Curtains For Three (9 page)

screeching something I didn’t catch, but her father and Adele Bosley had stopped her and were getting her under control. Judge Arnold and Rupert the Fat were excitedly telling Wolfe how wonderful he was. Peggy was apparently weeping, from the way her shoulders were shaking, but I couldn’t see her face because it was buried on Fred’s shoulder, and his arms had her tight.

Nobody wanted me or needed me, so I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

Bullet for One Rex Stout I It was her complexion that made it hard to believe she was as scared as she said she was.

“Maybe I haven’t made it clear,” she persisted, twisting her fingers some more though I had asked her to stop. “I’m not making anything up, really I’m not. If they framed me once, isn’t that a good enough reason to think they are doing it again?”

If her cheek color had been from a drugstore, with the patches showing because the fear in her heart was using extra blood for internal needs, I would probably have been affected more. But at first sight of her I had been reminded of a picture on a calendar hanging on the wall of Sam’s Diner on Eleventh Avenue, a picture of a round-faced girl with one hand holding a pail and the other hand resting on the flank of a cow she had just milked or was going to milk. It was her to a T, in skin tint, build, and innocence.

She quit the finger-twisting to make tight little fists and perch them on her thigh fronts. “Is he really such a puffed-up baboon?” she demanded. “They’ll be here in twenty minutes, and I’ve got to see him first!”

Suddenly she was out of the chair, on her feet. “Where is he, upstairs?”

Having suspected she was subject to impulses, I had, instead of crossing to my desk, held a position between her and the door to the hall.

“Give it up,” I advised her. “When you stand up you tremble, I noticed that when you came in, so sit down. I’ve tried to explain, Miss Rooney, that while this room is Mr, Wolfe’s office, the rest of this building is his home. From nine to eleven in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, he is absolutely at home, up in the plant rooms with his orchids, and bigger men than you have had to like it. But, what I’ve seen of you, I think possibly you’re nice, and I’ll do you a favor.”

“What?”

“Sit down and quit trembling.” She sat down.

“I’ll go up and tell him about you.”

“What will you tell him?”

“I’ll remind him that a man named Ferdinand Pohl phoned this morning and made a date for himself and four others, to come here to see Mr. Wolfe at six o’clock,

which is sixteen minutes from now. I’ll tell him your name is Audrey Rooney and you’re one of the four others, and you’re fairly good-looking and may be nice,

and you’re scared stiff because, as you tell it, they’re pretending they think it was Talbott but actually they’re getting set to frame you, and - “

“Not all of them.”

“Anyhow some. I’ll tell him that you came ahead of time to see him alone and inform him that you have not murdered anyone, specifically not Sigmund Keyes,

and to warn him that he must watch these stinkers like a hawk.”

“It sounds crazy - like that!”

“I’ll put feeling in it.”

She left her chair again, came to me in three swift steps, flattened her palms on my coat front, and tilted her head back to get my eyes.

“You may be nice too,” she said hopefully.

“That would be too much to expect,” I told her as I turned and made for the stairs in the hall.

II Ferdinand Pohl was speaking.

Sitting there in the office with my chair swiveled so that my back was to my desk, with Wolfe himself behind his desk to my left, I took Pohl in. He was close to twice my age. Seated in the red leather chair beyond the end of Wolfe’s desk, with his leg-crossing hoisting his pants so that five inches of bare shin showed above his garterless sock, there was nothing about him to command attention except an unusual assortment of facial creases, and nothing at all to love.

“What brought us together,” he was saying in a thin peevish tone, “and what brought us here together, is our unanimous opinion that Sigmund Keyes was murdered by Victor Talbott, and also our conviction - “

“Not unanimous,” another voice objected.

The voice was soft and good for the ears, and its owner was good for the eyes.

Her chin, especially, was the kind you can take from any angle. The only reason I hadn’t seated her in the chair nearest mine was that on her arrival she had answered my welcoming smile with nothing but brow-lifting, and I had decided to hell with her until she learned her manners.

“Not unanimous, Ferdy,” she objected.

“You said,” Pohl told her, even more peevish, “that you were in sympathy with our purpose and wanted to join us and come here with us.”

Seeing them and hearing them, I made a note that they hated each other. She had known him longer than I had, since she called him Ferdy, and evidently she agreed that there was nothing about him to love. I was about to start feeling that I had been too harsh with her when I saw she was lifting her brows at him.

