trysts with Frank Thomas Erskine on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, or if you and Breslow are champing at the bit until he can get his wife to give him a divorce. That takes time and money, and my technique is different. I prefer to ask you and settle it. Are you?”
“Am I what? Champing?”
“At the bit.”
“No. I’m champing shrimps.”
I swallowed another one. “You see,” I explained, “they’re all up a stump, including Nero Wolfe. They’re not trying to make it more complicated just for the hell of it. The most satisfactory way out of it, the way that would please nearly everybody most, including the investigators themselves, would be the simplest way, namely that one of those six NIA people killed Cheney Boone for the obvious motive, and then killed Phoebe Gunther for some related reason. But the trouble is that if that’s how it was, how are you ever going to find out which one of the six did it, let alone prove it? Apparently not a chance in a billion. The New York police and the FBI have been working on it over a week now, giving it all they’ve got, and where are they? Tailing
“Well.” She herded cheese and sauce with her fork. “You’re buying me a lunch.”
“Certainly, and I’m telling you why, aside from your hair and other personal details. We’re all sunk unless we can find a new angle. I came to you because there’s a possibility that you know something about such an angle without realizing it. Naturally I’m assuming that you want the murderer found and punished. Otherwise-”
“I do. Of course I do.”
“Then suppose we try the direct approach and see how it sounds. Did you know any of these NIA birds personally?”
“No.”
“None of those six?”
“No.”
“How about any NIA people at all? There were around fifteen hundred of them at that dinner.”
“This seems perfectly silly.”
“Then let’s get it over with. Did you?”
“Maybe a few-or rather, their sons and daughters. I graduated from Smith a year ago, and you meet a lot of people. But if we went back over every minute of it, every word of every conversation, we wouldn’t find anything remotely resembling an angle.”
“You don’t think it would do me any good to probe?”
“No.” She glanced at her wrist watch. “Anyway, we haven’t time.”
“Okay. We can go back to it. How about your aunt? Those trysts with Erskine. Did she have trysts?”
Nina made a noise which, under the circumstances, was a fair substitute for a laugh. “Ask her. Maybe that’s what she wants to see you about. If all the pasts are being investigated as you say they are, I should think it would be established by now that Aunt Luella was utterly and exclusively devoted to my uncle, and to everything he did and everything he stood for.”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it. That’s just the point. To illustrate: what if Boone learned something in Washington that Tuesday afternoon about something Winterhoff had done, or something that made him decide to take a certain step affecting Winterhoff’s line of business, and what if he told his wife about it when he saw her in their hotel room (which you might also have heard since you were there too), and what if Mrs. Boone happened to know Winterhoff, not for trysting purposes but just knew him, and what if later, in the reception room, she was talking with Winterhoff during her third cocktail, and what if unintentionally she gave him an idea of what was up? That’s what I mean by a new angle. I could invent a thousand of them just as I invented that one, but what is needed is one that really happened. So I’m asking about your aunt’s circle of acquaintance. Is that malevolent?”
She had been making steady progress with the shrimps, which had now cooled off enough to permit it. “No,” she admitted, “but you’d better ask her. All I can tell you is about me.”
“Sure. You’re virtuous and noble. It shows in your chin. The herald angels sing. A in deportment.”
“What do you want?” she demanded. “Do you want me to tell you that I saw my aunt sneaking into a corner with Winterhoff or with any of those apes and whispering to him? Well, I didn’t. And if I had-” She stopped.
“If you had would you tell me?”
“No. In spite of the fact that in my opinion my aunt is a pain in the neck.”
“You don’t like her?”
“No. I don’t like her and I disapprove of her and I regard her as a grotesque relic. That’s spread all over my past, but it’s strictly personal.”
“You don’t go so far as to accept Breslow’s suggestion that Mrs. Boone killed her husband on account of jealousy of Phoebe Gunther, and later, at Wolfe’s house, finished up?”
“No, does anybody?”
“I couldn’t say.” Having disposed of the last shrimp, I started on the salad. “I don’t. But it does seem to be a sound idea that Mrs. Boone was jealous of Phoebe Gunther.”
“Certainly she was. There are several thousand girls and women working for the BPR, and she was jealous of all of them.”
