Death of a Doxy (Crime Line)

Forty-seven hours later, at nine o'clock Thursday evening, Wolfe put his coffee cup down and said, "Four days and nights of nothingness." I put my cup down and said, "No argument." Actually there could have been one. There had been plenty of nothingness in results, but not in efforts. Somewhere in the nine notebooks here on my table – I write these reports on my own machine up in my room, not in the office – are the names of four males and six females, supplied by Jaquette-Jackson when she came to look at the orchids Wednesday afternoon, who had been seen by Saul and Fred. For something to bite on, hopeless. Of course anything is possible. It was possible that one of the women had thought that Isabel had pinched her lipstick and had gone to get it and got mad and bopped her, or that one of the men hated Rudyard Kipling and couldn't stand a woman who had him bound in leather, but you need something better than ten billion possibles to get your teeth into. Any little piece of straw will do, but you have to have something.

For instance, statistics. There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

I admit this is the second kind: out of every thousand murders committed by amateurs, eighty-three are a woman killing another woman because she has taken her husband, or part of him. Therefore, from the statistical point of view, on the list of names we had collected the only one with a worthy known motive was Mrs. Avery Ballou, and that automatically gave her top billing. The difficulty was the approach. If I went and asked her if she had known that her husband had for three years been reading Kipling's poems to the woman who had been murdered last week, Ballou would never speak to us again, and we might need him for something. So after breakfast Wednesday morning I rang Lily Rowan and asked her if she had ever met Mrs. Avery Ballou, and she said no, and from the little she knew about her she didn't particularly care to.

"Then I won't insist," I said. "But I need to find out if I want to meet her. This is strictly private. I don't need a detailed resume, just a sketch, especially what her main interests are. For instance, if she collects autographs of famous private detectives, that would be perfect."

"She can't be that sappy."