Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (26 page)

Wolfe did speak to me once, shortly after lunch; he asked me to bring him the letter from Phelps enclosing the material from Dykes, and the envelope it had come in. I did so, and, after he had inspected them with a magnifying glass, he kept them. And I took one step on my own. Wellman was still in town, and I phoned and invited him to attend because I thought he had certainly paid for a ticket. I didn’t phone Mrs. Abrams because I knew she wouldn’t care for it no matter what happened.

At dinnertime I took another step. As Wolfe sat behind his desk staring at nothing, pulling at his lip with a thumb and forefinger, I saw that he was in no shape to entertain a guest and went and told Fritz that Saul and I would eat in the kitchen with him. Then I returned to the office and announced it to Wolfe. He put his eyes on me without seeing me, let out a low growl, and muttered, “All right, but it won’t help any.”

“Can I do anything?” I asked.

“Yes. Shut up.”

I had spoken not more than twenty words to him since Cramer had left, seven hours ago.

At ten after nine they had all arrived, but Wolfe was still in the dining room, with the door closed. Leaving the front door and the hall to Saul, I had stayed in the office to supervise the seating. I kept the red leather chair for Cramer and put the lawyers in the front row, including O’Malley. Wellman was off in the corner near the globe. Sergeant Purley Stebbins was against the wall, back of Cramer. For Saul Panzer I had put a chair at the end of my desk. My intention had been to group the ten females at the rear of their employers, and I had so placed the chairs, but they had ideas of their own, at least some of them. For about half a minute I stood talking to Cramer with my back to them, and, when I turned, four of them had moved to the couch. From my chair at my desk I couldn’t take in the couch without swiveling or twisting my neck ninety degrees, but I decided to skip it. If Wolfe wanted his audience more compact he could say so.

At twelve after nine I sent Saul to tell Wolfe they were all present, and a moment later Wolfe entered. He went straight to his desk, with no halt for a greeting, not even for Cramer, and sat. The murmurs and mutterings stopped. Wolfe got himself settled, taking his time, moved his head slowly over the arc from left to right, and back again. Then his eyes darted left, and he spoke.

“Do you want to say anything, Mr. Cramer?”

Cramer cleared his throat. “No. They understand that there’s nothing official about this and I’m here as an observer.”

“You told us to come,” Louis Kustin said aggressively.

“I invited you. You all know the way out.”

“May I make a statement?” O’Malley asked.

“What about?”

“I want to congratulate Mr. Wolfe, and thank him. He has found the answer to a question I’ve been trying to find for a year and couldn’t. We’re all in his debt and we ought to say so.”

“We are not!” It was Briggs, blinking furiously. “I would like to make a statement! In my opinion, what Wolfe has done is actionable. I say this after full consideration. I came here because I am convinced—”

“Shut up!” Wolfe roared.

They gazed at him, astonished.

He gazed back, moving his head to include the lot. “I do not intend,” he said coldly, “to let you degrade this to gibberish. We are concerned with death and a dealer of death. I do this work to earn a living, but I am conscious of its dignities and obligations. I hope and believe that in the next two or three hours, here together, we are going to learn the truth about the deaths of four people, and, in doing so, get a start on preparations for the death of one of you. That’s what we’re here for. I can’t do it alone, but I’ll have to guide it.”

He closed his eyes, tight, and opened them again. “All of you knew Mr. Corrigan, who died Friday evening. You know of a document, ostensibly written by him, in which he confessed that he had betrayed his former partner and had murdered three people.” He opened a drawer and took out papers. “This is a copy of that confession. It was shrewdly conceived and brilliantly executed, but it wasn’t good enough for me. It has one fatal defect. The writer couldn’t possibly avoid including it, because in that detail the facts were known to others, and the incident was an essential part of the story. When Corrigan—”

“Are you impeaching it?” Kustin demanded. “Are you saying that Corrigan didn’t write it?”

“I am.”

There were noises, including audible words. Wolfe ignored them, waited, and continued.

