Trouble in Triplicate

by Rex Stout

  I told him the whole story, straight and complete. He had questions, both during the recital and at the end, and I answered what I could. The one I had expected him to put first, he saved till the last.

  “Well,” he said, “for the present we’ll assume that I believe you. You know what that amounts to, but we’ll assume it. Even so, how are you on figures? How much are two and one?”

  “I’m pretty good. Two plus one plus one equals four.”

  “Yes? Where do you get that second plus one?”

  “So you can add,” I conceded. “Mr. Wolfe thought maybe you couldn’t. However, so can we. Four capsules were found. Two are there in your drawer. One, as I told you, was used in a scientific experiment in Wolfe’s office and damn near killed him. He’s keeping the other one for the Fourth of July.”

  “Like hell he is. I want it.”

  “Try and get it.” I stood up. “Search warrant, subpoena, replevin, riot squad, tear gas, shoot the works. Standing in with G-2 as he does, he could get a carload of those things if he wanted them, but apparently he has taken a liking to this one nice bright little capsule. My God, you’re hard to please. Your men search Blaney and Poor’s without finding a single abditory, and I had to go and do it for you, and we’re splitting fifty-fifty on the capsules. And you beef. May I go now?”

  “Beat it. I’ll get it.”

  I turned with dignity and went.

  When I got back to Wolfe’s Fritz met me in the hall to tell me there was a woman in the office, and when I entered I found it was Martha Poor.

  I sat down at my desk and told her, “Mr. Wolfe will be engaged until eleven o’clock.” I glanced at my wrist. “He’ll be down in forty minutes.”

  She nodded. “I know. I’ll wait.”

  She didn’t look exactly bedraggled, nor would I say pathetic, but there was certainly nothing of the man-eater about her. She seemed older than she had on Tuesday. Anyone could have told at a glance that she was having trouble, but whether it was bereavement or bankruptcy was indicated neither by her clothes nor her expression. She merely made you feel like going up to her, maybe putting your hand on her shoulder or patting her on the arm, and asking, “Anything I can do?” It occurred to me that if she had been old enough to be my mother there would have been no question about how I felt, but she positively was not. If I had wanted to pass the time by deciding what I might want her for when she stopped being in trouble, it would not have been for a mother.

  Of course, since at that time I still had the case solved, and all I needed was evidence, there were about a dozen things I would have liked to ask her, but it seemed advisable to wait and let Wolfe do it. I reached that conclusion while I was sitting with my back to her, entering plant germination records, and that reminded me of a minor point I hadn’t covered. I went to the kitchen and asked Fritz if he had told Wolfe who had come to see him, and Fritz said he hadn’t, he had left that to me. So I returned to the office, buzzed the plant rooms, got Wolfe, and told him, “Returned from mission. I gave them to Cramer himself, and he says he’ll get the other one. Mrs. Poor is down here waiting to see you.”

  “Confound that woman. Send her away.”

  “But she-”

  “No. I know what she wants. I studied her. She wants to know what I’m doing to earn that money. Tell her to go home and read that receipt.”

  The line died. I swung my chair around and told Martha, “Mr. Wolfe says for you to go home and read the receipt.”

  She stared. “What?”

  “He thinks you came to complain because he isn’t earning the money your husband paid him, and the idea of having to earn money offends him. It always has.”

  “But-that’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?”

  “Certainly it is.” I fought back the impulse to step over and pat her on the shoulder. “But my advice is to humor him, much as I enjoy having you here. Nobody alive can handle him but me. If he came down and found you here he would turn around and walk out. If you have anything special to say, tell me and I’ll tell him. He’ll listen to me because he has to, or fire me, and he can’t fire me because then he would never do any work at all and would eventually starve to death.”

  “I shouldn’t think-” She stopped and stood up. She took a step toward the door, then turned and said, “I shouldn’t think a cold-blooded murder is something to joke about.”

  I had to fight back the impulse again. “I’m not joking,” I declared. “Plain facts. What did you want to say to him?”

