I

It was her complexion that made it hard to believe she was as scared as she said she was.

“Maybe I haven’t made it clear,” she persisted, twisting her fingers some more though I had asked her to stop. “I’m not making anything up, really I’m not. If they framed me once, isn’t that a good enough reason to think they are doing it again?”

If her cheek color had been from a drugstore, with the patches showing because the fear in her heart was using extra blood for internal needs, I would probably have been affected more. But at first sight of her I had been reminded of a picture on a calendar hanging on the wall of Sam’s Diner on Eleventh Avenue, a picture of a round-faced girl with one hand holding a pail and the other hand resting on the flank of a cow she had just milked or was going to milk. It was her to a T, in skin tint, build, and innocence.

She quit the finger-twisting to make tight little fists and perch them on her thigh fronts. “Is he really such a puffed-up baboon?” she demanded. “They’ll be here in twenty minutes, and I’ve got to see him first!” Suddenly she was out of the chair, on her feet. “Where is he, upstairs?”

Having suspected she was subject to impulses, I had, instead of crossing to my desk, held a position between her and the door to the hall.

“Give it up,” I advised her. “When you stand up you tremble, I noticed that when you came in, so sit down. I’ve tried to explain, Miss Rooney, that while this room is Mr. Wolfe’s office, the rest of this building is his home. From nine to eleven in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, he is absolutely at home, up in the plant rooms with his orchids, and bigger men than you have had to like it. But, what I’ve seen of you, I think possibly you’re nice, and I’ll do you a favor.”

“What?”

“Sit down and quit trembling.”

She sat down.

“I’ll go up and tell him about you.”

“What will you tell him?”

“I’ll remind him that a man named Ferdinand Pohl phoned this morning and made a date for himself and four others, to come here to see Mr. Wolfe at six o’clock, which is sixteen minutes from now. I’ll tell him your name is Audrey Rooney and you’re one of the four others, and you’re fairly good-looking and may be nice, and you’re scared stiff because, as you tell it, they’re pretending they think it was Talbott but actually they’re getting set to frame you, and—”

“Not all of them.”

“Anyhow some. I’ll tell him that you came ahead of time to see him alone and inform him that you have not murdered anyone, specifically not Sigmund Keyes, and to warn him that he must watch these stinkers like a hawk.”

“It sounds crazy — like that!”

“I’ll put feeling in it.”

She left her chair again, came to me in three swift steps, flattened her palms on my coat front, and tilted her head back to get my eyes.

“You may be nice too,” she said hopefully.

“That would be too much to expect,” I told her as I turned and made for the stairs in the hall.

II

Ferdinand Pohl was speaking.

Sitting there in the office with my chair swiveled so that my back was to my desk, with Wolfe himself behind his desk to my left, I took Pohl in. He was close to twice my age. Seated in the red leather chair beyond the end of Wolfe’s desk, with his leg-crossing histing his pants so that five inches of bare shin showed above his garterless sock, there was nothing about him to command attention except an unusual assortment of facial creases, and nothing at all to love.

“What brought us together,” he was saying in a thin peevish tone, “and what brought us here together, is our unanimous opinion that Sigmund Keyes was murdered by Victor Talbott, and also our conviction—”

“Not unanimous,” another voice objected.

The voice was soft and good for the ears, and its owner was good for the eyes. Her chin, especially, was the kind you can take from any angle. The only reason I hadn’t seated her in the chair nearest mine was that on her arrival she had answered my welcoming smile with nothing but brow-lifting, and I had decided to hell with her until she learned her manners.

“Not unanimous, Ferdy,” she objected.

“You said,” Pohl told her, even more peevish, “that you were in sympathy with our purpose and wanted to join us and come here with us.”

Seeing them and hearing them, I made a note that they hated each other. She had known him longer than I had, since she called him Ferdy, and evidently she agreed that there was nothing about him to love. I was about to start feeling that I had been too harsh with her when I saw she was lifting her brows at him.

“That,” she declared, “is quite different from having the opinion that Vic murdered my father. I have no opinion, because I don’t know.”

“Then what are you in sympathy with?”

“I want to find out. So do you. And I certainly agree that the police are being extremely stupid.”

“Who do you think killed him if Vic didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” The brows went up again. “But since I have inherited my father’s business, and since I am engaged to marry Vic, and since a few other things, I want very much to know. That’s why I’m here with you.”

“You don’t belong here!”

“I’m here, Ferdy.”

“I say you don’t belong!” Pohl’s creases were wriggling. “I said so and I still say so! We came, the four of us, for a definite purpose, to get Nero Wolfe to find proof that Vic killed your father!” Pohl suddenly uncrossed his legs, leaned forward to peer at Dorothy Keyes’ face, and asked in a mean little voice, “And what if you helped him?”

Three other voices spoke at once. One said, “They’re off again.”

Another, “Let Mr. Broadyke tell it.”

Another, “Get one of them out of here.”

Wolfe said, “If the job is limited to those terms, Mr. Pohl, to prove that a man named by you committed murder, you’ve wasted your trip. What if he didn’t?”

III

Many things had happened in that office on the ground floor of the old brownstone house owned by Nero Wolfe during the years I had worked for him as his man Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

This gathering in the office, on this Tuesday evening in October, had its own special angle of interest. Sigmund Keyes, top-drawer industrial designer, had been murdered the preceding Tuesday, just a week ago. I had read about it in the papers and had also found an opportunity to hear it privately discussed by my friend and enemy Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide, and from the professional-detective slant it struck me as a lulu.

It had been Keyes’ custom, five days a week at six-thirty in the morning, to take a walk in the park, and to do it the hard and silly way by walking on four legs instead of two. He kept the four legs, which he owned and which were named Casanova, at the Stillwell Riding Academy on Ninety-eighth Street just west of the park. That morning he mounted Casanova as usual, promptly at six-thirty, and rode into the park. Forty minutes later, at seven-ten, he had been seen by a mounted cop, in the park on patrol, down around Sixty-sixth Street. His customary schedule would have had him about there at that time. Twenty-five minutes later, at seven-thirty-five, Casanova, with his saddle uninhabited, had emerged from the park uptown and strolled down the street to the academy. Curiosity had naturally been aroused, and in three-quarters of an hour had been satisfied, when a park cop had found Keyes’ body behind a thicket some twenty yards from the bridle path in the park, in the latitude of Ninety-fifth Street. Later a .38-caliber revolver bullet had been dug out of his chest. The police had concluded, from marks on the path and beyond its edge, that he had been shot out of his saddle and had crawled, with difficulty, up a little slope toward a paved walk for pedestrians, and hadn’t had enough life left to make it.