“When Corrigan was in California his every move was known and reported, so this confession had to accept that record. But that is the fatal defect. According to this confession, Corrigan knew what was in the manuscript written by Leonard Dykes—he had read it through twice. But in Los Angeles all his efforts were focused on one objective: to get a look at the manuscript. That is emphasized by the fact that he left Mrs. Potter’s house, with Finch there, to hurry to Finch’s hotel room to search for the manuscript. If he already knew what was in it that was senseless. What good would it do him to find it? If you say that he wanted to destroy it, that too would have been senseless, since Finch had read it. According to this confession, he had already killed two women for the sole reason that they had read the manuscript. If he found and destroyed Finch’s copy, Finch would be on guard and after him.”

Wolfe shook his head. “No. Corrigan’s objective, plainly and unmistakably, was to see the manuscript. He wanted to know what it contained. Mr. Goodwin was there and saw him and heard him. Do you agree, Archie?”

I nodded. “I do.”

“Then he had never seen the manuscript, certainly he hadn’t read it, and this confession is spurious. There is a corroborative point.” Wolfe tapped the paper. “It says here that Dykes told him that all copies of the manuscript had been destroyed, there were no others, and that he believed it. Indeed he must have believed it fully, for otherwise he would hardly have undertaken the murders of the two women; but certainly, when the letter came from Mrs. Potter, saying that a literary
agent had a copy of the manuscript, he would have suspected a snare and would have proceeded quite differently.”

Wolfe turned a palm up. “Well?”

“I would have understood this this morning,” Cramer rasped.

“Are you challenging the whole confession?” Phelps inquired.

“Are you saying,” O’Malley demanded, “that Corrigan didn’t squeal on me?”

“No. To both of you. But a purported confession shown to be clearly false in so important a detail loses all claim to validity, both as to content and as to authorship. It can be credited only in those parts that are corroborated. For instance, Mr. Cramer has verified it that the anonymous letter to the court was typed on a machine at the Travelers Club, that Corrigan had access to it and used it, and that none of the others did. Therefore I accept that detail as established, and also the account of Corrigan’s visit to California, but nothing else, and certainly not the authorship. Of course Corrigan didn’t write it.”

“Why not?” It came from two of the women in unison. It was the first cheep out of them.

“If he didn’t know what was in the manuscript, and he didn’t, why did he kill people? There is no discernible reason. If he didn’t kill people, why does he confess to it? No, he didn’t write this.”

“Did he kill himself?” Mrs. Adams blurted. She looked ten years older, and she was already old enough.

“I shouldn’t think so. If he did, it was he who got me on the phone to hear the shot and told me he had mailed me a letter, meaning this—”

“What’s that?” Cramer demanded. “He said he had mailed you a letter?”

“Yes. I left that out of my report to you because I don’t want my mail intercepted. He said that. Mr. Goodwin heard it. Archie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And since he didn’t write this thing he would hardly tell me he had mailed it to me. No, madam, he didn’t kill himself. We might as well deal with that next—unless someone wants to maintain that Corrigan wrote the confession?”

No one did.

Wolfe took them in. “For this a new character is required, and we’ll call him X. This will have to be a hodgepodge party, partly what he must have done and partly what he could have done. Certainly he spent some hours yesterday between noon and ten in the evening at Corrigan’s apartment, composing and typing this document. Certainly Corrigan was there too. He had been hit on the head, and was either unconscious from the blow or had been tied and gagged. I prefer it that he was conscious, knowing something of X as I do, and that X, as he typed the confession—which may have been composed beforehand and merely had to be copied—read it aloud to Corrigan. He wore gloves, and, when he was through, he pressed Corrigan’s fingertips to the paper and envelope here and there, certainly on the postage stamp.

“I don’t know whether his schedule was left to exigency or was designed, but I would guess the latter, for X is fond of alibis, and we’ll probably find that he has one ready for last evening from nine-thirty to ten-thirty. Anyway, at ten o’clock he turned on the radio, if he hadn’t already done so, hit Corrigan on the head again, at the same spot as before, with something heavy and hard enough to stun but not kill, put him on the floor near the telephone, and dialed my number. While
talking to me, making the voice unrecognizable with huskiness and agitation, he pressed the muzzle of Corrigan’s own revolver against his head and, at the proper moment, pulled the trigger and dropped the gun and the phone on the floor. He may also have fallen heavily to the floor himself; I think he would have. If he did he didn’t stay there long. I said he was wearing gloves. He made Corrigan’s dead hand grip the gun, put the gun on the floor, and left, perhaps twenty seconds after the shot had been fired. I haven’t even inquired if the door had to be locked from the outside with a key; if it did, X had had ample opportunity to procure one. He dropped the letter to me, this confession, into the nearest mailbox. I lose him at the mailbox. We’ll hear of his next move when we are confronted with his alibi.”

