Man Alive

VI

That was terrible. The only thing that shakes Wolfe as profoundly as having a meal rudely interrupted is a bawling woman. His reaction to the first is rage, to the second panic.

I tried to reassure him. “She’ll be all right. She just has to—”

“Stop her,” he muttered desperately.

I crossed to her, yanked her hands away, using muscle, pulled her face up, and kissed her hard and good on the lips. She jerked her face aside, shoved at me, and protested, “What the hell!”

That sounded better, and I turned to Wolfe and told him reproachfully, “You can’t blame her. I doubt if it’s fear or despair or anything normal like that. It’s probably hunger. I’ll bet she hasn’t had a bite since breakfast.”

“Good heavens.” His eyes popped wide open. “Is that true, Miss Nieder? Haven’t you had lunch?”

She shook her head. “They kept me there — and then I had to see you—”

Wolfe was pushing the button. Since it was only five steps from the office to the kitchen door, in seconds Fritz was there.

“Sandwiches and beer at once,” Wolfe told him. “Beer, Miss Nieder?”

“I don’t have to eat.”

“Nonsense. Beer? Claret? Milk? Brandy?”

“Scotch and water. I could use that.”

Which of course halted progress for a good twenty minutes. It wasn’t only his own meals that Wolfe insisted on safeguarding from extraneous matters. When Fritz brought the tray Cynthia wasn’t reluctant about the Scotch, but she needed urging on the sandwiches and got it from both of us. After a taste of the homemade pâté no further urging was required. To make her feel that she could take her time Wolfe conversed with me about the plant germination records. Not about Cramer. His feelings about Cramer were much too warm and too recent. When she was through I put the tray on the table by the big globe, leaving her a glass full of her mixture, and then resumed my seat at my desk.

Wolfe was regarding her warily. “Do you feel better?”

“Much better, yes. I guess I was pretty empty.”

“Good.” Wolfe leaned back and sighed. “Now. You came to me as soon as the police let you go. Does that mean that you want my help in this new circumstance?”

“It certainly does. I want—”

“Excuse me. We’ll go faster if I lead, and Mr. Cramer is quite capable of sending men here with warrants. Let’s compress it. There are two points on which I must be satisfied before we can proceed. First, whether you killed that man. An attorney may properly work for a murderer, but I’m not an attorney, and anyway I don’t like money from murderers. Did you kill him?”

“No. I want to—”

“Just the no will do if it’s the truth. Is it?”

“Yes. It’s no.”

“I’m inclined to accept it, for reasons mostly not communicable. Some are. For instance, if you had been unable to eat that pâté—” Wolfe cut himself off and sent his eyes at me. “Archie. Did Miss Nieder kill that man?”

I looked at her, my lips puckered, and her gaze met mine. I must admit that she looked pretty ragged, not at all the same person as the one who had modeled, just twenty-four hours before, a dancing dress of Swiss eyelet organdy with ruffled shoulders. She had sure been through something, but not necessarily a murder.

I shook my head and told Wolfe, “No, sir. No guarantee with sanctions, but I vote no. My reasons are like yours, but I might mention that I strongly doubt if I would have had the impulse to make her stop crying by kissing her thoroughly if she had jabbed a window pole into a man’s face more than a dozen times. No.”

Wolfe nodded. “Then that’s settled. She didn’t, unless we get cornered by facts, and in that case we’ll deserve it. The other point, Miss Nieder, is this: Was the man you saw up there a week ago today your uncle, and was it he who was killed last night?”

A “yes” popped out of her. She added, “It was Uncle Paul. I saw him. I went—”

“Don’t dash ahead. We’ll get to that. Since I’m assuming your good faith, tentatively at least, I am not suggesting that what you told me yesterday was flummery. I grant that you thought it was your uncle you saw a week ago today, and I accepted it then, but now it’s too flimsy for me. You’ll have to give me something better if you’ve got it. What was it that convinced you it was your uncle?”

“I knew it was,” Cynthia declared. “Maybe if I tried I could tell you how I knew, but I don’t have to because now I do know so I could prove it. I’ve been trying to tell you. You remember what I said about my uncle’s private file — that I thought Jean Daumery had taken it and that Bernard has it now. I went there last night to look for it, and saw that — that dead man there on the floor. You can imagine—”

She stopped and made a gesture.

“Yes, I can imagine,” Wolfe agreed. “Go ahead.”

“I made myself go close to look at him — his face was dreadful but he had the beard and the slick hair. I wanted to do something but I didn’t have nerve enough, and I had to sit down to pull myself together. Now they say I was in there fifteen minutes, but I wouldn’t think it took me that long to get up my nerve, but maybe it did, and then I went and pulled up the right leg of his trousers and pulled his sock down. He had two little scars about four inches above the ankle, and I knew those scars — that’s where my uncle got bit by a dog once. I looked at them close. I had to sit down again—” She stopped, with her mouth open. “Oh! That’s why it was fifteen minutes! I had forgotten all about that, sitting down again—”

“Then you left? What did you do?”

“I went home to my apartment and phoned Mr. Demarest. I hadn’t—”

“Who’s Mr. Demarest?”

“He’s a lawyer. He was a friend of Uncle Paul’s, and he’s the executor. I hadn’t told him about seeing my uncle last week because after all I had no proof, and I wanted to find my uncle and talk with him first, so I decided to get you to find him for me. But when I got home I thought the only thing to do was to phone Mr. Demarest, so I did, but he had gone out—”

“Confound it,” Wolfe grumbled, “why didn’t you phone me?”

“Well—” Cynthia looked harassed. “I didn’t know you, did I? Well enough for that? How could I tell what you would believe and what you wouldn’t?”

“Indeed,” Wolfe said sarcastically. “So you decided to keep it from me, running the risk that I might glance at a newspaper. What is the lawyer doing? Reading up?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t get him. I phoned again at eleven-thirty, thinking he would be home by then, but he wasn’t, and the state I was in it didn’t even occur to me to leave word for him to call. Intending to phone again at midnight, I lay down on the couch to wait, and then — it may be hard to believe but I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until nearly seven o’clock. I thought it over and decided not to tell Mr. Demarest or anybody else. During a show season there are lots of people going up and down in those elevators in that building after hours, and I thought they wouldn’t remember about me, and my name wasn’t in the book because they know me so well and they’re not strict about it. That was dumb, wasn’t it?”

Wolfe acquiesced with a restrained groan.

She finished the story. “Of course I had to go to work as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t easy, but I did, and the place was full of people, police and detectives, when I got there. I had only been there a few minutes when they took me to a fitting room to ask questions, and like a fool I told them I hadn’t been there last night when they already knew about it.”

Cynthia fluttered a hand. “When they were through with me I phoned Mr. Demarest’s office and he was out at lunch. So I came here.”