If Death Ever Slept

AT A QUARTER PAST TEN Thursday morning, Memorial Day, I arrived at Jamaica race track to start the damnedest four days of detecting, or non-detecting, that I have ever put in.

After Wolfe had picked up the timetables, at six o’clock Wednesday, he had read them in twenty minutes, and then had gone over them for more than an hour, until dinner time. Back in the office after dinner, he had asked a few dozen assorted questions. What did I know about Mr. and Mrs. Herman Dietz? Practically nothing. Had Trella Jarrell’s hour in the park from two o’clock to three on Sunday been checked? No, and probably it never would be. If I wanted to leave a revolver in Central Park where I was reasonably certain it wouldn’t be discovered for three days, but where I could get it when I wanted it, where would I hide it? I made three suggestions, none of them any good, and said I’d have to think it over. Who was Clarinda Day? She was a woman who ran an establishment on 48th Street just off Fifth Avenue where women could get almost anything done that occurred to them-to their hair, their faces, their necks, their busts, their waists, their hips, their legs, their knees, their calves, their ankles-and where they could sweat, freeze, rest, or exercise forty-two different ways. Her customers ran all the way from stenographers to multi-millionairesses.

Did Nora Kent have keys to all the files in Jarrell’s library and the combination to the safes? Don’t know. Had a thorough search been made of the Jarrell duplex? Yes; a regiment of experts, with Jarrell’s permission, had spent all day Tuesday at it. Including the library? Yes, with Jarrell present. Who had told me so? Purley Stebbins. Where was the Metropolitan Athletic Club? Central Park South, 59th Street. How long would it take to get from where the steamship Bolivar was docked to Eber’s apartment on 49th Street? Between ten and thirty minutes, depending on traffic. Average, say eighteen minutes. How difficult would it have been for Nora Kent to get from the library to the street, and, later, back in again, without being observed? With luck, using the service entrance, fairly simple. Without luck, impossible.

Etc.

At ten-thirty Wolfe leaned back and said, “Instructions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Before you go to bed get Saul, Fred, and Orrie, and ask them to be here at eleven in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tomorrow is a holiday. I don’t suppose Miss Bonner will be at her office. If possible, get her tonight and ask her to breakfast with me at eight.”