Murder by the Book

I made it casual. "I'll have to hit only the high spots or it will take all night. It's a murder case. Three people have been murdered: a man named Leonard Dykes, who worked in the office where you are, a girl named Joan Wellman, an editor in a publishing firm, and a girl named Rachel Abrams, a public stenographer and typist."

There were murmurings, and looks were exchanged. Nina Perlman said emphatically, in a soft satin voice that five or six Manhattans had had no effect on, "I didn't do it."

"Three murders by one person?" Eleanor Gruber asked.

"I'll come to that. Our first connection with it, not much of one, a cop came and showed us a list of fifteen men's names which had been written on a piece of paper by Leonard Dykes. They had found it between the pages of a book in Dykes's room. Mr. Wolfe and I weren't much interested and barely glanced at it. Then-"

"Why did the cop show you the list?" Dolly Harriton put in.

"Because they hadn't found any men to fit any of the names, and he thought we might have a suggestion. We didn't. Then, six weeks later, a man named John R. Wellman called and wanted us to investigate the death of bis daughter, whose body had been found in Van Cortlandt Park-run over by a car. He thought she had been murdered, not killed by accident. He told us all about it, and showed us a copy of a letter Joan, his daughter, had written home. In it she said she had had a phone call from a man who gave his name as Baird Archer, author of a novel which he had submitted to Joan's firm some months back."

"Oh, my God," Blanche Duke said morosely. "Baird Archer again."

"I don't want to bore you," I declared.

Most of them said I wasn't.

"Okay. Joan had read Archer's novel and rejected it with a letter signed by her. On the phone he offered to pay her twenty dollars an hour to discuss his novel with him and tell him how to improve it, and she made a date to meet him the next day after office hours. So she said in her letter home. It was the evening of the next day that she was killed."