Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31

by Champagne for One

  “Did you have in mind something in particular that Miss Usher and Mrs. Robilotti said to each other?”

  “Oh, no. I never heard Faith say anything to her at all. Neither did I. She thought we were harlots.”

  “Did she use that word? Did she call you harlots?”

  “Of course not. She tried to be nice but didn’t know how. One of the girls said that one day when she had been there, she said that she thought we were harlots.”

  “Well.” Wolfe took in air, in and clear down to his middle, and let it out again. “I thank you again, ladies, for coming.” He pushed his chair back and rose. “We seem to have made little progress, but at least I have seen and talked with you, and I know where to reach you if the occasion arises.”

  “One thing I don’t see,” Rose Tuttle said as she left her chair. “Mr. Goodwin said he wasn’t there as a detective, but he is a detective, and I had told him about Faith having the poison, and I should think he ought to know exactly what happened. I didn’t think anyone could commit a murder with a detective right there.”

  A very superficial and half-baked way to look at it, I thought, as I got up to escort the ladies out.

  Chapter 9

  Paul Schuster, the promising young corporation lawyer with the thin nose and quick dark eyes, sat in the red leather chair at a quarter past eleven Friday morning, with the eyes focused on Wolfe. “We do not claim,” he said, “to have evidence that you have done anything that is actionable. It should be clearly understood that we are not presenting a threat. But it is a fact that we are being injured, and if you are responsible for the injury it may become a question of law.”

  Wolfe moved his head to take the others in—Cecil Grantham, Beverly Kent, and Edwin Laidlaw, lined up on yellow chairs—and to include them. “I am not aware,” he said dryly, “of having inflicted an injury on anyone.”

  Of course that wasn’t true. What he meant was that he hadn’t inflicted the injury he was trying to inflict. Forty-eight hours had passed since Laidlaw had written his check for twenty thousand dollars and put it on Wolfe’s desk, and we hadn’t earned a dime of it, and the prospect of ever earning it didn’t look a bit brighter. Dinky Byne’s cover, if he had anything to cover, was intact. The three unmarried mothers had supplied no crack to start a wedge. Orrie Cather, having delivered them at the office for consultation, had been given another assignment, and had come Thursday evening after dinner, with Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin, to report; and all it had added up to was an assortment of blanks. If anyone had had any kind of connection with Faith Usher, it had been buried good and deep, and the trio had been told to keep digging.

  When, a little after ten Friday morning, Paul Schuster had phoned to say that he and Grantham and Laidlaw and Kent wanted to see Wolfe, and the sooner the better, I had broken two of the standing rules: that I make no appointments without checking with Wolfe, and that I disturb him in the plant rooms only for emergencies. I had told Schuster to be there at eleven, and I had buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to tell Wolfe that company was coming. When he growled I told him that I had looked up “emergency” in the dictionary, and it meant an unforeseen combination of circumstances which calls for immediate action, and if he wanted to argue either with the dictionary or with me I was willing to go upstairs and have it out. He had hung up on me.

  And was now telling Schuster that he was not aware of having inflicted an injury on anyone.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cecil Grantham said.

  “Facts are facts,” Beverly Kent muttered. Unquestionably a diplomatic way of putting it, suitable for a diplomat. When he got a little higher up the ladder he might refine it by making it “A fact is a fact is a fact.”

  “Do you deny,” Schuster demanded, “that we owe it to Goodwin that we are being embarrassed and harassed by a homicide investigation? And he is your agent, employed by you. No doubt you know the legal axiom, respondeat superior. Isn’t that an injury?”

  “Not only that,” Cecil charged, “but he goes up to Grantham House, sticking his nose in. And yesterday a man tried to pump my mother’s butler, and he had no credentials, and I want to know if you sent him. And another man with no credentials is asking questions about me among my friends, and I want to know if you sent him.”

