Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 34

by Too Many Clients

  “Yes. In this room. The first one that came.”

  “Did he take anything?”

  “No. He said he didn’t.”

  “I was here,” Perez said. “He didn’t.”

  “Then if you’re leaving it to us that comes first. I’ll see if I can find something, first this room and then the others. Two can do it faster than one, so will you go up and tell that man to come—no. Better not. He already knows too much for his own good. What you two ought to do is go to bed, but I suppose you won’t. Go to the kitchen and eat something. You don’t want to be here while I’m looking. I’ll have to take the bed apart. I’ll have to go through all her things.”

  “It’s no good,” Mrs. Perez said. “I know everything she had. We don’t want you to do that.”

  “Okay. Then Mr. Wolfe and I are out and the police are in. It won’t be me looking, it will be a dozen of them, and they’re very thorough, and you won’t be here. You’ll be under arrest.”

  “That don’t matter now,” Perez said. “Maybe I ought to be.” He lifted the glass, and it nearly slipped from his fingers.

  Mrs. Perez rose, went to the head of the bed, and pulled the coverlet back. “You’ll see,” she said. “Nothing.”

  An hour and a half later I had to admit she was right. I had inspected the mattress top and bottom, emptied the drawers, removing the items one by one, taken up the rug and examined every inch of the floor, removed everything from the closet and examined the walls with a flashlight, pulled the chest of drawers out and inspected the back, flipped through thirty books and a stack of magazines, removed the backing of four framed pictures—the complete routine. Nothing. I was much better acquainted with Maria than I had been when she was alive, but hadn’t found the slightest hint that she knew or cared anything about Yeager, his guests, or the top floor.

  Perez was no longer present. He had been in the way when I wanted to take up the rug, and by that time the rum had him nearly under. We had taken him to the next room and put him on the bed. Maria’s bed was back in order, and her mother was sitting on it. I was standing by the door, rubbing my palms together, frowning around.

  “I told you, nothing,” she said.

  “Yeah. I heard you.” I went to the chest and pulled out the bottom drawer.

  “Not again,” she said. “You are like my husband. Too stubborn.”

  “I wasn’t stubborn enough with these drawers.” I put it on the bed and began removing the contents. “I just looked at the bottoms underneath. I should have turned them over and tried them.”

  I put the empty drawer upside down on the floor, squatted, jiggled it up and down, and tried the edges of the bottom with the screwdriver blade of my knife. Saul Panzer had once found a valuable painting under a false bottom that had been fitted on the outside instead of the inside. This drawer didn’t have one. When I put it back on the bed Mrs. Perez came and started replacing the contents, and I went and got the next drawer.

  That was it, and I darned near missed it again. Finding nothing on the outside of the bottom, as I put the drawer back on the bed I took another look at the inside with the flashlight, and saw a tiny hole, just a pinprick, near a corner. The drawer bottoms were lined with a plastic material with a pattern, pink with red flowers, and the hole was in the center of one of the flowers. I got a safety pin from the tray on the table and stuck the point in the hole and pried, and the corner came up, but it was stiffer than any plastic would have been. After lifting it enough to get a finger under, I brought it on up and had it. The plastic had been pasted to a piece of cardboard that precisely fitted the bottom of the drawer, and underneath was a collection of objects which had been carefully arranged so there would be no bulges. Not only had Maria been intelligent, she had also been neat-handed.

  Mrs. Perez, at my elbow, said something in Spanish and moved a hand, but I blocked it. “I have a right,” she said, “my daughter.”

  “Nobody has a right,” I said. “She was hiding it from you, wasn’t she? The only right was hers, and she’s dead. You can watch, but keep your hands off.” I carried the drawer to the table and sat in the chair Perez had vacated.

  Here’s the inventory of Maria’s private cache:

  1. Five full-page advertisements of Continental Plastic Products taken from magazines.

  2. Four labels from champagne bottles, Dom Pérignon.

  3. Three tear sheets from the financial pages of the Times, the stock-exchange price list of three different dates with a pencil mark at the Continental Plastic Products entries. The closing prices of CPP were 62½, 61⅝, and 66¾.

