Wolfe didn’t waste a bellow on him. He merely shook his head. “No, sir. Apparently you don’t know what you’re here for. You’re here to give me a chance to wriggle out of a predicament. I am desperate. I dislike acting under compulsion in any case, and I abominate being obliged to divulge information about a client’s affairs that I have received in confidence. The starting point is my conclusion that one of you is a murderer, not to go on from there to identify the culprit and expose him-that isn’t what I was hired for-but to show you the fix I’m in. What I desperately need is not sanction for my conclusion, but plausible ground for rejecting it. I want to impeach it. As for your notion that Mr. Goodwin took the gun, in a stratagem devised by me with your father’s knowledge, that is mere drivel and is no credit to your wit. If it had happened that way I would be in no predicament at all; I would produce the gun myself, demonstrate its innocence, and have a good night’s sleep.”
“If death ever slept,” Lois blurted.
Their heads all turned to her. Not, probably, that they expected her to supply anything helpful; they were glad to have an excuse to take their eyes off Wolfe and relieve the strain. They hadn’t been exchanging glances. Apparently no one felt like meeting other eyes.
“That’s all,” Lois said. “What are you all looking at me for? That just came out.”
The heads went back to Wolfe. Trella asked, “Am I dumb? Or did you say you want us to prove you’re wrong?”
“That’s one way of putting it, Mrs. Jarrell. Yes.”
“How do we prove it?”
Wolfe nodded. “That’s the difficulty. I don’t expect you to prove a negative. The simplest way would be to produce the gun, but I’ve abandoned hope of that. I don’t intend to go through the dreary routine of inquiry on opportunity; that would take all night, and checking your answers would take an army a week, and I have no army. But I have gathered from the public reports that Eber died between two o’clock and six o’clock Thursday afternoon, and Brigham died between ten o’clock Sunday morning and three o’clock that afternoon, so it may be possible to exclude one or more of you. Has anyone an alibi for either of those periods?”
“You’ve stretched the periods,” Roger Foote declared. “It’s three to five Thursday and eleven to two Sunday.”
“I gave the extremes, Mr. Foote. The extremes are the safest. You seem well informed.”
“My God, I ought to be. The cops.”
“No doubt. You’ll soon see much more of them if we don’t discredit my conclusion.”
“You can start by excluding me,” Otis Jarrell said. “Thursday afternoon I had business appointments, three of them, and got home a little before six. Sunday-”
“Were the appointments all at the same place?”
“No. One downtown and two midtown. Sunday morning I was with the police commissioner at the Penguin Club for an hour, from ten-thirty to eleven-thirty, went straight home, was in my library until lunch time at one-thirty, returned to the library and was there until five o’clock. So you can exclude me.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe was disgusted. “You can’t be as fatuous as you sound, Mr. Jarrell. Your Thursday is hopeless, and your Sunday isn’t much better. Not only were you loose between the Penguin Club and your home, but what about the library? Were you alone there?”
“Most of the time, yes. But if I had gone out I would have been seen.”
“Nonsense. Is there a rear entrance to your premises?”
“There’s a service entrance.”
“Then it isn’t even worth discussing. A man with your talents and your money, resolved on murder, could certainly devise a way of getting down to the ground without exposure.” Wolfe’s head moved. “When I invited exclusion by alibis I didn’t mean to court inanities. Can any of you furnish invulnerable proof that you must be eliminated for either of those periods?”
“On Sunday,” Roger Foote said, “I went to Belmont to look at horses. I got there at nine o’clock and I didn’t leave until after five.”
“With company? Continuously?”
“No. I was always in sight of somebody, but a lot of different people.”
“Then you’re not better off than Mr. Jarrell. Does anyone else want to try, now that you know the requirements?”
Apparently nobody did. Wyman and Susan, who were holding hands, looked at each other but said nothing. Trella turned around to look at her brother and muttered something I didn’t catch. Lois just sat, and so did Jarrell.
Then Nora Kent spoke. “I want to say something, Mr. Wolfe.”
“Go ahead, Miss Kent. You can’t make it any worse.”
“I’d like to make it better-for me. If you’re making an exception of me you haven’t said so, and I think you should. I think you should tell them that I came to see you Friday afternoon and what I said.”
“You tell them. I’ll listen.”
But she kept focused on him. “I came right after lunch on Friday. I told you that I had recognized the new secretary as Archie Goodwin as soon as I saw him, and I asked why you had sent him, and whether Mr. Jarrell had hired you or someone else had. I told you that the murder of Jim Eber had made me think I had better try to find out what the situation was. I told you I had discovered that Mr. Jarrell’s gun was missing from the drawer of his desk, and that I had just found out that the caliber of the bullet that killed Jim Eber was the same as Mr. Jarrell’s gun. I told you that I wasn’t frightened, but I didn’t want to just wait and see what happened, and I wanted to hire you to protect my interests and pay you a retainer. Is that correct?”
“It is indeed, madam. And well reported. And?”