“That,” she declared, “is quite different from having the opinion that Vic murdered my father. I have no opinion, because I don’t know.”

“Then what are you in sympathy with?”

“I want to find out. So do you. And I certainly agree that the police are being extremely stupid.”

“Who do you think killed him if Vic didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” The brows went up again. “But since I have inherited my father’s business, and since 1 am engaged to marry Vic, and since a few other things, I want very much to know. That’s why I’m here with you.”

“You don’t belong here!”

“I’m here, Ferdy.”

“I say you don’t belong!” Pohl’s creases were wriggling. “I said so and I still say so! We came, the four of us, for a definite purpose, to get Nero Wolfe to find proof that Vic killed your father!” Pohl suddenly uncrossed his legs,

leaned forward to peer at Dorothy Keyes’ face, and asked in a mean little voice,

“And what if you helped him?”

Three other voices spoke at once. One said, “They’re off again.”

Another, “Let Mr. Broadyke tell it.”

Another, “Get one of them out of here.”

Wolfe said, “If the job is limited to those terms, Mr. Pohl, to prove that a man named by you committed murder, you’ve wasted your trip. What if he didn’t?”

Many things had happened in that office on the ground floor of the old brownstone house owned by Nero Wolfe during the years I had worked for him as his man Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

This gathering in the office, on this Tuesday evening in October, had its own special angle of interest. Sigmund Keyes, top-drawer industrial designer, had been murdered the preceding Tuesday, just a week ago. I had read about it in the papers and had also found an opportunity to hear it privately discussed by my friend and enemy Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide, and from the professional-detective slant it struck me as a lulu.

It had been Keyes’ custom, five days a week at six-thirty in the morning, to take a walk in the park, and to do it the hard and silly way by walking on four legs instead of two. He kept the four legs, which he owned and which were named Casanova, at the Stillwell Riding Academy on Ninety-eighth Street just west of the park. That morning he mounted Casanova as usual, promptly at six-thirty, and rode into the park. Forty minutes later, at seven-ten, he had been seen by a mounted cop, in the park on patrol, down around Sixty-sixth Street. His customary schedule would have had him about there at that time. Twenty-five minutes later, at seven-thirty-five, Casanova, with his saddle uninhabited, had emerged from the park uptown and strolled down the street to the academy.

Curiosity had naturally been aroused, and in three-quarters of an hour had been satisfied, when a park cop had found Keyes’ body behind a thicket some twenty yards from the bridle path in the park, in the latitude of Ninety-fifth Street.

Later a .38-caliber revolver bullet had been dug out of his chest. The police had concluded, from marks on the path and beyond its edge, that he had been shot out of his saddle and had crawled, with difficulty, up a little slope toward a paved walk for pedestrians, and hadn’t had enough life left to make it.

A horseman shot from his saddle within sight of the Empire State Building was of course a natural for the tabloids, and the other papers thought well of it too.

No weapon had been found, and no eyewitnesses. No citizen had even come forward to report seeing a masked man lurking behind a tree, probably because very few New Yorkers could possibly explain being up and dressed and strolling in the park at that hour of the morning.

So the city employees had had to start at the other end and look for motives and opportunities. During the week that had passed a lot of names had been mentioned and a lot of people had received official callers, and as a result the glare had pretty well concentrated on six spots. So the papers had it, and so I gathered from Purley Stebbins. What gave the scene in our office that Tuesday afternoon its special angle of interest was the fact that five of the six spots were there seated on chairs, and apparently what they wanted Wolfe to do was to take the glare out of their eyes and get it aimed exclusively at the sixth spot, not present.

‘Permit me to say,” Frank Broadyke offered in a cultivated baritone, “that Mr.

Pohl has put it badly. The situation is this, Mr. Wolfe, that Mr. Pohl got us together and we found that each of us feels that he is being harassed unreasonably. Not only that he is un- justly suspected of a crime he did not commit, but that in a full week the police have accomplished nothing and aren’t likely to, and we will be left with this unjust suspicion permanently upon us.”

Broadyke gestured with a hand. More than his baritone was cultivated; he was cultivated all over. He was somewhat younger than Pohl, and ten times as elegant. His manner gave the impression that he was finding it difficult just to be himself because (a) he was in the office of a private detective, which was vulgar, (b) he had come there with persons with whom one doesn’t ordinarily associate, which was embarrassing, and (c) the subject for discussion was his connection with a murder, which was preposterous. He was going on. “Mr. Pohl suggested that we consult you and engage your services. As one who will gladly pay my share of the bill, permit me to say that what I want is the removal of that unjust suspicion. If you can achieve that only by finding the criminal and evidence against him, very well. If the guilty man proves to be Victor Talbott,

again very well.”

