Rex Stout - Might as Well Be Dead

“I don’t know exactly how to begin,” I told her, “because we have different opinions on a very important point. Mr. Freyer and Mr. Wolfe and I all think Peter Hays didn’t kill your husband, and you think he did.”

She jerked her chin up. “Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s no use beating around the bush. You think it because there’s nothing else for you to think, and anyhow you’re not really thinking. You’ve been hit so hard that you’re too numb to think. We’re not. Our minds are free and we’re trying to use them. But we’d like to be sure on one point: if we prove we’re right, if we get him cleared — I don’t say it looks very hopeful, but if we do — would you like that or wouldn’t you?”

“Oh!” she cried. Her jaw loosened. She said, “Oh,” again, but it was only a whisper.

“I’ll call that a yes,” I said. “Then just forget our difference of opinion, because opinions don’t count anyway. Mr. Freyer spent five hours with Nero Wolfe today, and Mr. Wolfe is going to try to find evidence that will clear Peter Hays. He has seen reports of your conversations with Freyer, but they didn’t help any. Since you were Molloy’s secretary for a year and his wife for three years, Mr. Wolfe thinks it likely — or, say, possible — that at some time you saw or heard something that would help. Remember he is assuming that someone else killed Molloy. He thinks it’s very improbable that a situation existed which resulted in Molloy’s murder, and that he never said or did anything in your presence that had a bearing on it.”

She shook her head, not at me but at fate. “If he did,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”

“Of course you didn’t. If you had you would have told Freyer. Mr. Wolfe wants to try to dig it up. He couldn’t ask you to come to his office so he could start the digging himself, because he has to spend two hours every afternoon playing with orchids, and at six o’clock he has a conference scheduled with four of his men who are going to be given other assignments — on this case. So he sent me to start in with you. I’ll tell you how it works by giving you an example. Once I saw him spend eight hours questioning a young woman about everything and nothing. She wasn’t suspected of anything; he was merely hoping to get some little fact that would give him a start. At the end of eight hours he got it: she had once seen a newspaper with a piece cut out of the front page. With that fact for a start, he got proof that a man had committed a murder. That’s how it works. We’ll start at the beginning, when you were Molloy’s secretary, and I’ll ask questions. We’ll keep at it as long as you can stand it.”

“It seems—” Her hand fluttered. I caught myself noticing how nice her hands were, and had to remind myself that that had all been decided. She said, “It seems so empty. I mean I’m empty.”

“You’re not really empty, you’re full. When and where did you first meet Molloy?”

“That was four years ago,” she said. “The way you — what you want to try — wouldn’t it be better to start later? If there was a situation, the way you say, it would have been more recent, wouldn’t it?”

“You never know, Mrs. Molloy.” It seemed stiff to be calling her Mrs. Molloy. She fully deserved to be called Selma. “Anyhow, I have my instructions from Mr. Wolfe — and by the way, I skipped something. I was to tell you how simple it could have been. Say I decided to kill Molloy and frame Peter Hays for it. The drugstore on the corner is perfectly placed for me. Having learned that you are out for the evening and Molloy is alone in the apartment, at nine o’clock I phone Peter Hays from the booth in the drugstore and tell him — Freyer has told you what Peter says I told him. Then I cross the street to his house, am admitted by Molloy, shoot him, leave the gun here on a chair, knowing it can’t be traced, go back down to the street, watch the entrance from a nearby spot until I see Hays arrive in a taxi and enter the building, return to the drugstore, and phone the police that a shot has just been fired on the top floor of One-seventy-one East Fifty-second Street. You couldn’t ask for anything simpler than that.”

She was squinting at me, concentrating. It gave the corners of her eyes a little upturn. “I see,” she said. “Then you’re not just—” She stopped.

“Just playing games? No. We really mean it. Settle back and relax a little. When and where did you first meet Molloy?”

She interlaced her fingers. No relaxing. “I wanted another job. I was modeling and didn’t like it, and I knew shorthand. An agency sent me to his office, and he hired me.”

“Had you ever heard of him before?”

“No.”

“What did he pay you?”

“I started at sixty, and in about two months he raised it to seventy.”

“When did he begin to show a personal interest in you?”

“Why — almost right away. The second week he asked me to have dinner with him. I didn’t accept, and I liked the way he took it. He knew how to be nice when he wanted to. He always was nice to me until after we were married.”

“Exactly what were your duties? I know what you told Freyer, but we’re going to fill in.”

“There weren’t many duties, really — I mean there wasn’t much work. I opened the office in the morning — usually he didn’t come in until around eleven o’clock. I wrote his letters, but that didn’t amount to much, and answered the phone, and did the filing, what there was of it. He opened the mail himself.”

“Did you keep his books?”

“I don’t think he had any books. I never saw any.”

“Did you draw his checks?”

“I didn’t at first, but later he asked me to sometimes.”

“Where did he keep his checkbook?”

“In a drawer of his desk that he kept locked. There wasn’t any safe in the office.”

“Did you do any personal chores for him? Like getting prizefight tickets or buying neckties?”

“No. Or very seldom. He did things like that himself.”

“Had he ever been married before?”

“No. He said he hadn’t.”

“Did you go to prizefights with him?”

“Sometimes I did, not often. I didn’t like them. And later, the last two years, we didn’t go places together much.”

“Let’s stick to the first year, while you were working for him. Were there many callers at the office?”

“Not many, no. Many days there weren’t any.”

“How many in an average week, would you say?”

“Perhaps—” She thought. “I don’t know, perhaps eight or nine. Maybe a dozen.”

“Take the first week you were there. You were new then and noticing things. How many callers were there the first week, and who were they?”

She opened her eyes at me. Wide open, they were quite different from when they were squinting. I merely noted that fact professionally. “But Mr. Goodwin,” she said, “that’s impossible. It was four years ago!”

I nodded. “That’s just a warm-up. Before we’re through you’ll be remembering lots of things you would have thought impossible, and most of them will be irrelevant and immaterial. I hope not all of them. Try it. Callers the first week.”

We kept at it for nearly two hours, and she did her best. She enjoyed none of it, and some of it was really painful, when we were on the latter part of the year, the period when she was cottoning to Molloy, or thought she was, and was making up her mind to marry him. She would have preferred to let the incidents of that period stay where they were, down in the cellar. I won’t say it hurt me as much as it did her, since with me it was strictly business, but it was no picnic. Finally she said she didn’t think she could go on, and I said we had barely started.