Rex Stout
REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and as a member of several national committees. After the war, he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. A month before his death, he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.
The Rex Stout Library
Fer-de-Lance
The League of Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
The Red Box
Too Many Cooks
Some Buried Caesar
Over My Dead Body
Where There’s a Will
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Silent Speaker
Too Many Women
And Be a Villain
The Second Confession
Trouble in Triplicate
In the Best Families
Three Doors to Death
Murder by the Book
Curtains for Three
Prisoner’s Base
Triple Jeopardy
The Golden Spiders
The Black Mountain
Three Men Out
Before Midnight
Might As Well Be Dead
Three Witnesses
If Death Ever Slept
Three for the Chair
Champagne for One
And Four to Go
Plot It Yourself
Too Many Clients
Three at Wolfe’s Door
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Homicide Trinity
The Mother Hunt
A Right to Die
Trio for Blunt Instruments
The Doorbell Rang
Death of a Doxy
The Father Hunt
Death of a Dude
Please Pass the Guilt
A Family Affair
Death Times Three
The Hand in the Glove
Double for Death
Bad for Business
The Broken Vase
The Sound of Murder
Red Threads
The Mountain Cat Murders
Introduction
Mysteries are a mind game. Lovers of the form are drawn to the puzzle. Who done it and why? Will good triumph over evil and how? In the pulse-pounding race to the solution, will the writer or the reader cross the finish line first?
In this particular sport, the most important muscles are the theoretical ones between the participants’ ears. Intellect is everything. A canny detective armed with gobs of gray matter will beat out the Uzi-wielding bad guy every time.
Which partly explains the enduring appeal of Nero Wolfe.
Wolfe is the large lump of calm at the center of the storm’s eye in Rex Stout’s eponymous mystery series. Evil doesn’t move Nero Wolfe. Nothing, short of a good meal or a serious beer shortage, could. This supersleuth is a supersloth, so unfit and lazy he lacks the steam to lean over and retrieve a weighty retainer check from his desk.
For that and other onerous physical chores, he has Archie Goodwin, his fleet-footed, lighthearted, adventurous assistant. While Archie does all necessary leg-work and Fritz, Wolfe’s household retainer, attends to the master’s ravenous appetites, Wolfe’s sole responsibility is to sit back and revel in the whirring of his keen, insightful mind.
At the critical moment, the cylinders are guaranteed to click into perfect alignment, allowing Wolfe to finger the suspect from the comfort of his favorite chair in his office in his elegant brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street.
Of course, the moment must conform to the detective’s unyielding schedule. During set mealtimes and the four hours each day Wolfe spends tending his ten thousand orchids, murder and mayhem simply have to wait.
And they do.
In this respect Nero Wolfe is sort of a porky two-legged Club Med: an antidote for the strident intrusiveness and chaos of civilization.
Reality for most of us is ringing phones, boisterous kids, mountains of bills, and demanding bosses. Most of our existences are liberally sprinkled with dark dreams and rude awakenings. Our paths are marred by potholes and sudden detours. Even when things feel settled, we face constant reminders that cataclysmic change can occur at any moment. Much of today’s news is a litany of tragic accidents, natural disasters, and unthinkable violence. Life, I tell my sons, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
That uncertainty invades most contemporary novels of mystery and suspense, often driving the narrative (sometimes off the road). Evil explodes on the fictional scene with all the subtlety of Howard Stern or Madonna. The hapless protagonist is derailed like a sabotaged train. Amateur sleuths spring into frantic action. Law-enforcement professionals haul out their full bags of high-and low-tech forensic tricks and pursue the bad guys like a stampede of crazed buffalo.
Pyrotechnics can dazzle. Car chases and literal cliffhangers do raise the blood pressure and squeeze out the gasps. But the reader manipulated by such shameless Hollywood devices is being distracted from the heart and soul of the mystery form: the puzzle.
Wolfe’s world, on the other hand, is refined, prescribed, predictable. Even when crime presses its noisome finger at his doorbell, Nero Wolfe remains in perfect, unflinching control.
Rex Stout recognized that the smallest detail can speak volumes. He relied solely on intricate plot twists and dazzlingly quiet feats of detection. He had no need or desire to distract his readers from the story’s central strand.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Curtains for Three, a trio of novelettes first published in 1950. Unsolved crimes are delivered handily to the detective’s door. Witnesses and likely perpetrators present themselves and compliantly await Wolfe’s audience. In one case the murder conveniently occurs in his office.
