Authors: Rex Stout
But the bell rang right on the dot.
Y
OU HAVE HEARD OF the exception that proves the rule. Professor F. O. Savarese was it.
The accepted rule is that an Italian is dark and, if not actually a runt, at least not tall; that a professor is dry and pedantic, with eye trouble; and that a mathematician really lives in the stratosphere and is here just visiting relatives. Well, Savarese was an Italian-American professor of mathematics, but he was big and blond and buoyant, two inches taller than me, and he came breezing in like a March morning wind.
He spent the first twenty minutes telling Wolfe and me how fascinating and practical it would be to work out a set of mathematical formulas that could be used in the detective business. His favorite branch of mathematics, he said, was the one that dealt with the objective numerical measurement of probability. Very well. What was any detective work, any kind at all, but the objective measurement of probability? All he proposed to do was to add the word
numerical
, not as a substitute or replacement, but as an ally and reinforcement.
“I’ll show you what I mean,” he offered. “May I have paper and pencil?”
He had bounded over to me before I could even uncross my legs, took the pad and pencil I handed him, and bounded back to the red leather chair. When the pencil had jitterbugged on the pad for half a minute he tore off the top sheet and slid it across the desk to Wolfe, then went to work on the next sheet and in a moment tore that off and leaped to me with it.
“You should each have one,” he said, “so you can follow me.”
I wouldn’t try to pretend I could put it down from memory, but I still have both of those sheets, in the folder marked
ORCHARD
, and this is what is on them:
“That,” Savarese said, his whole face smiling with eager interest and friendliness and desire to help, “is the second approximation of the normal law of error, sometimes called the generalized law of error. Let’s apply it to the simplest kind of detective problem, say the question which one of three servants in a house stole a diamond ring from a locked drawer. I should explain that
X
is the deviation from the mean,
D
is the standard deviation,
k
is—”
“Please!” Wolfe had to make it next door to a bellow, and did. “What are you trying to do, change the subject?”
“No.” Savarese looked surprised and a little hurt. “Am I? What was the subject?”
“The death of Mr. Cyril Orchard and your connection with it.”
“Oh. Of course.” He smiled apologetically and spread his hands, palms up. “Perhaps later? It is one of my favorite ideas, the application of the mathematical laws of probability and error to detective problems, and a chance to discuss it with you is a golden opportunity.”
“Another time. Meanwhile”—Wolfe tapped the generalized law of error with a finger tip—”I’ll keep this. Which one of the people at that broadcast placed that glass and bottle in front of Mr. Orchard?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to find it very interesting to compare your handling of me with the way the police did it. What you’re trying to do, of course, is to proceed from probability toward certainty, as close as you can get. Say you start, as you see it, with one chance in five that I poisoned Orchard. Assuming that you have no subjective bias, your purpose is to move as rapidly as possible from that position, and you don’t care which direction. Anything I say or do will move you one way or the other. If one way, the one-in-five will become one-in-four, one-in-three, and so on until it becomes one-in-one and a minute fraction, which will be close enough to affirmative certainty so that you will say you know that I killed Orchard. If it goes the other way, your one-in-five will become one-in-ten, one-in-one-hundred, one-in-one-thousand; and when it gets to one-in-ten-billion you will be close enough to negative certainty so that you will say you know that I did not kill Orchard. There is a formula—”
“No doubt.” Wolfe was controlling himself very well. “If you want to compare me with the police you’ll have to let me get a word in now and then. Had you ever seen Mr. Orchard before the day of the broadcast?”
“Oh, yes, six times. The first time was thirteen months earlier, in February 1947. You’re going to find me remarkably exact, since the police have had me over all this, back and forth. I might as well give you everything I can that will move you toward affirmative certainty, since subjectively you would prefer that direction. Shall I do that?”
“By all means.”
“I thought that would appeal to you. As a mathematician I have always been interested in the application of the calculation of probabilities to the various forms of gambling. The genesis of normal distributions—”
“Not now,” Wolfe said sharply.
