Too Many Women nwo-12

by Rex Stout

  Sumner Hoff had been after Hester Livsey, strictly honorable, for over a year.

  I was beginning to understand why Pine had said that Moore was the type that stirs up gossip.

  For nearly two hours, sitting there working on the steak and its accessories, and another bottle of wine, and then pastry and coffee and brandy, Rosa told me things. When she got through I had a bushel of details, but fundamentally I didn’t know anything I hadn’t known before. It was no news that Moore had made various people sore in his capacity as a correspondence checker, or that his own section head hadn’t liked him or wanted him, or even that he was death on dames.

  All Rosa had done was fill in., and when we got right down to it, how did she know Moore had been murdered and who did it, all she had was loose feathers. She knew he had been murdered because she knew who wanted him dead. Okay, who? On that she reminded me of the old gag about which one would he save, his wife or his son? She would have rooted for Hester Livsey if it hadn’t been for Gwynne Ferris, and she would have rooted for Ferris if it hadn’t been for Livsey. As for the actual circumstances of Moore’s death, she had plenty of gossip, unshakable opinions, and a fine healthy set of suspicions and prejudices, but no facts I didn’t already know.

  I wasn’t greatly disappointed, since in the detective business you always draw ten times as many blanks as you do paying numbers, but with all her pouring it out I had an uneasy feeling that she might have something I wasn’t getting. It was plausible that she had waylaid me just to give me moral support and a friendly shove in what she regarded as the right direction, she was quite capable of that, but by the time we finished with the brandy I had decided that she was also capable of hiding an ace. And I seemed to be stymied. So I told her: “It’s only a little after eight. We could go somewhere and dance, or take in a show, or I could get my car and we could ride around, but that can wait. I think for tonight we ought to concentrate on Wally Moore, Did you ever hear of Nero Wolfe?” “Nero Wolfe the detective? Certainly.” “Good. I know him quite well. As I said. I’m not a cop, but I’m a sort of a detective myself, and I often consult Nero Wolfe. His office is in his house on Thirty-fifth Street. What do you say we go down there and talk it over with him?

  He knows how to fit things together.” She had got completely relaxed, but now she darted a glance at me.

  “What is it, just a house?” “Sure, with a room in it he uses for an office.” She shook her head. “You’ve got me wrong, Mr. Truett. I wouldn’t go into a house I’d never been in with a man I didn’t know well enough to call him by his first name.” The girl interpreted everything in terms of companionship. “You’ve got me wrong,” I assured her. “If and when I ask you to enjoy life with me it won’t be on the pretense that we’ve got work to do. I doubt if I’ll feel like it until you get this Wally Moore out of your system. That might even be why I want to go and discuss it with Mr. Wolfe.” She wasn’t stubborn. Fifteen minutes later we were down on the sidewalk, climbing into a taxi. In that quarter-hour I had signed the check, drawn the curtain again for a decent interval, and phoned Wolfe to tell him what was coming.

  In the taxi she was nervous. Thinking it would be a good idea to keep her relaxed, and anyway I had drunk my half of the wine and brandy, I courteously got hold of her hand, but she pulled it away. It irritated me a little, because I felt sure that what made her balky was not the idea of discussing murder with Nero Wolfe but the prospect of entering a strange house with me. It seemed a little late in the day for a Puritan streak to show. As a result, however, my faculties resumed their normal operations, and therefore I became aware, at Forty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue, that we had an outrider. Another taxi had stuck to our rear all the way across town, and turned south on Tenth Avenue behind us. The driver was apparently not the subtle type. Since Rosa had seen fit to build a fence between us, I said nothing about it to her.

  When we turned right on Thirty-fifth Street our suffix came along. By the time we rolled to the curb in front of Wolfe’s house there wasn’t even a hyphen between us. I paid the driver from my seat, and my giving Rosa a hand out to the sidewalk, and the emergence from the other cab of a big husky male in a topcoat and a conservative felt hat, were simultaneous.

  As he started toward us I addressed him, “I didn’t quite catch the name.” He snubbed me and spoke to her, coming right up to her and ignoring me entirely.

