Too Many Women nwo-12

by Rex Stout

  By that time it was too late to eat in a restaurant and make it to the theater, so we ate in that big cafeteria near the station on Forty-second Street. Then we had bad luck and couldn’t get seats for the show we wanted to see and we went to a movie instead-The Best Years of Our Lives. Then I caught the eleven-fifty-six to Westport. Then the next day, Saturday, Mr. Hoff-he knew where I was-he came to Westport and said it was my duty to cooperate with the authorities, so I came to New York and went to the District Attorney’s office and told them what I have told you and answered their questions. So when you say you have a witness-well, I’d like to know who the witness is.” I was thinking to myself savagely, you will, my beautiful little liar, you’ll know all right. But I only felt it; I didn’t look it. I kept my face deadpan.

  Wolfe didn’t. He looked concerned and apologetic. “It seems,” he said, “that you had facts for me, not me for you. I do have a witness, Miss Livsey, but manifestly a mistaken one. Of course you certify all this, Mr. Hoff?” “I do,” Hoff said emphatically.

  “Then that settles it. I owe you an apology, Miss Livsey, which is a rare debt for me to incur. As for my witness-I wonder if you’ll do me a favor. Will you send me a photograph of yourself-a good one, as recent as possible?” “Why-” Hester hesitated.

  “Certainly,” Hoff agreed for her. “I don’t know what for, but certainly she will.” “Good. I’ll appreciate it. Today, if possible, by messenger collect. The witness may have an idea of going to the police and there’s no use getting them more confused than they are already.” Wolfe was out of his chair. “Good day, Miss Livsey. Good day, Mr. Hoff. Thank you for coming.” I went to the hall with them. At the door Hester told me, offering a hand, “I’m sorry if I was impolite this morning, Mr. Goodwin. I guess I was upset.” “Don’t mention it,” I told her eyes. “You were nervous. Everybody in the neighborhood of a murder gets nervous, sometimes even the murderer himself.” I returned to the office, resumed my chair, and sat and glared at Wolfe as he opened a fresh bottle, poured, waited until the foam was exactly a quarter of an inch below the rim of the glass, and drank. He put the glass down empty and used his tongue on his upper lip first and then his handkerchief. When company was present he omitted the tongue part.

  “Superficially neat,” he muttered at me, “but they’re a pair of idiots.” “Enravished,” I said, “is no word for it. I’m absolutely nuts about her. Did you notice that she even named the movie they went to? She left out the kind of sundae she had. That was an oversight. One thing you didn’t know about, but I doubt if it would have mattered, all I told her was that you had a fact you wanted to ask her about, and she was so anxious to know which fact that she nearly lost her pants. There was a time when the mere thought of her pants would have made my heart beat. Anyhow, our fact isn’t the only one, I’ll guarantee that. What do we do now, feed her to the animals?” “No.” Wolfe was grim. “I doubt if Mr. Cramer could shake them. Even if he could, she sat there and told me that preposterous lie and I will not tolerate it. What about Saul? Did he look twice?” “No. Not a chance. He spotted her himself and said yes, and with Saul you know how good that is. Even if she has a twin, it was her. Also, as I told you, he spotted Sumner Hoff.” I snorted. “Protect your woman.” “What?” “Nothing. It’s a motto. The corny performance we have just witnessed has got me voting for the stock department again. When I left the directors’ meeting I was voting for the thirty-sixth floor, murder on the highest executive level, but not now. What I would really like is to combine the two. I hate to leave Emmet Ferguson out of it.” “Tell me about the directors’ meeting.” I did so, and hoped he was listening. That was open to question because he kept his eyes open. When he doesn’t close his eyes while I am making a report it usually means that part of his mind is on something else, and I never know how big a part. On that occasion I suspected it was more than half, knowing as I did what he was doing with it. He was peeling strips of hide off of Hester Livsey and sprinkling salt on the exposed tissue. She had diddled him good. He had counted on getting from her, at a minimum, a hint as to where the path either entered the thicket or left it, and all he had got was a barefaced lie with Sumner Hoff to back it up.

