by Rex Stout
His gaze passed along the line. No one said a word.
“One or more of you,” he said, “might prefer not to speak in the presence of others. If so, do you want to come back later? This evening?”
“If I had anything to tell you,” Bill Meadows asserted, “I’d tell you now.”
“You sure would,” Traub agreed.
“I thought not,” Wolfe said grimly. “To get anything out of you another Miss Shepherd would be necessary. One other chance: if you prefer not even to make an appointment in the presence of the others, we are always here to answer the phone. But I would advise you not to delay.” He pushed his chair back and got erect. “That’s all I have for you now, and you have nothing for me.”
They didn’t like that much. They wanted to know what he was going to do. Especially and unanimously, they wanted to know what about their secret. Was the world going to hear of what a sip of Hi-Spot did to Madeline Fraser? On that Wolfe refused to commit himself. The stubbornest of the bunch was Traub. When the others finally left he stayed behind, refusing to give up the fight, even trying to follow Wolfe into the kitchen. I had to get rude to get rid of him.
When Wolfe emerged from the kitchen, instead of bearing left toward the dining room he returned to the office, although dinner was ready.
I followed. “What’s the idea? Not hungry?”
“Get Mr. Cramer.”
I went to the desk and obeyed.
Wolfe got on.
“How do you do, sir.” He was polite but far from servile. “Yes. No. No, indeed. If you will come to my office after dinner, say at nine o’clock, I’ll tell you why you haven’t got anywhere on that Orchard case. No, not only that, I think you’ll find it helpful. No, nine o’clock would be better.”
He hung up, scowled at me, and headed for the dining room. By the time he had seated himself, tucked his napkin in the V of his vest, and removed the lid from the onion soup, letting the beautiful strong steam sail out, his face had completely cleared and he was ready to purr.
Chapter 12
INSPECTOR CRAMER, ADJUSTED to ease in the red leather chair, with beer on the little table at his elbow, manipulated his jaw so that the unlighted cigar made a cocky upward angle from the left side of his mouth.
“Yes,” he admitted. “You can have it all for a nickel. That’s where I am. Either I’m getting older or murderers are getting smarter.”
He was in fact getting fairly gray and his middle, though it would never get into Wolfe’s class, was beginning to make pretensions, but his eyes were as sharp as ever and his heavy broad shoulders showed no inclination to sink under the load.
“But,” he went on, sounding more truculent than he actually was because keeping the cigar where he wanted it made him talk through his teeth, “I’m not expecting any nickel from you. You don’t look as if you needed anything. You look as pleased as if someone had just given you a geranium.”
“I don’t like geraniums.”
“Then what’s all the happiness about? Have you got to the point where you’re ready to tell Archie to mail out the bills?”
He not only wasn’t truculent; he was positively mushy. Usually he called me Goodwin. He called me Archie only when he wanted to peddle the impression that he regarded himself as one of the family, which he wasn’t.
Wolfe shook his head. “No, I’m far short of that. But I am indeed pleased. I like the position I’m in. It seems likely that you and your trained men—up to a thousand of them, I assume, on a case as blazoned as this one—are about to work like the devil to help me earn a fee. Isn’t that enough to give me a smirk?”
“The hell you say.” Cramer wasn’t so sugary. “According to the papers your fee is contingent.”
“So it is.”
“On what you do. Not on what we do.”
“Of course,” Wolfe agreed. He leaned back and sighed comfortably. “You’re much too clearsighted not to appraise the situation, which is a little peculiar, as I do. Would you like me to describe it?”
“I’d love it. You’re a good describer.”
“Yes, I think I am. You have made no progress, and after ten days you are sunk in a morass, because there is a cardinal fact which you have not discovered. I have. I have discovered it by talking with the very persons who had been questioned by you and your men many times, and it was not given to me willingly. Only by intense and sustained effort did I dig it out. Then why should I pass it on to you? Why don’t I use it myself, and go on to triumph?”
Cramer put his beer glass down. “You’re telling me.”
