Three for the Chair

by Rex Stout

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Mr. Goodwin?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Sally Colt. I hated to say no to your invitation, I really did, but I had to. I don’t suppose you feel like making it a dinner instead of a movie?”

  I took time out for control. Only one person could have told her where I was. But it wasn’t her fault. “Sure,” I told her. “I eat every day. When?”

  “Any time now. At the hotel?”

  “No, there’s a better place, just two blocks away. Henninger’s. Shall we meet there in fifteen minutes?”

  “It’s a deal. Henninger’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll be there. I’ll tell Mr. Wolfe where we’ll be in case he needs us.”

  “I’ll phone him.”

  “No, I’ll tell him, he’s right here.”

  As I went for my coat and hat my feelings were too mixed to sort out. Cold rage. It was okay to make allowances for a genius, but this was too much. Curiosity. What the hell was he doing with her? Relief. At least he was up and dressed, unless his attitude toward women had done a complete somersault. Cheerfulness. Under almost any circumstances it’s a pleasure to have a date with a good-looking girl. Expectation. Somewhere along the line she might see fit to tell me what my employer was up to.

  She didn’t. It was a very enjoyable meal, and before it was over I had decided that I would have to concede an exception to my verdict on she-dicks, but not a word about current affairs, and of course I wouldn’t ask her. Wolfe had told her to lay off. I can’t document that, but we got quite sociable by the time dessert and coffee came, and when a damsel smiles at me a certain way but steers clear of the subject she knows damn well is on top of my mind, she has been corrupted by someone. We were finishing our coffee and considering whether to move to a place down the street where there was a dance floor when the waiter came and told me I was wanted on the phone. I went.

  “Hello.”

  “Archie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Miss Colt with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come to the room, and bring her.”

  “Yeah.”

  I returned to the table, told her we were wanted, got the check and paid it, and we left. The sidewalk was icy in spots and she took my arm, which seemed a little sissy for a working detective, but at least she didn’t tug. At the hotel, when we got out at the ninth floor she went to her room, 917, to leave her things, and I waited in the hall for her. I had been told to bring her, and since that had been my only assignment for the day I wanted to carry it out properly. She rejoined me, we proceeded to 902, I opened the door with my key, and we entered.

  The room was full of people.

  “Well!” I said heartily, for I wasn’t going to let my bitterness show in public. “Another party, huh?”

  Wolfe was in the armchair toward the far wall. The writing table had been moved and was next to him, with papers on it. Dol Bonner was seated across the table from him. She was smirking. If you think I’m being unfair, that she wasn’t really smirking but was merely showing no signs of misery, you’re absolutely right. Wolfe nodded at me. “You may as well leave the door open, Archie. Mr. Groom and Mr. Hyatt are expected momentarily.”

  VIII

  MY THOUGHT, as I put my hat and coat away, was that apparently the son-of-a-gun was going to try to pull one extra fancy and wrap it up in one package – not only put the finger on a murderer for Groom, but also mop up the hearing for Hyatt, as far as that bunch, including us, was concerned. It looked like a big order to fill without my help, but of course he had Dol Bonner. I thought it would be a pity if it turned out that she had knotted Donahue’s necktie and he had to fall back on me.

  I was glancing around, noting that Ide and Kerr and Amsel were in the chairs farthest away from Wolfe, with two empty ones up front for the expected company, when footsteps sounded in the hall, and I turned. Groom was in the lead. Evidently they had left their coats and hats downstairs.

  Wolfe greeted them. “Good evening, gentlemen.” He gestured. “Chairs for you.”

  They stood. Groom said, “I expected something like this. From you. You didn’t say it was a convention.”

  “No, sir. I merely said that if you would come, and bring Mr. Hyatt, I was now prepared to add to my statement substantially and cogently. I prefer to have witnesses present.” He gestured again. “If you will be seated?”

  Groom looked at Hyatt, swiveled for a glance at me, moved through the gap between Kerr and Sally Colt, picked up one of the empty chairs and placed it against the wall, and sat. That way he had Wolfe and Dol Bonner on his right and the rest of us on his left, and couldn’t be jumped from behind. Hyatt wasn’t so particular. He didn’t bother to move the chair but just sat, although five of us – Ide, Kerr, Amsel, Sally, and I – were in his rear.

  “Let’s hear it,” Groom told Wolfe.

  “Yes, sir.” Wolfe shifted his chair to face him more directly. “A mass of detail is involved, but I won’t cover it exhaustively now. You’ll get it. First, the situation as it stood yesterday evening. In an ill-considered excess of zeal, you had arrested Mr. Goodwin and me. Therefore –”

  “I know what the situation was.”

