Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24 (18 page)

Since Kinney would soon be with us, and since Ferrone’s locker had first call, I thought I might as well wait there for him. However, with our client sitting there glaring at me, it would be well to display some interest and energy, so I moved. I took in the room. I went to filing cabinets and looked them over. I opened a door, saw a hall leading to stairs down, backed up, and shut the door. I took in the room again, crossed to another door in the opposite wall, and opened that.

Since I hadn’t the faintest expectation of finding anything pertinent beyond that door, let alone a corpse, I must have made some sound or movement in my surprise, but if so it wasn’t noticed. I stood for three seconds, then slipped inside and squatted long enough to get an answer to the main question.

I arose, backed out, and addressed Soffer. “Take a look here, Doc. I think he’s dead. If so, watch it.”

He made a noise, stared, and moved. I marched out, into the clubroom, crossed to Wolfe, and spoke. “Found something. I opened a door to a closet and found Nick Ferrone, in uniform, on the floor, with a baseball bat alongside him and his head smashed in. He’s dead, according to me, but Doc Soffer is checking, if you want an expert opinion. Found on contiguous premises.”

Wolfe grunted. He was seated on the leather couch. “Mr. Ferrone?” he asked peevishly.

“Yes, sir.”

“You found him?”

“Yes, sir.”

His shoulders went up a quarter of an inch and down again. “Call the police.”

“Yes, sir. A question. Any minute the ballplayers will be coming in here. The cops won’t like it if they mess around. The cops will think we should have prevented it. Do we care? It probably won’t be Cramer. Do we—”

A bellow, Chisholm’s, came through. “Wolfe! Come in here! Come here!”

He got up, growling. “We owe the police nothing, certainly
not deference. But we have a client—I think we have. I’ll see. Meanwhile you stay here. Everyone entering this room remains, under surveillance.” He headed for Kinney’s office, whence more bellows were coming.

Another door opened, the one in the west wall, and Nat Neill, the Giants’ center fielder, entered, his jaw set and his eyes blazing. Following him came Lew Baker, the catcher. Behind them, on the stairs, was a clatter of footsteps.

The game was over. The Giants had lost.

Another thing I don’t take along to ball games is a gun, but that day there was a moment when I wished I had. After any ordinary game, even a lost one, I suppose the Giants might have been merely irritated if, on getting to the clubhouse, they found a stranger there, backed up against the door to the locker room, who told them firmly that on account of a state of emergency they could not pass. But that day they were ready to plug one another, so why not a stranger?

The first dozen were ganging me, about to start using hands, when Art Kinney, the manager, appeared, strode across, and wanted to know what. I told him to go to his office and ask Chisholm. The gang let up then, to consider—all but Bill Moyse, the second-string catcher, six feet two, and over two hundred pounds. He had come late, after Kinney. He breasted up to me, making fists, and announced that his wife was waiting for him and he was going in to change, and either I would move or he would move me. One of his teammates called from the rear, “Show him her picture, Bill! That’ll move him!”

Moyse whirled and leaped. Hands grabbed for him, but he kept going. Whether he reached his target and actually landed or not I can’t say, because, first, I was staying put and it was quite a mixup, and second, I was seeing something that wasn’t present. The mention of Moyse’s wife and her picture had done it. What I was seeing was a picture of a girl that had appeared in the Gazette a couple of months back, with a caption tagging her as the showgirl
bride of William Moyse, the ballplayer; and it was the girl I had been glomming in a nearby box when the summons had come from Chisholm. No question about it. That was interesting, and possibly even relevant.

Meanwhile Moyse was doing me a service by making a diversion. Three or four had hold of him, and others were gathered around his target, Con Prentiss, the shortstop. They were all jabbering. Prentiss, who was wiry and tough, was showing his teeth in a grin—not an attractive one. Moyse suddenly whirled again and was back at me, and this time, obviously, he was coming through. It was useless to start slugging that mountain of muscle, and I was set to try locking him, hoping the others would admire the performance, when a loud voice came from the doorway to the manager’s office.

“Here! Attention, all of you!”

It was Art Kinney. His face was absolutely white, and his neck cords were twitching, as they all turned and were silent.