A horseman shot from his saddle within sight of the Empire State Building was of course a natural for the tabloids, and the other papers thought well of it too. No weapon had been found, and no eyewitnesses. No citizen had even come forward to report seeing a masked man lurking behind a tree, probably because very few New Yorkers could possibly explain being up and dressed and strolling in the park at that hour of the morning.

So the city employees had had to start at the other end and look for motives and opportunities. During the week that had passed a lot of names had been mentioned and a lot of people had received official callers, and as a result the glare had pretty well concentrated on six spots. So the papers had it, and so I gathered from Purley Stebbins. What gave the scene in our office that Tuesday afternoon its special angle of interest was the fact that five of the six spots were there seated on chairs, and apparently what they wanted Wolfe to do was to take the glare out of their eyes and get it aimed exclusively at the sixth spot, not present.

IV

“Permit me to say,” Frank Broadyke offered in a cultivated baritone, “that Mr. Pohl has put it badly. The situation is this, Mr. Wolfe, that Mr. Pohl got us together and we found that each of us feels that he is being harassed unreasonably. Not only that he is unjustly suspected of a crime he did not commit, but that in a full week the police have accomplished nothing and aren’t likely to, and we will be left with this unjust suspicion permanently upon us.”

Broadyke gestured with a hand. More than his baritone was cultivated; he was cultivated all over. He was somewhat younger than Pohl, and ten times as elegant. His manner gave the impression that he was finding it difficult just to be himself because (a) he was in the office of a private detective, which was vulgar, (b) he had come there with persons with whom one doesn’t ordinarily associate, which was embarrassing, and (c) the subject for discussion was his connection with a murder, which was preposterous.

He was going on. “Mr. Pohl suggested that we consult you and engage your services. As one who will gladly pay my share of the bill, permit me to say that what I want is the removal of that unjust suspicion. If you can achieve that only by finding the criminal and evidence against him, very well. If the guilty man proves to be Victor Talbott, again very well.”

“There’s no if about it!” Pohl blurted. “Talbott did it, and the job is to pin it on him!”

“With me helping, Ferdy, don’t forget,” Dorothy Keyes told him softly.

“Aw, can it!”

Eyes turned to the speaker, whose only contribution up to that point had been the remark, “They’re off again.” Heads had to turn too because he was seated to the rear of the swing of the arc. The high pitch of his voice was a good match for his name, Wayne Safford, but not for his broad husky build and the strong big bones of his face. According to the papers he was twenty-eight, but he looked a little older, about my age.

Wolfe nodded at him. “I quite agree, Mr. Safford.” Wolfe’s eyes swept the arc. “Mr. Pohl wants too much for his money. You can hire me to catch a fish, ladies and gentlemen, but you can’t tell me which fish. You can tell me what it is I’m after — a murderer — but you can’t tell me who it is unless you have evidence, and in that case why pay me? Have you got evidence?”

No one said anything.

“Have you got evidence, Mr. Pohl?”

“No.”

“How do you know it was Mr. Talbott?”

“I know it, that’s all. We all know it! Even Miss Keyes here knows it, but she’s too damn contrary to admit it.”

Wolfe swept the arc again. “Is that true? Do you all know it?”

No word. No “yes” and no “no.” No nods and no shakes.

“Then the identity of the fish is left to me. Is that understood? Mr. Broadyke?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Safford?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Rooney?”

“Yes. Only I think it was Vic Talbott.”

“Nothing can stop you. Miss Keyes?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Pohl?”

No answer.

“I must have a commitment on this, Mr. Pohl. If it proves to be Mr. Talbott you can pay extra. But in any case, I am hired to get facts?”

“Sure, the real facts.”

“There is no other kind. I guarantee not to deliver any unreal facts.” Wolfe leaned forward to press a button on his desk. “That is, indeed, the only guaranty I can give you. I should make it plain that you are responsible both collectively and individually for this engagement with me. Now if—”

The door to the hall had opened, and Fritz Brenner entered and approached.

“Fritz,” Wolfe told him, “there will be five guests at dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” Fritz told him without a blink and turned to go. That’s how good Fritz is, and he is not the kind to ring in omelets or canned soup. As he was opening the door a protest came from Frank Broadyke.

“Better make it four. I’ll have to leave soon and I have a dinner engagement.”

“Cancel it,” Wolfe snapped.

“I’m afraid I can’t, really.”

“Then I can’t take this job.” Wolfe was curt. “What do you expect, with this thing already a week old?” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ll need you, all of you, certainly all evening, and probably most of the night. I must know all that you know about Mr. Keyes and Mr. Talbott. Also, if I am to remove this unjust suspicion of you from the minds of the police and the public, I must begin by removing it from my own mind. That will take many hours of hard work.”

“Oh,” Dorothy Keyes put in, her brows going up, “you suspect us, do you?”

Wolfe, ignoring her, asked Broadyke, “Well, sir?”

“I’ll have to phone,” Broadyke muttered.

“You may,” Wolfe conceded, as if he were yielding a point. His eyes moved, left and right and left again, and settled on Audrey Rooney, whose chair was a little in the rear, to one side of Wayne Safford’s. “Miss Rooney,” he shot at her, “you seem to be the most vulnerable, since you were on the scene. When did Mr. Keyes dismiss you from his employ, and what for?”

Audrey had been sitting straight and still, with her lips tight. “Well, it was—” she began, but stopped to clear her throat and then didn’t continue because of an interruption.

The doorbell had rung, and I had left it to Fritz to answer it, which was the custom when I was engaged with Wolfe and visitors, unless superseding orders had been given. Now the door to the hall opened, and Fritz entered, closed the door behind him, and announced. “A gentleman to see you, sir. Mr. Victor Talbott.”

The name plopped in the middle of us like a paratrooper at a picnic.

“By God!” Wayne Safford exclaimed.

