Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 14

by Trouble in Triplicate

  “My head?” he croaked. “Is it my head?”

  The exhibition he was making of himself was no help to Nero Wolfe’s reputation for intrepidity. After a brief look I told him distinctly, “No, sir. Nothing but a nick in the upper outside corner of your ear.” I wiped with my handkerchief. “You might go to the bathroom and use a towel.”

  “I am not—hurt?”

  I could have murdered him. Instead, I told Fritz, standing there with my gun, that unnecessary movements were still forbidden, and took Hackett to the bathroom in the far corner and shut the door behind me. While I showed him the ear in the mirror and dabbed on some iodine and taped on a bandage, I told him to stay in there until his nerves calmed down and then rejoin us, act detached and superior, and let me do the talking. He said he would, but at that moment I would have traded him for one wet cigarette.

  As I reappeared in the office, Jane shot at me, “Did you search him?” I ignored her and circled around Wolfe’s desk for a look at the back of the chair. The head-rest was upholstered in brown leather; and about eight inches from the top and a foot from the side edge, a spot that would naturally have been on a line behind Hackett’s left ear as he sat, there was a hole in the leather. I looked behind, and there was another hole on the rear side. I looked at the wall back of the chair and found still another hole, torn into the plaster. From the bottom draw of my desk I got a screwdriver and hammer, started chiseling, ran against a stud, and went to work with the point of my knife. When I finally turned around I held a small object between my thumb and finger. As I did so Hackett emerged from the bathroom, apparently more composed.

  “Bullet,” I said informatively. “Thirty-eight. Passed through Mr. Wolfe’s ear and the back of his chair and ruined the wall. Patched plaster is an eyesore.”

  Jane sputtered. Jensen sat and gazed at me with narrowed eyes. Hackett said, in what he probably thought was a detached and superior tone, “I’ll search them again.” I tried not to glare at him.

  “No, sir,” I said deferentially, “I made sure of that. But I suggest—”

  “It could be,” Jensen put in, “that Wolfe fired that bullet himself.”

  “Yeah?” I returned his gaze. “Mr. Wolfe would be glad to let you inspect his face for powder marks.”

  “He washed them off in the bathroom,” Jane snapped.

  “They don’t wash off.” I continued to Jensen, “I’ll lend you a magnifying glass. You can examine the leather on the chair too.”

  By gum, he took me up. He nodded and arose, and I got the glass from Wolfe’s desk, the big one. First he went over the chair, the portion in the neighborhood of the bullet hole, and then crossed to Hackett and gave his face and ear a look. Hackett stood still, with his lips compressed and his eyes straight ahead. Jensen gave me back the glass and returned to his seat.

  I asked him, “Did Mr. Wolfe shoot himself in the ear?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Not unless he had the gun wrapped.”

  “Sure.” My tone cut slices off of them. “He tied a pillow around it, held it at arm’s length, pointing it at his ear, and pulled the trigger. How would you like to try demonstrating it? Keeping the bullet within an inch of your frontal lobe?”

  He never stopped gazing at me. “I am,” he declared, “being completely objective. With some difficulty. I agree it is highly improbable.”

  “If I understand what happened—” Hackett began, but I doubted if he was going to offer anything useful, so I cut him off.

  “Excuse me, sir. The bullet helps, but the gun would help still more. Let’s be objective too. We might possibly find the object in the front room.” I moved, touching his elbow to take him along. “Fritz, see that they stay put.”

  “I,” said Jensen, getting up, “would like to be present—”

  “The hell you would.” I wheeled to him. My voice may have gone up a notch. “Sit down, brother. I am trying not to fly off the handle. I am trying not to be rude. Whose house is this, with bullets zipping around? I swear to God Fritz will shoot you in the knee.”

  He had another remark to contribute, and so did Jane, but I disregarded them and wrangled Hackett ahead of me into the front room and shut the soundproof door. Hackett began to talk, but I shut him off. He insisted he had something to say. I told him to spill it.

  “It seems incredible,” he asserted, meeting my eye and choosing his words, “that one of them could have shot at me from in here, through the open door, without me seeing anything.”

