Curtains For Three (17 page)

“I’m in the office. You’d better come down. That prospective client I mentioned is here on the floor strangled. I think she’s done, but I’ve sent for Vollmer.”

“Is this flummery?” he roared.

“No, sir. Come down and look at her and then ask me.”

The connection went. He had slammed it down. I got a sheet of thin tissue paper from a drawer, tore off a corner, and placed it carefully over Cynthia’s mouth and nostrils.

Voices had been sounding from the hall. Now one of them entered the office. Its owner was the guest who had been in the cloakroom with Fritz when the screech came. He was a chunky, broad-shouldered guy with sharp, domineering dark eyes and arms like a gorilla’s. His voice was going strong as he started toward me from the door, but it stopped when he had come far enough to get a good look at the object on the floor.

“Oh, no.” he said huskily.

“Yes, sir,” I agreed.

“How did it happen?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who is it?”

“Don’t know.”

He made his eyes come away from it and up until they met mine, and I gave him an A for control. It really was a sight.

“The man at the door won’t let us leave,” he stated.

“No, sir. You can see why.”

“I certainly can.” His eyes stayed with me, however. “But we know nothing about it. My name is Carlisle, Homer N. Carlisle. I am the executive vice-president of the North American Foods Company. My wife was merely acting under impulse; she wanted to see the office of Nero Wolfe, and she opened the door and entered.

She’s sorry she did, and so am I. We have an appointment, and there’s no reason why we should be detained.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I told him, “but for one thing if for nothing else; your wife discovered the body. We’re stuck worse than you are, with a corpse here in our office. So I guess - Hello, Doc.”

Vollmer, entering and nodding at me on the fly, was panting a little as he set his black case on the floor and knelt beside it. His house was down the street and he had had only two hundred yards to trot, but he was taking on weight. As he opened the case and got out the stethoscope, Homer Carlisle stood and watched with his lips pressed tight, and I did likewise until I heard the sound of Wolfe’s elevator.

Crossing to the door and into the hall, I surveyed the terrain. Toward the front, Saul and Fritz were calming down the woman in the caracul coat, now Mrs.

Carlisle to me. Nero Wolfe and Mrs. Mimi Orwin were emerging from the elevator.

Four guests were coming down the stairs: Gene Orwin, Colonel Percy Brown, Bill McNab, and a middle - aged male with a mop of black hair. I stayed by the office door to block the quartet on the stairs.

As Wolfe headed for me, Mrs. Carlisle darted to him and grabbed his arm: “I only wanted to see your office! I want to go! I’m not -“

As she pulled at him and sputtered, I noted a detail: the caracul coat was unfastened, and the ends of a silk scarf, figured and gaily colored, were flying loose. Since at least half of the female guests had sported scarfs, I mention it only to be honest and admit that I had got touchy on that subject.

Wolfe, who had already been too close to too many women that day to suit him,

tried to jerk away, but she hung on. She was the big-boned, flat-chested,

athletic type, and it could have been quite a tussle, with him weighing twice as much as her and four times as big around, if Saul hadn’t rescued him by coming in between and prying her loose. That didn’t stop her tongue, but Wolfe ignored it and came on toward me: “Has Dr. Vollmer come?”

“Yes, sir.”

The executive vice - president emerged from the office, talking: “Mr. Wolfe, my name is Homer N. Carlisle and I insist -“

“Shut up,” Wolfe growled. On the sill of the door to the office, he faced the audience. “Flower lovers,” he said with bitter scorn. “You told me, Mr. McNab, a distinguished group of sincere and devoted gardeners. Pfui! … Saul!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put them all in the dining-room and keep them there. Let no one touch anything around this door, especially the knob … Archie, come with me.”

He wheeled and entered the office. Following, I used my foot to swing the door neatly shut, leaving no crack but not latching it. When I turned, Vollmer was standing, facing Wolfe’s scowl.

“Well?” Wolfe demanded.

“Dead,” Vollmer told him. “With asphyxiation from strangling.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know, but not more than an hour or two. Two hours at the outside,

probably less.”

Wolfe looked at the thing on the floor with no change in his scowl, and back at Doc. “Finger marks?”

