“If they’re relevant, yes.”
“They’re relevant all right. First, Mrs. Mion had and has money of her own. That was an added attraction for Mion. It wasn’t for me. I’m just telling you.”
“Thank you. And the second?”
“The second was Mrs. Mion’s reason for not leaving Mion immediately. I suppose you know he had been the top tenor at the Met for five or six years, and his voice was gone — temporarily. Gifford James, the baritone, had hit him on the neck with his fist and hurt his larynx — that was early in March — and Mion couldn’t finish the season. It had been operated, but his voice hadn’t come back, and naturally he was glum, and Mrs. Mion wouldn’t leave him under those circumstances. I tried to persuade her to, but she wouldn’t. I wasn’t anything like normal that day, on account of what had happened to me for the first time in my life, and on account of what Mion had said to me, so I wasn’t reasonable and I left her in the park and went downtown to a bar and started drinking. A lot of time went by and I had quite a few, but I wasn’t pickled. Along toward seven o’clock I decided I had to see her again and carry her off so she wouldn’t spend another night there. That mood took me back to East End Avenue and up to the twelfth floor, and then I stood there in the hall a while, perhaps ten minutes, before my finger went to the pushbutton. Finally I rang, and the maid let me in and went for Mrs. Mion, but I had lost my nerve or something. All I did was suggest that we should have a talk with Mion together. She agreed, and we went upstairs and—”
“Using the elevator?”
“No, the stairs inside the apartment. We entered the studio. Mion was on the floor. We went over to him. There was a big hole through the top of his head. He was dead. I led Mrs. Mion out, made her come, and on the stairs — they’re too narrow to go two abreast — she fell and rolled halfway down. I carried her to her room and put her on her bed, and I started for the living room, for the phone there, when I thought of something to do first. I went out and took the elevator to the ground floor, got the doorman and elevator man together, and asked them who had been taken up to the Mion apartment, either the twelfth floor or the thirteenth, that afternoon. I said they must be damn sure not to skip anybody. They gave me the names and I wrote them down. Then I went back up to the apartment and phoned the police. After I did that it struck me that a layman isn’t supposed to decide if a man is dead, so I phoned Dr. Lloyd, who has an apartment there in the building. He came at once, and I took him up to the studio. We hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the first policeman came, and of course—”
“If you please,” Wolfe put in crossly. “Everything is sometimes too much. You haven’t even hinted at the trouble you’re in.”
“I’ll get to it—”
“But faster, I hope, if I help. My memory has been jogged. The doctor and the police pronounced him dead. The muzzle of the revolver had been thrust into his mouth, and the emerging bullet had torn out a piece of his skull. The revolver, found lying on the floor beside him, belonged to him and was kept there in the studio. There was no sign of any struggle and no mark of any other injury on him. The loss of his voice was an excellent motive for suicide. Therefore, after a routine investigation, giving due weight to the difficulty of sticking the barrel of a loaded revolver into a man’s mouth without arousing him to protest, it was recorded as suicide. Isn’t that correct?”
They both said yes.