  4. Two newspaper reproductions of photographs of Thomas G. Yeager.

  5. A newspaper reproduction of a photograph of Thomas G. Yeager, Jr., and his bride, in their wedding togs.

  6. A newspaper reproduction of a photograph of Mrs. Thomas G. Yeager, Sr., with three other women.

  7. A full-page reproduction from a picture magazine of the photograph of the National Plastics Association banquet in the Churchill ballroom, of which I had seen a print in Lon Cohen’s office Monday evening. The caption gave the names of the others on the stage with Yeager, including one of our clients, Benedict Aiken.

  8. Three reproductions of photographs of Meg Duncan, two from magazines and one from a newspaper.

  9. Thirty-one pencil sketches of women’s heads, faces, some with hats and some without. They were on 5-by-8 sheets of white paper, of which there was a pad on Maria’s table and two pads in a drawer. In the bottom left-hand corner of each sheet was a date. I am not an art expert, but they looked pretty good. From a quick run-through I guessed that there were not thirty-one different subjects; there were second and third tries of the same face, and maybe four or five. The dates went back nearly two years, and one of them was May 8, 1960. That was last Sunday. I gave the drawing a good long look. I had in my hand a promising candidate for a people’s exhibit in a murder trial. Not Meg Duncan, and not Dinah Hough. It could be Julia McGee. When I realized that I was deciding it was Julia McGee I quit looking at it. One of the brain’s most efficient departments is the one that turns possibilities into probabilities, and probabilities into facts.

  10. Nine five-dollar bills of various ages.

  Mrs. Perez had moved the other chair beside me and was on it. She had seen everything, but had said nothing. I looked at my watch: twenty minutes to six. I evened the edges of the tear sheets from the Times, folded them double, and put the other items inside the fold. The question of obstructing justice by suppressing evidence of a crime was no longer a question. My lawyer might maintain that I had assumed that that stuff wasn’t relevant to the murder of Yeager, but if he told a judge and jury that I had also assumed that it wasn’t relevant to the murder of Maria Perez, he would have to concede that I was an idiot.

  With the evidence in my hand, I stood up. “All this proves,” I told Mrs. Perez, “is that Maria had the normal curiosity of an intelligent girl and she liked to draw pictures of faces. I’m taking it along, and Mr. Wolfe will look it over. I’ll return the money to you some day, I hope soon. You’ve had a hard night and you’ve got a hard day ahead. If you have a dollar bill, please get it and give it to me. You’re hiring Mr. Wolfe and me to investigate the murder of your daughter; that’s why you’re letting me take this stuff.”

  “You were right,” she said.

  “I’ve earned no medals yet. The dollar, please?”

  “We can pay more. A hundred dollars. It doesn’t matter.”

  “One will do for now.”

  She got up and went, and soon was back with a dollar bill in her hand. She gave it to me. “My husband is asleep,” she said.

  “Good. You ought to be too. We are now your detectives. A man will come sometime today, and he’ll probably take you and your husband down to the District Attorney’s office. They won’t mention Yeager, and of course you won’t. About Maria, just tell them the truth, what you’ve already told the policeman, about her going to the movie, and you don’t know
who killed her or why. Have you been getting breakfast for the man up above?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t bother this morning. He’ll be leaving pretty soon and he won’t come back.” I offered a hand, and she took it. “Tell your husband we’re friends,” I said, and went out to the elevator.

  Emerging into the bower of carnality, I switched on the light. My mind was so occupied that the pictures might as well not have been there, and anyway there was a living picture: Fred Durkin on the eight-foot-square bed, his head on a yellow pillow, and a yellow sheet up to his chin. As the light went on he stirred and blinked, then stuck his hand under the pillow and jerked it out with a gun in it.

  “At ease,” I told him. “I could have plugged you before you touched it. We’ve got all we can use, and it’s time to go. There’s no rush; it’ll be fine if you’re out of here in half an hour. Don’t stop down below to find Mrs. Perez and thank her; they’re in trouble. Their daughter was murdered last night—not here, not in the house. Just blow.”