“That was rhetoric. The trouble is that, while without this fact you can’t even get started, with it there is still a job to be done; that job will require further extended dealing with these same people, their histories and relationships; and I have gone as far as I can with them unless I hire an army. You already have an army. The job will probably need an enormous amount of the sort of work for which your men are passably equipped, some of them even adequately, so why shouldn’t they do it? Isn’t it the responsibility of the police to catch a murderer?”
Cramer was now wary and watchful. “From you,” he said, “that’s one hell of a question. More rhetoric?”
“Oh, no. That one deserves an answer. Yours, I feel sure, is yes, and the newspapers agree. So I submit a proposal: I’ll give you the fact, and you’ll proceed to catch the murderer. When that has been done, you and I will discuss whether the fact was essential to your success; whether you could possibly have got the truth and the evidence without it. If we agree that you couldn’t, you will so inform my clients, and I shall collect my fee. No document will be required; an oral statement will do; and of course only to my clients. I don’t care what you say to journalists or to your superior officers.”
Cramer grunted. He removed the cigar from his mouth, gazed at the mangled end suspiciously as if he expected to see a bug crawling, and put it back where it belonged. Then he squinted at Wolfe:
“Would you repeat that?”
Wolfe did so, as if he were reading it off, without changing a word.
Cramer grunted again. “You say if we agree. You mean if you agree with me, or if I agree with you?”
“Bah. It couldn’t be plainer.”
“Yeah. When you’re plainest you need looking at closest. What if I’ve already got this wonderful fact?”
“You didn’t have it two hours ago. If you have it now, I have nothing to give and shall get nothing. If when I divulge it you claim to have had it, you’ll tell me when and from whom you got it.” Wolfe stirred impatiently. “It is, of course, connected with facts in your possession—for instance, that the bottle contained sugared coffee instead of Hi-Spot.”
“Sure, they’ve told you that.”
“Or that your laboratory has found traces of a certain substance, in a band half an inch wide, encircling the neck of the bottle.”
“They haven’t told you that.” Cramer’s eyes got narrower. “There are only six or seven people who could have told you that, and they all get paid by the City of New York, and by God you can name him before we go any farther.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe was disgusted. “I have better use for my clients’ money than buying information from policemen. Why don’t you like my proposal? What’s wrong with it? Frankly, I hope to heaven you accept it, and immediately. If you don’t I’ll have to hire two dozen men and begin all over again on those people, and I’d rather eat baker’s bread—almost.”
“All right.” Cramer did not relax. “Hell, I’d do anything to save you from that. I’m on. Your proposal, as you have twice stated it, provided I get the fact, and all of it, here and now.”
“You do. Here it is, and Mr. Goodwin will have a typed copy for you. But first—a little detail—I owe it to one of my clients to request that one item of it be kept confidential, if it can possibly be managed.”
“I can’t keep murder evidence confidential.”
“I know you can’t. I said if it can po
ssibly be managed.”
“I’ll see, but I’m not promising, and if I did promise I probably wouldn’t keep it. What’s the item? Give it to me first.”
“Certainly. Miss Fraser can’t drink Hi-Spot because it gives her indigestion.”
“What the hell.” Cramer goggled at him. “Orchard didn’t drink Hi-Spot, he drank coffee, and it didn’t give him indigestion, it killed him.”
Wolfe nodded. “I know. But that’s the item, and on behalf of my clients I ask that it be kept undisclosed if possible. This is going to take some time, perhaps an hour, and your glass and bottle are empty. Archie?”
I got up and bartended without any boyish enthusiasm because I wasn’t very crazy about the shape things were taking. I was keeping my fingers crossed. If Wolfe was starting some tricky maneuver and only fed him a couple of crumbs, with the idea of getting a full-sized loaf, not baker’s bread, in exchange, that would be one thing, and I was ready to applaud if he got away with it. If he really opened the bag and dumped it out, letting Cramer help himself, that would be something quite different. In that case he was playing it straight, and that could only mean that he had got fed up with them, and really intended to sit and read poetry or draw horses and let the cops earn his fee for him. That did not appeal to me. Money may be everything, but it makes a difference how you get it.
