They were given errands. Saul was to go to Parker’s office to be at hand. Orrie, armed with Selma Molloy’s keys, was to go to her apartment and inspect the contents of the three cartons. Fred, supplied by Mrs. Molloy with descriptions of Jerome Arkoff and Tom Irwin, was to go to the Longacre Theatre and the bar across the street and see if he could find someone who could remember as far back as January 3. Fred was getting the scraps.
When they had gone Wolfe tackled Mrs. Molloy again, to get the lowdown on her friends. Using the telephone in the kitchen while he was busy with the staff, she had asked them to come to Wolfe’s office at six o’clock. I don’t know what she had told them,, since she couldn’t very well say that Wolfe wanted to find out which one of them had killed Mike Molloy, but anyhow they had said they would come. I had suggested that she could tell them that Wolfe was working with Freyer and was trying to find some grounds for an appeal, and probably she did.
Of course Wolfe had her cornered. If there were any chance of springing her P.H. she was all for it, but friends are friends, for people who are entitled to have any, until shown to be otherwise. If you want to take the word of one bewitched, she handled it very nicely. She stuck strictly to facts. For instance, she did not say that Fanny Irwin and Pat Degan were snatching a snuggle; she merely said that Rita Arkoff thought they were.
Jerome Arkoff, thirty-eight, a husky six-footer with a long solemn face, gray-blue eyes, a long nose, and big ears, according to the description she had given Fred Durkin, was a television producer, successful enough to have ulcers. She had met him through Rita, who had been a model when Selma was, and who had married Arkoff about the time Selma had quit modeling and gone to work for Molloy. Arkoff and Molloy had met through their wives’ friendship, and there had been nothing special in their relations, either of harmony or of hostility. If there had been anything between them that could possibly have led to murder, Selma knew nothing of it. She conceded it was conceivable that Molloy and Rita had put horns on Arkoff without her ever suspecting it, and Arkoff had removed the blot by blotting out Molloy, but not that he had also framed Peter Hays. Arkoff had liked Peter Hays.
Thomas L. Irwin, forty, was slender, handsome, and dark-skinned, with a skimpy black mustache. He was an executive in a big printing company, in charge of sales. Selma had met him shortly after her marriage, about the same time she had met Patrick Degan. His company did printing for Degan’s organization, the Mechanics Alliance Welfare Association, MAWA for short. Fanny Irwin called Degan “Mawa.” Irwin and Molloy had got on each other’s nerves and had had some fairly hot exchanges, but Selma had never seen any indication of serious enmity.
It was a thin crop. Wolfe poked all around, but the only real dirt he found was Rita Arkoff’s suspicion about Fanny Irwin and Pat Degan, and that wasn’t very promising. Even if it was true, and even if Irwin had been aware of it or suspected it, he could hardly have expected to relieve his feelings by killing Molloy. Wolfe abandoned it as fruitless and had gone back to the relationships among the men when a phone call came from Saul Panzer, from Parker’s office. Some papers were ready for Mrs. Molloy to sign before a notary and would she please come at once. She left, and five minutes later it was four o’clock and Wolfe went up to the plant rooms.
With a couple of hours to go before company was expected, I would have liked to take a trip up to 52nd Street and help Orrie paw through the cartons, but I had been instructed to stay put, and it was just as well. There were phone calls-one from Lon Cohen, one from our client in Omaha, and one from Purley Stebbins, wanting to know if we had got a line on Johnny Keems’s movements and contacts Wednesday evening. I told him no and he was skeptical. When the doorbell rang a little after five o’clock I expected to find Purley on the stoop, come to do a little snarling, but it was a stranger-a tall, slim, narrow-shouldered young man, looking very grim. When I opened the door he was going to push right in, but I was wider and heavier than he was. He announced aggressively, “I want to see Archie Goodwin.”
“You are.”
“I are what?”
“Seeing Archie Goodwin. Who am I seeing?”
“Oh, a wise guy.”
We were off to a bad start, but we got it straightened out that he meant that I was a wise guy, not that I was seeing one; and after I had been informed that his name was William Lesser and he was a friend of Delia Brandt I let him in and took him to the office. When I offered him a chair he ignored it.
“You saw Miss Brandt last night,” he said, daring me to try to crawl out of it.
“Right,” I confessed.
“About a piece about Molloy for some magazine.”
“Right.”
“I want to know what she told you about her and Molloy.”
I swiveled the chair at my desk and sat. “Not standing up,” I told him. “It would take too long. And besides, I’d want-”
“Did she mention me?”
“Not that I remember. I’d want some kind of a reason. You don’t look like a city detective. Are you her brother or uncle or lawyer or what?”
He had his fists on his hips. “If I was her brother my name wouldn’t be Lesser, would it? I’m a friend of hers. I’m going to marry her.”
I raised the brows. “Then you’re off on the wrong foot, brother. A happy marriage must be based on mutual trust and understanding, so they say. Don’t ask me what she told me about her and Molloy, ask her.”
“I don’t have to ask her. She told me.”
“I see. If that’s how it is you’d better sit down. When are you going to be married?”
The chair I had offered was right beside him. He looked at the seat of it as if he suspected tacks, looked back at me, and sat. “Listen,” he said, “it’s not the way you make it sound. I told her I was coming to see you. It’s not that I don’t trust her, it’s having it come out in a magazine. Haven’t I got a right to find out what’s going to be printed about my wife and a man she used to work for?”
