Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families

by Rex Stout

  Needing two hands to untie the cord, I put the Carson Snub Thirty down on the polished top of Zeck’s desk. I would have given a year’s pay for a glance at Rackham, to see what the chances were, but that might have ruined it. So I put the gun there, stepped around to the rear of Zeck’s chair, knelt, and started untying the knot. My heart was pounding my ribs like a sledgehammer.

  So I didn’t see it happen; I could only hear it. I did see one thing there behind Zeck’s chair: a sudden convulsive jerk of his arms, which must have been his reaction to the sight of Rackham jumping for the gun I had left on the desk. More even than a sight of Rackham, to see if he was rising to it, I wanted a sight of Wolfe, to see if he was keeping his promise to duck for cover the instant Rackham started for the gun, but I couldn’t afford it. My one desperate job now was to get that cord off of Zeck’s wrists in time, and while Wolfe had used the trick knot we had practiced with, he had made it damn tight. I barely had it free and was unwinding the cord from the wrists when the sound of the shot came, followed immediately by another.

  As I got the cord off and jammed it in my pocket, Zeck’s torso slumped sideways and then forward. Flat on the floor, I slewed around, saw Zeck’s contorted face right above my eyes, pulled the handkerchief out of his mouth and stuffed it in my pocket with the cord, slid forward under the desk, and reached for one of the signal buttons.

  I didn’t know, and don’t know yet, whether the noise of the shots had got through the soundproof door or whether it was my push on the button that brought them. I didn’t hear the door open, but the next shots I heard were a fusillade that came from no Carson, so I came back out from under the desk and on up to my feet. Schwartz and his buddy were standing just inside the door, one with two guns and one with one. Rackham was stretched out on the floor, flat on his face. Wolfe was standing at the end of the desk, facing the door, scowling as I had never seen him scowl before.

  “The dirty bastard,” I said bitterly, and I admit my voice might have trembled even if I hadn’t told it to.

  “Reach up,” Schwartz said, advancing.

  Neither Wolfe nor I moved a muscle. But Wolfe spoke. “What for?” He was even bitterer than me, and contemptuous. “They let him in armed, not us.”

  “Watch ’em, Harry,” Schwartz said, and came forward and on around behind the desk where I was. Ignoring me, he bent over Zeck’s collapsed body, spent half a minute with it, and then straightened and turned.

  “He’s gone,” he said.

  Harry, from near the door, squealed incredulously. “He’s gone?”

  “He’s gone,” Schwartz said.

  Harry wheeled, pushed the door open, and was gone too. Schwartz stared after him three seconds, not more than that, then jumped as if I had pinched him, made for the door, and on through.

  I went and took a look at Rackham, found he was even deader than Zeck, and turned to Wolfe. “Okay, that’s enough. Come on.”

  “No.” He was grim. “It will be safer when they’ve all skedaddled. Phone the police.”

  “From here?”

  “Yes.”

  I went to Zeck’s desk and pulled one of the phones to me.

  “Wait.” I had never heard him so grim. “First get Marko’s number. I want to speak to Fritz.”

  “Now? For God’s sake, now?”

  “Yes. Now. A man has a right to have his satisfactions match his pains. I wish to use Mr. Zeck’s phone to tell Fritz to go home and get dinner ready.”

  I dialed the operator.

  Chapter 20

  Three days later, Friday afternoon, I said to Wolfe, “Anyway, it’s all over now, isn’t it?” “No, confound it,” he said peevishly. “I still have to earn that fee.”

  It was six o’clock, and he had come down from the plant rooms with some more pointed remarks about the treatment the plants had got at Hewitt’s place. The remarks were completely uncalled for. Considering the two journeys they had taken, out to Long Island and then back again, the plants were in splendid shape, especially those hard to handle like the Miltonias and Phalaenopsis. Wolfe was merely trying to sell the idea, at least to himself, that the orchids had missed him.

