Too Many Cooks

“No. And I resent—” She stopped herself. She leaned forward, her head a little on one side, her lips not quite meeting, and looked at him. I watched her with pleasure. I suppose she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t try to be a special kind of woman, but she didn’t have to try. There was something in her—not only in her face, it came right out through her clothes—that gave you an instinctive impulse to start in that direction. I kept on being cynical, but it was easy to appreciate that there might be a time when cynicism wouldn’t be enough.

She asked with a soft breath, “Mr. Wolfe, why do you always jab at me? What have you got against me? Yesterday, when I told you what Phillip told me about the arsenic … and now when I tell you about Marko …”

She leaned back. “Marko told me once, long ago, that you don’t like women.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I can only say, nonsense again. I couldn’t rise to that impudence. Not like women? They are astounding and successful animals. For reasons of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under the pressure of necessity. I confess to a specific animus toward you. Marko Vukcic is my friend; you were his wife; and you deserted him. I don’t like you.”

“So long ago!” She fluttered a hand. Then she shrugged. “Anyway, I am here now in Marko’s behalf.”

“You mean he sent you?”

“No. But I came, for him. It is known, of course, that you have engaged to free Berin of the charge of killing my husband. How can you do that except by accusing Marko? Berin says Phillip was in the dining room, alive, when he left. Marko says Phillip was not there when he entered. So if not Berin, it must have been Marko. And then, you asked Marko to-day if he asked me to dance or suggested that I turn on the radio. There could be only one reason why you asked him that: because you suspected that he wanted the radio going so that no noise would be heard from the dining room when he … if anything happened in there.”

“So Marko told you that I asked about the radio.”

“Yes.” She smiled faintly. “He thought I should know. You see, he has forgiven what you will not forgive—”

I missed the rest of that on account of a knock on the door. I went to the foyer, closing the door of Wolfe’s room behind me, and opened up. The sight in the hall gave me a shock, even though I had been warned. It looked like half of Harlem. Four or five were greenjackets who a couple of hours back had been serving the dean’s dinner to us, and the others, the cooks and helpers, were in their own clothes. The light brown middle-aged one in front with the bottom of one ear chopped off was the head waiter in charge at Pocahontas, and I felt friendly to him because it was he who had left the cognac bottle smack in front of me at the table. I told them to come on in and stepped aside not to get trampled, and directed them through to my room and followed them in.

“You’ll have to wait in here, boys, Mr. Wolfe has a visitor. Sit on something. Sit on the bed, it’s mine and it looks like I won’t be using it anyway. If you go to sleep, snore a couple of good ones for me.”

I left them there and went back to see how Wolfe was getting along with the woman he didn’t like. Neither of them bothered with a glance at me as I sat down. She was saying:

“… but I know nothing about it beyond what I told you yesterday. Certainly I know there are other possibilities besides Berin and Marko. As you say, someone could have entered the dining room from the terrace. That’s what you’re thinking of, isn’t it?”

“It’s a possibility. But go back a little, Mrs. Laszio. Do you mean to say that Marko Vukcic told you of my asking him about the radio, and expressed the fear that I suspected him of having the radio turned on to give him an opportunity for killing your husband?”

“Well …” She hesitated. “Not exactly like that. Marko would not express a fear. But the way he told me about it—that was obviously in his mind. So I’ve come to you to find out if you do suspect him.”

“You’ve come to defend him? Or to make sure that my clumsiness hasn’t missed that inference from the timeliness of the radio?”

“Neither.” She smiled at him. “You can’t make me angry, Mr. Wolfe. Why, do you make other inferences? Many of them?”