  “To me,” Beverly Kent stated, “the most serious aspect is the scope of the police inquiry. My work on our Mission to the United Nations is in a sensitive field, very sensitive, and already I have been definitely injured. Merely to have been present when a sensational event occurred, the suicide of that young woman, would have been unfortunate. To be involved in an extended police inquiry, a murder investigation, could be disastrous for me. If in addition to that you are sending your private agents among my friends and associates to inquire about me, that is adding insult to injury. I have no information of that, as yet. But you have, Cece?”

  Cecil nodded. “I sure have.”

  “So have I,” Schuster said.

  “Have you, Ed?”

  Laidlaw cleared his throat. “No direct information, no. Nothing explicit. But I have reason to suspect it.”

  He handled it pretty well, I thought. Naturally he had to be with them, since if he had refused to join in the attack they would have wondered why, but he wanted Wolfe to understand that he was still his client.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Schuster told Wolfe. “Do you deny that we owe this harassment to Goodwin, and therefore to you, since he is your agent?”

  “No,” Wolfe said. “But you owe it to me, through Mr. Goodwin, only secondarily. Primarily you owe it to the man or woman who murdered Faith Usher. So it’s quite possible that one of you owes it to himself.”

  “I knew it,” Cecil declared. “I told you, Paul.”

  Schuster ignored him. “As I said,” he told Wolfe, “this may become a question of law.”

  “I expect it to, Mr. Schuster. A murder trial is commonly regarded as a matter of law.” Wolfe leaned forward, flattened his palms on the desk, and sharpened his tone. “Gentlemen. Let’s get to the point, if there is one. What are you here for? Not, I suppose, merely to grumble at me. To buy me off? To bully me? To dispute my ground? What are you after?”

  “Goddammit,” Cecil demanded, “what are you after? That’s the point! What are you trying to pull? Why did you send—”

  “Shut up, Cece,” Beverly Kent ordered him, not diplomatic at all. “Let Paul tell him.”

  The lawyer did so. “Your insinuation,” Schuster said, “that we have entered into a conspiracy to buy you off is totally unwarranted. Or to bully you. We came because we feel, with reason, that our rights of privacy are being violated without provocation or just cause, and that you are responsible. We doubt if you can justify that responsibility, but we thought you should have a chance to do so before we consider what steps may be taken legally in the matter.”

  “Pfui,” Wolfe said.

  “An expression of contempt is hardly an adequate justification, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “I didn’t intend it to be, sir.” Wolfe leaned back and clasped his fingers at the apex of his central mound. “This is futile, gentlemen, both for you and for me. Neither of us can possibly be gratified. You want a stop put to your involvement in a murder inquiry, and my concern is to involve you as deeply as possible—the innocent along with—”

  “Why?” Schuster demanded. “Why are you concerned?”

  “Because Mr. Goodwin’s professional reputation and competence have been challenged, and by extension my own. You invoked respondeat superior; I will not only answer, I will act. That the innocent must be involved along with the guilty is regrettable but unavoidable. So you can’t get what you want, but no more can I. What I want is a path to a fact. I want to know if one of you has buried in his past a fact that will account for his resort to murder to get rid of Faith Usher, and if so, which. Manifestly you are not going to sit here and submit to a day-long inquisition by me, and even if you did, the likelihood that one of you wo
uld betray the existence of such a fact is minute. So, as I say, this is futile both for you and for me. I wish you good day only as a matter of form.”

  But it wasn’t quite that simple. They had come for a showdown, and they weren’t going to be bowed out with a “good day” as a matter of form—at least, three of them weren’t. They got pretty well worked up before they left. Schuster forgot all about saying that they hadn’t come to present a threat. Kent went far beyond the bounds of what I would call diplomacy. Cecil Grantham blew his top, at one point even pounding the top of Wolfe’s desk with his fist. I was on my feet, to be handy in case one of them lost control and picked up a chair to throw but my attention was mainly on our client. He was out of luck. For the sake of appearance he sort of tried to join in, but his heart wasn’t in it, and all he could manage was a mumble now and then. He didn’t leave his chair until Cecil headed for the door, followed by Kent, and then, not wanting to be the last one out, he jumped up and went. I stepped to the hall to see that no one took my new hat in the excitement, went and tried the door after they were out, and returned to the office.