  “You said that before, in the bathroom. You also said you didn’t remember whether your eyes were open or shut, or where you were looking, when you heard that shot.” I moved my face to within fourteen inches of his. “See here. If you are suspecting that I shot at you, or that Wolfe did, you have got fleas or other insects playing tag in your brain and should have it attended to. One thing alone: the way the bullet went, straight past your ear and into the chair back, it had to come from in front, the general direction of that door and this room. It couldn’t have come from the door in the hall or anywhere else, because we haven’t got a gun that shoots a curve. I can’t help it if your eyes were focused somewhere else or were closed or you went temporarily blind. You will please sit in that chair against the wall and not move or talk.”

  He grumbled but obeyed. I surveyed the field. On the assumption that the gun had been fired in that room, I adopted the theory that either it was still there or it had been transported or propelled without. As for transportation, I had got there not more than five seconds after the shot and found them there staring at each other. As for propulsion, the windows were closed and the venetian blinds down. I preferred the first alternative and began to search.

  Obviously it couldn’t be anything abstruse, since five seconds wasn’t long enough to pry up a floor board or make a hole in a table leg, so I tried easier places, like under furniture and behind cushions. It might be thought that under the circumstances I would have been dead sure of finding it, but I had the curious feeling that I probably wouldn’t no matter how thoroughly I looked; I have never understood why. If it was a hunch it was a bad day for hunches, because when I came to the big vase on the table between the windows and peeked into it and saw something white and stuck my hand in, I felt the gun. Getting it by the trigger guard, I lifted it out. Judging by smell, it had been fired recently, but of course it had had time to cool off. It was an old Granville thirty-eight, next door to rusty. The white object I had seen was an ordinary cotton handkerchief, man’s size, with a tear in it through which the butt of the gun protruded. With proper care about touching, I opened the cylinder and found there were five loaded cartridges and one shell.

  Hackett was there beside me, trying to say things. I got brusque with him.

  “Yes, it’s a gun, recently fired, and not mine or Wolfe’s. Is it yours? No? Good. Okay, keep your shirt on. We’re going back in there, and there will be sufficient employment for my brain without interference from you. Do not try to help me. See how long you can go without speaking a word. Just look wise as if you knew it all. If this ends as it ought to, you’ll get an extra hundred. Agreed?”

  I’ll be damned if he didn’t say, “Two hundred. I was shot at. I came within an inch of getting killed.”

  I told him he’d have to talk the second hundred out of Wolfe and opened the door to the office and followed him through. He detoured around Jane Geer and went and sat in the chair he had just escaped being a corpse in. I swiveled my own chair to face it out and sat down too.

  Jensen demanded sharply, “What have you got there?”

  “This,” I said cheerfully, “is a veteran revolver, a Granville thirty-eight, which has been fired not too long ago.” I lowered it gently onto my desk. “Fritz, give me back my gun.” He brought it. I kept it in my hand. “Thank you. I found this other affair in the vase on the table in there, dressed in a handkerchief. Five unused cartridges and one used. It’s a stranger here. Never saw it before. It appears to put the finishing touch on a
critical situation.”

  Jane exploded. She called me an unspeakable rat. She said she wanted a lawyer and intended to go to one immediately. She called Hackett three or four thingh. She said it was the dirtiest frame-up in history. “Now,” she told Hackett, “I know damned well you framed Peter Root. I let that skunk Goodwin talk me out of it!” She was out of her chair, spitting fire. It was spectacular. “You won’t get away with it this time! You incredible louse!”

  Hackett was trying to talk back to her, making his voice louder and louder, and when she stopped for breath he could be heard.

  “… will not tolerate it! You come here and try to kill me! You nearly do kill me! Then you abuse me about a Peter Root and I have never heard of Peter Root!” He was putting real feeling into it; apparently he had either forgotten that he was supposed to be Nero Wolfe, or had got the notion, in all the excitement, that he really was Nero Wolfe. He was proceeding, “Young lady, listen to me! I will not—”

  She turned and made for the door. I was immediately on my feet and after her, but halfway across the room I put on the brake, because the doorway had suddenly filled up with a self-propelled massive substance and she couldn’t get through. She stopped, goggle-eyed, and then fell back a couple of paces. The massive substance advanced, halted, and used its mouth.

