“Don’t you know?” “No!” “Nonsense. Certainly you know. Unless I’ve underrated you, and I don’t think I have. Doesn’t my request make it plain that I have everything I need but a few details? I intend to get them without delay, and I’m giving you this chance to furnish them.” Wolfe’s voice suddenly went sharp and started to cut. “Either that or Mr. Cramer gets them, and that will be a different matter. You know what that would mean. Your husband lost his head. He sent for Miss Livsey, twice, and she refused to go. She came here instead. She is sitting here now under my eyes.
Mr. Cramer’s first step, of course, would be to get your husband, after I turned Miss Livsey over to him. I prefer to be more direct about it. I come straight to you.” “Where is my husband?” “At his office. He hasn’t been disturbed yet.” “And Miss Livsey is there with you?” “Yes.” “I don’t believe it.” “Very well, madam. Good-by. I thought it fair to give you this opportunity, since you own a large share of the corporation I’m working for-” “Wait. Will you wait?” “Not long. If you want a minute to decide, take it.” She took more than a minute, at least three. Wolfe and I sat with the receivers to our ears. I had my chair turned so as to have an eye on Hester, in case she took a notion to bounce over and do some yelling loud enough for the transmitter to pick it up. I still thought Wolfe was wrong, and I was pressing the receiver against my ear so hard it was a wonder I didn’t crush a cartilage. Finally Cecily’s voice came: “I’ll be there in half an hour.” Wolfe, having her, pressed, “With the others? The servants?” “No. You won’t need them.” “It shouldn’t take you half an hour.” “I have to dress. I’ll get there as soon as I can. You won’t do anything?” “Not until you get here, no.” Wolfe hung up and turned to Hester. “Mrs. Pine is going to come and tell me all about it. Do you want to go upstairs?” Hester didn’t speak. Nor did she move, not even her eyes. She was inspecting a rug. She was sitting straight, her coat still on, her hands grasping the ends of her leather bag. and the rug was evidently the most enthralling object she had ever gazed at in her life.
What I wanted to say to Wolfe would not have been fitting with a guest present, so I didn’t say it.
I still hadn’t said it thirty minutes later, when Mrs. Pine arrived.
CHAPTER Thirty-Four
She sat in the red leather chair. That day her coat was mink and her dress was tightly woven brown wool with an elegant black check. She had never met Miss Livsey, she had said, and had offered a hand which Hester had not taken. That had not disconcerted her. Nothing, as far as could be told from her appearance, had disconcerted her, though her mind was sufficiently occupied to keep her from making any personal remarks to me. She sat in the red leather chair and told Wolfe: “This would not have happened if you had done what I asked you to. My brother would not have been killed. He would have stopped his foolishness. Everything would have been all right.” “No,” Wolfe said, “it wouldn’t. It seems clear that your brother would never have abandoned his determination to become president of the firm. Nor would the death of Mr. Moore have been cleared up, but that didn’t interest you. I wish you would start with that Friday evening. Why did you tell me your husband was home in bed when he wasn’t?” “Because I saw no-what are you doing there, Archie?” “Shorthand,” I told her. “I’m good at it.” “Then stop it. I won’t have any record of this.” “I will,” Wolfe said curtly. He wiggled a finger at her. “I intend, madam, to be in a position to satisfy your Board of Directors that I have done the job they hired me for. As far as I’m concerned that’s all the record will be used for, but I’m going to have it. And I don’t need to make any pretenses to you. At this moment I know barely what I need to know and that’s all. For example, I had nothing but a surmise, a mere assumption, that your husband was not in bed asleep when you said he was, until you reacted as you did to my request to speak with your servants. That of course made the surmise a certainty. Why did you lie about it?” “I didn’t.” “Pah. You didn’t?” “I didn’t intend to.” Cecily kept glancing in my direction, but at the notebook, not at me. “When you phoned I was in my sitting-room. My husband’s room is some distance away, and I thought he had gone to bed. When I went to see, he wasn’t there. I didn’t know he had gone out. I merely didn’t care to tell you that, not that it mattered, not at the time, so I said he was asleep. He came in a little while after you phoned-” “How long after?” “I don’t know-twenty minutes or half an hour. Then, later, when the news came that my brother had been killed, I knew that my husband had killed him.” “How did you know? Did he tell you?” “Not that night. But I knew, and the next day I talked with him and he told me.” Her hand fluttered. “My husband told me everything sooner or later, after he learned that that was the best way.” “When did he tell you that he killed Mr. Moore?” She shook her head. “I’m not going to talk about that. I have decided that I don’t have to.” She had stopped glancing at my notebook and was sticking to Wolfe. “I know what this is for and I’m willing to say enough to satisfy you. I realize there are some things I have to tell you or you will turn it over to the police, but I don’t have to go beyond that. It is true that my husband killed Waldo, but that had nothing to do with me. He killed him because Miss Livsey had fallen in love with him and was going to marry him.” I wasn’t as good as Wolfe was. I jerked my head up at her. Wolfe merely murmured at her, “Jealousy.” She nodded. “My husband had completely lost his head about her-but I suppose she has told you all about that?” “Not all. I need your version. Go ahead.” “He met her at the company’s annual dinner and dance for employees over a year ago now, and he was a very passionate man. He told me about it, and he wanted to get a divorce. As time went on it got worse with him. She wouldn’t let him see her much, and not at all openly. She was extremely clever about it, she wouldn’t let him give her a better position at the office, and when I insisted that the only thing to do was to make her his mistress, he said she wouldn’t.” Cecily twisted around in her chair to look at Hester. “That was very clever of you, Miss Livsey,” she said without resentment, “but it made it very difficult for me.” Hester stayed motionless and had nothing to say.
“He wanted a divorce,” Wolfe prompted.
“Yes, and I wouldn’t give him one. It would have upset all my life’s arrangements-among other things, I had made him president of the firm. He was even willing to forfeit his career for her. So I persuaded Waldo Moore to take a job there.” She nodded, to herself. “You didn’t know Waldo. He was the most charming person I have ever known, until he got tiresome, which of course everyone does in time.
I doubt if there was a woman on earth who could have resisted him. So I got him to take a job in the stock department, where Miss Livsey worked, and to-well, to divert her. It worked splendidly, as I was sure it would. He had her completely in hand within-I forget, but it couldn’t have been-” “You’re lying!” Hester had spoken.
Cecily twisted to her. “Oh, you have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Livsey! No, indeed! You’re the only woman he ever asked to marry him.” She went back to Wolfe. “So there was no longer any reason for my husband to want a divorce, or so I thought, but I might have known, with the drive he had to get anything he wanted enough, that he wouldn’t accept defeat as easily as that. What happened was that Waldo Moore was killed. I’m not going to talk about that. It wouldn’t do you any good, and I don’t have to. Anyway, the blame was not mine, it didn’t happen because of any mistake of mine.” “Merely bad luck,” Wolfe murmured.
She nodded. “But I had made a mistake, a very bad one. I had confided in my brother. He was older than me, and I had formed the habit in childhood, and I kept it even after we had grown up and I had become aware that he was a peculiar man and not to be taken seriously. That was a mistake too, to think he was not to be
