And Be a Villain (14 page)

As was to be expected, Tully Strong wasn’t the only one who had the notion that Wolfe had committed treason by giving their fatal secret to the cops. They all let us know it, too, either by phone or in person. Nat Traub’s attitude was specially bitter, probably because of the item that had been volunteered by Bill Meadows, that Traub had served the bottle and glass to Orchard. Cramer’s crew must have really liked that one, and I could imagine the different keys they used playing it for Traub to hear. One thing I preferred not to imagine was what we would have got from Mr. Walter B. Anderson, the Hi-Spot president, and Fred Owen, the director of public relations, if anyone had told them the full extent of Wolfe’s treachery. Apparently they were still ignorant about the truth and horrible reason why one of the bottles had contained coffee instead of The Drink You Dream Of.

Another caller, this one Monday afternoon, was the formula hound, Professor Savarese. He too came to the office straight from a long conference with the cops, and he too was good and mad, but for a different reason. The cops had no longer been interested in his association with Cyril Orchard, or in anything about Orchard at all, and he wanted to know why. They had refused to tell him. They had reviewed his whole life, from birth to date, all over again, but with an entirely different approach. It was plain that what they were after now was a link between him and Miss Fraser. Why? What new factor had entered? The intrusion of a hitherto unknown and unsuspected factor would raise hell with his calculation of probabilities, but if there was one he had to have it, and quick. This was the first good chance he had ever had to test his formulas on the most dramatic of all problems, a murder case, from the inside, and he wasn’t going to tolerate any blank spaces without a fight.

What was the new factor? Why was it now a vital question whether he had had any previous association, direct or indirect, with Miss Fraser?

Up to a point Wolfe listened to him without coming to a boil, but he finally got annoyed enough to call on me again to do some more ushering. I obeyed in a halfhearted way. For one thing, Wolfe was passing up another chance to do a dime’s worth of work himself, with Savarese right there and more than ready to talk, and for another, I was resisting a temptation. The question had popped into my head, how would this figure wizard go about getting Miss Fraser’s indigestion into a mathematical equation? It might not be instructive to get him to answer it, but at least it would pass the time, and it would help as much in solving the case as anything Wolfe was doing. But, not wanting to get us any more deeply involved in treachery than we already were, I skipped it.

I ushered him out.

Anyhow, that was only Monday. By the time four more days had passed and another Friday arrived, finishing a full week since we had supplied Cramer with a fact, I was a promising prospect for a strait jacket. That evening, as I returned to the office with Wolfe after an unusually good dinner which I had not enjoyed, the outlook for the next three or four hours revolted me. As he got himself adjusted comfortably in his chair and reached for his book, I announced:

“I’m going to my club.”

He nodded, and got his book open.

“You do not even,” I said cuttingly, “ask me which club, though you know damn well I don’t belong to any. I am thoroughly fed up with sitting here day after day and night after night, waiting for the moment when the idea will somehow seep into you that a detective is supposed to detect. You are simply too goddam lazy to live. You think you’re a genius. Say you are. If in order to be a genius myself I had to be as self-satisfied, as overweight, and as inert as you are, I like me better this way.”

Apparently he was reading.

“This,” I said, “is the climax I’ve been leading up to for a week—or rather, that you’ve been leading me up to. Sure, I know your alibi, and I’m good and sick of it—that there is nothing we can do that the cops aren’t already doing. Of all the sausage.” I kept my voice dry, factual, and cultured. “If this case is too much for you why don’t you try another one? The papers are full of them. How about the gang that stole a truckload of cheese yesterday right here on Eleventh Avenue? How about the fifth-grade boy that hit his teacher in the eye with a jelly bean? Page fifty-eight in the
Times
. Or, if everything but murder is beneath you, what’s wrong with the political and economic fortuneteller, a lady named Beula Poole, who got shot in the back of her head last evening? Page one of any paper. You could probably sew that one up before bedtime.”

He turned over a page.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “is Saturday. I shall draw my pay as usual. I’m going to a fight at the Garden. Talk about contrasts—you in that chair and a couple of good middleweights in a ring.”

