Murder in E Minor

21

After breakfast Thursday, I walked to a newsstand on Eighth Avenue and picked up the early edition of the Gazette. The banner read SURPRISE IN STEVENS CASE, and there was a column of type of the previous night’s events in the brownstone, plus pictures of Wolfe and me. I made a mental note to thank Lon for using the newer mug shots that I’d sent him.

It had been well after midnight when things settled down at home and I finally got around to calling him. He’d griped about the hour, but he had his exclusive, and the timing was perfect for the Gazette, an evening paper. Now the A.M.’S would be scrambling to catch up, but they were dead until their first editions for Friday hit the streets late Thursday night.

I got back to the house and laid the paper on Wolfe’s desk blotter along with his mail just as the elevator came down from the plant rooms. “Good morning, Archie, nice to see the sun today, isn’t it?” he said, positioning himself in his custom-made chair. I let him go through the mail and have a look at the paper before I turned to face him.

“By the time we got everybody out of here last night and I got through filling in Lon on the phone, it was too damn late to ask any questions, but I’ve got a few,” I said.

“Oh?” Wolfe raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. For instance, why weren’t you suspicious about Alexandra Adjari? You didn’t seem concerned when she went back to London right in the middle of this mess, but how did you know she hadn’t come to New York earlier than she had said? She could have been here for several days before she came to see us, which would have made her a suspect.”

“That point occurred to me as well, and one morning I called Mr. Cohen from the plant rooms. Through his connections with the customs people, he determined that Miss Adjari did indeed arrive in New York on the day she came to see us.”

“Sneaking around behind my back again,” I said. “Speaking of Lon, I suppose he’s the ‘contacts in the press’ that you mentioned last night when you talked about Lucinda’s past?”

“Yes, another call to Mr. Cohen when you were out. Through the Gazette files and European correspondents, he confirmed what I suspected: that Lucinda Forrester-Moore was indeed a German émigré, and that her name had been Wald.”

“But you didn’t know that Willy was her brother?”

“No, I couldn’t establish that fact definitely, but it seemed almost a certainty. I felt confident in confronting her with it.”

I grinned. “There were several things about last night that I liked, but the one that tickled me most was the expression on Cramer’s face when he realized there were two of them in on it. I also noticed that you overcame your bashfulness about drinking a certain brand of beer in the presence of the heir. Which leads me to my last question: What would you have done if Remmers had been the murderer?”

The corners of Wolfe’s mouth went up slightly, deepening the folds in his cheeks. For him, that’s a smile. “I knew you would ask eventually, Archie. It’s a measure of your thoroughness.” He opened his center desk drawer, reached in, and pulled out four bottle caps, which he spread on his blotter.

I picked one up, then another. “When?” I asked.

“Fritz went out for them the afternoon you were at the bank getting Mr. Milner’s bail money.”

“Did any measure up?”

“Passable, all of them, and far superior to that unspeakable ‘Billy Beer’ you saw fit to present to me last summer. I’m pleased that Mr. Remmers was not one of the guilty. Any change would have been a step toward mediocrity, and as Isaac D’Israeli wrote, ‘It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity.’ I fervently hope my taste will never become so wretched as to be satisfied with one of these.”

With that, he dumped the bottle caps into his wastebasket and rang for beer.