Rex Stout - Might as Well Be Dead

I stood up, realized that that didn’t help matters any, and sat down. Wolfe took a long deep breath through his nose, and let it out through his mouth.

“I needn’t ask,” he said, “if you communicated your surmise.”

“No, sir. Of course not. A surmise isn’t enough.”

“No. What time does the morgue close?”

That’s one way I know he’s a genius. Only a genius would dare to ask such a question after functioning as a private detective for more than twenty years right there in Manhattan, and specializing in murder. The hell of it was, he really didn’t know.

“It doesn’t close,” Saul said.

“Then we can proceed. Archie. Call Mrs. Molloy and ask her to meet you there.”

“Nothing doing,” I said firmly. “There are very few women I would ask to meet me at the morgue, and Mrs. Molloy is not one of them. Anyway, her phone may be tapped. This sonofabitch probably taps lines in between murders to pass the time. I’ll go and get her.”

“Then go.”

I went.

I sat on a chair facing her. I had accepted the offer of a chair because on the way uptown in the taxi I had made a decision which would prolong my stay a little. She was wearing a light weight woolen dress, lemon-colored, which could have been Dacron or something, but I prefer wool.

“When I first saw you,” I told her, “fifty hours ago, I might have bet you one to twenty that Peter Hays would get clear. Now it’s the other way around. I’ll bet you twenty to one.”

She squinted at me, giving the corners of her eyes the little upturn, and her mouth worked. “You’re just bucking me up,” she said.

“No, I’m not, but I admit it’s a lead. We need your help. You remember I phoned you this morning to get the name of Mrs. Irwin’s maid and a description of her. A body of a woman with a battered skull was found today behind a lumber pile on One-hundred-and-fortieth Street, and it is now in the morgue. We think it’s Ella Reyes but we’re not sure, and we need to know. I’m going to take you down there to look. It’s your turn.”

She sat and regarded me without blinking. I sat and waited. Finally she blinked.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll go. Now?”

No shivers or shudders, no squeals or screams, no string of questions. I admit the circumstances were very favorable, since one thing was so heavy on her mind that there was no room for anything else.

“Now it is,” I told her. “But you’ll pack a bag for a night or two and we’ll take it along. You’ll stay at Wolfe’s house until this thing is over.”

She shook her head. “I won’t do that. I told you yesterday. I have to be alone. I can’t be with people and eat with people.”

“You don’t have to. You can have your meals in your room, and it’s a nice room. I’m not asking you, lady, I’m telling you. Fifty hours ago I had to swallow hard to keep from having personal feelings about you, and I don’t want to do it again, as I would have to if you were found with your skull battered. I’m perfectly willing to help get your guy out to you alive, but not to your corpse. This specimen has killed Molloy, and Johnny Keems, and now Ella Reyes. I don’t know his reason for killing her, but he might have as good a one for killing you, or think he had, and he’s not going to. Go pack a bag, and step on it. We’re in a hurry.”

I’ll be damned if she didn’t start to reach out a hand to me and then jerk it back. The instinct of a woman never to pass up an advantage probably goes back to when we had tails. But she jerked it back.

She stood up. “I think this is foolish,” she said, “but I don’t want to die now.” She left me.

Another improvement. It hadn’t been long since she had said she might as well be dead. She reappeared shortly with a hat and jacket on and carrying a brown leather suitcase. I took the case, and we were off.

To save time I intended to explain the program en route in the taxi, but I didn’t get to. After I had told the hackie, “City Mortuary, Four hundred East Twenty-ninth,” and he had given us a second look, and we had started to roll, she said she wanted to ask me a question and I told her to shoot.

She moved closer to me to get her mouth six inches from my ear, and asked, “Why did Peter try to get away with the gun in his pocket?”

“You really don’t know,” I said.

“No, I — How could I know?”

“You might have figured it out. He thought your fingerprints were on the gun and he wanted to ditch it.”

She stared. Her face was so close I couldn’t see it. “But how could — No! He couldn’t think that! He couldn’t!”

“If you want to keep this private, tone it down. Why couldn’t he? You could. Sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander. You are now inclined to change your mind, but you have been worked on. He hasn’t been in touch as you have, so I suppose he still thinks it. Why shouldn’t he?”

“Peter thinks I killed Mike?”

“Of course. Since he knows he didn’t. Goose is right.”

She gripped my arm with both hands. “Mr. Goodwin, I want to see him. I’ve got to see him now !”

“You will, but not where we’re going and not now. And for God’s sake don’t crumple on me at this point. Steady the nerves and stiffen the spine. You’ve got a job to do. I should have stalled and saved it for later, but you asked me.”

So when the cab stopped at the curb in front of the morgue I hadn’t briefed her, and, not caring to share it with the hackie, I told him to wait, with the suitcase as collateral, helped her out, and walked her down to the corner and back. Uncertain of the condition of her wits after the jolt I had given her, I made darned sure she had the idea before going inside.

Since I was known there, I had considered sending her in alone, but decided not to risk it. In the outer room I told the sergeant at the desk, whose name was Donovan, that my companion wanted to view the body of the woman which had been found behind a lumber pile. He put an eye on Mrs. Molloy.

“What’s her name?”

“Skip it. She’s a citizen and pays her taxes.”

He shook his head. “It’s a rule, Goodwin, and you know it. Give me a name.”

“Mrs. Alice Bolt, Churchill Hotel.”

“Okay. Who does she think it is?”

But that, as I knew, was not a rule, so I didn’t oblige. After a brief wait an attendant who was new to me took us through the gate and along the corridor to the same room where Wolfe had once placed two old dinars on the eyes of Marko Vukcic’s corpse. Another corpse was now stretched out on the long table under the strong light, with its lower two-thirds covered with a sheet. At the head an assistant medical examiner whom I had met before was busy with tools. As we approached he told me hello, suspended operations, and backed up a step. Selma had her fingers around my arm, not for support, but as part of the program. The head of the object was on its side, and Selma stooped for a good view at a distance of twenty inches. In four seconds she straightened up and squeezed my arm, two little squeezes.

“No,” she said.

It wasn’t in the script that she was to hang onto my arm during our exit, but she did, out to the corridor and all the way to the gate and on through. In the outer corridor I broke contact to cross to the desk and tell Donovan that Mrs. Bolt had made no identification, and he said that was too bad.

On the sidewalk I stopped her before we got in earshot of the hackie and asked, “How sure are you?”

“I’m positive,” she said. “It’s her.”

Crossing town on 34th Street can be a crawl, but not at that time of day. Selma leaned back with her eyes closed all the way. She had had three severe bumps within the hour: learning that her P.H. thought she had killed her husband, taking it that he hadn’t, and viewing a corpse. She could use a recess.