“I’m full up,” he said, half hysterical. “This is Nero Wolfe, the detective. He’ll tell you something.”

Muttering went around as Kinney stepped aside and Wolfe took his place in the doorway. Wolfe’s eyes darted from left to right, and he spoke.

“You deserve an explanation, gentlemen, but the police are coming and there’s not much time. You have just lost a ball game by knavery. Four of you were drugged, in a drink called Beebright, and could not perform properly. You will learn—”

They drowned him out. It was an explosion of astonished rage.

“Gentlemen!” Wolfe thundered. “Will you listen?” He glowered. “You will learn more of that later, but there is something more urgent. The dead body of one of your colleagues, Mr. Nick Ferrone, has been discovered on these premises. He was murdered. It is supposed, naturally, that the two events, the drugging and the murder, are connected. In any case, if you do not know what a murder investigation means to everyone within reach, innocent or not, you are about to learn. For the moment you will not leave this room. When the police arrive they will tell you—”

Heavy feet were clomping in the hall. A door swung open, and a uniformed cop stepped in, followed by three others. The one in front, a sergeant, halted and demanded indignantly, “What is all this? Where is it?”

The Giants looked at the cops and hadn’t a word to say.

Inspector Hennessy of uptown Homicide was tall and straight, silver-haired, with a bony face and quick-moving gray eyes. Some two years ago he had told Nero Wolfe that if he ever again tried poking into a murder in his territory he would be escorted to the Harlem River and dunked. But when, at nine o’clock that evening, Hennessy breezed through the clubroom, passing in front of the leather couch where Wolfe was seated with a ham sandwich in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, he didn’t even toss a glance. He was much too busy.

The police commissioner was in Manager Kinney’s office with Chisholm and others. The district attorney and an assistant were in the locker room, along with an assortment of Homicide men, giving various athletes their third or fourth quiz. There were still a couple of dozen city employees in the clubhouse, though the scientists—the photographers and fingerprint hounds—had all finished and gone.

I had standing as the finder of the corpse, but also I was a part of Wolfe. Technically Wolfe was not poking into a murder; he had been hired by Chisholm, before the corpse had been found, to find out who had doped the ballplayers. However, in gathering facts for relay to Wolfe, I had not discriminated. I saw Nick Ferrone’s locker opened and the contents examined, with nothing startling disclosed. While I was in Kinney’s office watching a basket squad load the corpse and carry it out, I heard a lieutenant on the phone giving instructions for a roundup of gamblers throughout the metropolitan area. A little later I picked up a bunch of signed statements from a table and sat down and read them through, without anyone’s noticing. By that time the commissioner and the DA had arrived, and they had eight or nine quiz posts going in the various
rooms, and Hennessy was doing his damnedest to keep it organized.

I collected all I could for Wolfe. The bat that had been used to crack Ferrone’s skull was no stock item, but a valued trophy. With it, years back, a famous Giant had belted a grand slam home run that had won a pennant, and the bat had been displayed on a wall rack in the manager’s office. The murderer could have simply grabbed it from the rack. It had no usable fingerprints. Of eight bottles of Beebright left in the cooler, the two in front had been doped, and the other six had not. No other drinks had been tampered with. Everyone had known of the liking of those four—Baker, Prentiss, Neill, and Eston—for Beebright, and their habit of drinking a bottle of it before a game. No good prints. No sign anywhere of any container of tablets of sodium phenobarbital. And a thousand other negatives—for instance, the clubhouse boy, Jimmie Burr. The custom was that, when he wasn’t around, the players would put chits in a little box for what they took, and he hadn’t been around. For that game someone had got him a box seat, and he had beat it to the grandstand while most of the players were in the locker room changing. A sergeant jumped on it: who had got him out of the way by providing a ticket for a box seat? But it had been Art Kinney himself, the manager.