  “Not as I saw it. Therefore I had either to sit here and twiddle my thumbs, trusting to your skill and luck, or bestir myself. To begin with, I needed to learn, if possible, whether any of the other five people – those who had been in room forty-two with Mr. Goodwin and me – had had any association with Donahue. I invited them to this room for consultation, and they came. They –”

  “I know they did. And today they wouldn’t say what happened here. Not one of them. And Goodwin wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t.”

  “I will now. This will go faster, Mr. Groom, if you don’t interrupt. They were here nearly four hours, and you won’t need all of it. As soon as I learned that all of them had recognized the body, and so had known Donahue, and that their times of arrival at that building yesterday eliminated none of them, the inevitable assumption was that one of them had killed him, and I made it. I made it, and held it for about an hour, proceeding with our discussion, when I had to abandon it.”

  Groom started to speak and Wolfe showed him a palm. “If you please. Perhaps I should say ‘suspended’ instead of ‘abandoned.’ I suspended it because my attention was diverted to another quarter. I had noted it as an interesting point that seven people who had been associated with Donahue in connection with wiretapping had all been summoned to appear today. That it had been coincidence was against all probability, but it didn’t have to be coincidence. It might have been so arranged purposely, for a comparison of their stories and even to bring them face to face.

  “But no. It developed that that wouldn’t do. None of us had mentioned Donahue’s name in our statements to the secretary of state. Miss Bonner and Mr. Ide and I had all reported being duped by a man who had followed the same pattern with each of us, and our physical descriptions of him agreed, so we three might have been summoned by design to appear on the same day, but not Mr. Kerr and not Mr. Amsel. Mr. Kerr had merely reported tapping the wire of Arthur M. Leggett at Leggett’s request. Mr. Amsel reported nothing – that is, nothing that could have linked him to Miss Bonner and Mr. Ide and me. Yesterday he identified Donahue as a man who had once asked him to make a tap and been refused, but he had made no mention of it in his statement to the secretary of state.”

  “You’re getting nowhere fast,” Groom declared. “You had all known him. One of you saw him there and killed him.”

  “But why were we all there?” Wolfe demanded. “That Miss Bonner and Mr. Ide and I had been brought together purposely was understandable, but not Mr. Kerr and Mr. Amsel. There was no connection, on the record; and yet they were connected, most significantly, since they too had had dealings with Donahue. By coincidence only? I didn’t believe it. One of them, possibly, but surely not both. So my attention was diverted to the question, w
ho had arranged for us all to be summoned to appear the same day? And simultaneously to another question, was there anything in common among the five men whose wires Donahue had wanted to tap? That suggested still another, why had he gone to five different detectives to arrange for the taps? Might it not have been because the five men did have something in common, and he didn’t want that fact to be noted?”

  Wolfe moved his eyes to Hyatt as if inviting an answer, but didn’t get one. He returned to Groom. “My first question had to wait, since I couldn’t very well call Mr. Hyatt and put it to him. The second was soon answered. I learned that four of the men whose wires had been tapped were members of the Charity Funds Investigating Committee, and had reason to suppose that the fifth one was also, embracing the entire committee. With that, I decided to describe the situation as I saw it to these ladies and gentlemen, and to enlist their co-operation. If it turned out that my surmise was wrong and one of them was in fact guilty, no harm would have been done; on the contrary, their reactions to my proposal might be indicative. I learned –”

  “What proposal?” Groom demanded.

  “I’m telling you. I learned that among them they had forty or more operatives in New York, and I could supply four or five. After describing the situation to them, I proposed that we put as many men as possible – and women – to work immediately. There were three main lines: one, the Hotel Marbury, where Donahue had lived; two, the background and interests and activities of Albert Hyatt, with emphasis on any discoverable connection with the Charity Funds Investigating Committee; and three –”

  “You mean you suspected Hyatt of murder?”

  “I mean I had formed a surmise I thought worth testing, and my confreres agreed with me. I have already put the question, who had arranged for all seven of us to appear on the same day? Mr. Hyatt was conducting the hearing. Another point, which is usually thought significant, but which you seem to have ignored, was that Mr. Hyatt was the last person, as far as was known, to see Donahue alive. Still another was that Hyatt had said that Donahue had told him that I had been given the name Donahue and that I had known the tap was illegal. I knew that either Donahue had lied or Hyatt was lying, and Donahue was dead.”

  Wolfe lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “What I suspected at that point is no longer important. The third line of investigation was to find evidence of former association between Hyatt and Donahue. My confreres made phone calls, and I made one myself. By ten o’clock this morning we had – how many operatives Miss Bonner?”

  “By ten o’clock, thirty-four. By two this afternoon, forty-eight. Forty-two men and six women.”

  Steve Amsel suddenly exploded. “Too many detectives, Hyatt! Cancel our licenses! Too many!”

  “Shut your trap!” Jay Kerr ordered him. “Wolfe’s telling it.”

