Curtains For Three (11 page)

“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.”

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.