The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

He rose. In any case, I am obliged to you on behalf of my client. He headed for the hall, five minutes ahead of schedule. Leo Bingham looked at the brandy bottle, then at his watch, sprang to his feet, and went. I followed. In the hall Wolfe was entering the elevator. Bingham beat me to the front door, and I held it open because the other two were coming. They nodded as they passed by, and I stood on the sill and watched them down the stoop before I returned to the office.

There were several things to chew on, but of course the main one was Bingham's alternatives. If he had known Carol Mardus as well as he said he did there were just four candidates. Even if he had killed her himself, he would name the ones she would have been most likely to pick if she hadn't picked him, so it was highly probable that it was one of those four. I stood at a window, and sat at my desk, and stood some more, going over them. Which one? That's the silliest game of solitaire there is, and we all play it, trying to tag a murderer as one of a bunch from what they said and how they looked and acted, unless you can spot something that really opens a crack. I couldn't.

The trouble was, there was no telling how much time we had a month or a week or a day. Or an hour. Homicide would check all angles on Carol Mardus, and they would all be seen and questioned, probably Willis Krug first, and one of them might wilt. If he did we were in the soup. There's a big difference between not giving information you haven't been asked for, and declining to give it, or faking it, when you are asked. All Cramer needed was a hint that there was a connection between Carol Mardus and the baby, or just that she had come to see Wolfe anything at all that would bring him to the door, to march to the office and ask Wolfe if he had ever heard of Carol Mardus. That would do it. It was the thinnest ice we had ever been on. I had to go to the kitchen and chin with Fritz to keep from going up to the plant rooms and telling Wolfe that since he hadn't asked me before spilling it to Krug and Haft and Bingham, I wasn't going to ask him when and where I could spill it, and he could either fire me or quit fiddling with the damn orchids and do something. I decided to wait till he came down, and if he asked me if I had a suggestion I would throw something at him.