Bullet for One

III

Many things had happened in that office on the ground floor of the old brownstone house owned by Nero Wolfe during the years I had worked for him as his man Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

This gathering in the office, on this Tuesday evening in October, had its own special angle of interest. Sigmund Keyes, top-drawer industrial designer, had been murdered the preceding Tuesday, just a week ago. I had read about it in the papers and had also found an opportunity to hear it privately discussed by my friend and enemy Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide, and from the professional-detective slant it struck me as a lulu.

It had been Keyes’ custom, five days a week at six-thirty in the morning, to take a walk in the park, and to do it the hard and silly way by walking on four legs instead of two. He kept the four legs, which he owned and which were named Casanova, at the Stillwell Riding Academy on Ninety-eighth Street just west of the park. That morning he mounted Casanova as usual, promptly at six-thirty, and rode into the park. Forty minutes later, at seven-ten, he had been seen by a mounted cop, in the park on patrol, down around Sixty-sixth Street. His customary schedule would have had him about there at that time. Twenty-five minutes later, at seven-thirty-five, Casanova, with his saddle uninhabited, had emerged from the park uptown and strolled down the street to the academy. Curiosity had naturally been aroused, and in three-quarters of an hour had been satisfied, when a park cop had found Keyes’ body behind a thicket some twenty yards from the bridle path in the park, in the latitude of Ninety-fifth Street. Later a .38-caliber revolver bullet had been dug out of his chest. The police had concluded, from marks on the path and beyond its edge, that he had been shot out of his saddle and had crawled, with difficulty, up a little slope toward a paved walk for pedestrians, and hadn’t had enough life left to make it.

A horseman shot from his saddle within sight of the Empire State Building was of course a natural for the tabloids, and the other papers thought well of it too. No weapon had been found, and no eyewitnesses. No citizen had even come forward to report seeing a masked man lurking behind a tree, probably because very few New Yorkers could possibly explain being up and dressed and strolling in the park at that hour of the morning.

So the city employees had had to start at the other end and look for motives and opportunities. During the week that had passed a lot of names had been mentioned and a lot of people had received official callers, and as a result the glare had pretty well concentrated on six spots. So the papers had it, and so I gathered from Purley Stebbins. What gave the scene in our office that Tuesday afternoon its special angle of interest was the fact that five of the six spots were there seated on chairs, and apparently what they wanted Wolfe to do was to take the glare out of their eyes and get it aimed exclusively at the sixth spot, not present.