Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 14

by Trouble in Triplicate

  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.”

  X

  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 that. 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 a
ll 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.

  He turned his head our way, and I said, “Hello, Saul.”

  He said, “Hello, Archie.”

  She closed the door, not letting it bang, and went by way of the dining room back to the living room and on to the front foyer. If this seems crazy to you reading about it, that’s nothing to what it seemed to me helping do it. Not wanting any scene in the public hall, I slipped ahead of her in the foyer and stood with my back against the entrance door, and she simply turned around and re-entered the living room. I hadn’t the dimmest idea then whether she was merely a rat in a cage and acting like one, or what, and I haven’t now. But I wasn’t going to have to phone Nero Wolfe that she had climbed down a fire escape and would he please tell the police to start looking, so when she kept going until she was in the master bedroom again I was right there.

  She hadn’t uttered one word since she had asked me if I had said Arthur Howell, but now she did. When she turned, in the middle of the room, near the foot of the big double bed where she had presumably slept with her husband, I thought she was going to take hold of me, but all she did was stand in front of me, about eight inches away, looking up at me. She came about up to my chin, that was all. She wasn’t tall.

  “Archie Goodwin,” she said. “You think I’m terrible, don’t you? You think I’m an awful woman, bad clear through. Don’t you?”

  “I’m not thinking, lady. I’m just an errand boy.” The funny thing was that if at any moment up to then I had made a list of the ten most beautiful women she would not have been on it.

  “You’ve had lots of experience,” she said, her head back to look up at me. “You know what women are like. I knew you did when you put your hand on my arm yesterday. You know I’m a man’s woman, but it has to be the right man. Just one man’s, forever.” She started to smile, and her lip began to quiver, and she stopped it. “But I didn’t find the man until it was too late. I didn’t find him until you put your hand on my arm yesterday. You could have had me then, forever yours, you could have me now if anything like that was possible. I mean—we could go away together—now you wouldn’t have to promise anything—only you could find out if you want me forever too—the way I want you—”

  She lifted her hand and touched me, just a touch, the tips of her fingers barely brushing my sleeve.

  I jerked back.

  “Listen,” I said, with my voice sounding peculiar, so I tried to correct it. “You are extremely good, no question about it, but as you say, it’s too late. You are trying to go to bat when your side already has three out in the ninth, and that’s against the rules. I’ll hand it to you that you are extremely good. When you turn it on it flows. But in seven minutes now Nero Wolfe will be phoning the police, so you’d better fix your hair. You’ll be having your picture taken.”

  She hauled off and smacked me in the face. I barely felt it and didn’t even move my hands.

  “I hate men,” she said through her teeth. “God, how I hate men!”

  She turned and walked to the bathroom, and entered and closed the door.

  I didn’t know whether she had gone to fix her hair or what, and I didn’t care. Instead of crossing to the window and standing there without breathing, as I had done before, I sat down on the edge of the bed and did nothing but breathe. I suppose I did actually know what was going to happen. Anyhow, when it happened, when the noise came, not nearly as loud as it had been in Wolfe’s office because then the capsule had been inside a metal percolator, I don’t think I jumped or even jerked. I did not run, but walked, to the bathroom door, opened it and entered.

  Less than a minute later I went to the back door in the kitchen and opened that and told Saul Panzer, “All over. She stuck it in her mouth and lit the fuse. You get out. Go and report to Wolfe. I’ll phone the cops.”

  “But you must be—I’ll stay—”

  “No, go on. Step on it. I feel fine.”

  XI

  At noon the next day, Saturday, I was getting fed up with all the jabber because I had a question or two I wanted to ask myself. Cramer had come to Nero Wolfe’s office prepared to attack from all sides at once, bringing not only Sergeant Purley Stebbins but also a gang of civilians consisting of Helen Vardis, Joe Groll, and Conroy Blaney. Blaney had not been let in. On that Wolfe would not budge. Blaney was not to enter his house. The others had all been admitted and were now distributed around the office, with Cramer, of course, in the red leather chair. For over half an hour he and Wolfe had been closer to getting locked in a death grip than I had ever seen them before.

  Wolfe was speaking. “Then arrest me,” he said. “Shut up, get a warrant, and arrest me.”

  Cramer, having said about all an inspector could say, merely glared.

  “Wording the charge would be difficult,” Wolfe murmured. When he was maddest he murmured. “I have not withheld evidence, or obstructed justice, or shielded the guilty. I thought it possible that Mrs. Poor, confronted suddenly with that evidence, would collapse and confess.”

