Plot It Yourself

Saul and I let go but stayed between her and Amy Wynn, and Harvey and Imhof were there too. She moved, back to her chair, and sat. She looked at Wolfe. “I don’t know if you’re in it with her,” she said, “but if you are you’ll regret it. She’s a liar and a murderer and now she thinks she can frame me for it, but she can’t. Neither can you. That’s all lies about my seeing those people. I never saw any of them. And if that story was found in my house and that knife was found in my car she put them there. Or you did.”

“Are you saying that Amy Wynn killed Simon Jacobs and Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert?”

“I am. I wish to God I had never seen her. She’s a liar and a sneak and a double-crosser and a murderer, and I can prove it.”

“How?”

“Don’t worry, I can prove it. I’ve got the typewriter that she used to write that story, ‘There Is Only Love,’ when she got me to make that claim against Ellen Sturdevant. And I know how she planted it in a bureau drawer in Ellen Sturdevant’s house. And that’s all I’m going to tell you. And if you’re in it with her you’re going to regret it.” She stood up, bumping me. “You get out of my way.” Saul and I stayed put.

Wolfe’s tone sharpened. “I’m not in it with her, Miss Porter. On the contrary, I’m in it with you, up to a point. I ask one question, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t answer it. Did you write an account of your association with Miss Wynn, put it in an envelope, and entrust the envelope to someone with instructions that it was to be opened if and when you died?”

She stared. She sat down. “How did you know that?”

“I didn’t. I surmised it. It was the simplest and best way to account for your remaining alive and not in trepidation. Where is it? You might as well tell me, now that its contents are no longer a secret. You have just revealed them, their essence. Where is it?”

“A woman named Garvin has it. Mrs Ruth Garvin.”

“Very well.” Wolfe leaned back and took a breath. “It would have made things easier for both of us if you had been candid with me last evening. It would have saved me the trouble of all this hocus-pocus to force you to speak up. Miss Wynn did not put a manuscript in your house or a knife in your car. Mr Panzer did not go there last evening. He spent the day composing and typing the kind of story he described because I thought you might demand to see it. He also bought the kind of knife he described.”

Alice Porter was staring again. “Then that was all lies. Then you were in it.”