Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 10 (7 page)

Wolfe’s lips moved faintly but no sound came out. He was speechless with rage.

He took a deep breath.

“Archie,” he said, “you have the advantage over me. There is nothing I can do to you. I can’t dismiss you, since you are no longer in my employ.” His eyes moved. “Mr. Cramer, you are an ass. Leave Mr. Goodwin alone with me for an hour, and I’ll get you all the information you want.”

“Alone with you?” Cramer grunted derisively. “Not that big an ass I’m not.”

Wolfe grimaced. He was having all he could do to control himself.

I said in a manly tone, “It’s like this, boss. I’m in a bad hole. I admit it. I am innocent, but my honor is involved. A good lawyer may pull me through. I had to
grit my teeth last night to keep from waking you up to tell you about it. I knew you didn’t want—”

“Apparently, Archie,” he said grimly, “you forget how well I know you. Enough of this flummery. What are your terms?”

He had me flustered for a second. I stammered, “My what? Terms?”

“Yes. For the information I’ll have to have to clean up this mess. First to get you out of here. Do you realize, when Fritz brought me that paper and I saw that headline—”

“Yes, sir, I realize. As for terms, it’s not me, it’s the Army. I’m in it, and I’m on duty. We ask your assistance—”

“You’re going to get it. I am preparing for it—”

“Sure you are. You’re preparing to dry up and die. We respectfully request an appointment for Colonel Ryder to call on you at the earliest opportunity. We request you to remove your brain from the cedar chest and give me back my sweater, which is stretched out of shape, and go to work.”

“Confound you—”

“What the hell,” Cramer barked, “is all this?”

“Please be quiet,” Wolfe snapped. He folded his arms and shut his eyes, and his lips pushed out and then in again, and out and in. Cramer and I had both seen that before, on various occasions. This time it went on for quite a while. Finally Wolfe heaved a deep sigh and his eyes opened.

“Very well,” he muttered at me. “Talk.”

I grinned at him. “May I phone Colonel Ryder to come tomorrow at eleven?”

“How do I know? I’ve got a job to do.”

“As soon as it’s finished?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I turned to Cramer. “Tell Stebbins to phone Fritz to dust and air the office and to get things in and have dinner at eight, as before—let’s see—pan-broiled young turkey and what goes with it. And beer. Three cases of beer.”

Purley uttered a grunt of indignation, but Cramer made it an order by nodding at him, and he left the room.

“Also,” I told Cramer cheerfully, “before I pull the zipper I want a passport from you. I’ve got—”

“Save it,” he rasped. “It’s your turn now. If I like it well enough—”

“Nothing doing.” I shook my head firmly. “You’re not going to like it at all. Short of murder there’s practically nothing you couldn’t wrap around me if you felt like it. So I’ve got terms for you too. You can have the satisfaction of salting me away for ten years—five anyhow. Or you can have the facts. But you’re not going to get both satisfaction
and
facts. Now say you lock me up and Mr. Wolfe totters home without me. How long do you think it would take you to find out how a lock of my hair got under that scarf? And so forth. If you want the facts, give me a passport. In advance. And get set to restrain yourself, because I freely admit that in my enthusiasm I—”

“In your what?”

“Enthusiasm. Zeal.”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, sir. I admit that I acted somewhat arbitrarily and when I tell you about it you will be inclined to take offense. In fact—”

“Don’t talk so damn much. What do you want?”

“Fresh air. Short of murder, I’m clear. Not a signed statement, just verbal will do.”

“Go to hell.”

“Suit yourself.” I shrugged. “You can’t possibly tag me for murder. I know the facts and you don’t. It would take you three thousand years to find out about that lock of hair, let alone—”

“Shut up!”

I did so. Cramer glowered at me, and I gazed at him composedly but inflexibly. Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed.

“Okay,” he said. “Short of murder you’re clear. Shoot.”

I stood up. “May I use your phone, please?”