If you think that sounds dull, think again. The seventy-three Nero Wolfe mysteries have intrigued and entertained millions of readers and inspired countless writers to tackle the form. Rex Stout has become a virtual synonym for the term classic mystery. Mention West Thirty-fifth Street to a mystery fan and the response is sure to be a look of instant recognition and a smile.
If
Rex Stout and his stout detective have become a reading addiction, you have plenty of company. If this is your first experience in puzzle solving with the great Nero Wolfe, prepare to settle in and savor. You have plenty of tasty treats yet to enjoy.
—Judith Kelman
Contents
The Gun with Wings
Bullet for One
Disguise for Murder
The Gun
with Wings
I
The young woman took a pink piece of paper from her handbag, got up from the red leather chair, put the paper on Nero Wolfe’s desk, and sat down again. Feeling it my duty to keep myself informed and also to save Wolfe the exertion of leaning forward and reaching so far, I arose and crossed to hand the paper to him after a glance at it. It was a check for five thousand dollars, dated that day, August fourteenth, made out to him, and signed Margaret Mion. He gave a look and dropped it back on the desk.
“I thought,” she said, “perhaps that would be the best way to start the conversation.”
In my chair at my desk, taking her in, I was readjusting my attitude. When early that Sunday afternoon, she had phoned for an appointment, I had dug up a vague recollection of a picture of her in the paper some months back, and had decided it would be no treat to meet her, but now I was hedging. Her appeal wasn’t what she had, which was only so-so, but what she did with it. I don’t mean tricks. Her mouth wasn’t attractive even when she smiled, but the smile was. Her eyes were just a pair of brown eyes, nothing at all sensational, but it was a pleasure to watch them move around, from Wolfe to me to the man who had come with her, seated off to her left. I guessed she had maybe three years to go to reach thirty.
“Don’t you think,” the man asked her, “we should get some questions answered first?”
His tone was strained and a little harsh, and his face matched it. He was worried and didn’t care who knew it. With his deep-set gray eyes and well-fitted jaw he might on a happier day have passed for a leader of men, but not as he now sat. Something was eating him. When Mrs. Mion had introduced him as Mr. Frederick Weppler I had recognized the name of the music critic of the Gazette, but I couldn’t remember whether he had been mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the event that had caused the publication of Mrs. Mion’s picture.
She shook her head at him, not arbitrarily. “It wouldn’t help, Fred, really. We’ll just have to tell it and see what he says.” She smiled at Wolfe—or maybe it wasn’t actually a smile, but just her way of handling her lips. “Mr. Weppler wasn’t quite sure we should come to see you, and I had to persuade him. Men are more cautious than women, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Wolfe agreed, and added, “Thank heaven.”
She nodded. “I suppose so.” She gestured. “I brought that check with me to show that we really mean it. We’re in trouble and we want you to get us out. We want to get married and we can’t. That is—if I should just speak for myself—I want to marry him.” She looked at Weppler, and this time it was unquestionably a smile. “Do you want to marry me, Fred?”
“Yes,” he muttered. Then he suddenly jerked his chin up and looked defiantly at Wolfe. “You understand this is embarrassing, don’t you? It’s none of your business, but we’ve come to get your help. I’m thirty-four years old, and this is the first time I’ve ever been—” He stopped. In a moment he said stiffly, “I am in love with Mrs. Mion and I want to marry her more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.” His eyes went to his love and he murmured a plea. “Peggy!”
Wolfe grunted. “I accept that as proven. You both want to get married. Why don’t you?”
“Because we can’t,” Peggy said. “We simply can’t. It’s on account—you may remember reading about my husband’s death in April, four months ago? Alberto Mion, the opera singer?”
“Vaguely. You’d better refresh my memory.”
“Well, he died—he killed himself.” There was no sign of a smile now. “Fred—Mr. Weppler and I found him. It was seven o’clock, a Tuesday evening in April, at our apartment on East End Avenue. Just that afternoon Fred and I had found out that we loved each other, and—”
“Peggy!” Weppler called sharply.
Her eyes darted to him and back to Wolfe. “Perhaps I should ask you, Mr. Wolfe. He thinks we should tell you just enough so you understand the problem, and I think you can’t understand it unless we tell you everything. What do you think?”
“I can’t say until I hear it. Go ahead. If I have questions, we’ll see.”
She nodded. “I imagine you’ll have plenty of questions. Have you ever been in love but would have died rather than let anyone see it?”
“Never,” Wolfe said emphatically. I kept my face straight.
“Well, I was, and I admit it. But no one knew it, not even him. Did you, Fred?”
“I did not.” Weppler was emphatic too.
