Might as Well Be Dead

Chapter 6

At four o’clock that afternoon I left the house, bound for 171 East 52nd Street, to keep an appointment, made for me by Freyer, with Mrs. Michael M. Molloy.

After lunch we had returned to the office and taken up where we had left off. Freyer had phoned his office to send us the complete file on the case, and it had arrived and been pawed over. I had summoned Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather, and Johnny Keems to report to the office at six o’clock. They were our four main standbys, and they would call for a daily outlay of $160, not counting expenses. If it lasted a month, 30 times 160 equals 4800, so Wolfe’s self-esteem might come high if he found he couldn’t deliver.

Nothing had come of any of the leads suggested by what Mrs. Molloy had told Freyer about her deceased husband, and no wonder, since they had been investigated only by a clerk in Freyer’s office and a sawbuck squirt supplied by the Harland Ide Detective Agency. I will concede that they had dug up some relevant facts: Molloy had had a two-room office in a twenty-story hive on 46th Street near Madison Avenue, and it said on the door MICHAEL M. MOLLOY, REAL ESTATE. His staff had consisted of a secretary and an errand boy. His rent had been paid for January, which was commendable, since January 1 had been a holiday and he had died on the third. If he had left a will, it had not turned up. He had been a fight fan and an ice-hockey fan. During the last six months of his life he had taken his current secretary, whose name was Delia Brandt, to dinner at a restaurant two or three times a week, but the clerk and the squirt hadn’t got any deeper into that.

Mrs. Molloy hadn’t been very helpful about his business affairs. She said that during her tenure as his secretary he had apparently transacted most of his business outside the office, and she had never known much about it. He had opened his own mail, which hadn’t been heavy, and she had written only ten or twelve letters a week for him, and less than half of them had been on business matters. Her chief function had been to answer the phone and take messages when he was absent, and he had been absent most of the time. Apparently he had been interested almost exclusively in rural properties; as far as she knew, he had never had a hand in any New York City real-estate transactions. She had no idea what his income was, or his assets.

As for people who might have had a motive for killing him, she had supplied the names of four men with whom he had been on bad terms, and they had been looked into, but none of them seemed very promising. One of them had merely got sore because Molloy had refused to pay on a bet the terms of which had been disputed, and the others weren’t much better. It had to be a guy who had not only croaked Molloy but had also gone to a lot of trouble to see that someone else got hooked for it, specifically Peter Hays, and that called for a real character.

In the taxi on my way uptown, if someone had hopped in and offered me ten to one that we had grabbed the short end of the stick, I would have passed. I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.

Number 171 East 52nd Street was an old walk-up which had had a thorough job of upgrading, inside and out, along with the houses on either side. They had all been painted an elegant gray, one with yellow trim, one with blue, and one with green. In the vestibule I pushed the button at the top of the row, marked MOLLOY, took the receiver from the hook and put it to my ear, and in a moment was asked who it was. I gave my name, and, when the latch clicked, pushed the door open, entered, and took the do-it-yourself elevator to the fifth floor. Emerging, I took a look around, noting where the stairs were. After all, this was the scene of the crime, and I was a detective. Hearing my name called, I turned. She was standing in the doorway.

She was only eight steps away, and by the time I reached her I had made a decision which sometimes, with one female or another, may take me hours or even days. I wanted no part of her. The reason I wanted no part was that just one look had made it plain that if I permitted myself to want a part it would be extremely difficult to keep from going on and wanting the whole; and that was highly inadvisable in the circumstances. For one thing, it wouldn’t have been fair to P.H., handicapped as he was. This would have to be strictly business, not only outwardly but inwardly. I admit I smiled at her as she moved aside to let me enter, but it was merely a professional smile.

The room she led me into, after I put my coat and hat on a chair in the foyer, was a large and attractive living room with three windows. It was the room that P.H. had entered to find a corpse — if you’re on our side. The rugs and furniture had been selected by her. Don’t ask me how I know that; I was there and saw them, and saw her with them. She went to a chair over near a window, and, invited, I moved one around to face her. She said that Mr. Freyer had told her on the phone that he was consulting with Nero Wolfe, and that Mr. Wolfe wanted to send his assistant, Mr. Goodwin, to have a talk with her, and that was all she knew. She did not add, “What do you want?”

“I don’t know exactly how to begin,” I told her, “because we have different opinions on a very important point. Mr. Freyer and Mr. Wolfe and I all think Peter Hays didn’t kill your husband, and you think he did.”

She jerked her chin up. “Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s no use beating around the bush. You think it because there’s nothing else for you to think, and anyhow you’re not really thinking. You’ve been hit so hard that you’re too numb to think. We’re not. Our minds are free and we’re trying to use them. But we’d like to be sure on one point: if we prove we’re right, if we get him cleared — I don’t say it looks very hopeful, but if we do — would you like that or wouldn’t you?”

“Oh!” she cried. Her jaw loosened. She said, “Oh,” again, but it was only a whisper.

“I’ll call that a yes,” I said. “Then just forget our difference of opinion, because opinions don’t count anyway. Mr. Freyer spent five hours with Nero Wolfe today, and Mr. Wolfe is going to try to find evidence that will clear Peter Hays. He has seen reports of your conversations with Freyer, but they didn’t help any. Since you were Molloy’s secretary for a year and his wife for three years, Mr. Wolfe thinks it likely — or, say, possible — that at some time you saw or heard something that would help. Remember he is assuming that someone else killed Molloy. He thinks it’s very improbable that a situation existed which resulted in Molloy’s murder, and that he never said or did anything in your presence that had a bearing on it.”

