Plot It Yourself

Orrie got up and went to the corner of Wolfe’s desk and stood facing the committee. “My job,” he said, “was to find out if she had ever been in contact with Simon Jacobs. Of course the best place to start was with the widow. I went to the apartment on Twenty-first Street and there was no one there. I asked around among the other tenants, and I-”

“Briefly, Orrie. Just the meat.”

“Yes, sir. I finally found her at a friend’s house in New Jersey. She didn’t want to talk, and I had a time with her. I showed her the photograph, and she recognized it. She had seen the subject twice about three years ago. The subject had come to the apartment to see her husband and had stayed quite a while both times, two hours or more. She didn’t know what they had talked about. Her husband had told her it was about some stories for a magazine. I tried to get her more exact on the time, but the closest she could come was that it was in the spring of 1956 and the two visits were about three weeks apart. Her husband hadn’t told her the name of the subject.”

Wolfe asked, “Was her recognition of the photograph at all doubtful?”

“No, she was positive. She recognized it right away. She said she-”

Alice Porter blurted, “You’re a liar! I never went to see Simon Jacobs! I never saw him anywhere!”

“You’ll get a turn, Miss Porter,” Wolfe told her. “As long a turn as you want. That will do, Orrie. Miss Corbett?”

Sally Corbett was one of the two women who, a couple of years back, had made me feel that there might be some flaw in my attitude toward female dicks. The other one was Dol Bonner. Their physical characteristics, including their faces, were quite different, but were both of a description that makes a woman looked at from a personal viewpoint; and they were good operatives. Sally went and took Orrie’s place at the corner of Wolfe’s desk, turned her head to look at him, got a nod, and faced the audience.