Might as Well Be Dead

In a way he has spoiled me. Some of the spectacular charades he has thought up have led me to expect too much, and it was something of a letdown Monday morning when I learned what the program was. Nothing but another treasure hunt, and not even a safe-deposit box. I admit that it did the trick, but at the time it struck me as a damned small mouse to come out of so big a mountain.

I had made sacrifices, having rolled out early enough to finish my breakfast by the time Saul and Fred and Orrie arrived at eight, only to find that it hadn’t been necessary when Wolfe told me on the house phone to bring them up at a quarter to nine. When the time came I led the way up the two flights and found his door standing open, and we entered. He was seated at the table near a window, his breakfast gone, but still with coffee, with the morning Times propped on the reading rack. He greeted the staff and asked me if there was any news, and I said no, I had phoned Stebbins and he had not bitten my ear off only because you can’t bite over the wire.

He took a sip of coffee and put the cup down. “Then we’ll have to try. You will go, all four, to Mrs. Molloy’s apartment, and search it, covering every inch. Take probes for the upholstery and whatever tools may be required. The devil of it is you won’t know what you’re looking for.”

“Then how will we know when we find it?”

“You won’t, with any certainty. But we know that a situation existed which led to Molloy’s murder; that he had cached a large sum of money in a safe-deposit box under an alias; that he was contemplating departure from the country; and that exhaustive inquiry among his friends and associates has disclosed no hint of where the money came from or when or how he got it. Further, there was no such hint found on his person, or among the papers taken from his office, or in his apartment, or in the safe-deposit box. I don’t believe it. I do not believe that no such hint exists. As I said to Archie on Friday, when a man is involved in a circumstance pressing enough to cause his murder he must leave a relic of it somewhere, and I had hoped it was in that box. When it wasn’t I should have persisted, but other matters intervened-for one thing, a woman got killed.”