  He was on his feet. “What the hell is this, Archie? What am I in?”

  “You’re in three hundred bucks. I advise you to ask me no questions; I might answer them. Go home and tell your wife you’ve had a rough two days and nights and need a good rest.”

  “I want to know one thing. Am I going to get tagged?”

  “Toss a coin. I hope not. We could be lucky.”

  “Would it help if I wipe up here? Ten minutes would be it.”

  “No. If they ever get this far they won’t need fingerprints. Go home and stay put. I may be ringing you around noon. Don’t take any of the pictures.”

  I entered the elevator.

  Chapter 12

  When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock I was at my desk with the noon edition, so-called, of the Gazette. There was a picture of Maria Perez, dead, on the front page. She didn’t really rate it, since she had had absolutely no distinction but youth and beauty, but she got a break because nobody important had been killed or robbed or arrested that night.

  It was wide open. The only facts they had, leaving off the tassels, were: a) the body had been found at 12:35 a.m. by a watchman making his rounds on a North River pier in the Forties; b) she had been dead not more than three hours and probably less; c) she had been shot in the back of the head with a .32; d) she had last been seen alive by the two girl friends who had gone to the movie with her, and who said she had got up and left a little before nine o’clock and hadn’t come back; she had said nothing to them; they had supposed she was going to the rest room; and e) her father and mother refused to talk to reporters. There was no hint of any suspicion that there was any connection between her death and that of Thomas G. Yeager, whose body had been found three days earlier in a hole in the street she had lived on.

  I had reported briefly to Wolfe after his breakfast in his room, just the essentials. Now, as he sat at his desk, I handed him the Gazette. He glanced at the picture, read the story, put the paper down, and leaned back.

  “Verbatim,” he said.

  I gave him the crop, including, of course, my call on Fred. When I had finished I handed him the evidence I had got from Maria’s drawer. “One item,” I said, “might mislead you—labels from four champagne bottles. I do not and will not believe that Maria drank any of the champagne. She got the labels when her father or mother brought the bottles down to dispose of them.”

  “Who said so?”

  “I say so.”

  He grunted and began his inspection. With that sort of thing he always takes his time. He looked at the back of each item as well as the front, even the advertisements, the five-dollar bills, and the tear sheets from the Times. Finishing with them, the labels, and the photographs, he handed them to me and tackled the drawings. After running through them, five seconds for some and up to a minute for others, he stood up and began laying them out on his desk in rows. They just about covered it. I stood and watched as he shifted them around into groups, each group being presumably different sketches of the same woman. Twice I disagreed and we discussed it. We ended up with three groups with four sketches each, five groups with three sketches each, one group with two, and two with only one. Eleven different guests in two years, and it wasn’t likely that Maria had got all of them. Yeager had been a very hospitable man.

  I pointed to one of the four-sketch groups. “I can name her,” I said. “Ten to one. I have danced with her. Her husband owns a chain of restaurants and is twice her age.”

  He glared at me. “You’re being frivolous.”

  “No, sir. The name is Delancey.”

  “Pfui. Name that one.” He pointed to the two-sketch group. “One dated April fifteenth and the other May eighth. Last Sunday.”

  “I was leaving it to you. You name it.”

  “She has been in this room.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Julia McGee.”

  “Yes, sir. I wasn’t being frivolous. I wanted to see if you would spot her. If those are the dates Maria saw the subjects in the hall, not merely the dates she made these sketches, Julia McGee was there Sunday. Either she killed him or she found him dead. If he was on his feet when she arrived she wouldn’t have left before midnight, because refreshments were expected—and of course she didn’t go to take dictation. And if he was alive and she was there when the murderer came she would have got it too. So if she didn’t kill him she found him dead. By the way, to clear up a detail, I have entered the dollar Mrs. Perez gave me in the cash book as a retainer. I took it because I thought she would be more likely to hold on if she had us hired, and I assumed they are now eliminated. They didn’t kill their daughter. I am not crowing. I would rather have been wrong than be proved right by having Maria get it, even if she asked for it.”

