by Rex Stout
The first brand-new ingredient for me, of which nothing had been reported in the papers, was introduced by accident by Mrs. Boone. The only person invited to our party who hadn’t come was Phoebe Gunther, Boone’s confidential secretary. Her name had of course been mentioned several times during the first hour or so, but it was Mrs. Boone who put the spotlight on it. I had the notion that she did it deliberately. She had not up to that moment got any of my major attention. She was mature and filled-out, though not actually fat and by no means run to seed, and she had been short-changed as to nose.
Wolfe had doubled back to the question of Cheney Boone’s arrival at the Waldorf, and Cramer, who was by then in a frame of mind to get it over with and disperse, had said sarcastically, “I’ll send you a copy of my notes. Meanwhile Goodwin can take this down. Five of them-Boone and his wife, Nina Boone, Phoebe Gunther, and Alger Kates-were to take the one o’clock train from Washington to New York, but Boone got caught in an emergency conference and couldn’t make it. The other four came on the train, and when they reached New York Mrs. Boone went to the Waldorf, where rooms had been engaged, and the other three went to the BPR New York office. Boone came on a plane that landed at LaGuardia Field at six-five, went to the hotel and up to the room where his wife was. By that time the niece was there too, and the three of them went together down to the ballroom floor. They went straight to the reception room. Boone had no hat or coat to check, and he hung onto a little leather case he had with him.”
“That was the case,” Mrs. Boone put in, “that Miss Gunther says she forgot about and left on a window sill.”
I looked at the widow reproachfully. That was the first sign of a split in the BPR ranks, and it sounded ominous, with the nasty emphasis she put on says. To make it worse, Hattie Harding of the NIA immediately picked it up:
“And Miss Gunther is absolutely wrong, because four different people saw that case in her hand as she left the reception room!”
Solomon Dexter snorted: “It’s amazing what-”
“Please, sir.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “What was this case? A brief case? A vanity case?”
“No.” Cramer was helping out again. “It was a little leather case like a doctor’s, and it contained cylinders from a dictating machine. Miss Gunther has described it to me. When she took that baby carriage and other stuff to him Tuesday evening, to the room where he was killed, he told her the conference in Washington had ended earlier than he expected, and he had gone to his office and spent an hour dictating before he took the plane to New York. He had the cylinders with him in that case for her to transcribe. She took it to the reception room when she went back there for a cocktail, and left it there on a window sill. That’s the last of it.”
“So she says,” Mrs. Boone repeated.
Dexter glared at her. “Nonsense!”
“Did you,” Hattie Harding demanded, “see the case in her hand when she left the reception room?”
All eyes went to the widow. She moved hers and got the picture. One word would be enough. She was either a traitor or she wasn’t. Confronted with that alternative, it didn’t take her long to decide. She met Hattie Harding’s gaze and said distinctly:
“No.”
Everybody breathed. Wolfe asked Cramer:
“What was on the cylinders, letters? What?”
“Miss Gunther doesn’t know. Boone didn’t tell her. No one in Washington knows.”
“The conference that ended earlier than Boone expected, what was it about?”
Cramer shook his head.
“Who was it with?”
Cramer shook his head again. G. G. Spero offered, “We’ve been working on that in Washington. We can’t trace any conference. We don’t know where Boone was for about two hours, from one to three. The best lead is that the head NIA man in Washington had been wanting to see him, to discuss his speech, but he denies-”
Breslow exploded. “By God,” he blurted, “there it is! It’s always an NIA man! That’s damned silly, Spero, and don’t forget where FBI salaries come from! They come from taxpayers!”
From that point on the mud was flying more or less constantly. It wasn’t on account of any encouragement from Wolfe. He told Breslow:
“The constant reference to your Association is unfortunate from your standpoint, sir, but it can’t be helped. A murder investigation invariably centers on people with motives. You heard Mr. Cramer, early in this discussion, say that a thorough inquiry has disclosed no evidence of personal enemies. But you cannot deny that Mr. Boone had many enemies, earned by his activities as a government official, and that a large number of them were members of the NIA.”
