As far as Sally knew, none of the four messengers, the only ones besides her father and the cook and steward who had been in reaching distance of the chocolate, had ever seen Paul Jerin before or had any connection with him; and if they had she would almost certainly have known because they were all in the Blounts' circle, one way or another, and she saw them fairly frequently. Ditto for Bernard Nash and Tony Laghi, the steward and cook, though she had never seen them. 2. The messengers. Charles W. Yerkes, the banker, had occasional social contacts with the Blounts. Blount was on the Board of Directors of Yerkes's bank. Yerkes enjoyed being in the same room with Mrs Blount, Sally's mother. but so did lots of men. In my notes I included a parenthesis, a guess that Sally thought it would 18 be just as well if men would take time out from looking at her mother to give her a glance now and then. That was a little odd, since Sally herself was no eyesore, but of course I hadn't seen her mother. 3. Morton Farrow, age thirty-one, was not a wizard, but wasn't aware of it. He drew a good salary from the Blount Textile Corporation only because he was Mrs Blount's nephew, and thought he was underpaid. I'm translating what Sally told us, not quoting it. 4. Ernst Hausman, retired broker, a lifelong friend of Matthew Blount, was Sally's godfather. He was an unhappy man and would die unhappy because he would give ten million dollars to be able to play a chess master without odds and mate him, and there was no hope. He hadn't played a game with Blount for years because he suspected Blount of easing up on him. He had disapproved of the idea of having Paul Jerin come to the club and do his stunt; he thought no one but members should ever be allowed in. In short, a suffering snob. 5. Daniel Kalmus, the lawyer, had for years been counsel for Blount's corporation. Sally had some kind of strong feeling for him, but I wasn't sure what it was, and I'm still not sure, so I'll skip it. She had said that Yerkes was in his forties, and Hausman, her godfather, was over seventy, but she said definitely that Kalmus was fifty-one. If a twenty-two-year- old girl can rattle off the age of a man more 19 than twice as old who is not a relative and with whom she isn't intimate, there's a reason. There were other indications, not only things she said but her tone and manner. I put it down that her not trusting Kalmus--she always said 'Clan Kalmus,' not 'Mr Kalmus' or just 'Kalmus'--that her not trusting him to pull her father out of the hole was only partly because she thought he couldn't. The other part was a suspicion that even if he could, he wouldn't. If Blount were sent to the chair, or even sent up for life, Mrs Blount might be available. Sally didn't say that, but she mentioned for the third time that Clan Kalmus was in love with her mother. Wolfe asked her, 'Is your mother in love with him?' and she said, 'Good heavens, no. She's not in love with anyone--except of course my father.' 6. So much for the messengers. Of the other items in my notebook I'll report only one, the only one that was material. If any container that had held arsenic had been found the newspapers didn't know about it, but that's the kind of detail the police and DA often save. When Wolfe asked Sally if she knew anything about it I held my breath. I wouldn't have been surprised if she had said yes, a bottle half full of arsenic trioxide had been found in her father's pocket. Why not? But she said that as far as she knew no container had been found. Dr Avery, who was usually called on by her father or mother when a doctor was needed, had told her 20 father two or three days after the affair, before Blount had been arrested, that after questioning and examining Jerin he had considered the possibility of poison and had looked around; he had even gone down to the kitchen; and he had found nothing. And four days ago, last Thursday, when Sally, after two sleepless nights, had gone to his office to get a prescription for a sedative, he had said that he had been told by an assistant DA that no container had ever been found, and now that Blount had been charged and was in custody he doubted if the police would try very hard to find one. The police hadn't been called in until after Jerin died, and Blount, who had walked to the hospital, only a couple of blocks from the Gambit Club, after the ambulance had taken Jerin, had had plenty of opportunity to ditch a small object if he had one he wanted to get rid of. Dr Avery, convinced that his friend and patient Matthew Blount was innocent, had told Sally that someone must have had a container and disposed of it, and had advised her to tell Kalmus to hire a detective to try to find it. It was that advice from Dr Avery that had given Sally the idea of coming to Nero Wolfe. One item not in the notebook. At the end Wolfe told her that it was absurd to suppose that he could act without the knowledge of Kalmus and her father. He would have to see people. At the very least he would have to see 21 the four men who had been messengers, and, since he never left the house on business, they would have to come to him, and Sally would have to bring them or send them. Inevitably Kalmus would hear about it and would tell Blount. Sally didn't like that. For a couple of minutes it had looked as if there was going to be an exchange, me handing her the wad and her giving me back the receipt, but after chewing on her lip for twenty seconds she decided to stick. She asked Wolfe who he wanted to see first, and he said we would let her know. She asked when, and he said he had no idea, he had to consider it. At a quarter past one, when I returned to the office, not chipper, after letting her out, and put the wad in the safe, he was sitting straight, his mouth pressed so tight he had no lips, his palms flat on the desk pad, scowling at the door to the front room. It could have been either his farewell to the subversive dictionary or his greeting to a hopeless job, and it wouldn't help matters any to ask him which. As I swung the safe door shut, Fritz appeared to announce lunch, saw Wolfe's pose and expression, looked at me, found my face no better, said, 'All right, you tell him,' and went. Of course business was out at the table, but Wolfe refuses to let anything whatever spoil a meal if the food is good, as it always is in that house, and he managed to pretend that life was sweet and the goose hung high. But when we 22 finished the coffee, got up, and crossed the hall back to the office, he went to his desk, sat, rested fists on the chair arms, and demanded, 'Did he do it?' I raised a brow. If Sally herself had been suspected of murder I would have humored him, since I am supposed, by him, after an hour or so in the company of an attractive young woman, to be able to answer any question he wants to ask about her. But it was stretching it too far to assume that my insight extended to relatives I had never seen, even a father. 'Well,' I said. 'I admit that if there is anything to the idea of guilt by association there can also be innocence by association, but I recall that you once remarked to Lewis Hewitt that the transference�' 'Shut up!' 'Yes, sir.' 'Why didn't you intervene? Why didn't you stop me?' 'My job is starting you, not stopping you.' 'Pfui. Why in heaven's name did I consent? The money? Confound it, I'll take to a cave and eat roots and berries. Money!' 'Nuts are good too, and the bark of some trees, and for meat you could try bats. It was only partly the money. She said you can do things no one else on earth can do, so when it developed that prying Blount loose is obviously something that no one on earth can do you were stuck. Whether Blount did it or 23 not is beside the point. You have to prove he didn't even if he did. Marvelous. By far your best case.' 'Yours too. Ours. You didn't stop me.' He reached to put a finger on the button and pressed it, two short and one long, the beer signal.
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