I blew.

But I didn’t go to the Garden. My first stop was the corner drugstore, where I went to a phone booth and called Lon Cohen of the
Gazette
. He was in, and about through, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t buy him eight or ten drinks, provided he could have a two-inch steak for a chaser.

So an hour later Lon and I were at a corner table at Pietro’s. He had done well with the drinks and had made a good start on the steak. I was having highballs, to be sociable, and was on my third, along with my second pound of peanuts. I hadn’t realized how much I had short-changed myself on dinner, sitting opposite Wolfe, until I got into the spirit of it with the peanuts.

We had discussed the state of things from politics to prizefights, by no means excluding murder. Lon had had his glass filled often enough, and had enough of the steak in him, to have reached a state of mind where he might reasonably be expected to be open to suggestion. So I made an approach by telling him, deadpan, that in my opinion the papers were riding the cops too hard on the Orchard case.

He leered at me. “For God’s sake, has Cramer threatened to take your license or something?”

“No, honest,” I insisted, reaching for peanuts, “this one is really tough and you know it. They’re doing as well as they can with what they’ve got. Besides that, it’s so damn commonplace. Every paper always does it—after a week start crabbing and after two weeks start screaming. It’s got so everybody always expects it and nobody ever reads it. You know what I’d do if I ran a newspaper? I’d start running stuff that people would read.”

“Jesus!” Lon gawked at me. “What an idea! Give me a column on it. Who would teach ‘em to read?”

“A column,” I said, “would only get me started. I need at least a page. But in this particular case, where it’s at now, it’s a question of an editorial. This is Friday night. For Sunday you ought to have an editorial on the Orchard case. It’s still hot and the public still loves it. But—”

“I’m no editor, I’m a news man.”

“I know, I’m just talking. Five will get you ten that your sheet will have an editorial on the Orchard case Sunday, and what will it say? It will be called
OUR PUBLIC GUARDIANS
, and it will be the same old crap, and not one in a thousand will read beyond the first line. Phooey. If it was me I would call it
TOO OLD OR TOO FAT
, and I wouldn’t mention the cops once. Nor would I mention Nero Wolfe, not by name. I would refer to the blaze of publicity with which a certain celebrated private investigator entered the Orchard case, and to the expectations it aroused. That his record seemed to justify it. That we see now how goofy it was, because in ten days he hasn’t taken a trick. That the reason may be that he is getting too old, or too fat, or merely that he hasn’t got what it takes when a case is really tough, but no matter what the reason is, this shows us that for our protection from vicious criminals we must rely on our efficient and well-trained police force, and not on any so-called brilliant geniuses. I said I wouldn’t mention the cops, but I think I’d better, right at the last. I could add a sentence that while they may have got stuck in the mud on the Orchard case, they are the brave men who keep the structure of our society from you know.”

Lon, having swallowed a hunk of steak, would have spoken, but I stopped him:

“They would read that, don’t think they wouldn’t. I know you’re not an editor, but you’re the best man they’ve got and you’re allowed to talk to editors, aren’t you? I would love to see an editorial like that tried, just as an experiment. So much so that if a paper ran it I would want to show my appreciation the first opportunity I get, by stretching a point a hell of a ways to give it first crack at some interesting little item.”

Lon had his eyebrows up. “If you don’t want to bore me, turn it the other side up so the interesting little item will be on top.”

“Nuts. Do you want to talk about it or not?”

“Sure, I’ll talk about anything.”

I signaled the waiter for refills.

I
WOULD GIVE ANYTHING in the world, anyway up to four bits, to know whether Wolfe saw or read that editorial before I showed it to him late Sunday afternoon. I think he did. He always glances over the editorials in three papers, of which the
Gazette
is one, and if his eye caught it at all he must have read it. It was entitled
THE FALSE ALARM
, and it carried out the idea I had given Lon to a T.

I knew of course that Wolfe wouldn’t do any spluttering, and I should have realized that he probably wouldn’t make any sign or offer any comment. But I didn’t, and therefore by late afternoon I was in a hole. If he hadn’t read it I had to see that he did, and that was risky. It had to be done right or he would smell an elephant. So I thought it over: what would be the natural thing? How would I naturally do it if I suddenly ran across it?

