Murder by the Book

"Or here's another. I myself killed Dykes and the women, though again I have no idea why, and I think you're more dangerous than the police and want to keep an eye on you." O'Malley picked up his glass. "That's four, that should be enough."

"It'll do for the time being," Wolfe concurred. "Of course they're mutually exclusive. In one your associates helped you fight and in another they let you down. Which was it actually?"

"They fought like tigers to save me."

"Goddam it, Con," Phelps exploded, "we did! We let everything else go! We did our damnedest!"

O'Malley was unmoved. "Then you'd better take that one," he told Wolfe. "Number Two. It has corroboration, which is always a help."

"I prefer it anyway." Wolfe glanced up at the clock on the wall. "I want all you can tell me about Dykes, gentlemen, but it's my dinnertime. As I said, I'm sorry we're not prepared for guests."

They left their chairs. Corrigan asked, "What time do you want us back?"

Wolfe made a face. He hated the prospect of work during digestion. "Nine o'clock?" he suggested. "Will that suit?"

They said it would.

12

WHEN, an hour after midnight, Wolfe finally called it a day and let them go, it looked as if I would be seeing a lot of the girls. Not that they had balked at answering questions. We had at least four thousand facts, an average of a

thousand an hour, but if anyone had offered me a dime for the lot it would have been a deal. We were full of information to the gills, but not a glimmer of Baird Archer or fiction writing or anything pertaining thereto. Wolfe had even sunk so low as to ask where and how they had spent the evening of February second and the afternoon of February twenty-sixth, though the cops had of course covered that and double-checked it.

Especially we knew enough about Leonard Dykes to write his biography, either straight or in novel form. Having started in as office boy, by industry, application, loyalty, and a satisfactory amount of intelligence, he had worked up to office manager and confidential clerk. He was not married. He had smoked a pipe, and had once got pickled on two glasses of punch at an office party, proving that he was not a drinker. He had had no known interest in anything outside his work except baseball in summer and professional hockey games in winter. And so forth and so on. None of the five had any notion about who had killed him or why.