Too Many Cooks

by Rex Stout

The swamp-woman, now a swamp-widow, was absent, but everyone else—except Berin, of course—was there. Apparently Rossi hadn’t been much impressed by the murder of his son-in-law; he was still ready for a scrap and full of personal and national comments. Mondor paid no attention to him. Vukcic was gloomy and ate like ten minutes for lunch. Ramsey Keith was close to pie-eyed, and about every five minutes he had a spell of giggles that might have been all right coming from his niece. During the entrée Leon Blanc told me, “That little Berin girl is a good one. You see her hold herself? Louis put her between him and the ambassador as a gesture to Berin. She justifies him; she represents her father bravely.” Blanc sighed. “You heard what I told Mr. Wolfe in there when he questioned me. This was to be expected of Phillip Laszio, to let his sins catch up with him on this occasion. Infamy was in his blood. If he were alive I could kill him now—only I don’t kill. I am a chef, but I couldn’t be a butcher.” He swallowed a mouthful of stewed rabbit and sighed again. “Look at Louis. This is a great affair for him, and this civet de lapin is in fact perfection, except for a slight excess of bouquet garni, possibly because the rabbits were young and tender flavored. Louis deserved gayety for this dinner and this salute to his cuisine, and look at us!’ He went at the rabbit again.

  The peak of the evening for me came with the serving of coffee and liqueurs, when Louis Servan arose to deliver his talk, which he had worked on for two years, on The Mysteries of Taste. I was warm and full inside, sipping a cognac which made me shut my eyes as it trickled into my throat—and I’m not a gourmet—so as not to leave any extra openings for the vapor to escape by, and I was prepared to be quietly entertained, maybe even instructed up to a point. Then he began: “Mesdames et messieurs, mes confrères des Quinze Maîtres: Il y a plus que cent ans un homme fameux, Brillat-Savarin le grand…” He went on from there. I was stuck. If I had known beforehand of the dean’s intentions as to language I would have negotiated some sort of arrangement, but I couldn’t simply get up and beat it. Anyway, the cognac bottle was two-thirds full, and the fundamental problem was to keep my eyes open, so I settled back to watch his gestures and mouth work. I guess it was a good talk. There were signs of appreciation throughout the hour and a half it lasted, nods and smiles and brows lifted, and applause here and there, and once in a while Rossi cried “Bravo!” and when Ramsey Keith got a fit of giggles Servan stopped and waited politely until Lisette Putti got him shushed. Once it got embarrassing, at least for me, when at the end of a sentence Servan was silent, and looked slowly around the table and couldn’t go on, and two big tears left his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. There were murmurs, and Leon Blanc beside me blew his nose, and I cleared my throat a couple of times and reached for the cognac. When it was over they all left their places and gathered around him and shook hands, and a couple of them kissed him.

  They drifted into the parlor in groups. I looked around for Constanza Berin, but apparently she had used up all her bravery for one evening, for she had disappeared. I turned to a hand on my arm and a voice:

  “Pardon me, you are Mr. Goodwin? Mr. Rossi told me your name. I saw you … this afternoon with Mr. Wolfe…”

  I acknowledged everything. It was Albert Malfi, the entrée man with no imagination. He made a remark or two about the dinner and Servan’s speech and then went on, “I understand that Mr. Wolfe has changed his mind. He has been persuaded to investigate the … that is, the murder. I suppose that was because Mr. Berin was arrested?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s just because he’s a guest. A guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality.”

  “No doubt. Of course.” The Corsican’s eyes darted around and back to me. “There is something I think I should tell Mr. Wolfe.”

  “There he is.” I nodded at where Wolfe was chinning with a trio of the masters. “Go tell him.”

  “But I don’t like to interrupt him. He is the guest of honor of Les Quinze Maîtres.” Malfi sounded awed. “I just thought I would ask you … perhaps I could see him in the morning? It may not be important. To-day we were talking with Mrs. Laszio—Mr. Liggett and I—and I was telling her about it—”

  “Yeah?” I eyed him. “You a friend of Mrs. Laszio’s?”

