Fer-De-Lance

by Rex Stout

  “You���re quite welcome. Don���t hurry on my account. My father won���t be home and I dislike eating alone. I���ll run over to the club for dinner later.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Your father won���t be home? That throws me out a little. I had figured on finding a bite to eat in Pleasantville or White Plains and coming back for a little talk with him. In fact, I was just about to ask you for a favor: to tell him I was coming.”

  “Sorry.”

  “He won���t be back tonight?”

  “No. He went to Chicago on business last week. Your disappointment isn���t the first one. Anderson and that detective have been wiring him every day, I don���t exactly see why. After all, he barely knew Barstow. I imagine their telegrams won���t start him back till he���s through with his business. My father is like that. He finishes things.

  “When do you expect him?”

  “I hardly know. Around the fifteenth, he thought when he left.”

  “Well. That���s too bad. It���s just routine, of course, but any detective would want to complete the foursome, and since you can���t do me the favor with your father that I wanted to ask, maybe you will do me another one. More routine. Tell me where you were between seven o���clock and midnight Monday evening, June fifth. That was the evening before the Barstow funeral. Did you go to the funeral? This was the evening before.

  Manuel Kimball���s black eyes were straight at me, concentrated, like a man trying to remember. “I went to the funeral,” he said. “Yes, that was Tuesday. A week ago today. Oh yes. I think it was; yes, I���m sure. Skinner would know. I was in the clouds.”

  “In the clouds?”

  He nodded. “I���ve been trying flying and landing at night. A couple of times in May, and again that Monday. Skinner would know; he helped me off and I had him wait till I got back to make sure the lights would be in order. It���s quite a trick, very different from the daytime.”

  “What time did you go up?”

  “Around six o���clock. Of course it wasn���t dark until nearly nine, but I wanted to be ahead of the twilight.”

  “You got well ahead of it all right. When did you get back?”

  “Ten or a little after. Skinner would know that too; we fooled around with the timer till midnight.”

  “Did you go up alone?”

  “Completely.” Manuel Kimball smiled at me with his lips, but it appeared to me that his eyes weren���t cooperating. “You must admit, Mr. Goodwin, that I���m being pretty tolerant. What the devil has my flying Monday night or any other night got to do with you? If I wasn���t so curious I might have reason to be a little irritated. Don���t you think?”

  “Sure.” I grinned. “I���d be irritated if I was you. But anyway I���m much obliged. Routine, Mr. Kimball, just the damn routine.” I got up and shook a leg to get the cuff of my trousers down. “And I am much obliged and I appreciate it. I should think it would be more fun flying at night than in the daytime.”

  He was on his feet too, polite. “It is. But do not feel obliged. It is going to distinguish me around here to have talked to Nero Wolfe���s man.”

  He called the fat butler to bring my hat.

  Half an hour later, headed south around the curves of the Bronx River Parkway, I was still rolling him over on my mind���s tongue. Since there was no connection at all between him and Barstow or the driver or anything else, it could have been for no other reason than because he made me nervous. And yet Wolfe said that I had no feeling for phenomena! The next time he threw that at me I would remind him of my mysterious misgivings about Manuel Kimball, I decided. Granted, of course, that it turned out that Manuel had murdered Barstow, which I had to confess didn���t seem very likely at that moment.

  When I got home, around half-past eight, Wolfe had finished dinner. I had phoned from the drugstore on the Urand Concourse, and Fritz had a dish of flounder with his best cheese sauce hot in the oven, with a platter of lettuce and tomatoes and plenty of good cold milk. Considering mv thin lunch at the Barstows��� and the hour I was getting my knees under the table, it wasn���t any too much. I cleaned it up. Fritz said it seemed good to have me busy and out working again.

  I said. “You���re darned right it. does. This dump would be about ready for the sheriff if it wasn���t for me.

  Fritz giggled. He���s the only man I���ve ever known who could giggle without giving you doubts about his fundamentals.

  Wolfe was in his chair in the office, playing with flies. He hated flies and very few ever got in there, but two had somehow made it and were fooling around on his desk. Much as he hated them, he couldn���t kill them; he said that while a live fly irritated him to the point of hatred, a killed one outraged his respect for the dignity of death, which was worse. My opinion was it just made him sick. Anyway, he was in his chair with the swatter in his hand, seeing how close to the fly he could lower it without the fly taking off. When I went in he handed me the swatter and I let them have it and raked them into the wastebasket.

  “Thank you,” Wolfe said. “Those confounded insects were trying to make me forget that one of the Dendrobiums chlorostele is showing two buds.”

  “No! Really?”

  He nodded. “That one in half sunlight. The others have been moved over.”

  “One for Horstmann.”

  “Yes. Who killed Barstow?”

  I grinned. “Give me a chance. The name just escapes me-I���ll remember it in a minute.”

  “You should have written it down��� No, just your light. That���s better. Did you get enough to eat? Proceed.”