  “Where are you going with this man?” Masterful as he was, it by no means withered her. “You’re getting to be a bigger fool every day, Harry,” she declared, extremely annoyed. “I’ve told you a thousand times that it’s none of your business where I go or who with!” “And I’ve told you it is and it still is.” He was towering over her. “You were going in that house with him. By God, you come with me!” He gripped her shoulder.

  She squirmed, but not a panicky squirm; he was probably squeezing her flesh into her bones. With his build he could have tucked her under one arm. Grimacing from it, she appealed to me.

  “Mr. Truett, this is that husband I was telling you about. He’s so big!” Implying I was helpless. So I spoke to “Listen, brother, here’s a suggestion.

  We’ll only be in there three or four hours that ought to do it. You wait here on the stoop and when she comes out you can take her home.” I suppose it was badly phrased, but husbands who try to go on steering when the car is upside down in a ditch always aggravate me. He reacted immediately by letting go of her shoulder, which was a necessary preliminary to his next move, an accurate and powerful punch aimed for the middle of my face.

  Ducking out of its path, my thought was that this would be simple, since he didn’t know enough about it to go for something more vulnerable and easier to get at than a face, but I was wrong. He knew plenty about it, and evidently, also thinking it would be simple, hadn’t bothered about tactics. When I merely jerked my head sideways to let the punch go by and planted a left hook with my weight behind it just below the crotch of his ribs, thereby informing him that I knew the alphabet, he became a different man.

  Within a minute he had landed on my body three times and underneath my jaw once, and I had become aware that, with his extra fifteen or twenty pounds, he had the advantage in every way but one: he was mad and I wasn’t. Believing as I do in advantages, so long as you don’t do anything you aren’t willing to have done back at you, I carefully chose moments to use a little precious breath on remarks.

  When he missed with a right swing and had to dance back a step to recover I told him, “Three hours with her…seems like three minutes…huh?” When I sneaked in a swift short punch and had the other one coming up and he had to clinch, I muttered, “In a month or so I’ll be through with her anyway.” At one point, just after he had jolted me good with a solid one over the heart, I thought he was doing some conversing himself. I distinctly heard a voice say, “You might as well pay me now. He shouldn’t try to talk. You can’t talk and fight both.” Then I realized at the edge of my mind that it wasn’t him. The taxi drivers were leaning against the fender of the cab I had paid for, enjoying a free show. I resented that, and, knowing I was in no position to resent anything, shoved it out of the way. The husband apparently had oversize lungs. With no gong to announce intermissions I was beginning to wish I had learned to breathe through my ears, but he didn’t even his mouth open. He just kept coming. I told him, “Even if you put me to sleep…I’ll wake up again…and so will she…not three hours…three days and nights…and it’ll be worth it…” With his right he started a haymaker for my head, practically putting his left in his pocket. He had done that once before, and I had been a tenth of a second too slow. My best punch is a right to the body, the kidney spot, turning my whole weight behind it exactly as if I meant to spin clear on around. When the timing and distance are just right it’s as good as I’ve got. That one clicked.

  He didn’t go down, but it softened the springs in his legs, and for an instant his arms were paralyzed. I was on him, in close, sawing with both elbows, my fa
ce not six inches from his, and when I saw he was really on the way and perfectly safe for two full seconds, I backed out a little and let him have two more kidney punches. The second one was a little high because he had started down.

  I stood over him with my fists still tight and became aware that I was trembling from head to foot and there was nothing I could do about it. I heard the voice of one of the taxi drivers: “Boy, Oh boy. Pretty as a picture! I felt them last two myself.” I looked around. That block was never much populated, and at that time of day was deserted. We hadn’t done any yelping or bellowing. Not a soul was in sight except the two drivers.

  “Where’s the lady?” I asked.

  “She beat it like a streak when he slammed you up against my car.” He aimed a thumb west. “That way. And I don’t want no argument with you. What the hell, Mac, you’re good enough for the Garden!” I was still trying to catch up on my breathing. The husband rose to an elbow and was evidently on his way up. I spoke to him.

