As for Monday morning, Elma had been in Busch’s room from nine-forty to ten-fifteen, taking dictation from him, and then in the rumpus with the crew. About half past eleven John Mercer had entered with a man, a stranger, and called them together, and the man had asked if any of them had been in Ashby’s room that morning, or had seen anyone entering or leaving it, and had got a unanimous no; and then Mercer had told them what had happened.
Even with my extremely acute understanding of attractive young women, I didn’t suspect that she was holding out on me, except maybe on one detail, near the end, when I asked who she thought had lied to the cops about her and Ashby. She wouldn’t name anyone even as a wild guess. I told her that was ridiculous, that any man or woman alive, knowing that someone or ones of a group had smeared him, would darned well have a notion who it was, but nothing doing. If any of them had it in for her she didn’t know it, except Ashby, and he was dead.
At a quarter of eleven I was at my desk typing that part, nearly finished, when the house phone buzzed and I turned and got it. Wolfe rarely interrupts himself in the plant rooms to buzz me. Since he eats breakfast in his room and goes straight up to the roof, I hadn’t seen him, so I said good morning.
“Good morning. What are you doing?”
“Typing my conference with Miss Vassos. The substance. Not verbatim. About done.”
“Well?”
“Nothing startling. Some facts that might help. As for believing her, it’s now fifty to one.”
He grunted. “Or better. What could conceivably have led her to come to me with her story if it weren’t true? Confound it. Where is she?”
“In her room. Of course she isn’t going to work.”
“Has she eaten? A guest, welcome or not, must not starve.”
“She won’t. She ate. She phoned the DA’s office to ask when she can have the body. She’ll do.”
“The account in the Times supports her conclusion that the police assume that her father killed Ashby and committed suicide-not, of course, explicitly. You have read it?”
“Yes. So has she.”
“But the Times may be wrong, and certainly she may be. It’s possible that Mr. Cramer is finessing, and if so we can leave it to him. You’ll have to find out. Conclusively.”
“Lon Cohen may know.”
“That won’t do. You’ll have to see Mr. Cramer. Now.”
“If he’s finessing he won’t show me his hand.”
“Certainly not. It will take dexterity. Your intelligence, guided by experience.”
“Yeah. That’s me. I’ll go as soon as I finish typing this-five minutes. You’ll find it in your drawer.” I hung up, beating him to it.
It took only three minutes. I put the original in his desk drawer and the carbon in mine, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving, got my coat from the hall rack, and departed. It’s a good distance for a leg-stretcher from the old brownstone to Homicide South, but my brain likes to take it easy while I’m walking and I had to consult it about approaches, so I went to Ninth Avenue and flagged a taxi.
The dick at the desk, who was not my favorite city employee, said Cramer was busy but Lieutenant Rowcliff might spare me a minute, and I said no thank you and sat down to wait. It was close to noon when I was escorted down the hall to Cramer’s room and found him standing at the end of his desk. As I entered he rasped, “So your client bought a one-way ticket. Want to see him?”
It seldom pays to prepare an approach. It depends on the approachee. The frame of mind he was in, it was hopeless to try smoothing him, so I switched. “Nuts,” I said offensively. “If you mean Vassos, he wasn’t a client, he was just a bootblack. You owe Mr. Wolfe something and he wants it. Elma Vassos, the daughter, slept in his house last night.”
“The hell she did. In your room?”
“No. I snore. She came and fed him a line that her life was in danger. Whoever killed Ashby and her father, she didn’t know who, was going to kill her. Then the morning paper has it different. Not spelled out, but it’s there, that Vassos killed Ashby and when you started breathing down his neck he found a cliff and jumped off. So you knew about it when you came to see Mr. Wolfe Monday, you knew then about Ashby and Elma Vassos. Why didn’t you say so? If you had, when she came last night she wouldn’t have got in. So you owe him something. When he turns her out he wants to make a little speech to her, and he wants to know who gave you the dope on her and Ashby. Off the record, and you won’t be quoted.”
He threw his head back and laughed. Not an all-out laugh, just a ha-ha. He stretched an arm to touch my chest with a forefinger. “Slept in his house, huh? Wonderful! I’d like to hear his speech, what will he call her? Not trollop or floozy, he’ll have some fancy word for it. And he has the nerve-on out, Goodwin.”
“He wants to know-”
“Nuts. Beat it.”
“But dammit-”
“Out.”
I went; and since there was now nothing to work the brain on, I walked back to 35th Street. Wolfe was at his desk with the book he was on, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer. A tray on his desk held beer bottles and a glass, and beside it was the report I had typed of my talk with Elma. I went to my desk and sat, and waited until he finished a paragraph and looked up.
“We’ll have to bounce her,” I said. “You will. I would prefer to marry her and reform her, but Cramer would take my license away. Do you want it in full?”
He said yes, and I gave it to him. At the end I said, “As you see, it didn’t take any dexterity. The first thing he said, ‘So your client bought a one-way ticket,’ was enough. He is not finessing. You can’t blame him for laughing, since he honestly believes that you have a floozy for a house guest. As for his refusing to name-”
“Shut up.”
I leaned back and crossed my legs. He glowered at me for five seconds, then closed his eyes. In a moment he opened them. “It’s hopeless,” he said through his teeth.
“Yes, sir,” I agreed. “I suppose I could disguise myself as a bootblack and take Pete’s box and try to-”
“Shut up! I mean it’s intolerable. Mr. Cramer cannot be permitted to flout…” He put the book down without marking his place, which he never did. “There’s no way out. I could have shined my shoes myself. I considered this possibility after reading your report, and here it is. Get Mr. Parker.”
I didn’t have to look at the book for the number of Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer. I turned to the phone and dialed it, and got him, and Wolfe lifted his receiver.
“Good morning, sir. Afternoon. I need you. I am going to advise a young woman who has consulted me to bring actions against a corporation and five or six individuals, asking for damages, say a million dollars from each of them, on account of defamatory statements they have made. Slander, not libel, since as far as I know the statements have been made orally and not published. She is here in my house. Can you come to my office?… No, after lunch will do. Three o’clock?… Very well, I’ll expect you.”
He hung up and turned to me. “We’ll have to keep her. You will go with her to her home to get whatever she needs-not now, later. Mr. Cramer expects me to turn her out, does he? Pfui. She would be dead within twenty-four hours, and that would clean the slate for him. Tell Fritz to take her lunch to her room. I will not be rude to a guest at my table, and the effort to control myself would spoil the meal.”