Might as Well Be Dead

Chapter 11

The exchange of greetings between Selma and the quartet had seemed a little cramped for old friends, but that might have been expected. After all, she was aiding and abetting a program that might lead to one of them getting charged with murder, and they had been invited by her to the office of a well-known private detective. When they had got seated she sent her eyes to Wolfe and kept them there. Their eyes were more interested in her than in Wolfe. I concentrated on them.

Selma’s descriptions of Tom and Jerry had been adequate and accurate. Jerome Arkoff was big and broad, taller than me, and so solemn it must have hurt, but it could have been the ulcers that hurt. Tom Irwin, with his dark skin and thin little clipped mustache, looked more like a saxophone artist than a printing executive, even while holding his wife’s hand. His wife, Fanny, was obviously not at her best, with her face giving the impression that she was trying not to give in to a raging headache, but even so she was no eyesore. Under favorable conditions she would have been very decorative. She was a blonde, and a headache is much harder on a blonde than on a brunette; some brunettes are actually improved by a mild one. This brunette, Rita Arkoff, didn’t need one. There was a faint touch of snake hips in her walk, a faint suggestion of slant at the corners of her eyes, and a faint hint of a pout in the set of her well-tinted lips. But an order-giver...

Wolfe’s eyes went from the Arkoffs on his left to the Irwins on the right. “I don’t presume,” he said, “to thank you for coming, since it was at Mrs. Molloy’s request. She has told you what I’m after. Mr. Albert Freyer, counsel for Peter Hays, wishes to establish a basis for a retrial or an appeal, and I’m trying to help him. I assume you are all in sympathy with that?”

They exchanged glances. “Sure we are,” Jerome Arkoff declared. “If you can find one. Is there any chance?”

“I think so.” Wolfe was easy and relaxed. “Certain aspects have not been thoroughly investigated — not by the police because of the overwhelming evidence against Peter Hays, and not by Mr. Freyer because he lacked funds and facilities. They deserve—”

“Does he have funds now?” Tom Irwin asked. His voice didn’t fit his physique. You would have expected a squeak, but it was a deep baritone.

“No. My interest has been engaged, no matter how, and I am indulging it. Those aspects deserve inquiry, and last evening I sent a man to look into one of them — a man named Johnny Keems, who worked for me intermittently. He was to learn if there was any possibility that on the evening the murder was committed, January third, the invitation to Mrs. Molloy to join a theater party had been designed with the purpose of getting her out of the way. Of course it didn’t—”

“You sent that man?” Arkoff demanded.

His wife looked reproachfully at her friend. “Selma darling, really! You know perfectly well—”

“If you please!” Wolfe showed her a palm, and his tone sharpened. “Save your resentment for a need; I’m imputing no malignity to any of you. I was about to say, it didn’t have to be designed, since the murderer may have merely seized an opportunity; and if it was designed, it didn’t have to be one of you who designed it. You might have been quite unaware of it. That was what I sent Mr. Keems to find out, and he was to begin by seeing you, all four of you. First on his list was Mrs. Arkoff, since she had phoned the invitation to Mrs. Molloy.” His eyes leveled at Rita. “Did he see you, madam?”

She started to answer, but her husband cut in. “Hold it, Rita.” Apparently he could give orders too. He looked at Wolfe. “What’s the big idea? If you sent him why don’t you ask him? Why drag us down here? Did someone else send him?”

Wolfe nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them, and nodded again. “A logical inference, Mr. Arkoff, but wrong. I sent him, but I can’t ask him, because he’s dead. On Riverside Drive in the Nineties, shortly before midnight last night, an automobile hit him and killed him. It’s possible that it was an accident, but I don’t think so. I think he was murdered. I think that, working on the assignment I had given him, he had uncovered something that was a mortal threat to someone. Therefore I must see the people he saw and find out what was said. Did he see you, Mrs. Arkoff?”

Her husband stopped her again. “This is different,” he told Wolfe, and he looked and sounded different. “If he was murdered. What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”

Wolfe shook his head. “We won’t go into that, Mr. Arkoff, and we don’t have to because the police also suspect that it wasn’t. A sergeant at the Homicide Bureau phoned me today to ask if Mr. Keems was working for me last night, and if so, what his assignment was and whom he had seen. Mr. Goodwin put him off—”

“He phoned again later,” I put in.

“Yes? What did you tell him?”

“That we were trying to check and would let him know as soon as we had anything useful.”

Wolfe went back to them. “I wanted to talk with you people myself first. I wanted to learn what you had told Mr. Keems, and whether he had uncovered anything that might have threatened one of you or someone else. I’ll have—”

Fanny Irwin blurted, “He didn’t uncover anything with me!” She had got her hand back from her husband’s hold.

“Then that’s what I’ll learn, madam. I’ll have to tell the police what he was to do and whom he was to see; that can’t be postponed much longer; but it may make things easier for you if I can also tell them that I have talked with you — depending, of course, on what you tell me. Or would you prefer to save it for the police?”

“My God.” Tom Irwin groaned. “This is a nice mess.”

“And we can thank you for it,” Arkoff told Wolfe. “Sicking your damn snoop on us.” His head turned. “And you, Selma. You started it.”

