by Rex Stout
I went. Out to the elevator, down to the lobby, out to the sidewalk; and I started walking again. A taxi wouldn’t have been much quicker, and I preferred to be on my feet. Down Lexington Avenue to 35th Street, and crosstown to the old brownstone. I mounted the stoop, let myself in with my key, put my coat on a hanger, and went to the office. Wolfe was at his desk, pouring beer.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “Did you turn on the radio for the twelve o’clock news?”
“Yes.”
“Did it mention Jimmy Vail?”
“Yes.”
I went to my desk and sat. “I dropped in so you could have the satisfaction of firing me face to face. I have disobeyed orders. I am disloyal. I have betrayed your trust. I just told Lon Cohen about the kidnaping of Jimmy Vail. Not for publication; he won’t use it until I say he can. I didn’t mention Mrs. Vail’s hiring you. I kept you out of it. I’m not quitting, you’re firing me, so I’m entitled to two months’ severance pay.”
He lifted the glass and drank. The idea is to drink when there is still an inch of foam so it will get on his lips and he can lick it off. He licked it off and put the glass down. “Is this flummery?” he demanded.
“No, sir. It’s straight. If you want me to tell you why I did it, I will, but not as an excuse, just as information. Do you want it?”
“Yes.”
“It was getting too hot. I knew too much that you didn’t know. You wouldn’t take what I had got at White Plains, and you knew darned well I had seen Mrs. Vail on my way back, and you wouldn’t take what I had got there either. From what—”
“I did not refuse to listen to you.”
“Nuts. You know as well as I do how it stood. You had said we didn’t care what had happened to Dinah Utley and we were not concerned. Will it help to chew at that?”
“No.”
“Okay. What I had got had made me decide that Jimmy had probably kidnaped himself, and he had killed Dinah Utley, and he was making monkeys of us. So I was stuck. I had to give in and say, please Mr. Wolfe, put your book down for a while and kindly permit me to tell you what happened yesterday so you can decide what to do. When you came down at eleven o’clock. You know how I liked that. I wasn’t going to sit here on my rump all morning looking forward to it, so I went for a walk, and at eighteen minutes past eleven I heard a man tell another man that Jimmy Vail had been found dead on the floor of the library, where I had been yesterday afternoon.”
I paused for dramatic effect. “So where was I? If Homicide hadn’t already learned that I had been there yesterday in conference with the whole damn family, they soon would. Cramer himself might already be here ringing the bell. When he asked me what I was doing there, if I told him, I would be ditching our commitment to Mrs. Vail, and if I didn’t tell him. I would be in for a picnic and the least I could expect would be losing my license. It wouldn’t help any to come and say, please, Mr. Wolfe, even if you’re not concerned kindly permit me to tell you what has happened because I’m in a jam. What could you do? I had to handle it myself, and I did. I went and did something you had told me not to do. I told Lon Cohen about the kidnaping. Then I came and saw that Cramer or Stebbins wasn’t here, since there was no police car out front, and entered. Now you fire me and I go. Fast. One will get you a thousand that no one will find me before eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, the deadline.” I arose.
“Sit down,” he growled.
“No. Cramer or Stebbins may be here any minute.”
“He won’t be admitted.”
“They’ll cover the house front and back and come back with a warrant.” I moved.
“Stop!” he bellowed. “Very well,” he said. “You leave me no choice. I concede that we care what happened to Miss Utley and we are concerned. Report in full.”
“If I’m fired why should I report?”
“You are not fired. Confound you, report!”
“It’s too late. I’d be interrupted. The doorbell might ring any second.”
He glared at me, then turned his head to glare at the clock. He made fists of his hands and glared at them, then used them to push his chair back. He got up and headed for the door, and when he reached the hall he roared, “Fritz!” The door to the kitchen swung open, and Fritz appeared. Wolfe was moving to the front, to the rack. He got his coat off the hanger and turned.
“Are the mussels open?”
“No, sir. It’s only—”
“Don’t open them. Keep them. Archie and I are going out. We’ll be back for lunch tomorrow. Keep the door bolted.”
Fritz gawked. “But—but—” He was speechless.
“If anyone inquires, you can’t tell tell him where we are, since you won’t know.” He found the armholes of the coat I had taken and was holding. “Lunch at the usual time tomorrow.”
“But you must have a bag—”
“I’ll manage. Tell Theodore. You know what a search warrant is. If a policeman comes with one admit him, and stay with him. Archie?”
