I agreed with her absolutely. There was nothing I could say that would be worthy of the occasion. Besides, my name wasn’t Porphyro. But I didn’t want to turn and go with no response at all, so I reached to the trellis beside me and picked a red rose, pressed it to my lips, and tossed it to her. Then I went.
At a phone booth in a drugstore a few blocks away I dialed Alice Porter’s number in Carmel, and again there was no answer. That left me with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Of course Wolfe’s idea in telling me to go and make the acquaintance of the quartet had been simply to get rid of me, since he knew that if I stuck around I would ride him; and even if I didn’t ride him I would look at him. So I dialed another number, got an answer, made a suggestion about ways of passing the time for the next eight or nine hours, and had it accepted. Then I dialed the number I knew best and told Fritz I wouldn’t be home for dinner. It was well after midnight when I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone on West 35th Street and used my key. There was no note for me on my desk. I left one in the kitchen for Fritz, telling him not to expect me for breakfast until ten o’clock. I can always use eight hours’ sleep, and if Wolfe snapped out of it during the night he knew where to find me.
When I went down to breakfast Friday morning I had a packed bag with me, and at a quarter to eleven I took my second cup of coffee to the office, to my desk, and buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone. Wolfe’s voice came. “Yes?”
“Good morning.” I was cheerful. “You may remember that I have accepted an invitation for the weekend.”
“Yes.”
“Should I call it off?”
“No.”
“Then I have a suggestion. I saw three of them yesterday, Jacobs and Rennert and Miss Ogilvy, but not Alice Porter. She didn’t answer her phone. As you know, Miss Rowan’s place, where I’m going, is near Katonah, and it’s less than half an hour from there to Carmel. Miss Rowan expects me at six o’clock. If I leave now I can go to Carmel first and have the afternoon for making the acquaintance of Miss Porter.”
“Is there anything in the mail that requires attention?”
“No. Nothing that can’t wait.”
“Then go.”
“Right. I’ll be back late Sunday evening. Do you want a report on the three I saw before I go?”
“No. If you had anything exigent to report you would have said so.”
“Sure. Miss Rowan’s phone number is on your desk. I’ll give her your regards. Don’t overdo.”
He hung up. The big fat bum. I wrote the phone number on his memo pad, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz good-by, got my bag, and was gone.
There is always traffic on the West Side Highway, twenty-four hours a day, but it thinned out beyond the city limits, and north of Hawthorne Circle I had long stretches to myself. After leaving Route 22 at Croton Falls and meandering through patches of woods and along shores of reservoirs for a few miles, I stopped for an hour at the Green Fence, known to me, where a woman with a double chin fries chicken the way my Aunt Margie did out in Ohio. Fritz does not fry chicken. At two o’clock I was rolling again, with only a couple of miles to go.
There was no point in phoning, since I was there anyway, but I almost had to, to find out where her cottage was. The cop on Main Street had never heard of Alice Porter. The man in the drugstone had, he had put up prescriptions for her, but didn’t know where she lived. The man at the filling station thought her place was out toward Kent Cliffs but wasn’t sure. He advised me to consult Jimmy Murphy, who ran a taxi. Jimmy rattled it off: a mile and a half west on Route 301, right on a blacktop for a mile, right on dirt for half a mile, mailbox on the right.
It checked. The half a mile of dirt was uphill, winding, narrow, and stony. The mailbox was at the mouth of a lane, even narrower, through a gap in a stone fence, no gate. I turned in and eased my way along the ruts to where the lane ended in front of a little house painted blue, one story. There was no car in sight. As I climbed out and shut the door a little bicoloured mutt trotted up and started to growl, but his curiosity to see what I smelled like close up was too much for him, and the growl petered out. I reached down and scratched the back of his neck, and we were pals. He went with me to help knock on the door, and when, after knocking got no response, I tried the knob and found it was locked, he was as disappointed as I was.
With my years of training as a detective, I reached a conclusion. Dogs have to be fed. There was no other house in sight, no nearby neighbour to pinch-feed for Alice Porter. Therefore she would return. A top-drawer detective, say Nero Wolfe, could have found out exactly when she would return by looking at the dog’s teeth and feeling its belly, but I’m not in that class. I looked over the grounds-four young trees and half a dozen shrubs scattered here and there-and then moseyed around to the back. There was a neat little vegetable garden, no weeds, and I pulled some radishes and ate them. Then I went to the car and got a book from my bag, I forget what, but it wasn’t
She came at five-twenty-eight. A ’58 Ford station wagon came bumping along the ruts and stopped back of the Heron, and she scrambled out and headed for me. The mutt went bounding to meet her, and she halted to give him a pat. I shut my book and stood up.
“You looking for me?” she asked.
“I am if you’re Miss Alice Porter,” I said.
She knew who I was. It’s easy to make a mistake on a thing like that, I had made plenty in my time, but it was in her eyes that she had recognized me or I had better quit the detective business and take up truck- driving or window-washing. That was nothing startling; it happened now and then. My picture hadn’t been in the papers as often as President Eisenhower’s, but it had once made the front page of the
“That’s my name,” she said.
From her photograph I had guessed 150, but she had put on ten pounds. Her round face was bigger
