“Okay, Mr. Billings, where were you on—”
“On the Tuesday before last,” Billings cut in, smirking. “I looked on my calendar right after you phoned, knowing that you and Wolfe would consider me a suspect. And frankly, I’m still a suspect as far as you’re concerned, because I have no alibi — none whatever. I’d been working at home on Tuesdays — I can get infinitely more done away from the telephone and other office interruptions. And that was the case on the day Charles was found dead. I was at home all day — I have an apartment on the Upper East Side. Do I live with someone? No, sorry. Does my building have a doorman? No, it’s not in that league. Did anybody see me? No, at least not until I went to a bar in my neighborhood for a sandwich — corned beef, it was, on rye, and a beer. Any other questions?”
I showed him the key I was carrying, which he told me looked like hundreds of others he’d seen, but not that had ever belonged to him. “Here are mine,” he said casually, tossing a ringful on his desk blotter. None matched the one I had.
“Anything else?” he demanded.
“Ever been to Childress’s apartment?” I asked.
“You don’t give it up, do you? No, I have never been there.”
“Did you know that he died from a bullet fired from his own gun?”
“Yeah. Listen, I do read the papers. I don’t know why he had one, but I wasn’t surprised. I’ve toyed with getting a small-caliber pistol myself, for self-protection. Lord knows you need one in this town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a pile of stuff to do.”
I got up, playing ever so fleetingly with the idea of making an anonymous, handkerchief-over-the-mouthpiece telephone call to one Lieutenant George Rowcliff of the Homicide Squad and telling him that a fellow named Keith Billings was seen leaving Charles Childress’s apartment building on the day the latter was found dead.
Nine
The walk home from Keith Billings’s office cooled me off, so by the time I mounted the steps to the brownstone, I conceded that turning Rowcliff loose on the sawed-off, smart-mouthed editor would be a form of cruel and unusual punishment, the kind that was frowned upon by the framers of the Federal Constitution. Maybe I’d make my anonymous call to Sergeant Purley Stebbins instead; unlike Rowcliff, Purley is neither mean nor stupid. But the man sure loves to use his handcuffs.
It was almost a quarter of six by the time I settled in at my desk. Wolfe had left two handwritten letters on my blotter, to orchid growers in Marietta, Georgia, and Madison, Wisconsin. I dutifully entered each into the PC and printed them out twice — one for his signature and the other for our files. After I’d finished, I glanced at my watch, which told me it was eight minutes past the hour: It’s a terrific watch, a quartz job Lily Rowan got me for my birthday two-plus years ago, and it’s never been off more than a second or so — until now. I accused it of galloping until I shot a peek at the wall clock, which also read 6:08. Just as I began contemplating the implications of all this, Fritz appeared at the door, alarm both on his face and in his voice.
“Where is he, Archie? He did not ring for beer, and he did not call down on the house telephone to say he would be delayed.”
“I was wondering the very same thing myself. I’ll go up.”
I took the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor. When I got there, I found Wolfe standing in the little hallway that led to the plant rooms, glowering into the darkened interior of the one vehicle in the world he trusted. Theodore Horstmann stood behind him, his face longer than the men’s-room lines at Shea in the seventh inning on a warm Sunday afternoon when the Mets are playing the Dodgers.
“It doesn’t work,” Wolfe muttered.
I stepped into the elevator and pressed each of the buttons. He was right.
“Oh, well, at least the trip is southbound,” I told him, trying to make light of the situation. “Beer awaits at base camp.”
Wolfe was not amused, as his expression indicated. But he made the best of it and began the descent behind me. I beat him to the first floor by at least a minute. Fritz was at the bottom of the stairs, kneading his hands in his apron and looking up at me with a question mark on his face.
“The elevator’s on the fritz, pardon the expression. He’s coming — on foot. Have beer on his desk when he arrives,” I ordered. I swear Fritz saluted before doing a snappy about-face and darting into the kitchen — probably a vestige of his days with the Alpine Patrol.
When Wolfe arrived in the doorway, two bottles of beer and a frosted glass awaited on his blotter, and I was back at my desk. He marched into the office and got settled in his chair.
“I’ll call the elevator maintenance outfit,” I told him. “There’s a chance somebody can come tomorrow, although it probably will cost extra because it’s a Saturday.” He grunted what I took to be his approval, so I found the number in my telephone file and punched it out. A recorded female voice informed me the office was closed but that I could try an emergency number, which I did. The guy who answered sounded like he’d just been roused from a deep sleep. I told him the problem and he responded with a few sluggish “uh-huhs.” He was equally unenthusiastic when he said they’d send a crew out first thing in the morning — no later than nine. “Hafta charge you the weekend rate,” he warned, and I responded that we would live with it.
I hung up and told Wolfe help was on the way, but he didn’t appear to be impressed, so I changed the subject. “I talked to Keith Billings,” I said as he set down his glass of beer, licked his lips, and picked up his current book, Byzantium: The Apogee, by John Julius Norwich. “Do you want a report?”
He scowled and closed the book. “Proceed,” he said icily. I forgave him silently, knowing it had been an unsettling day for him, and gave him the conversation verbatim while he sat with eyes closed and hands on his chair arms. When I finished, he opened his eyes, drained his glass, and poured more beer before uttering a single word. “Indiana.”
“Yeah, two people now have told me Childress seemed different when he came back from there. Like I told Billings, maybe that’s understandable, though.”
“I detected no appreciable change in your personality or demeanor when you returned from your mother’s funeral several years ago,” Wolfe observed.
“True, but no two people react to a personal loss in the same way.”
“Manifestly. How would one get to this place?” To Wolfe, any travel, even a few blocks by car, is an act of outright recklessness. I went to the bookshelves and pulled down the big atlas, taking it back to my desk. “Mercer, Indiana, population, four thousand six hundred eleven. Here it is, southeast of Indianapolis about fifty or sixty miles, say an hour’s drive.”
Wolfe shuddered. “And to get to Indianapolis?”
“Something over an hour by air, ninety minutes at the outside. Do I go?”
Another shudder. “I believe you are visiting Miss Rowan’s dacha this weekend?”
Wolfe calls it a dacha, and Lily herself refers to it as “my country cottage.” It actually is a spacious, stone-and-timber, tile-roofed, four-bedroom villa with an Olympic-sized pool and stables set on forty rolling and wooded acres near Katonah. “We were supposed to drive up around noon tomorrow, but I can cancel,” I told him.
“No, Monday is soon enough. Make the necessary arrangements,” he said, returning to his book. You might think he was being considerate by letting me keep my weekend plans, but he had a couple of ulterior motives: One, he wanted to be sure I was around in the morning to deal with the elevator repair crew; and two, he knew that if I were away toiling on Sunday, he would have to give me a day off somewhere along the way as compensation, and he doesn’t like it when I’m not around on weekdays to carry out whatever duties he dreams up. Actually, there was a third factor, too. Wolfe, despite his overall opinion of women, approves of Lily Rowan — whenever she comes to the brownstone, she asks to see his orchids, a request that is sure to get a positive response from him. She had a weekend planned, and he did not want to cast himself in the role of bad guy by messing it up.