Rex Stout - Homicide Trinity (Crime Line)

"Bah." Wolfe was disgusted. "You are gibbering. If you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed for- lorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties later and wish to communicate with me I'll be here." He pushed his chair back.

"No." Otis extended a hand. "Good God, man, I'm trapped! It's not my faculties! I have my faculties."

"Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?"

"They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of course, my three partners. It could have only been one of them, partly because none of our associates was in our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She wouldn't have used that phrase, 'member of the firm,' loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted applica- tion. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that's incredible!"

"Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbe- lieve Miss Aaron-or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin? Here with me privately?"

"No."

Wolfe turned a palm up. "Then let's get at it. It is equally incredible for all three of those men, or are there preferences?"

During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen times, and on some details-for instance, the respects in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable-he clammed up absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my notebook.

Frank Edey, fifty-five, married with two sons and a daughter, wife living, got twenty-seven per cent of the firm's net income. (Otis's share was forty per cent.) He was a brilliant idea man but seldom went to court. He had drafted the marriage agreement which had been signed by Morton Sorell and Rita Ramsey when they got yoked four years ago. Personal financial condition, sound. Relations with wife and children, so-so. Interest in other women, definitely yes, but fairly discreet. In- terest in Mrs. Sorell casual so far as Otis knew.

Miles Heydecker, forty-seven, married and wife liv- ing but no children, got twenty-two per cent. His fa- ther, now dead, had been one of the original members of the firm. His specialty was trial work and he handled the firm's most important cases in court. He had ap- peared for Mrs. Sorell at her husband's request two years ago when she had been sued by a man who had formerly been her agent. He was tight with money and had a nice personal pile of it. Relations with his wife, uncertain; on the surface, okay. Too interested in his work and his hobbies, chess and behind-the-scene poli- tics, to bother with women, including Mrs. Sorell.

Gregory Jett, thirty-six, single, had been made a firm member and allotted eleven per cent of the income because of his spectacular success in two big corpora- tion cases. One of the corporations was controlled by Morton Sorell, and for the past year or so Jett had been a fairly frequent guest at the Sorell home on Fifth Avenue but had not been noticeably attentive to his hostess. His personal financial condition was one of the details Otis balked on, but he allowed it to be inferred that Jett was careless about the balance between in- come and outgo and was in the red in his account with the firm. Shortly after he had been made a member of the firm, about two years ago, he had dropped a fat chunk, Otis thought about forty thousand dollars, back- ing a Broadway show that flopped. A friend of his, female, had been in the cast. Whether he had had other expenses connected with a female friend or friends Otis either didn't know or wasn't telling. He did say that he had gathered, mostly from remarks Bertha Aaron had made, that in recent months Jett had shown more at- tention to Ann Paige than their professional association required.

But when Wolfe suggested the possibility that Ann Paige had left through a window because she sus- pected, or even knew, what was in the wind, and had decided to take a hand, Otis wouldn't buy it. He was having all he could do to swallow the news that one of his partners was a snake, and the idea that another of his associates might have been in on it was too much. He would tackle Ann Paige himself; she would no doubt have an acceptable explanation.

On Mrs. Morton Sorell he didn't balk at all. Part of his information was known to everyone who read newspa- pers and magazines: that as Rita Ramsey she had daz- zled Broadway with her performance in Reach for the Moon when she was barely out of her teens, that she had followed with even greater triumphs in two other plays, that she had spumed Hollywood, that she had also spumed Morton Sorell for two years and then abandoned her career to marry him. But Otis added other information that had merely been hinted at in gossip columns: that in a year the union had gone sour, that it became apparent that Rita had married Sorell only to get her lovely paws on a bale of dough, and that she was by no means going to settle for the terms of the marriage agreement. She wanted much more, more than half, and she had carefully begun to collect evi- dence of certain activities of Scroll's, but he had got wise and consulted his attorneys, Otis, Edey, Hey- decker and Jett, and they had stymied her-or thought they had. Otis had been sure they had, until he had read the copy of my statement. Now he was sure of nothing.

But he was still alive. When he got up to go, at two hours past midnight, he had bounced back some. He wasn't nearly as jittery as he had been when he asked for a glass of water to take the pills. He hadn't accepted Wolfe's offer in so many words, but he had agreed to take no steps until he had heard further from Wolfe, provided he heard within thirty-two hours, by ten o'clock Wednesday morning. The only action he would take during that period would be to instruct Ann Paige to tell no one that he had read my statement and to leam why she had skedaddled. He didn't think the police would tell him the contents of my statement, but if they did he would say that he would credit it only if it had corroboration. Of course he wanted to know what Wolfe was going to do, but Wolfe said he didn't know and probably wouldn't decide until after break- fast.

When I returned to the office after holding Otis's coat for him and letting him out, Fritz was there.

"No," Wolfe was saying grimly. "You know quite well I almost never eat at night."

"But you had no dinner. An omelet, or at least-"

"No! Confound it, let me starve! Go to bed!"

Fritz looked at me, I shook my head, and he went. I sat down and spoke. "Do I get Saul and Fred and Orrie?"

"No." He took in air through his nose and let it out through his mouth. "If I don't know how I am going to proceed, how the deuce can I have errands for them?

"Rhetorical," I said.

"It is not rhetorical. It's logical. There are the obvi- ous routine errands, but that would be witless. Find the cheap restaurant or lunchroom where they met? How many are there?"

"Oh, a thousand. More."

He grunted. "Or question the entire personnel of that law office to learn which of those three men spoke at length with Miss Aaron yesterday afternoon? Or, as- suming that he followed her here, left the office on her heels? Or which one cannot account for himself from five o'clock to ten minutes past six? Or find the nearby phone booth from which he dialed this number? Or investigate their relations with Mrs. Sorell? Those are all sensible and proper lines of inquiry, and by mid- moming Mr. Cramer and the District Attorney will have a hundred men pursuing them."