  “How do you do. I am Nero Wolfe.”

  VII

  He did it well, at top form, and it was quite an effect.

  Nobody made a chirp. He moved forward, and Jane retreated again, moving backwards without looking around and nearly tripping on Jensen’s feet. Wolfe stopped at the corner of his desk and wiggled a finger at Hackett.

  “Take another chair, sir, if you please?”

  Hackett sidled out, without a word, and went to the red leather chair. Wolfe leaned over to peer at the hole in the back of his own chair, and then at the hole in the plaster, which I had chiseled to a diameter of four inches, grunted, and got himself seated.

  “This,” Jensen said, “makes it a farce.”

  Jane snapped, “I’m going,” and headed for the door, but I had been expecting that and with only two steps had her by the arm with a good grip and was prepared to give her the twist if she went thorny on me. Jensen sprang to his feet, with both of his hands fists. Evidently in the brief space of forty-eight hours it had developed to the point where the sight of another man laying hands on his Jane started his adrenaline spurting in torrents. If he had come close enough to make it necessary to slap him with my free hand he might have got blood on his ear too, because I had my gun in that hand.

  “Stop it!” Wolfe’s voice was a whip. It turned us into a group of statuary. “Miss Geer, you may leave shortly, if you still want to, after I have said something. Mr. Jensen, sit down. Mr. Goodwin has a gun and is probably in a temper, and might hurt you. Archie, go to your desk, but be ready to use the gun. One of them is a murderer.”

  “That’s a lie!” Jensen was visibly breathing. “And who the hell are you?”

  “I introduced myself, sir. That gentleman is my temporary employee. When my life was threatened I hired him to impersonate me. If I had known the worst to be expected was a gash in the ear I could have saved some money and spared myself a vast amount of irritation.”

  Jane spat at him, “You fat coward!”

  He shook his head. “No, Miss Geer. It is no great distinction not to be a coward, but I can claim it. Not cowardice. Conceit. I am insufferably conceited. I was convinced that the person who killed Mr. Jensen would be equally daring, witty, and effective in dealing with me. Should I be killed, I doubted if the murderer would ever be caught. Should another be killed in my place, I would still be alive to attend to the matter myself. Justified conceit, but still conceit.” He turned abruptly to me. “Archie, get Inspector Cramer on the phone.”

  They both started talking at once, with vehemence. I watched them from a corner of an eye while dialing. Wolfe cut them off.

  “If you please! In a moment I shall offer you an alternative: the police or me. Meanwhile Mr. Cramer can help. One of you, of course, is putting all this on; to the other I wish to say that you might as well sit down and resign yourself to some inconvenience and unpleasantness.” He glanced at Hackett. “If you want to get away from this uproar, there is your room upstairs …”

  “I think I’ll stay here,” Hackett declared. “I’m a little interested in this myself, since I nearly got killed.”

  “Cramer on,” I told Wolfe.

  He lifted his phone from the cradle. “How do you do, sir. No. No, I have a request to make. If you send a man here right away, I’ll give him a revolver and a bullet. First, examine the revolver for fingerprints and send me copies. Second, trace the revolver if possible. Third, fire a bullet from it and compare it both with the bullet I am sending you and with the bullets that killed Mr. Jensen and Mr. Doyle. Let me know the results. That’s all. No. Confound it, no! If you come yourself you will be handed the package at the door and not admitted. I’m busy.”

  As he hung up I said, “The number has been filed off of the gun.”

  “Then it can’t be traced.”

  “No, sir. Does Cramer get the handkerchief too?”

  “Let me see it.”

  I handed the gun to him, with its butt still protruding through the tear in the handkerchief. Wolfe frowned as he saw that the handkerchief had no laundry mark or any other mark and was a species that could be bought in at least a thousand stores in New York City alone, not to mention the rest of the country.

  “We’ll keep the handkerchief,” Wolfe said.

  Jensen demanded, “What the devil is it doing there?”