“No. A constricting band of something with pressure below the hyoid bone. Not a stiff or narrow band; something soft, like a strip of cloth - say, a scarf.”

Wolfe switched to me: “You didn’t notify the police?”

“No, sir.” I glanced at Vollmer and back. “I need a word.”

“I suppose so.” He spoke to Doc: “If you will leave us for a moment'The front room?”

Vollmer hesitated, uncomfortable. “As a doctor called to a violent death I’d catch the devil. Of course, I could say -“

“Then go to a corner and cover your ears.”

He did so. He went to the farthest corner, the angle made by the partition of the bathroom, pressed his palms to his ears, and stood facing us. I addressed Wolfe with a lowered voice:

“I was here and she came in. She was either scared good or putting on a very fine act. Apparently, it wasn’t an act, and I now think I should have alerted Saul and Fritz, but it doesn’t matter what I now think. Last October a woman named Doris Hatten was killed, strangled, in her apartment. No one got elected.

Remember?”

“Yes.”

“She said she was a friend of Doris Hatten’s and was at her apartment that day,

and saw the man that did the strangling, and that he was here this afternoon.

She said he was aware that she had recognized him - that’s why she was scared -

and she wanted to get you to help by telling him that we were wise and he’d better lay off. No wonder I didn’t gulp it down. I realize that you dislike complications and therefore might want me to scratch this out, but at the end she touched a soft spot by saying that she had enjoyed my company, so I prefer to open up to the cops.”

“Then do so. Confound it!”

I went to the phone and started dialing WAtkins 9 - 8241. Doc Vollmer came out of his corner. Wolfe was pathetic. He moved around behind his desk and lowered himself into his own oversized custom-made number; but there smack in front of him was the object on the floor, so after a moment he made a face, got back onto his feet, grunted like an outraged boar, went across to the other side of the room, to the shelves, and inspected the backbones of books.

But even that pitiful diversion got interrupted. As I finished with my phone call and hung up, sudden sounds of commotion came from the hall. Dashing across,

getting fingernails on the edge of the door and pulling it open, I saw trouble.

A group was gathered in the open doorway of the dining-room, which was across the hall. Saul Panzer went bounding past me toward the front.

At the front door, Col. Percy Brown was stiff-arming Fritz Brenner with one hand and reaching for the doorknob with the other. Fritz, who is chef and housekeeper, is not supposed to double in acrobatics, but he did fine. Dropping to the floor, he grabbed the colonel’s ankles and jerked his feet out from under him.

Then I was there, and Saul, with his gun out; and there, with us, was the guest with the mop of black hair.

“You fool,” I told the colonel as he sat up. “If you’d got outdoors Saul would have winged you.”

“Guilt,” said the black-haired guest emphatically. “The compression got unbearable and he exploded. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Good for you.” I took his elbow and turned him. “Go back in and watch all of ‘em. With that wall mirror you can include yourself.”

“This is illegal,” stated Colonel Brown, who had scrambled to his feet. Saul herded them to the rear.

Fritz got hold of my sleeve: “Archie, I’ve got to ask Mr. Wolfe about dinner.”

“Nuts,” I said savagely. “By dinner-time this place will be more crowded than it was this afternoon.”

“But he has to eat; you know that.”

“Nuts,” I said. I patted him on the shoulder. “Excuse my manners, Fritz; I’m upset. I’ve just strangled a young woman.”

“Phooey,” he said scornfully.

“I might as well have,” I declared.

The doorbell rang. It was the first consignment of cops.

In my opinion, Inspector Cramer made a mistake. It is true that in a room where a murder has occurred the city scientists may shoot the works. And they do. But,

except in rare circumstances, the job shouldn’t take all week, and in the case of our office a couple of hours should have been ample. In fact, it was. By eight o’clock the scientists were through. But Cramer, like a sap, gave the order to seal it up until further notice, in Wolfe’s hearing. He knew that Wolfe spent at least three hundred evenings a year in there, and that was why he did it.

It was a mistake. If he hadn’t made it, Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as Wolfe saw it himself, and Cramer would have been saved a lot of trouble.

