Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25

by Before Midnight

“I’ll be glad to save you the trouble and maybe throw in a few extras. He was killed between eleven-thirty and three o’clock, shot once from behind, with a cushion for a muffler, with a .32 revolver. That’s from the bullet; we haven’t found the gun. The building has a self-service elevator and no doorman, and we haven’t dug up anyone who saw Dahlmann come home or saw anyone else coming to see him. Do you want all the negatives?”

  “I like positives better.”

  “So do I, but we haven’t got any, or damn few. No fingerprints that have helped so far, no other clues from the premises, nothing in his papers or other effects, no hackie that took somebody there, no phone call to that number from the hotel, and so on right through the routine. But you already knew that. If routine had got us anywhere I wouldn’t be here keeping you from your work.”

  “Your routine is impeccable,” Wolfe said politely.

  “Much obliged. As for alibis, nobody is out completely. Getting out of a big hotel, and back in again, without being observed, isn’t hard to do if you’ve got a good reason for it. The Tescher woman says that after the meeting she went to the library of a friend of hers and worked there on the contest until four o’clock, but nobody was in the room with her and everyone in the house was asleep. This leads to the point that really brought me here—the chief point. We’re finding out that there were quite a few people around town who had it in for Louis Dahlmann—three or more women for personal reasons, two or three men for personal reasons, and several of both sexes for business reasons. Even some of his own business associates. We’re looking into them, checking on where they were last night and so on, but the fact that his wallet was taken, and nothing else, may mean that it’s a waste of time and talent. There was no money in the wallet; he carried bills in a roll in another pocket. The wallet was more of a card case, driver’s license and so on.”

  Speaking of pockets must have reminded him. He reached to his breast pocket and took out a cigar, and wrapped his fingers around it. “So,” he said, “I thought you might answer a question. Now that you’ve told me what you’re after, I think so even more. Was he killed in order to get the wallet, or not? If so, it was one of the contestants and we can more or less forget the others, for now anyway, and it was on account of the contest, and as I said, you’ve got the inside track on that. I’m not asking for Goodwin’s notes of your talk with your clients and that lawyer. I’m only asking your opinion, if he was killed to get the wallet.”

  “I repeat, Mr. Cramer, I am not investigating the murder.”

  “Damn it, who said you were? How do you want me to put it?”

  Wolfe’s shoulders went up and down. “It doesn’t matter. You only want my opinion. I am strongly inclined to think that your man, the murderer, and my man, the thief, are one and the same. It would seem to follow, therefore, that the answer to your question is yes. Does that satisfy you?”

  From the look on Cramer’s face, it didn’t. “I don’t like that ‘strongly inclined,”’ he objected. “You know damn well what’s on my mind. And this privileged communication dodge. Why couldn’t it be like this: after the meeting last night Dahlmann’s associates talked it over, and they decided it was dangerous for him to have that paper in his wallet, and one of them went to his place to get it or destroy it. When he got there the door wasn’t locked, and he went in and found Dahlmann on the floor, dead. He took the wallet from his pocket and beat it. Don’t ask me why he didn’t notify the police, ask him; he could have thought he would be suspected. Anyhow he didn’t, but of course he had to tell his associates, and they all got hold of their lawyer and told him, and after talking it over they decided to hire you.”

  “To do what?”

  “To figure out a way of handling it so the contest wouldn’t blow them all sky high. Of course the contestants would learn not only that Dahlmann had been killed but also that the wallet was missing, and they would suspect each other of getting the answers, and it would be a hell of a mess. But I’m not going to try to juggle that around, that’s their lookout, and yours. My lookout is that if it happened that way the contestants are not my meat at all because he wasn’t killed to get the wallet. And can you give me a reason why it couldn’t have happened that way?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And the lawyer fixing it so that what he told you was privileged—wouldn’t that fit in?”

  “Yes,” Wolfe conceded. “But it is a fact, not an opinion, that if it did happen that way I am not privy to it. I have been told that none of Mr. Dahlmann’s associates went to his apartment last night, and have had no reason to suspect that they were gulling me. If they were they’re a pack of fools.”