Cramer shoved the phone across and I put in a person-to-person call to Lily Rowan at the Worthington at Greenwich. Evidently she wasn’t out leading Roy a chase, for I got her right away. She was inclined to be cantankerous, but I told her all conversation would have to be postponed until I saw her, which would be that very afternoon if she would take the next train to New York and go straight from the station to Wolfe’s office. Then I asked her to return me to the hotel switchboard and when I got it asked to speak to Roy Douglas. In a couple of minutes I had him. His voice sounded as if he had the jitters, and he began sputtering about the papers saying he had run away and was being searched for, but I calmed him down and told him the same thing I had told Lily, to return to New York and go to Wolfe’s office. When I put the receiver back on the cradle Cramer was regarding me with a mean eye. He reached for the phone and got somebody and growled into it:

“Send four men to Nero Wolfe’s place on 35th Street. Lily Rowan and Roy Douglas will be showing up there in a couple of hours, maybe sooner. Let ’em go in Wolfe’s house if that’s what they do, and keep it covered. If they do anything else, follow them.” He
hung up and turned to me. “So you had ’em on ice, did you? Both of ’em, huh?” He pointed the cigar at me. “You’re wrong about one thing, bud. You won’t be seeing any Lily Rowan at Wolfe’s office this afternoon, because you’re not going to be there. Now let’s hear you.”

Wolfe muttered, “Talk, Archie.”

I
talked. One thing I know how to do is to report current events which I have witnessed, and they both knew it, so there were no interruptions. It didn’t present any great difficulties, since all I had to do was open the bag and dump it, as I would have done if I had been alone with Wolfe. I saw no reason to try to hide any cards from Cramer. I gave them the crop, with only one exception. My modesty wouldn’t permit me to suggest that reading aloud to me was an essential ingredient in Lily Rowan’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, so I skipped any hint of that. I merely said we met by accident on the plane to New York, and she told me about Ann Amory being in trouble, and I decided to try to use that in my effort to bring Nero Wolfe back to his senses. Of course I had to tell about the object of my trip to New York, since otherwise there would have been no way to explain my planting the note and the hair and my fingerprints, and various other details, and anyhow Wolfe already knew it, as he had shown when he asked me what were my terms.

“So,” I ended, looking straight at Wolfe, “here I am. I have disgraced the uniform. A million people are at this moment reading the headline,
Nero Wolfe’s
Former Assistant Locked Up
, and snickering. Even if Cramer believes my story, he still has a lock of my hair. If he doesn’t believe it, he may get me electrocuted. And it’s all on account of you! If you—”

Cramer was regarding me sourly, mangling his third cigar, and massaging the back of his neck. “I had a headache,” he said cutting me off, “and now it’s worse. My son’s in Australia with the Air Corps. He’s a bombardier.”

“I was aware of it,” I said politely. “Have you heard from him recently?”

“Go to hell. As you know damn well, Goodwin, I’ve been wanting to teach you a lesson for years. Here’s my chance. Five years would be about right. But short of murder you’re clear. I said so, and what I say sticks. If it wasn’t for that I’d hang it on you, don’t think I wouldn’t. Anyway you’re wearing the same uniform my son’s wearing, and I have more respect for it than you seem to have. And I guess you’ll be court-martialed. There was a Colonel Ryder here to see you about an hour ago and I wouldn’t let him.”

“That’ll be all right,” I said reassuringly. “As soon as Mr. Wolfe finds the murderer everything will be rosy.”

“You don’t say. Wolfe’s going to find the murderer, is he? That’s damn kind of him.”

“Archie.” Wolfe had found his tongue. “You admit that the sole purpose of this grotesque performance was to bring pressure on me? To coerce me?”

“To stimulate you, yes, sir.”

Wolfe nodded grimly. “We’ll discuss it at the proper time. I prefer not to do so in the presence of others. First there is this murder. How much of what you told Mr. Cramer was true?”

“All of it.”

“You’re talking to me now.”

“I know I am.”

“How much did you withhold?”

“Nothing. That was the works.”

“I don’t believe it. You hesitated twice.”

I shook my head, grinning at him. “You’re a little rusty, that’s all. You’re out of practice. But there is one thing I didn’t say. I did want you to get back to work because the Army needs you, but when I saw Ann Amory there on the floor there was another reason. She was a good kid. She was all right. I danced with her and I liked her. If you had seen her as she was Monday evening, and then as she was there on the floor—anyway, I saw her. So I was in favor of making sure that the guy who did it wouldn’t live any longer than was necessary, and that was another reason for getting you back to work. Because it may have been partly my fault. I went down there and stirred it up. Otherwise it might not have happened.”

“Nonsense,” Wolfe said testily. “A murderer doesn’t sprout overnight like a mushroom. What about it, Mr. Cramer? What have you got? Do you need anything?”