  “I just wanted to talk with him. He hasn’t come see me. Neither have you.” She tried to smile, but all she accomplished was to start her lip quivering. She stopped it. “You haven’t even phoned me. I don’t know what’s happening. The police asked me about two of my hairs being in that box of cigars, and I suppose they have told Mr. Wolfe about it, and I don’t even know what he thinks or what he told the police…”

  I grinned at her. “That’s easy. He made a speech to the jury, demonstrating that those hairs in the box were evidence that you did not kill your husband.” I went to her and put a hand on her arm, like a brother. “Listen, lady. Isn’t the funeral this afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, go and have the funeral, that’s enough for you for one day. Leave the rest to me. I mean, if anything occurs that it would help you to know about, I’ll see that you know. Right?” She didn’t pull anything corny like grasping my hand with hers firm and warm or gazing at me with moist eyes filled with trust.

  She did meet my eyes, but only long enough to say, “Thank you, Mr. Goodwin,” and turned to go. I went to the front door and let her out.

  After Wolfe came down the relations between us were nothing to brag about.

  Apparently he had nothing to offer, and I was too sore to start in on him. I had brought him Helen and Joe, and except for having fun with that capsule like a kid with a firecracker, he hadn’t bothered to disturb one cell of his celebrated brain. Martha had come on her own, and he wouldn’t even see her. As for Blaney, I had to admit I couldn’t blame him much on that, but the fact remained that he had walked out without doing a lick of work.

  He passed the time until lunch going through catalogues, and at two-thirty P.M., with a veal cutlet and half a bushel of Fritz’s best mixed salad stowed in the hold, he returned to the office and resumed with catalogues. That got interrupted before long, but not by me. The bell rang, and I went to the front and it was Saul Panzer. I took him to the office.

  Wolfe greeted him and then told me, “Archie. Go up and help Theodore with the pollen lists.”

  There was nothing new about it, but that didn’t make me like it any better.

  When the day finally comes that I tie Wolfe to a stake and shoot him, one of the fundamental reasons will be his theory that the less I know the more I can help, or to put it another way, that everything inside my head shows on my face. It only makes it worse that he doesn’t really believe it. He merely can’t stand it to have anybody keep up with him at any time on any track. I am being fair about it. I admit that even under ideal circumstances it wouldn’t happen very often, but it would ruin a good meal for him if it ever happened at all.

  I did my best with Theodore and the pollen lists, not wanting to take it out on them. The conference with Saul seemed to be comprehensive, since a full hour passed before the house phone in the potting room buzzed. Theodore answered it, and told me that I was wanted downstairs.

  When I got there Saul was gone. I had a withering remark prepared, thinking to open up with it, but had to save it for some other time. Wolfe was seated behind his desk, leaning back with his eyes closed, and his lips were moving, pushing out and then in again, out and in…

  So I sat down and kept my mouth shut. The brain had actually got on the job, and I knew better than make remarks, withering or not, during the performance of miracles. The first result, which came in ten or twelve minutes after I entered, did not however seem to be very miraculous. He opened his eyes halfway grunted, and m
uttered, “Archie. Yesterday you showed me an article in a paper about a man’s body found in an orchard near White Plains, but I didn’t look at it. Now I want it.”

  “Yes, sir. There was more this morning-”

  “Have they identified the body?”

  “No, sir. The head was smashed-”

  “Get it.”

  I obeyed. Newspapers were kept in the office for three days. I opened it to the page and handed it to him. He would read a newspaper only one way, holding it out wide-open, no folding, with his arms stretched. I had never tried to get him to do it more intelligently because it was the only strenuous exercise he ever got and was therefore good for him. He finished the Thursday piece and asked for Friday’s, and finished that. Then he told me, “Get the district attorney of Westchester County. What’s his name? Fraser.”

  “Right.” I got busy with the phone. I had no trouble getting the office, but then they gave me the usual line about Mr. Fraser being in conference and I had to put on pressure. Finally the elected person said hello.

