not be irrelevant, because it may partly account for Paul’s attitude. Also I suppose we’re over-sensitive about any threat of scandal. Pneumonia is a touchy subject with us. My father died of pneumonia twenty years ago, but it was thought by the police he was murdered. Not only by the police. He was in a ground-floor bedroom in our house at Mount Kisco, and it was January, and on a stormy night, extremely cold, someone raised two windows and left them wide open. I found him dead at five o’clock in the morning. Snow was drifted a foot deep on the floor and there was snow on the bed. My sister Louise, who was caring for him that night, was sound asleep on a couch in the next room. It was thought that some hot chocolate she drank at midnight had been drugged, but that wasn’t proven. The windows weren’t locked and could have been opened from the outside – in fact, they must have been. My father had been a little shrewd in some of his real-estate dealings, and there were people in the community who had been – uh – who were not fond of him.”
Fyfe repeated the mild little gesture. “So you see, there is the coincidence. Unfortunately, my brother Bert – he was only twenty-two then – he had quarreled with my father and was not living at home. He was living in a rooming house about a mile away and had a job in a garage. The police thought they had enough evidence to arrest him for murder, and he was tried, but the evidence certainly wasn’t conclusive, because he was acquitted. Anyhow he had an alibi. Up to two o’clock that night he had been playing cards with a friend – Vincent Tuttle, who later married my sister – in Tuttle’s room in the rooming house, and it had stopped snowing shortly after two, and the windows must have been opened long before it stopped snowing. But Bert resented some of our testimony on the witness stand – Paul’s and Louise’s and mine – though all we did was tell the truth about things that were known anyway – for example, Bert’s quarrel with my father. Everybody knew about it. The day after he was acquitted Bert left town, and we never heard from him, not a word for twenty years. So that’s why I used the word ‘reconciled.’”
Wolfe had returned the knife to his pocket and was putting the oilstone in the drawer.
“Actually,” Fyfe said, “Arrow was wrong when he stated that Bert possessed nothing that had not been acquired with income from the uranium. Bert never claimed his share of our father’s estate, and they couldn’t find him, and we have never applied for its distribution. His one-quarter share was around sixty thousand dollars, and now it’s more than double that. Of course Paul and Louise and I will get it now, but honestly it will give me no pleasure. I may say frankly, Mr. Wolfe, that I am sorry Bert came back. It reopened an old sore, and now his death, and the way it happened, and Paul acting like this…”
It was one minute to four, and Wolfe was pushing his chair back and leaving it. “Yes indeed, Mr. Fyfe,” he concurred. “A nuisance alive and an affliction dead. Please give Mr. Goodwin the necessary information, and phone when you have made the arrangements for this evening.”
He headed for the door.
II
A LITTLE RESEARCH into backgrounds is often a help, even in cases that apparently don’t call for it, and after Fyfe left I made a few phone calls to various quarters, getting a skimpy crop of useless information. David had taught at Audubon High School for twelve years, and had been head of the English Department for four. Paul’s real estate agency in Mount Kisco was no whirlwind but was seemingly solvent. Vincent Tuttle’s drugstore, also in Mount Kisco, was his own, and was thought to be doing fine. David had had no address or phone number for the nurse, Anne Goren, but Wolfe wanted them all, and I found her in the Manhattan book, listed as an RN. The first two times I dialed her number I got a busy signal, and the next three times no answer. Nor could I get Johnny Arrow. Calls to the Churchill Towers go through the Churchill switchboard, and I left word for him to call, and made half a dozen tries. Finally, just before Fritz announced dinner, I got Tim Evarts, assistant house dick, security officer to you, and asked him a few discreet questions. The answers were both for and against. For, the rent was paid on the de luxe Towers apartment, and the bar and restaurant staff all liked Johnny Arrow, especially his tipping standards. Against, Arrow had plugged a guy in the bar Saturday night, repeatedly and persistently, and had been removed by cops. Tim said that technically it had been a fine performance, but the Churchill bar wasn’t the place for it.
Fyfe had phoned that the arrangements had been made. At nine o’clock, when Doctor Frederick Buhl arrived, Wolfe and I were through in the dining room, having put away around four pounds of salmon mousse, Wolfe’s own recipe, and a peck of summer salad, and were back in the office. The doorbell took me to the hall, and as I switched on the stoop light what I saw through the one-way glass panel of the front door gave me a double surprise. Doctor Buhl, if it was he, was no doddering old worn-out hick doc; he was an erect, gray-haired, well-dressed man of distinction. And with him was a young female having her own personal points of distinction, discernible even by a swift glance at a distance.
I went and opened up. He moved aside for her to enter and then followed, saying that he was Doctor Buhl and had an appointment with Nero Wolfe. No hat covered his crown of distinguished gray hair, so there was nothing for the rack, and I led them down the hall and into the office. Inside, he halted to dart a glance around, then crossed to Wolfe’s desk and said aggressively, “I’m Frederick Buhl. David Fyfe asked me to come. What is all this nonsense?”
“I don’t know,” Wolfe murmured. He keeps his voice down to a murmur after a meal, unless goaded. “I’ve been hired to find out. Sit down, sir. The young woman?”
“She’s the nurse. Miss Anne Goren. Sit down, Anne.”
She was already sitting, in a chair I had moved up for her. I was making revisions in my opinion of Paul Fyfe. Probably he had been too impetuous, but the temptation had been strong; and the marks on her neck and cheeks and wrists must have been superficial since no scars were visible. Also a nurse’s uniform is much more provocative than the blue cotton print she was wearing, with a bolero jacket to match. Even in the cotton print, I could have – but skip it. She was there on business. She thanked me for the chair, coldly, no smile.
Doctor Buhl, in the red leather chair, demanded, “Well, what is it?”
Wolfe murmured, “Didn’t Mr. Fyfe tell you?”
“He told me that Paul thought there was something suspicious about Bert’s death and wanted to go to the police, and David and Louise and Vincent Tuttle couldn’t talk him out of it, and they agreed to get you to investigate and accept your decision, and he had talked with you, and you insisted on seeing me. I think it quite unnecessary. I am a reputable physician, and I signed a death certificate.”
“So I understand,” Wolfe murmured. “But if my decision is to be final it should be well fortified. I
