Death of a Doxy (Crime Line)

"Yes. She asked two or three times if it was continuing. I told her about the phone call in December. The last time she asked me was in January. Around the middle of January."

Wolfe nodded. "She knew it must be her brother-in-law, and she told him it must stop, and he -"

"Better than that," I cut in. "She was going to tell on him. Tell her sister. He might rather have called it off than kill her, but he would rather kill her than have his wife know. He may not be ipso facto a murderer, but ipso Archie Goodwin he is."

"Mr. Goodwin is sometimes a little precipitate," Wolfe told Ballou. "He has seen and spoken with them – Mr. and Mrs. Fleming. At length." He pointed to the package. "That money. If I earn it I want it, but you can't engage me now. My purpose is to clear Mr. Cather; yours is to prevent disclosure of your name. If I can serve your purpose without damage to mine, I shall. When you go, take the package; here in my safe it might affect my mental processes. There is -"

"What are you going to do?" Ballou demanded. Demanding again.

"I don't know. Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Panzer, Mr. Durkin, and I are now going to confer." He looked at the clock. "It's nearly midnight. If you don't want two more men in on your secret, go."

Chapter 11

At one o'clock Friday afternoon I was on a chair in a hotel bedroom, at arm's length from an attractive young woman in the bed. Various possible approaches had been discussed in the Thursday night conference that went on for more than two hours. Two of them – get a picture of him and show it to the General Delivery clerks at the Grand Central Station post office, and find out if he had been spending more money than he should have had – were discarded offhand because they could only confirm the blackmailing, and that was regarded as settled.

An obvious one was where had he been Saturday morning, but we weren't ready for that. If he was open, he was open. If he had an alibi, cracking it could and should wait until we had some kind of leverage on him.

Get three pictures of him, somehow – one for Saul, one for Fred, and one for me – and do the neighborhood again, to dig up someone who had seen him Saturday morning. The cops had of course been at that for four days, with pictures of Orrie. Fred was for it, and Saul was willing to try, but Wolfe vetoed it. He said we had tolerated banality long enough.