“Oh—of course not. There are reasons why it is exceptionally difficult to calculate probabilities in the case of horse races, and yet people bet hundreds of millions of dollars on them. A little over a year ago, studying the possibilities of some formulas, I decided to look at some tip sheets, and subscribed to three. One of them was the
Track Almanac
, published by Cyril Orchard. Asked by the police why I chose that one, I could only say that I didn’t know. I forget. That is suspicious, for them and you; for me, it is simply a fact that I don’t remember. One day in February last year a daily double featured by Orchard came through, and I went to see him. He had some intelligence, and if he had been interested in the mathematical problems involved I could have made good use of him, but he wasn’t. In spite of that I saw him occasionally, and he once spent a week end with me at the home of a friend in New Jersey. Altogether, previous to that broadcast, I had seen him, been with him, six times. That’s suspicious, isn’t it?”
“Moderately,” Wolfe conceded.
Savarese nodded. “I’m glad to see you keep as objective as possible. But what about this? When I learned that a popular radio program on a national network had asked for opinions on the advisability of having a horse race tipster as a guest, I wrote a letter strongly urging it, asked for the privilege of being myself the second guest on the program, and suggested that Cyril Orchard should be the tipster invited.” Savarese smiled all over, beaming. “What about your one-in-five now?”
Wolfe grunted. “I didn’t take that position. You assumed it for me. I suppose the police have that letter you wrote?”
“No, they haven’t. No one has it. It seems that Miss Fraser’s staff doesn’t keep correspondence more than two or three weeks, and my letter has presumably been destroyed. If I had known that in time I might have been less candid in describing the letter’s contents to the police, but on the other hand I might not have been. Obviously my treatment of that problem had an effect on my calculations of the probability of my being arrested for murder. But for a free decision I would have had to know, first, that the letter had been destroyed, and, second, that the memories of Miss Fraser’s staff were vague about its contents. I learned both of those facts too late.”
Wolfe stirred in his chair. “What else on the road to affirmative certainty?”
“Let’s see.” Savarese considered. “I think that’s all, unless we go into observation of distributions, and that should be left for a secondary formula. For instance, my character, a study of which,
a posteriori
, would show it to be probable that I would commit murder for the sake of a sound but revolutionary formula. One detail of that would be my personal finances. My salary as an assistant professor is barely enough to live on endurably, but I paid ten dollars a week for that
Track Almanac
.”
“Do you gamble? Do you bet on horse races?”
“No. I never have. I know too much—or rather, I know too little. More than ninety-nine per cent of the bets placed on horse races are outbursts of emotion, not exercises of reason. I restrict my emotions to the activities for which they are qualified.” Savarese waved a hand. “That starts us in the other direction, toward a negative certainty, with its conclusion that I did not kill Orchard, and we might as well go on with it. Items:
“I could not have managed that Orchard got the poison. I was seated diagonally across from him, and I did not help pass the bottles. It cannot be shown that I have ever purchased, stolen, borrowed, or possessed any cyanide. It cannot be established that I would, did, or shall profit in any way from Orchard’s death. When I arrived at the broadcasting studio, at twenty minutes to eleven, everyone else was already there and I would certainly have been observed if I had gone to the refrigerator and opened its door. There is no evidence that my association with Orchard was other than as I have described it, with no element of animus or of any subjective attitude.”
Savarese beamed. “How far have we gone? One-in-one-thousand?”
“I’m not with you,” Wolfe said with no element of animus. “I’m not on that road at all, nor on any road. I’m wandering around poking at things. Have you ever been in Michigan?”
For the hour that was left before orchid time Wolfe fired questions at him, and Savarese answered him briefly and to the point. Evidently the professor really did want to compare Wolfe’s technique with that of the police, for, as he gave close attention to each question as it was asked, he had more the air of a judge or referee sizing something up than of a murder suspect, guilty or innocent, going through an ordeal. The objective attitude.
He maintained it right up to four o’clock, when the session ended, and I escorted the objective attitude to the front door, and Wolfe went to his elevator.