The two of them got the fact at the same time, from me. We were in the dining-room - this was shortly after the scientists had got busy in the office,

and the guests, under guard, had been shunted to the front room - and I was relating my conversation with Cynthia Brown. Whatever else my years as Wolfe’s assistant may have done for me or to me, they have practically turned me into a tape recorder. I gave them the real thing, word for word. When I finished,

Cramer had a slew of questions, but Wolfe not a one. Maybe he had already focused on the fact above referred to, but neither Cramer nor I had.

Cramer called a recess on the questions to take steps. He called men in and gave orders. Colonel Brown was to be photographed and fingerprinted, and headquarters records were to be checked for him and Cynthia. The file on the murder of Doris Hatten was to be brought to him at once. The lab reports were to be rushed. Saul Panzer and Fritz Brenner were to be brought in.

They came. Fritz stood like a soldier at attention, grim and grave. Saul, only five feet seven, with the sharpest eyes and one of the biggest noses I have ever seen, in his unpressed brown snit and his necktie crooked - he stood like Saul,

not slouching and not stiff. Of course, Cramer knew both of them.

“You and Fritz were in the hall all afternoon?”

Saul nodded. “The hall and the front room, yes.”

“Who did you see enter or leave the office?”

“I saw Archie go in about four o’clock - I was just coming out of the front room with someone’s hat and coat. I saw Mrs. Carlisle come out just after she screamed. In between those two I saw no one either enter or leave. We were busy most of the time, either in the hall or the front room.”

Cramer grunted. “How about you, Fritz?”

“I saw no one.” Fritz spoke louder than usual. “I would like to say something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think a great deal of all this disturbance is unnecessary. My duties here are of the household and not professional, but I cannot help hearing what reaches my ears. Many times Mr. Wolfe has found the answer to problems that were too much for you. This happened here in his own house, and I think it should be left entirely to him.”

I yooped, “Fritz, I didn’t know you had it in you!”

Cramer was goggling at him. “Wolfe told you to say that, huh?”

“Bah.” Wolfe was contemptuous. “It can’t be helped, Fritz. Have we plenty of ham and sturgeon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Later, probably. For the guests in the front room, but not the police… Are you through with them, Mr. Cramer?”

“No.” Cramer went back to Saul: “How’d you check the guests in?”

“I had a list of the members of the Manhattan Flower Club. They had to show their membership cards. I checked on the list those who came. If they brought a wife or husband, or any other guest, I took the names.”

“Then you have a record of everybody?”

“Yes.”

“About how many names?”

“Two hundred and nineteen.”

“This place wouldn’t hold that many.”

Saul nodded. “They came and went. There wasn’t more than a hundred or so at any one time.”

“That’s a help.” Cramer was getting more and more disgusted, and I didn’t blame him. “Goodwin says he was there at the door with you when that woman screamed and came running out of the office, but that you hadn’t seen her enter the office. Why not?”

“We had our backs turned. We were watching a man who had just left. Archie had asked him for his name and he had said that was ridiculous. If you want it, his name is Malcolm Vedder.”

“How do you know?”

“I had checked him in with the rest.”

Cramer stared. “Are you telling me that you could fit that many names to that many faces after seeing them once?”

Saul’s shoulders went slightly up and down. “There’s more to people than faces.

I might go wrong on a few, but not many.”

Cramer spoke to a dick standing by the door: “You heard that name, Levy -

Malcolm Vedder. Tell Stebbins to check it on that list and send a man to bring him in.”

Cramer returned to Saul: “Put it this way: Say I sit you here with that list,

and a man or woman is brought in -“

“I could tell you positively whether the person had been here or not, especially if he was wearing the same clothes and hadn’t been disguised. On fitting him to his name I might go wrong in a few cases, but I doubt it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Mr. Wolfe does,” Saul said complacently. “Archie does. I have developed my faculties.”

“You sure have. All right; that’s all for now. Stick around.”

Saul and Fritz went. Wolfe, in his own chair at the end of the dining table,

where ordinarily, at this hour, he sat for a quite different purpose, heaved a deep sigh and closed his eyes. I, seated beside Cramer at the side of the table which put us facing the door to the hall, was beginning to appreciate the problem we were up against.