“Using the elevator?”
“No, the stairs inside the apartment. We entered the studio. Mion was on the floor. We went over to him. There was a big hole through the top of his head. He was dead. I led Mrs. Mion out, made her come, and on the stairs — they’re too narrow to go two abreast — she fell and rolled halfway down. I carried her to her room and put her on her bed, and I started for the living room, for the phone there, when I thought of something to do first. I went out and took the elevator to the ground floor, got the doorman and elevator man together, and asked them who had been taken up to the Mion apartment, either the twelfth floor or the thirteenth, that afternoon. I said they must be damn sure not to skip anybody. They gave me the names and I wrote them down. Then I went back up to the apartment and phoned the police. After I did that it struck me that a layman isn’t supposed to decide if a man is dead, so I phoned Dr. Lloyd, who has an apartment there in the building. He came at once, and I took him up to the studio. We hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the first policeman came, and of course—”
“If you please,” Wolfe put in crossly. “Everything is sometimes too much. You haven’t even hinted at the trouble you’re in.”
“I’ll get to it—”
“But faster, I hope, if I help. My memory has been jogged. The doctor and the police pronounced him dead. The muzzle of the revolver had been thrust into his mouth, and the emerging bullet had torn out a piece of his skull. The revolver, found lying on the floor beside him, belonged to him and was kept there in the studio. There was no sign of any struggle and no mark of any other injury on him. The loss of his voice was an excellent motive for suicide. Therefore, after a routine investigation, giving due weight to the difficulty of sticking the barrel of a loaded revolver into a man’s mouth without arousing him to protest, it was recorded as suicide. Isn’t that correct?”
They both said yes.
“Have the police reopened it? Or is gossip at work?”
They both said no.
“Then let’s get on. Where’s the trouble?”
“It’s us,” Peggy said.
“Why? What’s wrong with you?”
“Everything.” She gestured. “No. I don’t mean that — not everything, just one thing. After my husband’s death and the — the routine investigation, I went away for a while. When I came back — for the past two months Fred and I have been together some, but it wasn’t right — I mean we didn’t feel right. Day before yesterday, Friday, I went to friends in Connecticut for the weekend, and he was there. Neither of us knew the other was coming. We talked it out yesterday and last night and this morning, and we decided to come and ask you to help us — anyway, I did, and he wouldn’t let me come alone.”
Peggy leaned forward and was in deadly earnest. “You must help us, Mr. Wolfe. I love him so much — so much! — and he says he loves me, and I know he does! Yesterday afternoon we decided we would get married in October, and then last night we got started talking — but it isn’t what we say, it’s what is in our eyes when we look at each other. We just can’t get married with that back of our eyes and trying to hide it—”
A little shiver went over her. “For years — forever? We can’t! We know we can’t — it would be horrible! What it is, it’s a question: who killed Alberto? Did he? Did I? I don’t really think he did, and he doesn’t really think I did — I hope he doesn’t — but it’s there back of our eyes, and we know it is!”
She extended both hands. “We want you to find out!”
Wolfe snorted. “Nonsense. You need a spanking or a psychiatrist. The police may have shortcomings, but they’re not nincompoops. If they’re satisfied—”
“But that’s it! They wouldn’t be satisfied if we had told the truth!”
“Oh.” Wolfe’s brows went up. “You lied to them?”
“Yes. Or if we didn’t lie, anyhow we didn’t tell them the truth. We didn’t tell them that when we first went in together and saw him, there was no gun lying there. There was no gun in sight.”
“Indeed. How sure are you?”
“Absolutely positive. I never saw anything clearer than I saw that — that sight — all of it. There was no gun.”
Wolfe snapped at Weppler, “You agree, sir?”
“Yes. She’s right.”
Wolfe sighed. “Well,” he conceded, “I can see that you’re really in trouble. Spanking wouldn’t help.”
I shifted in my chair on account of a tingle at the lower part of my spine. Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street was an interesting place to live and work — for Fritz Brenner, the chef and housekeeper, for Theodore Horstmann, who fed and nursed the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms up on the roof, and for me, Archie Goodwin, whose main field of operations was the big office on the ground floor. Naturally I thought my job the most interesting, since a confidential assistant to a famous private detective is constantly getting an earful of all kinds of troubles and problems — everything from a missing necklace to a new blackmail gimmick. Very few clients actually bored me. But only one kind of case gave me that tingle in the spine: murder. And if this pair of lovebirds were talking straight, this was it.
II
I had filled two notebooks when they left, more than two hours later.
If they had thought it through before they phoned for an appointment with Wolfe, they wouldn’t have phoned. All they wanted, as Wolfe pointed out, was the moon. They wanted him, first, to investigate a four-month-old murder without letting on there had been one; second, to prove that neither of them had killed Alberto Mion, which could be done only by finding out who had; and third, in case he concluded that one of them had done it, to file it away and forget it. Not that they put it that way, since their story was that they were both absolutely innocent, but that was what it amounted to.
Wolfe made it good and plain. “If I take the job,” he told them, “and find evidence to convict someone of murder, no matter who, the use I make of it will be solely in my discretion. I am neither an Astraea nor a sadist, but I like my door open. But if you want to drop it now, here’s your check, and Mr. Goodwin’s notebooks will be destroyed. We can forget you have been here, and shall.”
That was one of the moments when they were within an ace of getting up and going, especially Fred Weppler, but they didn’t. They looked at each other, and it was all in their eyes. By that time I had about decided I liked them both pretty well and was even beginning to admire them, they were so damn determined to get loose from the trap they were in. When they looked at each other like that their eyes said, “Let’s go and be together, my darling love, and forget this — come on, come on.” Then they said, “It will be so wonderful!” Then they said, “Yes, oh yes, but— But we don’t want it wonderful for a day or a week; it must be always wonderful — and we know ...”
It took strong muscles to hold onto it like that, not to mention horse sense, and several times I caught myself feeling sentimental about it. Then of course there was the check for five grand on Wolfe’s desk.
The notebooks were full of assorted matters. There were a thousand details which might or might not turn out to be pertinent, such as the mutual dislike between Peggy Mion and Rupert Grove, her husband’s manager, or the occasion of Gifford James socking Alberto Mion in front of witnesses, or the attitudes of various persons toward Mion’s demand for damages; but you couldn’t use it all, and Wolfe himself never needed more than a fraction of it, so I’ll pick and choose. Of course the gun was Exhibit A. It was a new one, having been bought by Mion the day after Gifford James had plugged him and hurt his larynx — not, he had announced, for vengeance on James but for future protection. He had carried it in a pocket whenever he went out, and at home had kept it in the studio, lying on the base of a bust of Caruso. So far as known, it had never fired but one bullet, the one that killed Mion.