  Wolfe ignored them. “Reports started to reach us before one o’clock and have been arriving all afternoon, up to an hour ago, when we told the people in New York that we had enough for our purpose. Miss Bonner and Miss Colt took most of them, but the others helped. There was no important result from the first line of investigation, the Hotel Marbury. From the second, Hyatt’s background and interests and activities, there was nothing conclusive, but much that is pregnant. Eighteen months ago derogatory information about the activities of fund-raising organizations began to appear in the press, and as the weeks passed it increased in volume and significance. A little more than a year ago Mr. Hyatt was retained as consulting counsel by a large fund-raising organization which had realized large profits, variously estimated at from one to three million dollars annually, from its operation. That was about the time that the governor set up the Charity Funds Investigating Committee, and Mr. Hyatt’s client might reasonably expect to be a major target of that committee. There is some evidence that Mr. Hyatt approached two members of the committee in an effort to learn its plans –”

  “What do you mean, ‘some evidence’?” Groom demanded.

  Wolfe tapped the papers on the table. “It’s here waiting for you, but as I said, it is not conclusive. The committee members were not loquacious with our private operatives, but no doubt they will be more helpful with officers of the law. I merely give you this from our second line of investigation: that Mr. Hyatt was keenly interested in that committee and its plans. The results from our third line were more than pregnant, they were decisive, or close to it. It was of course the most promising, and thirty of the operatives were assigned to it. They were provided with pictures of Hyatt and Donahue from newspapers, and they found three people who had seen them together on two different occasions last spring – under circumstances that may fairly be described as furtive. I will not oblige Mr. Hyatt by naming the people and occasions and places, but that information is here.” He tapped the papers again.

  “And Mr. Hyatt has stated, in my hearing and yours, that he had never seen Donahue before yesterday morning. You asked if I suspect him of murder. I do now, yes. There are of course questions I am not prepared to answer, except with conjectures if you want them – for instance, the most important one, why did he arrange for all of us – he knew, of course, with whom Donahue had arranged for the taps – to appear before him on the same day? As a conjecture, because that was his best alternative, since we all had to be summoned for inquiry sooner or later, either in New York or in Albany, and he wanted us himself, not his colleague in New York. Having us all on the same day insured that we would all be at hand, to be called back in if occasion demanded it; and if things went smoothly he might well have intended to have us together before him and tell us magnanimously that, since our separate statements corroborated the assumption that we had all been imposed upon by a scoundrel, he would recommend no action against us.”

  Wolfe turned a hand over. “For he supposed, of course, that Donahue was safely out of the way, out of the state and not to be found. Unquestionably he had so arranged it. The situation held no great hazard for him. The fact that one of his clients was one of the targets of investigation of one of the governor’s committees had no known connection with the investigation he was himself conducting, and he was confident that no such connection would be discovered or even suspected. Possibly he was even cocky, for he may have got, from the tapped wires, the information about the committee’s plans and intentions that he needed. If so, he got a shattering blow when he answered his phone yesterday morning and was told that a man named Donahue wanted to see him about something urgent and confidential.”

  Wolfe’s eyes went to Hyatt and back to Groom. “If you want another conjecture, what passed between Hyatt and Donahue in room thirty-eight yesterday, the most obvious one is that Donahue threatened to divulge the whole story – either as a screw for extortion, or because Donahue had learned that we seven had been called to appear together and suspected that he was to be made a scapegoat – and the obvious is often the best. Those questions, and others, are your concern, Mr. Groom, not ours. Our only concern was to show you that you were much too ready with a false assumption. As for Mr. Goodwin and me, I suppose you could successfully defend an action for false arrest, but I trust you have learned that it is infantile to take the word of a man as gospel merely because he is a special deputy of the secretary of state. Can the charge against us be dismissed tonight?”

  “No. Not until court opens in the morning.” Groom got up and went to the table and flattened his hand on the papers. He looked at the special deputy. “Mr. Hyatt, do you want to say anything?”

  Hyatt was a lawyer. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but I doubt if it was showing anything much. “Except,” he said, “that I deny all of Wolfe’s allegations and implications regarding me, and that I’ll hold him responsible for them, no. I have nothing to say here and now.” He got up and started for the door. Groom made no move to stop him, and couldn’t be expected to, at least until he had inspected the papers.

  Steve Amsel called after him, “Too many detectives, Hyatt!”

  IX

 
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON I was in the office with Wolfe, discussing a little job we had taken on, when the phone rang and I answered it.

  “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

  “This is Dol Bonner. How are you?”

  “Better than ever.”

  “Good. May I speak to Mr. Wolfe?”

  “Hold it, I’ll see.” I covered the transmitter and turned and told Wolfe. He made a face, hesitated, and reached for his phone. I kept mine to my ear, since I was supposed to unless he told me otherwise.

  “Yes, Miss Bonner? Nero Wolfe.”

  “How are you?”

  “Well, thank you.”