I had my coat on and the door open. He crossed the sill, and as I followed I shut the door. As we descended the stoop I asked, “The car?” and he said no, and at the bottom he turned right, toward Ninth Avenue. But we didn’t reach Ninth Avenue. Halfway there he turned right and started up a stoop of a brownstone the same size and color and age as his, but it had a vestibule. He had used his vestibule to enlarge the hall years ago. He pushed the button, and in a moment the door was opened by a dark-haired woman with fine frontage to whom we had sent orchids now and then for the past ten years. She was a little startled at sight of us.
“Why, Mr. Wolfe … Mr. Goodwin … come in. You want to see the doctor?”
We entered, and she closed the door. “Not professionally,” Wolfe said. “And briefly. Here will do.”
“Of course. Certainly.” She was flustered. I had been there off and on, but Wolfe hadn’t; Doc Vollmer had come to him when required. She went down the hall and opened a door and disappeared, and in a minute Vollmer came—a sad-looking little guy with lots of forehead and not much jaw. He had once taken twenty-two stitches in my side where a character with a knife had gone wide enough but not deep enough.
He approached. “Well, well! Come in, come in!”
“We have come to impose on you, Doctor,” Wolfe said. “We need a room to sit in the rest of today and beds for tonight. We need enough food to sustain us until tomorrow. Can you oblige us?”
Vollmer wasn’t startled; he was merely stunned. “Why—of course—you mean for you? You and Archie?”
“Yes. We expected a troublesome visitor, and we fled. By tomorrow he will be less troublesome. We want seclusion until then. If it would inconvenience you beyond tolerance …”
“No, of course not.” He smiled. “I’m honored. I’m flattered. I’m afraid the food won’t be quite … I have no Fritz. Will you need a phone in the room?”
“No, just the room.”
“Then, if you’ll excuse me—I have a patient in my office—”
He went back to the door and in, and in a couple of minutes the dark-haired woman, whose name was Helen Gillard, came out. She asked us to come with her, trying to sound as if it was perfectly natural for a couple of neighbors to drop in and request board and lodging, and led the way to the stairs. She took us up two flights and down a hall to the rear, and into a room with two windows and a big bed and walls covered with pictures of boats and baseball players and boys and girls. Bill Vollmer, whom I had once showed how to take fingerprints, was away at school. Helen asked, “Will you come down for lunch or shall I bring trays?”
“Later,” Wolfe said. “Thank you. Mr. Goodwin will tell you.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
Wolfe said no, and she went. She left the door open, and I went and closed it. We removed our coats, and I found hangers in a closet. Wolfe stood and looked around. It was hopeless. There were three chairs. The seats of two of them were about half as wide as his fanny, and the third one had arms and it would be a sq
ueeze. He went to the bed, sat on the edge, took his shoes off, twisted around, stretched out with his head on the pillow, shut his eyes, and spoke.
“Report.”
6
At 12:35 P.M. Friday, Inspector Cramer of Homicide West, seated in the red leather chair, took a mangled unlit cigar from his mouth and said, “I still want to know where you and Goodwin have been and what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours.”
The only objection to telling him was that he would have gone or sent someone to check, and Doc Vollmer was a busy man, so it would have been a poor return for his hospitality. As for the hospitality, I had no kick coming, having been given a perfectly good bed in a spare room, but Wolfe had had a few difficulties. Books to read, but no chair upstairs big enough to take him, and he won’t read lying down. No pajamas big enough for him, so he had to sleep in his underwear. Grub not bad enough to take credit for facing up to hardship, but not good enough to please the palate; only one brand of beer, and not his. Pillows too soft to use only one and too thick to use two. Towels either too little or too big. Soap that smelled like tuberoses (he said), and he uses geranium. He really bore up well for his first day and night away from home in more than a year; he was glum, of course, as you would be if you were forced to skedaddle, without stopping to take a toothbrush, by circumstances you weren’t to blame for.
We had not phoned Fritz to find out if there had been any callers because we didn’t know much about modern electronics, and who does? We knew tracing a phone call wasn’t as simple as it used to be, but they might have a tame neutron or positron or some other tron that could camp inside Wolfe’s number and tell where a call came from. For news there were the papers, Thursday evening and Friday morning. Not a word in the Gazette about kidnaping; Lon had kept it; and nothing in the Times Friday morning or on the radio at eleven o’clock. There was plenty about Jimmy Vail, but the main fact was still as I had got it from Lon: Margot Tedder had entered the library at 9:05 Thursday morning and found him there on the floor underneath Benjamin Franklin. The bronze statue had flattened his chest.