  Wolfe’s eyes went shut. He was, of course, tasting Jensen’s expression, tone of voice, and mental longitude and latitude, to try to decide whether innocent curiosity was indicated or a camouflage for guilt. He always shut his eyes when he tasted. In a moment they opened again halfway.

  “If a man has recently shot a gun,” he said, “and has had no opportunity to wash, an examination of his hand will furnish incontestable proof. You probably know that. One of you, the one who fired that shot, certainly does. The handkerchief protected the hand. Under a microscope it would be found to contain many minute particles of explosive and other residue. The fact that it is a man’s handkerchief doesn’t help. Major Jensen would naturally possess a man’s handkerchief. If Miss Geer decided to use a handkerchief in that manner, naturally she wouldn’t use a woman’s handkerchief. Anyway, it wouldn’t be big enough.”

  “You asked me to stay while you said something,” Jane snapped. She and Jensen were back in their chairs. “You haven’t said anything yet. Where were you when the shot was fired?”

  “Pfui.” Wolfe sighed. “Fritz, pack the gun and bullet in a carton, carefully with tissue paper, and give it to the man when he comes. First bring me beer. Do any of you want beer?”

  Evidently no one did.

  “Very well. Miss Geer. To assume, or pretend to assume some elaborate hocus-pocus by the inmates of this house is inane. At the moment the shot was fired I was standing near the kitchen talking with Mr. Goodwin. Since then I have been at a spot from which part of this room can be seen and voices heard.”

  His eyes went to Jensen and back to Jane. “One of you two people is apt to make a mistake, and I want to prevent it if possible. I have not yet asked you where you were and what you were doing at the instant the shot was fired. Before I do so I want to say this, that even with the information at hand it is demonstrable that the shot came from the direction of that door to the front room, which was standing open. Mr. Hackett could not have fired it; you, Mr. Jensen, satisfied yourself of that. Mr. Brenner was in the kitchen. Mr. Goodwin and I were together. I warn you—one of you—that this is sufficiently provable to satisfy a jury in a murder trial. Now what if you both assert that at the instant you heard the shot you were together, close together perhaps, looking at each other? For the one who fired the gun that would be a blessing indeed. For the other it m
ight be disastrous in the end; for when the truth is disclosed, as it will be, the question of complicity will arise. How long have you two known each other?”

  He knew; I had told him. But apparently they had both forgotten, for neither answered.

  “Well?” Wolfe was crisp. “Miss Geer, how long have you been acquainted with Mr. Jensen. I don’t suppose it’s a secret?”

  Jane’s teeth were holding her lower lip. She removed them. “I met him day before yesterday. Here.”

  “Indeed. Is that correct, Mr. Jensen?”

  “Yes.”

  Wolfe’s brows were up. “Hardly long enough to form an attachment to warrant any of the more costly forms of sacrifice. Unless the spark was exceptionally hot, not long enough to weld you into collusion for murder. I hope you understand, Miss Geer, that all that is wanted here is the truth. Where were you and what were you doing when you heard the shot?”

  “I was standing by the piano. I had put my bag on the piano and was opening it.”

  “Which way were you facing?”

  “Toward the window.”

  “Were you looking at Mr. Jensen?”

  “Not at that moment, no.”

  “Thank you.” Wolfe’s eyes moved. “Mr. Jensen?”

  “I still say,” Jensen still said, “that it’s a damned farce.”

  “Even so, sir, you’re one of the cast. Surely it is risking little to tell me where—”

  “I was in the doorway to the hall, looking down the hall and wondering where Goodwin had gone to. For no particular reason. I was not at that precise moment looking at Miss Geer. But I regard it as—”

  “That won’t help me any. How you regard it. And I doubt if it will help you.” Wolfe poured beer, which Fritz had brought. “Now we are ready to decide something.” He took them both in. “Miss Geer, you said you wanted to go to a lawyer, heaven protect you. But it would not be sensible to permit either of you to walk out of here, to move and act at your own will and discretion. Since that bullet was intended for me, I reject the notion utterly. On the other hand, we can’t proceed intelligently until I get a report from Mr. Cramer. There is time to be passed. You can—”