from the hook and put it to my ear, and in a moment was asked who it was. I gave my name, and, when the latch clicked, pushed the door open, entered, and took the do-it-yourself elevator to the fifth floor. Emerging, I took a look around, noting where the stairs were. After all, this was the scene of the crime, and I was a detective. Hearing my name called, I turned. She was standing in the doorway.
She was only eight steps away, and by the time I reached her I had made a decision which sometimes, with one female or another, may take me hours or even days. I wanted no part of her. The reason I wanted no part was that just one look had made it plain that if I permitted myself to want a part it would be extremely difficult to keep from going on and wanting the whole; and that was highly inadvisable in the circumstances. For one thing, it wouldn’t have been fair to P.H., handicapped as he was. This would have to be strictly business, not only outwardly but inwardly. I admit I smiled at her as she moved aside to let me enter, but it was merely a professional smile.
The room she led me into, after I put my coat and hat on a chair in the foyer, was a large and attractive living room with three windows. It was the room that P.H. had entered to find a corpse-if you’re on our side. The rugs and furniture had been selected by her. Don’t ask me how I know that; I was there and saw them, and saw her with them. She went to a chair over near a window, and, invited, I moved one around to face her. She said that Mr. Freyer had told her on the phone that he was consulting with Nero Wolfe, and that Mr. Wolfe wanted to send his assistant, Mr. Goodwin, to have a talk with her, and that was all she knew. She did not add, “What do you want?”
“I don’t know exactly how to begin,” I told her, “because we have different opinions on a very important point. Mr. Freyer and Mr. Wolfe and I all think Peter Hays didn’t kill your husband, and you think he did.”
She jerked her chin up. “Why do you say that?”
“Because there’s no use beating around the bush. You think it because there’s nothing else for you to think, and anyhow you’re not really thinking. You’ve been hit so hard that you’re too numb to think. We’re not. Our minds are free and we’re trying to use them. But we’d like to be sure on one point: if we prove we’re right, if we get him cleared-I don’t say it looks very hopeful, but if we do-would you like that or wouldn’t you?”
“Oh!” she cried. Her jaw loosened. She said, “Oh,” again, but it was only a whisper.
“I’ll call that a yes,” I said. “Then just forget our difference of opinion, because opinions don’t count anyway. Mr. Freyer spent five hours with Nero Wolfe today, and Mr. Wolfe is going to try to find evidence that will clear Peter Hays. He has seen reports of your conversations with Freyer, but they didn’t help any. Since you were Molloy’s secretary for a year and his wife for three years, Mr. Wolfe thinks it likely-or, say, possible-that at some time you saw or heard something that would help. Remember he is assuming that someone else killed Molloy. He thinks it’s very improbable that a situation existed which resulted in Molloy’s murder, and that he never said or did anything in your presence that had a bearing on it.”
She shook her head, not at me but at fate. “If he did,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”
“Of course you didn’t. If you had you would have told Freyer. Mr. Wolfe wants to try to dig it up. He couldn’t ask you to come to his office so he could start the digging himself, because he has to spend two hours every afternoon playing with orchids, and at six o’clock he has a conference scheduled with four of his men who are going to be given other assignments-on this case. So he sent me to start in with you. I’ll tell you how it works by giving you an example. Once I saw him spend eight hours questioning a young woman about everything and
