know if he was available, he said he’d be right over. Twenty minutes later, I opened the front door, and Saul, in his standard-issue rumpled brown suit and flat cap, stepped over the sill, winked, and strode into the office.
“I appreciate your coming,” Wolfe said, reaching across the desk to shake hands, which says a lot about his feelings for Saul.
“No problem,” he answered, dropping into the leather chair and nodding at my offer of coffee. “Things have been a little slow the last few days.” I didn’t believe that, but it sounded good.
“As you surely know,” Wolfe said, pressing his palms down on the desk blotter, “I am interested in the death of Harriet Haverhill.”
Saul nodded and Wolfe went on. “I am convinced she was murdered, and I’ll be happy to elucidate if you wish.”
“Not necessary,” Saul said.
“Very well. What do you know about a woman named Audrey MacLaren?”
Saul took a sip of coffee and screwed up his already wrinkled face. “First wife of that newspaper guy who’s been trying to grab the Gazette,” he said. “English. Got dumped by MacLaren when he married a society babe from out West—Palm Springs, I think. After the divorce, which was maybe three years ago, she moved here from London. She had a couple of kids by him, never remarried. If I remember right, she lives someplace over around Stamford or Greenwich.”
One corner of Wolfe’s mouth turned up slightly, which showed amusement but was more than anything else a salute to Saul. As I’ve mentioned, both Wolfe and I pride ourselves on being thorough newspaper readers who generally keep up pretty well with current events and names in the news, but we’re simply not in the same league with Saul Panzer, who always seems to know more than the World Almanac, People, and Who’s Who in America combined.
“Saul, I’m seeing this woman tomorrow at three,” Wolfe said. “I realize this is absurdly short notice, and I’ll certainly understand if you decline, but I’d like before our meeting to know a number of things about her.”
“Fire away.” Saul didn’t pull out a notebook because he doesn’t use one; he keeps everything filed away upstairs, which seems to work just fine.
Wolfe finished his coffee and pushed the cup away. “Mrs. MacLaren is coming here tomorrow because she says she knows who murdered Harriet Haverhill and wants to hire me to unveil him. This reeks of flummery, perhaps a puerile attempt to implicate her former husband, for whom I gather she holds no warm regard. But the woman has piqued my curiosity.
“What I want to learn is something of the circumstances of their divorce. Were the proceedings initiated by her husband, as your comments about the woman from Palm Springs would seem to suggest? What are the custody arrangements? What kind of settlement did she receive? For instance, does she maintain any kind of equity in his publishing empire? And does she have a residual bitterness toward Mr. MacLaren? Now, if you find this kind of investigation as distasteful as I do,” he said, making a face, “perhaps you’ll want to decline.”
Saul shook his head. “I’ve gotten into lots seamier stuff than this. I could just about give you the answers to some of your questions right now, but they’d be at least partly speculation, and that’s not what you want. I should have something by tomorrow at this time. I’ll check in with Archie,” he said, thanking us for the coffee and rising to go.
I saw him to the door, made a crack about how I bluffed him out of the biggest pot in our last poker game, and went back to the office, which Wolfe had vacated. My watch read eleven-fifty, meaning, this being Sunday, that he had gone to the kitchen to strategize next week’s meals with Fritz. That left me to straighten up the office for our afternoon visitors.
Thirteen
Compared to Wolfe’s rigid schedule during the week, Sunday in the brownstone is downright free-wheeling. Sometimes he goes to the plant rooms to putter, sometimes not. And the meals are pretty much catch-as-catch-can after breakfast. This day, partly because guests were coming at two, Wolfe ate early in the kitchen with Fritz—the two of them boldly experimented by adding pompano and scallops to their New Orleans bouillabaisse recipe and pronounced the operation a success. That was more meal than I felt like, so I made a pastrami-on-rye sandwich that I had with a glass of milk in the office while reading the accounts