Gambit Read Free Page B

In my notes I included a parenthesis, a guess that Sally thought it would be just as well if men would take time out from looking at her mother to give her a glance now and then. That was a little odd, since Sally herself was no eyesore, but of course I hadn’t seen her mother.
    Morton Farrow, age thirty-one, was not a wizard, but wasn’t aware of it. He drew a good salary from the Blount Textile Corporation only because he was Mrs.
    Blount’s nephew, and thought he was underpaid. I’m translating what Sally told us, not quoting it.
    Ernst Hausman, retired broker, a lifelong friend of Matthew Blount, was Sally’s godfather. He was an unhappy man and would die unhappy because he would give ten million dollars to be able to play a chess master without odds and mate him, and there was no hope. He hadn’t played a game with Blount for years because he suspected Blount of easing up on him. He had disapproved of the idea of having Paul Jerin come to the club and do his stunt; he thought no one but members should ever be allowed in. In short, a suffering snob.
    Daniel Kalmus, the lawyer, had for years been counsel for Blount’s corporation.
    Sally had some kind of strong feeling for him, but I wasn’t sure what it was,
    and I’m still not sure, so I’ll skip it. She had said that Yerkes was in his forties, and Hausman, her godfather, was over seventy, but she said definitely that Kalmus was fifty-one. If a twenty-two-year-old girl can rattle off the age of a man more than twice as old who is not a relative and with whom she isn’t intimate, there’s a reason. There were other indications, not only things she said but her tone and manner. I put it down that her not trusting Kalmus - she always said ‘Dan Kalmus,” not ‘Mr. Kalmus’ or just ‘Kalmus’ - that her not trusting him to pull her father out of the hole was only partly because she thought he couldn’t. The other part was a suspicion that even if he could, he wouldn’t. If Blount were sent to the chair, or even sent up for life, Mrs.
    Blount might be available. Sally didn’t say that, but she mentioned for the third time that Dan Kalmus was in love with her mother. Wolfe asked her, “Is your mother in love with him?’ and she said, “Good heavens, no. She’s not in love with anyone - except of course my father.”
    6. So much for the messengers. Of the other items in my notebook I’ll report only one, the only one that was material. If any container that had held arsenic had been found the newspapers didn’t know about it, but that’s the kind of detail the police and DA often save. When Wolfe asked Sally if she knew anything about it I held my breath. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had said yes, a bottle half full of arsenic trioxide had been found in her father’s pocket. Why not'But she said that as far as she knew no container had been found. Dr Avery,
    who was usually called on by her father or mother when a doctor was needed, had told her father two or three days after the affair, before Blount had been arrested, that after questioning and examining Jerin he had considered the possibility of poison and had looked around; he had even gone down to the kitchen; and he had found nothing. And four days ago, last Thursday, when Sally,
    after two sleepless nights, had gone to his office to get a prescription for a sedative, he had said that he had been told by an assistant DA that no container had ever been found, and now that Blount had been charged and was in custody he doubted if the police would try very hard to find one. The police hadn’t been called in until after Jerin died, and Blount, who had walked to the hospital,
    only a couple of blocks from the Gambit Club, after the ambulance had taken Jerin, had had plenty of opportunity to ditch a small object if he had one he wanted to get rid of. Dr Avery, convinced that his friend and patient Matthew Blount was innocent, had told Sally that someone must have had a container and