“Not by him or me. If I should ask for information on Birch, it will be because you dragged him in yourself.”
“Okay, hold everything. I want to catch the early.”
He left the room. I sat and tried to argue Wolfe into letting Lon have the juicy item about the flap from Matthew Birch’s pocket being found on the car that had killed Pete, but since Wolfe wasn’t there I made no progress. Before long Lon came back, and after he had crossed to his desk and got his big feet under it I told him, “I still need an hour.”
“We’ll see. There’s not much nourishment in that crumb.”
It didn’t take a full hour, but a big hunk of one. He gave me nearly everything I wanted without consulting any documents and with only two phone calls to shopmates.
Mrs. Fromm had had lunch Friday at the Churchill with Miss Angela Wright, Executive Secretary of Assadip — the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons. Presumably she had gone to the Churchill upon leaving Wolfe’s office, but I didn’t go into that with Lon. After lunch, around two-thirty, the two women had gone together to the office of Assadip, where Mrs. Fromm signed some papers and made some phone calls. The Gazette didn’t have her taped from around 3:15 to around five, when she had returned to her home on Sixty-eighth Street and had spent an hour or so working with her personal secretary, Miss Jean Estey. According to Lon, Angela Wright was a credit to her sex, since she would talk to reporters, and Jean Estey wasn’t, since she wouldn’t.
A little before seven o’clock Mrs. Fromm had left home, alone, to go out to dinner, driving one of her cars, a Cadillac convertible. The dinner was at the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Horan on Gramercy Park. It wasn’t known where she had parked the car, but in that neighborhood in the evening there are always spaces. There had been six people at the dinner:
Dennis Horan, the host
Claire Horan, his wife
Laura Fromm