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pocket, took out two pills, and washed them down.
    “Will they help?” Wolfe asked. “The pills?”
    “Yes. The
pills
are reliable.” He handed me the glass.
    “Then we may proceed?”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you any notion why Miss Paige was impelled to leave by a window?”
    “No. It’s extraordinary. Damn it, Wolfe, I have no notions of anything! Can’t you see I’m lost?”
    “I can. Shall we put it off?”
    “No!”
    “Very well. My assumption that Miss Aaron was killed by a member of your firm, call him X, rests on a prior assumption, that when she spoke with Mr. Goodwin she was candid and her facts were accurate. Would you challenge that assumption?”
    Otis looked at me. “Tell me something. I know what she said from your statement, and it sounded like her, but how was she—her voice and manner? Did she seem in any way … well, out of control? Unbalanced?”
    “No, sir,” I told him. “She sat with her back straight and her feet together, and she met my eyes all the time.”
    He nodded. “She would. She always did.” To Wolfe: “At this time, here privately with you, I don’t challenge your assumption.”
    “Do you challenge the other one, that X killed her?”
    “I neither challenge it nor accept it.”
    “Pfui. You’re not an ostrich, Mr. Otis. Next: if Miss Aaron’s facts were accurate, it must be supposed that X was in a position to give Mrs. Sorell information that would help her substantially in her action against her husband, your client. That is true?”
    “Of course.” Otis was going to add something, decided not to, and then changed his mind again. “Again here privately with you, it’s not merely her action at law. It’s blackmail. Perhaps not technically, but that’s what it amounts to. Her demands are exorbitant and preposterous. It’s extortion.”
    “And a member of your firm could give her weapons. Which one or ones?”
    Otis shook his head. “I won’t answer that.”
    Wolfe’s brows went up. “Sir? If you pretend to help at all that’s the very least you can do. If you’re rejecting my proposal say so and I’ll get on without you. By noon tomorrow—today—the police will have that elementary question answered. It may take me longer.”
    “It certainly may,” Otis said. “You haven’t mentioned a third assumption you’re making. You are assuming that Goodwin was candid and accurate in reporting what Miss Aaron said.”
    “Bah.” Wolfe was disgusted. “You are gibbering. If you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed forlorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties later and wish to communicate with me I’ll be here.” He pushed his chair back.
    “No.” Otis extended a hand. “Good God, man, I’m trapped! It’s not my faculties! I have my faculties.”
    “Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?”
    “They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of course, my three partners. It could have only been one of them, partly because none of our associates was in our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She wouldn’t have used that phrase, ‘member of the firm,’ loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted application. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that’s incredible!”
    “Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbelieve Miss Aaron—or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin? Here with me privately?”
    “No.”
    Wolfe turned a palm up. “Then let’s get at it. It is equally incredible for all three of those men, or are there preferences?”
    During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen times, and on some details—for instance, the respects in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable—he clammedup absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my