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added, “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
    “Neither do I,” Judge Arnold put in with emphasis. He smiled sarcastically.
    “Unless it’s force of habit with you, asking people where they were at the time a death by violence occurred. Why don’t you go after all of us?”
    “That’s what I intend to do,” Wolfe said imperturbably. “I would like to know why Mion decided to kill himself, because that has a bearing on the opinion I shall give his widow. I understand that two or three of you have said that he was wrought up when that conference ended, but not despondent or splenetic. I know he committed suicide; the police can’t be flummoxed on a thing like that;
    but why?”
    “I doubt,” Adele Bosley offered, “if you know how a singer - especially a great artist like Mion - how he feels when he can’t let a sound out, when he can’t even talk except in an undertone or a whisper. It’s horrible.”
    “Anyway, you never knew with him,” Rupert Grove contributed. “In rehearsal I’ve heard him do an aria like an angel and then rush out weeping because he thought he had slurred a release. One minute he was up in the sky and the next he was under a rug.”
    Wolfe grunted. “Nevertheless, anything said to him by anyone during the two hours preceding his suicide is pertinent to this inquiry, to establish Mrs.
    Mion’s moral position. I want to know where you people were that day, after the conference up to seven o’clock, and what you did.”
    “My God!” Judge Arnold threw up his hands. The hands came down again. “All right, it’s getting late. As Miss Bosley told you, my client and I left Mion’s studio together. We went to the Churchill bar and drank and talked. A little later Miss James joined us, stayed long enough for a drink, I suppose half an hour, and left. Mr. James and I remained together until after seven. During that time neither of us communicated with Mion, nor arranged for anyone else to. I believe that covers it?”
    “Thank you,” Wolfe said politely. “You corroborate, of course, Mr. James?”
    “I do,” the baritone said gruffly. “This is a lot of goddam nonsense.”
    “It does begin to sound like it,” Wolfe conceded. “Dr. Lloyd'If you don’t mind?”
    He hadn’t better, since he had been mellowed by four ample helpings of our best bourbon, and he didn’t. “Not at all,” he said cooperatively. “I made calls on five patients, two on upper Fifth Avenue, one in the East Sixties, and two at the hospital. I got home a little after six and had just finished dressing after taking a bath when Fred Weppler phoned me about Mion. Of course I went at once.”
    “You hadn’t seen Mion or phoned him?”
    “Not since I left after the conference. Perhaps I should have, but I had no idea - I’m not a psychiatrist, but I was his doctor.”
    “He was mercurial, was he?”
    “Yes, he was.” Lloyd pursed his lips. “Of course, that’s not a medical term.”
    “Far from it,” Wolfe agreed. He shifted his gaze. “Mr. Grove, I don’t have to ask you if you phoned Mion, since it is on record that you did. Around five o’clock?”
    Rupert the Fat had his head tilted again. Apparently that was his favorite pose for conversing. He corrected Wolfe. “It was after five. More like a quarter past.”
    “Where did you phone from?”
    “The Harvard Club.”
    I thought, I’ll be damned, it takes all kinds to make a Harvard Club.
    “What was said?”
    “Not much.” Grove’s lips twisted. “It’s none of your damn business, you know,
    but the others have obliged, and I’ll string along. I had forgotten to ask him if he would endorse a certain product for a thousand dollars, and the agency wanted an answer. We talked less than five minutes. First he said he wouldn’t and then he said he would. That was all.”
    “Did he sound like a man getting ready to kill himself?”
    “Not the slightest. He was glum, but naturally, since he couldn’t sing and couldn’t