  “Nuts,” Cramer said wearily. “How about confronting me with the evidence? Instead of evidence, what you confront me with is another corpse. And I know”—he tapped the chair arm with a stiff finger—“exactly why. The only evidence you had that was worth a damn was that photograph of Arthur Howell. If you had turned it over to me—”

  “Nonsense. You already had a photograph of Arthur Howell. Several of them. The Beck Products Corporation people gave them to you on Thursday. So they told Saul Panzer. What good would one more do you?”

  “Okay.” Cramer was in a losing fight and knew it. “But I didn’t know that Howell had come to see you on Tuesday with Mrs. Poor, passing himself off as her husband. Dressed in the same kind of suit and shirt and tie that Poor was wearing that day. Only you and Goodwin knew that.”

  “I knew it. Mr. Goodwin didn’t. He thought it was a photograph of Mr. Poor.”

  “Protecting the help, huh?” Cramer snorted incredulously. “Anyhow, you knew it, and you knew it sewed her up, and you knew if she was arrested and came to trial you would have to go to court and testify, and you don’t like to leave home and you don’t like what there is to sit on in a courtroom, so you arrange it otherwise, and I’ll be damned if anyone has appointed you judge, jury, district attorney, and the police force all in one.”

  Wolfe’s shoulders moved an eighth of an inch up and down. “As I said, get a warrant, but watch the wording.”

  Cramer glared. A noise like a giggle came from the direction of Helen Vardis, and Joe Groll, being perched on the arm of her chair and therefore close enough, put his hand over hers. Apparently the days when they had taken turns following each other were only a memory.

  I put in an entry. “Excuse me, but when you gentlemen finish the shadow-boxing I would like to ask a question.” I was looking at Wolfe. “You say you knew Poor wasn’t Poor. W
hen and how?”

  Of course Wolfe faked. He sighed as if he were thinking now this is going to be an awful bore. Actually he was always tickled stiff to show how bright he was.

  His eyes came to me. “Wednesday evening you told me that Mr. Poor smoked ten to fifteen cigars a day. Thursday Mr. Cramer said the same thing. But the man that came here Tuesday, calling himself Poor, didn’t even know how to hold a cigar, let alone smoke one.”

  “He was nervous.”

  “If he was he didn’t show it, except with the cigar. You saw him. It was a ludicrous performance and he should never have tried it. When I learned that Mr. Poor was a veteran cigar smoker, the only question was who had impersonated him in this office? And the complicity of Mrs. Poor was obvious, especially with the added information, also furnished by Mr. Cramer, that no photograph of Mr. Poor was available. There are photographs of everybody nowadays. Mrs. Poor was an ass. She was supremely an ass when she selected me to bamboozle. She wanted to establish the assumption that Mr. Blaney was going to kill Mr. Poor. That was intelligent. She did not want to take her counterfeit Mr. Poor to the police, for fear someone there might be acquainted with the real Mr. Poor. That also was intelligent. But it was idiotic to choose me as the victim.”

  “She hated men,” I remarked.

  Wolfe nodded. “She must have had a low opinion of men. In order to get what she wanted, which presumably was something like half a million dollars—counting her husband’s fortune, the insurance money, and a half share in the business after Mr. Blaney had been executed for the murder of Mr. Poor—she was willing to kill three men, two by direct action and one indirectly. Incidentally, except for the colossal blunder of picking on me she was not a fool.”

  “The hell she wasn’t,” Cramer growled. “With all that trick set-up? She was absolutely batty.”

  “No, sir.” Wolfe shook his head. “She was not. Go back over it. She didn’t manufacture the trick set-up out of her head, she simply used what she had. On a certain day she found herself with these ingredients at hand. One, the hostility between the partners in the business, amply corroborated by such details as Mr. Poor having Miss Vardis spy on Mr. Blaney, and Mrs. Poor herself having Mr. Groll do the same. Two, her acquaintance with a man named Arthur HOwell, who had access to a supply of explosive capsules capable of concealment in a cigar, and who also sufficiently resembled her husband in build and general appearance except for the face itself, and she intended to take care of the face. Ten of your men, Mr. Cramer, kept at it for a week or so, can probably trace her association with Mr. Howell. They’re good at that. Unquestionably it was those qualifications of Mr. Howell that suggested the details of her plan. She did not of course inform him that she hated men. Quite the contrary. She persuaded him to help her kill her husband, offering, presumably, a strong incentive.”