Plot It Yourself

I had used up half of Cora Ballard’s ideas. Of those left, two weren’t very promising. There are about a thousand banks with safe-deposit vaults in New York, and anyway I didn’t have keys to all the boxes, and besides, it was after hours. Taking a plane to the West Coast to look up Alice Porter’s parents seemed a little headlong. Finding an empty taxi in midtown Manhattan at that time of day was almost as hopeless, but I finally grabbed one and gave the driver the address on West 82nd Street.

Collander House could have been worse. The girl in the neat little office had a vase of daisies on her desk, and the room across the hall, which she called the lounge, where she sent me to wait for Mrs Garvin, had two vases of daisies, comfortable chairs, and rugs on the floor. Another thirty-minute wait. When Mrs Garvin finally appeared, one straight look from her sharp gray eyes confirmed Cora Ballard’s statement that anyone would trust her with anything. Certainly she remembered Alice Porter, who had lived there from August 1951 until May 1956. She had the dates in her head because she had looked them up at the request of a city detective last week, and had recalled them that morning because a woman had come and asked about Alice Porter. She hadn’t seen Alice Porter for three years and was keeping nothing for her. Not even some little thing like an envelope? No. Which didn’t mean a thing. She was a busy woman, and it was quicker to say no than to explain that it was none of my business and have me trying to persuade her that it was. A lie isn’t a lie if it is in reply to a question that the questioner has no right to ask.

All in all, a hell of an afternoon. Not one little crumb. And the immediate future was as bleak as the immediate past: another meatless dinner for Wolfe, after a beerless day. More gloom. He would be there at his desk, glaring into space, wallowing in it. As I climbed out of the taxi in front of the old brownstone I had a notion to go to Bert’s diner around the corner and eat hamburgers and slaw and discuss the world situation for an hour or so, but, deciding it wouldn’t be fair to deprive him of an audience, I mounted the stoop and used my key on the door; and, with one foot inside and one out, stopped and stared. Wolfe was emerging from the kitchen, carrying a large tray loaded with glasses. He turned in at the office. I brought my other foot in, shut the door, and proceeded.