3 at Wolfe's Door
'I said'if.''
I lifted my shoulders and dropped them. 'It's a little complicated. If I have quit you can't fire me. If I haven't quit I am still on your payroll, and it would be unethical for me to have Miss Holt as my client. It would also be wrong for you to accept pay from me for helping me with the kind of work you are paying me to do. If you return the twenty-five to me and I return the fifty to Miss Holt, I will be deserting an innocent fellow being in a jam whom I have accepted as a client, and that would be inexcusable. It looks to me as if we have got ourselves in a fix that is absolutely hopeless, and I can't see--'
'Confound it,' he roared, 'go to bed!' and marched out.
VI
By 8:15 Tuesday morning I was pretty well convinced that Mira Holt was in the coop, since I had got it from three different sources. At 7:20 Judy Bram phoned to say that Mira was under arrest and what was I going to do. I said it wouldn't be practical to tell a suspect my plans, and she hung up on me. At 7:40 Lon Cohen of the Gazette phoned to ask if it was true that I had quit my job with Nero Wolfe, and if so what was I doing there, and was Mira Holt my client, and if so what was she doing in the can, and had she killed Phoebe Arden or not. Since Lon had often been useful and might be again, I explained fully, off the record, why I couldn't explain. And at eight o'clock the radio said that Mira Holt was being held as a material witness in the murder of Phoebe Arden.
Neither Lon nor the radio supplied any items that helped, nor did the morning papers. The Star had a picture of the taxi parked in front of Wolfe's house, but I had seen that for myself. It also had a description of the clothes Phoebe Arden had died in, but what I needed was a description of the clothes the murderer had killed in. And it gave the specifications of the knife--an ordinary kitchen knife with a five-inch blade and a plastic handle--but if the answer was going to come from any routine operation like tracing
Method Three for Murder 91
the knife or lifting prints from the handle, it would be darner's army who would get it, not me.
I made one phone call, to Anderson, to ask him to postpone his appointment because Wolfe was busy on a case, and he said sure, it wasn't urgent; and, since Fritz takes Wolfe's breakfast to his room and I seldom see him before he comes down to the office at eleven, I put a note on his desk. I wanted to make another call, to Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer, but vetoed it. For getting Mira out on bail he would have charged about ten times what she had paid me, and there was no big hurry. It would teach her not to drive a hack without a license.
At a quarter past eight I left the house and went to Ninth Avenue for a taxi, and at half past I dismissed it at the corner of Carmine and Ferrell, and walked down Ferrell Street to its dead end. There were only two alternatives for what had happened during the period--call it ten minutes--when Mira had been away from the cab: either the murderer, having already killed Phoebe Arden, had carried or dragged the body to the cab and hoisted it in, or he had got in the cab with her and killed her there. I preferred the latter, since you can walk to a cab with a live woman in much less time than you can carry her to it dead, and also since, even in a secluded spot like that and even after dark, there is much less risk of being noticed. But in either case they had to come from some place nearby.
The first place to consider was Reams' house, but it only took five minutes to cross it off. The alley that led to it was walled on both sides, Mira had been parked at its mouth, and there was no other way to get from the house to the street. On the left of the alley was a walled-in lumber yard, and on the right was a dingy old two-story warehouse. On inspection neither of them seemed an ideal spot for cover, but across the street was a beaut. It was an open lot cluttered with blocks of stone scattered and piled around, some rough and some chiseled and polished. A whole company could have hid there, let alone one murderer and one victim. As you know, I was already on record that Mira hadn't killed her, but it was nice to see that stoneyard. If there had been no place to hide in easy distance . . . Three men were there, two discussing a stone
92 3 at Wolfe's Door
and one chiseling, but they wouldn't be there at eight in the evening. I recrossed the street and entered the alley, and walked through.
By gum, Kearns had a garden, a sizable patch, say forty by sixty, with flowers in bloom and a little pool with a fountain, and a flagstone path leading to the door of a two-story brick house painted white. I hadn't known there was anything like it in Manhattan, and I thought I knew Manhattan. A man in a gray shirt and blue jeans was kneeling among the flowers, and half way up the path I stopped and asked him, 'Are you Waldo Kearns?'
'Do I look it?' he demanded.
'Yes and no. Are you Morton?'
'That's my name. What's yours?'
'Goodwin.' I headed for the house, but he called, 'Nobody there,' and I turned.
'Where's Mr. Kearns?'
'I don't know. He went out a while ago.'
'When will he be back?'
'I couldn't say.'
I looked disappointed. 'I should have phoned. I want to buy a picture. I came last evening around half past eight and knocked, but nothing doing. I knocked loud because I heard the radio or TV going.'
'It was the TV. I was watching it. I heard you knock. I don't open the door at night when he's not here. There's some tough ones around this neighborhood.'
'I don't blame you. I suppose I just missed him. What time did he leave last evening?'
'What difference does it make when he left if he wasn't here?'
Perfectly logical, not only for him but for me. If Kearns hadn't been there when Mira arrived in the cab it didn't matter when he had left. I would have liked to ask Morton one more question, whether anyone had left with him, but from the look in his eye he would have used some more logic on me, so I skipped it, said I'd try again, and went.