  Wolfe took it. “How do you do, Mr. Fraser. Nero Wolfe. I have something to give you. That body found in an orchard Wednesday evening with the head crushed-has it been identified?”

  Fraser was brusque. “No. What-”

  “Please. I’m giving you something. Put this down. Arthur Howell, nine one four West Seventy-eighth Street, New York. He worked for the Beck Products Corporation of Basston, New Jersey. They have an office at six two two East Forty-second Street, New York. His dentist was Lewis Marley, six nine nine Park Avenue, New York. That should help. Try that. In return for this, I would appreciate it very much if you will have me notified the moment the identification is made. Did you get it all down?”

  “Yes. But what-”

  “No, sir. That’s all. That’s all you’ll get from me until I get word of the identification.”

  There was some sputtering protest from the White Plains end, but it accomplished nothing-Wolfe hung up with a self-satisfied smirk on his big face, cleared his throat importantly, and picked up a catalogue.

  I growled at him, “So it’s in the bag. A complete stranger named Arthur Howell. After snitching the capsules from Beck Products and making the cigars and getting them into Poor’s home God knows how, he was overcome by remorse and went to an orchard and took his clothes off and lay down and ran a car over himself with radio control-”

  “Archie. Shut up. We are ready to act in any case, but it will make things a little simpler if that corpse proves to be Mr. Howell, so it is worth waiting for a report on it.” He glanced at the clock, which said seven minutes to four, and put the catalogue down. “We might as well prepare it now. Get that capsule from the safe.” I thought to myself, this time it may not miss him, but as for me, I’m going outdoors. However, it appeared that he was going to try some new gag instead of repeating with the percolator. By the time I got the capsule from the safe and convoyed it to him, he had taken two articles from a drawer and put them on his desk. One was a roll of Scotch tape. The other was a medium-sized photograph of a man, mounted on gray cardboard. I gave it a glance, then picked it up and did a thorough job of looking. It was unquestionably Eugene R. Poor.

  “Goody,” I said enthusiastically. “No wonder you’re pleased. Even if Saul had to pay two hundred bucks for it-”

  “Archie. Let me have that. Here, hold this thing.” I helped. What I was to hold was the capsule, flat on the cardboard near a corner, while he tore off a piece of tape and fastened it there. When he lifted the photo and jiggled it to see if the fastening was firm, the thread dangled over Poor’s right eye.

  “Put it in an envelope and in the safe,” he said, glanced at the clock, and made for the hall and the elevator.

  That was all for the present. I sat at my desk and went over the case again, testing my logic point by point. The conclusion I reached an hour later was that there were two distinct kinds of logic, Wolfe’s and mine, and that they were destined to clash. I wasn’t dumb enough not to have a general idea of where his was headed for, but where he got the notion that we were ready to act was way beyond me. It looked to me as if we were barely ready to start wondering what to do. At six o’clock he returned to the office, rang for Fritz to bring beer, and took up where he had left off with the catalogues. At eight o’clock Fritz summoned us to dinner. At nine-thirty we returned to the office. At a quarter to ten a phone call came from District Attorney Fraser. The body had been identified. It was Arthur Howell. An assistant district attorney and a pair of detectives were on their way to Thirty-fifth Street to ask Wolfe, how come and would he please supply all necessary details, including the present address of the murderer.

  Wolfe hung up, leaned back and sighed, and muttered at me, “Archie. You’ll have to pay a call on Mrs. Poor.”

  I objected, “She’s probably in bed, tired out. The funeral was today.”

  “It can’t be helped. Saul will go with you.”

  I stared. “Saul?”

  “Yes. He’s up in my room asleep. He didn’t get to bed last night. You will take her that photograph of her husband. You should leave as soon as possible, before that confounded Westchester lawyer gets here. I don’t want to see him. Tell Fritz to bolt the door after you go. Ring my room and tell Saul to come down at once. Then I’ll give you your instructions.”

  The appearance of the living room in the Poor apartment on Eighty-fourth Street was not the same as it had been when I had arrived there three evenings before.

