Seeing them and hearing them, I made a note that they hated each other. She had known him longer than I had, since she called him Ferdy, and evidently she agreed that there was nothing about him to love. I was about to start feeling that I had been too harsh with her when I saw she was lifting her brows at him.
'That,' she declared, 'is quite different from having the opinion that Vie murdered my father. I have no opinion, because I don't know.'
'Then what are you in sympathy with?'
'I want to find out. So do you. And I certainly agree that the police are being extremely stupid.'
'Who do you think killed him if Vk didn't?'
'I don't know.' The brows went up again. 'But since I have inherited my father's business, and since I am engaged to marry Vie, and since a few other things, I want very much to know. That's why I'm here with you.'
'You don't belong here!'
'I'm here, Ferdy.'
'I say you don't belong!' Pohl's creases were wriggling. 'I said so and I still say so! We came, the four of us, for a definite purpose, to get Nero Wolfe to find proof that Vie killed your father!' Pohl suddenly uncrossed his legs, leaned forward to peer at Dorothy Keyes' face, and asked in a mean little voice, 'And what if you helped him?'
Three other voices spoke at once. One said, 'They're off again.'
Another, 'Let Mr. Broadyke tell it.'
Another, 'Get one of them out of here.'
Wolfe said, 'If the job is limited to those terms, Mr.
Curtains for Three 77
1, to prove that a man named by you committed ier, you've wasted your trip. What if he didn't?'
Ill
ny things had happened in that office on the ground or of the old brownstone house owned by Nero Sfolfe during the years I had worked for him as his Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, pMednesday, and Thursday.
This gathering in the office, on this Tuesday eve in October, had its own special angle of interest, tiund Keyes, top-drawer industrial designer, had en murdered the preceding Tuesday, just a week I had read about it in the papers and had also and an opportunity to hear it privately discussed by ay friend and enemy Sergeant Purley Stebbins of lomicide, and from the professional-detectivejslant it ack me as a lulu.
It had been Keyes' custom, five days a week at sixty in the morning, to take a walk in the park, and to it the hard and silly way by walking on four legs i instead of two. He kept the four legs, which he owned 1 which were named Casanova, at the Stillwell Rid; Academy on Ninety-eighth Street just west of the Ijiark. That morning he mounted Casanova as usual, omptly at six-thirty, and rode into the park. Forty nutes later, at seven-ten, he had been seen by a nted cop, in the park on patrol, down around ty-sixth Street. His customary schedule would fgj&ye had him about there at that time. Twenty-five nutes later, at seven-thirty-five, Casanova, with his I saddle uninhabited, had emerged from the park uptown and strolled down the street to the academy. Cu 78 Rex Stout
riosity had naturally been aroused, and in three quarters of an hour had been satisfied, when a park cop had found Keyes' body behind a thicket some twenty yards from the bridle path in the park, in the latitude of Ninety-fifth Street. Later a .38-caliber revolver bullet had been dug out of his chest. The police had concluded, from marks on the path and beyond its edge, that he had been shot out of his saddle and had crawled, with difficulty, up a little slope toward a paved walk for pedestrians, and hadn't had enough life left to make it.
A horseman shot from his saddle within sight of the Empire State Building was of course a natural for the tabloids, and the other papers thought well of it too. No weapon had been found, and no eyewitnesses. No citizen had even come forward to report seeing a masked man lurking behind a tree, probably because very few New Yorkers could possibly explain being up and dressed and strolling in the park at that hour of the morning.
So the city employees had had to start at the other end and look for motives and opportunities. During the week that had passed a lot of names had been mentioned and a lot of people had received official callers, and as a result the glare had pretty well concentrated on six spots. So the papers had it, and so I gathered from Purley Stebbins. What gave the scene in our office that Tuesday afternoon its special angle of interest was the fact that five of the six spots were there seated on chairs, and apparently what they wanted Wolfe to do was to take the glare out of their eyes and get it aimed exclusively at the sixth spot, not present.
Curtains for Three 79
l IV
'Permit me to say,' Frank Broadyke offered in a cultivated baritone, 'that Mr. Pohl has put it badly. The situation is this, Mr. Wolfe, that Mr. Pohl got us tori gether and we found that each of us feels that he is being harassed unreasonably. Not only that he is unjustly suspected of a crime he did not commit, but that in a full week the police have accomplished nothing and aren't likely to, and we will be left with this unjust suspicion permanently upon us.'
Broadyke gestured with a hand. More than his bar
ritone was cultivated; he was cultivated all over. He
was somewhat younger than Pohl, and ten times as
elegant. His manner gave the impression that he was
finding it difficult just to be himself because (a) he was
in the office of a private detective, which was vulgar,
i (b) he had come there with persons with whom one
