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.”