Rex Stout - Murder by the Book

"To prove it, no. But we like it."

"You're crazyV' Helen Troy asserted.

"Yeah? Why?"

"You said the death of Leonard Dykes was connected with these two. Did you mean the same man killed all of them?"

"I didn't say so, but I would for a nickel. That's what I think."

"Then you're crazy. Why should Con O'Malley kill those girls? He didn't-"

"Be quiet, Helen," Mrs. Adams said sharply.

She ignored it. "He didn't kill-"

"Helen, be quiet! You're drunk."

"I am not drunk! I was, but I'm not now. How could anybody be drunk after listening to those two?" To me: "Con O'Malley didn't kill Leonard Dykes on account of any manuscript. He killed him because it was Dykes that got him disbarred. Everybody-"

She was drowned out. Half of them spoke and the other half shouted. It may have been partly to relieve the feelings that had been piled up by Wellman and Mrs. Abrams, but there was more to it than that. Both Mrs. Adams and Dolly Harriton tried to shut them up, but nothing doing. Looking and listening, I caught enough scraps to gather that a longstanding feud had blazed into battle. As near as I could make out, Helen Troy, Nina Perlman, and Blanche Duke were arrayed against Portia Liss, Eleanor Gmber- and Mabel Moore, with Sue Dondero interested but not committed, and Claire Burkhardt, the night-school wonder, not qualified for combat. Mrs. Adams and Dolly Harriton were outside.

In one of those moments of comparative calm that even the hottest fracas will have, Blanche Duke tossed a grenade at Eleanor Gruber. "What were you wearing when O'Malley told you? Pajamas?"

That shocked them into silence, and Mrs. Adams took advantage of it. "This is disgraceful," she declared. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Blanche, apologize to Eleanor."

"For what?" Blanche demanded.

"She won't," Eleanor said. She turned a white face to me. "We should all apologize to you, Mr. Goodwin."

"I don't think so," Dolly Harriton said dryly. "Since Mr. Goodwin staged this, I must admit cleverly and effectively, I hardly believe he has an apology coming. Congratulations, Mr. Goodwin."

"I must decline them, Miss Harriton. I haven't congratulations coming either."

"I don't care," Eleanor insisted to me, "what you have coming. I'm going to say this. After what Blanche said to me. And what you must have heard before. Do you know who Conroy O'Malley is?"

"Sure. I've been allowed to have a look at the police file on Leonard Dykes. A former member of the firm who got disbarred about a year ago."

She nodded. "He was the senior member. The name of the firm was O'Malley, Corrigan and Phelps. I was his secretary. Now I am Louis Kustin's secretary. Must I say that what Blanche said, her insinuation about my relations with Mr. O'Malley, that that was pure malice?"

"There's no must about it, Miss Gruber. Say it if you want to, or just skip it."

"I do say it. It's too bad, because really I like Blanche, and she likes me. This was starting to die down, and then the police came back and stirred it up again, and now you say it was something you told them about these two girls being killed that made them come back. I'm not blaming you, but I wish you hadn't, because-well, you saw what happened here just now. Could you hear what we said?" "Some."

"Anyway, you heard Helen say that Conroy O'Malley killed Dykes because Dykes got him disbarred. That isn't true. O'Malley was disbarred for bribing a foreman of a jury in a civil suit. I don't know who it was that informed the court, that never came out, but it was certainly someone connected with the other side. Of course it made a lot of talk in the office, all kinds of wild talk-that Louis Kustin had done the informing because O'Malley didn't like him and wouldn't make him a member of the firm, and that-"

"Is this wise, Eleanor?" Dolly Harriton asked coldly. "I think so," Eleanor said, not fazed. "He ought to understand." She, went on to me. "-and that others had done it,

Mr. Corrigan and Mr. Briggs among them, for similar reasons, and that Leonard Dykes had done it because O'Malley was going to fire him. I wouldn't even be surprised if there was talk that I had done it, I suppose because he wouldn't buy me some new pajamas. As the months went by there wasn't so much of it, and then Leonard Dykes got killed and it started up again. I don't know who began it that O'Malley had killed Dykes because he found out that Dykes had been the informer to the court, but someone did, and it was worse than ever. Just a lot of wild talk. No one really knew anything. You heard Blanche ask me if I was wearing pajamas when O'Malley told me something."

She seemed to think she had asked a question, so I grunted an affirmative.

"Well, what he told me, just a few weeks ago, was that he had heard that it was the jury foreman's wife who had written the anonymous letter to the judge telling about the bribing. It isn't likely that I was wearing pajamas, because I don't wear them in the office, and it was in the office that he told me-of course he's no longer connected with the firm, but he comes there once in a while. The talk that O'Malley killed Dykes is simply ridiculous."

"Why don't you say what you think?" Helen Troy demanded. "You think Uncle Fred killed Dykes. Why don't you say so?"

"I've never said I think that, Helen."

"But you do."

"I do," Blanche Duke stated, still ready to tangle.

"Who is Uncle Fred?" I asked.

Helen answered. "He's my uncle, Frederick Briggs. They don't like him. They think he informed on O'Malley because he wouldn't make him a partner, and Dykes found out about it and threatened to tell O'Malley, and Uncle Fred killed Dykes to keep him from telling. You know perfectly well you think that, Eleanor."

"I do," Blanche repeated.

"You girls work in a law office," Dolly Harriton said warn-ingly, "and you should realize that gabbing in the women's room is one thing, and talking like this to Mr. Goodwin is quite another. Didn't you ever hear of slander?"

"I'm not slandering anyone," Eleanor declared, and she wasn't. She looked at me. "The reason I tell you all this, I think you've wasted a lot of orchids and food and drink. Your

client is Mr. Wellman, and you're investigating the death of his daughter, and you went to all this trouble and expense because you think there was a connection between her and Leonard Dykes. That list of names he wrote that was found in his room-what if some friend was there one evening and said he was trying to choose a name to use on something he had written, and Dykes and the friend made up some names and Dykes wrote them down? There are a dozen ways it could have happened. And from what you say, that name Baird Archer is absolutely the only thing that connects Dykes with Joan Wellman and Rachel Abrams."

"No," I contradicted her. "There's another. They were all three murdered."

"There are three hundred homicides in New York every year." Eleanor shook her head. "I'm just trying to put you straight. You got us all worked up, or Mrs. Abrams and Mr. Wellman did, and from that row we had you might think you have started something, but you haven't. That's why I told you all that. We all hope you find the man that killed those girls, I know I do, but I don't think you'll ever do it this way."