Three Witnesses

morning I didn’t see him at all. A little after ten a call came from Sergeant Stebbins to invite me to drop in at the District Attorney’s office at my earliest inconvenience. I don’t apologize for taking only four minutes to put weights on papers on my desk, phone up to Wolfe, and get my hat and go, because there was a chance of running into our former clients, and they might possibly be coming to the conclusion that they hadn’t had enough of Wolfe after all.

I needn’t have been in such a hurry. In a large anteroom on an upper floor at 155 Leonard Street I sat for nearly half an hour on a hard wooden chair, waiting. I was about ready to go over to the window and tell the veteran female that another three minutes was all I could spare when another female appeared, coming from a corridor that led within. That one was not veteran at all, and I postponed my ultimatum. The way she moved was worthy of study, her face invited a full analysis, her clothes deserved a complete inventory, and either her name was Ann Savage Horne or the Gazette had run the wrong picture.

She saw me taking her in, and reciprocated frankly, her head tilted a little to one side, came and sat on a chair near mine, and gave me the kind of straight look that you expect only from a queen or a trollop.

I spoke. “What’s that stole?” I asked her. “Rabbit?”

She smiled to dazzle me and darned near made it. “Where did you get the idea,” she asked back, “that vulgarity is the best policy?”

“It’s not policy; I was born vulgar. When I saw your picture in the paper I wondered what your voice was like, and I wanted to hear it. Talk some more.”

“Oh. You’re one up on me.”

“I don’t mind squaring it. I am called Goodwin, Archie Goodwin.”

“Goodwin?” she frowned a little. She brightened. “Of course! You’re in the paper too-if you’re that one. You work for Nero Wolfe?”

“I practically am Nero Wolfe, when it comes to work. Where were you yesterday afternoon from eleven minutes past two until eighteen minutes to six?”

“Let’s see. I was walking in the park with my pet flamingo. If you think that’s no alibi, you’re wrong. My flamingo can talk. Ask me some more.”

“Can your flamingo tell time?”

“Certainly. It wears a wristwatch on its neck.”

“How can it see it?”

She nodded. “I knew you’d ask that. It has been trained to tie its neck in a knot, just a plain single knot, and when it does that the watch is on a bend so that- well, Mother?” She was suddenly out of her chair and moving. “What, no handcuffs on anybody?”

Mother, Sidney Karnow’s Aunt Margaret, leading a procession emerging from the corridor, would have made two of her daughter Ann and more than half of Nero Wolfe. She was large not only in bulk but also in facial detail, each and all of her features being so big that space above her chin was at a premium. Besides her was a thin young man, runty by comparison, wearing black-rimmed glasses, and behind them were two other males, one, obviously, from his resemblance to Mother, Ann’s brother Richard, and the other a tall loose-jointed specimen who would have been called distinguished-looking by any woman between sixteen and sixty.

As I made my swift survey the flamingo trainer was going on. “Mother, this is Mr. Goodwin-the Archie Goodwin who was at the Churchill yesterday with Caroline and Paul. He’s grilling me. Mr. Goodwin, my mother, my brother Dick, my husband, Norman Horne -no, not the one with the cheaters, that’s Jim Beebe, the lawyer to end all laws. This is my husband.” The distinguished-looking one had pushed by and was beside her. She was flowing on. “You know how disappointed I was at the District Attorney being so godawful polite to us, but Mr. Goodwin is different. He’s going to give me the third degree-physically, I mean; he’s built for it, and I expect I’ll go to pieces and confess-”

Her husband’s palm pressed over her mouth, firm but not rough, stopped her. “You talk too much, darling,” he said tolerantly.

“It’s her sense of humor,” Aunt Margaret explained. “All the same, Ann dear, it is out of place, with poor Sidney just cruelly murdered. Cruelly.”

“Nuts,” Dick Savage snapped.

“It was cruel,” his mother insisted. “Murder is cruel.”

“Sure it was,” he agreed, “but for us Sid has been dead more than two years, and he’s been alive again only two weeks, and we never even saw him, so what do you expect?”

“I suggest,” Beebe the lawyer put in, in a high thin voice that fitted his stature perfectly, “that this is rather a public spot for a private discussion. Shall we go?”

“I can’t,” Ann declared. “Mr. Goodwin is going to wear me down and finally break me. Look at his hard gray eyes. Look at his jaw.”

“Now, darling,” Norman Horne said affectionately, and took her elbow and started her toward the door. The others filed after them, with Beebe in the rear. Not one mentioned the pleasure it had given them to meet me, though the lawyer did let me have a nod of farewell as he went by.

As I stood and watched the door closing behind them the veteran female’s voice came. “Mr. Mandelbaum will see you, Mr. Goodwin.”

Only two assistant district attorneys rate corner rooms, and Mandelbaum wasn’t one of them. Halfway down the corridor, his door was standing open, and, entering, I had a surprise. Mandelbaum was at his desk, and across from him, on one of the two spare chairs that the little room sported, was a big husky guy with graying hair, a broad red face, and gray eyes that had been found hard to meet by tougher babies than Mrs. Norman Horne. If she called mine hard she should have seen those of Inspector Cramer of Homicide.