After the drinks had come and been distributed, and Wolfe had taken a couple of healthy gulps of beer, he focused on Jay Kerr. “Yes, sir? You were going to tell us.”
Kerr was sipping his scotch. “He played me too. Good. Only not the same pattern exactly. What was eating him was his wife. He wanted his home tapped, an apartment in Brooklyn. He wanted full reports on all voices, male and female, because he thought there might be a male around when he was away that shouldn’t be there. I can tell you and Miss Bonner too, you got gypped. He gave me two thousand at the go and another pair later.”
“Thank you. I’ll demand more next time. When was this?”
“It was early April when he contacted me. After two weeks, sixteen days if I remember right, he called the tap off and settled up.”
“What was his name? The name he gave.”
Kerr took a sip, swallowed, and made a face. “This whiskey don’t taste right, but that’s not the whiskey’s fault. I had cabbage for dinner. About his name, well, the name he gave was Leggett. Arthur M. Leggett.”
“That sounds familiar. L-e-g-g-e-double-t?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve seen it. Archie?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He’s the head of something.”
“He’s the president,” Dol Bonner said, “of the Metropolitan Citizens League.”
That woman was getting on my nerves. Now she was giving him information he had asked me for and hadn’t got, and they weren’t even engaged yet. Wolfe thanked her courteously. Courtesy is okay, but I hoped he wasn’t making a fetish of it. He asked Kerr, “How did he establish his identity?”
“He didn’t.”
Kerr took another sip and made another face, and Wolfe turned to me and said sharply, “Taste that whiskey.”
I had had the same idea myself. It was beginning to look as if we might have a murderer with us, and not only that, it hadn’t been long since a guy named Assa, right in our office, had swallowed a drink that had been served to him by me and had dropped dead. Cyanide. Wolfe didn’t want a rerun of that one, and neither did I. I went and asked Kerr to let me taste it, and he said what the hell but handed it over. I took in a dribble, distributed it with my tongue, let it trickle down, repeated the performance with a thimbleful, and handed it back to him.
“Okay,” I told Wolfe. “It must be the cabbage.”
He grunted. “You say he didn’t establish his identity, Mr. Kerr? Why not?”
“Why should he?” Kerr demanded. “Do you know how many husbands in the metropolitan area get suspicious about their wives every week on an average? Hundreds. Thousands! Some of them come to me for help. A man comes and wants to pay me for expert service. Why should I doubt if he knows who he is? If I tried to check on all of them I’d spend all my time on it.”
“You must have heard that name, Arthur M. Leggett. A man of your widespread – uh, activities.”
Kerr jerked his chin up. “Look, are you a cop? Or one of us?”
“I’m one of us.”
“Then be yourself. Let the cops tell me what names I must have heard. Don’t worry, they have and they will. And I reported the tap in my statement to the secretary of state, because it was ethical and because I knew I had to. I knew they had two of the technicians singing, and I would have been sunk if they connected me with a job I hadn’t reported.”
Wolfe nodded. “We have no desire to harass you, Mr. Kerr. We only ask that you contribute your share to our pool of information. You had no suspicion that your client was not Arthur M. Leggett?”
“No.”
“And never have had?”
“No.”
“Then when you were taken to view the corpse today you must have identified it as Arthur M. Leggett.”
“I did.”
“I see.” Wolfe considered a moment. “Why not? And naturally, when you learned that wasn’t his name you were shocked and indignant, and now you have severe epithets for him. You’re not alone in that. So have I; so has Miss Bonner; and so, doubtless, have Mr. Ide and Mr. Amsel.” He emptied his beer glass, refilled it, kept his eye on it long enough to see that the rising foam didn’t break at the edge, then looked up. “Have you, Mr. Ide?”
Ide put his cup and saucer down on my suitcase, there on the rack, which I had invited him to use for a table. He cleared his throat. “I want to say, Mr. Wolfe, that I feel better than I did when I entered this room.”
“Good. Since it’s my room, and Mr. Goodwin’s, I am gratified.”
“Yes, sir. The fact is, my experience with that man was very similar to yours and Miss Bonner’s, and I have deeply regretted it. He imposed on me as he did on you, and in the same pattern. If I gave you all the details it would be mostly a repetition of what you and Miss Bonner have said.”
“Nevertheless, we’d like to hear them.”
“I see no point in it.”
Ide’s voice had sharpened a little, but Wolfe stayed affable. “One or more of the details might be suggestive. Or at least corroborative. When did it happen?”
“In April.”
“How much did he pay you?”
“Two thousand dollars.”
“Did he give his name as Donahue?”
“No. Another name. As I said, the pattern was very similar to the one he used with you.”
“How did he establish his identity?”
“I prefer not to say. I mishandled it badly. I omitted that detail from my statement to the secretary of state. I suppose Mr. Hyatt will insist on it at the hearing, but I don’t think the whole thing will be published, and I’m not going to publish it by telling it here. I was going to say, the reason I feel better is that now I have the consolation of knowing that I’m not the only one he made a fool of.”
“You have indeed. We have all qualified for dunce’s caps.” Wolfe drank some beer and passed his tongue over his lips. “How did it end? Did you get onto him, or did he call it off as he did with Miss Bonner and Mr. Kerr?”
“I prefer not to say.” From the expression on Ide’s bony face, with its long hawk’s nose, he would prefer to switch to some harmless topic like the weather. “I’ll say this much, the tap was discontinued after ten days, and that ended my association with him. Like you and Miss Bonner and Mr. Kerr, I never saw him again until today, and then he was a corpse.”
“And you identified the corpse?”
“Yes. There was no other… it would have been folly not to.”
“You identified it with the name he gave you when he hired you?”
“Of course.”