Prisoner's Base

No fingerprints found in the apartment had been those of any of the suspects. There had been none on the bronze tiger, and none on the knob of the closet door.

They were hunting a motive. Whereas with Priscilla Eads the motive had been as plain as the nose on a face, and fitted all five faces, with Sarah Jaffee there was none at all. For one of them to kill her, or have her killed, on account of the threatened injunction would have been batty, and none of those five was anywhere near batty. So finding a motive for any one of them would have been a big help, and that was a major objective of the supplementary questioning. Two of the five hours Cramer had spent with Helmar, me present, had been devoted to a thorough and fine-tooth review of his association with Sarah Jaffee from the beginning to the end.

Purley unquestionably briefed me. It didn't look as if he was holding anything back, and I was touched. Therefore, when the waiter brought the check and he insisted on splitting it, and during the debate he made a crack about city dicks not starving, I made it a point of honor because I got what was eating him. He knew that my take-home pay, considering that my home was with Wolfe, was at least four times his, and he wasn't going to sponge fried clams off of any goddam plutocrat. So I had to tell him I had invited him and my honor was at stake.

We parted outside, him going west and me heading for Leonard Street. I had my pick of Fomos or Pitkin, and on the way I voted for Pitkin.

Chapter 15

At five o'clock Saturday morning I sat in a room at Leonard Street, reading papers from a folder. Pitkin had been sent home an hour previously, from another room. This was the room where all reports and documents bearing on the three stranglings, either originals or copies, were being collected and held, and the report I was reading was about the movements of Jay Brucker during the rest of Thursday night after he left the meeting at Wolfe's office. The correctness of some of his statements seemed to be in question, and I was trying to find a basis of an opinion on whether, instead of going home to Brooklyn as he claimed, he had actually gone to Sarah Jaffee's apartment on Eightieth Street or to Daphne O'Neil's apartment on Fourth Street.