It was his turn to let his jaw hang. Apparently it was going to be prolonged, and he didn’t budge, so I took her elbow again and escorted her around to the other side and told her, “Slide in under the wheel. I’d rather have you next to me anyhow.”
She did so, and I got in and slammed the door. By the time I had got the engine started and rolled to the corner and turned downtown, neither of them had said a word.
“If I were you folks,” I told them, “I would incorporate and call it the Greater New York Mutual Tailing League. I don’t see how you keep track of who is following whom on any given day. Of course if one of you gets convicted of murder that will put a stop to it. You have now, however, the one good reason that I know of for getting married, the fact that a wife can’t testify against a husband or vice versa.” I swerved around a pushcart. “One thing you want to watch. Now that Poor is dead, Helen will try to sell you the idea, Joe, that she was meeting him on the sly merely to keep him informed of anything Blaney seemed to be up to, and Joe will try to sell you the idea, Helen, that he was seeing Martha merely for that too. Now, of course, he can’t marry her, at least not for a long time, because it would look suspicious, and he may want you for a stopgap. You should both be realistic—”
“Can it,” Joe croaked. “We’re not going there, where I said. Stop and let me out.”
“Oh, yes we are.” I stepped on it. “Stopgap or not, you are enjoying feeling her sit next to you as much as I am, and I could keep right on going to the foot of the rainbow. If you really wanted out, what was wrong with any of the stops for traffic lights? She can help us, and it won’t hurt to have a witness. The idea is, Helen, we are bound for the Blaney and Poor office to go through the abditories. We think we hid something in them.”
“What?” she demanded.
“We don’t know. Maybe a detailed estimate in triplicate of what it would cost to kill Poor. Maybe a blueprint of the cigar. Even a rough sketch would help.”
“That’s ridiculous. You sound to me like a clown.”
“Good. It is a well-known fact that clowns have the biggest and warmest hearts on record except mothers and three characters in books by Dickens. So if and when you get tired of being a stopgap, just give me a ring and— here we are.”
I pulled over to the curb in front of Blaney and Poor’s on Varick Street.