If Death Ever Slept

He laughed, closing the key fold. “That’s my idea.” He pointed above the door. “See the clock? Anyone coming in, his picture is taken, and the clock shows the time. Not only that, it goes by closed circuit to the Horland Protective Agency, only three blocks away. A man there saw us come in just now. There’s a switch at my desk and when we’re in here we turn it off-Nora or I. I’ve got them at the doors of the apartment too, front and back. By the way, I’ll give you keys. With this I don’t have to wonder about keys-for instance, Jim Eber could have had duplicates made. I don’t give a damn if he did. What do you think of it?”

“Very neat. Expensive, but neat. I ought to mention, if someone at Horland’s saw me come in with you, he may know me, by sight anyway. A lot of them do. Does that matter?”

“I doubt it.” He had turned on lights and gone to his desk. “I’ll call them. Damn it, I could have come in first and switched it off. I’ll call them. Sit down. Have a cigar?”

It was the cigar he had lit in the lounge after dinner that had warned me to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t smoke them myself, but I admit that the finest tobacco smell you can get is a whiff from the lit end of a fine Havana, and when the box had been passed I had noticed that they were Portanagas. But I had not enjoyed the whiff I had got from the one Jarrell had lit. In fact, I had snorted it out. That was bad. When you can’t stand the smell of a Portanaga because a client is smoking it, watch out or you’ll be giving him the short end of the stick, which is unethical. Anyway, I saved him three bucks by not taking one.

He leaned back, let smoke float out of his mouth, and inquired, “What impression did you get?”

I looked judicious. “Not much of any. I only spoke a few words with her. Your suggestion that I get the others talking about her, especially your wife and your wife’s brother-there has been no opportunity for that, and there won’t be while they’re playing cards. I think I ought to cultivate Corey Brigham.”

He nodded. “You saw how it was there before dinner.”

“Sure. Also Foote and Dietz, not to mention your son. Your wife thinks she hypnotizes them.”

“You don’t know what my wife thinks. You only know what she says she thinks. Then you discussed her with my wife?”