Plot It Yourself

at least it was worth exploring. When she had gone I spent an hour on the telephone, getting five people, highly competent detectives who help me on occasion; and when they came at eight o’clock this morning I gave them assignments. They are present and I wish to introduce them. If you will please turn your heads?”

They twisted around.

“In front at the left,” Wolfe told them, “is Miss Theodolinda Bonner. Beside her is Miss Sally Corbett. In the rear at the left is Mr Saul Panzer, next to him is Mr Fred Durkin, and at the right is Mr Orrie Cather. I should explain that before they went on their separate errands they were supplied with photographs of Alice Porter, procured by Mr Panzer at a newspaper office. I’m going to ask them to report to you, Mr Cather?”

Orrie got up and went to the corner of Wolfe’s desk and stood facing the committee. “My job,” he said, “was to find out if she had ever been in contact with Simon Jacobs. Of course the best place to start was with the widow. I went to the apartment on Twenty-first Street and there was no one there. I asked around among the other tenants, and I-”

“Briefly, Orrie. Just the meat.”

“Yes, sir. I finally found her at a friend’s house in New Jersey. She didn’t want to talk, and I had a time with her. I showed her the photograph, and she recognized it. She had seen the subject twice about three years ago. The subject had come to the apartment to see her husband and had stayed quite a while both times, two hours or more. She didn’t know what they had talked about. Her husband had told her it was about some stories for a magazine. I tried to get her more exact on the time, but the closest she could come was that it was in the spring of 1956 and the two visits were about three weeks apart. Her husband hadn’t told her the name of the subject.”

Wolfe asked, “Was her recognition of the photograph at all doubtful?”

“No, she was positive. She recognized it right away. She said she-”

Alice Porter blurted, “You’re a liar! I never went to see Simon Jacobs! I never saw him anywhere!”

“You’ll get a turn, Miss Porter,” Wolfe told her. “As long a turn as you want. That will do, Orrie. Miss Corbett?”

Sally Corbett was one of the two women who, a couple of years back, had made me feel that there might be some flaw in my attitude toward female dicks. The other one was Dol Bonner. Their physical characteristics, including their faces, were quite different, but were both of a description that makes a woman looked at from a personal viewpoint; and they were good operatives. Sally went and took Orrie’s place at the corner of Wolfe’s desk, turned her head to look at him, got a nod, and faced the audience.

“My job was the same as Mr Cather’s,” she said, “except that it was with Jane Ogilvy instead of Simon Jacobs. I didn’t get to see Mrs Ogilvy, Jane’s mother, until this afternoon. I showed her the photograph and asked her if she had ever seen the subject. After studying it she said she was pretty sure she had. She said that one day more than two years ago the subject had come to see her daughter, and they had gone to the cloister. If you have read the newspapers you know about the building that Jane called the cloister. In half an hour or so they returned to the house because the electric heater in the cloister was out of order. They went up to Jane’s room and were there for three hours or more. Mrs Ogilvy didn’t learn the subject’s name and never saw her again. By association with other matters she figured that it was in February, 1957 that the subject had come to see her daughter. She didn’t make the identification positive, but she said she could, one way or the other, if she saw the subject in person instead of a photograph.”

I turned my head for a look at Alice Porter. She was on the edge of the chair, rigid, her eyes half closed, her head thrust forward, and her lips parted with the tip of her tongue showing. She was looking at Wolfe, oblivious of the eight pairs of eyes, including mine, that were aimed at her. When Sally Corbett returned to her chair and Fred Durkin took her place at the corner of Wolfe’s desk, Alice Porter s gaze didn’t leave Wolfe, even when Fred spoke.

“I had Kenneth Rennert,” Fred said, “and the trouble was there wasn’t any widow or mother or anyone like that. I saw about twenty people, other tenants in the building and the building superintendent, and friends and acquaintances, but none of them recognized the subject from the photograph. From two or three of them I got a steer to a restaurant on Fifty-second Street, the Pot-au-Feu, where Rennert often ate lunch and sometimes dinner, and that was the only place I got anything at all. One of the waiters, the one that had the table where Rennert usually sat, thought the subject had been there twice with Rennert, once for lunch and once for dinner. He was cagey. Of course he knew Rennert had been murdered. He might have opened up more if I had slipped him a twenty, but of course that was out. He thought it had been in the late winter or spring last year. He thought if he saw the subject he could tell better than from a photograph. He had liked Rennert. The only reason he talked at all was because I told him it might help to get the murderer. I think if he was sure of that and if he saw the subject in person-”

Wolfe stopped him. “That will serve, Fred. The ifs are ahead of us. Mr Panzer?” As Fred went back to his chair and Saul came forward, Wolfe told the committee, “I should explain that Mr Panzer’s assignment was of a different nature. It was given to him because it required illegal entry to a private dwelling. Yes, Saul?”

The committee had Saul’s profile because he was turned to face Alice Porter. “Yesterday evening,” he said, “as instructed, I drove to Alice Porter’s home near Carmel, arriving at twelve minutes past ten. I opened the door with a key, one of an assortment I had, and entered, and made a search. On a shelf in a cupboard I found some sheets of paper with typewriting, clipped together, twenty-five pages. The first page was headed ‘Opportunity Knocks,’ and below that it said ‘By Alice Porter.’ It was an original, not a carbon. I have delivered it to Mr Wolfe.”

He glanced at Wolfe, and Wolfe spoke. “It’s here in a drawer of my desk. I have read it. In plot and characters and action it is identical with the story, ‘Opportunity Knocks,’ by Alice Porter, the manuscript of which was found in a file in the office of the Victory Press. But that one, the one found in the file, was written in Alice Porter’s natural style, the style of her published book, The Moth That Ate Peanuts, whereas this one, the one found by Mr Panzer in Miss Porter’s house, was written in her assumed style, the one she had used for the three stories on which the previous claims had been based. Call them A and B. The obvious inference is that in writing the story that was to be the basis for her claim against Amy Wynn she had tried both styles, A and B, and had decided, for whatever reason, to use the one in style B. What else did you find, Saul?”

Saul’s eyes were again on Alice Porter. “That was all in the house,” he said. “But she had gone to New York with Mr Goodwin in his car, so her car was there, and I searched it. Under the front seat, wrapped in newspaper, I found a knife, a kitchen knife with a black handle. Its blade is seven inches long and an inch wide. I have delivered it to Mr Wolfe. If he has examined it with-”

He sprang forward. Alice Porter had bounced out of her chair and dived for Amy Wynn, her arms