What I did do was turn in my chair to grin at him and ask casually:

“Did you see this editorial in the
Gazette
called
THE FALSE ALARM
?”

He grunted. “What’s it about?”

“You’d better read it.” I got up, crossed over, and put it on his desk. “A funny thing, it gave me the feeling I had written it myself. It’s the only editorial I’ve seen in weeks that I completely agree with.”

He picked it up. I sat down facing him, but he held the paper so that it cut off my view. He isn’t a fast reader, and he held the pose long enough to read it through twice, but that’s exactly what he would have done if he already knew it by heart and wanted me to think otherwise.

“Bah!” The paper was lowered. “Some little scrivener who doubtless has ulcers and is on a diet.”

“Yeah, I guess so. The rat. The contemptible louse. If only he knew how you’ve been sweating and stewing, going without sleep—”

“Archie. Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hoped to God I was being natural.

That was all for then, but I was not licked. I had never supposed that he would tear his hair or pace up and down. A little later an old friend of his, Marko Vukcic, dropped in for a Sunday evening snack—five kinds of cheese, guava jelly, freshly roasted chestnuts, and almond tarts. I was anxious to see if he would show the editorial to Marko, which would have been a bad sign. He didn’t. After Marko had left, to return to Rusterman’s Restaurant, which was the best in New York because he managed it, Wolfe settled down with his book again, but hadn’t turned more than ten pages before he dogeared and closed it and tossed it to a far corner of his desk. He then got up, crossed the room to the big globe, and stood and studied geography. That didn’t seem to satisfy him any better than the book, so he went and turned on the radio. After dialing to eight different stations, he muttered to himself, stalked back to his chair behind his desk, and sat and scowled. I took all this in only from a corner of one eye, since I was buried so deep in a magazine that I didn’t even know he was in the room.

He spoke. “Archie.”

“Yes, sir?”

“It has been nine days.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Since that tour de force of yours. Getting that Miss Shepherd here.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was being tactful. What he meant was that it had been nine days since he had passed a miracle by uncovering the tape on the bottle and Miss Fraser’s indigestion, but he figured that if he tossed me a bone I would be less likely either to snarl or to gloat. He went on:

“It was not then flighty to assume that a good routine job was all that was needed. But the events of those nine days have not supported that assumption.”

“No, sir.”

“Get Mr. Cramer.”

“As soon as I finish this paragraph.”

I allowed a reasonable number of seconds to go by, but I admit I wasn’t seeing a word. Then, getting on the phone, I was prepared to settle for less than the inspector himself, since it was Sunday evening, and hoped that Wolfe was too, but it wasn’t necessary. Cramer was there, and Wolfe got on and invited him to pay us a call.

“I’m busy.” Cramer sounded harassed. “Why, have you got something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I’ve talked with you. After we’ve talked your busyness may be more productive than it has been.”

“The hell you say. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

That didn’t elate me at all. I hadn’t cooked up a neat little scheme, and devoted a whole evening to it, and bought Lon Cohen twenty bucks’ worth of liquids and solids, just to prod Wolfe into getting Cramer in to talk things over. As for his saying he had something, that was a plain lie. All he had was a muleheaded determination not to let his ease and comfort be interfered with.

So when Cramer arrived I didn’t bubble over. Neither did he, for that matter. He marched into the office, nodded a greeting, dropped into the red leather chair, and growled:

“I wish to God you’d forget you’re eccentric and start moving around more. Busy as I am, here I am. What is it?”

“My remark on the phone,” Wolfe said placidly, “may have been blunt, but it was justified.”

“What remark?”

“That your busyness could be more productive. Have you made any progress?”

“No.”

“You’re no further along than you were a week ago?”

“Further along to the day I retire, yes. Otherwise no.”

“Then I’d like to ask some questions about that woman, Beula Poole, who was found dead in her office Friday morning. The papers say that you say it was murder. Was it?”