  I expected to see Wolfe leaning back with his eyes closed, but no. He was sitting up straight, glaring at space. He transferred the glare to me.

  “This is grotesque,” he growled.

  “It certainly is,” I agreed warmly. “Four of the suspects come to see you uninvited, all set for a good long heart-to-heart talk, and what do they get? Bounced. The trouble is, one of them was our client, and he may think we’re loafing on the job.”

  “Bah. When the men phone, tell them to come in at three. No. At two-thirty. No. At two o’clock. We’ll have lunch early. I’ll tell Fritz.” He got up and marched out.

  I felt uplifted. That he was calling the men in for new instructions was promising. That he had changed it from three o’clock, when his lunch would have been settled, to two-thirty, when digestion would have barely started, was impressive. That he had advanced it again, to two, with an early lunch, was inspiring. And then to go to tell Fritz instead of ringing for him—all hell was popping.

  Chapter 10

  How many times,” Wolfe asked, “have you heard me confess that I am a witling?”

  Fred Durkin grinned. A joke was a joke. Orrie Cather smiled. He was even handsomer when he smiled, but not necessarily braver. Saul Panzer said, “Three times when you meant it, and twice when you didn’t.”

  “You never disappoint me, Saul.” Wolfe was doing his best to be sociable. He had just crossed the hall from the dining room. With Fred and Orrie he wouldn’t have strained himself, but Saul had his high regard. “This, then,” he said, “makes four times that I have meant it and this time my fault was so egregious that I made myself pay for it. The only civilized way to spend the hour after lunch is with a book, but I have just swallowed my last bite of cheese cake, and here I am working. You must bear with me. I am paying a deserved penalty.”

  “Maybe it’s our fault too,” Saul suggested. “We had an order and we didn’t fill it.”

  “No,” Wolfe said emphatically. “I can’t grab for the straw of your charity. I am an ass. If any share of the fault is yours it lies in this, that when I explained the situation to you Wednesday evening and gave you your assignments none of you reminded me of my maxim that nothing is to be expected of tagging the footsteps of the police. That’s what you’ve been doing, at my direction, and it was folly. There are scores of them, and only three of you. You have been merely looking under stones that they have already turned. I am an ass.”

  “Maybe there’s no other stones to try,” Orrie observed.

  “Of course there are. There always are.” Wolfe took time to breathe. More oxygen was always needed after a meal unless he relaxed with a book. “I have an excuse, naturally, that one approach was closed to my ingenuity. By Mr. Cramer’s account, and Archie didn’t challenge it, no one could possibly have poisoned that glass of champagne with any assurance that it would get to Miss Usher. I could have tackled that problem only by a minute examination of everyone who was there, and most of them were not available to me. Sooner or later it must be solved, but only after disclosure of a motive. That was the only feasible approach open to me, to find the motive, and you know what I did. I sent you men to flounder around on ground that the police had already covered, or were covering. Pfui.”

  “I saw four people,” Fred protested, “that the cops hadn’t got to.”

  “And learned?”

  “Well—nothing.”

  Wolfe nodded. “So. The quarry, as I told you Wednesday evening, was evidence of some significant association of one of those people with Miss Usher. That was a legitimate line of inquiry, but it was precisely the one the police were following, and I offer my apologies. We shall now try another line, where you will at least be on fresh ground. I want to see Faith Usher’s mother. You are to find her and bring her.”

  Fred and Orrie pulled out their notebooks. Saul had one but rarely used it. The one inside his skull was usually all he needed.

  “You won’t need notes,” Wolfe said. “There is nothing to note except the bare fact that Miss Usher’s mother is alive and must be somewhere. This may lead nowhere, but it is not a resort to desperation. Whatever circumstance in Miss Usher’s life resulted in her death, she must have been emotionally involved, and I have been apprised of only two phenomena which importantly engaged her emotions. One was her experience with the man who begot her infant. A talk with him might be fruitful, but if he can be found the police will find him; of course they’re trying to. The other was her relationship with her mother. Mrs. Irwin, of Grantham House, told Archie that she had formed the conclusion, from talking with Miss Usher, that her mother was alive and that she hated her. And yesterday Miss Helen Yarmis, with whom Miss Usher shared an apartment the last seven months of her life, told me that Miss Usher had come home from work one day with a headache and had said that she had encountered her mother on the street and there had been a scene, and she had had to run to get away from her; and that she wished her mother was dead. Miss Yarmis’s choice of words.”

