The Missing Chapter

Her face softened, but only slightly. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m still somewhat off-balance over this whole thing. Actually, I worked at home on Tuesday, editing press releases my staff had done for shows that we’ll be running during the summer. I do that sometimes — work at home, I mean. I can get so much more done away from the phones. I live in a co-op on Park near Sixty-eighth.”

“Did anyone see you during that time?”

“You really do ask nosy questions, don’t you? Well, I guess you have to. No, nobody saw me. Wait — I’m wrong. I went out just before noon. I needed some air, so I took a long walk and ended up doing some grocery shopping at a deli in the neighborhood. Our doorman, Jake, saw me go, and he saw me come back.”

“When was that?”

“I think it must have been close to two o’clock. I remember that I’d been home for about an hour and a half and I was thinking Charles would be phoning me soon. He had planned to spend some time at the library in the afternoon doing research on Pennsylvania for his next book. He had said he would call and tell me when he was picking me up — we were supposed to go to a cocktail party that the head of our news division was having in his place on Park. Well, I got a call, all right, but it wasn’t from Charles. It was from my office, telling me about Charles.” She fingered an ashtray on the coffee table, then looked up. “And that’s it,” she said, spreading her hands.

“But nobody can vouch for you between noon and two?”

She shrugged. “Maybe the clerk in the deli, but I didn’t get there until after my walk, maybe about one-forty-five. Does that make me a suspect?” she demanded with a toss of the head.

“It might,” I answered in a light tone. We were nothing if not civilized. “One more thing. Would you mind showing me the key to your apartment?”

Debra Mitchell started to frown but quickly erased it, smiling without warmth and tossing her head again. She knew that made her hair fall across her cheek. If I hadn’t been so intent on getting something accomplished, the gesture might have impressed me no end. “If this is some sort of come-on that I’m not familiar with, call me naive,” she said, narrowing her eyes and wrinkling her nose.

“I am by no means above a come-on,” I conceded, “but only after hours. I only want to see your key — I won’t even touch it.”

She shook her head as if indulging a child and went to her desk, reaching into a drawer and pulling out a patent leather purse. “All right, here it is,” she said, holding one key between her thumb and forefinger as she thrust her key chain at me with a flourish. “What does it tell you?”

“All that I want to know,” I said. Even from two feet away, I could see that her key was not even a distant cousin of the one I had pocketed earlier in the Village. I thanked her for seeing me and started to rise. “Before you go,” she said sheepishly, “I wonder if I can change the subject?” I nodded and she went on.

“You might have heard me on the phone when you arrived. A program of ours, Entre Nous, is an interview show — maybe you’ve seen it. It’s on weeknights at seven. Anyway, we lost our guest for next Tuesday, an inventor from the Dakotas, and I wondered if we could get Nero Wolfe in his place. I know he doesn’t like to leave home, but he won’t have to. Belle Corliss, she’s our interviewer, would come to his house along with a crew, and do the conversation right there. It would take—”

“Forget it,” I told her with a smile. “Mr. Wolfe guards his privacy like a Doberman. And he has a powerful aversion to television. Call the latter a character defect on his part, but that’s the way he is, eccentric through and through.” I didn’t bother to tell her that Wolfe also has a powerful aversion to having women in the brownstone.

“One more thing,” I said, stopping just short of the doorway and reaching into my pocket, pulling out the key I had found above Childress’s door. “Does this look familiar to you?”

Debra Mitchell took it and held it up. “No... It’s not one of mine,” she said, looking puzzled. “Why?”

“Just wondered. Well, thanks for your time.”

She pressed me again about Wolfe being on Entre Nous like a good TV executive, but I held fast, and she finally surrendered gracefully. I thanked her again for her time and patience, and she gave me a firm handshake. As I walked down the hall toward the elevator, I found myself musing on two things: Debra Mitchell’s beauty and her hardness, the latter underscored by what seemed to be a total lack of grief over the death of the man she had been going to marry.

Five