Angela Wright
Paul Kuffner, public-relations expert
Vincent Lipscomb, magazine publisher
The party had broken up a little after eleven, and the guests had gone their ways separately. Mrs. Fromm had been the last to leave. The Gazette had a tip that Horan had taken her down to her car, but the police weren’t saying, and it couldn’t be checked. That was all on Laura Fromm until five o’clock Saturday morning, when a man on his way to work in a fish market, passing through the construction lane between the pillars, had found the body.
Just a few minutes before I reached the Gazette office the District Attorney had announced that Mrs. Fromm had been run over by her own car. The convertible had been found parked on Sixteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, only a five-minute walk from the Tenth Precinct, and had yielded not only evidence of that fact but also a heavy tire wrench, found on the floor, which had been used on the back of Mrs. Fromm’s head. Whether the murderer had been concealed in the car, under a rug behind the front seat, when Mrs. Fromm had come down to it, or whether he had been allowed by her to get in with her, then or later, it seemed better than a guess that he had picked a moment and spot to hit her with the wrench, replace her at the wheel, drive to an appropriate site, unoccupied and unobserved at that hour, unload her, and run the car over her. It would have been interesting and instructive to go down to Centre Street and watch the scientists working on that car, but they wouldn’t have let me get within a mile of it, and anyhow I was busy with Lon.
As far as the Gazette knew, as of that moment the field was wide open, with no candidate favored either by the police or by any outside talent. Of course those who had been present at the dinner were in a glare, but it could have been anyone who had known where Mrs. Fromm would be, or even possibly someone who hadn’t. Lon had no suggestions to offer, though he tossed in the comment that one Gazette female was being curious about Mrs. Horan’s attitude toward the progress of the friendship between her husband and Mrs. Fromm.
I made an objection. “But if you want to fit in Pete Drossos and Matthew Birch, that’s no good. Unless you can make it good. Who was Matthew Birch?”
Lon snorted. “On your way out buy a Wednesday Gazette.”
“I’ve got one at home and I’ve read it. But that was three days ago.”
“He hasn’t changed any. He was a special agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had been for twenty years, with a wife and three children. He had only twenty-one teeth, looked like a careworn statesman, dressed beyond his station, wasn’t any too popular in his circle, and bet on the races through Danny Pincus.”