  That report was an in-between; I wasn���t proud of it or ashamed of it either. Wolfe scarcely interrupted once throughout; he sat as he always did when I had a long story; leaning back, his chin on his chest, his elbows on the arms of the chair with his fingers interlaced on his belly, his eyes half closed but always on my face. Halfway through he stopped me to have Fritz bring some beer, then with two bottles and a glass within reach at the edge of the table he resumed his position. I went on to the end. It was midnight.

  He sighed. I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. When I got back he was pinching the top of his ear and looking sleepy.

  “Perhaps you had an impression,” he said.

  I sat down again. “Vague. Pretty watery. Mrs. Barstow is just some kind of a nut. She might have killed her husband or she might not, but of course she didn���t kill Carlo Maffei. For Miss Barstow you can use your own impression. Out. Her brother is out too, I mean on Maffei, his alibi for the fifth is so tight you could use it for a vacuum. Dr. Bradford must be a very interesting person, I would like to meet him some time. As for Manuel Kimball, I suppose there���s no chance he killed Barstow, but I���ll bet he runs river angels with his airplane.”

  “Why? Is he cruel? Does he sneer? Do his eyes focus badly?”

  “No. But look at his name. He made me nervous. He looks like a Spaniard. What���s he doing with the name Kimball?”

  “You haven���t seen his father.”

  “I know. Of course the had news about the golf bag never being in his locker threw me off my stride and I was looking for something to kick.”

  “Bad news? Why bad?”

  “Well, good Lord. We thought we had the membership of the Green Meadow Club to run through the sifter, and now we���ve got everybody that���s been in Barstow���s home at the university for the past nine months.”

  “Oh no. By no means. No known poison, exposed to the air, by being smeared on a needle for instance, will retain an efficacy sufficient to kill a man as Barstow was killed for more than a day or two. Probably only a few hours. It depends on the poison.

  I grinned at him. “That���s a help. What else did you read?”

  “A few interesting things. Many tiresome ones. So the golf bag�
��s itinerary is not bad news at all. Its later disappearance interests us only indirectly, for we never could have expected to come upon the driver. But who caused it to disappear and why?”

  “Sure. But as far as that���s concerned, who came to ask you to return the reward unopened and why? We already knew there���s someone in that family with funny ideas.”

  Wolfe wiggled a finger at me. “It is easier to recognize a style from a sentence than from a single word. But as for that, the removal of the golf bag from the scene was direct, bold and forthright, while the visit to our office, though direct enough, was merely desperate.”

  I said, “Doctors know all about poisons.

  “Yes. This one-this Dr. Bradford-is satisfactorily forthright. Three times today I was told that he was too busy to come to the telephone, and the indication was that that condition could be expected to continue. You are intending to resume in the morning?”

  I nodded. “The club first, I thought, then the coroner, then back to town for Doc Bradford���s office. I���m sorry old Kimball���s gone; I���d like to clean up that foursome. You don���t think Saul Panzer would enjoy a trip to Chicago?”

  “It would cost a hundred dollars.”

  “That���s not much of a chunk out of fifty grand.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “You���re a spendthrift, Archie. And unnecessarily thorough. Let us first make sure no murderer can be found within the commuting area.”

  “Okay.” I got up and stretched. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, Archie.”

  CHAPTER 11

  There was a point on the public road from which the Green Meadow clubhouse could be seen, but at a considerable distance; to reach it you turned off the highway into a grove, and when you left that you were winding around a hollow. The clubhouse had a grove of its own, on top of a moderate hill; on one side were a bunch of tennis courts and an outdoor pool, everywhere else, in all directions, were smooth rolling fairways dotted with little tee plateaus, sand traps of various shapes and sizes, and the vivid velvet carpets of the putting greens. There were two courses of eighteen holes each; the Barstow foursome had started on the north course, the long one.

  The club professional, who had dined with us at Wolfe’s place Monday evening, wasn’t there yet when I arrived and wasn’t expected until eleven o’clock, so the only introduction I had to offer was Larry Barstow’s phone call the preceding afternoon which had been received by the chief steward. He was nice enough and went with me out to the caddy master. Two of the caddies I wanted to see didn’t come on weekdays, since the schools they attended weren’t out yet, and the other two were out on the links somewhere with early morning matches. I monkeyed around for an hour trying to find someone for a page in the notebook, but as far as real information was concerned they were about as helpful as a bunch of Eskimos. I hopped in the roadster and beat it for White Plains.

  The coroner’s office was in the same building as Anderson’s, where I had been six days previously trying to get Wolfe’s money covered, and as I passed the door with District Attorney painted on the glass panel I stuck out my tongue at it. The coroner wasn’t in, but by luck there was a doctor there signing papers and he was the one who had done the Barstow autopsy. Before leaving home in the morning I had telephoned Sarah Barstow, and now this doctor told me that he had had a phone call from Lawrence Barstow and had been told that I would visit the coroner’s office as a representative of the Barstow family. I thought to myself, I’ll have that Barstow brat fixing my flat tires before I get through with this.

