from the plant rooms, I had just finished typing the last of the timetables and had them ready for him.
It had taken that long to fill his order, for three reasons. First, the city and county employees hadn’t got started on the trails of the Jarrells until Tuesday morning, and each of the subjects was given two sittings before Cramer got the results. Second, Cramer didn’t decide until Wednesday noon that he would let Wolfe have it, though I had known darned well he would, since it included nothing he wanted to save, and since he was curious to see what Wolfe wanted with it. And third, after I had been given permission to look at a selected collection of the reports, it took quite a job of digging to get what Wolfe wanted, not to mention my own contributions and the typing after I got home.
I can’t tell you what Wolfe did Tuesday and Wednesday because I wasn’t there to see, but if you assume that he did nothing whatever I won’t argue-that is, nothing but eat, sleep, read, drink beer, and play with orchids. As for me, I was busy. Monday night they kept me at 20th Street-Rowcliff and a Sergeant Coffey-until four o’clock in the morning, going over it back and forth and across and up and down, and when they got through they knew every bit as much as Cramer and Stebbins had already known when they took me down. Rowcliff could not believe that he wasn’t smart enough to maneuver me into leaking what I was at Jarrell’s for, and I didn’t dare to make it clear to him in words he would understand for fear he might see to it that Wolfe didn’t get what he wanted for brain exercise. So daylight was trying to break through at my windows when I turned in.
And Tuesday at noon, when I had just started on my fourth griddle cake and my second cup of coffee, the phone rang to tell me that I would be welcome at the DA’s office in twenty minutes. I made it in forty, and was there five solid hours, one of them with the DA himself present, and at the end they knew everything that Rowcliff did. There was one little spot where the chances looked good for my getting booked as a material witness, but I bumped through it without having to yell for help.
My intention was, if and when I left Leonard Street a free man, to stop in at Homicide West to see if Cramer had decided to let me look at the reports, but I was interrupted. After finally being dismissed by Mandelbaum, as I was on my way down the hall from his room to the front, a door on the right opened and one of the three best dancers I had ever stepped with came out. Seeing me, she stopped.
“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”
An assistant DA named Riley, having opened the door for her, was there shutting it. He saw me, thought he would say something, decided not to, and closed the door. The look Lois was giving was not an invitation to dance, far from it.
“So,” she said, “you’ve made it nice for us, you and your fat boss.”
“Then don’t speak to me,” I told her. “Give me an icy stare and flounce out. As for making it nice for you, wrong address. We held on till the last possible tenth of a second.”
“Hooray for you. Our hero.” We were moving down the hall. “Where are you bound for?”
“Home, with a stopover.”
We were in the anteroom, with people there on chairs. She waited until we were in the outer hall to say, “I think I want to ask you something. If we go where we can get a drink, by the time we get there I’ll know.”
I looked at my wrist. Ten minutes to six. We no longer had a client to be billed for expenses, but there was a chance she would contribute something useful for the timetables, and besides, looking at her was a pleasant change after the five hours I had just spent. So I said I’d be glad to buy her a drink whether she decided to ask me something or not.
I took her to Mohan’s, which was in walking distance around the corner, found an empty booth at the far end, and ordered. When the drinks came she took a sip of her Bloody Mary, made a face, took a bigger sip, and put the glass down.
“I’ve decided to ask you,” she said. “I ought to wait until I’ve had a couple because my nerves have gone back on me. When I saw you there in the hall my knees were shaking.”
“After you saw me or before?”
“They were already shaking. I knew I’d have to tell about it, I knew that yesterday, but I was afraid nobody would believe me. That’s what I want to ask you, I want you to back me up and then they’ll have to believe me. You see, I know that nobody used my father’s gun to kill Jim Eber and Corey Brigham. I want you to say you were with me when I threw it in the river.”
I raised my brows. “That’s quite a want. God knows what you might have wanted if you waited till you had a couple. You threw your father’s gun in the river?”
“Yes.” She was making her eyes meet mine. “Yes, I did.”
“When?”
“Thursday morning. That’s how I know nobody could have used it, because Jim was killed Thursday afternoon. I got it the day before, Wednesday, you know how I got it, going in with that rug held up in front of me. I hid it-”
“How did you open the library door?”
“I had a key. Jim Eber let me have a duplicate made from his-about a year ago. Jim was rather warm on me for a while. I hid the gun in my room, under the mattress. Then I was afraid Dad might have the whole place searched and it would be found, so I got rid of it. Don’t you want to know why I took it?”
“Sure, that would help.”
“I took it because I was afraid something might happen. I knew how Dad felt about Susan, and I knew it was getting worse every day between him and Wyman, and I knew he had a gun in his drawer, and I hate guns anyway. I didn’t think any one thing-I didn’t think he would shoot Susan or Wyman would shoot him-I just thought something might happen. So Thursday morning I put it in my bag and went and got my car, and drove up the West Side Highway and onto George Washington Bridge, and stopped on the bridge and threw the gun in the river.”
She finished the drink and put the glass down. “Naturally I never intended to tell anybody. Friday morning, when the news came that Jim Eber had been shot, it never occurred to me that that had anything to do with Dad’s gun. How could it, when I knew Dad’s gun was in the river? Then that afternoon at Nero Wolfe’s office I