He opened the bag and dumped it. He gave Cramer all we had. He even quoted, from memory, the telegram that had been sent to Mom Shepherd, and as he did so I had to clamp my jaw to keep from making one of four or five remarks that would have fitted the occasion. I had composed that telegram, not him. But I kept my trap shut. I do sometimes ride him in the presence of outsiders, but rarely for Cramer to hear, and not when my feelings are as strong as they were then.
Also Cramer had a lot of questions to ask, and Wolfe answered them like a lamb. And I had to leave my chair so Cramer could rest his broad bottom on it while he phoned his office.
“Rowcliff? Take this down, but don’t broadcast it.” He was very crisp and executive, every inch an inspector. “I’m at Wolfe’s office, and he did have something, and for once I think he’s dealing off the top of the deck. We’ve got to start all over. It’s one of those goddam babies where the wrong person got killed. It was intended for the Fraser woman. I’ll tell you when I get there, in half an hour, maybe a little more. Call in everybody that’s on the case. Find out where the Commissioner is, and the D.A. Get that Elinor Vance and that Nathan Traub, and get the cook at the Fraser apartment. Have those three there by the time I come. We’ll take the others in the morning. Who was it went to Michigan—oh, I remember, Darst. Be sure you don’t miss him, I want to see him…”
And so forth. After another dozen or so executive orders Cramer hung up and returned to the red leather chair.
“What else?” he demanded.
“That’s all,” Wolfe declared. “I wish you luck.”
Having dropped his chewed-up cigar in my wastebasket when he usurped my chair, Cramer got out another one and stuck it in his mouth without looking at it. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “You gave me a fact, no doubt about that, but this is the first time I ever saw you turn out all your pockets, so I sit down again. Before I leave I’d like to sit here a couple of minutes and ask myself, what for?”
Wolfe chuckled. “Didn’t I just hear you telling your men to start to work for me?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” The cigar slanted up. “It seems plausible, but I’ve known you to seem plausible before. And I swear to God if there’s a gag in this it’s buried too deep for me. You don’t even make any suggestions.”
“I have none.”
And he didn’t. I saw that. And there wasn’t any gag. I didn’t wonder that Cramer suspected him, considering what his experiences with him had been in the past years, but to me it was only too evident that Wolfe had really done a strip act, to avoid overworking his brain. I have sat in that office with him too many hours, and watched him put on his acts for too many audiences, not to know when he is getting up a charade. I certainly don’t always know what he is up to, but I do know when he is up to nothing at all. He was simply utterly going to let the city employees do it.
“Would you suggest, for instance,” Cramer inquired, “to haul Miss Fraser in on a charge of tampering with evidence? Or the others for obstructing justice?”
Wolfe shook his head. “My dear sir, you are after a murderer, not tamperers or obstructers. Anyway you can’t get convictions on charges like that, except in very special cases, and you know it. You are hinting that it isn’t like me to expose a client to such a charge, but will you arrest her? No. What you will do, I hope, is find out who it is that wants to kill her. How could I have suggestions for you? You know vastly more about it than I do. There are a thousand lines of investigation, in a case like this, on which I haven’t moved a finger; and doubtless you have explored all of them. I won’t insult you by offering a list of them. I’ll be here, though, I’m always here, should you want a word with me.”
Cramer got up and went.
Chapter 13
I CAN’T DENY THAT from a purely practical point of view the deal that Wolfe made with Cramer that Friday evening was slick, even fancy, and well designed to save wear and tear on Wolfe’s energy and the contents of his skull. No matter how it added up at the end it didn’t need one of Professor Savarese’s formulas to show how probable it was that the fact Wolfe had furnished Cramer would turn out to be an essential item. That was a good bet at almost any odds. But.
