Murder by the Book

It was then two in the morning, and I was not through. I drove downtown to Sullivan Street and let myself into Dykes's apartment with the key I had taken from his pocket. With my bare hands an hour there would have been enough, but with gloves on it took three hours to • make a thorough search. I found only three items, but they were well worth it. Two of them were receipts signed by Rachel Abrams for payments for typing made by Baird Archer, and the third was a letter addressed to (Baird Archer at General Delivery, Clinton Station, on the letterhead of Scholl Hanna, signed by Joan Well-man. I said I made a thorough search, but there were many books on the shelves, and there wasn't time to turn through every page of them even if I had thought it necessary. If I had done so I would have found the sheet of paper on which Dykes made that list of names with Baird Archer among them, and you would never have seen it, and I wouldn't be writing you this now.

For a while, a week or so, I had no intention of doing anything about Joan Wellman or Rachel Abrams, but then I began to worry. One of them had typed the script and the other had read it. The trial of O'Malley and the juror and the disbarment proceedings had of course been fully reported in the papers, only a year ago. What if one of those women or both of them had noticed the similarity, or rather the sameness, between the actual happening and Dykes's novel? What if they had mentioned it or an occasion arose for them to mention it in the future? They were less dangerous than Dykes, but they were dangerous, or might be.

That was more and more on my mind, and finally I did something about it. The last day of January, a Wednesday, I phoned Joan Wellman at her office. I told her I was Baird Archer, and offered to pay her for advice about my novel, and made an appointment with her for the next day but one, Friday, at five-thirty. We met in the Ruby

Room at the Churchill and had drinks and talked. She was attractive and intelligent, and I was thinking that it would be impossible to do her any serious harm, when she asked me point blank about the remarkable resemblance between the plot of my novel and an occurrence in real life here in New York a year ago. She said she wasn't sure she remembered the name of the disbarred lawyer, she thought it was O'Mara, but probably I remembered it.