  Fritz might have been a mother whose lost little boy has been brought home after wandering in the desert for days, living on cactus pulp and lizards’ tails. Wolfe had gained not an ounce less than ten pounds in seventy-two hours, in spite of all the activity of getting resettled, and at the rate he was going he would be back to normal long before Thanksgiving. The pleats in his face were already showing a tendency to spread out, and of course the beard was gone, and the slick had been shampooed out of his hair. I had tried to persuade him to stay in training, but he wouldn’t even bother to put up an argument. He just spent more time than ever with Fritz, arranging about meals.

  He had not got home for dinner Tuesday evening after all, in spite of the satisfaction he had got by putting in a call to Fritz on Zeck’s phone. We were now cleaned up with Westchester, but it had not been simple. The death of Arnold Zeck had of course started a chain reaction that went both deep and wide, and naturally there had been an earnest desire to make goats out of Wolfe and me, but they didn’t have a damn thing on us, and when word came from somewhere that Wolfe, during his association with Zeck, might have collected some facts that could be embarrassing to people who shouldn’t be embarrassed, the attitude toward us changed for the better right away.

  As for the scene that ended with the death of Zeck and Rackham, we were clean as a whistle. The papers in Roeder’s brief case, which of course the cops took, proved nothing on anybody. By the time the cops arrived there had been no one on the premises but Wolfe and me and the two corpses. A hot search was on, especially for Schwartz and Harry, but so far no take. No elaborate lying was required; our basic story was that Wolfe, in his disguise as Roeder, had got in with Zeck in order to solve the murder of Mrs. Rackham, and the climax had come that afternoon when Zeck had put the screws on Rackham by saying that he had evidence that would convict him for killing his wife, and Rackham had pulled a gun, smuggled somehow past the sentinels, and had shot Zeck, and Schwartz and Harry had rushed in and drilled Rackham. It was surprising and gratifying to note how much of it was strictly true.

  So by Friday afternoon we were cleaned up with Westchester, as I thought, and therefore it was a minor shock when Wolfe said, “No, confound it, I still have to earn that fee.”

  I was opening my mouth to ask him how come, when the phone rang. I got it. It was Annabel Frey. She wanted to speak to Wolfe. I told him so. He frowned and reached for his phone, and I stayed on.

  “Yes, Mrs. Frey? This is Nero Wolfe.”

  “I want to ask you a favor, Mr. Wolfe. That is, I expect to pay for it of course, but still it’s a favor. Could you and Mr. Goodwin come up here this evening? To my home, Birchvale?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Frey, but it’s out of the question. I transact business only in my office. I never leave it.”

  That was a little thick, I thought, from a guy who had just spent five months the way he had. And if she read newspapers she knew all about it—or anyhow some.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “because we must see you. Mr. Archer is here, the District Attorney, and I’m calling at his suggestion. We have a problem—two problems, really.”

  “By ‘we’ do you mean you and Mr. Archer?”

  “No, I mean all of us—all of us who inherited property from Mrs. Rackham, and all of us who were here the night she was killed. Our problem is about evidence that her husband killed her. Mr. Archer says he has none, none that is conclusive—and perhaps you know what people are saying, and the newspapers. That’s what we want to consult you about—the evidence.”

  “Well.” A pause. “I’m trying to get a little rest after a long period of overexertion. But—very well. Who is there?”

  “We all are. We met to discuss this. You’ll come? Wonderful! If you—”

  “I didn’t say I’ll come. All five of you are there?”

&nbs
p; “Yes—and Mr. Archer—”

  “Be at my office, all of you, at nine o’clock this evening. Including Mr. Archer.”

  “But I don’t know if he will—”

  “I think he will. Tell him I’ll be ready then to produce the evidence.”

  “Oh, you will? Then you can tell me now—”

  “Not on the phone, Mrs. Frey. I’ll be expecting you at nine.”

  When we had hung up I lifted the brows at him. “So that’s what you meant about earning that fee? Maybe?”

  He grunted, irritated that he had to interrupt his convalescence for a job of work, sat a moment, reached for a bottle of the beer Fritz had brought, grunted again, this time with satisfaction, and poured a glass with plenty of foam.

  I got up to go to the kitchen, to tell Fritz we were having company and that refreshments might be required.