  “You state that as a fact.”

  “I do.”

  “Well,” Cramer allowed, “it’s not your kind of a lie.” He was suddenly flustered, realizing that wasn’t the way to keep it clean. He blurted, “You know what I mean.” He stuck the cigar between his teeth and chewed on it. If he couldn’t chew Wolfe the cigar would have to do. I’ve never seen him light one.

  “Yes,” Wolfe said indulgently, “I know what you mean.”

  Cramer took the cigar from his mouth. “You asked me a while ago if I assumed that whoever killed him took the wallet, and I said yes, but I should have said maybe. This other angle has got a bite. If I got some grounds to believe that one or more of Dahlmann’s associates went to his place last night that would make it a different story entirely, because that would account for the missing wallet, and I could stop concentrating on the contestants. I tell you frankly I have no such grounds. None of them—Buff, O’Garro, Assa, Heery, Hansen the lawyer—no one of that bunch can prove he didn’t go down to Perry Street some time last night, but I haven’t got anything to back up a claim that one of them did. You understand I’m not itching to slap a murder charge on him; as I said, he could have found Dahlmann dead and took the wallet. In that case he would be the one you’re interested in, and I’d have an open field to find the murderer.”

  “Satisfactory all around,” Wolfe said drily.

  “Yeah. You say if one of them went there last night you know nothing about it, and I believe you, but what if they held that out on you? Wouldn’t they? Naturally?”

  “Not if they expected me to earn my fee.” Wolfe looked up at the clock. “It’s midnight. Mr. Cramer. I can only say that I reject your theory utterly. Not only for certain reasons of my own—as you say, I’m on the inside track on the contest—but also from other considerations. If one of those men went there last night and found Dahlmann dead, why was he ass enough to take the wallet, when he knew it would be missed, and that that would make a botch of the contest? He had to have the paper, of course, since if it were left on the corpse it would be seen by policemen, and possibly by reporters too, but why didn’t he just take the paper and leave the wallet?”

  “By God,” Cramer said, “you were lying after all.”

  “Yes? Why?”

  “Because that’s dumb and you’re not dumb. He goes in and finds a corpse, and he’s nervous. It makes people nervous to find a corpse. He wants to turn and run like hell, they all do, especially if there’s the slightest reason for them to be suspected, but he makes himself get the wallet from the corpse’s pocket. He may even intend to take the paper and put the wallet back and start looking for the paper, but he thinks of fingerprints. Maybe he can wipe the wallet off before he puts it back, but he might miss one. Even so, he might try, if he calmly considered all the consequences of taking the wallet, but he’s not calm and there’s no time and he has to get out of there. So he gets, with the wallet. Excuse me for taking up your valuable time with kindergarten stuff, but you asked for it.”

  He stood up, looked at the cigar in his hand, threw it at my wastebasket, and missed. He glared at it and then at Wolfe. “If that’s the best you can do I’ll be going.” He turned.

  “Manifestly,” Wolfe said, “you don’t believe Mr. Hansen and the others when they profess their conviction that Mr. Dahlmann’s display
of the paper was only a hoax?”

  Cramer turned at the door long enough to growl, “Nuts. Do you?”

  When I returned to the office after seeing him out Wolfe was still at his desk, pinching the lobe of his ear with a thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. I put my empty milk glass on one of the beer trays, took them to the kitchen, washed and wiped the glasses, disposed of the bottles, and put the trays away. Fritz goes to bed at eleven unless he has been asked not to. Back in the office, the ear massage was still under way. I spoke. “I can finish the typing tonight if there are other errands for the morning. Have I got a program?”

  “No.”

  “Oh well,” I said cheerfully, “there’s no rush. April twentieth is a week off. You can read twenty books in a week.”

  He grunted. “Get Saul and ask him to breakfast with me in my room at eight o’clock. Give me two hundred dollars for him—no, make it three hundred—and lock the safe and go to bed. I want some quiet.”