  When I finished the report, instead of asking questions or making comments, he muttered that he wished to speak to Mr. Cramer, and when the connection was made he told Cramer that in checking alibis and tracing movements of people for Friday evening a special effort should be made in the case of Sumner Hoff for the two hours from six to eight. Cramer naturally wanted to know why, since the hours they were concentrating on were from ten to midnight, and Wolfe’s refusal to explain naturally got growls. Wolfe hung up, sighed deeply, and leaned back and then in a matter of seconds had to straighten up again when a call came from Saul Panzer.

  Saul made a report, a brief one, with me off the wire. Wolfe took it with no remarks but grunts, told Saul to come to the office at six that afternoon, and added: “That confounded woman is a nincompoop. Has Mr. Cramer reached you? Of course not. Now you may let him. Let him find you. Tell him about Mr. Naylor but make no reference to Miss Livsey or Mr. Hoff. Leave them out. They have concocted a story that can’t be disproven except by your word. It would be two to one, and Mr. Cramer would keep you for hours and perhaps days, accomplishing nothing.

  You’d better go to see him and finish with him so you can be here at six o’clock.” Wolfe hung up and glowered at me.

  “Archie. At least we’ve been hired to do a job and we know what the job is.

  After lunch go back down there and use your eyes, ears, and tongue as the occasion suggests and your capacities permit.” He glanced at the wall clock.

  “Get Durkin, Gore, Gather, and Keems. I want them all here at six o’clock. If they’re working and need an inducement give them one. That woman is going to regret this.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-Seven

  A week went by. Seven days and seven nights. They brought us to another Monday, the last day of March, and they brought us nowhere else at all.

  It was the longest dry spell we have ever had on a murder case. When I finished breakfast that second Monday morning and put on my coat and hat to go downtown for the start of another week at the office of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., if Wolfe had intercepted me to tell me to type for him a summary of the headway made during the week, it wouldn’t have delayed me more than ten seconds. I could merely have stepped into the office for a blank sheet of paper and handed it to him-or, if he wanted it in triplicate, three sheets. That would have covered the accomplishments not only of me, but of everybody-Wolfe himself, Saul Panzer, Bill Gore, Orrie Gather, Fred Durkin, Johnny Keems, and Inspector Cramer with his entire army.

  The cops had done everything they were supposed to do and then some. Their scientists, with microscopes and chemicals, had demonstrated that Naylor’s body had been carried in the tonneau, on the floor, of the car that had run over him, proving that he had been either killed or stunned somewhere else and transported to Thirty-ninth Street for the last act. The theory was that the body had been where the murderer didn’t want it to be, so he had needed to take it somewhere else, and why not Thirty-ninth Street again if it was as suitably deserted as it had been before? He could choose a moment when no one was in sight for dumping it out of the car, and if someone appeared before he could back the car up and run over it he could merely decide not to add that touch, and step on the gas.

  Naturally the curiosity of the cops was aroused by the fact that the murderer had thought it undesirable for people to know where Naylor was killed and what with, so a few platoons worked on that. In their effort to find out where the car had been the scientists used the microscope on every particle of dust and dirt from the tires, and even from underneath the chassis. Purley told me that one of them had sold himself on the notion that the car had been in Passaic, New Jersey, but had found no other buyers. Otherwise no results.

  Something over two hundred units of personnel of the stock department were conversed with, anywhere fr
om one to five times. Rosa Bendini and her husband, Gwynne Ferns, Sumner Hoff, Hester Livsey, and Ben Frenkel were among the most popular but were by no means the only ones. The assumption was that the murderer of Naylor had also killed Waldo Moore, but it was not allowed to exclude other possibilities, and since at least half of the people on the thirty-fourth floor might conceivably have felt murderous about either one or the other, there was plenty of territory to move around in. It would have been a good training school, Purley told me, for any rookie wanting to learn how to trace movements and check alibis, there were so many different kinds.