  But I came away as good as empty. Everything that the doctor could tell me I had read three days earlier in the newspapers except for a bunch of medical terms which the papers hadn’t tried to print for fear of a typesetters’ strike. I don’t high-hat technical words, because I know there are a lot of things that can’t be said any other way, but the doctor’s lengthy explanation simply boiled down to this, that nothing conclusive could be said regarding the poison that had killed Barstow, because no one had been able to analyze it. Additional tissues had been sent to a New York laboratory but no report had been received. The needle had been taken by the District Attorney and was presumably being tested elsewhere.

  “Anyway,” I said, “there’s no chance he died of old age or something? He was actually poisoned? He died a violent death?”

  The doctor nodded. “Absolutely. Something remarkably virulent. Haemolysis-”

  “Sure. Just between you and me, what is your opinion of a doctor who would go up to a man who had just died like that and would say coronary thrombosis?”

  He stiffened as if he had just got rigor mortis himself, only much quicker. “That is not a question for me to decide, Mr. Goodwin.”

  “I didn’t ask you to decide anything, I just asked your opinion.”

  “I haven’t got any.”

  “You mean you have, only you’re going to keep it to remember me by. All right. Much obliged.”

  On my way out of the building I would have liked to stop in and ask Derwin for Ben Cook’s telephone number or some such pleasantry, but I had too much on my mind. By the time I got back to the Green Meadow Club it was nearly noon and I had pretty well decided that life would be nothing but a dreary round until I had had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Bradford.

  The two caddies were there. Their boss rounded them up for me, and I made a deal with them: I would get sandwiches, two apiece, bananas, ice cream, and root beer, and we would go over under a tree and eat, drink and be merry, provided they wouldn’t expect me to pay for their lost time. They signed up and we collected the provisions from the lunch counter and found the tree.

  One of them, a skinny pale kid with brown hair, had been Manuel Kimball’s caddy and the other had been Peter Oliver Barstow’s. This other was a chunky lad with snappy brown eyes and a lot of freckles; his name was Mike Allen. After we got arranged under the tree, before he took his first bite he said: “You know, mister, we don’t get paid.”

  “What do you mean, you work for fun?”

  “We don’t get paid all the time, only when we’re out on a round. We’re not losing any time. We couldn’t get another match till after lunch anyhow.”

  “Oh. You don’t say so. You’re too darned honest. If you don’t watch out you’ll get a job in a bank. Go on and eat your sandwich.”

  While we chewed I got them onto the Barstow foursome. The way they rattled it off it was easy to see they hadn’t gone over it more than a thousand times, with Anderson and Corbett of course, the other caddies, families and friends at home. They were glib and ready with an answer on every little detail, and that made it pretty hopeless to try to get anything fresh out of them, for they had drawn the picture so many times that they were now doing it with their eyes shut. Not that I really expected a damn thing, but I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to. There was no variation worth mentioning from the versions I had got from Larry Barstow and Manuel Kimball. By the time the sandwiches and stuff were down I saw that the pale skinny kid was milked dry, so I sent him back to his boss. Chunky Mike I kept a while, sitting with him under the tree. He had some sense in him and he might have noticed something: for instance, how Dr. Bradford had acted when he arrived at the scene on the fourth fairway. But I didn’t get a bite there. He only remembered that the doctor had been out of breath when he had run up with everyone waiting for him, and when he stood up after examining Barstow he had been white and calm.

  I checked up on the golf bag. There was no uncertainty in him about that; he had positively put it in the front of Barstow’s car, leaning against the driver’s seat.

  I said, “Of course, Mike, you were pretty excited. At a time like that everybody is. Isn’t there a chance you put it in some other car?”

  “No, sir. I couldn’t. There was no other car there.”

  “Maybe it was someone else’s bag you put in.”


  “No, sir. I’m not a dummy. When you’re a caddy you get so you glance at the heads to make sure all the clubs are in, and after I leaned the bag against the seat I did that, and I remember seeing all the new heads.”

  “New heads?”

  “Sure, they were all new.”

  “What made them new? Do you mean Barstow had had new heads put on?”

  “No, sir, they were new clubs. The new bag of clubs his wife gave him.”

  “What!”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t want to startle him; I picked a blade of grass and chewed on it. “How do you know his wife gave them to him?”

  “He told me.”

  “How did he happen to tell you?”

  “Well, when I went up to him he shook hands and said he was glad to see me again, of course he was one of my babies last year-”

  “For God’s sake, Mike, wait a minute. What do you mean he was one of your babies?”

  The kid grinned. “That’s what us fellows call it. When a man likes us for a caddy and won’t take another one he’s our baby.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “He said he was glad to see me again, and when I took his bag I saw they were all new Hendersons, genuine, and he said he was glad to see I admired the new clubs his wife had given him for his birthday.”

  There were a couple of bananas left and I handed him one and he began peeling it. I watched him. After a minute I said: “Do you know that Barstow was killed by a poison needle shot out of the handle of a golf driver?”

  His mouth was full. He waited till most of it was down before he answered. “I know that’s what they say.”