Mrs. Irwin twice during the afternoon, and I phoned headquarters once an hour to ask about accidents, of course not mentioning Ella Reyes. My last call to headquarters, at five o’clock, I was told that the body of a woman had been found behind a pile of lumber on the Harlem River bank near One-hundred-and-fortieth Street, with nothing on it to identify it. The body was on its way to the morgue. I went there, but the body hadn’t arrived yet. When it came I looked at it, and it fits Mrs. Molloy’s description of Ella Reyes-around thirty, small and neat, coffee with cream. Only the head wasn’t neat. The back of the skull was smashed. I just came from there.”
I stood up, realized that that didn’t help matters any, and sat down. Wolfe took a long deep breath through his nose, and let it out through his mouth.
“I needn’t ask,” he said, “if you communicated your surmise.”
“No, sir. Of course not. A surmise isn’t enough.”
“No. What time does the morgue close?”
That’s one way I know he’s a genius. Only a genius would dare to ask such a question after functioning as a private detective for more than twenty years right there in Manhattan, and specializing in murder. The hell of it was, he really didn’t know.
“It doesn’t close,” Saul said.
“Then we can proceed. Archie. Call Mrs. Molloy and ask her to meet you there.”
“Nothing doing,” I said firmly. “There are very few women I would ask to meet me at the morgue, and Mrs. Molloy is not one of them. Anyway, her phone may be tapped. This sonofabitch probably taps lines in between murders to pass the time. I’ll go and get her.”
“Then go.”
I went.
Chapter 15
I SAT ON A CHAIR facing her. I had accepted the offer of a chair because on the way uptown in the taxi I had made a decision which would prolong my stay a little. She was wearing a light weight woolen dress, lemon-colored, which could have been Dacron or something, but I prefer wool.
“When I first saw you,” I told her, “fifty hours ago, I might have bet you one to twenty that Peter Hays would get clear. Now it’s the other way around. I’ll bet you twenty to one.”
She squinted at me, giving the corners of her eyes the little upturn, and her mouth worked. “You’re just bucking me up,” she said.
“No, I’m not, but I admit it’s a lead. We need your help. You remember I phoned you this morning to get the name of Mrs. Irwin’s maid and a description of her. A body of a woman with a battered skull was found today behind a lumber pile on One-hundred-and-fortieth Street, and it is now in the morgue. We think it’s Ella Reyes but we’re not sure, and we need to know. I’m going to take you down there to look. It’s your turn.”
She sat and regarded me without blinking. I sat and waited. Finally she blinked.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll go. Now?”
No shivers or shudders, no squeals or screams, no string of questions. I admit the circumstances were very favorable, since one thing was so heavy on her mind that there was no room for anything else.
“Now it is,” I told her. “But you’ll pack a bag for a night or two and we’ll take it along. You’ll stay at Wolfe’s house until this thing is over.”
She shook her head. “I won’t do that. I told you yesterday. I have to be alone. I can’t be with people and eat with people.”
“You don’t have to. You can have your meals in your room, and it’s a nice room. I’m not asking you, lady, I’m telling you. Fifty hours ago I had to swallow hard to keep from having personal feelings about you, and I don’t want to do it again, as I would have to if you were found with your skull battered. I’m perfectly willing to help get your guy out to you alive, but not to your corpse. This specimen has killed Molloy, and Johnny Keems, and now Ella Reyes. I don’t know his reason for killing her, but he might have as good a one for killing you, or think he had, and he’s not going to. Go pack a bag, and step on it. We’re in a hurry.”
I’ll be damned if she didn’t start to reach out a hand to me and then jerk it back. The instinct of a woman never to pass up an advantage probably goes back to when we had tails. But she jerked it back.
She stood up. “I think this is foolish,” she said, “but I don’t want to die now.” She left me.
Another improvement. It hadn’t been long since she had said she might as well be dead. She reappeared shortly with a hat and jacket on and carrying a brown leather suitcase. I took the case, and we were off.
To save time I intended to explain the program en route in the taxi, but I didn’t get to. After I had told the hackie, “City Mortuary, Four hundred East Twenty-ninth,” and he had given us a second look, and we had started to roll, she said she wanted to ask me a question and I told her to shoot.
She moved closer to me to get her mouth six inches from my ear, and asked, “Why did Peter try to get away with the gun in his pocket?”
“You really don’t know,” I said.
“No, I-How could I know?”
“You might have figured it out. He thought your fingerprints were on the gun and he wanted to ditch it.”
She stared. Her face was so close I couldn’t see it. “But how could-No! He couldn’t think that! He