  That operation was not confined to the thirty-fourth floor. Up on the thirty-sixth, on the executive and directorial level, the approach was of course somewhat different, since vice-presidents and directors are more sensitive and bleed easier than typists or heads of sections, but the job was actually just as thorough, especially when the days and nights stretched into a week without even one measly little lead. The police elite who worked on it found the normal tangle of jealousies and rivalries, and inclinations to trip and shove, but it all added up to nothing really helpful, including the movement-tracing and alibi-checking. The most promising angle, on the face of it, was Kerr Naylor’s attempt to have Jasper Pine booted out and himself made president, but that too produced no bacon because, first, Naylor had been after the president’s job for years and was getting nowhere, and second, Pine had been in bed asleep the night Naylor was killed, as Wolfe and Cramer and I had learned from Cecily.

  Not satisfied with all the wonderful raw material at Naylor-Kerr, the cops had tried other places too. They had broadened out to include everybody either Moore or Naylor had been known to associate with, getting the same amount of nothing that they got on William Street. On Wolfe’s hint that there might be something phony about Sumner Hoff’s account of his movements from six to eight o’clock, they had questioned both Hoff and Hester several times, and had also tried other lines of inquiry, with no result. By Saturday afternoon, eight days after Naylor’s death, they had got so desperate that Lieutenant Rowcliff himself invited me to go along for their third examination of Naylor’s papers and effects, but I found them just as uninteresting as the cops had, except for a document of forty-six handwritten pages in which Naylor had set down his program for the firm of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., if and when he became president. His list of executives and directors that he intended to get rid of might have been helpful if the list hadn’t been so damn long.

  Meanwhile all Wolfe was doing was getting upset. True, he was paying five operatives besides me-Panzer, Gore, Durkin, Keems, and Gather-but that wasn’t costing him anything since it would all go on the client’s bill. And what do you suppose the last four were doing? It might be supposed, naturally, that they were developing some subtle and intricate plan which Wolfe had cooked up with his celebrated finesse and imagination. Haha. They were tailing Hester and Sumner, which was exactly what they would have been doing if Naylor-Kerr, wanting to hire an investigator, had picked an agency at random from the Red Book. That was how far Wolfe’s genius had got him on this case. As for Saul Panzer, I had not heard his instructions, but I knew he had the photograph which Hester Livsey had sent us at Wolfe’s request, and I suspected he was going around town asking people to guess who it was.

  The reports covering Hester’s and Sumner’s movements from Gore, Durkin, Keems, and Gather weren’t even worth filing. But our four men were having fun, because the subjects were also being tailed by the cops and that made it more sociable.

  I am not being snooty. I can’t afford it, because during that long dry spell I was being as futile as everybody else. I performed occasional and miscellaneous errands which aren’t worth telling about, but most of the time I was at William Street, in the stock department, trying to kid somebody. The only meal I ate at home was breakfast because I worked overtime. Monday evening I took Rosa to dine and dance. Tuesday I took Gwynne Ferris. Wednesday I made a try for Hester.

  First she said she would go and then a couple of hours later reneged, stating that she had tried to cancel another engagement and couldn’t. My guess was that Sumner Hoff was handling things and that if I tried for the next evening or the next I would only get humiliated and perhaps a start on an inferiority complex, so I passed it up and made a stab at a possible fresh source of gossip which weighed around a hundred and fifty and went by the name of Elise Grimes. She proved to be unprofitable no matter what I was after, and Thursday I repeated with Rosa and Friday with Gwynne. I won’t go so far as to say the time and effort were wasted, but I had to be stern with myself to persuade me that it was entirely proper, nothing but routine really, to put it on the client’s expense account.

  Wolfe and I, during that week, had three hot arguments about Hester Livsey and Sumner Hoff. I lost the first one, when I took the stand that we should let the cops have a try at them. Wolfe was dead against it. He said, first, that Cramer would be sore and suspicious because we had held it back so long; second, that Cramer wouldn’t do a real job on them because he wouldn’t be sure we weren’t trying to put something over and Saul was lying; and third, that even if he took Saul for gospel, it would be two against one and Hester and Hoff would probably hold fast. I hated to agree with him but had to.