“How the devil—” Frank Broadyke started, and stopped.

“So you told him!” Pohl spat at Dorothy Keyes.

Dorothy merely raised her brows. I was getting fed up with that routine and wished she would try something else.

Audrey Rooney’s mouth was hanging open.

“Show him in,” Wolfe told Fritz.

V

Like millions of my fellow citizens, I had done some sizing up of Victor Talbott from pictures of him in the papers, and within ten seconds after he had joined us in the office I had decided the label I had tied on him could stay. He was the guy who, at a cocktail party or before dinner, grabs the tray of appetizers and passes it around, looking into eyes and making cracks.

Not counting me, he was easily the best-looking male in the room.

Entering, he shot a glance and a smile at Dorothy Keyes, ignored the others, came to a stop in front of Wolfe’s desk, and said pleasantly, “You’re Nero Wolfe, of course. I’m Vic Talbott. I suppose you’d rather not shake hands with me under the circumstances — that is, if you’re accepting the job these people came to offer you. Are you?”

“How do you do, sir,” Wolfe rumbled. “Good heavens, I’ve shaken hands with — how many murderers, Archie?”

“Oh — forty,” I estimated.

“At least that. That’s Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Talbott.”

Evidently Vic figured I might be squeamish too, for he gave me a nod but extended no hand. Then he turned to face the guests. “What about it, folks? Have you hired the great detective?”

“Nuts,” Wayne Safford squeaked at him. “You come prancing in, huh?”

Ferdinand Pohl had left his chair and was advancing on the gate-crasher. I was on my feet, ready to move. There was plenty of feeling loose in the room, and I didn’t want any of our clients hurt. But all Pohl did was to tap Talbott on the chest with a thick forefinger and growl at him, “Listen, my boy. You’re not going to sell anything here. You’ve made one sale too many as it is.” Pohl whirled to Wolfe. “What did you let him in for?”

“Permit me to say,” Broadyke put in, “that it does seem an excess of hospitality.”

“By the way, Vic” — it was Dorothy’s soft voice — “Ferdy says I was your accomplice.”

The remarks from the others had made no visible impression on him, but it was different with Dorothy. He turned to her, and the look on his face was good for a whole chapter in his biography. He was absolutely all hers unless I needed an oculist. She could lift her lovely brows a thousand times a day without feeding him up. He let his eyes speak to her and then wheeled to use his tongue for Pohl. “Do you know what I think of you, Ferdy? I guess you do!”

“If you please,” Wolfe said sharply. “You don’t need my office for exchanging your opinions of one another; you can do that anywhere. We have work to do. Mr. Talbott, you asked if I’ve accepted a job that has been offered me. I have. I have engaged to investigate the murder of Sigmund Keyes. But I have received no confidences and can still decline it. Have you a better offer? What did you come here for?”

Talbott smiled at him. “That’s the way to talk,” he said admiringly. “No, I have nothing to offer in the way of a job, but I felt I ought to be in on this. I figured it this way: they were going to hire you to get me arrested for murder, so naturally you would like to have a look at me and ask me some questions — and here I am.”

“Pleading not guilty, of course. Archie. A chair for Mr. Talbott.”

“Of course,” he agreed, thanking me with a smile for the chair I brought, and sitting down. “Otherwise you’d have no job. Shoot.” Suddenly he flushed. “Under the circumstances, I guess I shouldn’t have said ‘shoot.’”

“You could have said ‘Fire away,’ “Wayne Safford piped up from the rear.

“Be quiet, Wayne,” Audrey Rooney scolded him.

“Permit me—” Broadyke began, but Wolfe cut him off.

“No. Mr. Talbott has invited questions.” He focused on the inviter. “These other people think the police are handling this matter stupidly and ineffectively. Do you agree, Mr. Talbott?”

Vic considered a moment, then nodded. “On the whole, yes,” he assented.

“Why?”

“Well — you see, they’re up against it. They’re used to working with clues, and while they found plenty of clues to show what happened, like the marks on the bridle path and leading to the thicket, there aren’t any that help to identify the murderer. Absolutely none whatever. So they had to fall back on motive, and right away they found a man with the best motive in the world.”

Talbott tapped himself on the necktie. “Me. But then they found that his man — me — that I couldn’t possibly have done it because I was somewhere else. They found I had an alibi that was—”

“Phony!” From Wayne Safford.

“Made to order.” From Broadyke.

“The dumbheads!” From Pohl. “If they had brains enough to give that switchboard girl—”

“Please!” Wolfe shut them up. “Go ahead, Mr. Talbott. Your alibi — but first the motive. What is the best motive in the world?”

Vic looked surprised. “It’s been printed over and over again.”

“I know. But I don’t want journalistic conjectures when I’ve got you — unless you’re sensitive about it.”

Talbott’s smile had some bitterness in it. “If I was,” he declared, “I’ve sure been cured this past week. I guess ten million people have read that I’m deeply in love with Dorothy Keyes or some variation of that. All right, I am! Want a shot — want a picture of me saying it?” He turned to face his fiancée. “I love you, Dorothy, better than all the world, deeply, madly, with all my heart.” He returned to Wolfe. “There’s your motive.”

“Vic, darling,” Dorothy told his profile, “you’re a perfect fool, and you’re perfectly fascinating. I really am glad you’ve got a good alibi.”

“You demonstrate love,” Wolfe said dryly, “by killing your beloved’s surviving parent. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Talbott asserted. “Under certain conditions. Here was the situation. Sigmund Keyes was the most celebrated and successful industrial designer in America, and—”

“Nonsense!” Broadyke exploded, without asking permission to say.

Talbott smiled. “Sometimes,” he said, as if offering it for consideration, “a jealous man is worse than any jealous woman. You know, of course, that Mr. Broadyke is himself an industrial designer — in fact, he practically invented the profession. Not many manufacturers would dream of tooling for a new model — steamship, railroad train, airplane, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, alarm clock, no matter what — without consulting Broadyke, until I came along and took over the selling end for Sigmund Keyes. Incidentally, that’s why I doubt if Broadyke killed Keyes. If he had got that desperate about it he wouldn’t have killed Keyes, he would have killed me.”

“You were speaking,” Wolfe reminded him, “of love as a motive for murder under certain conditions.”

“Yes, and Broadyke threw me off.” Talbott cocked his head. “Let’s see — oh, yes, and I was doing the selling for Keyes, and he couldn’t stand the talk going around that I was mostly responsible for the big success we were having, but he was afraid to get rid of me. And I loved his daughter and wanted her to marry me, and will always love her. But he had great influence with her, which I did not and do not understand — anyway, if she loved me as I do her that wouldn’t have mattered, but she doesn’t—”

“My God, Vic,” Dorothy protested, “haven’t I said a dozen times I’d marry you like that” — she snapped her fingers — “if it weren’t for Dad? Really, I’m crazy about you!”

“All right,” Talbott told Wolfe, “there’s your motive. It’s certainly old-fashioned, no modern industrial design to it, but it’s absolutely dependable. Naturally that’s what the police thought until they ran up against the fact that I was somewhere else. That got them bewildered and made them sore, and they haven’t recovered their wits, so I guess my good friends here are right that they’re being stupid and ineffective. Not that they’ve crossed me off entirely. I understand they’ve got an army of detectives and stool pigeons hunting for the gunman I hired to do the job. They’ll have to hunt hard. You heard Miss Keyes call me a fool, but I’m not quite fool enough to hire someone to commit a murder for me.”

“I should hope not.” Wolfe sighed. “There’s nothing better than a good motive. What about the alibi? Have the police given up on that?”

“Yes, the damn idiots!” Pohl blurted. “That switchboard girl—”

“I asked Mr. Talbott,” Wolfe snapped.

“I don’t know,” Talbott admitted, “but I suppose they had to. I’m still trembling at how lucky I was that I got to bed late that Monday night — I mean a week ago, the night before Keyes was killed. If I had been riding with him I’d be in jail now, and done for. It’s a question of timing.”

Talbott compressed his lips and loosened them. “Oh, boy! The mounted cop saw Keyes riding in the park near Sixty-sixth Street at ten minutes past seven. Keyes was killed near Ninety-sixth Street. Even if he had galloped all the way he couldn’t have got there, the way that bridle path winds, before seven-twenty. And he didn’t gallop, because if he had the horse would have shown it, and he didn’t.” Talbott twisted around. “You’re the authority on that, Wayne. Casanova hadn’t been in a sweat, had he?”

“You’re telling it,” was all he got from Wayne Safford.

“Well, he hadn’t,” Talbott told Wolfe. “Wayne is on record on that. So Keyes couldn’t have reached the spot where he was killed before seven-twenty-five. There’s the time for that, twenty-five minutes past seven.”

“And you?” Wolfe inquired.

“Me, I was lucky. I often rode in the park with Keyes at that ungodly hour — two or three times a week. He wanted me to make it every day, but I got out of it about half the time. There was nothing social or sociable about it. We would walk our horses side by side, talking business, except when he felt like trotting. I live at the Hotel Churchill. I got in late Monday night, but I left a call for six o’clock anyway, because I hadn’t ridden with Keyes for several days and didn’t want to get him sore. But when the girl rang my phone in the morning I was just too damn sleepy, and I told her to call the riding academy and say I wouldn’t be there, and to call me again at seven-thirty. She did so, and I still didn’t feel like turning out but I had to because I had a breakfast date with an out-of-town customer, so I told her to send up a double orange juice. A few minutes later a waiter brought it up. So was I lucky? Keyes was killed uptown at twenty-five past seven at the earliest, and probably a little later. I was in my room at the Churchill, nearly three miles away, at half-past seven. You can have three guesses how glad I was I left that seven-thirty call!”

Wolfe nodded. “You should give the out-of-town customer a discount. In that armor, why did you take the trouble to join this gathering?”

“A switchboard girl and a waiter, for God’s sake!” Pohl snorted sarcastically.

“Nice honest people, Ferdy,” Talbott told him, and answered Wolfe, “I didn’t.”

“No? You’re not here?”

“Sure I’m here, but not to join any gathering. I came to join Miss Keyes. I don’t regard it as trouble to join Miss Keyes. As for the rest of them, except maybe Broadyke—”

The doorbell rang again, and since additional gatecrashers might or might not be desirable, I upped myself in a hurry, stepped across and into the hall, intercepted Fritz just in time, and went to the front door to take a look through the panel of one-way glass.

Seeing who it was out on the stoop, I fastened the chain bolt, pulled the door open the two inches the chain would permit, and spoke through the crack. “I don’t want to catch cold.”

“Neither do I,” a gruff voice told me. “Take that damn bolt off.”

“Mr. Wolfe is engaged,” I said politely. “Will I do?”

“You will not. You never have and you never will.”

“Then hold it a minute. I’ll see.”

I shut the door, went to the office, and told Wolfe, “The man about the chair,” which was my favorite alias for Inspector Cramer of Homicide.

Wolfe grunted and shook his head. “I’ll be busy for hours and can’t be interrupted.”

I returned to the front, opened to the crack again, and said regretfully, “Sorry, but he’s doing his homework.”

“Yeah,” Cramer said sarcastically, “he certainly is. Now that Talbott’s here too you’ve got a full house. All six of ’em. Open the door.”

“Bah. Who are you trying to impress? You have tails on one or more, possibly all, and I do hope you haven’t abandoned Talbott because we like him. By the way, the phone girl and the waiter at the Churchill — what’re their names?”

“I’m coming in, Goodwin.”

“Come ahead. This chain has never had a real test, and I’ve wondered about it.”

“In the name of the law, open this door!”

I was so astonished that I nearly did open it in order to get a good look at him. Through the crack I could use only one eye. “Well, listen to you,” I said incredulously. “On me you try that? As you know, it’s the law that keeps you out. If you’re ready to make an arrest, tell me who, and I’ll see that he or she doesn’t pull a scoot. After all, you’re not a monopoly. You’ve had them for a full week, day or night, and Wolfe has had them only an hour or so, and you can’t bear it! Incidentally, they’re not refusing to see you, they don’t know you’re here, so don’t chalk that against them. It’s Mr. Wolfe who can’t be disturbed. I’ll give you this much satisfaction: he hasn’t solved it yet, and it may take till midnight. It will save time if you’ll give me the names—”

“Shut up,” Cramer rasped. “I came here perfectly friendly. There’s no law against Wolfe having people in his office. And there’s no law against my being there with them, either.”