Winterhoff asked, “A question, Mr. Wolfe, is it always an enemy who kills a man?”
“Answer it yourself,” Wolfe told him. “Obviously that’s what you asked it for.”
“Well, it certainly isn’t always an enemy,” Winterhoff declared. “For an illustration, you couldn’t say that Mr. Dexter here was Boone’s enemy, quite the contrary, they were friends. But if Mr. Dexter had been filled with ambition to become the Director of the Bureau of Price Regulation-and that’s what he is at this moment-he might conceivably have taken steps to make the office vacant. Incidentally, he would also have placed under grave suspicion the members of an organization he mortally hates-which also has happened.”
Solomon Dexter was smiling at him, not a loving smile. “Are you preferring a charge, Mr. Winterhoff?”
“Not at all.” The other met his gaze. “As I said, merely an illustration.”
“Because I could mention one little difficulty. I was in Washington until eleven o’clock Tuesday evening. You’ll have to get around that somehow.”
“Nevertheless,” Frank Thomas Erskine said firmly and judicially, “Mr. Winterhoff has made an obvious point.”
“One of several,” Breslow asserted. “There are others. We all know what they are, so why not out with them? The talk about Boone and his secretary, Phoebe Gunther, has been going on for months, and whether Mrs. Boone was going to get a divorce or not. And lately a reason, a mighty good reason from Phoebe Gunther’s standpoint, why Boone had to have a divorce no matter how his wife felt about it. What about it, Inspector, when you’re dealing with a murder don’t you think it’s legitimate to take an interest in things like that?”
Alger Kates stood up and announced in a trembling voice: “I want to protest that this is utterly despicable and beyond the bounds of common decency!”
His face was white and he stayed on his feet. I had not supposed he had it in him. He was the BPR research man who had taken some up-to-the-minute statistics to the Waldorf to be used in Boone’s speech and had discovered the body. If my attention had been directed to him on the subway and I had been asked to guess what he did for a living, I would have said, “Research man.” He was that to a T, in size, complexion, age, and chest measurement. But the way he rose to protest-apparently he led the BPR, as there represented, in spunk. I grinned at him.
From the reaction he got you might have thought that what the NIA hated and feared most about the BPR was its research. They all howled at him. I caught the gist of only two of their remarks, one from Breslow to the effect that he had only said what everyone was saying, and the wind-up from Don O’Neill, in the accents of The Boss:
“You can keep out of this, Kates! Sit down and shut up!”
That seemed to me to be overdoing it a little, since he wasn’t paying Kates’s wages; and then Erskine, twisting around in the red leather chair to face the research man, told him cuttingly:
“Since you didn’t regard the President of the NIA as a fit person to bring the news to, you are hardly acceptable as a judge of common decency.”
So, I thought, that’s why they’re jumping on him, because he told the hotel manager instead of them. He should have had more sense than to hurt their feelings like that. Erskine wasn’t through with him, but was going on:
“Surely, Mr. Kates, you are aware that personal em
otions, such as jealousy, revenge, or frustration, often result in violence, and therefore they are proper matters of inquiry when a murder has been committed. It would be proper to ask you, for example, whether it is true that you wanted to marry Boone’s niece, and you were aware that Boone opposed it and intended to prevent-”
“Why, you big liar!” Nina Boone cried.
“Whether it is proper or not,” Kates said in a high thin voice that was still trembling, “it certainly is not proper for you to ask me anything whatever. If I were asked that by the police, I would reply that part of it is true and part of it isn’t. There are at least two hundred men in the BPR organization who wanted, and it is a reasonable assumption that they still want, to marry Mr. Boone’s niece. I was not under the impression that Mr. Boone was having anything to say about it one way or another, and, knowing Miss Boone as I do, not intimately but fairly well, I doubt it.” Kates moved not his eyes, but his head, to change his target. “I would like to ask Mr. Wolfe, who has admitted that he is in the pay of the NIA, if we were invited here for a typical NIA inquisition.”