A little after five Saul Panzer arrived. Coming only up to the middle of my ear, and of slight build, Saul doesn’t even begin to fill the red leather chair, but he likes to sit in it, and did so. He is pretty objective too, and I have rarely seen him either elated or upset about anything that had happened to him, or that he had caused to happen to someone else, but that day he was really riled.
“It was bad judgment,” he told me, frowning and glum. “Rotten judgment. I’m ashamed to face Mr. Wolfe. I had a good story ready, one that I fully expected to work, and all I needed was ten minutes with the mother to put it over. But I misjudged her. I had discussed her with a couple of the bellhops, and had talked with her on the phone, and had a good chance to size her up in the hotel lobby and when she came outside, and I utterly misjudged her. I can’t tell you anything about her brains or character, I didn’t get that far, but she certainly knows how to keep the dogs off. I came mighty close to spending the day in the pound.”
He told me all about it, and I had to admit it was a gloomy tale. No operative likes to come away empty from as simple a job as that, and Saul Panzer sure doesn’t. To get his mind off of it, I mixed him a highball and got out a deck of cards for a little congenial gin. When six o’clock came and brought Wolfe down from the plant rooms, ending the game, I had won something better than three bucks.
Saul made his report. Wolfe sat behind his desk and listened, without interruption or comment. At the end he told Saul he had nothing to apologize for, asked him to phone after dinner for instructions, and let him go. Left alone with me, Wolfe leaned back and shut his eyes and was not visibly even breathing. I got at my typewriter and tapped out a summary of Saul’s report, and was on my way to the cabinet to file it when Wolfe’s voice came:
“Archie.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I am stripped. This is no better than a treadmill.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have to talk with that girl. Get Miss Fraser.”
I did so, but we might as well have saved the nickel. Listening in on my phone, I swallowed it along with Wolfe. Miss Fraser was sorry that we had made little or no progress. She would do anything she could to help, but she was afraid, in fact she was certain, that it would be useless for her to call Mrs. Shepherd at Atlantic City and ask her to bring her daughter to New York to see Wolfe. There was no doubt that Mrs. Shepherd would flatly refuse. Miss Fraser admitted that she had influence with the child, Nancylee, but asserted that she had none at all with the mother. As for phoning Nancylee and persuading her to scoot and come on her own, she wouldn’t consider it. She couldn’t very well, since she had supplied the money for the mother and daughter to go away.
“You did?” Wolfe allowed himself to sound surprised. “Miss Koppel told Mr. Goodwin that none of you knew where they had gone.”
“We didn’t, until we saw it in the paper today. Nancylee’s father was provoked, and that’s putting it mildly, by all the photographers and reporters and everything else, and he blamed it on me, and I offered to pay the expense of a trip for them, but I didn’t know where they decided to go.”
We hung up, and discussed the outlook. I ventured to suggest two or three other possible lines of action, but Wolfe had his heart set on Nancylee, and I must admit I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to start another round of conferences with the individuals he had been working on. Finally he said, in a tone that announced he was no longer discussing but telling me:
“I have to talk with that girl. Go and bring her.”
I had known it was coming. “Conscious?” I asked casually.
“I said with her, not to her. She must be able to talk. You could revive her after you get her here. I should have sent you in the first place, knowing how you are with young women.”
“Thank you very much. She’s not a young woman, she’s a minor. She wears socks.”
“Archie.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get her.”
I
HAD A BAD BREAK. An idea that came to me at the dinner table, while I was pretending to listen to Wolfe telling how men with mustaches a foot long used to teach mathematics in schools in Montenegro, required, if it was to bear fruit, some information from the janitor at 829 Wixley Avenue. But when, immediately after dinner, I drove up there, he had gone to the movies and I had to wait over an hour for him. I got what I hoped would be all I needed, generously ladled out another buck of Hi-Spot money, drove back downtown and put the car in the garage, and went home and up to my room. Wolfe, of course, was in the office, and the door was standing open, but I didn’t even stop to nod as I went by.