  I obeyed, of course, but I wondered. Could he be tossing a couple of C’s—no, three—of LBA money to the breeze just to make me think he had hatched something? Saul Panzer was the best man in the city of New York for any kind of a job, but what was it? Tailing five people, hardly. If tailing one, who and why? If not tailing, then what? For me, nothing we had heard or seen had pointed in anyone’s direction. For him, I didn’t believe it. He wanted company for breakfast, and not me. Okay.

  I got Saul at his apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, signed him up for the morning, got the money from the cash drawer in the safe and locked the safe, gave Wolfe the dough, and asked him, “Then I don’t do the typing tonight?”

  “No. Go to bed. I have work to do.”

  I went. Up one flight I stopped on the landing, thinking it might help if I tiptoed back down and went in and caught him with his book up, but decided it would only make him so stubborn he’d read all night.

  Chapter 11

  My morning paper is usually the Times, with the Gazette for a side dish, but that Thursday I gave the Gazette a bigger play because it has a keener sense of the importance of homicide. Its by-line piece on the career and personality of the brilliant young advertising genius who had been shot in the back did not say that there were at least a hundred beautiful and glamorous females in the metropolitan area who might have had reason to erase him, but it gave that impression without naming names.

  However, that was only a tactful little bone tossed to the sex hounds for them to gnaw on. The main story was the contest, and they did it proud, with their main source of information Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles. There was a picture of her on page three which made her unique combination of rare features more picturesque than in the flesh, and harder to believe. She had briefed the reporter thoroughly on the Women’s Nature League, told him all about the dinner meeting Tuesday evening, including Dahlmann’s display of the paper and what he said, and spoken at length of her rights as a contestant under the rules and the agreement.

  Of the other contestants, Susan Tescher of Clock magazine had been inaccessible to journalists, presumably after consulting her three windbags. Harold Rollins had been reached but had refused any information or comment; he hadn’t even explained why winning half a million bucks would be a fatal blow to him. Mrs. Wheelock, who was living on pills, and Philip Younger, who had paroxysms to contend with, had apparently been almost as talkative as Miss Frazee. They were both indignant, bitter, and pugnacious, but on one point their minds had not met. Younger thought that the only fair way out of the mess was to split the prize money five ways, whereas Mrs. Wheelock did not. She was holding out for the big one, and said the five verses should be scrapped and five new ones substituted, under circumstances that would give each of them an equal opportunity.

  Perhaps I should have confined my reading to the contest part, since we hadn’t been hired for the murder, but only Fritz was in the kitchen with me and he wouldn’t blab. There were a lot of facts that Cramer hadn’t furnished—that Dahlmann was wearing a dark blue suit; that he had taken a taxi from the Churchill to his apartment and arrived a little before 11:30; that the woman who found him when she came to get his breakfast was named Elga Johnson; that his apartment was two rooms and bath; that the bullet had hit a rib after passing through the heart; and many other details equally helpful. The name of the murderer wasn’t given.

  Having got an early start, I was through with breakfast and the papers and was in the office at the typewriter when Saul Panzer came. Saul is not a natural for Mr. America. His nose is twice as big as he needs, he never looks as if he had just shaved, one shoulder is half an inch higher than the other and they both slope, and his coat sleeves are too short. But if and when I find myself up a tree with a circle of man-eating tigers crouching on the ground below, and a squad of beavers starting to gnaw at the trunk of the tree, the sight of Saul approaching would be absolutely beautiful. I have never seen him fazed.

  He came at eight sharp and went right upstairs, and I went back to the typewriter. At five to nine he came back down but I didn’t hear him until he called to me from the door to the hall. “Want to come and bolt me out?”

  I swiveled. “With pleasure. That’s what the bolt’s for, such as you.” I arose. “Have a good breakfast?”

  “You know I did.”

  I was with him. “Need any professional coaching?”

  “I sure do.” He was at the rack getting his things. “I’ll start at the bottom and work down.”

  “That’s the spirit.” I opened the door. “If you get your throat cut or something just give me a ring.”

  “Glad to, Archie. You’d be the one all right.”

  “Okay. Keep your gloves on.”