  Fred, writing in his notebook, looked up. “Does she spell Irwin with an E or an I?”

  Wolfe always tried to be patient with Fred, but there was a limit. “As you prefer,” he said. “Why spell it at all? I’ve told you all she said that is relevant, and all that I know. I will add that I doubt if either Mrs. Irwin or Miss Yarmis mentioned Miss Usher’s mother to the police, so in looking for her you shouldn’t be jostled.”

  “Is her name Usher?” Orrie asked. Of course Saul wouldn’t have asked it, and neither would Fred.

  “You should learn to listen, Orrie,” Wolfe told him. “I said that’s all I know. And no more is to be expected from either Mrs. Irwin or Miss Yarmis. They know no more.” His eyes went to Saul. “You will direct the search, using Fred and Orrie as occasions arise.”

  “Do we keep covered?” Saul asked.

  “Preferably, yes. But don’t preserve your cover at the cost of missing your mark.”

  “I took a look,” I said, “at the Manhattan phone book when I got back from Grantham House yesterday. A dozen Ushers are listed. Of course she doesn’t have to be named Usher, and she doesn’t have to live in Manhattan, and she doesn’t have to have a phone. It wouldn’t take Fred and Orrie long to check the dozen. I can call Lon Cohen at the Gazette. He might have gone after the mother for an exclusive and a picture.”

  “Sure,” Saul agreed. “If it weren’t for cover my first stop would be the morgue. Even if her daughter hated her, the mother may have claimed the body. But they know me there, and Fred and Orrie too, and of course they know Archie.”

  It was decided, by Wolfe naturally, that that risk should be taken only after other tries had failed, and that calling Lon Cohen should obviously come first, and I dialed and got him. It was a little complicated. He had rung me a couple of times to try to talk me into the eye-witness story, and now my calling to ask if he had dug up Faith Usher’s mother a
roused all his professional instincts. Was Wolfe working on the case, and if so, on behalf of whom? Had someone made me a better offer for a story, and did I want the mother so I could put her in, and who had offered me how much? I had to spread the salve thick, and assure him that I wouldn’t dream of letting anyone but the Gazette get my by-line, and promise that if and when we had anything fit for publication he would get it, before he would answer my simple question.

  I hung up and swiveled to report. “You can skip the morgue. A woman went there Wednesday afternoon to claim the body. Name, Marjorie Betz. B-E-T-Z. Address, Eight-twelve West Eighty-seventh Street, Manhattan. She had a letter signed by Elaine Usher, mother of Faith Usher, same address. By her instructions the body was delivered this morning to the Metropolitan Crematory on Thirty-ninth Street. A Gazette man has seen Marjorie Betz, but she clammed up and is staying clammed. She says Elaine Usher went somewhere Wednesday night and she doesn’t know where she is. The Gazette hasn’t been able to find her, and Lon thinks nobody else has. End of chapter.”

  “Fine,” Saul said. “Nobody skips for nothing.”

  “Find her,” Wolfe ordered. “Bring her. Use any inducement that seems likely to—”

  The phone rang, and I swiveled and got it.

  “Nero Wolfe’s office, Arch—”

  “Goodwin?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Laidlaw. I’ve got to see Wolfe. Quick.”

  “He’s here. Come ahead.”

  “I’m afraid to. I just left the District Attorney’s office and got a taxi, and I’m being followed. I was on my way to see Wolfe about what happened at the District Attorney’s office but now I can’t because they mustn’t know I’m running to Wolfe. What do I do?”

  “Any one of a dozen things. Shaking a tail is a cinch, but of course you haven’t had any practice. Where are you?”

  “In a booth in a drugstore on Seventh Avenue near Sixteenth Street.”