  Chapter 21

  I was mildly interested when the six guests arrived—a little early, five to nine—in such minor issues as the present state of relations between Annabel Frey and the banker, Dana Hammond, and between Lina Darrow and the statesman, Oliver Pierce, and whether Calvin Leeds would see fit to apologize for his unjust suspicions about Wolfe and me.

  To take the last first, Leeds was all out of apologies. The spring was in his step all right, but not in his manners. First to enter the office, he plunged himself down in the red leather chair, but I figured that Archer rated it ex officio and asked him to move, which he did without grace. As for the others, there was too much atmosphere to get any clear idea. They were all on speaking terms, but the problem that brought them there was in the front of their minds, so much so that no one was interested in the array of liquids and accessories that Fritz and I had arranged on the table over by the big globe. Annabel was in the most comfortable of the yellow chairs, to Archer’s left; then, working toward me at my desk, Leeds and Lina Darrow; and Hammond and Pierce closest to me.

  Wolfe’s eyes swept the arc.

  “This,” he said, “is a little awkward for me. I have met none of you before except Mr. Leeds. I must be sure I have you straight.” His eyes went along the line again. “I think I have. Now if you’ll tell me what you want—you, Mrs. Frey, it was you who phoned me.”

  Annabel looked at the DA. “Shouldn’t you, Mr. Archer?”

  He shook his head. “No, you tell him.”

  She concentrated, at Wolfe. “Well, as I said, there are two problems. One is that it seems to be supposed that Barry Rackham killed his wife, but it hasn’t been proven, and now that he is dead how can it be proven so that everyone will know it and the rest of us will be entirely free of any suspicion? Mr. Archer says there is no official suspicion of us, but that isn’t enough.”

  “It is gratifying, though,” Wolfe murmured.

  “Yes, but it isn’t gratifying to have some of the people who say they are your friends looking at you as they do.” Annabel was earnest about it. “Then the second problem is this. The law will not allow a man who commits a murder to profit by it. If Barry Rackham killed his wife he can’t inherit property from her, no matter what her will said. But it has to be legally proven that he killed her, and unless that is done her will stands, and what she left to him will go to his heirs.”

  She made a gesture. “It isn’t that we want it—the rest of us. It can go to the state or to charity—we don’t care. But we think it’s wrong and a shame for it to go to his people, whoever will inherit from him. It’s not only immoral, it’s illegal. It can’t be stopped by convicting him of murder, because he’s dead and can’t be tried. My lawyer and Mr. Archer both say we can bring action and get it before a court, but then we’ll have to have evidence that he killed her, and Mr. Archer says he hasn’t been able to get it from you, and he hasn’t got it. But surely you can get it, or anyhow you can try. You see, that would solve both problems, to have a court rule that his heirs can’t inherit because he murdered her.”

  “You have stated it admirably,” Archer declared.

  “We don’t want any of it,” Lina blurted.

  “My interest,” Pierce put in, “ls only to have the truth fully and universally known and acknowledged.”

  “That,” Wolfe said, “will take more than me. I am by no means up to that. And not only my capacities, but the circumstances themselves, restrict me to a much more modest ambition. I can get you one of the things you want, removal of all suspicion from the innocent, but the other, having Mrs. Rackham’s bequest to her husband set aside, is beyond me.”

  They all frowned at him, in their various fashions. Hammond, the banker, protested, “That doesn’t seem to make sense. What accomplishes one accomplishes the other. If you prove that Rackham killed his wife—”

  “But I can’t prove that.” Wolfe shook his head. “I’m sorry, but it can’t be done. It is true that Rackham deserved to die, and as a murderer. He killed a woman here in New York three years ago, a woman named Delia Montrose—one of Mr. Cramer’s unsolved cases; Rackham ran his car over her. That was how Zeck originally got a noose on Rackham, by threatening to expose him for the murder he did commit. As you know, Mr. Archer, I penetrated some distance—not very far, but far enough—into Zeck’s confidence, and I learned a good deal about his methods. I doubt if he ever had conclusive evidence that Rackham had killed Delia Montrose, but Rackham, conscious of his guilt, hadn’t the spine to demand a showdown. Murderers seldom have. Then Rackham got a spine, suddenly and fortuitously, by becoming a millionaire; he thought then he could fight it; he defied Zeck, who, taking his time, retorted by threatening to expose Rackham for the murder of his wife. The threat was dangerous and effective even without authentic evidence to support it; there could of course be no authentic evidence that Rackham killed his wife, because he didn’t.”