  “That she asked for it is only conjecture.”

  “Yeah. But our theory is that she was killed by the person who killed Yeager or we haven’t got a theory, and in that case Maria must have made the contact. Suppose it was Julia McGee. She couldn’t have known there was an eye on her behind that crack as she went down the hall, or if she did she couldn’t have known whose eye it was. If she felt or suspected it, as I did, and pushed the door open and found Maria there, she wouldn’t have gone up and used the gun she had brought to shoot Yeager. So Maria must have made the contact yesterday, and she wouldn’t do that just for the hell of it, just for the pleasure of saying, ‘I saw you come in Sunday evening so I know you killed Mr. Yeager.’ She wanted to make a deal. That she asked for it may be only a conjecture, but I don’t make it because I like it. I would prefer to believe that she was as good inside as outside. Anyhow she didn’t drink that champagne.”

  Wolfe said, “Mmmmh.”

  I pointed to one of the three-sketch groups. “That’s Dinah. Mrs. Austin Hough. Maria knew how to get a likeness. She got Mrs. Delancey too.”

  “There is none of Meg Duncan.”

  “No. When she got photographs of her she didn’t need a sketch.”

  He sat down. “Get Fred. How soon can he be here?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Get him.”

  I got at my phone and dialed, and Fred answered. I told him that if he could make it here in nineteen minutes two things would be waiting for him, $315 and instructions from Wolfe, and he said both would be welcome. I turned and told Wolfe, and he said, “Get Miss McGee. I’ll speak to her.”

  That took a little longer. The trouble seemed to be, when I got the Continental Plastic Products switchboard, that Julia McGee had been Yeager’s secretary, and now that he was no longer there the operator didn’t know where Miss McGee was. I finally got her and signed to Wolfe, and he took his phone. I stayed on.

  “Miss McGee? I must see you as soon as possible. At my office.”

  “Well—” She didn’t sound enthusiastic. “I leave at five. Will six o’clock do?”

  “No, it’s urgent. As soon as you can get here.”

  “Can’t you tell
me on the phone—no, I suppose not. All right, I’ll come.”

  “Now.”

  “Yes. I’ll leave in a few minutes.”

  We hung up. Wolfe leaned back and closed his eyes. I gathered up the drawings and put them with the rest of Maria’s collection. Getting a folder from the cabinet, I marked it YEAGER and put the collection in it, decided that the safe was the proper place for something that might some day be a people’s exhibit, and took it there instead of the cabinet. When Wolfe’s eyes opened I took him a check to sign, to Fred Durkin for three hundred fifteen & 00/100 dollars. We were now out about five Cs on the Yeager operation, and we had four clients and two bucks in retainers, plus a damn good chance of ending up in the coop for obstructing justice. As I put Fred’s check on my desk the phone rang. It was Mrs. Yeager. She wanted to know when I was going to take her to see the room on 82nd Street. She also wanted to tell me that the daughter of the superintendent of that house had been murdered, and she thought Wolfe and I should look into it. I could do that when I took her to see the room, saving a trip. If you think I should have stopped her because phones have extensions and someone might have been on one, you are correct. I tried to. I finally managed without hanging up on her.

  By then Fred was there, having been admitted by Fritz. I gave him his check, and Wolfe gave him his instructions, which he took without a blink. The difference in the way he takes Wolfe and the way he takes me is not based on experience. Up in the bower, getting it only from me, he had suspected that I was perching him far out on a limb and he didn’t like it. Now, with Wolfe, there was no question of suspecting or not liking. He had got the idea somehow, long ago, that there was absolutely no limit to what Wolfe could do if he wanted to, so of course there was no risk involved. I would like to be present to see his face if and when Wolfe tells him to go to Moscow and tail Khrushchev. When the doorbell rang he got up and moved to a chair over by the bookshelves as I crossed to the hall.