“And I,” Solomon Dexter put in, his voice sounding like a train in a tunnel in contrast to Kates’s, “would like to inform you, Mr. Wolfe, that you are by no means the only detective in the employ of the NIA. For nearly a year executives and other BPR personnel have been followed by detectives, and their whole lives have been thoroughly explored in an effort to get something on them. I don’t know whether you have taken part in those operations-”
More bedlam from the NIA, taking the form chiefly, as near as I could get it, of indignant denials. At that point, if it hadn’t been for my seating arrangements, the two armies would probably have made contact. Wolfe was looking exasperated, but making no effort to stop it, possibly aware that it would take more energy than he wished to spend. What quieted them was Inspector Cramer getting to his feet and showing a palm, officially.
“I would like,” he barked, “before going, to say three things. First, Mr. Dexter, I can assure you that Wolfe has not helped to tail your personnel or explore their lives, because there’s not enough money in that kind of work. Second, Mr. Erskine and you other gentlemen, the police are aware that jealousy and things like that are often behind a murder, and we are not apt to forget it. Third, Mr. Kates, I have known Wolfe for twenty years, and I can tell you why you were invited here this evening. We were invited because he wanted to learn all he could as quick as he could, without leaving his chair and without Goodwin’s buying gas and wearing out his tires. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was a sucker to come.”
He turned. “Come on, Sergeant. You coming, Spero?”
Of course that ended it. The BPR didn’t want any more anyhow, and though the NIA, or part of it, showed an inclination to stay and make suggestions, Wolfe used his veto power on that. With everyone out of their chairs, Ed Erskine crossed the lines again and tried another approach on Nina, but it appeared, from where I stood, that she disposed of that without even opening her mouth. I did much better, in spite of my being associated with Wolfe, who was in the pay of the NIA. When I told her that it was impossible to get a taxi in that part of town and offered to drive her and her aunt to their hotel, she said:
“Mr. Dexter is taking us.”
A frank, friendly statement, and I appreciated it.
But after they had all gone and Wolfe and I were alone in the office, it appeared that I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it even if she had accepted. I remarked to Wolfe:
“Too bad Cramer bollixed it up like that. If we had been able to keep them here a while, say two weeks, we might have got started somewhere. Too bad.”
“It was not too bad,” he said testily.
“Oh.” I gestured, and sat down. “Okay, then it was a screaming success. Of all our guests, which do you think was the most interesting?”
To my surprise, he answered, “The most interesting was Miss Gunther.”
“Yeah? Because?”
“Because she didn’t come. You have her address.”
“Sure. I sent the telegram-”
“Go and bring her here.”
I stared at him, looked at my wrist, and stared at him again. “It is now twenty minutes past eleven.”
He nodded. “The streets are less dangerous at night, with the reduced traffic.”
“I won’t argue.” I stood up. “You are in the pay of the NIA, and I am in the pay of you. So it goes.”
Chapter 10
I TOOK AN ASSORTMENT of keys along, to simplify things in case 611 East Fifty-fifth Street proved to be an old-fashioned walkup with a locked entrance door, but instead of that it was one of the twelve-story beehives with an awning and hired men. I stepped down the broad hall to the elevator, went in, and said casually:
“Gunther.”
Without even glancing at me, the pilot finished a yawn and called out, “Hey, Sam! For Gunther!”
The doorman, whom I had by-passed, appeared and looked in at me. “I’ll phone up,” he said, “but it’s a waste of time. What’s your name and what paper are you from?”
Ordinarily I like to save butter, but under the circumstances, with no ceiling on expenses, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be in the pay of the NIA too. So I left the elevator and walked down the hall with him, and when we got to the switchboard I spread out a ten-dollar bill thereon, saying:
“I’m not on a paper. I sell sea shells.”
He shook his head and started manipulations at the board. I put a hand on his arm and told him, “You didn’t let me finish. That was papa. Here’s mamma.” I deployed another ten. “But I warn you they have no children.”
He only shook his head again and flipped a lever. I was shocked speechless. I have had a lot to do with doormen, and I am certainly able to spot one too honest to accept twenty bucks for practically nothing, and that was not it. His principles didn’t even approach as high a standard as that, and he was being pure from some other motive. I emerged from the shock when I heard him telling the receiver:
“He says he sells sea shells.”