Wolfe’s eyes moved. “I invite comment.”

Three lawyers spoke at once. Cramer outspoke them. “How much of it can you prove?”

“Nothing. Not a word.”

“Then what does it get us?”

“It clears away the rubbish. The rubbish was the assumption that Corrigan wrote that confession and killed himself. I have shown that one is false and the other is not invulnerable. Depriving you of a suicide was simple. Giving you a murder, and a murderer, is harder. May I proceed?”

“If you’ve got something better than guesses, yes.”

“I’ve got a question,” Kustin put in. “Is this a buildup for charging someone in this room with murder?”

“Yes.”

“Then I want to speak with you privately.”

“The devil you do.” Wolfe was indignant. To control his emotions, he closed his eyes and waggled his head. Then he told Kustin dryly, “So you’re beginning to see something, now that I’ve cleared away some of the
rubbish? And you’d like to point at it? I’ll do the pointing, Mr. Kustin.” His eyes moved. “Before I go on to particulars, another comment. At my first reading of this”—he tapped the paper—“I saw the flaw that told me that Corrigan hadn’t written it: his performance in Los Angeles made it obvious that he had never read the manuscript. But it could have been written by you, Mr. Kustin, or you, Mr. Phelps, or you, Mr. Briggs. It could have been any one of you, instead of Corrigan, who had done the deeds which this document attributes to Corrigan. That was why it was of first importance to learn if any of you had had access to the typewriter at the Travelers Club. Learning that you hadn’t, and therefore had not exposed O’Malley, it was clear that if one of you had committed three murders it must have been for some other motive than concealment of a betrayal of your former partner.”

“Get down to it,” Cramer growled.

Wolfe ignored him. He looked over the heads of the lawyers and inquired abruptly, “Is one of you ladies named Dondero?”

I twisted my neck. Sue was one of the four on the couch. Startled, she stared at him. “Yes, I am.” She was a little flushed and pretty as a picture.

“You are Mr. Phelps’s secretary?”

“Yes.”

“A week ago Saturday, nine days ago, Mr. Phelps dictated a brief letter to me, to be sent by messenger. There were enclosures for it—items of material written by Leonard Dykes, from the files, including a letter of resignation he wrote last July. Do you remember that incident?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“I understand that you have recently been questioned about it by the police; that you have been shown
the Dykes letter and your attention has been called to a certain notation, ‘Ps one-forty-six, three,’ in a corner of it, in pencil, in a handwriting resembling Corrigan’s; and that you state flatly that the notation was not on the letter that Saturday morning when it was sent to me. Is that correct?”

“Yes, it is,” Sue said firmly.

“Are you positive the notation was not on the letter at the time you enclosed it in the envelope with the other material?”

“I am.”

“You’re a positive person, aren’t you, Miss Dondero?”

“Well—I know what I saw and what I didn’t see.”

“Admirable and remarkable.” Wolfe was terse but not hostile. “Few of us can say that and support it. How many typewriters did you use that morning?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I used one. Mine.”

“Mr. Phelps dictated the letter to me, and you typed it on your machine. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And you addressed an envelope to me on the same machine?”

“Yes.”

“How positive are you of that?”

“I’m absolutely positive.”

“How much chance is there that for some trivial reason, no matter what, you used a different machine for addressing the envelope?”

“Absolutely none. I was there at my desk, and I did the envelope right after I typed the letter. I always do.”

“Then we have a problem.” Wolfe opened a drawer of his desk and took out a sheet of paper and an envelope, handling the envelope gingerly, holding it by a corner. “This is the letter and the envelope; Mr. Goodwin will attest that and so will I. The variation is apparent
to the naked eye, and I have examined them with a glass. They were not typed on the same machine.”