“Yeah.” I switched back to Mrs. Orwin. “Miss Brown asked me to tell you that she went home. I gave her a little drink and it seemed to help, but she decided to leave. She asked me to apologize for her.”
“She’s perfectly healthy,” the colonel asserted. He sounded a little hurt. “There’s nothing wrong with her.”
“Is she all right?” Mrs. Orwin asked.
“For her,” the other male put in, “you should have made it three drinks. Three big ones. Or just hand her the bottle.”
His tone was mean and his face was mean, and anyhow that was no way to talk in front of the help in a strange house, meaning me. He was some younger than Colonel Brown, but he already looked enough like Mrs. Orwin, especially the eyes, to make it more than a guess that they were mother and son. That point was settled when she commanded him, “Be quiet, Gene!” She turned to the colonel. “Perhaps you should go and see about her?”
He shook his head, with a fond but manly smile at her. “It’s not necessary, Mimi. Really.”
“She’s all right,” I assured them and pushed off, thinking there were a lot of names in this world that could stand a reshuffle. Calling that overweight narrow-eyed pearl-and-mink proprietor Mimi was a paradox.
I moved around among the guests, being gracious. Fully aware that I was not equipped with a Geiger counter that would flash a signal if and when I established a contact with a strangler, the fact remained that I had been known to have hunches, and it would be something for my scrapbook if I picked one as the killer of Doris Hatten and it turned out later to be sunfast.
Cynthia Brown hadn’t given me the Hatten, only the Doris, but with the context that was enough. At the time it had happened, some five months ago, early in October, the papers had given it a big play of course. She had been strangled with her own scarf, of white silk with the Declaration of Independence printed on it, in her cozy fifth-floor apartment in the West Seventies, and the scarf had been left around her neck, knotted at the back. The cops had never got within a mile of charging anyone, and Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide had told me that they had never even found out who was paying the rent, but there was no law against Purley being discreet.
I kept on the go through the plant rooms, leaving all switches open for a hunch. Some of them were plainly preposterous, but with everyone else I made an opportunity to exchange some words, fullface and close up. That took time, and it was no help to my current and chronic campaign for a raise in wages, since it was the women, not the men, that Wolfe wanted off his neck. I stuck at it anyhow. It was true that if Cynthia was on the level, and if she hadn’t changed her mind by the time I got Wolfe in to her, we would soon have specifications, but I had had that tingle at the bottom of my spine and I was stubborn.