Three Doors to Death (The Rex Stout Library)

Routine would have been to call Wolfe and get his opinion of my interesting idea, but he had sicked me onto them with nothing to go by but his snooty remark that circumstances might offer suggestions, so I went right past him. I could have got what I wanted from 20th Street, but if I got a break and my hunch grew feathers I didn't want the Homicide boys in on it, so the number I dialed was that of the Gazette office. Lon Cohen was always there until midnight, so I soon had him.

'I'm looking,' I told him, 'for a good doctor to pierce my ears for earrings, and I think I've found one. Call me at this number' – I gave it to him – 'and tell me who New York license UMX four three three one seven belongs to.'

He had me repeat it, which shouldn't have been necessary with a veteran newspaperman. I hung up and did my waiting outside the booth, since the temperature inside was well over a hundred. The phone rang in five minutes, exactly par for that routine item of research, and a voice – not Lon's, for he was a busy man at that time of night – gave me a name and address: Frederick M. Cutler, M.D., with an office on East 65th and a residence on Park Avenue.

It was ten blocks away, so I went for the car and drove it, parked on the avenue a polite distance from the canopy with the number on it, and went in. The lobby was all it should have been in that locality, and the night man took exactly the right attitude toward a complete stranger. On my way I had decided what would be exactly the right attitude for me.

'Dr. Frederick M. Cutler,' I said. 'Please phone up.'

'Name?'

'Tell him a private detective named Goodwin has an important question to ask him about the patient he was visiting forty minutes ago.'

I thought that would do. If that got me to him my hunch would already have an attractive fuzz on its bare pink skin. So when, after finishing at the phone, he crossed to the elevator with me and told his colleague I was to be conveyed to 12C, my heart had accelerated a good ten per cent.

At 12C I was admitted by the man I had seen leaving the Whitten house with his black case. Here, with a better view of him, I could note such details as the gray in his hair, his impatient gray-blue eyes, and the sag at the corners of his wide full mouth. Also I could see, through an arch, men and women at a couple of card tables in the large room beyond.

'Come this way, please,' my victim said gruffly, and I followed him down a hall and through a door. This was a small room, its walls solid with books, and a couch, a desk, and three chairs, leaving no space at all. He closed the door, confronted me, and was even gruffer.

'What do you want?'

The poor guy had already given me at least half of what I wanted, but of course he would have had to be very nifty on the draw not to.

'My name,' I said, 'is Archie Goodwin, and I work for Nero Wolfe.'

'So that's who you are. What do you want?'

'I was sent to see Mrs. Floyd Whitten, and while I was parking my car in front I saw you leaving her house. Naturally I recognized you, since you are pretty well known.' I thought he might as well have a lump of sugar. 'I went in and had a little talk with Mrs. Whitten up in her bedroom. Her son said, and she said, that the trouble was her heart. But then how come? There is a widespread opinion that she is in splendid health and always has been. At her age she plays tennis. She walks up two flights to her bedroom.

People who know her admire her healthy complexion. But when I saw her, there in bed, she was as pale as a corpse, in fact she was pale like a corpse, and she kept taking long sighing breaths. I'm not a doctor, but I happen to know that those two symptoms – that kind of pallor and that kind of breathing – go with a considerable loss of blood, say over a pint. She didn't have a cardiac hemorrhage, did she?'

Cutler's jaw was working. 'The condition of my patient is none of your business. But Mrs. Whitten has had an extremely severe shock.'

'Yeah, I know she has. But the business I'm in, I have seen quite a few people under the shock of the sudden death of someone they loved, and I've seen a slew of reactions, and this one is brand new. The pallor possibly, but combined with those long frequent sighs?' I shook my head. 'I will not settle for that. Besides, why did you let me come up after the kind of message I sent, if it's just shock? Why did you let me in and herd me back here so private? At this point I think you ought to either toss me out or invite me to sit down.'

He did neither. He glared.

'Lookit,' I said, perfectly friendly. 'Do some supposing. Suppose you were called there and found her with a wound and a lot of blood gone. You did what was needed, and when she asked you to keep it quiet you decided to humor her and ignore your legal obligation to make a report to the authorities in such cases. Ordinarily that would be nothing for a special broadcast; doctors do it every day. But this is far from ordinary. Her husband was murdered, stabbed to death. A man named Pompa has been charged with it, but he's not convicted yet. Suppose one of the five people hid in the dining room killed Whitten? They could have, easily, while Pompa and Mrs. Whitten were in the living room – a whole half-hour. Those five people are in Mrs. Whitten's house with her now, and two of them live there. Suppose the motive for killing Whitten is good for her too, and one of them tried it, and maybe tonight or tomorrow makes another try and this time it works? How would you feel about clamming up on the first try? How would others feel when it came out, as it would?'

'You're crazy,' Cutler growled. 'They're her sons and daughters!'

'Oh, for God's sake,' I growled back at him. 'And you a doctor who sees inside people? The parents who have been killed by sons and daughters would fill a hundred cemeteries. I'm not crazy, but I'm good and scared. I guess I scare easier than you. I say that woman has lost blood, and you're not denying it, so one of two things has to happen. Either you give me the lowdown confidentially, and it will have to sound right, or I suggest to the cops that they send a doctor to have a look at her. Then if my supposes all come true I won't have to feel that I helped to kill her. How you will feel is your affair.'

'The police have no right to invade a citizen's privacy in that manner.'

'You'd be surprised. In a house where a murder was committed, and she was there and so were they?'

'Your suppositions are contrary to the facts.'