“Let Selma alone,” Rita ordered him. “She’s had a rough time and you can’t blame her.” She looked at Wolfe, and she wasn’t pouting. “Let’s go ahead and get it over with. Yes, your man saw me, at my apartment. He came when I was about ready to leave, to meet my husband for dinner. He said he was investigating the possibility of a new trial for Peter Hays. I thought he was after Selma’s alibi and I told him he might as well save his breath because she was with me every minute, but it was the invitation he wanted to ask about. He asked when I first thought of asking Selma, and I said at the restaurant when Tom phoned and told me Fanny couldn’t make it. He asked why I asked Selma instead of someone else, and I said because I liked her and enjoyed her company, and also because when Tom phoned I asked him if he wanted to suggest anyone and he suggested Selma. He asked if Tom gave any special reason for having Selma, and I said he didn’t have to because I wanted her anyway. He was going to ask more, but I was late and I said that was all I knew anyhow. So that was all — no, he asked when he could see my husband, and I told him we’d be home around ten o’clock and he might see him then.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. We got home a little after ten and he was waiting down in the lobby.”

Wolfe’s eyes moved. “Mr. Arkoff?”

Jerry hesitated, then shrugged. “I talked with him there in the lobby. I didn’t ask him upstairs because I had some scripts to go over. He asked me the same things he had asked my wife, but I couldn’t tell him as much as she had because she had talked with Tom on the phone. I really couldn’t tell him anything. He tried to be clever, asking trick questions about how it was decided to invite Mrs. Molloy, and finally I got fed up and told him to go peddle his papers.”

“Did he say anything about having seen Mr. or Mrs. Irwin?”

“No. I don’t think so. No.”

“Then he left?”

“I suppose so. We left him in the lobby when we went to the elevator.”

“You and your wife went up to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do the rest of the evening?”

Arkoff took a breath. “By God,” he said, “if anyone had told me an hour ago that I was going to be asked where I was at the time of the murder I would have thought he was crazy.”

“No doubt. It does often seem an impertinence. Where were you?”

“I was in my apartment, working with scripts until after midnight. My wife was in another room, and neither of us could have gone out without the other one knowing it. No one else was there.”

“That seems conclusive. Certainly either conclusive or collusive.” Wolfe’s eyes went right. “Mr. Irwin, since Mr. Keems had been told that you had suggested Mrs. Molloy, I presume he sought you. Did he find you?”

From the expression on Tom Irwin’s face, he needed a hand to hold. He opened his mouth and closed it again. “I’m not sure I like this,” he said. “If I’m going to be questioned about a murder I think I’d rather be questioned by the police.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” his wife protested. “He won’t bite you! Do what Rita did, get it over with!” She went to Wolfe. “Do you want me to tell it?”

“If you were present, madam.”

“I was. That man — what was his name?”

“John Joseph Keems.”

“It was nearly nine o’clock when he came, and we were just going out. We had promised to drop in at a party some friends were giving for somebody, and we would have been gone if my maid hadn’t had to fix the lining of my wrap. He said the same thing he told Rita, about the possibility of a new trial for Peter Hays, and he asked my husband about the phone call to the restaurant. Rita has told you about that. Actually—”

“Did your husband’s account of it agree with Mrs. Arkoffs?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t it? Actually, though, it was I who suggested asking Selma Molloy. While Tom was at the phone I told him to tell her to ask Selma because I could trust him with her. It was partly a joke, but I’m one of those jealous wives. Then he wanted to ask some more questions, I mean that man Keems, but by that time my wrap was ready and we had told him all we knew. That was all there was to it.”

“Did your husband tell him that you had suggested asking Mrs. Molloy?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure — Didn’t you, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“And you went to the party? How late did you stay?”

“Not late at all. It was a bore, and my husband was tired. We got home around eleven and went to bed. We sleep in the same room.”

Wolfe started to make a face, realized he was doing it, and called it off. The idea of sleeping in the same room with anybody on earth, man or woman, was too much. “Then,” he asked, “you had only that one brief talk with Mr. Keems? You didn’t see him again?”

“No. How could we?”

“Did you see him again, Mr. Irwin?”

“No.”

“Can you add anything to your wife’s account of your talk with him?”

“No. That was all there was to it. I might add that our maid sleeps in, and she was there that night.”

“Thank you. That should be helpful. I’ll include it in my report to the police.” Wolfe went back to the wife. “One little point, Mrs. Irwin. If you decided earlier in the day that you wouldn’t be able to go to the theater that evening, you might have mentioned it to someone, for instance to some friend on the phone, and you might also have mentioned, partly as a joke, that you would suggest that Mrs. Molloy be asked in your place. Did anything like that happen?”

She shook her head. “No, it couldn’t have, because I didn’t decide not to go until just before my husband came home.”

“Then your headache was a sudden attack?”

“I don’t know what you would call sudden. I was lying down with it most of the afternoon, and taking emagrin, and I was hoping it would go away. But I had to give up.”

“Do you have frequent headaches?”

Irwin burst out, “What the hell has that got to do with it?”