Five people, not one, had last seen him alive Wednesday evening—his wife; her son and daughter, Noel and Margot Tedder; her brother, Ralph Purcell; and her attorney, Andrew Frost. They had all been in the library after dinner (subject of the family conference not mentioned), and shortly after ten o’clock Jimmy Vail, saying that he hadn’t slept much for three days (reason not given), had stretched out on the couch and gone to sleep. He had still been there an hour later, sound asleep, when they broke it up and left. Noel and Margot Tedder and Ralph Purcell had gone up to bed, and Mrs. Vail and Andrew Frost had gone up to her study. Around midnight Frost had left, and Mrs. Vail had gone to bed. Evidently she too had been short on sleep, for she had still been in bed when her son and daughter came to her room Thursday morning to tell her about Jimmy.
Everyone in the house, of course including the servants, had known that Benjamin Franklin was wobbly. The Gazette had a piece by an expert about the different methods of fastening the bronze feet of a man to the base he stands on. He hadn’t been permitted to examine the statue that had toppled onto Jimmy Vail, but he said the trouble couldn’t have been a loose nut; his guess was that the bolt or bolts had had a flaw and had cracked at some time when the statue was being handled. It was quite possible, he said, that Jimmy Vail, half aroused from a deep sleep, on his way across the room to the door, had lost his balance and grabbed at the statue and pulled it down on him. I thought it was darned decent of the Gazette to run the piece. A good murder or suspicion of one will sell thousands of extra papers, and here they were promoting the idea that it had been accidental. They had got the picture Lon had said would be beautiful, of Benjamin Franklin on top of Jimmy Vail.
There were no quotes from any members of the family. Mrs. Vail was in bed under a doctor’s care, inaccessible. Andrew Frost wasn’t seeing reporters, but he had told the police that when he left the house around midnight, unescorted, he had not stopped at the library on his way out.
As I have said, there was nothing new on the radio at eleven o’clock Friday morning. At 11:10 I phoned Homicide West from Doc Vollmer’s office downstairs—he was at the hospital—and told the desk man to tell Inspector Cramer that Nero Wolfe had some information for him regarding Jimmy Vail. At 11:13 I called the District Attorney’s office at White Plains, got an assistant DA, and told him to tell Hobart that Wolfe had decided to answer any questions he might care to ask. At 11:18 I rang the Gazette, got Lon Cohen, and told him it was all his and would probably soon be everybody’s, and he could even use our names as the source if he spelled them right. Of course he wanted more, but I hung up. At 11:24 we thanked Helen Gillard and asked her to thank the doctor for us, left the house, walked sixty yards to Wolfe’s, found the door was bolted, pushed the button and were admitted by Fritz, and learned that Sergeant Purley Stebbins had come yesterday ten minutes after we left, and Inspector Cramer had come at six o’clock. No search warrant, but Cramer had phoned at 8:43 and again at 10:19. At the office door Wolfe asked about the mussels, and Fritz said they were in perfect condition. Wolfe was at his desk with his eyes closed, in the only chair that will really do, sitting and breathing, and I was at my desk opening the mail, when the doorbell rang and I went. It was Inspector Cramer, his rugged pink face a little pinker than normal and his burly shoulders hunched a little. When I let him in he didn’t even give me an eye, but kept going, to the office, and as I followed, after closing the door, I heard him rasping.
“Where have you and Goodwin been since yesterday noon?”
Fifty minutes later, as I have said, at 12:35 P.M., he demanded, “I still want to know where you and Goodwin have been and what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours.”
We had opened the bag. Most of the talking had been done by me because the whole world knows—well, six or eight people—that the only difference between me and a tape recorder is that you can ask me questions. And for some of it—the White Plains part and the session in the Harold F. Tedder library—Wolfe hadn’t been present. We had handed over the note that had come in the mail, the original, and my transcriptions, carbons, of the other two notes and the telephone conversation between Mrs. Vail and Mr. Knapp. I did make a few improvements on Wolfe’s phrasing, and mine too, by making it emphatic that the main point had been, first, to get Jimmy Vail back alive, and then to protect him and Mrs. Vail by keeping his promise to the kidnapers. Of course Cramer landed on that with both feet. Why had we gone on protecting Vail for twenty-four hours after he was dead? Obviously, so Wolfe could hang onto the money he already had in the bank. Withholding information vital to a murder investigation. Obstructing justice to earn a fee.