Around eight o’clock they turned a big batch loose. Twenty Giants, including coaches and the bat boy, were allowed to go to the locker room to change, under surveillance, and then let out, with instructions to keep available. They were not in the picture as it then looked. It was established that Ferrone had arrived at the clubhouse shortly after twelve o’clock and had got into uniform; a dozen of them had been in the locker room when he had. He had been present during a pre-game session with Kinney in the clubroom, and no one remembered seeing him leave afterward. After they had trooped out and down the stairs, emerged onto the field, and crossed it, Ferrone’s absence was not noticed until they had been in the dugout some minutes. As the cops figured it, he couldn’t have been slammed with a baseball bat in Kinney’s office, only a few yards away, while the team was in the clubroom, and
therefore all who had unquestionably left for the field with the gang, and had stayed there, were in the clear until further notice. With them went Pierre Mondor, who had wanted to see a ball game and had picked a beaut.

As I said, when Inspector Hennessy breezed through the clubroom at nine o’clock, coming from the locker room and headed for Kinney’s office, he didn’t even toss a glance at the leather couch where Wolfe and I were seated. He disappeared. But soon he was back again, speaking from the doorway.

“Come in here, will you, Wolfe?”

“No,” Wolfe said flatly. “I’m eating.”

“The commissioner wants you.”

“Is he eating?” Waiting for no reply, Wolfe turned his head and bellowed, “Mr. Skinner! I’m dining!”

It wasn’t very polite, I thought, to be sarcastic about the sandwiches and beer. Chisholm had provided. Hennessy started a remark which indicated that he agreed with me, but it was interrupted by the appearance of Commissioner Skinner at his elbow. Hennessy stepped in and aside, and Skinner entered, followed by Chisholm, and approached the couch. He spoke. “Dining?”

“Yes, sir.” Wolfe reached for another sandwich. “As you see.”

“Not your accustomed style.”

Wolfe grunted and bit into the sandwich.

Skinner kept it friendly. “I’ve just learned that four men who were told they could go are still here—Baker, Prentiss, Neill, and Eston. When Inspector Hennessy asked them why, they told him that Mr. Chisholm asked them to stay. Mr. Chisholm says that he did so at your suggestion. He understood that you want to speak with them after our men have all left. Is that correct?”

Wolfe nodded. “I made it quite plain, I thought.”

“M-m-m-m.” The commissioner regarded him. “You see, I know you fairly well. You wouldn’t dream of hanging on here half the night to speak with those men merely as a routine step in an investigation. And besides, at Mr. Chisholm’s request you have already been permitted to speak with them, and with several others. You’re cooking something. Those are the four men who were drugged, but
they left the clubhouse for the field with the rest of the team, so, the way we figure it, none of them killed Ferrone. How do you figure it?”

Wolfe swallowed the last of a well-chewed bite. “I don’t.”

Hennessy growled and set his jaw. Skinner said, “I don’t believe it,” with his tone friendlier than his words. “You’re cooking something,” he insisted. “What’s the play with those four men?”

Wolfe shook his head. “No, sir.”

Hennessy took a step forward. “Look,” he said, “this is my territory. My name’s Hennessy. You don’t turn
this
murder into a parlor game.”

Wolfe raised brows at him. “Murder? I am not concerned with murder. Mr. Chisholm hired me to investigate the drugging of his employees. The two events may of course be connected, but the murder is your job. And they were not necessarily connected. I understand that a man named Moyse is in there now with the district attorney”—Wolfe aimed a thumb at the door to the locker room—“because it has been learned that he has twice within a month assaulted Mr. Ferrone physically, through resentment at Ferrone’s interest in his wife, injudiciously displayed. And that Moyse did not leave the clubhouse with the others, and arrived at the dugout three or four minutes later, just before Ferrone’s absence was noticed. For your murder, Mr. Hennessy, that should be a help; but it doesn’t get me on with my job, disclosure of the culprit who drugged the drinks. Have you charged Mr. Moyse?”

“No.” Hennessy was curt. “So you’re not interested in the murder?”

“Not as a job, since it’s not mine. But if you want a comment from a specialist, you’re closing your lines too soon.”

“We haven’t closed any lines.”

“You let twenty men walk out of here. You are keeping Moyse for the reasons given. You are keeping Doctor Soffer, I suppose, because when Ferrone was missed in the dugout Soffer came here to look for him, and he could have found him here alive and killed him. You are keeping Mr. Durkin, I suppose again, because he too could have been here alone with Ferrone. He says he left the clubhouse shortly before the team did and went to his seat in
the grandstand, and stayed there. Has he been either contradicted or corroborated?”