Chapter 17
When Inspector Cramer arrived, a little before six o’clock, I was in the kitchen squeezing lemons. Various things had happened during the hundred minutes since Wolfe had gone off upstairs with Sara Dunn, approximately in this order:
The visitors had departed, not much less downhearted than when they arrived, after informing us that they had checked out of the Hawthorne mansion on 67th Street and moved to a hotel. Daisy’s chumminess with the police accounted for that.
Wolfe had phoned some orders down from the roof. To send Orrie Cather up to him for instructions was the first one. I had done so, and a little later Orrie had come down and left the house. Second, to send Fred Durkin to the address on 11th Street where Eugene Davis was Earl Dawson, with instructions to get him and bring him to the office. I instructed Fred and dispatched him. Third, to get Raymond Plehn on the phone if possible. That one was entirely beyond me. Plehn was the horticultural expert of Ditson and Company, the big wholesale florists. It was still beyond me after I got him, and listened in, and heard Wolfe ask him to come down to the house as soon as possible.
Saul Panzer and Johnny Keems both phoned in, and in both cases Wolfe told me to connect them upstairs and no record was needed, which meant that my powers of dissimulation were not to be subjected to an undue strain, and it didn’t help my temper any that I didn’t even know for whose benefit the dissembling would have been necessary.
Another thing that failed to soothe my temper was the fact that I indulged in a private session of “What’s Wrong with this Picture?” and it didn’t get me anywhere. I got the six snapshots from the safe and took them to a window and studied them with the big glass in the strong light, and as far as solving a murder was concerned I might as well have been studying picture post cards from the Grand Canyon. If it was there, it wasn’t there for me; but I was going on with it when Raymond Plehn arrived. I announced him, and Wolfe told me to have Fritz take him up in the elevator, together with the envelope of snapshots, the magnifying glass, and the thing in the vase in the kitchen which Fred had brought back from Rockland County with his bag of clues. That put me in a first-class mood. I knew it was on the level, for he wouldn’t have got Plehn down there just to make me itch, but I paced the office floor and concentrated on it and couldn’t even get within a mile of a wild guess. I was still stabbing around at it when I heard the elevator descending and Fritz leading Plehn out at the front door. He came to the office to give me the envelope, which I returned to the drawer in the safe without any further attempt at homework.
Meanwhile there had been two more phone calls. John Charles Dunn first, from his hotel room, to say that April had got back from the district attorney’s office safe and sound, with nothing worse than a bad headache, and that Andy Dunn had returned with her but not Prescott. Prescott had remained with them throughout the interview, but then had left them, sending a message to Dunn that he would communicate with him later. The second call was from Fred Durkin. He reported that he had rung the bell marked “Dawson” and got no response, had got admitted by the janitor and gone up to the apartment, and had found the door locked and got no reply to knocks or kicks. He was phoning from a drugstore around the corner. I told him to hold the wire, rang Wolfe on the house line, and relayed instructions to Fred to camp.
Shortly after that, while I was in the kitchen squeezing lemons, Cramer arrived. Fritz put him in the office, and pretty soon I joined him there and offered him a glass of good cold lemonade. He wouldn’t even say no, he merely growled. From the dirty look he gave me, you might have thought I had written to the mayor about him.
I put both glasses on my desk, sat down and told him, “This weather is simply frightful,” and stirred with a spoon.
“To hell with you,” he observed. “I want to see Wolfe.”