Wolfe snorted, and my feelings were hurt. There had still been Mrs. Vail to consider, and we hadn’t known that Vail had been murdered. Did he? I had read an article by a statue expert which said that it could have been an accident. Wasn’t it? Cramer didn’t say, but he didn’t have to; his being there was enough to show that it was open, though maybe not open-and-shut. He said we had of course seen the statement of the District Attorney’s office in the morning paper that the apparent cause of Vail’s death was the statue falling on him, that a final determination would be made when the autopsy had been completed, and that a thorough investigation was being made. Then he took the chewed unlit cigar from his mouth and said he still wanted to know where we had been the past twenty-four hours.
Wolfe would not be riled. He was back in his house, in his chair, the deadline was past, and the mussels would be ready in an hour. “As I told you,” he said, “we knew we would be pestered and we decamped. Where is of no consequence. We did nothing and communicated with no one. At eleven this morning, when our obligation to Mrs. Vail had been fulfilled, Mr. Goodwin telephoned your office. You have no valid grievance. Even now you will not say that you’re investigating a murder; you’re trying to determine if one has been committed. A charge of obstructing justice couldn’t possibly hol
d. Some of the questions you asked Mr. Goodwin indicated that you suspect him of trying to find the typewriter that was missing from Mrs. Vail’s study. Nonsense, Since yesterday noon he has been trying to find nothing whatever, and neither have I. Our interest in the matter is ended. We have no further commitment to Mrs. Vail. We have no client. If she herself killed both Miss Utley and Mr. Vail, which seems unlikely but is not inconceivable, I owe her no service.”
“She has paid you sixty thousand dollars.”
“And by the terms of my employment I have earned it.”
Cramer got up, came to my desk, and dropped the cigar in my wastebasket. That wasn’t regular; usually he threw the cigar at it and missed. He went back and picked up his hat from the floor where he had dropped it and turned to Wolfe.
“I want a statement with nothing left out signed by you and Goodwin. At my office by four o’clock. The District Attorney’s office will probably want to see Goodwin. It would suit me fine if they want you too.”
“Not everything everybody said by four o’clock,” I objected. “That would be a six-hour job.”
“I want the substance. All details. You can omit White Plains, we’ve got that from them.” He turned and tramped out. By the time I had followed him to the front, shut the door after him, and returned to the office, Wolfe had his book open. I finished opening the mail and put it on his desk and then pulled the typewriter around and got out paper and carbons. That would be a job, and it was water under the bridge, since we had no case and no client. Four carbons: one for Westchester, one for the Manhattan DA, and two for us. As I rolled the paper in Wolfe’s voice came at my back.
“Dendrobium chrysotoxum for Miss Gillard and Laelia purpurata for Doctor Vollmer. Tomorrow.”
“Right. And Sitassia readia for you and Transcriptum underwoodum for me.” I hit the keys.
With time out for lunch and a shave and a clean shirt, it was five minutes past four when I left the house, walked to 34th and Eighth Avenue for a Gazette, and flagged a taxi. I had made it barely in time for Wolfe to sign it before he went up to the plant rooms, but there had been interruptions. Sergeant Purley Stebbins had phoned to tell me to take the statement to the DA’s office instead of Homicide West. Ben Dykes had phoned and kept me on the wire fifteen minutes and had finally settled for an appointment with Wolfe at eleven-thirty Saturday morning. Reporters from three newspapers had called, two on the phone and one in person, and had been stalled. What had stung them was on the front page of the Gazette, which I perused as the taxi took me downtown—the first public notice of the kidnaping of Jimmy Vail and delivery of the ransom money by his wife. Of course it didn’t have the big kick of a kidnaping story, the suspense about the fate of the victim, since Jimmy had come back safe and sound, but it had the added attraction of his death by violence in his own home some fifteen hours after he returned. There were pictures of Fowler’s Inn and The Fatted Calf and Iron Mine Road. Lon had hung onto it, but he had taken steps. The mention of Wolfe and me was vague and sort of gave the impression that we knew about it because we knew everything, which wouldn’t hurt a bit. It was the fattest scoop I had ever given Lon, and that wouldn’t hurt either. When I got to 155 Leonard Street and was taken to the room of assistant DA Mandel, he greeted me by tapping the Gazette that was there on his desk and demanding, “When did you give them this?” I told him ten minutes after eleven this morning.
