Plot It Yourself

Trying on Alice Porter the approach we had meant to try on Jane Ogilvy. Or trying to throw a scare into her. Or trying to get from Ellen Sturdevant and her publishers, McMurray & Co., an agreement not to prosecute or demand repayment if Alice Porter would identify X.

Get a membership list of the NAAD and go over it, name by name, with Cora Bollard.

Have a couple of hundred copies made of “There Is Only Love,” “What’s Mine Is Yours,” and “On Earth but Not in Heaven,” and send them to editors and book reviewers, with a letter citing the internal evidence that they had all been written by the same person, and asking if they knew of any published material, or, with editors, submitted material, apparently by that person.

During the discussion of this last item Wolfe had before him the manuscripts of the first two, and the copy of the third, they having been returned by Cramer Friday afternoon as agreed.

There were other suggestions that I didn’t bother to put down. To each of the items listed I could have added the objections and difficulties, but they’re so obvious, especially to the routine ones, the first eight, that I didn’t think it was necessary.

The stymie was the motive. In ninety-nine murder investigations out of a hundred it gets narrowed down before long to just a few people who had motives, often only two or three, and you go on from there. This time the motive had been out in full view from the start; the trouble was, who had it? It could be anyone within reach who could read and write and drive a car-say five million in the metropolitan area, and except for Alice Porter there was absolutely no pointer. She was still alive at midnight Sunday. Orrie Cather, phoning from Carmel at twelve-twenty-three to report that Saul Panzer had relieved him on schedule, said that the light in the house had gone out at ten-fifty-two and all had been quiet since. Wolfe had gone up to bed, leaving it that we would decide in the morning how to tackle Alice Porter.

In the kitchen at a quarter to nine Monday morning, as I was pouring a third cup of coffee, Fritz asked me what I was nervous about. I said I wasn’t nervous. He said of course I was, I had been jerky for the last ten minutes, and I was taking a third cup of coffee. I said everybody in that house was too damned observant. He said, “See? You’re very nervous”-and I took the coffee to the office.