Plot It Yourself Read Online Free PDF Page A

This guy was dead against it. He claimed you should plot it yourself. I was thinking that a detective working on a case can't plot it himself. It has already been plotted. Look at this. This is now a totally different animal. One thing: with all those similarities, why hasn't anyone noticed it?'
    'Probably because no one has ever had the three manuscripts together and compared them. Until that committee was formed they were in different hands.'
    I returned to my desk and sat. 'Okay. Congratulations. So I'll have to rearrange my mind. I suppose you already have.'
    'No. I hadn't even arranged it.'
    I glanced up at the clock. 'Quarter past eleven. Harvey might be home. Do you want to swagger?'
    'No. I'm tired. I want to sleep. There's no hurry.' He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.
    Sometimes he self-propels his seventh of a ton up one flight of stairs to his room, but that night he used the elevator. When he had gone I took the three stories to my desk and spent half an hour studying paragraphing, and though Lily Rowan told me once that I am about as subtle as a sledge hammer-at a moment when her diction was not determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness-I saw what Wolfe meant. I put the stories in the safe and then considered the problem of the table-load of paper. The statuses and functions of the inhabitants of that old brownstone on West 35th Street are clearly understood. Wolfe is the owner and the commandant. Fritz Brenner is the chef and housekeeper and is responsible for the condition of the castle with the exception of the plant rooms, the office, and my bedroom. Theodore Horstmann is the orchid-tender, with no responsibilities or business on the lower floors. He eats in the kitchen with Fritz. I eat in the dining room with Wolfe, except when we are not speaking; then I join Fritz and Theodore in the kitchen, or get invited somewhere, or take a friend to a restaurant, or go to Bert's diner around the corner on Tenth Avenue and eat beans. My status and function are whatever a given situation calls for, and the question who decides what it calls for is what occasionally creates an atmosphere in which Wolfe and I are not speaking. The next sentence is to be, 'But the table-load of paper, being in the office, was clearly up to me,' and I have to decide whether to put it here or start a new paragraph with it. You see how subtle it is. Paragraph it yourself.
    I stood surveying the stacks of paper. Scattered through them were assorted items of information about the four claimants. Assuming that one of them had written the stories, which was the most likely candidate'I ran over them in my mind.
    Alice Porter. In her middle thirties, unmarried. No physical description, but a photograph. Fleshy, say 150 pounds. Round face, small nose, eyes too close together. In 1955 had lived at Collander House on West 82nd Street, a hive-home for girls and women who couldn't afford anything fancy. Was now living near Carmel, sixty miles north of New York, in a cottage which she had presumably bought with some of the loot she had pried out of Ellen Sturdevant. Between 1949 and 1955 had had fourteen stories for children published in magazines, and one children's book. The Moth That Ate Peanuts, published by Best and Green in 1954, not a success. Joined the National Association of Authors and Dramatists in 1951, was dropped for nonpayment of dues in 1954, rejoined in 1956.
    Simon Jacobs. Description and photograph. Sixty-two years old, thin and scrawny, hair like Mark Twain's (that item from Title House's lawyer), stuttered. Married in 1948, therefore at the age of fifty-one. In 1956 was living with his wife and three children in a tenement on West 21st Street, and was still there. Overseas with AEF in First World War, wounded twice. Wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps between 1922 and 1940, using four pen names. Was with the OWI in the Second World War, writing radio scripts in German and Polish. After