  “Not a friend. A woman like her doesn’t have friends, only slaves. I know her, of course. I was telling about this Zelota, and she and Mr. Liggett thought Mr. Wolfe should know. That was before Berin was arrested, when it was thought someone might have entered the dining room from the terrace—and killed Laszio. But if Mr. Wolfe is interested to clear Berin, certainly he should know.” Malfi smiled at me. “You frown, Mr. Goodwin? You think if Berin is not cleared that would suit my ambition, and why am I so unselfish? I am not unselfish. It would be the greatest thing in my life if I could become chef de cuisine of the Hotel Churchill. But Jerome Berin saw my talent in the little inn at Ajaccio and took me into the world, and guided me with his genius, and I would not pay for my glory with his misfortune. Besides, I know him; he would not have killed Laszio that way, from behind. So I think I should tell Mr. Wolfe about Zelota. Mrs. Laszio and Mr. Liggett think the same. Mr. Liggett says it would do no good to tell the police, because they are satisfied with Berin.”

  I meditated on him. I was trying to remember where I had heard the name Zelota, and all at once it came to me. I said, “Uh-huh. You mean Zelota of Tarragona. Laszio stole something from him in 1920.”

  Malfi looked surprised. “You know of Zelota?”

  “Oh, a little. A few things. What’s he been up to? Or would you rather wait and tell Wolfe about it in the morning?”

  “Not necessarily. Zelota is in New York.”

  “Well, he’s got lots of company.” I grinned. “Being in New York is no crime. It’s full of people who didn’t kill Laszio. Now if he was in Kanawha Spa, that might be different.”

  “But maybe he is.”

  “He can’t be in two places at once. Even a jury wouldn’t believe that.”

  “But he might have come here. I don’t know what you know about Zelota, but he hated Laszio more than—” Malfi shrugged. “He hated him bitterly. Berin often spoke to me about it. And about a month ago Zelota turned up in New York. He came and asked me for a job. I didn’t give him one, because there is nothing left of him but a wreck, drink has ruined him, and because I remembered what Berin had told me about him and I thought perhaps he wanted a job at the Churchill only for a chance to get at Laszio. I heard later that Vukcic gave him a job on soup at Rusterman’s, and he only lasted a week.” He shrugged again. “That’s all. I told Mrs. Laszio and Mr. Liggett about it, and they said I should tell Mr. Wolfe. I don’t know anything more about Zelota.”

  “Well, much obliged. I’ll tell Wolfe. Will you still be here in the morning?”

  He said yes, and his eyes began to dart around again and he shoved off, apparently to electioneer. I strolled around a while, finding opportunities for a few morsels of harmless eavesdropping, and then I saw Wolfe’s finger crooked at me and went to him. He announced that it was time to leave.

  Which suited me. I was ready for the hay. I went to the hall and got our hats and waited with them, yawning, while Wolfe completed his good-nights. He joined me and we started out, but he stopped on the threshold and told me, “By the way, Archie. Give these men a dollar each. Appreciation for good memories.”

  I shelled out to the two greenjackets, from the expense roll.

  In our own suite 60, over at Upshur, having switched on the lights and closed a window so the breeze wouldn’t chill his delicate skin while undressing, I stood in the middle of his room and stretched and enjoyed a real yawn.

  “It’s a funny thing about me. If I once get to bed really late, like last night at four o’clock, I’m not really myself again until I catch up. I was afraid you were going to hang around over there and chew the rag. As it is, it’s going on for midnight—”

  I stopped because his actions looked suspicious. He wasn’t even unbuttoning his vest. Instead, he was getting himse
lf arranged in the big chair in a manner which indicated that he expected to be there awhile. I demanded:

  “Are you going to start your brain going at this time of night? Haven’t you done enough for one evening?”

  “Yes.” He sounded grim. “But there is more to do. I arranged with Mr. Servan for the cooks and waiters of Pocahontas Pavilion to call on us soon as they have finished. They will be here in a quarter of an hour.”

  “Well for God’s sake.” I sat down. “Since when have we been on the night shift?”

  “Since we found Mr. Laszio with a knife in him.” He sounded grimmer. “We have but little time. Not enough . perhaps, in view of Mrs. Coyne’s story.”

  “And those blackbirds coming in a flock? At least a dozen.”

  “If by blackbirds you mean men with dark skin, yes.”

  “I mean Africans.” I stood up again. “Listen, boss. You’ve lost your sense of direction, honest you have. Africans or blackbirds or whatever you like, they can’t be handled this way. They don’t intend to tell anything or they would have told that squint-eyed sheriff when he questioned them. Are you expecting me to use a carpetbeater on the whole bunch? The only thing is to get Tolman and the sheriff here first thing in the morning to hear Mrs. Coyne’s tale, and let them go on from there.”

