The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

might conceivably have taken steps to make the office vacant. Incidentally, he would also have placed under grave suspicion the members of an organization he mortally hates-which also has happened.”

Solomon Dexter was smiling at him, not a loving smile. “Are you preferring a charge, Mr. Winterhoff?”

“Not at all.” The other met his gaze. “As I said, merely an illustration.”

“Because I could mention one little difficulty. I was in Washington until eleven o’clock Tuesday evening. You’ll have to get around that somehow.”

“Nevertheless,” Frank Thomas Erskine said firmly and judicially, “Mr. Winterhoff has made an obvious point.”

“One of several,” Breslow asserted. “There are others. We all know what they are, so why not out with them? The talk about Boone and his secretary, Phoebe Gunther, has been going on for months, and whether Mrs. Boone was going to get a divorce or not. And lately a reason, a mighty good reason from Phoebe Gunther’s standpoint, why Boone had to have a divorce no matter how his wife felt about it. What about it, Inspector, when you’re dealing with a murder don’t you think it’s legitimate to take an interest in things like that?”

Alger Kates stood up and announced in a trembling voice: “I want to protest that this is utterly despicable and beyond the bounds of common decency!”

His face was white and he stayed on his feet. I had not supposed he had it in him. He was the BPR research man who had taken some up-to-the-minute statistics to the Waldorf to be used in Boone’s speech and had discovered the body. If my attention had been directed to him on the subway and I had been asked to guess what he did for a living, I would have said, “Research man.” He was that to a T, in size, complexion, age, and chest measurement. But the way he rose to protest-apparently he led the BPR, as there represented, in spunk. I grinned at him.

From the reaction he got you might have thought that what the NIA hated and feared most about the BPR was its research. They all howled at him. I caught the gist of only two of their remarks, one from Breslow to the effect that he had only said what everyone was saying, and the wind-up from Don O’Neill, in the accents of The Boss:

“You can keep out of this, Kates! Sit down and shut up!”

That seemed to me to be overdoing it a little, since he wasn’t paying Kates’s wages; and then Erskine, twisting around in the red leather chair to face the research man, told him cuttingly:

“Since you didn’t regard the President of the NIA as a fit person to bring the news to, you are hardly acceptable as a judge of common decency.”

So, I thought, that’s why they’re jumping on him, because he told the hotel manager instead of them. He should have had more sense than to hurt their feelings like that. Erskine wasn’t through with him, but was going on:

“Surely, Mr. Kates, you are aware that personal emotions, such as jealousy, revenge, or frustration, often result in violence, and therefore they are proper matters of inquiry when a murder has been committed. It would be proper to ask you, for example, whether it is true that you wanted to marry Boone’s niece, and you were aware that Boone opposed it and intended to prevent-”

“Why, you big liar!” Nina Boone cried.

“Whether it is proper or not,” Kates said in a high thin voice that was still trembling, “it certainly is not proper for you to ask me anything whatever. If I were asked that by the police, I would reply that part of it is true and part of it isn’t. There are at least two hundred men in the BPR organization who wanted, and it is a reasonable assumption that they still want, to marry Mr. Boone’s niece. I was not under the impression that Mr. Boone was having anything to say about it one way or another, and, knowing Miss Boone as I do, not intimately but fairly well, I doubt it.” Kates moved not his eyes, but his head, to change his target. “I would like to ask Mr. Wolfe, who has admitted that he is in the pay of the NIA, if we were invited here for a typical NIA inquisition.”

“And I,” Solomon Dexter put in, his voice sounding like a train in a tunnel in contrast to Kates’s, “would like to inform you, Mr. Wolfe, that you are by no means the only detective in the employ of the NIA. For nearly a year executives and other BPR personnel have been followed by detectives, and their whole lives have been thoroughly explored in an effort to get something on them. I don’t know whether you have taken part in those operations-”

More bedlam from the NIA, taking the form chiefly, as near as I could get it, of indignant denials. At that point, if it hadn’t been for my seating arrangements, the two armies would probably have made contact. Wolfe was looking exasperated, but making no effort to stop it, possibly aware that it would take more energy than he wished to spend. What quieted them was Inspector Cramer getting to his feet and showing a palm, officially.

“I would like,” he barked, “before going, to say three things. First, Mr. Dexter, I can assure you that Wolfe has not helped to tail your personnel or explore their lives, because there’s not enough money in that kind of work. Second, Mr. Erskine and you other gentlemen, the police are aware that jealousy and things like that are often behind a murder, and we are not apt to forget it. Third, Mr. Kates, I have known Wolfe for twenty years, and I can tell you why you were invited here this evening. We were invited because he wanted to learn all he could as quick as he could, without leaving his chair and without Goodwin’s buying gas and wearing out his tires. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was a sucker to come.”

He turned. “Come on, Sergeant. You coming, Spero?”

Of course that ended it. The BPR didn’t want any more anyhow, and though the NIA, or part of it, showed an inclination to stay and make suggestions, Wolfe used his veto power on that. With everyone out of their chairs, Ed Erskine crossed the lines again and tried another approach on Nina, but it appeared, from where I stood, that she disposed of that without even opening her mouth. I did much better, in spite of my being associated with Wolfe, who was in the pay of the NIA. When I told her that it was impossible to get a taxi in that part of town and offered to drive her and her aunt to their hotel, she said:

“Mr. Dexter is taking us.”

A frank, friendly statement, and I appreciated it.

But after they had all gone and Wolfe and I were alone in the office, it appeared that I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it even if she had accepted. I remarked to Wolfe: