1

It began with a combination of circumstances, but what doesn’t? To mention just one, if there hadn’t been a couple of checks to deposit that morning I might not have been in that neighborhood at all.

But I was, and, approving of the bright sun and the sharp clear air as I turned east off Lexington Avenue into Thirty-seventh Street, I walked some forty paces to the number and found it was a five-story yellow brick, clean and neat, with greenery in tubs flanking the entrance. I went in. The lobby, not much bigger than my bedroom, had a fancy rug, a fireplace without a fire, more greenery, and a watchdog in uniform who challenged me with a suspicious look.

As I opened my mouth to meet his challenge, circumstances combined. A big guy in a dark blue topcoat and homburg, entering from the street, breezed past me, heading for the elevator, and as he did so the elevator door opened and a girl emerged. Four of us in that undersized lobby made a crowd, and we had to maneuver. Meanwhile I was speaking to the watchdog.

“My name’s Goodwin, and I’m calling on Leo Heller.”

Gazing at me, his expression changing, he blurted at me, “Ain’t you Archie Goodwin works for Nero Wolfe?”

The girl, making for the exit, stopped a step short of it and turned, and the big guy, inside the elevator, blocked the door from closing and stuck his head out, while the watchdog was going on, “I’ve saw your picture in the paper, and look, I want Nero Wolfe’s autograph.”

It would have been more to the point if he had wanted mine, but I’m no hog. The man in the elevator, which was self-service, was letting the door close, but the girl was standing by, and I hated to disappoint her by denying I was me, as of course I would have had to do if I had been there on an operation that needed cover.

I’ll have to let her stand there a minute while I explain that I was actually not on an operation at all. Chiefly, I was satisfying my curiosity. At five in the afternoon the day before, in Nero Wolfe’s office, there had been a phone call. After taking it I had gone to the kitchen — where Fritz was boning a pig’s head for what he calls fromage de cochon — to get a glass of water, and told Fritz I was going upstairs to do a little yapping.

“He is so happy up there,” Fritz protested, but there was a gleam in his eye. He knows darned well that if I quit yapping the day would come when there would be no money in the bank to meet the payroll, including him.

I went up three flights, on past the bedroom floors to the roof, where ten thousand square feet of glass in aluminum frames make a home for ten thousand orchid plants. The riot of color on the benches of the three rooms doesn’t take my breath any more, but it is unquestionably a show, and as I went through that day I kept my eyes straight ahead to preserve my mood for yapping intact. However, it was wasted. In the intermediate room Wolfe stood massively, with an Odontoglossum seedling in his hand, glaring at it, a mountain of cold fury, with Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, standing nearby with his lips tightened to a thin line.

As I approached, Wolfe transferred the glare to me and barked savagely, “Thrips!”

I did some fast mood shifting. There’s a time to yap and a time not to yap. But I went on.

“What do you want?” he rasped.

“I realize,” I said politely but firmly, “that this is ill timed, but I told Mr. Heller I would speak to you. He phoned—”

“Speak to me later! If at all!”

“I’m to call him back. It’s Leo Heller, the probability wizard. He says that calculations have led him to suspect that a client of his may have committed a serious crime, but it’s only a suspicion and he doesn’t want to tell the police until it has been investigated, and he wants us to investigate. I asked for details, but he wouldn’t give them on the phone. I thought I might as well run over there now — it’s over on East Thirty-seventh Street — and find out if it looks like a job. He wouldn’t—”

“No!”

“My eardrums are not insured. No what?”

“Get out!” He shook the thrips-infested seedling at me. “I don’t want it! That man couldn’t hire me for any conceivable job on any imaginable terms! Get out!”

I turned, prompt but dignified, and went. If he had thrown the seedling at me I would of course have dodged, and the fairly heavy pot would have sailed on by and crashed into a cluster of Calanthes in full bloom, and God only knew what Wolfe would have done then.

On my way back down to the office I was wearing a grin. Even without the thrips, Wolfe’s reaction to my message would have been substantially the same, which was why I had been prepared to yap. The thrips had merely keyed it up. Leo Heller had been tagged by fame, with articles about him in magazines and Sunday newspapers. While making a living as a professor of mathematics at Underhill College, he had begun, for amusement, to apply the laws of probability, through highly complicated mathematical formulas, to various current events, ranging from ball games and horse races to farm crops and elections. Checking back on his records after a couple of years, he had been startled and pleased to find that the answers he had got from his formulas had been 86.3 per cent correct, and he had written a piece about it for a magazine. Naturally requests had started coming from all kinds of people for all kinds of calculations, and he had granted some of them to be obliging, but when he had tried telling a woman in Yonkers where to look for thirty-one thousand dollars in currency she had lost, and she had followed instructions and found it and had insisted on giving him two grand, he side-stepped to a fresh slant on the laws of probability as applied to human problems and resigned his professorship.

That had been three years ago, and now he was sitting pretty. It was said that his annual take was in six figures, that he returned all his mail unanswered, accepting only clients who called in person, and that there was nothing on earth he wouldn’t try to dope a formula for, provided he was furnished with enough factors to make it feasible. It had been suggested that he should be hauled in for fortunetelling, but the cops and the DA’s office let it lay, as well they might, since he had a college degree and there were at least a thousand fortunetellers operating in New York who had never made it through high school.

It wasn’t known whether Heller was keeping his percentage up to 86.3, but I happened to know it wasn’t goose eggs. Some months earlier a president of a big corporation had hired Wolfe to find out which member of his staff was giving trade secrets to a competitor. I had been busy on another case at the time, and Wolfe had put Orrie Cather on the collection of details. Orrie had made a long job of it, and the first we knew we were told by the corporation president that he had got impatient and gone to Leo Heller with the problem, and Heller had cooked up a formula and come out with an answer, the name of one of the junior vice-presidents, and the junior VP had confessed! Our client freely admitted that most of the facts he had given Heller for the ingredients of his formula had been supplied by us, gathered by Orrie Cather, and he offered no objection to paying our bill, but Wolfe was so sore he actually told me to send no bill — an instruction I disregarded, knowing how he would regret it after he had cooled off. However, as I was aware through occasional mutterings from him, he still had it in for Leo Heller, and taking on any kind of job for him would have been absolutely off the program that day or any other day, even if there had been no thrips within a mile of Thirty-fifth Street.

Back downstairs in the office, I phoned Heller and told him nothing doing. “He’s extremely sensitive,” I explained, “and this is an insult. As you know, he’s the greatest detective that ever lived, and — do you know that?”

“I’m willing to postulate it,” Heller conceded in a thin voice that tended to squeak. “Why an insult?”

“Because you want to hire Nero Wolfe — meaning me, really — to collect facts on which you can base a decision whether your suspicion about your client is justified. You might as well try to hire Stan Musial as bat boy. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t sell the raw material for answers; he sells answers.”

“I’m quite willing to pay him for an answer, any amount short of exorbitance, and in cash. I’m gravely concerned about this client, this situation, and my data is insufficient. I shall be delighted if with the data I get an answer from Mr. Wolfe, and—”

“And,” I put in, “if his answer is that your client has committed a serious crime, as you suspect, he decides whether and when to call a cop, not you. Yes?”

“Certainly.” Heller was eager to oblige. “I do not intend or desire to shield a criminal — on the contrary.”

“Okay. Then it’s like this. It wouldn’t do any good for me to take it up with Mr. Wolfe again today because his feelings have been hurt. But tomorrow morning I have to go to our bank on Lexington Avenue not far from your place, to deposit a couple of checks, and I could drop in to see you and get the sketch. I suspect that I make this offer mostly because I’m curious to see what you look like and talk like, but I haven’t enough data to apply the laws of probability to it. Frankly, I doubt if Mr. Wolfe will take this on, but we can always use money, and I’ll try to sell him. Shall I come?”

“What time?”

“Say a quarter past ten.”

“Come ahead. My business day begins at eleven. Take the elevator to the fifth floor. An arrow points right, to the waiting room, but go left to the door at the end of the hall, and push the button, and I’ll let you in. If you’re on time we’ll have more than half an hour.”

“I’m always on time.”

That morning I was a little early. It was nine minutes past ten when I entered the lobby on Thirty-seventh Street and gave the watchdog my name.

2

I told the watchdog I would try to get Nero Wolfe’s autograph for him, and wrote his name in my notebook: Nils Lamm. Meanwhile the girl stood there facing us, frowning at us. She was twenty-three or — four, up to my chin, and without the deep frown her face would probably have deserved attention. Since she showed no trace of embarrassment, staring fixedly at a stranger, I saw no reason why I should, but something had to be said, so I asked her, “Do you want one?”

She cocked her head. “One what?”

“Autograph. Either Mr. Wolfe’s or mine, take your pick.”

“Oh. You are Archie Goodwin, aren’t you? I’ve seen your picture too.”

“Then I’m it.”

“I—” She hesitated, then made up her mind. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

Someone trotted in from the street, a brisk female in mink, executive type, between twenty and sixty, and the girl and I moved aside to clear the lane to the elevator. The newcomer told Nils Lamm she was seeing Leo Heller and refused to give her name, but when Lamm insisted she coughed it up: Agatha Abbey, she said, and he let her take the elevator. The girl told me she had been working all night and was tired, and we went to a bench by the fireplace. Close up, I would still have said twenty-three or — four, but someone or something had certainly been harassing her. Naturally there was a question in my mind about the night work.

She answered it. “My name’s Susan Maturo, and I’m a registered nurse.”

“Thanks. You know mine, and I’m a registered detective.”

She nodded. “That’s why I want to ask you something. If I hired Nero Wolfe to investigate a — a matter, how much would it cost?”

I raised my shoulders half an inch and let them down. “It all depends. The kind of matter, the amount of time taken, the wear and tear on his brain, the state of your finances....”

I paused, letting it hang, to return a rude stare that was being aimed at us by another arrival, a thin tall bony specimen in a brown suit that badly needed pressing, with a bulging briefcase under his arm. When my gaze met his he called it off and turned and strode to the elevator, without any exchange with Nils Lamm.

I resumed to Susan Maturo. “Have you got a matter, or are you just researching?”

“Oh, I’ve got a matter.” She set her teeth on her lip — nice teeth, and not a bad lip — and kept them that way a while, regarding me. Then she went on, “It hit me hard, and it’s been getting worse in me instead of better. I began to be afraid I was going batty, and I decided to come to this Leo Heller and see what he could do, so I came this morning, but I was sitting up there in his waiting room — two people were already there, a man and a woman — and it went all through me that I was just being bitter and vindictive, and I don’t think I’m really like that — I’m pretty sure I never have been—”

Apparently she needed some cooperation, so I assured her, “You don’t look vindictive.”

She touched my sleeve with her fingertips to thank me. “So I got up and left, and then as I was leaving the elevator I heard that man saying your name and who you are, and it popped into my head to ask you. I asked how much it would cost to have Nero Wolfe investigate, but that was premature, because what I really want is to tell him about it and get his advice about investigating.”

She was dead serious and she was all worked up, so I arranged my face and voice to fit. “It’s like this,” I told her, “for that kind of approach to Mr. Wolfe, with no big fee in prospect, some expert preparation is required, and I’m the only expert in the field.” I glanced at my wrist and saw 10:19. “I’ve got a date, but I can spare five minutes if you want to brief me on the essentials, and then I’ll tell you how it strikes me. What was it that hit you?”

She looked at me, shot a glance at Nils Lamm, who couldn’t have moved out of earshot in that lobby if he had wanted to, and came back to me. Her jaw quivered, and she clamped it tight and held it for a moment, then released it and spoke. “When I start to talk about it, it sticks in my throat and chokes me, and five minutes wouldn’t be enough, and anyway I need someone old and wise like Nero Wolfe. Won’t you let me see him?”

I promised to try. I told her that it would be hard to find any man in the metropolitan area more willing to help an attractive girl in distress than I was, but it would be a waste of time and effort for me to take her in to Wolfe cold, and though I was neither old nor wise she would have to give me at least a full outline before I could furnish either an opinion or help. She agreed that that was reasonable and gave me her address and phone number, and we arranged to communicate later in the day. I went and opened the door for her, and she departed.

On the way up in the elevator my watch said 10:28, so I wasn’t on time after all, but we would still have half an hour before Heller’s business day began. On the fifth floor a plaque on the wall facing the elevator was lettered LEO HELLER, WAITING ROOM, with an arrow pointing right, and at that end of the narrow hall a door bore the invitation, WALK IN. I turned left, toward the other end, where I pushed a button beside a door, noticing as I did so that the door was ajar a scanty inch. When my ring brought no response, and a second one, more prolonged, didn’t either, I shoved the door open, crossed the sill, and called Heller’s name. No reply. There was no one in sight.

Thinking that he had probably stepped into the waiting room and would soon return, I glanced around to see what the lair of a probability wizard looked like, and was impressed by some outstanding features. The door, of metal, was a good three inches thick, either for security or for soundproofing, or maybe both. If there were any windows they were behind the heavy draperies; the artificial light came indirectly from channels in the walls just beneath the ceiling. The air was conditioned. There were locks on all the units of a vast assembly of filing cabinets that took up all the rear wall. The floor, with no rugs, was tiled with some velvety material on which a footfall was barely audible.

The thick door was for soundproofing. I had closed it, nearly, on entering, and the silence was complete. Not a sound of the city could be heard, though the clang and clatter of Lexington Avenue was nearby one way and Third Avenue the other.

I crossed for a look at the desk, but there was nothing remarkable about it except that it was twice the usual size. Among other items it held a rack of books with titles that were not tempting, an abacus of ivory or a good imitation, and a stack of legal-size working pads. Stray sheets of paper were scattered, and a single pad had on its top sheet some scribbled formulas that looked like doodles by Einstein. Also a jar of sharpened lead pencils had been overturned, and some of them were in a sort of a pattern near the edge of the desk.

I had been in there ten minutes, and no Heller; and when, at eleven o’clock by schedule, Wolfe came down to the office from his morning session with the orchids, it was desirable that I should be present. So I went, leaving the door ajar as I had found it, walked down the hall to the door of the waiting room at the other end, and entered.

This room was neither air-conditioned nor soundproofed. Someone had opened a window a couple of inches, and the din was jangling in. Five people were here and there on chairs; three of them I had seen before: the big guy in the dark blue topcoat and homburg, the brisk female in mink who called herself Agatha Abbey, and the tall thin specimen with a briefcase. Neither of the other two was Leo Heller. One was a swarthy little article, slick and sly, with his hair pasted to his scalp, and the other was a big blob of an overfed matron with a spare chin.

I addressed the gathering. “Has Mr. Heller been in here?”

A couple of them shook their heads, and the swarthy article said hoarsely, “Not visible till eleven o’clock, and you take your turn.”

I thanked him, left, and went back to the other room. Still no Heller. I didn’t bother to call his name again, since even if it had flushed him I would have had to leave immediately. So I departed. Down in the lobby I again told Nils Lamm I’d see what I could do about an autograph. Outside, deciding there wasn’t time to walk it, I flagged a taxi. Home again, I hadn’t been in the office more than twenty seconds when the sound came of Wolfe’s elevator descending.

That was a funny thing. I’m strong on hunches, and I’ve had some beauts during the years I’ve been with Wolfe, but that day there wasn’t the slightest glimmer of something impending. You might think that was an ideal spot for a hunch, but no, not a sign of a tickle. I was absolutely blithe as I asked Wolfe how the anti-thrips campaign was doing, and later, after lunch, as I dialed the number Susan Maturo had given me, though I admit I was a little dampened when I got no answer, since I had the idea of finding out someday how she would look with the frown gone.

But still later, shortly after six o’clock, I went to answer the doorbell and through the one-way glass panel saw Inspector Cramer of Manhattan Homicide there on the stoop. There was an instant reaction in the lower third of my spine, but I claim no credit for a hunch, since after all a homicide inspector does not go around ringing doorbells to sell tickets to the Policemen’s Annual Ball.

I let him in and took him to the office, where Wolfe was drinking beer and scowling at three United States senators on television.

3

Cramer, bulky and burly, with a big red face and sharp and skeptical gray eyes, sat in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk. He had declined an offer of beer, the TV had been turned off, and the lights had been turned on.

Cramer spoke. “I dropped in on my way down, and I haven’t got long.” He was gruff, which was normal. “I’d appreciate some quick information. What are you doing for Leo Heller?”

“Nothing.” Wolfe was brusque, which was also normal.

“You’re not working for him?”

“No.”

“Then why did Goodwin go to see him this morning?”

“He didn’t.”

“Hold it,” I put in. “I went on my own, just exploring. Mr. Wolfe didn’t know I was going, and this is the first he’s heard of it.”

There were two simultaneous looks of exasperation — Cramer’s at Wolfe, and Wolfe’s at me. Cramer backed his up with words. “For God’s sake. This is the rawest one you ever tried to pull! Been rehearsing it all afternoon?”

Wolfe let me go temporarily, to cope with Cramer. “Pfui. Suppose we have. Justify your marching into my house to demand an accounting of Mr. Goodwin’s movements. What if he did call on Mr. Heller? Has Mr. Heller been found dead?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a little. “Violence?”

“Murdered. Shot through the heart.”

“On his premises?”

“Yeah. I’d like to hear from Goodwin.”

Wolfe’s eyes darted to me. “Did you kill Mr. Heller, Archie?”

“No, sir.”

“Then oblige Mr. Cramer, please. He’s in a hurry.”

I obliged. First telling about the phone call the day before, and Wolfe’s refusal to take on anything for Heller, and my calling Heller back, I then reported on my morning visit at Thirty-seventh Street, supplying all details, except that I soft-pedaled Susan Maturo’s state of harassment, putting it merely that she asked me to arrange for her to see Wolfe and didn’t tell me what about. When I had finished, Cramer had a few questions. Among them:

“So you didn’t see Heller at all?”

“Nope.”

He grunted. “I know only too well how nosy you are, Goodwin. There were three doors in the walls of that room besides the one you entered by. You didn’t open any of them?”

“Nope.”

“One of them is the door to the closet in which Heller’s body was found by a caller, a friend, at three o’clock this afternoon. The medical examiner says that the sausage and griddle cakes he ate for breakfast at nine-thirty hadn’t been in him more than an hour when he died, so it’s practically certain that the body was in the closet while you were there in the room. As nosy as you are, you’re telling me that you didn’t open the door and see the body?”

“Yep. I apologize. Next time I’ll open every damn door in sight.”

“A gun had been fired. You didn’t smell it?”

“No. Air-conditioned.”

“You didn’t look through the desk drawers?”

“No. I apologize again.”

“We did.” Cramer took something from his breast pocket. “In one drawer we found this envelope, sealed. On it was written in pencil, in Heller’s hand, ‘Mr. Nero Wolfe.’ In it were five one-hundred-dollar bills.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” I said with feeling.

Wolfe stirred. “I assume that has been examined for fingerprints.”

“Certainly.”

“May I see it, please?”

Wolfe extended a hand. Cramer hesitated a moment, then tossed it across to the desk, and Wolfe picked it up. He took out the bills, crisp new ones, counted them, and looked inside.

“This was sealed,” he observed dryly, “with my name on it, and you opened it.”

“We sure did.” Cramer came forward in his chair with a hand stretched. “Let me have it.”

It was a demand, not a request, and Wolfe reacted impulsively. If he had taken a second to think he would have realized that if he claimed it he would have to earn it, or at least pretend to, but Cramer’s tone of voice was the kind of provocation he would not take. He returned the bills to the envelope and put it in his pocket.

“It’s mine,” he stated.

“It’s evidence,” Cramer growled, “and I want it.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Evidence of what? As an officer of the law, you should be acquainted with it.” He tapped his pocket with a fingertip. “My property. Connect it, or connect me, with a crime.”

Cramer was controlling himself, which wasn’t easy under the circumstances. “I might have known,” he said bitterly. “You want to be connected with a crime? Okay. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat in this chair and listened to you making assumptions. I’m not saying you never make good on them, I just say you’re strong on assumptions. Now I’ve got some of my own to offer, but first here are a few facts. In that building on Thirty-seventh Street, Heller lived on the fourth floor and worked on the fifth, the top floor. At five minutes to ten this morning, on good evidence, he left his living quarters to go up to his office. Goodwin says he entered that office at ten-twenty-eight, so if the body was in the closet when Goodwin was there — and it almost certainly was — Heller was killed between nine-fifty-five and ten-twenty-eight. We can’t find anyone who heard the shot, and the way that room is proofed we probably never will. We’ve tested it.”

Cramer squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, a trick of his. “Very well. From the doorman we’ve got a list of everyone who entered the place during that period, and most of them have been collected, and we’re getting the others. There were six of them. The nurse, Susan Maturo, left before Goodwin went up, and the other five left later, at intervals, when they got tired waiting for Heller to show up — according to them. As it stands now, and I don’t see what could change it, one of them killed Heller. Any of them, on leaving the elevator at the fifth floor, could have gone to Heller’s office and shot him, and then to the waiting room.”

Wolfe muttered, “Putting the body in the closet?”

“Of course, to postpone its discovery. If someone happened to see the murderer leaving the office, he had to be able to say he had gone in to look for Heller and Heller wasn’t there, and he couldn’t if the body was there in sight. There are marks on the floor where the body — and Heller was a featherweight — was dragged to the closet. In leaving, he left the door ajar, to make it more plausible, if someone saw him, that he had found it that way. Also—”

“Fallacy.”

“I’ll tell him you said so the first chance I get. Also, of course, he couldn’t leave the building. Knowing that Heller started to see callers at eleven o’clock, those people had all come early so as not to have a long wait. Including the murderer. He had to go to the waiting room and wait with the others. One of them did leave, the nurse, and she made a point of telling Goodwin why she was going, and it’s up to her to make it stick under questioning.”

“You were going to connect me with a crime.”

“Right.” Cramer was positive. “First one more fact. The gun was in the closet with the body, under it on the floor. It’s an old Gustein flug, a nasty little short-nose, and there’s not a chance in a thousand of tracing it, though we’re trying. Now here are my assumptions. The murderer went armed to kill, pushed the button at the door of Heller’s office, and was admitted. Since Heller went to his desk and sat, he couldn’t—”

“Established?”

“Yes. He couldn’t have been in fear of a mortal attack. But after some conversation, which couldn’t have been more than a few minutes on account of the timetable as verified, he was not only in fear, he felt that death was upon him, and in that super-soundproofed room he was helpless. The gun had been drawn and was aimed at him. He knew it was all up. He talked, trying to stall, not because he had any hope of living, but because he wanted to leave a message to be read after he was dead. Shaking with nervousness, with a trembling hand, perhaps a pleading one, he upset the jar of pencils on his desk, and then he nervously fumbled with them, moving them around on the desk in front of him, all the while talking. Then the gun went off, and he wasn’t nervous any more. The murderer circled the desk, made sure his victim was dead, and dragged the body to the closet. It didn’t occur to him that the scattered pencils had been arranged to convey a message — if it had, one sweep of a hand would have taken care of it. It was desperately urgent for him to get out of there and into the waiting room.”

Cramer stood up. “If you’ll let me have eight pencils I’ll show you how they were.”

Wolfe opened his desk drawer, but I got there first with a handful taken from my tray. Cramer moved around to Wolfe’s side, and Wolfe, making a face, moved his chair to make room.

“I’m in Heller’s place at his desk,” Cramer said, “and I’m putting them as he did from where he sat.” After getting the eight pencils arranged to his satisfaction, he stepped aside. “There it is, take a look.”

Wolfe inspected it from his side, and I from mine. It was like this from Wolfe’s side:

“You say,” Wolfe inquired, “that was a message?”

“Yes,” Cramer asserted. “It has to be.”

“By mandate? Yours?”

“Blah. You know damn well there’s not one chance in a million those pencils took that pattern by accident. Goodwin, you saw them. Were they like that?”

“Approximately,” I conceded. “I didn’t know there was a corpse in the closet at the time, so I wasn’t as interested in it as you were. But since you ask me, the pencil points were not all in the same direction, and an eraser from one of them was there in the middle.” I put a fingertip on the spot. “Right there.”

“Fix it as you saw it.”

I went around and joined them at Wolfe’s side of the desk and did as requested, removing an eraser from one of the pencils and placing it as I had indicated. Then it was like this:

“Of course,” I said, “you had the photographer shoot it. I don’t say that’s exact, but they were pointing in different directions, and the eraser was there.”

“Didn’t you realize it was a message?”

“Nuts. Someday you’ll set a trap that’ll catch me, and I’ll snarl. Sure, I thought it was Heller’s way of telling me he had gone to the bathroom and would be back in eight minutes. Eight pencils, see? Pretty clever. Isn’t that how you read it?”

“It is not.” Cramer was emphatic. “I think Heller turned it sideways to make it less likely that his attacker would see what it was. Move around here, please. Both of you. Look at it from here.”

Wolfe and I joined him at the left end of the desk and looked as requested. One glance was enough. You can see what we saw by turning the page a quarter-turn counterclockwise.

Cramer spoke. “Could you ask for a plainer NW?”

“I could,” I objected. “Why the extra pencil on the left of the W?”

“He put it there deliberately, for camouflage, to make it less obvious, or it rolled there accidentally, I don’t care which. It is unmistakably NW.” He focused on Wolfe. “I promised to connect you with a crime.”

Wolfe, back in his chair, interlaced his fingers. “You’re not serious.”

“The hell I’m not.” Cramer returned to the red leather chair and sat. “That’s why I came here, and came alone. You deny you sent Goodwin there, but I don’t believe you. He admits he was in Heller’s office ten minutes, because he has to, since the doorman saw him go up and five people saw him enter the waiting room. In a drawer of Heller’s desk is an envelope addressed to you, containing five hundred dollars in cash. But the clincher is that message. Heller, seated at his desk, sure that he is going to be killed in a matter of seconds, uses those seconds to leave a message. Can there be any question what the message was about? Not for me. It was about the person or persons responsible for his death. I am assuming that its purpose was to identify that person or persons. Do you reject that assumption?”

“No. I think it quite likely. Highly probable.”

“You admit it?”

“I don’t admit it, I state it.”

“Then I ask you to suggest any person or persons other than you whom the initials NW might identify. Unless you can do that here and now I’m going to take you and Goodwin downtown as material witnesses. I’ve got men in cars outside. If I didn’t do it the DA would.”

Wolfe straightened up and sighed deep, clear down. “You are being uncommonly obnoxious, Mr. Cramer.” He got to his feet. “Excuse me a moment.” Detouring around Cramer’s feet, he crossed to the other side of the room, to the bookshelves back of the big globe, reached up to a high one, took a book down, and opened it. He was too far away for me to see what it was. He turned first to the back of the book, where the index would be if it had one, and then to a page near the middle of it. He went on to another page, and another, while Cramer, containing his emotions under pressure, got a cigar from a pocket, stuck it in his mouth and sank his teeth in it. He never lit one.

Finally Wolfe returned to his desk, opened a drawer and put the book in it, and closed and locked the drawer. Cramer was speaking. “I’m not being fantastic. You didn’t kill him; you weren’t there. I’m not even assuming Goodwin killed him, though he could have. I’m saying that Heller left a message that would give a lead to the killer, and the message says NW, and that stands for Nero Wolfe, and therefore you know something, and I want to know what. I want a yes or no to this. Do you or do you not know something that indicates, or may indicate, who murdered Leo Heller?”

Wolfe, settled in his chair again, nodded. “Yes.”

“Ah. You do. What?”

“The message he left.”

“The message only says NW. Go on from there.”

“I need more information. I need to know — are the pencils still there on his desk as you found them?”

“Yes. They haven’t been disturbed.”

“You have a man there, of course. Get him on the phone and let me talk to him. You will hear us.”

Cramer hesitated, not liking it, then decided he might as well string along, came to my desk, dialed a number, got his man, and told him Wolfe would speak to him. Wolfe took it with his phone while Cramer stayed at mine.

Wolfe was courteous but crisp. “I understand those pencils are there on the desk as they were found, that all but one of them have erasers in their ends, and that an eraser is there on the desk, between the two groups of pencils. Is that correct?”

“Right.” The dick sounded bored. I was getting it from the phone on the table over by the globe.

“Take the eraser and insert it in the end of the pencil that hasn’t one in it. I want to know if the eraser was loose enough to slip out accidentally.”

“Inspector, are you on? You said not to disturb—”

“Go ahead,” Cramer growled. “I’m right here.”

“Yes, sir. Hold it, please.”

There was a long wait, and then he was back on. “The eraser couldn’t have slipped out accidentally. Part of it is still clamped in the end of the pencil. It had to be pulled out, torn apart, and the torn surfaces are bright and fresh. I can pull one out of another pencil and tell you how much force it takes.”

“No, thank you, that’s all I need. But to make certain, and for the record, I suggest that you send the pencil and eraser to the laboratory to check that the torn surfaces fit.”

“Do I do that, Inspector?”

“Yeah, you might as well. Mark them properly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cramer returned to the red leather chair, and I went to mine. He tilted the cigar upward from the corner of his mouth and demanded, “So what?”

“You know quite well what,” Wolfe declared. “The eraser was yanked out and placed purposely, and was a part of the message. No doubt as a dot after the N to show it was an initial? And he was interrupted permanently before he could put one after the W?”

“Sarcasm don’t change it any. It’s still NW.”

“No. It isn’t. It never was.”

“For me and the district attorney it is. I guess we’d better get on down to his office.”

Wolfe upturned a palm. “There you are. You’re not hare-brained, but you are pigheaded. I warn you, sir, that if you proceed on the assumption that Mr. Heller’s message says NW, you are doomed; the best you can expect is to be tagged a jackass.”

“I suppose you know what it does say.”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I’m waiting.”

“You’ll continue to wait. If I thought I could earn this money” — Wolfe tapped his pocket — “by deciphering that message for you, that would be simple, but in your present state of mind you would only think I was contriving a humbug.”

“Try me.”

“No, sir.” Wolfe half closed his eyes. “An alternative. You can go on as you have started and see where it lands you, understanding that Mr. Goodwin and I will persistently deny any knowledge of the affair or those concerned in it except what has been given you, and I’ll pursue my own course; or you can bring the murderer here and let me at him — with you present.”

“I’ll be glad to. Name him.”

“When I find him. I need all six of them, to learn which one Heller’s message identifies. Since I can translate the message and you can’t, you need me more than I need you, but you can save me much time and trouble and expense.”

Cramer’s level gaze had no trace whatever of affection or sympathy. “If you can translate that message and refuse to disclose it, you’re withholding evidence.”

“Nonsense. A conjecture is not evidence. Heaven knows your conjecture that it says NW isn’t. Nor is mine, but it should lead to some if I do the leading.” Wolfe flung a hand impatiently, and his voice rose. “Confound it, am I suggesting a gambol for my refreshment? Do you think I welcome an invasion of my premises by platoons of policemen herding a drove of scared and suspected citizens?”

“No. I know damn well you don’t.” Cramer took the cigar from his mouth and regarded it as if trying to decide exactly what it was. That accomplished, he glanced at Wolfe and then looked at me, by no means as a bosom friend.

“I’ll use the phone,” he said, and got up and came to my desk.

4

With three of the six scared citizens, it was a good thing that Wolfe didn’t have to start from scratch. They had been absolutely determined not to tell why they had gone to see Leo Heller, and, as we learned from the transcripts of interviews and copies of statements they had signed, the cops had had a time dragging it out of them.

By the time the first one was brought to us in the office, a little after eight o’clock, Wolfe had sort of resigned himself to personal misery and was bravely facing it. Not only had he had to devour his dinner in one-fourth the usual time; also he had been compelled to break one of his strictest rules and read documents while eating — and all that in the company of Inspector Cramer, who had accepted an invitation to have a bite. Of course Cramer returned to the office with us and called in, from the assemblage in the front room, a police stenographer, who settled himself in a chair at the end of my desk. Sergeant Purley Stebbins, who once in a spasm of generosity admitted that he couldn’t prove I was a hoodlum, after bringing the citizen in and seating him facing Wolfe and Cramer, took a chair against the wall.

The citizen, whose name as furnished by the documents was John R. Winslow, was the big guy in a dark blue topcoat and homburg who had stuck his head out of the elevator for a look at Archie Goodwin. He now looked unhappy and badly wilted, and was one of the three who had tried to refuse to tell what he had gone to Heller for; and considering what it was I couldn’t blame him much.

He started in complaining. “I think — I think this is unconstitutional. The police have forced me to tell about my private affairs, and maybe that couldn’t be helped, but Nero Wolfe is a private detective, and I don’t have to submit to questioning by him.”

“I’m here,” Cramer said. “I can repeat Wolfe’s questions if you insist, but it will take more time.”

“Suppose,” Wolfe suggested, “we start and see how it goes. I’ve read your statement, Mr. Winslow, and I—”

“You had no right to! They had no right to let you! They promised me it would be confidential unless it had to be used as evidence!”

“Please, Mr. Winslow, don’t bounce up like that. A hysterical woman is bad enough, but a hysterical man is insufferable. I assure you I am as discreet as any policeman. According to your statement, today was your third visit to Mr. Heller’s office. You were trying to supply him with enough information for him to devise a formula for determining how much longer your aunt will live. You expect to inherit a considerable fortune from her, and you wanted to make plans intelligently based on reasonable expectations. So you say, but reports are being received which indicate that you are deeply in debt and are hard pressed. Do you deny that?”

“No.” Winslow’s jaw worked. “I don’t deny it.”

“Are your debts, or any part of them, connected with any violation of the law? Any criminal act?”

“No!”

“Granted that Mr. Heller could furnish a valid calculation on your aunt’s life, how would that help you any?”

Winslow looked at Cramer and met only a stony stare. He went back to Wolfe. “I was negotiating to borrow a very large sum against my — expectations. There was to be a certain percentage added for each month that passed before repayment was made, and I had to know what my chances were. It was a question of probabilities, and I went to an expert.”

“What data had you given Heller as a basis for his calculations?”

“My God, I couldn’t — all kinds of things.”

“For instance?” Wolfe insisted.

Winslow looked at the police stenographer and me, but we couldn’t help. He returned to Wolfe. “Hundreds of things. My aunt’s age, her habits — eating, sleeping, everything I could — her health as far as I knew about it, the ages of her parents and grandparents when they died, her weight and build — I gave him photographs — her activities and interests, her temperament, her attitude to doctors, her politics—”

“Politics?”

“Yes. Heller said her pleasure or pain at the election of Eisenhower was a longevity factor.”

Wolfe grunted. “The claptrap of the charlatan. Did he also consider as a longevity factor the possibility that you might intervene by dispatching your aunt?”

That struck Winslow as funny. He did not guffaw, but he tittered, and it did not suit his build. Wolfe insisted, “Did he?”

“I really don’t know, really.” Winslow tittered again.

“From whom did your aunt inherit her fortune?”

“Her husband. My Uncle Norton.”

“When did he die?”

“Six years ago. In nineteen forty-seven.”

“How? Of what?”

“He was shot accidentally while hunting. Hunting deer.”

“Were you present?”

“Not present, no. I was more than a mile away at the time.”

“Did you get a legacy from him?”

“No.” Some emotion was mobilizing Winslow’s blood and turning his face pink. “He sneered at me. He left me six cents in his will. He didn’t like me.”

Wolfe turned to speak to Cramer, but the inspector forestalled him. “Two men are already on it. The shooting accident was up in Maine.”

“I would like to say how I feel about this,” Winslow told them. “I mean the questions that have been asked me about my uncle’s death. I regard them as a compliment. They assume that I might have been capable of shooting my uncle, and that is a very high compliment, and you say there are two men on it, so it is being investigated, and that is a compliment too. My aunt would be amused at the idea of my having killed Uncle Norton, and she would be amused at the idea that I might try to kill her. I wouldn’t mind a bit having her know about that, but if she finds out what I went to Leo Heller for — God help me.” He gestured in appeal. “I was promised, absolutely promised.”

“We disclose people’s private affairs,” Cramer rumbled, “only when it is unavoidable.”

Wolfe was pouring beer. When the foam was at the rim he put the bottle down and resumed. “I have promised nothing, Mr. Winslow, but I have no time for tattle. Here’s a suggestion. You’re in this pickle only because of your association with Mr. Heller, and the question is, was there anything in that association to justify this badgering? Suppose you tell us. Start at the beginning, and recall as well as you can every word that passed between you. Go right through it. I’ll interrupt as little as possible.”

“You’ve already seen it,” Cramer objected. “The transcript, the statement — what the hell, have you got a lead or haven’t you?”

Wolfe nodded. “We have a night for it,” he said, not happily. “Mr. Winslow doesn’t know what the lead is, and it’s Greek to you.” He went to Winslow. “Go ahead, sir. Everything that you said to Mr. Heller, and everything he said to you.”

It took more than an hour, including interruptions. The interruptions came from various city employees who were scattered around the house — the front room, the dining room, and three upstairs bedrooms — working on other scared citizens, and from the telephone. Two of the phone calls were from homicide dicks who were trying to locate a citizen who had got mislaid — one named Henrietta Tillotson, Mrs. Albert Tillotson, the overfed matron whom I had seen in Heller’s waiting room with the others. There were also calls from the police commissioner and the DA’s office and other interested parties.

When Purley Stebbins got up to escort Winslow from the room, Wolfe’s lead was still apparently Greek to Cramer, as it was to me. As the door closed behind them Cramer spoke emphatically. “I think it’s a goddam farce. I think that message was NW, meaning you, and you’re stalling for some kind of a play.”

“And if so?” Wolfe was testy. “Why are you tolerating this? Because if the message did mean me I’m the crux, and your only alternative is to cart me downtown, and that would merely make me mum, and you know it.” He drank beer and put the glass down. “However, maybe we can expedite it without too great a risk. Tell your men who are now interviewing these people to be alert for something connected with the figure six. They must give no hint of it, they must themselves not mention it, but if the figure six appears in any segment of the interview they should concentrate on that segment until it is exhausted. They all know, I presume, of Heller’s suspicion that one of his clients had committed a serious crime?”

“They know that Goodwin says so. What’s this about six?”

Wolfe shook his head. “That will have to do. Even that may be foolhardy, since they’re your men, not mine.”

“Winslow’s uncle died six years ago and left him six cents.”

“I’m quite aware of it. You say that is being investigated. Do you want Mr. Goodwin to pass this word?”

Cramer said no thanks, he would, and left the room.

By the time he returned, citizen number two had been brought in by Stebbins, introduced to Wolfe, and seated where Winslow had been. She was Susan Maturo. She looked fully as harassed as she had that morning, but I wouldn’t say much more so. There was now, of course, a new aspect to the matter: did she look harassed or guilty? She was undeniably attractive, but so had Maude Vail been, and she had poisoned two husbands. There was the consideration that if Heller had been killed by the client whom he suspected of having committed a crime, it must have been a client he had seen previously at least once, or how could he have got grounds for a suspicion; and, according to Susan Maturo, she had never called on Heller before and had never seen him. But actually that eliminated neither her nor Agatha Abbey, who also claimed that that morning had been her first visit. It was known that Heller had sometimes made engagements by telephone to meet prospective clients elsewhere, and Miss Maturo and Miss Abbey might well have been among that number.

Opening up on her, Wolfe was not too belligerent, probably because she had accepted an offer of beer and, after drinking some, had licked her lips. It pleases him when people share his joys.

“You are aware, Miss Maturo,” he told her, “that you are in a class by yourself. The evidence indicates that Mr. Heller was killed by one of the six people who entered that building this morning to call on him, and you are the only one of the six who departed before eleven o’clock, Mr. Heller’s appointment hour. Your explanation of your departure as given in your statement is close to incoherent. Can’t you improve on it?”

She looked at me. I did not throw her a kiss, but neither did I glower. “I’ve reported what you told me,” I assured her, “exactly as you said it.”

She nodded at me vaguely and turned to Wolfe. “Do I have to go through it again?”

“You will probably,” Wolfe advised her, “have to go through it again a dozen times. Why did you leave?”

She gulped, started to speak, found no sound was coming out, and had to start over again. “You know about the explosion and fire at the Montrose Hospital a month ago?”

“Certainly. I read newspapers.”

“You know that three hundred and two people died there that night. I was there working, in Ward G on the sixth floor. In addition to those who died, many were injured, but I went all through it and I didn’t get a scratch or any burn. My dearest friend was killed, burned to death trying to save the patients, and another dear friend is crippled for life, and a young doctor I was engaged to marry — he was killed in the explosion, and others I knew. I don’t know how I came out of it without a mark, because I’m sure I tried to help. I’m positively sure of that, but I did, and that’s one trouble, I guess, because I couldn’t be glad about it — how could I?”

She seemed to expect an answer, so Wolfe muttered, “No. Not to be expected.”

“I am not,” she said, “the kind of person who hates people.”

She stopped, so Wolfe said, “No?”

“No, I’m not. I never have been. But I began to hate the man — or if it was a woman, I don’t care which — that put the bomb there and did it. I can’t say I went out of my mind because I don’t think I did, but that’s how I felt. After two weeks I tried to go back to work at another hospital, but I couldn’t. I read all there was in the newspapers, hoping they would catch him, and I couldn’t think of anything else, and I dreamed about it every night, and I went to the police and wanted to help, but of course they had already questioned me and I had told everything I knew. The days went by, and it looked as if they never would catch him, and I wanted to do something, and I had read about that Leo Heller, and I decided to go to him and get him to do it.”

Wolfe made a noise and her head jerked up. “I said I hated him!”

Wolfe nodded. “So you did. Go on.”

“And I went, that’s all. I had some money saved, and I could borrow some, to pay him. But while I was sitting there in the waiting room, with that man and woman there, I suddenly thought I must be crazy, I must have got so bitter and vindictive I didn’t realize what I was doing, and I wanted to think about it, and I got up and went. Going down in the elevator I felt as if a crisis had passed — that’s a feeling a nurse often has about other people — and then as I left the elevator I heard the names Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, and the idea came to me, why not get them to find him? So I spoke to Mr. Goodwin, and there I was again, but I couldn’t make myself tell him about it, so I just told him I wanted to see Nero Wolfe to ask his advice, and he said he would try to arrange it, and he would phone me or I could phone him.”

She fluttered a hand. “That’s how it was.”

Wolfe regarded her. “It’s not incoherent, but neither is it sapient. Do you consider yourself an intelligent woman?”

“Why — yes. Enough to get along. I’m a good nurse, and a good nurse has to be intelligent.”

“Yet you thought that quack could expose the man who planted the bomb in the hospital by his hocus-pocus?”

“I thought he did it scientifically. I knew he had a great reputation, just as you have.”

“Good heavens.” Wolfe opened his eyes wide at her. “It is indeed a bubble, as Jacques said. What were you going to ask my advice about?”

“Whether you thought there was any chance — whether you thought the police were going to find him.”

Wolfe’s eyes were back to normal, half shut again. “This performance I’m engaged in, Miss Maturo — this inquisition of a person involved by circumstance in a murder — is a hubbub in a jungle, at least in its preliminary stage. Blind, I grope, and proceed by feel. You say you never saw Mr. Heller, but you can’t prove it. I am free to assume that you had seen him, not at his office, and talked with him; that you were convinced, no matter how, that he had planted the bomb in the hospital and caused the holocaust; and that, moved by an obsessive rancor, you went to his place and killed him. One ad—”

She was gawking. “Why on earth would I think he had planted the bomb?”

“I have no idea. As I said, I’m groping. One advantage of that assumption would be that you have confessed to a hatred so overpowering that surely it might have impelled you to kill if and when you identified its object. It is Mr. Cramer, not I, who is deploying the hosts of justice in this enterprise, but no doubt two or three men are calling on your friends and acquaintances to learn if you have ever hinted a suspicion of Leo Heller in connection with the hospital disaster. Also they are probably asking whether you had any grudge against the hospital that might have provoked you to plant the bomb yourself.”

“My God!” A muscle at the side of her neck was twitching. “Me? Is that what it’s like?”

“It is indeed. That wouldn’t be incongruous. Your proclaimed abhorrence of the perpetrator could be simply the screeching of your remorse.”

“Well, it isn’t.” Suddenly she was out of her chair, and a bound took her to Wolfe’s desk, and her palms did a tattoo on the desk as she leaned forward at him. “Don’t you dare say a thing like that! The six people I cared for most in the world — they all died that night! How would you feel?” More tattoo. “How would anybody feel?”

I was up and at her elbow, but no bodily discipline was required. She straightened and for a moment stood trembling all over, then got her control back and went to her chair and sat. “I’m sorry,” she said in a tight little voice.

“You should be,” Wolfe said grimly. A woman cutting loose is always too much for him. “Pounding the top of my desk settles nothing. What were the names of the six people you cared for most in the world, who died?”

She told him, and he wanted to know more about them. I was beginning to suspect that actually he had no more of a lead than I did, that he had given Cramer a runaround to jostle him loose from the NW he had fixed on, and that, having impulsively impounded the five hundred bucks, he had decided to spend the night trying to earn it. The line he now took with Susan Maturo bore me out. It was merely the old grab-bag game — keep her talking, about anything and anybody, in the hope that she would spill something that would faintly resemble a straw. I had known Wolfe, when the pickings had been extremely slim, to play that game for hours on end.

He was still at it with Susan Maturo when an individual entered with a message for Cramer which he delivered in a whisper. Cramer got up and started for the door, then thought better of it and turned.

“You might as well be in on this,” he told Wolfe. “They’ve got Mrs. Tillotson, and she’s here.”

That was a break for Susan Maturo, since Wolfe might have kept her going another hour or so, though I suppose all it got her was an escort to some lieutenant or sergeant in another room, who started at her all over again. As she arose to go she favored me with a glance. It looked as if she intended it for a smile to show there were no hard feelings, but if so it was the poorest excuse for a smile I had ever seen. If it hadn’t been unprofessional I would have gone and given her a pat on the shoulder.

The newcomer who was ushered in was not Mrs. Tillotson but an officer of the law, not in uniform. He was one of the newer acquisitions on Homicide, and I had never seen him before, but I admired his manly stride as he approached and his snappy stance when he halted and faced Cramer, waiting to be spoken to.

“Who did you leave over there?” Cramer asked him.

“Murphy, sir. Timothy Murphy.”

“Okay. You tell it. Hold it.” Cramer turned to Wolfe. “This man’s name is Roca. He was on post at Heller’s place. It was him you asked about the pencils and the eraser. Go on, Roca.”

“Yes, sir. The doorman in the lobby phoned up that there was a woman down there that wanted to come up, and I told him to let her come. I thought that was compatible.”

“You did.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then go ahead.”

“She came up in the elevator. She wouldn’t tell me her name. She asked me questions about how much longer would I be there and did I expect anybody else to come, and so on. We bantered back and forth, my objective being to find out who she was, and then she came right out with it. She took a roll of bills from her bag. She offered me three hundred dollars, and then four hundred, and finally five hundred, if I would unlock the cabinets in Heller’s office and let her be in there alone for an hour. That put me in a quandary.”

“It did.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did you get out?”

“If I had had keys to the cabinets I would have accepted her offer. I would have unlocked them and left her in there. When she was ready to go I would have arrested her and taken her to be searched, and we would have known what she had taken from the cabinet. That would have broken the case. But I had no keys to the cabinets.”

“Uh-huh. If you had had keys and had unlocked the cabinets and left her in there, and she had taken something from a cabinet and burned it up, you would have collected the ashes and sent them to the laboratory for examination by modern scientific methods.”

Roca swallowed. “I admit I didn’t think about burning. But if I had had keys I would have thought harder.”

“I bet you would. Did you take her money for evidence?”

“No, sir. I thought that might be instigation. I took her into custody. I phoned in. When a relief came, I brought her here to you. I am staying here to face her.”

“You’ve faced her enough for tonight. Plenty. We’ll have a talk later. Go and tell Burger to bring her in.”

5

Although my stay in Heller’s waiting room that morning had been brief, I have long been trained to see what I look at and to remember what I see, and I would hardly have recognized Mrs. Albert Tillotson. She had lost five pounds and gained twice that many wrinkles, and the contrast between her lipstick and her drained-out skin made her look more like a woman-hater’s pin-up than an overfed matron.

“I wish to speak with you privately,” she told Inspector Cramer.

She was one of those. Her husband was president of something, and therefore it was absurd to suppose that she was not to expect privileges. It took Cramer a good five minutes to get it into her head that she was just one of the girls, and it was such a shock that she had to take time out to decide how to react to it.

She decided on a barefaced lie. She demanded to know if the man who had brought her there was a member of the police force, and Cramer replied that he was.

“Well,” she declared, “he shouldn’t be. You may know that late this afternoon a police officer called at my residence to see me. He told me that Leo Heller had been killed, murdered, and wanted to know for what purpose I had gone to his office this morning. Naturally I didn’t want to be involved in an ugly thing like that, so I told him I hadn’t gone to see Leo Heller, but he convinced me that that wouldn’t do, so I said I had gone to see him, but on an intimate personal matter that I wouldn’t tell — Is that man putting down what I’m saying?”

“Yes. That’s his job.”

“I wouldn’t want it. Nor yours either. The officer insisted that I must tell why I had gone to see that Heller, and I refused, and he insisted, and I refused. When he said he would have to take me to the district attorney’s office, under arrest if necessary, and I saw that he meant it, I told him. I told him that my husband and I have been having some difficulty with our son, especially his schooling, and I went to Heller to ask what college would be best for him. I answered the officer’s questions, within reason, and finally he left. Perhaps you knew all this.”

Cramer nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, after the officer had gone I began to worry, and I went to see a friend and ask her advice. The trouble was that I had given Heller many details about my son, some of them very intimate and confidential, and since he had been murdered the police would probably go through all his papers, and those details were private and I wanted to keep them private. I knew that Heller had made all his notes in a personal shorthand that no one else could read — anyhow he had said so, but I couldn’t be sure, and it was very important. After I had discussed it with my friend a long time, for hours, I decided to go to Heller’s place and ask whoever was in charge to let me have any papers relating to my family affairs, since they were not connected with the murder.”

“I see,” Cramer assured her.