  Not only was there no army of city employees present and no man of the house with his face gone huddled on the floor, but the furniture had been moved around. The chair Poor had sat in when he lit his last cigar was gone, probably to the cleaners on account of spots, the table Cramer had used for headquarters had been shifted to the other side of the room, and the radio had been moved to the other end of the couch. Martha Poor was sitting on the couch, and I was on a chair I had pulled around to face her. She was wearing something that wasn’t a bathrobe and wasn’t exactly a dress, modest, with sleeves and only a proper amount of throat showing.

  “I’m here under orders,” I told her. “I said this morning that if anything happened that it would help you to know about I’d see that you knew, but this isn’t it. This is different. Nero Wolfe sent me with orders. I just want to make that clear. Item number one is to hand you this envelope and invite you to look at the contents.”

  She took it from me. With steady fingers, slow-moving rather than hurried, she opened the flap and pulled out the photograph.

  I informed her, “That decoration may look like something by Dali, but it was Nero Wolfe’s idea. I am not authorized to discuss it or the picture from any angle, just there it is, except to remark that it is a very good likeness of your husband. I only saw him that one time, the other afternoon at the office, but of course I had a long and thorough look at him. Wednesday we could have sold that photo to a newspaper for a nice amount, but of course we didn’t have it Wednesday.” She had put the photo beside her on the couch and was pinching an edge of the cardboard between her index finger and thumbnail, with the nail sinking in. She was looking straight at me. The muscles of her throat had tightened, which no doubt accounted for the change in her voice when she spoke.

  “Where did you get it?”

  I shook my head. “Out of bounds. As I said, I’m under orders. Item number two is just a piece of information to the effect that a man named Saul Panzer is out in the back hall on this floor, standing by the door of the service elevator. Saul is not big but he just had a nap and is alert. Number three: that naked body found up in Westchester with the head smashed by running a car over it, in an orchard not more than ten minutes’ drive from either Monty’s Tavern or Blaney’s place, has been identified as formerly belonging to a man named Arthur Howell, an employee of the Beck Products Corporation.”

  Her eyes hadn’t moved. I hadn’t even seen the lashes blink. She said in a faraway voice, “I don’t know why you tell me about t
hat. Arthur Howell? Did you say Arthur Howell?”

  “Yep, that’s right. Howell, Arthur. Head flattened to a pancake, but enough left for the dentist. As for telling you about it, I’m only obeying orders.” I glanced at my wrist. “Number four: it is now twenty past ten. At a quarter to eleven I am supposed either to arrive back at the office or phone. If I do neither, Nero Wolfe will phone Inspector Cramer and then here they’ll come. Not as many as Tuesday evening I suppose, because they won’t need all the scientists, but plenty.” I stopped, still meeting her eyes, and then went on, “Let’s see. Photo and capsule, Saul out back, Howell, cops at a quarter to eleven… that’s all.”

  She got up, with the photo in her hand, and started for a door to the right, the one she had retreated through Tuesday when Blaney had arrived on the scene.

  It was up to me to decide. If she wanted to be alone to get her mind arranged, or anything else arranged, that was all right with me, but the one detail which I thought had not been sufficiently considered was fire escapes. So although I would have much preferred to stay where I was, I went along.

  That game of follow the leader was one of my experiences that can stay unique and suit me fine. She might have been a deaf-and-dumb renting agent showing me the apartment, and me a deaf-and-dumb prospective tenant. First we did the master bedroom, her in front and me right behind. She went and opened a closet door, looked in a moment, and shut it again. Then she crossed to another door that was standing open. I had never seen a fire escape with an entrance through a bathroom window, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to look so I did. Seeing it was okay, I backed out and she shut the door, staying inside. I went to a window and frowned out at the dark for maybe three minutes, and apparently I forgot to breathe, for when the door opened and she came out I pulled in enough oxygen to fill a barrel. Observing that she no longer was carrying the photograph, I let her go on being it. Her next destination was the back door, leading from the kitchen to the service hall. With me at her elbow, she pulled the door wide-open, and we were both looking at Saul, standing there reading a newspaper.