  They all froze, still wearing the frowns. Knowing Wolfe as I did, I had suspected that was coming, so I was taking them all in to get the impact, but there wasn’t much to choose. After the first shock they all began to make noises, then words came, and then, as the full beauty of it hit them, the words petered out.

  All but Archer’s. “You have signed a statement,” he told Wolfe, “to the effect that Zeck told Rackham he could produce evidence that would convict him of murder, and that Rackham thereupon shot Zeck. Now you say, in contradiction—”

  “There is no contradiction,” Wolfe declared. “The fact of Rackham’s innocence would have been no defense against evidence manufactured by Zeck, and Rackham knew it. Innocent as he was—of this murder, that is—he knew what Zeck was capable of.”

  “You have said that you think Rackham killed his wife, but that you have no proof.”

  “I have not,” Wolfe snapped. “Read your transcripts.”

  “I shall. And you now say that you think Rackham did not kill his wife?”

  “Not that I think he didn’t. I know he didn’t, because I know who did.” Wolfe flipped a hand. “I’ve known that from the beginning. That night in April, when Mr. Goodwin phoned me that Mrs. Rackham had been murdered, I knew who had murdered her. But I also knew that the interests of Arnold Zeck were involved and I dared not move openly. So I—but you know all about that.” Wolfe turned to me. “Archie. Precautions may not be required, but you might as well take them.”

  I opened a desk drawer and got out the Grisson .38. My favorite Colt, taken from me in Zeck’s garage antechamber, was gone forever. After a glance at the cylinder I dropped the Grisson in my side pocket and as I did so lifted my head to the audience. As if they had all been on one circuit, the six pairs of eyes left me and went to Wolfe.

  “I don’t like this,” Archer said in a tight voice. “I am here officially, and I don’t like it. I want to speak to you privately.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “It’s much better this way, Mr. Archer, believe me. We’re not in your county, and you’re free to leave if it gets too much for you, but—”

  “I don’t want to leave. I want a talk with you. If you knew, that night, who had killed Mrs. Rackham, I int
end to—”

  “It is,” Wolfe said cuttingly, “of no importance what you intend. You have had five months to implement your intentions, and where are you? I admit that up to three days ago I had one big advantage over you, but not since then—not since I told you of the package I got with a cylinder of tear gas in it, and of the phone call from Mr. Zeck. That brought you even with me. It was after noon on a Friday that Mrs. Rackham left here after hiring me. It was the next morning, Saturday, that I received that package and the phone call from Zeck. How had he learned about it? Apparently he even knew the amount of the check she had given me. How? From whom?”

  I was not really itching to shoot anybody. So I got up and unobtrusively moved around back of them, to the rear of the chair that was occupied by Calvin Leeds. Wolfe was proceeding.

  “It was not inconceivable that Mrs. Rackham had told someone else about it, her daughter-in-law or her secretary, or even her husband, but it was most unlikely, in view of her insistence on secrecy. She said she had confided in no one except her cousin, Calvin Leeds.” Wolfe’s head jerked right and he snapped, “That’s correct, Mr. Leeds?”

  Being back of Leeds, I couldn’t see his face, but there was no difficulty about hearing him, since he spoke much too loud.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Up to then—before she came to see you—certainly.”

  “Good,” Wolfe said approvingly. “You’re already drawing up your lines of defense. You’ll need them.”

  “What you’re doing,” Leeds said, still too loud, “if I understand you—you’re intimating that I told Zeck about my cousin’s coming here and hiring you. You’re intimating that in front of witnesses.”

  “That’s right,” Wolfe agreed. “But it’s not vital to me; I mention it chiefly to explain why I suspected you of duplicity, and of being involved in some way with Arnold Zeck even before Mr. Goodwin left here that day to go up there. It draws attention to you, no doubt of that; but it is not primary evidence that you murdered your cousin. The proof that it was you who killed her was given to me on the phone that night by Mr. Goodwin.”