Cramer grunted. “I didn’t need what Goodwin gave me. If I believe him. Say I believe him. I didn’t need him to scratch the favorite.”

My brows went up. “Roy Douglas? Were you liking him?”

“I was.” Cramer tossed the worn-out unlit cigar in the wastebasket. “For one thing, because he beat it. But if I’m believing you, he’s good and out. According to three people, the girl left her office a couple of minutes after five. She couldn’t have got home before 5:20, probably not before 5:25. Miss Rowan saw her there dead at 5:45, close to that. So she was killed in that
twenty minutes. Or even if you want to get fancy and say she was killed somewhere else, as soon as she left the office, and then taken and dumped in the apartment, still Douglas is out. According to you, he got to Wolfe’s house before five o’clock and was with you constantly until Miss Rowan arrived.”

I nodded. “I told you I checked on her leaving the office. If I had slipped the murderer a hundred bucks for a train ride, that would have been overdoing it. What have you got left? How about Leon Furey?”

“Playing pool at Martin’s from four o’clock on. Ate sandwiches there and went on playing. Didn’t return to Barnum Street until nearly midnight.”

“Sewed up?”

“We thought it was. Now we’ll have to go over it. We were after Douglas. We’ll have to go back over all of it. I suppose even the grandmother. Two people saw her entering at 7:10, but she could have been there earlier and gone out again. And Miss Leeds. Her agent was with her up to some time between 6:30 and 7:00, going over leases and accounts, and now we’ll have to pin that down. We had crossed off four other people who were in the building at the time because they seemed to have no connection with Ann Amory, but we’ll have to go back to that too.” Cramer glared at me. “Nuts. I don’t remember any single time I ever saw you or spoke to you that you didn’t ball something up.”

He picked up the phone and began giving orders. In ten minutes or less he issued instructions that started a couple of dozen men either going or coming. But I wasn’t paying very close attention. In spite of Wolfe’s agreeing to see Colonel Ryder and permitting the order to be relayed to Fritz for pan-broiled young turkey, I wasn’t sure whether I had him or not. He was as unpredictable as Lily Rowan, and I was trying to figure out
some way of getting him really involved. I didn’t like the way he looked. He was keeping his eyes open and his head straight up; and there was no way of telling what it meant because it was new to me. Of course the thing to do was to get him home, get him seated back of his desk again, with beer in front of him and smells coming from the kitchen, as soon as possible.

I was considering ways of selling that idea to Cramer, when Cramer saved me the trouble. He pushed the phone aside and said abruptly to Wolfe, “You asked if I need anything. Well, I do. I suppose you’ve noticed the way things seem to be heading.”

“I perceive,” Wolfe said dryly, “a general tendency in the direction of Miss Rowan.”

Cramer nodded without enthusiasm. “That don’t require much perceiving. We’ve got to go back over everybody, but that’s the way it looks now. And Lily Rowan’s father was one of my best friends. He got me on the force, and he got me out of a couple of tight holes in the old days when he was on the inside at the Hall. I knew Lily before she could walk. I’m not the man to do any cleaning job on her, and I don’t want to turn her over to any of these wolves. I want you to handle her up at your place. And I want to be there in the front room where she can’t see me.”

Wolfe frowned. “I know her myself. I have given her orchids. She has been pestering me lately. It will not be pleasant.” He shot me a glance that was supposed to wither me. Then he regarded Cramer with an expression of repugnance, and heaved a sigh. “Very well. Provided Archie goes with us, and stays. This idiotic farce—”

A dick I didn’t know entered the room, advanced at a nod from Cramer and reported: “Mrs. Chack is here
and wants to talk. Miss Leeds is with her. Give her to Lieutenant Rowcliff?”

“No,” Cramer said, after a glance at the clock, “bring them in here.”

T
hose two females had been something out of the ordinary when I saw them separately on my first trip to Barnum Street, but marching in that office together they were really something. As far as size and weight went, Miss Leeds could easily have tucked Mrs. Chack under her arm and carried her off, but the expression in Mrs. Chack’s black eyes made it seem likely that such things as size and weight would be minor considerations, and age too, if anybody tried to start anything. She had to take two steps to Miss Leeds’s one, but she was in front. They were both dressed to sit in a buggy and watch a parade of soldiers returning from the Spanish-American war. When Purley had got them into chairs, Cramer asked, “You ladies have something to say?”