She cut me off. “Oh, the bell’s ringing! It must be Bill.”
A little click and she was gone. It didn’t matter much, since there was soon an interruption at my end. I had just hung up when the sound came of Wolfe’s elevator descending, and he had just entered and was crossing to his desk when the doorbell rang and I had to go to the hall to receive the company. I have already told about that, about Rita Arkoff ordering her mate to hang up his hat, and about Tom Irwin moving his chair next to his wife’s and holding her hand. But, looking back, I see that I haven’t mentioned Selma Molloy. I could go back and insert her, but I don’t care to cover up. I am not responsible for my subconscious, and if it arranged, without my knowing it, to leave Selma out because it didn’t want you to know how it felt about her, that’s its lookout. I now put her back in. Around five o’clock she had returned from her errand at Parker’s office, and, at Wolfe’s suggestion, had gone up to the plant rooms to look at the orchids. He had brought her down with him, and she was sitting in the red leather chair, after greeting her friends. Try again, subconscious.
Chapter 11
THE EXCHANGE OF GREETINGS between Selma and the quartet had seemed a little cramped for old friends, but that might have been expected. After all, she was aiding and abetting a program that might lead to one of them getting charged with murder, and they had been invited by her to the office of a well-known private detective. When they had got seated she sent her eyes to Wolfe and kept them there. Their eyes were more interested in her than in Wolfe. I concentrated on them.
Selma’s descriptions of Tom and Jerry had been adequate and accurate. Jerome Arkoff was big and broad, taller than me, and so solemn it must have hurt, but it could have been the ulcers that hurt. Tom Irwin, with his dark skin and thin little clipped mustache, looked more like a saxophone artist than a printing executive, even while holding his wife’s hand. His wife, Fanny, was obviously not at her best, with her face giving the impression that she was trying not to give in to a raging headache, but even so she was no eyesore. Under favorable conditions she would have been very decorative. She was a blonde, and a headache is much harder on a blonde than on a brunette; some brunettes are actually improved by a mild one. This brunette, Rita Arkoff, didn’t need one. There was a faint touch of snake hips in her walk, a faint suggestion of slant at the corners of her eyes, and a faint hint of a pout in the set of her well-tinted lips. But an order-giver…
Wolfe’s eyes went from the Arkoffs on his left to the Irwins on the right. “I don’t presume,” he said, “to thank you for coming, since it was at Mrs. Molloy’s request. She has told you what I’m after. Mr. Albert Freyer, counsel for Peter Hays, wishes to establish a basis for a retrial or an appeal, and I’m trying to help him. I assume you are all in sympathy with that?”
They exchanged glances. “Sure we are,” Jerome Arkoff declared. “If you can find one. Is there any chance?”
“I think so.” Wolfe was easy and relaxed. “Certain aspects have not been thoroughly investigated-not by the police because of the overwhelming evidence against Peter Hays, and not by Mr. Freyer because he lacked funds and facilities. They deserve-”
“Does he have funds now?” Tom Irwin asked. His voice didn’t fit his physique. You would have expected a squeak, but it was a deep baritone.
“No. My interest has been engaged, no matter how, and I am indulging it. Those aspects deserve inquiry, and last evening I sent a man to look into one of them-a man named Johnny Keems, who worked for me intermittently. He was to learn if there was any possibility that on the evening the murder was committed, January third, the invitation to Mrs. Molloy to join a theater party had been designed with the purpose of getting her out of the way. Of course it didn’t-”
“You sent that man?” Arkoff demanded.
His wife looked reproachfully at her friend. “Selma darling, really! You know perfectly well-”
“If you please!” Wolfe showed her a palm, and his tone sharpened. “Save your resentment for a need; I’m imputing no malignity to any of you. I was about to say, it didn’t have to be designed, since the murderer may have merely seized an opportunity; and if it was designed, it didn’t have to be one of you who designed it. You might have been quite unaware of it. That was what I sent Mr. Keems to find out, and he was to begin by seeing you, all four of you. First on his list was Mrs. Arkoff, since she had phoned the invitation to Mrs. Molloy.” His eyes leveled at Rita. “Did he see you, madam?”
She started to answer, but her husband cut in. “Hold it, Rita.” Apparently he could give orders too. He looked at Wolfe. “What’s the big idea? If you sent him why don’t you ask him? Why drag us down here? Did someone else send him?”
Wolfe nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them, and nodded again. “A logical inference, Mr. Arkoff, but wrong. I sent him, but I can’t ask him, because he’s dead. On Riverside Drive in the Nineties, shortly before midnight last night, an automobile hit him and killed him. It’s possible that it was an accident, but I don’t think so. I think he was murdered. I think that, working on the assignment I had given him, he had uncovered something that was a mortal threat to someone. Therefore I must see the people he saw and find out what was said. Did he see you, Mrs. Arkoff?”
Her husband stopped her again. “This is different,” he told Wolfe, and he looked and sounded different. “
Wolfe shook his head. “We won’t go into that, Mr. Arkoff, and we don’t have to because the police also suspect that it wasn’t. A sergeant at the Homicide Bureau phoned me today to ask if Mr. Keems was working for me last night, and if so, what his assignment was and whom he had seen. Mr. Goodwin put him off-”
“He phoned again later,” I put in.
“Yes? What did you tell him?”
“That we were trying to check and would let him know as soon as we had anything useful.”
Wolfe went back to them. “I wanted to talk with you people myself first. I wanted to learn what you had told Mr. Keems, and whether he had uncovered anything that might have threatened one of you or someone else. I’ll have-”
Fanny Irwin blurted, “He didn’t uncover anything with me!” She had got her hand back from her husband’s hold.
