Prisoner's Base by Rex Stout Page A

the street and strangled to death Monday night, a couple of hours before Priscilla Eads.”
    Sarah Jaffee’s eyes popped. “Margaret has—too?”
    “Yes. Was that all, those five, to be—”
    “She was strangled just like Pris?”
    “Yes. Apparently the idea was to get a key to Miss Eads’s apartment, since there was a key in the maid’s bag and the bag was taken. Were they to make up the new board of directors, those five women?”
    “Yes.”
    “But you told her you wouldn’t go to the meeting?”
    Mrs. Jaffee’s hands were fists again, but not as tight as before. “And I told her I wouldn’t be a director either. I didn’t want to get mixed up in it in any way at all. I didn’t want to have anything whatever to do with it. She said I seemed to be perfectly willing to accept the dividend checks, and I said certainly I was and I hoped they would keep coming forever, and they probably wouldn’t if I started butting in. I told her I hoped her new arrangement, the board of directors and the president, would work all right, but if it didn’t there was nothing I could do about it.”
    “Had she asked you before about coming to a stockholders’ meeting?”
    “No, that was the first time. I hadn’t seen her for more than a year. She phoned and came to see me when she heard about Dick’s—my husband’s—death.”
    “I thought she was your closest friend.”
    “Oh, that was a long time ago.”
    “How long?”
    She eyed me. “I’m not enjoying this a bit.”
    “I know you’re not.”
    “It’s not doing anyone any good either.”
    “It might. However. I figure I’ve got a dollar’s worth, so I’ll settle for two bucks if you insist.”
    She turned her head and called, “Olga!” In a moment the Valkyrie came marching in, by no means silently. Mrs. Jaffee asked her if there was any coffee left, and she said there was and was requested to bring some. She went and soon was back with the order, this time on a tray without being told. Mrs. Jaffee wriggled to the edge of the divan, poured, and sipped.
    “I can tell you how old I was,” she said, “when I first met Pris.”
    I said I would appreciate it very much.
    She sipped more coffee. “I was four years old. Pris was about two weeks. My father was in her father’s business, and the families were friends. Of course, with children four years is a big difference, but we liked each other all along, and when Pris’s mother died, and soon afterward her father, and Pris went to live with the Helmars, she and I got to be like sisters. We were apart a lot, since we went to different schools, and I graduated from college the year she started, but we wrote to each other—we must have written a thousand letters back and forth. Do you know about her leaving college and setting up a menage in the Village?”
    I said I did.
    “That was when we were closest. My father had died then, and my mother long before, and I practically lived with Pris, though I had a little place of my own. The trouble with Pris is she has too much money.”
    “Was and had,” I corrected.
    “Oh. Yes. Her income was enormous. After a few months of the Village all of a sudden she was off, and doyou know what her excuse was? Her maid—that was Margaret—she had to take Margaret to New Orleans to see her sick mother! Did you ever hear anything to beat it? Off she went, leaving me to close up the place in the Village, We were still friends all right; she wrote me from New Orleans raving about it, and the first thing I knew, here came a letter saying that she had found her prince and married him, and they were off for Peru, where he had an option on the Andes Mountains, or approximately that.”
    Mrs. Jaffee finished the coffee, put the cup and saucer down on the tray, and wriggled back until she was against the cushions. “That,” she said, “was the last letter I ever got from Pris. The very last. Maybe I still have it—I remember she enclosed a picture of him. I wondered why