Might as Well Be Dead

“No. My interest has been engaged, no matter how, and I am indulging it. Those aspects deserve inquiry, and last evening I sent a man to look into one of them-a man named Johnny Keems, who worked for me intermittently. He was to learn if there was any possibility that on the evening the murder was committed, January third, the invitation to Mrs. Molloy to join a theater party had been designed with the purpose of getting her out of the way. Of course it didn’t-”

“You sent that man?” Arkoff demanded.

His wife looked reproachfully at her friend. “Selma darling, really! You know perfectly well-”

“If you please!” Wolfe showed her a palm, and his tone sharpened. “Save your resentment for a need; I’m imputing no malignity to any of you. I was about to say, it didn’t have to be designed, since the murderer may have merely seized an opportunity; and if it was designed, it didn’t have to be one of you who designed it. You might have been quite unaware of it. That was what I sent Mr. Keems to find out, and he was to begin by seeing you, all four of you. First on his list was Mrs. Arkoff, since she had phoned the invitation to Mrs. Molloy.” His eyes leveled at Rita. “Did he see you, madam?”

She started to answer, but her husband cut in. “Hold it, Rita.” Apparently he could give orders too. He looked at Wolfe. “What’s the big idea? If you sent him why don’t you ask him? Why drag us down here? Did someone else send him?”

Wolfe nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them, and nodded again. “A logical inference, Mr. Arkoff, but wrong. I sent him, but I can’t ask him, because he’s dead. On Riverside Drive in the Nineties, shortly before midnight last night, an automobile hit him and killed him. It’s possible that it was an accident, but I don’t think so. I think he was murdered. I think that, working on the assignment I had given him, he had uncovered something that was a mortal threat to someone. Therefore I must see the people he saw and find out what was said. Did he see you, Mrs. Arkoff?”

Her husband stopped her again. “This is different,” he told Wolfe, and he looked and sounded different. “If he was murdered. What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”

Wolfe shook his head. “We won’t go into that, Mr. Arkoff, and we don’t have to because the police also suspect that it wasn’t. A sergeant at the Homicide Bureau phoned me today to ask if Mr. Keems was working for me last night, and if so, what his assignment was and whom he had seen. Mr. Goodwin put him off-”