“There sure isn’t,” I agreed heartily, “once you’re in, but what about this door? Here’s a legal door, with a man on one side who can’t open it, and a man on the other side who won’t, and according to the statutes—”

“Archie!” It was a bellow from the office, Wolfe’s loudest bellow, seldom heard, and there were other sounds. It came again. “Archie!”

I said hastily, “Excuse me,” slammed the door shut, ran down the hall and turned the knob, and popped in.

It was nothing seriously alarming. Wolfe was still in his chair behind his desk. The chair Talbott had occupied was overturned. Dorothy was on her feet, her back to Wolfe’s desk, with her brows elevated to a record high. Audrey Rooney was standing in the corner by the big globe, with her clenched fists pressed against her cheeks, staring. Pohl and Broadyke were also out of their chairs, also gazing at the center of the room. From the spectators’ frozen attitudes you might have expected to see something really startling, but it was only a couple of guys slinging punches. As I entered Talbott landed a right hook on the side of Safford’s neck, and as I closed the door to the hall behind me Safford countered with a solid stiff left to Talbott’s kidney sector. The only noise besides their fists and feet was a tense mutter from Audrey Rooney in her corner. “Hit him, Wayne; hit him, Wayne.”

“How much did I miss?” I demanded.

“Stop them!” Wolfe ordered me.

Talbott’s right glanced off of Safford’s cheek, and Safford got in another one over the kidney. They were operating properly and in an orderly manner, but Wolfe was the boss and he hated commotion in the office, so I stepped across, grabbed Talbott’s coat collar and yanked him back so hard he fell over a chair, and faced Safford to block him. For a second I thought Safford was going to paste me with one he had waiting, but he let it drop.

“What started it so quick?” I wanted to know.

Audrey was there, clutching my sleeve, protesting fiercely, “You shouldn’t have stopped him! Wayne could have knocked him down! He did before!” She sounded more bloodthirsty than milkthirsty.

“He made a remark about Miss Rooney,” Broadyke permitted himself to say.

“Get him out of here!” Wolfe spluttered.

“Which one?” I asked, watching Safford with one eye and Talbott with the other.

“Mr. Talbott!”

“You did very well, Vic,” Dorothy was saying. “You were fantastically handsome with the gleam of battle in your eye.” She put her palms against Talbott’s cheeks, pulled his head forward, and stretched her neck to kiss him on the lips — a quick one. “There!”

“Vic is going now,” I told her. “Come on, Talbott, I’ll let you out.”

Before he came he enfolded Dorothy in his arms. I glanced at Safford, expecting him to counter by enfolding Audrey, but he was standing by with his fists still doubled up. So I herded Talbott out of the room ahead of me. In the hall, while he was getting his hat and coat, I took a look through the one-way panel, saw that the stoop was clear, and opened the door. As he crossed the sill I told him, “You go for the head too much. You’ll break a hand that way someday.”

Back in the office someone had righted the overturned chair, and they were all seated again. Apparently, though her knight had been given the boot, Dorothy was going to stick. As I crossed to resume my place at my desk Wolfe was saying, “We got interrupted, Miss Rooney. As I said, you seem to be the most vulnerable, since you were on the scene. Will you please move a little closer — that chair there? Archie, your notebook.”

VI

At 10:55 the next morning I was sitting in the office — not still, but again — waiting for Wolfe to come down from the plant rooms on the roof, where he keeps ten thousand orchids and an assortment of other specimens of vegetation. I was playing three-handed pinochle with Saul Panzer and Orrie Cather, who had been phoned to come in for a job. Saul always wore an old brown cap, was undersized and homely, with a big nose, and was the best field man in the world for everything that could be done without a dinner jacket. Orrie, who would be able to get along without a hairbrush in a few years, was by no means up to Saul but was a good all-round man.

At 10:55 I was three bucks down.

In a drawer of my desk were two notebookfuls. Wolfe hadn’t kept the clients all night, but there hadn’t been much left of it when he let them go, and we now knew a good deal more about all of them than any of the papers had printed. In some respects they were all alike, as they told it. For instance, none of them had killed Sigmund Keyes; none was heartbroken over his death, not even his daughter; none had ever owned a revolver or knew much about shooting one; none could produce any evidence that would help to convict Talbott or even get him arrested; none had an airtight alibi; and each had a motive of his own which might not have been the best in the world, like Talbott’s, but was nothing to sneeze at.

So they said.

Ferdinand Pohl had been indignant. He couldn’t see why time should be wasted on them and theirs, since the proper and sole objective was to bust Talbott’s alibi and nab him. But he came through with his facts. Ten years previously he had furnished the hundred thousand dollars that had been needed to get Sigmund Keyes started with the style of setup suitable for a big-time industrial designer. In the past couple of years the Keyes profits had been up above the clouds, and Pohl had wanted an even split and hadn’t got it. Keyes had ladled out a measly annual five per cent on Pohl’s ante, five thousand a year, whereas half the profits would have been ten times that, and Pohl couldn’t confront him with the classic alternative, buy my share or sell me yours, because Pohl had been making bad guesses on other matters and was deep in debt. The law wouldn’t have helped, since the partnership agreement had guaranteed Pohl only the five per cent and Keyes had given the profits an alias by taking the gravy as salary, claiming it was his designing ability that made the money. It had been, Pohl said, a case of misjudging a man’s character. Now that Keyes was dead it would be a different story, with the contracts on hand and royalties to come for periods up to twenty years. If Pohl and Dorothy, who inherited, couldn’t come to an understanding, it would be up to a judge to make the divvy, and Pohl would get, he thought, at least two hundred thousand, and probably a lot more.

He denied that that was a good motive for murder — not for him, and anyway it was silly to discuss it, because that Tuesday morning at 7:28 he had taken a train to Larchmont to sail his boat. Had he boarded the train at Grand Central or One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street? Grand Central, he said. Had he been alone? Yes. He had left his apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street at seven o’clock and taken the subway. Did he often ride the subway? Yes, fairly frequently, when it wasn’t a rush hour. And so on, for fourteen pages of a notebook. I gave him a D minus, even granting that he could cinch it that he reached Larchmont on that train, since it would have stopped at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street at 7:38, ten minutes after it left Grand Central.