She shook her head, not at me but at fate. “If he did,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”

“Of course you didn’t. If you had you would have told Freyer. Mr. Wolfe wants to try to dig it up. He couldn’t ask you to come to his office so he could start the digging himself, because he has to spend two hours every afternoon playing with orchids, and at six o’clock he has a conference scheduled with four of his men who are going to be given other assignments — on this case. So he sent me to start in with you. I’ll tell you how it works by giving you an example. Once I saw him spend eight hours questioning a young woman about everything and nothing. She wasn’t suspected of anything; he was merely hoping to get some little fact that would give him a start. At the end of eight hours he got it: she had once seen a newspaper with a piece cut out of the front page. With that fact for a start, he got proof that a man had committed a murder. That’s how it works. We’ll start at the beginning, when you were Molloy’s secretary, and I’ll ask questions. We’ll keep at it as long as you can stand it.”

“It seems—” Her hand fluttered. I caught myself noticing how nice her hands were, and had to remind myself that that had all been decided. She said, “It seems so empty. I mean I’m empty.”

“You’re not really empty, you’re full. When and where did you first meet Molloy?”

“That was four years ago,” she said. “The way you — what you want to try — wouldn’t it be better to start later? If there was a situation, the way you say, it would have been more recent, wouldn’t it?”

“You never know, Mrs. Molloy.” It seemed stiff to be calling her Mrs. Molloy. She fully deserved to be called Selma. “Anyhow, I have my instructions from Mr. Wolfe — and by the way, I skipped something. I was to tell you how simple it could have been. Say I decided to kill Molloy and frame Peter Hays for it. The drugstore on the corner is perfectly placed for me. Having learned that you are out for the evening and Molloy is alone in the apartment, at nine o’clock I phone Peter Hays from the booth in the drugstore and tell him — Freyer has told you what Peter says I told him. Then I cross the street to his house, am admitted by Molloy, shoot him, leave the gun here on a chair, knowing it can’t be traced, go back down to the street, watch the entrance from a nearby spot until I see Hays arrive in a taxi and enter the building, return to the drugstore, and phone the police that a shot has just been fired on the top floor of One-seventy-one East Fifty-second Street. You couldn’t ask for anything simpler than that.”

She was squinting at me, concentrating. It gave the corners of her eyes a little upturn. “I see,” she said. “Then you’re not just—” She stopped.

“Just playing games? No. We really mean it. Settle back and relax a little. When and where did you first meet Molloy?”

She interlaced her fingers. No relaxing. “I wanted another job. I was modeling and didn’t like it, and I knew shorthand. An agency sent me to his office, and he hired me.”

“Had you ever heard of him before?”

“No.”

“What did he pay you?”

“I started at sixty, and in about two months he raised it to seventy.”

“When did he begin to show a personal interest in you?”

“Why — almost right away. The second week he asked me to have dinner with him. I didn’t accept, and I liked the way he took it. He knew how to be nice when he wanted to. He always was nice to me until after we were married.”

“Exactly what were your duties? I know what you told Freyer, but we’re going to fill in.”

“There weren’t many duties, really — I mean there wasn’t much work. I opened the office in the morning — usually he didn’t come in until around eleven o’clock. I wrote his letters, but that didn’t amount to much, and answered the phone, and did the filing, what there was of it. He opened the mail himself.”

“Did you keep his books?”

“I don’t think he had any books. I never saw any.”

“Did you draw his checks?”

“I didn’t at first, but later he asked me to sometimes.”

“Where did he keep his checkbook?”

“In a drawer of his desk that he kept locked. There wasn’t any safe in the office.”

“Did you do any personal chores for him? Like getting prizefight tickets or buying neckties?”

“No. Or very seldom. He did things like that himself.”

“Had he ever been married before?”

“No. He said he hadn’t.”

“Did you go to prizefights with him?”

“Sometimes I did, not often. I didn’t like them. And later, the last two years, we didn’t go places together much.”

“Let’s stick to the first year, while you were working for him. Were there many callers at the office?”

“Not many, no. Many days there weren’t any.”

“How many in an average week, would you say?”

“Perhaps—” She thought. “I don’t know, perhaps eight or nine. Maybe a dozen.”

“Take the first week you were there. You were new then and noticing things. How many callers were there the first week, and who were they?”

She opened her eyes at me. Wide open, they were quite different from when they were squinting. I merely noted that fact professionally. “But Mr. Goodwin,” she said, “that’s impossible. It was four years ago!”

I nodded. “That’s just a warm-up. Before we’re through you’ll be remembering lots of things you would have thought impossible, and most of them will be irrelevant and immaterial. I hope not all of them. Try it. Callers the first week.”

We kept at it for nearly two hours, and she did her best. She enjoyed none of it, and some of it was really painful, when we were on the latter part of the year, the period when she was cottoning to Molloy, or thought she was, and was making up her mind to marry him. She would have preferred to let the incidents of that period stay where they were, down in the cellar. I won’t say it hurt me as much as it did her, since with me it was strictly business, but it was no picnic. Finally she said she didn’t think she could go on, and I said we had barely started.

“Then tomorrow?” she asked. “I don’t know why, but this seems to be tougher than it was with the police and the District Attorney. That seems strange, since they were enemies and you’re a friend — you are a friend, aren’t you?”

It was a trap, and I dodged it. “I want what you want,” I told her.

“I know you do, but I just can’t go on. Tomorrow?”

“Sure. Tomorrow morning. But I’ll have some other errands, so it will have to be with Mr. Wolfe. Could you be at his office at eleven o’clock?”

“I suppose I could, but I’d rather go on with you.”

“He’s not so bad. If he growls just ignore it. He’ll dig up something quicker than I would, in order to get rid of you. He doesn’t appreciate women, and I do.” I got out a card and handed it to her. “There’s the address. Tomorrow at eleven?”

She said yes, and got up to see me to the door, but I told her that with a friend it wasn’t necessary.