  Wolfe grunted. “They arrive at eight o’clock. They hear her story and they believe it or they don’t—after all, she is Chinese. They question her at length, and even if they believe her they do not immediately release Berin, for her story doesn’t explain the errors on his list. At noon they begin with the Negroes, singly. God knows what they do or how much time they take, but the chances are that Thursday midnight, when our train leaves for New York, they will not have finished with the Negroes, and they may have discovered nothing.”

  “They’re more apt to than you are. I’m warning you, you’ll see. These smokes can take it, they’re used to it. Do you believe Mrs. Coyne’s tale?”

  “Certainly, it was obvious.”

  “Would you mind telling me how you knew she had hurt her finger in the dining room door?”

  “I didn’t. I knew she had told Tolman that she had gone directly outside, had stayed outside, and had returned directly to the parlor; and I knew that she had hurt her finger in a door. When she told me she had caught her finger in the main entrance door, which I knew to be untrue, I knew she was concealing something, and I proceeded to make use of the evidence we had prepared.”

  “I had prepared.” I sat down. “Some day you’ll try to bluff the trees out of their leaves. Would you mind telling me now what motive one of these smokes had for bumping off Laszio?”

  “I suppose he was hired.” Wolfe grimaced. “I don’t like murderers, though I make my living through them. But I particularly dislike murderers who buy the death they seek. One who kills at least keeps the blood on his own hands. One who pays for killing—pfui! That is worse than repugnant, it is dishonorable. I presume the colored man was hired. Naturally, that’s an annoying complication for us.”

  “Not so terrible.” I waved a hand. “They’ll be here pretty soon. I’ll arrange them for you in a row. Then you’ll give them a little talk on citizenship and the Ten Commandments, and explain how illegal it is to croak a guy for money even if you get paid in advance, and then you’ll ask whoever stabbed Laszio to raise his hand and his hand will shoot up, and then all you’ll have to do is ask who paid him and how much—”

  “That will do, Archie.” He sighed. “It’s amazing how patiently and with what forbearance I have tolerated—but there they are. Let them in.”

  That was an instance when Wolfe himself jumped to an unwarranted conclusion, which was a crime he often accused me of. For when I made it through the foyer and opened the door to the hall, it wasn’t Africans I found waiting there, but Dina Laszio. I stared at her a second, adjusting myself to the surprise. She put her long sleepy eyes on me and said:

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but—may I see Mr. Wolfe?”

  I told her to wait and returned to the inner chamber.

  “Not men with dark skin, but a woman. Mrs. Phillip Laszio wants to see you.”

  “What? Her?”

  “Yes, sir. In a dark cloak and no hat.”

  Wolfe grimaced. “Confound that woman! Bring her in here.”

  9

  I SAT AND WATCHED and listened and felt cynical. Wolfe rubbed his cheek with the tip of his forefinger, slowly and rhythmically, which meant he was irritated but attentive. Dina Laszio was on a chair facing him, with her cloak thrown back, her smooth neck showing above a plain black dress with no collar, her body at ease, her eyes dark in shadow.

  Wolfe said, “No apology is needed, madam. Just tell me about it. I’m expecting callers and am pressed for time.”

  “It’s about Marko,” she said.

  “Indeed. What about Marko?”

  “You’re so brusque.” She smiled a little, and the smile clung to the corners of her mouth. “You should know that you can’t expect a woman to be direct like that. We don’t take the road, we wind around. You know that. Only I wonder how much you know about women like me.”

  “I couldn’t say. Are you a special kind?”

  She nodded. “I think I am. Yes, I know I am. Not because I want to be or try to be, but…” She made a little gesture. “It has made my life exciting, but not very comfortable. It will end … I don’t know how it will end. Right now I am worried about Marko, because he thinks you suspect him of killing my husband.”

  Wolfe stopped rubbing his cheek. He told her, “Nonsense.”

  “No, it isn’t. He thinks that.”

  “Why? Did you tell him so?”

  “No. And I resent—” She stopped herself. She leaned forward, her head a little on one side, her lips not quite meeting, and looked at him. I watched her with pleasure. I suppose she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t try to be a special kind of woman, but she didn’t have to try. There was something in her—not only in her face, it came right out through her clothes—that gave you an instinctive impulse to start in that direction. I kept on being cynical, but it was easy to appreciate that there might be a time when cynicism wouldn’t be enough.