“There’s no if about it!” Pohl blurted. “Talbott did it, and the job is to pin it on him!”

“With me helping, Ferdy, don’t forget,” Dorothy Keyes told him softly. “Aw, can it!”

Eyes turned to the speaker, whose only contribution up to that point had been the remark, “They’re off again.” Heads had to turn too because he was seated to the rear of the swing of the arc. The high pitch of his voice was a good match for his name, Wayne Safford, but not for his broad husky build and the strong big bones of his face. According to the papers he was twenty-eight, but he looked a little older, about my age.

Wolfe nodded at him. “I quite agree, Mr. Safford.” Wolfe’s eyes swept the arc.

“Mr. Pohl wants too much for his money. You can hire me to catch a fish, ladies and gentlemen, but you can’t tell me which fish. You can tell me what it is I’m after - a murderer - but you can’t tell me who it is unless you have evidence,

and in that case why pay me'Have you got evidence?”

No one said anything.

“Have you got evidence, Mr. Pohl?”

“No.”

“How do you know it was Mr. Talbott?”

“I know it, that’s all. We all know it! Even Miss Keyes here knows it, but she’s too damn contrary to admit it.”

Wolfe swept the arc again. “Is that true'Do you all know it?”

No word. No “yes” and no “no.” No nods and no shakes.

“Then the identity of the fish is left to me. Is that understood'Mr. Broadyke?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Safford?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Rooney?”

“Yes. Only I think it was Vic Talbott.”

“Nothing can stop you. Miss Keyes?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Pohl?”

No answer.

“I must have a commitment on this, Mr. Pohl. If it proves to be Mr. Talbott you can pay extra. But in any case, I am hired to get facts?”

“Sure, the real facts.”

“There is no other kind. I guarantee not to deliver any unreal facts.” Wolfe leaned forward to press a button on his desk. “That is, indeed, the only guaranty I can give you. I should make it plain that you are responsible both collectively and individually for this engagement with me. Now if - “

The door to the hall had opened, and Fritz Brenner entered and approached.

“Fritz,” Wolfe told him, “there will be five guests at dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” Fritz told him without a blink and turned to go. That’s how good Fritz is, and he is not the kind to ring in omelets or canned soup. As he was opening the door a protest came from Frank Broadyke.

“Better make it four. I’ll have to leave soon and I have a dinner engagement.”

“Cancel it,” Wolfe snapped.

“I’m afraid I can’t, really.”

“Then I can’t take this job.” Wolfe was curt. “What do you expect, with this thing already a week old?” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ll need you,

all of you, certainly all evening, and probably most of the night. I must know all that you know about Mr. Keyes and Mr. Talbott. Also, if I am to remove this unjust suspicion of you from the minds of the police and the public, I must begin by removing it from my own mind. That will take many hours of hard work.”

“Oh,” Dorothy Keyes put in, her brows going up, “you suspect us, do you?”

Wolfe, ignoring her, asked Broadyke, “Well, sir?”

“I’ll have to phone,” Broadyke muttered.

“You may,” Wolfe conceded, as if he were yielding a point. His eyes moved, left and right and left again, and settled on Audrey Rooney, whose chair was a little in the rear, to one side of Wayne Safford’s. “Miss Rooney,” he shot at her, “you seem to be the most vulnerable, since you were on the scene. When did Mr. Keyes dismiss you from his employ, and what for?”

Audrey had been sitting straight and still, with her lips tight. “Well, it was -

” she began, but stopped to clear her throat and then didn’t continue because of an interruption.

The doorbell had rung, and I had left it to Fritz to answer it, which was the custom when I was engaged with Wolfe and visitors, unless superseding orders had been given. Now the door to the hall opened, and Fritz entered, closed the door behind him, and announced. “A gentleman to see you, sir. Mr. Victor Talbott.”

The name plopped in the middle of us like a paratrooper at a picnic.

“By God!” Wayne Safford exclaimed.

“How the devil - ” Frank Broadyke started, and stopped.

“So you told him!” Pohl spat at Dorothy Keyes.

Dorothy merely raised her brows. I was getting fed up with that routine and wished she would try something else.

Audrey Rooney’s mouth was hanging open.

“Show him in,” Wolfe told Fritz.