  He went, and I shut the door and went back to work. There had been a day when I got a little peeved if Wolfe gave Saul a chore without telling me what it was, and also told him not to tell me, but that was long past. It didn’t peeve me any more; it merely bit me because I couldn’t guess it. I sat at my desk a good ten minutes trying to figure it, then realized that was about as useful as reading a novel in verse, and hit the typewriter.

  My speed at typing notes of interviews depends on the circumstances. Once in a real pinch I did ten pages an hour for three hours, but my average is around six or seven, and I have been known to mosey along at four or five. That morning I stepped on it, to get as much done as possible before Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock, since he would certainly have some errands ready for me. I was interrupted by phone calls—one from Rudolph Hansen, wanting a progress report, one from Oliver Buff, wanting the same, one from Philip Younger, wanting me to arrange an appointment for him with the LBA crowd and getting sore when I stalled him, and one from Lon Cohen of the Gazette, wanting to know if I felt like giving him something hot on the Dahlmann murder. Being busy, I didn’t start an argument by saying we weren’t working on the murder; I just told him he’d have to stand in line, and didn’t bother to ask him how he knew we were in the play. Probably Miss Frazee. In spite of the interruptions, I had finished Wheelock and Younger and Tescher by eleven o’clock, and started on Rollins.

  The sound of Wolfe’s elevator came, and he appeared, told me good morning, crossed to his chair and got his poundage adjusted, and spoke. “I left my papers in my room. May I have yours?”

  I should have put them on his desk, since I knew he had had company for breakfast. I took them to him and then resumed at the typewriter. He glanced through the morning mail, which was mostly circulars and requests from worthy causes, then settled back with the news. That was okay, since there could have been an item that might affect the program for the day. He is not a fast reader, and I pounded along in high so as to be finished by the time he was ready. It was still before noon by ten minutes when I rolled the last page of Rollins from the machine, and after collating the originals and carbons I turned for a glance at him.

  He had put the papers down and was deep in Beauty for Ashes.

  No
commonplace crack would fit the situation. It was serious and could be critical. I stapled the reports, labeled a folder “Lippert, Buff and Assa” and put them in it, went and put the folder in the cabinet, came back to my desk and put things away, turned to him and announced, “I’m all set. Hansen and Buff phoned to ask how we’re coming, and I told them there was no use crowding. Philip Younger wants you to get him a conference with LBA, and I said maybe later. Lon Cohen wants the murderer’s name with a picture by five o’clock. That’s the crop. I’m ready for instructions.”

  He finished a paragraph—no, it was verse. He finished something, then his eyes came at me over the top of the book. “I haven’t any,” he stated.

  “Oh. Tomorrow, maybe? Or some day next week?”

  “I don’t know. I gave it some thought last night, and I don’t know.”

  I stared at him. “This is your finest hour,” I said emphatically. “This is the rawest you have ever pulled. You took the case just twenty-four hours ago. Why didn’t you turn it down? That you have the gall to sit there on your fanny and read poetry is bad enough, but that you tell me to do likewise …” I stood up. “I quit.”

  “I haven’t told you to read poetry.”

  “You might as well. I’m quitting, and I’m going to the ball game.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t quit in the middle of a case, and you can’t go to the ball game because I couldn’t get you if you were suddenly needed.”

  “Needed for what? Bring you beer?”

  “No.” He put the book down, drew a long deep sigh, and leaned back. “I suppose this has to be. You’re enraged because I haven’t devised a list of sallies and exploits for you. You have of course pondered the situation, as I have. I sympathize with your eagerness to do something. What would you suggest?”

  “It’s not up to me. If I did the suggesting around here, that would be my desk and this would be yours.”

  “Nevertheless, I put it to you. Please sit down so I can look at you without stretching my neck. Thank you. There is nothing you can do about any of these people that the police have not already done, and are doing, with incomparably greater resources and numbers. Keeping them under surveillance, investigating their past, learning if any of them had a gun, checking their alibis, harassing them by prolonged and repetitive inquisition—do you want to compete with the police on any of those?”