  She asked with a soft breath, “Mr. Wolfe, why do you always jab at me? What have you got against me? Yesterday, when I told you what Phillip told me about the arsenic … and now when I tell you about Marko…”

  She leaned back. “Marko told me once, long ago, that you don’t like women.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I can only say, nonsense again. I couldn’t rise to that impudence. Not like women? They are astounding and successful animals. For reasons of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under the pressure of necessity. I confess to a specific animus toward you. Marko Vukcic is my friend; you were his wife; and you deserted him. I don’t like you.”

  “So long ago!” She fluttered a hand. Then she shrugged. “Anyway, I am here now in Marko’s behalf.”

  “You mean he sent you?”

  “No. But I came, for him. It is known, of course, that you have engaged to free Berin of the charge of killing my husband. How can you do that except by accusing Marko? Berin says Phillip was in the dining room, alive, when he left. Marko says Phillip was not there when he entered. So if not Berin, it must have been Marko. And then, you asked Marko to-day if he asked me to dance or suggested that I turn on the radio. There could be only one reason why you asked him that: because you suspected that he wanted the radio going so that no noise would be heard from the dining room when he … if anything happened in there.”

  “So Marko told you that I asked about the radio.”

  “Yes.” She smiled faintly. “He thought I should know. You see, he has forgiven what you will not forgive—”

  I missed the rest of that on account of a knock on the door. I went to the foyer, closing the door of Wolfe’s room behind me, and opened up. The sight in the hall gave me a
shock, even though I had been warned. It looked like half of Harlem. Four or five were greenjackets who a couple of hours back had been serving the dean’s dinner to us, and the others, the cooks and helpers, were in their own clothes. The light brown middle-aged one in front with the bottom of one ear chopped off was the head waiter in charge at Pocahontas, and I felt friendly to him because it was he who had left the cognac bottle smack in front of me at the table. I told them to come on in and stepped aside not to get trampled, and directed them through to my room and followed them in.

  “You’ll have to wait in here, boys, Mr. Wolfe has a visitor. Sit on something. Sit on the bed, it’s mine and it looks like I won’t be using it anyway. If you go to sleep, snore a couple of good ones for me.”

  I left them there and went back to see how Wolfe was getting along with the woman he didn’t like. Neither of them bothered with a glance at me as I sat down. She was saying:

  “…but I know nothing about it beyond what I told you yesterday. Certainly I know there are other possibilities besides Berin and Marko. As you say, someone could have entered the dining room from the terrace. That’s what you’re thinking of, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a possibility. But go back a little, Mrs. Laszio. Do you mean to say that Marko Vukcic told you of my asking him about the radio, and expressed the fear that I suspected him of having the radio turned on to give him an opportunity for killing your husband?”

  “Well…” She hesitated. “Not exactly like that. Marko would not express a fear. But the way he told me about it—that was obviously in his mind. So I’ve come to you to find out if you do suspect him.”

  “You’ve come to defend him? Or to make sure that my clumsiness hasn’t missed that inference from the timeliness of the radio?”

  “Neither.” She smiled at him. “You can’t make me angry, Mr. Wolfe. Why, do you make other inferences? Many of them?”

  Wolfe shook his head impatiently. “You can’t do that, madam. Give it up. I mean your affected insouciance. I don’t mind fencing when there’s time for it, but it’s midnight and there are men in that other room waiting to see me.—Please let me finish. Let me clear away some fog. I have admitted an animus toward you. I knew Marko Vukcic both before and after he married you, I saw the change in him. Then why was I not grateful whey you suddenly selected a new field for your activities? Because you left débris behind you. It is not decent to induce the cocaine habit in a man, but it is monstrous to do so and then suddenly withdraw his supply of the drug. Nature plainly intends that a man should nourish a woman, and a woman a man, physically and spiritually, but there is no nourishment in you for anybody; the vapor that comes from you, from your eyes, your lips, your soft skin, your contours, your movements, is not beneficent but malignant. I’ll grant you everything: you were alive, with your instincts and appetites, and you saw Marko and wanted him. You enveloped him with your miasma—you made that the only air he wanted to breathe—and then by caprice, without warning, you deprived him of it and left him gasping.”