With Dorothy Keyes the big question was how much of the Keyes profits had been coming her way. Part of the time she seemed to have the idea that her father had been fairly liberal with the dough, and then she would toss in a comment which indicated that he had been as tight-fisted as a baby hanging onto another baby’s toy. It was confusing because she had no head for figures. The conclusion I reached was that her take had averaged somewhere between five hundred and twenty thousand a year, which was a wide gap. The point was, which way was she sitting prettier, with her father alive and making plenty of dough and shelling it out, or with him dead and everything hers after Pohl had been attended to? She saw the point all right, and I must say it didn’t seem to shock her much, since she didn’t even bother to lift her brows.

If it was an act it was good. Instead of standing on the broad moral principle that daughters do not kill fathers, her fundamental position was that at the unspeakable hour in question, half-past seven in the morning, she couldn’t even have been killing a fly, let alone her father. She was never out of bed before eleven, except in emergencies, as for instance the Tuesday morning under discussion, when word had come sometime between nine and ten that her father was dead. That had roused her. She had lived with her father in an apartment on Central Park South. Servants? Two maids. Wolfe put it to her: would it have been possible, before seven in the morning, for her to leave the apartment and the building, and later get back in again, without being seen? Not, she declared, unless someone had turned a hose on her to wake her up; that accomplished, possibly the rest could be managed, but she really couldn’t say because he had never tried.

I gave her no mark at all because by that time I was prejudiced and couldn’t trust my judgment.

Frank Broadyke was a wow. He had enthusiastically adopted Talbott’s suggestion that if he, Broadyke, had undertaken to kill anyone it would have been Talbott and not Keyes, since it implied that Keyes’ eminence in his profession had been on account of Talbott’s salesmanship instead of Keyes’ ability as a designer. Broadyke liked that very much and kept going back to it and plugging it. He admitted that the steady decrease in his own volume of business had been coincident with the rise of Keyes’, and he further admitted, when the matter was mentioned by Dorothy, that only three days before the murder Keyes had started an action at law against him for damages to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, complaining that Broadyke had stolen designs from Keyes’ office which had got him contracts for a concrete mixer and an electric washing machine. But what the hell, he maintained, the man he would naturally have it in for was Vic Talbott, who had stampeded the market with his high-pressure sales methods — and his personality. Ask any reputable industrial designer; ask all of them. Keyes had been a mediocre gadget contriver, with no real understanding of the intricate and intimate relationship between function and design. I see from my notebook that he permitted himself to say that four times altogether.

He had been doing his best to recover lost ground. He partook, he said, of the nature of the lark; the sunrise stirred and inspired him; that was his time of day. All his brilliant early successes had been conceived before the dew was dry in shady places. In the afternoon and evening he was no better than a clod. But eventually he had got lazy and careless, stayed up late and got up late, and it was then his star had begun to dim. Recently, quite recently, he had determined to light the flame again, and only a month ago he had started getting to his office before seven o’clock, three hours before the staff was due to arrive. To his satisfaction and delight, it was beginning to work. The flashes of inspiration were coming back. That very Tuesday morning, the morning Keyes was killed, he had greeted his staff when they arrived by showing them a revolutionary and irresistible design for an electric egg beater.

Had anyone, Wolfe wanted to know, been with him in his office that morning during the parturition, say from half-past six to eight o’clock? No. No one.

For alibi, Broadyke, of those three, came closest to being naked.

Since I had cottoned to Audrey Rooney and would have married her any second if it wasn’t that I wouldn’t want my wife to be a public figure and there was her picture on the calendar on the wall of Sam’s Diner, it was a setback to learn that her parents in Vermont had actually named her Annie, and she had changed it herself. Okay if she hadn’t cared for Annie with Rooney, but good God, why Audrey? Audrey. It showed a lack in her.

It did not, of course, indict her for murder, but her tale helped out on that. She had worked in the Keyes office as Victor Talbott’s secretary, and a month ago Keyes had fired her because he suspected her of swiping designs and selling them to Broadyke. When she had demanded proof and Keyes hadn’t been able to produce it, she had proceeded to raise hell, which I could well believe. She had forced her way into his private room at the office so often that he had been compelled to hire a husky to keep her out. She had tried to get the rest of the staff, forty of them, to walk out on him until justice had been done her, and had darned near succeeded. She had tried to get at him at his home but failed. Eight days before his death, on a Monday morning, he had found her waiting for him when he arrived at the Stillwell Riding Academy to get his four legs. With the help of the stable hand, by name Wayne Safford, he had managed to mount and clatter off for the park.

But next morning Annie Audrey was there again, and the next one too. What was biting her hardest, as she explained to Wolfe at the outset, was that Keyes had refused to listen to her, had never heard her side, and was so mean and stubborn he didn’t intend to. She thought he should. She didn’t say in so many words that another reason she kept on showing up at the academy was that the stable hand didn’t seem to mind, but that could be gathered. The fourth morning, Thursday, Vic Talbott had arrived too, to accompany Keyes on his ride. Keyes, pestered by Audrey, had poked her in the belly with his crop; Wayne Safford had pushed Keyes hard enough to make him stumble and fall; Talbott had intervened and taken a swing at Wayne; and Wayne had socked Talbott and knocked him into a stall that hadn’t been cleaned.

Evidently, I thought, Wayne held back when he was boxing in a nicely furnished office on a Kerman rug; and I also thought that if I had been Keyes I would have tried designing an electric horse for my personal use. But the next day he was back for more, and did get more comments from Audrey, but that was as far as it went; and three days later, Monday, it was the same. Talbott wasn’t there either of those two days.

Tuesday morning Audrey got there at a quarter to six, the advantage of the early arrival being that she could make the coffee while Wayne curried horses. They ate cinnamon rolls with the coffee. Wolfe frowned at that because he hates cinnamon rolls. A little after six a phone call came from the Hotel Churchill not to saddle Talbott’s horse and to tell Keyes he wouldn’t be there. At six-thirty Keyes arrived, on the dot as usual, responded only with grimly tightened lips to Audrey’s needling, and rode off. Audrey stayed on at the academy, was there continuously for another hour, and was still there at twenty-five minutes to eight, when Keyes’ horse came wandering in under an empty saddle.