  The other two arguments ended in a tie. I insisted that Hester and Hoff should be got to the office one at a time, offering to do the getting myself no matter how they felt about it, and Wolfe should give them the works. He maintained it was hopeless. He would have nothing to go on, he said, but one little fact regarding which they had agreed to lie, and they knew we knew they were lying.

  It was stalemate, and he would have nowhere to start from. I said it was the only crack we had found anywhere and he ought to try to get a wedge in it anyhow. He flatly refused. I thought at the time he was just being contrary, but it may be that he was already considering the experiment that he finally decided to try on Sunday evening and didn’t want to run any risk of spoiling it.

  At least it wasn’t laziness. He was really working. With a minimum of pestering from me he agreed that the executives and directors required some attention, and even took my advice where to begin, so I had the satisfaction, Thursday morning, of putting the bee on Emmet Ferguson. At first he was going to sneer me right off the phone, but a few well-chosen dirty insinuations put him where he belonged, and at two o’clock he came tearing into Wolfe’s office with his ten-dollar Sulka tie off center, full of words and ready for war. Wolfe spent two hours on him, and when he finally tore out again two things were perfectly plain: one, Ferguson would always vote against hiring Wolfe or me by anyone for anything, at any time, and two, if Wolfe and I should run short on morals and resort to a frame for the murders, we would heartily agree on who to pick for the victim.

  I would say that probably nobody engaged with the investigation of Naylor’s death got a single thing out of that whole week, except me. Not only were there those opportunities to study women, which any detective under eighty should be glad to have, at the client’s expense, but also I got season tickets for both the Giants and the Yankees. And not by mail or messenger; Cecily brought them herself. When I got home Thursday after midnight I found Wolfe still up, reading apparently only one book, at his desk in the office.

  He grunted at me. “Where have you been?” “I told you where I was going. With Rosa. At one time, months ago it seems, I thought she thought her husband killed Moore, but I’m beginning to think she did it herself. She has a great deal of vitality.” He shuddered. “The plant records are getting badly behind and Theodore needs them.” “They sure are,” I agreed. “I can’t help it if this case is so tough that I have to work days and nights both.” I yawned. “You got me that job down there. You told me to use my organs as the occasion suggests and my capacities permit.” I yawned. “I guess I’ll go to bed.” “No. Mrs. Pine is coming. She telephoned that she wants to give you your baseball tickets and I told her you would be home shortly.” “My God. Shouldn’t you-let us
be alone?” “No. I want to see her. Anyhow, that’s what she really wants. Why the devil should she want to give you baseball tickets?” That, it seemed to me, called for an argument, and I sat down to give it my attention, but before I got a word out I had to get up again because the doorbell rang. I went down the hall, glanced through the one-way panel, opened the door, and invited her in.

  She put out a hand and exchanged a firm friendly clasp with me, gave me a warm wholesome smile, looked searchingly at my face and nodded-to herself, not to me-and said cheerfully: “I could see you would be like that even when you were all red and bruised. Is that fat man in there? I’d like to see him.” Without waiting for clearance she was on her way, and I followed her down the hall and into the office. She offered no hand to Wolfe, only a polite nod with a good evening, and took the straight-backed chair she had used before, after I had moved it up for her.

  “I surmised, madam,” Wolfe said peevishly, “that you wished to see me as well as Mr. Goodwin.” “Not particularly,” she declared. “Except that it is always a satisfaction to remind a man-especially a conceited one like you -that I was right. If you had done what I asked you to my brother would not have been killed.” “Pah. He wouldn’t?” “Certainly not.” Mrs. Pine looked at me. “You know perfectly well, Archie, that you are responsible, spreading it around that he told you he knew who killed Waldo Moore. If you had stayed away from there as I wanted you to it wouldn’t have happened. Not that you’re to blame, since you work for this Mr. Wolfe and have to do what he tells you to.” She smiled at me. “Oh, here are those tickets.” She opened her bag, a medium-sized embroidered thing with a gold frame, fingered in it, and produced an envelope. I crossed to get it, and thanked her, trying to speak like a pet. She asked if I would dispose of her wrap, and I took it-this time it was chinchilla-and put it on the couch.