Read Too Many Clients for Free Online

hour I must have either gaped or gasped when Perez turned on the lights. I have seen quite a few rooms where people had gone all out, but that topped them all. It may have been partly the contrast with the neighborhood, the outside of the house, and the down below, but it would have been remarkable no matter where. The first impression was of silk and skin. The silk, mostly red but some pale yellow, was on the walls and ceiling and couches. The skin was on the girls and women in the pictures, paintings, that took a good third of the wall space. In all directions was naked skin. The pale yellow carpet, wall to wall, was silk too, or looked it. The room was enormous, twenty-five feet wide and the full length of the house, with no windows at either end. Headed to the right wall, near the center, was a bed eight feet square with a pale yellow silk coverlet. Since yellow was Wolfe’s pet color it was too bad he hadn’t come along. I sniffed the air. It was fresh enough, but it smelled. Air-conditioned, with built-in perfume.
    There weren’t many surfaces that would hold fingerprints-the tops of two tables, a TV console, a stand with a telephone. I turned to Mrs. Perez. “Have you cleaned here since Sunday night?”
    “Yes, yesterday morning.”
    That settled that. “Where’s the door to the stairs?”
    “No stairs.”
    “They’re boarded up below,” Perez said. “The elevator’s the only way to come up?” “Yes.”
    “How long has it been like this?”
    “Four years. Since he bought the house. We had been here two years.”
    “How often did he come here?” “We don’t know.”
    “Certainly you do, if you came up every day to clean. How often?”
    “Maybe once a week, maybe more.” I turned on Perez. “Why did you kill him?” “No.” He half closed an eye. “Me'No.” “Who did?”
    “We don’t know,” his wife said.
    I ignored her. “Look,” I told him, “I don’t want to turn you over unless I have to. Mr. Wolfe and I would prefer to keep you to ourselves. But if you don’t open up we’ll have no choice, and there may not be much time. They’ve got a lot of fingerprints from the tarpaulin that covered his body. I know he was killed in this house. If just one of those prints matches yours, good-by.
    You’re in. Since he was killed in this house, you know something. What?”
    He said to his wife, “Felita?”
    She was looking at me, her sharp black eyes into me. “You’re a private detective,” she said. “You told my husband that’s how you make a living. So we pay you. We have some money, not much. One hundred dollars.”
    “What do you pay me for?”
    “To be our detective.”
    “And detect what?”
    “We’ll tell you. We have the money downstairs.”
    “I’ll earn it first. All right, I’m your detective, but I can quit any time, for instance if I decide that you or your husband killed Yeager. What do you want me to detect?”
    “We want you to help us. What you said about the fingerprints. I told him he must put on gloves, but he didn’t. We don’t know how you know so much, but we know how it will be if you tell the police about this house. We did not kill Mr. House. Mr. Yeager. We don’t know who killed him. My husband took his dead body and put it in that hole because we had to. When he came Sunday evening he told my husband to go to Mondor’s at midnight and bring some things he had ordered, some caviar and roast pheasant and other things, and when my husband came up with them his dead body was here.” She pointed. “There on the floor. What could we do'It was secret that he came to this house. What would happen if we called a policeman'We knew what would happen. So now we pay you to help us. Perhaps more than one hundred dollars. You will know�”
    She whirled around. There had been a noise from the elevator, a click, and then a faint sound of friction, barely audible. Perez said, “It’s going down. Someone down there.”
    “Yeah,” I agreed.