Archer, his lips puckered, was giving me a good look. He spoke. “I don’t understand you, Goodwin. I don’t know why you don’t see that your position is impossible.”
“That’s easy,” I told him. “For exactly the same reason that you don’t.”
“That I don’t see it’s impossible? But I do.”
“Like hell you do. If you did you’d be on your way by now, leaving me to Ben Dykes or one of your assistants. You’ve got a busy schedule ahead of you, but here you still are. May I make a statement?”
“By all means. That’s just what I want you to do.”
“Fine.” I clasped my hands behind my head. “There’s no use going over what I did and when. I’ve already told it three times and it’s on the record. But with this news, that it was Mr. Wolfe’s car that killed him, you don’t have to bother any more with what anybody was doing, even me, eight o’clock or nine or ten. You know exactly when he was killed. It couldn’t have been before nine-thirty, because that’s when he got out of the cab at the entrance. It couldn’t have been after nine-fifty, because that’s when I got in the car to drive to Chappaqua. Actually, it’s even narrower, say between nine-thirty-two and nine-forty-six — only fourteen minutes. During that time I was up in the bedroom with Mr. Wolfe. Where were the others? Because of course it’s all in the family now, since our car was used. Someone here did it, and during that fourteen minutes. You’ll want to know where the key to the ignition was. In the car. I don’t remove it when I’m parking on the private grounds of a friend or a client. I did remove it, however, when I got back from Chappaqua, since it might be there all night. I didn’t know how long it would take Sperling to decide to let go of forty grand. You will also want to know if the engine was warm when I got in and started it. I don’t know. It starts like a dream, warm or cold. Also it is June. Also, if all it had done was roll down the drive and kill Rony, and turn around at the entrance and come back again, and there wasn’t time for much more than that, it wouldn’t have got warmed up to speak of.”
I considered a moment. “That’s the crop.”
“You can eat that timetable,” Noonan said in his normal voice, which you ought to hear. “Try again, bud. He wasn’t killed in that fifteen minutes. He was killed at nine-fifty-two, when you went down the drive on your way to Chappaqua. Do your statement over.”
I turned my head to get his eyes. “Oh, you here?”
Archer said to Dykes, “Ask him some questions, Ben.”