“The name,” I said, “is Archie Goodwin, and I was sent by Mr. Nero Wolfe.”
He repeated it to the receiver, and in a moment hung up and turned to me with a look of surprise. “She says go on up. Nine H.” He accompanied me toward the elevator. “About papa and mamma, I’ve changed my mind, in case you still feel-”
“I was kidding you,” I told him. “They really have got children. This is little Horace.” I handed him two bits and went in and commanded the pilot, “Nine H.”
It is not my custom to make personal remarks to young women during the first five minutes after meeting them, and if I violated it this time it was only because the remark popped out of me involuntarily. When I pushed the button and she opened the door and said good evening, and I agreed and removed my hat and stepped inside, the ceiling light right above her was shining on her hair, and what popped out was:
“Golden Bantam.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what I dye it with.”
I was already understanding, from the first ten seconds, what motive it was that the doorman was being pure from. Her pictures in the papers had been just nothing compared with this. After we had disposed of my hat and coat she preceded me into the room, and from the middle of it turned her head to say:
“You know Mr. Kates?”
I thought it had popped out of her as my remark had popped out of me, but then I saw him, rising to his feet from a chair in a corner where the light was dim.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good evening,” he piped.
“Sit down.” Phoebe Gunther straightened a corner of a rug with the toe of a little red slipper. “Mr. Kates came to tell me what happened at your party this evening. Will you have some Scotch? Rye? Bourbon? Gin? Cola?”
“No, thanks.” I was getting my internal skull fixtures jerked back into place.
“Well.” She sat on a couch against a nest
of cushions. “Did you come to see what color my hair is or was there something else?”
“I’m sorry to bust in on you and Mr. Kates.”
“That’s all right. Isn’t it, Al?”
“It is not all right,” Alger Kates said, without hesitation, in his thin voice stretched tight but extremely distinct, “with me. It would be folly to trust him at all or to believe anything he says. As I told you, he is in the pay of the NIA.”
“So you did.” Miss Gunther was relaxing among the cushions. “But since we know enough not to trust him, all we have to do is to be a little smarter than he is in order to get more out of him than he gets out of us.” She looked at me, and seemed to be smiling, but I had already discovered that her face was so versatile, especially her mouth, that it would be better not to jump to conclusions. She told me, possibly smiling, “I have a theory about Mr. Kates. He talks the way people talked before he was born, therefore he must read old-fashioned novels. I wouldn’t suppose a research man would read novels at all. What would you suppose?”
“I don’t discuss people who don’t trust me,” I said politely. “And I don’t think you are.”
“Are what?”
“Smarter than me. I admit you’re prettier, but I doubt if you’re smarter. I was spelling champion of Zanesville, Ohio, at the age of twelve.”
“Spell snoop.”
‘That’s just childish.” I glared at her. “I don’t imagine you’re hinting that catching people who commit crimes is work to be ashamed of, since you’re smart, so if what you have in mind is my coming here, why didn’t you tell the doorman-”
I stopped short because she was possibly laughing at me. I quit glaring, but went on looking at her, which was a bad policy because that was what was interfering with my mental processes.
“Okay,” I said curtly, “you got a poke in and made me blink. Round one for you. Round two. Your Mr. Kates may be as loyal as What’s-his-name, the boy that stood on the burning deck, but he’s a sap. Nero Wolfe is tricky, that I admit, but the idea that he would cover a murderer because he happened to belong to something out of the alphabet that signed checks is plain loony. Look at the record and show me where he ever accepted a substitute, no matter who said it was just as good. Here’s a free tip: if you think or know a BPR man did it, and don’t want him caught, bounce me out immediately and keep as far away from Wolfe as you can get. If you think an NIA man did it and you’d like to help, put on some shoes and get your hat and coat and come to his office with me. As far as I’m concerned you don’t need to bother about the hat.” I looked at Kates. “If you did it yourself, with some motive not to be mentioned for the sake of common decency, you’d better come along and confess and get it over with.”