Was Wayne Safford also there continuously? Yes, they were together all the time.

So Audrey and Wayne were fixed up swell. When it came Wayne’s turn he didn’t contradict her on a single point, which I thought was very civilized behavior for a stable hand. He too made the mistake of mentioning cinnamon rolls, but otherwise turned in a perfect score.

When they had gone, more than two hours after midnight, I stood, stretched and yawned good, and told Wolfe, “Five mighty fine clients. Huh?”

He grunted in disgust and put his hands on the rim of his desk to push his chair back.

“I could sleep on it more productively,” I stated, “if you would point. Not at Talbott, I don’t need that. I’m a better judge of love looks than you are, and I saw him looking at Dorothy, and he has it bad. But the clients? Pohl?”

“He needs money, perhaps desperately, and now he’ll get it.”

“Broadyke?”

“His vanity was mortally wounded, his business was going downhill, and he was being sued for a large sum.”

“Dorothy?”

“A daughter. A woman. It could have gone back to her infancy, or it could have been a trinket denied her today.”

“Safford?”

“A primitive romantic. Within three days after he met that girl the fool was eating cinnamon rolls with her at six o’clock in the morning. What about his love look?”

I nodded. “Giddy.”

“And he saw Mr. Keyes strike the girl with his riding crop.”

“Not strike her, poke her.”

“Even worse, because more contemptuous. Also the girl had persuaded him that Mr. Keyes was persisting in a serious injustice to her.”

“Okay, that’ll do. How about her?”

“A woman either being wronged or caught wronging another. In either case, unhinged.”

“Also he poked her with his crop.”

“No,” Wolfe disagreed. “Except in immediate and urgent retaliation, no woman ever retorts to physical violence from a man in kind. It would not be womanly. She devises subtleties.” He got to his feet. “I’m sleepy.” He started for the door.

Following, I told his back, “I know one thing, I would collect from every damn one of them in advance. I can’t imagine why Cramer wanted to see them again, even Talbott, after a whole week with them. Why don’t he throw in and draw five new cards? He’s sore as a pup. Shall we phone him?”

“No.” We were in the hall. Wolfe, heading for the elevator to ascend to his room on the second floor, turned. “What did he want?”

“He didn’t say, but I can guess. He’s at a dead stop in pitch-dark in the middle of a six corners, and he came to see if you’ve got a road map.”

I made for the stairs, since the elevator is only four by six, and with all of Wolfe inside, it would already be cramped.

VII

“Forty trump,” Orrie Cather said at 10:55 Wednesday morning.

I had told them the Keyes case had knocked on our door and we had five suspects for clients, and that was all. Wolfe had not seen fit to tell me what their errands would be, so I was entertaining at cards instead of summarizing the notebooks for them. At eleven sharp we ended the game, and Orrie and I shelled out to Saul, as usual, and a few minutes later the door from the hall opened and Wolfe entered. He greeted the two hired hands, got himself installed behind his desk, rang for beer, and asked me, “You’ve explained things to Saul and Orrie, of course?”

“Certainly not. For all I knew it’s classified.”

He grunted and told me to get Inspector Cramer. I dialed the number and had more trouble getting through than usual, finally had Cramer and signaled to Wolfe, and, since I got no sign to keep off, I stayed on. It wasn’t much of a conversation.

“Mr. Cramer? Nero Wolfe.”

“Yeah. What do you want?”

“I’m sorry I was busy last evening. It’s always a pleasure to see you. I’ve been engaged in the matter of Mr. Keyes’ death, and it will be to our mutual interest for you to let me have a little routine information.”

“Like what?”

“To begin with, the name and number of the mounted policeman who saw Mr. Keyes in the park at ten minutes past seven that morning. I want to send Archie—”

“Go to hell.” The connection went.

Wolfe hung up, reached for the beer tray which Fritz had brought in, and told me, “Get Mr. Skinner of the District Attorney’s office.”

I did so, and Wolfe got on again. In the past Skinner had had his share of moments of irritation with Wolfe, but at least he hadn’t had the door slammed in his face the preceding evening and therefore was not boorish. When he learned that Wolfe was on the Keyes case he wanted to know plenty, but Wolfe stiff-armed him without being too rude and soon had what he was after. Upon Wolfe’s assurance that he would keep Skinner posted on developments at his end, which they both knew was a barefaced lie, the Assistant D.A. even offered to ask headquarters to arrange for me to see the cop. And did so. In less than ten minutes after Wolfe and he were finished, a call came from Centre Street to tell me that Officer Hefferan would meet me at 11:45 at the corner of Sixty-sixth Street and Central Park West.

During the less than ten minutes, Wolfe had drunk beer, asked Saul about his family, and told me what I was expected to find out from the cop. That made me sore, but even more it made me curious. When we’re on a case it sometimes happens that Wolfe gets the notion that I have got involved on some angle or with some member of the cast, and that therefore it is necessary to switch me temporarily onto a siding. I had about given up wasting nervous energy resenting it. But what was it this time? I had bought nobody’s version and was absolutely fancy free, so why should he send me out to chew the rag with a cop and keep Saul and Orrie for more important errands? It was beyond me, and I was glaring at him and about to open up, when the phone rang again.

It was Ferdinand Pohl, asking for Wolfe. I was going to keep out of it, since the main attack was to be entrusted to others, but Wolfe motioned me to stay on.

“I’m at the Keyes office,” Pohl said, “Forty-seventh and Madison. Can you come up here right away?”

“Certainly not,” Wolfe said in a grieved tone. It always riled him that anybody in the world didn’t know that he never left his house on business, and rarely for anything whatever. “I work only at home. What’s the matter?”

“There’s someone here I want you to talk to. Two members of the staff. With their testimony I can prove that Talbott took those designs and sold them to Broadyke. This clinches it that it was Talbott who killed Keyes. Of us five, the only ones that could possibly be suspected were Miss Rooney and that stable hand, with that mutual alibi they had, and this clears her — and him too, of course.”

“Nonsense. It does nothing of the sort. It proves that she was unjustly accused of theft, and an unjust accusation rankles more than a just one. Now you can have Mr. Talbott charged with larceny, at least. I’m extremely busy. Thank you very much for calling. I shall need the cooperation of all of you.”

