And Be a Villain Read Free

they had on the Orchard case.
    When I had finished I wasn’t a bit worried that Monday morning’s paper would confront me with a headline that the cops had wrapped it up.

Chapter 3
    T HE BEST I WAS able to get on the phone was an appointment for 3:00 P.M. , so at that hour Monday afternoon I entered the lobby of an apartment house in the upper Seventies between Madison and Park. It was the palace type, with rugs bought by the acre, but with the effect somewhat spoiled, as it so often is, by a rubber runner on the main traffic lane merely because the sidewalk was wet with rain. That’s no way to run a palace. If a rug gets a damp dirty footprint, what the hell, toss it out and roll out another one, that’s the palace spirit.
    I told the distinguished-looking hallman that my name was Archie Goodwin and I was bound for Miss Fraser’s apartment. He got a slip of paper from his pocket, consulted it, nodded, and inquired:
    “And? Anything else?”
    I stretched my neck to bring my mouth within a foot of his ear, and whispered to him:
    “Oatmeal.”
    He nodded again, signaled with his hand to the elevator man, who was standing outside the door of his car fifteen paces away, and said in a cultivated voice, “Ten B.”
    “Tell me,” I requested, “about this password gag, is it just since the murder trouble or has it always been so?”
    He gave me an icy look and turned his back. I told the back:
    “That costs you a nickel. I fully intended to give you a nickel.”
    With the elevator man I decided not to speak at all. He agreed. Out at the tenth floor, I found myself in a box no bigger than the elevator, another palace trick, with a door to the left marked 10A and one to the right marked 10B. The elevator man stayed there until I had pushed the button on the latter, and the door had opened and I had entered.
    The woman who had let me in, who might easily have been a female wrestling champion twenty years back, said, “Excuse me, I’m in a hurry,” and beat it on a trot. I called after her, “My name’s Goodwin!” but got no reaction.
    I advanced four steps, took off my hat and coat and dropped them on a chair, and made a survey. I was in a big square sort of a hall, with doors off to the left and in the wall ahead. To the right, instead of a wall and doors, it just spread out into an enormous living room which contained at least twenty different kinds of furniture. My eye was professionally trained to take in anything from a complicated street scene to a speck on a man’s collar, and really get it, but for the job of accurately describing that room I would have charged double. Two of the outstanding items were a chrome-and-red-leather bar with stools to match and a massive old black walnut table with carved legs and edges. That should convey the tone of the place.
    There was nobody in sight, but I could hear voices. I advanced to pick out a chair to sit on, saw none that I thought much of, and settled on a divan ten feet long and four feet wide, covered with green burlap. A near-by chair had pink embroidered silk. I was trying to decide what kind of a horse the person who furnished that room would draw, when company entered the square hall sector from one of the doors in the far wall—two men, one young and handsome, the other middle-aged and bald, both loaded down with photographic equipment, including a tripod.
    “She’s showing her age,” the young man said.
    “Age, hell,” the bald man retorted, “she’s had a murder, hasn’t she? Have you ever had a murder?” He caught sight of me and asked his companion, “Who’s that?”
    “I don’t know, never saw him before.” The young man was trying to open the entrance door without dropping anything. He succeeded, and they passed through, and the door closed behind them.
    In a minute another of the doors in the square hall opened and the female wrestler appeared. She came in my direction, but, reaching me, trotted on by, made for a door near a corner off to