Homicide Trinity Read Free

the evening. They were together in a booth in a cheap restaurant—more of a lunchroom. The kind of place she would never go to, never. She would never go to that part of town. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was on a personal errand and I went in there to use the phone. They didn’t see me.”
    “Then one of the members of the firm is a woman?”
    Her eyes widened. “Oh. I said ‘she.’ I meant the opposing client. We have a woman lawyer as one of the associates, just an employee really, but no woman firm member.” She laced her fingers. “It couldn’t possibly have been accidental. But of course it was conceivable, just barely conceivable, that he wasn’t a traitor, that there was some explanation, and that made it even harder for me to decide what to do. But now I know. After worrying about it for a whole week I couldn’t stand it any longer, and this afternoon I decided the only thing I
could
do was tell him and see what he said. If he had a good explanation, all right. But he didn’t. The way he took it, the way it hit him, there isn’t any question about it. He’s a traitor.”
    “What did he say?”
    “It wasn’t so much what he said as how he looked. He said he had a satisfactory explanation, that he was acting in the interest of our client, but that he couldn’t tell me more than that until the matter had developed further. Certainly within a week, he said, and possibly tomorrow. So I knew I had to do something, and I was afraid to go to Mr. Otis because his heart has been worse lately, and I wouldn’t go to another firm member. I even thought of going to the opposing counsel, but of course that wouldn’t do. Then I thought of Nero Wolfe, and I put on my hat and coat and came. Now it’s urgent. You can see it’s urgent?”
    I nodded. “It could be. Depending on the kind of caseinvolved. Mr. Wolfe might agree to take the job before you name the alleged traitor, but he would have to know first what the case is about—your firm’s case. There are some kinds he won’t touch, even indirectly. What is it?”
    “I don’t want …” She let it hang. “Does he have to know that?”
    “Certainly. Anyhow, you’ve told me the name of your firm and it’s a big important case and the opposing client is a woman, and with that I could—but I don’t have to. I read the papers. Is your client Morton Sorell?”
    “Yes.”
    “And the opposing client is Rita Sorell, his wife?”
    “Yes.”
    I glanced at my wrist watch and saw 5:39, left my chair, told her, “Cross your fingers and sit tight,” and headed for the hall and the stairs. Two new factors had entered and now dominated the situation: that if our first bank deposit of the new year came from the Sorell pile it would not be hay; and that one of the kind of jobs Wolfe wouldn’t touch, even indirectly, was divorce stuff. It would take some doing, and as I mounted the three flights to the roof of the old brownstone my brain was going faster than my feet. In the vestibule of the plant rooms I paused, not for breath but to plan the approach, decided that was no good because it would depend on his mood, and entered. You might think it impossible to go down the aisles between the benches of those three rooms—cool, tropical, and intermediate—without noticing the flashes and banks of color, but that day I did, and then was in the potting room.
    Wolfe was over at the side bench peering at a pseudo-bulb through a magnifying glass. Theodore Horstmann, the fourth member of the household, who was exactly half Wolfe’s weight, 137 to 270, was opening a bag of osmundine. I crossed over and told Wolfe’s back, “Excuse me for interrupting, but I have a problem.”
    He took ten seconds to decide he had heard me, thenremoved the glass from his eye and demanded, “What time is it?”
    “Nineteen minutes to six.”
    “It can wait nineteen minutes.”
    “I know, but there’s a snag. If you came down and found her there in the office with no warning