If Death Ever Slept

I understood how he felt, and I even sympathized with him. On the phone with Jarrell, both Sunday evening and Monday morning, I did my best to string him along, telling him that Wolfe was sitting tight, which he was, God knows, and explaining why it was better for me to be out of the way, at least temporarily. It wasn’t too bad. Lieutenant Rowcliff had called on the Jarrell family, as I had expected, but hadn’t been too nasty about the coincidence that two of Jarrell’s associates, his former secretary and a close friend, had got it within a week. He had been nasty, of course-Rowcliff would be nasty to Saint Peter if he ever got near him; but he hadn’t actually snarled.

But although I sympathized with Wolfe, I’m not a genius like him, and if I was sliding into a hole too deep to crawl out of I wanted to know about it in time to get a haircut and have my pants pressed before my appearance in the line-up. Of the half a dozen possible facts that could send me over the edge there was one in particular that I wanted very much to get a line on, but it wasn’t around. None of the newscasts mentioned it, Sunday night or Monday morning. It wasn’t in the Monday morning papers. Lon Cohen didn’t have it. There were four guys-one at headquarters, one on the DA’s staff, and two on Homicide-for whom I had done favors in the past, who could have had it and who might have obliged me, but with two murders in the stew it was too risky to ask them.

So I was still factless when, ten minutes before noon, the phone rang and I got an invitation to call at the DA’s office at my earliest convenience. Wolfe was still up in the plant rooms. He always came down at eleven o’clock, but hadn’t shown that morning-for fear, as I said, that I would tell him something. I buzzed him on the house phone to tell him where I was going, went out and walked to Ninth Avenue, and took a taxi to Leonard Street.

That time I was kept waiting only a few minutes before I was taken in to Mandelbaum. He was polite, as usual, getting to his feet to shake hands. I was only a private detective, true, but as far as he knew I had committed neither a felony nor a misdemeanor, and the only way an assistant DA can get the “assistant” removed from his title is to have it voted off, making it DA, and I was a voter. The chair for me at the end of his desk was of course placed so I was facing a window.