“No. Root wasn’t mentioned. He said he had no idea who intended to kill him.”
Cramer humphed. “That’s what he told Tim Cornwall too. Cornwall thinks you passed because you knew or suspected it was too hot to handle. Naturally Cornwall is bitter. He has lost his best man.”
“Indeed,” Wolfe said mildly. “If that was his best man...”
“So Cornwall says,” Cramer insisted, “and he’s dead. Name of Doyle, been in the game twenty years, with a good record. The picture as we’ve got it doesn’t necessarily condemn him. Jensen went to Cornwall and Mayer yesterday about noon, and Cornwall assigned Doyle as a guard. We’ve traced all their movements — nothing special. In the evening Doyle went along to a meeting at a midtown club. They left the club at eleven-twenty, and apparently went straight home, on the subway or a bus, to the apartment house where Jensen lived on Seventy-third Street near Madison. It was eleven-forty-five when they were found dead on the sidewalk at the entrance to the apartment house. Both shot in the heart with a thirty-eight, Doyle from behind and Jensen from the front. We have the bullets. No powder marks. No nothing.”
Wolfe murmured sarcastically, putting down his coffee cup and indicating that since I was there I might as well remove the tray, “Mr. Cornwall’s best man.”
“Nuts,” Cramer objected to the sarcasm. “He was shot in the back. There’s a narrow passage ten paces away where the guy could have hid. Or the shots could have come from a passing car, or from across the street — though that would have taken some shooting, two right in the pump. We haven’t found anybody who heard the shots. The doorman was in the basement stoking the water heater, the excuse for that being that they’re short of men like everybody else. The elevator man was on his way to the tenth floor with a passenger, a tenant. The bodies were discovered by two women on their way home from a movie. It must have happened not more than a minute before they came by, but they had just got off a Madison Avenue bus at the corner.”
Wolfe got out of bed, which was an operation deserving an audience. He glanced at the clock on the bed table. It was eight-thirty-five.
“I know, I know,” Cramer growled. “You’ve got to get dressed and get upstairs to your goddam horticulture. The tenant going up in the elevator was a prominent doctor who barely knew Jensen by sight. The two women who found the bodies are Seventh Avenue models who never heard of Jensen. The elevator man has worked there over twenty years without displaying a grudge, and Jensen was a generous tipper and popular with the bunch. The doorman is a fat nitwit who was hired two weeks ago only because of the manpower situation and doesn’t know the tenants by name. Beyond those, all we have is the population of New York City and the guests who arrive and depart daily and nightly. That’s why I came to you, and for God’s sake, give me what you’ve got. You can see I need it.”
“Mr. Cramer.” The mountain of yellow pajamas moved. “I repeat. I am not interested, not involved, and not curious.” Wolfe headed for the bathroom.
Two minutes later, downstairs, as I opened the front door for Inspector Cramer’s exit, he turned to me with his cigar tilted up from the corner of his mouth to about a quarter to one and observed, “One thing about that black silk bed cover, it can be used for his shroud when the time comes. Let me know, and I’ll come and help sew on it.”