There was one fatal flaw in the deal. The city scientists, in order to earn Wolfe’s fee for him while he played around with his toys, had to crack the case. That was the joker. I have never seen a more completely uncracked case than that one was, a full week after Wolfe had made his cute little arrangement to have his detective work done by proxy. I kept up to date on it both by reading the newspapers and by making jaunts down to Homicide headquarters on Twentieth Street, for chats with Sergeant Purley Stebbins or other acquaintances, and twice with Cramer himself. That was humiliating, but I did want to keep myself informed somehow about the case Wolfe and I were working on. For the first time in history I was perfectly welcome at Homicide, especially after three or four days had passed. It got to be pathetic, the way they would greet me like a treasured pal, no doubt thinking it was just possible I had come to contribute another fact. God knows they needed one. For of course they were reading the papers too, and the press was living up to one of its oldest traditions by bawling hell out of the cops for bungling a case which, by prompt and competent—you know how it goes.
So far the public had not been informed that Hi-Spot gave Miss Fraser indigestion. If the papers had known that!
Wolfe wasn’t lifting a finger. It was not, properly speaking, a relapse. Relapse is my word for it when he gets so offended or disgusted by something about a case, or so appalled by the kind or amount of work it is going to take to solve it, that he decides to pretend he has never heard of it, and rejects it as a topic of conversation. This wasn’t like that. He just didn’t intend to work unless he had to. He was perfectly willing to read the pieces in the papers, or to put down his book and listen when I returned from one of my visits to Homicide. But if I tried to badger him into some mild exertion like hiring Saul and Fred and Orrie to look under some stones, or even thinking up a little errand for me, he merely picked up his book again.
If any of the developments, such as they were, meant anything to him, he gave no sign of it. Elinor Vance was arrested, held as a material witness, and after two days released on bail. The word I brought from Homicide was that there was nothing to it except that she had by far the best opportunity to put something in the coffee, with the exception of the cook. Not that there weren’t plenty of others; the list had been considerably lengthened by the discovery that the coffee had been made, bottled, and kept overnight in Miss Fraser’s apartment, with all the coming and going there.
Then there was the motive-collecting o
peration. In a murder case you can always get some motives together, but the trouble is you can never be sure which ones are sunfast for the people concerned. It all depends. There was the guy in Brooklyn a few years ago who stabbed a dentist in and around the heart eleven times because he had pulled the wrong tooth. In this case the motive assortment was about average, nothing outstanding but fairly good specimens. Six months ago Miss Fraser and Bill Meadows had had a first-class row, and she had fired him and he had been off the program for three weeks. They both claimed that they now dearly loved each other.
Not long ago Nat Traub had tried to persuade a soup manufacturer, one of the Fraser sponsors, to leave her and sign up for an evening comedy show, and Miss Fraser had retaliated by talking the sponsor into switching to another agency. Not only that, there were vague hints that Miss Fraser had started a campaign for a similar switch by other sponsors, including Hi-Spot, but they couldn’t be nailed down. Again, she and Traub insisted that they were awful good friends.
The Radio Writers Guild should have been delighted to poison Miss Fraser on account of her tough attitude toward demands of the Guild for changes in contracts, and Elinor Vance was a member of the Guild in good standing. As for Tully Strong, Miss Fraser had opposed the formation of a Sponsors’ Council, and still didn’t like it, and of course if there were no Council there would be no secretary.
And so on. As motives go, worth tacking up but not spectacular. The one that would probably have got the popular vote was Deborah Koppel’s. Somebody in the D.A.’s office had induced Miss Fraser to reveal the contents of her will. It left ten grand each to a niece and nephew, children of her sister who lived in Michigan, and all the rest to Deborah. It would be a very decent chunk, somewhere in six figures, with the first figure either a 2 or a 3, certainly worth a little investment in poison for anyone whose mind ran in that direction. There was, however, not the slightest indication that Deborah’s mind did. She and Miss Fraser, then Miss Oxhall, had been girlhood friends in Michigan, had taught at the same school, and had become sisters-in-law when Madeline had married Deborah’s brother Lawrence.