Pohl wanted to prolong it, but Wolfe got rid of him, drank more beer, and turned to me. “You’re expected there in twenty minutes, Archie, and considering your tendency to get arrested for speeding—”

I had had one ticket for speeding in eight years. I walked to the door but turned to remark bitterly, “If you think you’re just sending me out to play, try again. Who was the last to see Keyes alive? The cop. He did it. And who will I deliver him to — you? No. Inspector Cramer!”

VIII

It was sunny and warm for October, and the drive uptown would have been pleasant if I hadn’t been prejudiced by my feeling that I was being imposed on. Parking on Sixty-fifth Street, I walked around the corner and up a block, and crossed Central Park West to where a man in uniform was monkeying with his horse’s bridle. I have met a pack of guardians of the peace on my rounds, but this rugged manly face with a pushed-in nose and bright big eyes was new to me. I introduced myself and showed credentials and said it was nice of him, busy as he was, to give me his time. Of course that was a blunder, but I’ve admitted I was prejudiced.

“Oh,” he said, “one of our prominent kidders, huh?”

I made for cover. “About as prominent,” I declared, “as a fish egg in a bowl of caviar.”

“Oh, you eat caviar.”

“Goddam it,” I muttered, “let’s start over again.” I walked four paces to a lamp post, wheeled, returned to him, and announced, “My name’s Goodwin and I work for Nero Wolfe. Headquarters said I could ask you a couple of questions and I’d appreciate it.”

“Uh-huh. A friend of mine in the Fifteenth Squad has told me about you. You damn near got him sent to the marshes.”

“Then you were already prejudiced. So was I, but not against you. Not even against your horse. Speaking of horses, that morning you saw Keyes on his horse, not long before he was killed, what time was it?”

“Ten minutes past seven.”

“Within a minute or two?”

“Not within anything. Ten minutes past seven. I was on the early shift then, due to check out at eight. As you say, I’m so busy that I have no time, so I was hanging around expecting to see Keyes go by as per schedule. I liked to see his horse — a light chestnut with a fine spring to him.”

“How did the horse look that morning — same as usual? Happy and healthy?” Seeing the look on his face, I added hastily, “I’ve sworn off kidding until tomorrow. I actually want to know, was it his horse?”

“Certainly it was! Maybe you don’t know horses. I do.”

“Okay. I used to too, when I was a boy on a farm in Ohio, but we haven’t corresponded lately. What about Keyes that morning, did he look sick or well or mad or glad or what?”

“He looked as usual, nothing special.”

“Did you speak to each other?”

“No.”

“Had he shaved that morning?”

“Sure he had.” Officer Hefferan was controlling himself. “He had used two razors, one on the right side and another one on the left, and he wanted to know which one did the best job, so he asked me to rub his cheeks and tell him what I thought.”

“You said you didn’t speak.”

“Nuts.”

“I agree. Let’s keep this frankly hostile. I shouldn’t have asked about shaving, I should have come right out and asked what I want to know, how close were you to him?”

“Two hundred and seventy feet.”

“Oh, you’ve measured it?”

“I’ve paced it. The question came up.”

“Would you mind showing me the spot? Where he was and where you were?”

“Yes, I’d mind, but I’ve got orders.”

The courteous thing would have been for him to lead his horse and walk with me, so he didn’t do that. He mounted his big bay and rode into the park, with me tagging along behind; and not only that, he must have given it a private signal that they mustn’t be late. I never saw a horse walk so fast. He would have loved to lose me and blame it on me, or at least make me break into a trot, but I gave my legs the best stretch they had had in years, bending my elbows and pumping my lungs, and I wasn’t more than thirty paces in the rear when he finally came to a stop at the crest of a little knoll. There were a lot of trees, big and little, off to the right down the slope, and clumps of bushes were on the left, but in between there was a good view of a long stretch of the bridle path. It was almost at a right angle to our line of vision, and at its nearest looked about a hundred yards away.

He did not dismount. There is no easier way in the world to feel superior to a man than to talk to him from on top of a horse.

Speaking, I handled things so as not to seem out of breath. “You were here?”

“Right here.”

“And he was going north.”

“Yep.” He gestured. “That direction.”

“You saw him. Did he see you?”

“Yes. He lifted his crop to me and I waved back. We often did that.”

“But he didn’t stop or gaze straight at you.”

“He didn’t gaze straight or crooked. He was out for a ride. Listen, brother.” The mounted man’s tone indicated that he had decided to humor me and get it over. “I’ve been through all this with the Homicide boys. If you’re asking was it Keyes, it was. It was his horse. It was his bright yellow breeches, the only ones that color around, and his blue jacket and his black derby. It was the way he sat, with his shoulders hunched and his stirrups too long. It was Keyes.”

“Good. May I pat your horse?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t. It would suit me fine if the occasion arose someday for me to pat you. When I’m dining with the inspector this evening I’ll put in a word for you, not saying what kind.”

I hoofed it out of the park and along Sixty-sixth Street to Broadway, found a drugstore and a phone booth, wriggled onto the stool, and dialed my favorite number. It was Orrie Cather’s voice that answered. So, I remarked to myself, he’s still there, probably sitting at my desk; Wolfe’s instructions for him must be awful complicated. I asked for Wolfe and got him.

“Yes, Archie?”

“I am phoning as instructed. Officer Hefferan is a Goodwin-hater, but I swallowed my pride. On the stand he would swear up and down that he saw Keyes at the place and time as given, and I guess he did, but a good lawyer could shoot it full of ifs and buts.”

“Why? Is Mr. Hefferan a shuttlecock?”

“By no means. He knows it all. But it wasn’t a closeup.”

“You’d better let me have it verbatim.”

I did so. By years of practice I had reached the point where I could relay a two-hour conversation, without any notes but practically word for word, and the brief session I had just come from gave me no trouble at all. When I had finished Wolfe said, “Indeed.”

Silence.

I waited a full two minutes and then said politely, “Please tell Orrie not to put his feet on my desk.”

In another minute Wolfe’s voice came. “Mr. Pohl has telephoned again, twice, from the Keyes office. He’s a jackass. Go there and see him. The address—”

“I know the address. What part of him do I look at?”