breath back. “This is her husband, Mr. Harold Anthony from the financial district, a college man. He tailed her from her office, and tailed her and me clear here, and he thought I was bringing her as a plaything for you. Evidently he knows your reputation. He aimed for my face and missed, on the sidewalk out in front. He has taken lessons and it took me ten minutes or more to nail him, which I did with three kidney punches. He was down flat. Is that correct, Mr.
Anthony?” “Yes,” he said.
“Okay. Scotch, rye, or bourbon?” “Plenty of bourbon.” “We have it. Mr. Wolfe will ask Fritz to bring it. The bathroom is this way.
Come along.” Wolfe’s voice came behind us, “Confound it, where is Mrs. Anthony?” “No soap,” I told him from the bathroom door. “You’ll have to stifle your desires for tonight. She went for a walk. Her husband is substituting for her.”
CHAPTER Thirteen
A few feet from the end of Wolfe’s desk is a roomy and comfortable red leather chair, and next to it on one side is a solid little table made of massaranduba, the primary function of which is as a resting place for checkbooks while clients write in them, Harold Anthony sat in the chair, with a bottle of bourbon at his elbow on the little table, while Wolfe kept at him for over an hour.
Mr. Anthony had a conviction: the stock department of Naylor-Kerr was a hotbed of lust and lechery where the primitive appetites germinated like sweet potato sprouts.
Mr. Anthony had a record: since he had got out of the Army in November he had bopped four assorted men whom he had detected in the act of escorting his wife somewhere, and one of them had gone to a hospital with a broken jaw. He did not know if one of them had been named either Wally or Moore.
Mr. Anthony had an alibi: the evening of December 4 had been spent by him in a bowling alley, with friends. They had quit around eleven-thirty and he had gone home. When Wolfe observed that that would have left him plenty of time to get over to Thirty-ninth Street and run a car over Moore, he agreed without hesitation but added that he couldn’t have had the car, since it had been stolen before eleven-twenty, at which time the owner, coming from the theater, had arrived where he had parked the car and found it gone.
“You appear,” Wolfe commented, “to have followed the accounts of Mr. Moore’s death with interest and assiduity. In newspapers?” “Yes.” “Why were you interested?” “Because the papers had pictures of Moore, and I recognized him as the man I had seen with my wife a few days before.” “Where?” “Getting into a taxi on Broadway, downtown.” “Had you spoken with him?” “Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off.” “Cooled? By what process?” “I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife.” “You did?” Wolfe scowled at him. “What’s the matter with your brain? Does it leak? You said you didn’t know whether one of your wife’s escorts, the ones you bombarded, was named Moore.” “Sure I did.” The husband was not disturbed. “What the hell, I didn’t know then you were going into it.” He was really two different persons. Sitting there with a couple of men, drinking good bourbon, he had poise and he knew the score. I would hardly have recognized him as the wild-eyed infuriated male moose who had lost all self-control at the sight of me helping an assistant chief filer from a taxicab, if it hadn’t been for a band-aid covering a gash on his face. The gash was the result of my having neglected to remember, for a brief moment, that cheekbones are hard on knuckles.
At the beginning, after he and I had finished in the bathroom and returned to the office, he had been suspicious and cagey, even with bourbon in him, until he was satisfied that I really had been bringing Rosa there on business. Then, when he learned that the business was an inquiry into the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore, it took him only a minute to decide that his best line was full and frank co-operation if he wanted any help from us in keeping his wife out of it as far as possible. At least that was the way it looked to me, and by the time we got to his alibi for December 4 I was almost ready to regard him as a fellow being.
Around a quarter to ten he left, not because the bottle was empty or Wolfe had run out of questions, but because Saul Panzer arrived. I let Saul in, and as he headed for the office the husband came out, got his things from the rack, and grunted and groaned without any false modesty as he got into his coat. He offered a hand.
“Christ, I’ll be a cripple for a week,” he admitted. “That right of yours would dent a tank.” I acknowledged the compliment, closed the door after him, and returned to the office.
Saul Panzer, who was under size, who had a nose which could be accounted for only on the theory that a nose is all a face needs, and who always looked as if he had shaved the day before, was the best free-lance operative in New York. He was the only colleague I knew that I would give a blank check to and forget it.
He had come to make a report, and, judging from the ground it covered, Wolfe must have got in touch with him and put him to work that morning as soon as I had left the house.
But that was about all you could say for it, that it covered lots of ground. He had talked with squad men who had worked on the case, had gone through three newspaper files, had been shown the record by Captain Bowen downtown, and had even seen the owner of the car; and all he had harvested was one of the most complete collections of negatives I had ever seen. No fingerprints from the car; nobody had any idea what Moore had been doing on Thirty-ninth Street; no one had seen the car being parked, afterwards, on Ninety-fifth Street; not a single lead had been picked up anywhere. The police knew about Moore’s friendship with Mrs.
Pine, and his romantic career at Naylor-Kerr, and a few other things about him that were news to me, but none of them had turned on a light they could see by.
It was now, for them, past history, and they had other things to do, except that a hit-and-run manslaughter was never finished business until they collared him.
“One little thing,” said Saul, who wasn’t pleased with himself. “The body was found at one-ten in the morning. An M.E. arrived at one-forty-two. His quick guess was that Moore had been dead about two hours, and the final report more or less agreed with him. So we have these alternatives: first, the body was there on the street, from around midnight until ten after one, with nobody seeing it.
Second, the M.E. report is a bad guess and he hadn’t been dead so long. Third, the body wasn’t there all that time but was somewhere else. I mentioned it downtown, and they don’t think it’s a thing at all, not even a
