She shook her head, with a corner of her mouth turned up. “That’s no kind of question to ask.”
“We work for Mr. Huck, you know,” Sylvia Marcy cooed.
“He’s a very fine man,” Dorothy Riff declared. “Very, very fine. That’s why one of us poisoned Mrs. Huck so she could marry him. What is she waiting for? It’s been a year.”
I upturned a palm. “That’s only common sense. You have to watch your step on a thing like that, and besides, that might not have been the motive. In fact, here’s one I like better: Mrs. Huck handed her a real bundle, say a hundred grand, to be given to Lewent if and when Mrs. Huck died. But as the months went by and Mrs. Huck stayed perfectly healthy, good for another twenty or thirty years, our heroine got impatient and acted. Of course she is now in a pickle. She has the hundred grand, but even after a year has passed she doesn’t dare to start spending it.”
Mrs. O’Shea permitted herself a refined snort. “It wouldn’t surprise me if that Lewent creature actually believed that rot.” Her tone was chilly, and her deep blue eyes were far from warm. “Mr. Huck said you would ask us question and we would answer as we please and think proper. Go ahead.”
I stuck with them for an hour. I have had chores that were far more disagreeable, but none less fruitful. There were assorted indications that there was no love lost among them, and various hints that Huck was not regarded solely as a source of wages by any of them, but to pick one for Lewent at the end of the hour I would have had to use eeny, meeny, miny, mo. I was disappointed in me. Deciding that I had made a mistake to bunch them, I arose, thanked them for their patience and co-operation, said that I would like to talk with each of them singly a little later, asked where I would be apt to find Lewent, and was told that his room was on the floor below us, two flights up from the ground and one up from Huck’s study. Sylvia Marcy offered to show me and preceded me out and down the stairs. She had cooed throughout. It was a pleasant and even a musical coo, but what the hell. If I had been, like Huck, exposed to it continually, after a couple of days I would either have canned her or sent for a justice of the peace to perform a ceremony.
To my knock Lewent opened the door of his room and invited me in. For the first four paces his room was only a narrow hall, as rooms frequently are in big old houses where bathrooms have been added later, but then it widened to a spacious chamber. He asked me to sit, but I declined, saying I had had a warming-up session with the suspects and would like to meet Paul Thayer, Huck’s nephew, if he was available. He said he would see, and left the room, me following, mounted two flights of stairs, which put us on the floor above the sewing room, and went down a hall and knocked on a door. A voice within told us to enter.
The room was comparatively small, and no inch was being wasted. There was a single bed, a grand piano, two small chairs, and a few tons of books and portfolios on shelves and tables and stacked on the floor. Thayer, who was about my age and built like a bull, thought he would bust my knuckles as we shook, and then decided not to when I reacted. I had told Lewent on the way up that it might be better if I had Thayer to myself, and he had agreed, so he left us. Thayer flopped on the bed, and I took a chair.
“You sure have bitched it up,” he stated.
“Yeah? How?”