Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe by Three at Wolfe's Door Page A

but for a guess she was afraid the cops would get too curious and find out how she had saved her honor and her virtue and tell her mother and father, and father would spank her. Shall I also guess why you proposed your alternative instead of having her bring them here for you?”
    â€œShe wouldn’t. She said so.”
    â€œOf course she would, if you had insisted. That’s your guess. Mine is that you’re not desperate enough yet to take on five females in a bunch. When you told me to bring the whole dozen you knew darn well it couldn’t be done, not even by me. Okay, I want instructions.”
    â€œLater,” he muttered, and closed his eyes.
V
    It was on the fourth floor of an old walk-up in the West Nineties near Amsterdam Avenue. I don’t know what it had in the way of a kitchen or bedroom—or bedrooms—because the only room I saw was the one we were sitting in. It was medium-sized, and the couch and chairs and rugs had a homey look, the kind of homeyness that furniture gets by being used by a lot of different people for fifty or sixty years. The chair I was on had a wobbly leg, but that’s no problem if you keep it in mind and make no sudden shifts. I was more concerned about the spidery little stand at my elbow on which my glass of milk was perched. I can always drink milk and had preferred it to Bubble-Pagne, registered trademark,a dime a bottle, which they were having. It was ten o’clock Wednesday evening.
    The hostesses were the redhead with milky skin, Peggy Choate, and the one with big brown eyes and dimples, Nora Jaret, who shared the apartment. Carol Annis, with the fine profile and the corn-silk hair, had been there when Helen lacono and I arrived, bringing Lucy Morgan and her throaty voice after detouring our taxi to pick her up at a street corner. They were a very attractive collection, though of course not as decorative as they had been in their ankle-length purple stolas. Girls always look better in uniforms or costumes. Take nurses or elevator girls or Miss Honeydew at a melon festival.
    I was now calling her Helen, not that I felt like it, but in the detective business you have to be sociable, of course preserving your honor and virtue. In the taxi, before picking up Lucy Morgan, she told me she had been thinking it over and she doubted if it would be possible to find out which one of them had a good reason to kill Pyle, or thought she had, because Pyle had been so very careful when he had a girl come to his penthouse. The only way would be to get one of them to open up, and Helen doubted if she could get her to, since she would be practically confessing murder, and she was sure I couldn’t. So the best way would be for Helen and me, after spending an evening with them, to talk it over and decide which one was the most likely, and then she would tell Wolfe she had seen her going back to the kitchen and bringing another plate, and Wolfe would tell the police, and that would do it.
    No, I didn’t feel like calling her Helen. I would just as soon have been too far away from her to call her at all.
    Helen’s declared object in arranging the party—declaredto them—was to find out from me what Nero Wolfe and the cops had done and were doing, so they would know where they stood. Helen was sure I would loosen up, she had told them, because she had been to see me and found me very nice and sympathetic. So the hostesses were making it sort of festive and intimate by serving Bubble-Pagne, though I preferred milk. I had a suspicion that at least one of them, Lucy Morgan, would have preferred whisky or gin or rum or vodka, and maybe they all would, but that might have me suspect that they were not just a bunch of wholesome, hard-working artists.
    They didn’t look festive. I wouldn’t say they were haggard, but much of the bloom was off. And they hadn’t bought Helen’s plug for me that I was nice and sympathetic. They were absolutely