Might as Well Be Dead

I obliged. That didn’t take long. When I finished, with my emergency exit as the clerk was polling the jury, he asked for the Times’s report of the trial, and I went to the cupboard and got it-all issues from March 27 to date. He started at the beginning, and since I thought I might as well bone up on it myself, I started at the end and went backward. He had reached April 2, and I had worked back to April 4, and there would soon have been a collision but for an interruption. The doorbell rang. I went to the hall, and seeing, through the one-way glass panel of the front door, a sloppy charcoal topcoat and a black homburg that I had already seen twice that day, I recrossed the sill of the office and told Wolfe, “He kept his word. Albert Freyer.”

His brows went up. “Let him in,” he growled.

Chapter 3

THE COUNSELOR-AT-LAW hadn’t had a shave, but it must be admitted that the circumstances called for allowances. I suppose he thought he was flattening somebody when, convoyed to the office and introduced, he didn’t extend a hand, but if so he was wrong. Wolfe is not a hand-shaker.

When Freyer had got lowered into the red leather chair Wolfe swiveled to face him and said affably, “Mr. Goodwin has told me about you, and about the adverse verdict on your client. Regrettable.”

“Did he tell you you would hear from me?”

“Yes, he mentioned that.”

“All right, here I am.” Freyer wasn’t appreciating the big, comfortable chair; he was using only the front half of it, his palms on his knees. “Goodwin told me your ad in today’s papers had no connection with my client, Peter Hays. He said you had never heard of him. I didn’t believe him. And less than an hour later he appears in the courtroom where my client was on trial. That certainly calls for an explanation, and I want it. I am convinced that my client is innocent. I am convinced that he is the victim of a diabolical frame-up. I don’t say that your ad was a part of the plot, I admit I don’t see how it could have been since it appeared on the day the case went to the jury, but I intend to-”

“Mr. Freyer.” Wolfe was showing him a palm. “If you please. I can simplify this for you.”

“You can’t simplify it until you explain it to my satisfaction.”

“I know that. That’s why I am prepared to do something I have rarely done, and should never do except under compulsion. It is now compelled by extraordinary circumstances. I’m going to tell you what a client of mine has told me. Of course you’re a member of the New York bar?”

“Certainly.”