  “You goddam married wife-chaser, the second you’re on your feet you get more of the same, or even on one foot. Do you know who lives in this house? Nero Wolfe.

  I was taking her to see him on business. Now she’s gone, and damned if I’m going in with nothing, so I’ll take you. Besides, you ought to get brushed off and drink a cup of tea.” He was sitting up, looking the way I felt. “Is that straight?” he demanded. “You were bringing her here to see Nero Wolfe?” “Yes.” Then I’m sorry. I apologize.” He scrambled to his feet. “When it comes to her I don’t stop to think. I could use a drink and I don’t mean tea, and I’d like to take a look in a mirror.” “Then up that stoop. I know where there’s a mirror. Your hat’s there in the gutter.” One of the drivers handed it to him. I followed him up the seven steps and let us in with my key. We hung our things in the hall, and I steered him on to the office. Wolfe was there behind his desk. He took the husband in with a swift glance, then transferred it to me and demanded: “What the devil are you up to now? Is this the young woman who dined with you?” “No, sir,” I said. I was feeling battered but self-satisfied, and I had my breath back. “This is her husband, Mr. Harold Anthony from the financial district, a college man. He tailed her from her office, and tailed her and me clear here, and he thought I was bringing her as a plaything for you. Evidently he knows your reputation. He aimed for my face and missed, on the sidewalk out in front. He has taken lessons and it took me ten minutes or more to nail him, which I did with three kidney punches. He was down flat. Is that correct, Mr.

  Anthony?” “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay. Scotch, rye, or bourbon?” “Plenty of bourbon.” “We have it. Mr. Wolfe will ask Fritz to bring it. The bathroom is this way.

  Come along.” Wolfe’s voice came behind us, “Confound it, where is Mrs. Anthony?” “No soap,” I told him from the bathroom door. “You’ll have to stifle your desires for tonight. She went for a walk. Her husband is substituting for her.”

  CHAPTER Thirteen

  A few feet from the end of Wolfe’s desk is a roomy and comfortable red leather chair, and next to it on one side is a solid little table made of massaranduba, the primary function of which is as a resting place for checkbooks while clients write in them, Harold Anthony sat in the chair, with a bottle of bourbon at his elbow on the little table, while Wolfe kept at him for over an hour.

  Mr. Anthony had a conviction: the stock department of Naylor-Kerr was a hotbed of lust and lechery where the primitive appetites germinated like sweet potato sprouts.

  Mr. Anthony had a record: since he had got out of the Army in November he had bopped four assorted men whom he had detected in the act of escorting his wife somewhere, and one of them had gone to a hospital with a broken jaw. He did not know if one of them had been named either Wally or Moore.

  Mr. Anthony had an alibi: the evening of December 4 had been spent by him in a bowling alley, with friends. They had quit around eleven-thirty and he had gone home. When Wolfe observed that that would have left him plenty of time to get over to Thirty-ninth Street and run a car over Moore, he agreed without hesitation but added that he couldn’t have had the car, since it had been stolen before eleven-twenty, at which time the owner, coming from the theater, had arrived where he had parked the car and found it gone.

  “You appear,” Wolfe commented, “to have followed the accounts of Mr. Moore’s death with interest and assiduity. In newspapers?” “Yes.” “Why were you interested?” “Because the papers had pictures of Moore, and I recognized him as the man I had seen with my wife a few days before.” “Where?” “Getting into a taxi on Broadway, downtown.” “Had you spoken with him?” “Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off.” “Cooled? By what process?” “I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife.” “You did?” Wolfe scowled at him. “What’s the matter with your brain? Does it leak? You said you didn’t know whether one of your wife’s escorts, the ones you bombarded, was named Moore.” “Sure I did.” The husband was not disturbed. “What the hell, I didn’t know then you were going into it.” He was really two different persons. Sitting there with a couple of men, drinking good bourbon, he had poise and he knew the score. I would hardly have recognized him as the wild-eyed infuriated male moose who had lost all self-control at the sight of me helping an assistant chief filer from a taxicab, if it hadn’t been for a band-aid covering a gash on his face. The gash was the result of my having neglected to remember, for a brief moment, that cheekbones are hard on knuckles.

