If Death Ever Slept

Wolfe didn’t waste a bellow on him. He merely shook his head. “No, sir. Apparently you don’t know what you’re here for. You’re here to give me a chance to wriggle out of a predicament. I am desperate. I dislike acting under compulsion in any case, and I abominate being obliged to divulge information about a client’s affairs that I have received in confidence. The starting point is my conclusion that one of you is a murderer, not to go on from there to identify the culprit and expose him-that isn’t what I was hired for-but to show you the fix I’m in. What I desperately need is not sanction for my conclusion, but plausible ground for rejecting it. I want to impeach it. As for your notion that Mr. Goodwin took the gun, in a stratagem devised by me with your father’s knowledge, that is mere drivel and is no credit to your wit. If it had happened that way I would be in no predicament at all; I would produce the gun myself, demonstrate its innocence, and have a good night’s sleep.”

“If death ever slept,” Lois blurted.

Their heads all turned to her. Not, probably, that they expected her to supply anything helpful; they were glad to have an excuse to take their eyes off Wolfe and relieve the strain. They hadn’t been exchanging glances. Apparently no one felt like meeting other eyes.

“That’s all,” Lois said. “What are you all looking at me for? That just came out.”

The heads went back to Wolfe. Trella asked, “Am I dumb? Or did you say you want us to prove you’re wrong?”

“That’s one way of putting it, Mrs. Jarrell. Yes.”

“How do we prove it?”

Wolfe nodded. “That’s the difficulty. I don’t expect you to prove a negative. The simplest way would be to produce the gun, but I’ve abandoned hope of that. I don’t intend to go through the dreary routine of inquiry on opportunity; that would take all night, and checking your answers would take an army a week, and I have no army. But I have gathered from the public reports that Eber died between two o’clock and six o’clock Thursday afternoon, and Brigham died between ten o’clock Sunday morning and three o’clock that afternoon, so it may be possible to exclude one or more of you. Has anyone an alibi for either of those periods?”

“You’ve stretched the periods,” Roger Foote declared. “It’s three to five Thursday and eleven to two Sunday.”

“I gave the extremes, Mr. Foote. The extremes are the safest. You seem well informed.”

“My God, I ought to be. The cops.”

“No doubt. You’ll soon see much more of them if we don’t discredit my conclusion.”