“Gosh, no, I’m just a stranger.” I pushed my coffee cup back. “Look, Mrs. Jaffee, it’s like this. Nero Wolfe is investigating the murder of Priscilla Eads for a client. As I told you on the phone, we have no idea that you know anything at all about the murder, directly or indirectly, but you may have information that will help. You inherited from your father ten per cent of the stock of Softdown, Incorporated, and for a time you were Priscilla Eads’s closest friend. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“When did you see her last?”
She used her napkin on lips and fingers, dropped it on the table, pushed back her chair, and arose. “We’ll be more comfortable in the other room,” she said, and moved. I followed, through to the living room, where it was cooler, with the slanted Venetian blinds admitting only a dim and restful light. The furniture was all wearing light blue slipcovers that looked as if none of them had been sat on yet. After she had got cigarettes from an enameled box and I had lit them, she perched with cushions on an oversized divan, looking less than ever like Widow Rowley, and I took a chair.
“You know,” she said, “my mind is a very funny thing. I guess there’s no doubt I’m a nut. When you asked me just now about seeing Pris, when I saw her last, I realized for the first time that someone did it.”
“Did what? Killed her?”
She nodded. “I didn’t hear about it until late yesterday afternoon, when a friend told me on the phone. I never see an evening paper, and I haven’t looked at this morning’s paper yet, and anyhow I probably wouldn’t read about it because I can’t stand things like that. I seem to just shut my eyes to things I can’t stand. So I knew Pris was dead, found dead in her apartment, strangled, but that was all. When you asked me when I saw her last, it hit me all of a sudden that someone actually did it! She didn’t do it herself, did she?”
“Not unless somebody helped out by removing the cord for her afterward. She was strangled with some kind of cord.”
Mrs. Jaffee shivered and seemed to shrink into the cushions. “Did that — would that take long?”
“Probably not.”