  At the beginning, after he and I had finished in the bathroom and returned to the office, he had been suspicious and cagey, even with bourbon in him, until he was satisfied that I really had been bringing Rosa there on business. Then, when he learned that the business was an inquiry into the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore, it took him only a minute to decide that his best line was full and frank co-operation if he wanted any help from us in keeping his wife out of it as far as possible. At least that was the way it looked to me, and by the time we got to his alibi for December 4 I was almost ready to regard him as a fellow being.

  Around a quarter to ten he left, not because the bottle was empty or Wolfe had run out of questions, but because Saul Panzer arrived. I let Saul in, and as he headed for the office the husband came out, got his things from the rack, and grunted and groaned without any false modesty as he got into his coat. He offered a hand.

  “Christ, I’ll be a cripple for a week,” he admitted. “That right of yours would dent a tank.” I acknowledged the compliment, closed the door after him, and returned to the office.

  Saul Panzer, who was under size, who had a nose which could be accounted for only on the theory that a nose is all a face needs, and who always looked as if he had shaved the day before, was the best free-lance operative in New York. He was the only colleague I knew that I would give a blank check to and forget it.

  He had come to make a report, and, judging from the ground it covered, Wolfe must have got in touch with him and put him to work that morning as soon as I had left the house.

  But that was about all you could say for it, that it covered lots of ground. He had talked with squad men who had worked on the case, had gone through three newspaper files, had been shown the record by Captain Bowen downtown, and had even seen the owner of the car; and all he had harvested was one of the most complete collections of negatives I had ever seen. No fingerprints from the car; nobody had any idea what Moore had been doing on Thirty-ninth Street; no one had seen the car being parked, afterwards, on Ninety-fifth Street; not a single lead had been picked up anywhere. The police knew about Moore’s friendship with Mrs.

  Pine, and his romantic career at Naylor-Kerr, and a few other things about him that were news to me, but none of them had turned on a light they could see by.

  It was now, for them, past history, and they had other things to do, except that a hit-and-run manslaughter was never finished business until they collared him.

  “One little thing,” said Saul, who wasn�
�t pleased with himself. “The body was found at one-ten in the morning. An M.E. arrived at one-forty-two. His quick guess was that Moore had been dead about two hours, and the final report more or less agreed with him. So we have these alternatives: first, the body was there on the street, from around midnight until ten after one, with nobody seeing it.

  Second, the M.E. report is a bad guess and he hadn’t been dead so long. Third, the body wasn’t there all that time but was somewhere else. I mentioned it downtown, and they don’t think it’s a thing at all, not even a little one. They have settled for either number one or number two, or a combination. They say Thirty-ninth Street between Tenth and Eleventh might easily be that empty from midnight on.” Saul turned his palms up. “You can pay me expenses and forget it.” “Nonsense,” Wolfe said. “I’m not paying you, the client is. A tiger’s eyes can’t make light, Saul, they can only reflect it. You’ve spent the day in the dark.

  Come back in the morning. I may have some suggestions.” Saul went.

  I yawned. Or rather, I started to, and stopped. It is true that wine always makes me yawn, but it is also true that the after-effect of a series of socks on my jaw and the side of my neck makes me stop yawning. I swiveled my chair around with a swing of my body, not bothering to put my hand on the edge of my desk for an assist. A simultaneous protest came from at least forty muscles, and, since Harry was no longer there, I groaned without restraint.

  “I guess I’ll go to bed,” I stated.

  “Not yet,” Wolfe objected. “It’s only half-past ten. You have to go to your job in the morning and I haven’t heard your report.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Go ahead.” And three hours later, at half-past one in the morning, we were still there and I was still reporting. I have never known him to be more thorough, wanting every detail and every little word. My face felt stiff as a board, and I hurt further down, especially my left side, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction and pleasure of hearing me groan again, and I didn’t. After I had given him everything he kept coming back for more, and when it was no longer possible to continue that without making it perfectly plain that he was merely trying to see how long it would take me to collapse on the floor there in front of him, he asked: “What do you think?” I tried to grin at him, but I doubt if I put it over.