“Until that afternoon,” Peggy told Wolfe. “He was at the apartment for lunch, and it happened right after lunch. The others had left, and all of a sudden we were looking at each other, and then he spoke or I did, I don’t know which.” She looked at Weppler imploringly. “I know you think this is embarrassing, Fred, but if he doesn’t know what it was like he won’t understand why you went upstairs to see Alberto.”
“Does he have to?” Weppler demanded.
“Of course he does.” She returned to Wolfe. “I suppose I can’t make you see what it was like. We were completely—well, we were in love, that’s all, and I guess we had been for quite a while without saying it, and that made it all the more—more overwhelming. Fred wanted to see my husband right away, to tell him about it and decide what we could do, and I said all right, so he went upstairs—”
“Upstairs?”
“Yes, it’s a duplex, and upstairs was my husband’s soundproofed studio, where he practiced. So he went—”
“Please, Peggy,” Weppler interrupted her. His eyes went to Wolfe. “You should have it firsthand. I went up to tell Mion that I loved his wife, and she loved me and not him, and to ask him to be civilized about it. Getting a divorce has come to be regarded as fairly civilized, but he didn’t see it that way. He was anything but civilized. He wasn’t violent, but he was damned mean. After some of that I got afraid I might do to him what Gif James had done, and I left. I didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Mion while I was in that state of mind, so I left the studio by the door to the upper hall and took the elevator there.”
He stopped.
“And?” Wolfe prodded him.
“I walked it off. I walked across to the park, and after a while I had calmed down and I phoned Mrs. Mion, and she met me in the park. I told her what Mion’s attitude was, and I asked her to leave him and come with me. She wouldn’t do that.” Weppler paused, and then went on, “There are two complications you ought to have if you’re to have everything.”
“If they’re relevant, yes.”
“They’re relevant all right. First, Mrs. Mion had and has money of her own. That was an added attraction for Mion. It wasn’t for me. I’m just telling you.”
“Thank you. And the second?”
“The second was Mrs. Mion’s reason for not leaving Mion immediately. I suppose you know he had been the top tenor at the Met for five or six years, and his voice was gone—temporarily. Gifford James, the baritone, had hit him on the neck with his fist and hurt his larynx—that was early in March—and Mion couldn’t finish the season. It had been operated, but his voice hadn’t come back, and naturally he was glum, and Mrs. Mion wouldn’t leave him under those circumstances. I tried to persuade her to, but she wouldn’t. I wasn’t anything like normal that day, on account of what had happened to me for the first time in my life, and on account of what Mion had said to me, so I wasn’t reasonable and I left her in the park and went downtown to a bar and started drinking. A lot of time went by and I had quite a few, but I wasn’t pickled. Along toward seven o’clock I decided I had to see her again and carry her off so she wouldn’t spend another night there.
That mood took me back to East End Avenue and up to the twelfth floor, and then I stood there in the hall a while, perhaps ten minutes, before my finger went to the pushbutton. Finally I rang, and the maid let me in and went for Mrs. Mion, but I had lost my nerve or something. All I did was suggest that we should have a talk with Mion together. She agreed, and we went upstairs and—”
“Using the elevator?”
“No, the stairs inside the apartment. We entered the studio. Mion was on the floor. We went over to him. There was a big hole through the top of his head. He was dead. I led Mrs. Mion out, made her come, and on the stairs—they’re too narrow to go two abreast—she fell and rolled halfway down. I carried her to her room and put her on her bed, and I started for the living room, for the phone there, when I thought of something to do first. I went out and took the elevator to the ground floor, got the doorman and elevator man together, and asked them who had been taken up to the Mion apartment, either the twelfth floor or the thirteenth, that afternoon. I said they must be damn sure not to skip anybody. They gave me the names and I wrote them down. Then I went back up to the apartment and phoned the police. After I did that it struck me that a layman isn’t supposed to decide if a man is dead, so I phoned Dr. Lloyd, who has an apartment there in the building. He came at once, and I took him up to the studio. We hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the first policeman came, and of course—”
“If you please,” Wolfe put in crossly. “Everything is sometimes too much. You haven’t even hinted at the trouble you’re in.”
“I’ll get to it—”
“But faster, I hope, if I help. My memory has been jogged. The doctor and the police pronounced him dead. The muzzle of the revolver had been thrust into his mouth, and the emerging bullet had torn out a piece of his skull. The revolver, found lying on the floor beside him, belonged to him and was kept there in the studio. There was no sign of any struggle and no mark of any other injury on him. The loss of his voice was an excellent motive for suicide. Therefore, after a routine investigation, giving due weight to the difficulty of sticking the barrel of a loaded revolver into a man’s mouth without arousing him to protest, it was recorded as suicide. Isn’t that correct?”
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