Death of a Doxy (Crime Line)

In the taxi, going uptown, I touched bottom. I had hoped to get some little lead out of Orrie, at least a glimmer, but as we turned west at 35th Street I realized that I was going over how he had looked and what he had said for indications about him, which was plain silly, since he was supposed to be definitely out. Of course the trouble was that the only way to get something out of your mind is to get something else in. The idea that Orrie might have conked Isabel Kerr with that ashtray had popped into my head as soon as I saw the dent in her skull, and it was going to stay there, no matter what, until I had an X or Y to substitute for Orrie; and after three days and nights there was still no X or Y anything like good enough. If you say, even so, I shouldn't have been considering Orrie because we had barred him, you're perfectly right but you don't know much.

To show how I was taking it, when I entered the office I did not open the top left drawer of my desk to get the pad on which I enter items for my weekly expense account. The $3.75 cab fare would be on me. Wolfe had told us the undertaking was his, but until we brought him something he would have nothing to undertake, and he had no corner in self-esteem. Since it was only a couple of minutes past eleven, he had just come down from the plant rooms and was taking a look at the mail. When he found there was nothing interesting, no checks and no lists from orchid collectors, he pushed it aside and said good morning. I said it wasn't, and to prove it gave him a verbatim report of my talk with Orrie, ending with the comment that he had better take on the next one himself, since I had got nowhere with the three I had tackled, Jill Hardy and the Flemings.

"Anyway," I said, "it's a man. I admit that Julie Jaquette would probably be too much for you, but she can wait until you have had a go at Avery Ballou."

He frowned. "Dr. Gamm."

I frowned back. "You can't put it off forever. As you know, I agree with you on jobs like divorce evidence, they're too grubby. Any job is apt to be if the main point is who has been, or is, or will be, sleeping with whom. But while it's true that Ballou was probably not paying her rent so he could read poetry to her, that presumably sex was a factor, that's not the main point and you can ignore it. You can pretend that he might have killed her because she snickered when he pronounced a word wrong."

His lips were tight. He breathed three times before he said, "Very well. Bring him."