Murder by the Book

"Any and all relevant matters. We're willing to spread our cards out, Mr. Wolfe; we have to. Frankly, our firm is in a highly vulnerable position. We've had all the scandal we can absorb. Only a little over a year ago our senior partner was disbarred and narrowly escaped a felony conviction. That was a major blow to the firm. We reorganized, months passed, we were regaining lost ground, and then our chief confidential clerk, Leonard Dykes, was murdered, and it was all reopened. There was never a shred of evidence that there was any connection between O'Malley's disbarment and Dykes's death, but it doesn't take evidence to make scandal. It affected us even more seriously than the first blow; the effect was cumulative. Weeks went by, and Dykes's murder was still unsolved, and it was beginning to die down a little, when suddenly it came back on us through the death of someone we had never heard of, a young woman named Joan Wellman. However, that was much less violent and damaging. It was confined mostly to an effort by the police to find some trace, through us or our staff, of a man who was named Baird Archer, or who had used that name, and the effort was completely unsuccessful. After a week of that it was petering out too, and then here they came again, we didn't know why at the time, but now we know it was because of the death of another young woman we had never heard of, named Rachel Abrams. At that point don't you think we had a right to feel a little persceutedf

Wolfe shrugged. "I doubt if it matters what I think. You did feel persecuted."

"We certainly did. We do. We have had enough. As you know, the Abrams girl died three days ago. Again what the police are after is a trace of a Baird Archer, though God knows if there were any trace of such a man or such a name at our office they should have dug it up long ago. Anyhow, there's nothing we can do except hope they find their damned Baird Archer, and wait for this to begin to die down too. That's how we felt yesterday. Do you know what happened in court this afternoon? Louis Kustin was trying an important case for us, and during a recess opposing counsel came up to him and said -what did he say, Louis?"

Kustin stirred in his chair. "He asked me what I was doing about a new connection when our firm dissolves." His voice had a sharp edge, not at all sleepy like his eyes. "He was trying to get me sore to spoil my style. He didn't succeed."