“Probably nothing,” Wolfe conceded. “I’m fishing white water, Mr. Irwin, and am casting at random.”

“It seems to me,” Arkoff put in, “that you’re fishing in dead water. Asking Mrs. Molloy didn’t have to be designed at all. If Peter Hays didn’t kill Molloy, if someone else did, of course it was somebody who knew him. He could have phoned Molloy and said he wanted to see him alone, and Molloy told him to come to the apartment, they would be alone there because Mrs. Molloy had gone to the theater. Why couldn’t it have happened like that?”

“It could,” Wolfe agreed. “Quite possible. The invitation to Mrs. Molloy was merely one of the aspects that deserved inquiry, and it might have been quickly eliminated. But not now. Now there is a question that must be answered: who killed Johnny Keems, and why?”

“Some damned fool. Some hit-and-run maniac.”

“Possibly, but I don’t believe it. I must be satisfied now, and so must the police, and even if you people are innocent of any complicity you can’t escape harassment. I’ll want to know more than I do now about the evening of January third, about what happened at the theater. I understand — Yes, Archie?”

“Before you leave last night,” I said, “I have a question to ask them.”

“Go ahead.”

I leaned forward to have all their faces as they turned to me. “About Johnny Keems,” I said. “Did he ask any of you anything about Bill Lesser?”

They had never heard the name before. You can’t always go by the reaction to a sudden unexpected question, since some people are extremely good at handling their faces, but if that name meant anything to one or more of them they were better than good. They all looked blank and wanted to know who Bill Lesser was. Of course Wolfe would also have liked to know who he was but didn’t say so. I told him that was all, and he resumed.

“I understand that Mrs. Molloy and Mrs. Arkoff went in to their seats before curtain time, and that Mr. Arkoff and Mr. Irwin joined them about an hour later, saying they had been in a bar across the street. Is that correct, Mr. Arkoff?”

Arkoff didn’t care for that at all, and neither did Irwin. Their position was that their movements on the evening of January 3 had no significance unless it was assumed that one or both of them might have killed Molloy and framed Peter Hays, and that was absurd. Wolfe’s position was that the police would ask him if he had questioned them about January 3, and if he said he had and they had balked, the police would want to know why.

Rita told her husband to quit arguing and get it over with, and that only made it worse, until she snapped at him, “What’s so touchy about it? Weren’t you just dosing up?”

He gave her a dirty look and then transferred it to Wolfe. “My wife and I,” he said, “met Mrs. Molloy in the theater lobby at half-past eight. The ladies went on in and I waited in the lobby for Irwin. He came a few minutes later and said he wanted a drink, and he also said he didn’t care much for plays about Joan of Arc. We went across the street and had a couple of drinks, and by the time we got in to our seats the first act was about over.”

Wolfe’s head turned. “You corroborate that, Mr. Irwin?”

“I do.”

Wolfe turned a hand over. “So simple, gentlemen. Why all the pother? And with a new and quite persuasive detail, that Mr. Irwin doesn’t care for plays about Joan of Arc — an inspired hoyden. To show you to what lengths an investigation can be carried, and sometimes has to be, a dozen men could make a tour of Mr. Irwin’s friends and acquaintances and ask if they have ever heard him express an attitude toward Joan of Arc and plays about her. I doubt if I’ll be driven to that extremity. Have you any questions?”

They hadn’t, for him. Rita Arkoff got up and went to Selma, and Fanny Irwin joined them. The men did too, for a moment, and then headed for the hall, and I followed them. They got their coats on and stood and waited, and finally their women came, and I opened the door. As they moved out Rita was telling the men that she had asked Selma to come and eat with them, but she had said she wasn’t up to it. “And no wonder,” Rita was saying as I swung the door to.

When I re-entered the office Selma didn’t look as if she were up to anything whatever, sitting with her shoulders slumped and her head sagging and her eyes closed. Wolfe was speaking, inviting her to stay for not only dinner but also the night. He said he wanted her at hand for consultation if occasion arose, but that wasn’t it. She had brought word from Parker that the court formalities might be completed in the morning, and if so we might get to the safe-deposit box by noon. For that Mrs. Molloy would be needed, and Wolfe would never trust a woman to be where she was supposed to be when you wanted her. Therefore he was telling her how pleasant our south room was, directly under his, with a good bed and morning sunshine, but no sale, not even for dinner. She got to her feet, and I went to the hall with her.

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it,” she said, not a question. I patted her shoulder professionally and told her we had barely started.

In the office again, Wolfe demanded, “Who is Bill Lesser?”

I told him, reporting it verbatim, including my phone call to Delia Brandt, and explaining I had hoped to get a glimmer from one or more of the quartet at sound of the name. He wasn’t very enthusiastic but admitted it was worth a look and said we would put Fred Durkin on it. I asked if I should phone Purley Stebbins, and he said no, it was too close to dinnertime and he wanted first to think over his talk with Mrs. Molloy’s friends.

He heaved a sigh. “Confound it,” he complained, “no gleam anywhere, no little fact that stings, no word that trips. I have no appetite!”

I snorted. “That’s the least of my worries,” I declared.