“It has. Every minute. I slept with it under my pillow.”
“Was Miss Colt with you when you found it?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you find it?”
“In a locker on the fourth floor at Clarinda Day’s on Forty-eighth Street.”
Trella Jarrell let out a king-size gasp. Eyes went to her and she covered her mouth with both hands.
Wolfe went on. “Was the locker locked?”
“Yes.”
“Did you break it open?”
“No, I used a key.”
“I won’t ask you how you got the key. You may be asked in court, but this is not a court. Was the locker one of a series?”
“Yes. There are four rows of private lockers on that floor, with twenty lockers to a row. Clarinda Day’s customers put their clothes and belongings in them while they are doing exercises or getting massages. Some of them keep changes of clothes or other articles in them.”
“You said private lockers. Is each locker confined to a single customer?”
“Yes. The customer has the only key, except that I suppose the management has a master key. The key I used-but I’m not to tell that now?”
“It isn’t necessary. You may tell it on the witness stand. As you know, what you did is actionable, but since you discovered a weapon that was used in two murders I doubt if you will suffer any penalty. Instead, you should be rewarded and probably will be. Do you know which of Clarinda Day’s customers the locker belonged to? The one you found the gun in.”
“Yes. Mrs. Wyman Jarrell. Her name was on it. It also had other articles in it, and among them were letters in envelopes addressed to her.”
No gasp from anyone. No anything, until Otis Jarrell muttered, barely loud enough to hear, “The snake, the snake.”
Wolfe’s eyes were at Susan. “Mrs. Jarrell. Do you wish to offer an explanation of how the gun got into your locker?”
Naturally, knowing what was coming, I had been watching her little oval face from a corner of my eye, and she was only four feet from me, and I swear there hadn’t been a flicker. As she met Wolfe’s eyes her lip muscles moved a little as if they were trying to manage a smile, but I had seen them do that before. And when she spoke it was the same voice, low, and shy or coy or wary or demure, depending on your attitude.
“I can’t explain it,” she said, “because I don’t know. But you can’t think I took it that day, that Wednesday, because I told you about that. I was upstairs in my room, and my husband was with me. Weren’t you, Wy?”
She would probably have skipped that if she had turned for a good look at his face before asking it. He was paralyzed, staring at Wolfe with his jaw hanging. He looked incapable of speech, but a kind of idiot mumble came out, “I was taking a shower, a long shower, I always take a long shower.”
You might think, when a man is hit so hard with the realization that his wife is a murderess that he lets something out which will help to sink her, he would at least give it some tone, some quality. That’s a hell of a speech in a crisis like that: “I was taking a shower, a long shower. I always take a long shower.”
As Wolfe would say, pfui.
Chapter 18
AS IT TURNED OUT, when Otis Jarrell’s private affairs, at least some of them, became public, it was out of his own mouth on the witness stand. While it is true that evidence of motive is not legally essential in a murder case, it helps a lot, and for that the DA had to have Jarrell. The theory was that Susan had worked on Jim Eber and got information from him, specifically about the claim on the shipping company, and passed it along to Corey Brigham, who had acted on it. After Eber was fired he had learned about Brigham’s clean-up on the deal, suspected he had been fired because Jarrell thought he had given the information to Brigham, remembered he had told Susan about it, suspected her of telling Brigham, and told her, probably just before I entered the studio that day, that he was going to tell Jarrell. To support the theory Jarrell was needed, though they had other items, the strongest one being that they found two hundred thousand dollars in cash in a safe-deposit box Susan had rented about that time, and she couldn’t remember where she had got it.
Brigham’s death was out of it as far as the trial was concerned, since she was being tried for Eber, but the theory was that he had suspected her of killing Eber and had told her so, and take your pick. Either he had disapproved of murder so strongly that he was going to pass it on, or he wanted something for not passing it on- possibly the two hundred grand back, possibly something more personal.
None of the rest of them was called to testify by either side. The defense put neither Susan nor Wyman on, and that probably hurt. Susan’s having a key to the library was no problem, since her husband had one and she slept in the same room with him. As for whether they’ll ever get her to the chair, you’ll have to watch the papers. The jury convicted her of the big one, with no recommendation, but to get a woman actually in that seat, especially a young one with a little oval face, takes a lot of doing.
