Homicide Trinity (26 page)

Over the years I have been suspected of a lot of
things by various authorities, from corrupting a cop by buying him a drink to complicity in a murder, and that day they added a new one to the list. None of them came right out with it, but what was really biting them was their suspicion that I was in collusion with the United States government. Of course they covered other aspects of the case, all of them and thoroughly, but what they concentrated on was the package of phony lettuce. That was all the DA himself asked me about, and he put it to me point-blank: did I know the money was counterfeit? I told him point-blank no, and felt better; it’s always a relief to get a lie off your chest. He said of course I was lying, that I would have been a nitwit not to suspect it. I said it didn’t matter now anyway, since the Secret Service had it, and he blew his top. I admit it’s hard to believe that he actually thought I had disposed of evidence in a murder case by arranging for Leach to beat Cramer to it, but I suppose a DA has as much right to be a damfool as the people who voted for him.

It was a quarter past six when I left the building and flagged a taxi. By the time it turned into 35th Street I had decided that I wouldn’t wait until after dinner to go for Wolfe. He was too darned lazy to live. Since, thanks to me, Hattie had told him that he had already made Cramer eat dirt, he would consider that no matter what happened or didn’t happen he could send her a bill for a modest hunk of the forty-two thousand, say five grand, and why should he strain his brain? She was out on bail as a material witness and in no real danger. We had got rid of the contraband. There was no great hurry. Nuts, I decided. He had to be poked. As I mounted the stoop and put my key in the door I was choosing my opening remark from three I had hatched.

But I didn’t get to use it. The rack in the hall was so crowded with coats that I had to squeeze mine between two that I recognized—Inspector Cramer’s and Saul Panzer’s. Cramer’s voice was raised in the office, and it was hoarse, as it always was when he was in a huff. As I reached the office door he was saying, “… not just
to hear you spout! If you’ve got something let’s have it!”

Wolfe, seated behind his desk with his fingers laced at the summit of his middle mound, had sent his eyes to me. “Ah,” he said. “Satisfactory. I was concerned.”

Sure he was. The bigger the audience the better when he is staging a scene. Before I headed for my desk I glanced around: Cramer in the red leather chair, Sergeant Stebbins at his right, Paul Hannah and Noel Ferris on chairs facing Wolfe’s desk, Raymond Dell and Albert Leach, the T-man, behind them, and Martha Kirk and Hattie Annis on the couch to the left of my desk. Saul Panzer was over by the big globe. As I circled around Leach and Dell, Wolfe was speaking.

“You know quite well I have something, Mr. Cramer, or you wouldn’t have come. As I told you on the phone, I had a stroke of luck, but I had invited it; and I knew where to send the invitation. True, I sent it to three addresses—an East Side tenement, a shop on First Avenue, and a building on Bowie Street which housed the theater—but my expectation was centered on the last. When my expectation was realized I was faced with the question whether to notify you or to notify Mr. Leach; and preferring not to choose, I asked you both to come and to bring Miss Kirk, Mr. Dell, Mr. Ferris, and Mr. Hannah. Miss Annis, my client, was here. I thought the first three had a right to be present; as for Mr. Hannah, since he is both a counterfeiter and a murderer, you and Mr. Leach will have to decide—”

“That’s a lie,” Hannah said, and was rising, but Leach, behind him, grabbed his arm. Hannah jerked, but Leach held on. “Who the hell are you?” Hannah demanded, and with his free hand Leach got his leather fold from his pocket and flipped it open, and by then Stebbins was there.

“Are you arresting him?” Stebbins said.

“No, are you?” Leach asked.

“Nobody’s arresting me,” Hannah said. “Turn loose of me.”

“Sit down, Hannah,” Cramer growled. He looked at
Wolfe. He had seen Wolfe perform before, and Leach hadn’t. Not only had he heard Wolfe say that Hannah was a counterfeiter and a murderer, but also he saw the expression on Wolfe’s face, and he certainly knew that face. He left his chair, put his hand on Hannah’s shoulder, and said, “You’re under arrest as a material witness in the murder of Tamiris Baxter. All right, Sergeant,” and returned to his chair. Stebbins stood at Hannah’s left and Leach stood at his right.

“That’s prudent, Mr. Cramer,” Wolfe said, “since I have no conclusive evidence. Up to three hours ago I had merely a surmise. Talking with these people last evening, I got nothing but faint intimations. Miss Kirk? Unlikely. She attended a ballet school regularly, she exercised an hour every morning, and she received a monthly remittance from her father, all of which could be checked. Mr. Dell? Also unlikely. He had paid no room rent for three years. Mr. Ferris? Possibly, but with a reservation. His statement that two oí the agencies he called at yesterday would corroborate him made it improbable that he had followed Miss Annis here yesterday morning.”

“So what?” Cramer rasped.

“So my attention centered on Mr. Hannah. He had lived there only four months. He had paid for his room every week. He had almost certainly lied when he said Miss Baxter had told him that a man had twice followed her to the door. Miss Baxter was an agent of the Secret Service of the Treasury Department, and she—”

“Who said so?” Leach demanded.

“No one. Mr. Goodwin inferred it. You have carried discretion to an extreme, Mr. Leach, in concealing the interest of your organization in the occupants of that house, but you will soon agree that it is no longer needed. So I did not believe that Miss Baxter had told Mr. Hannah that. Finally, Mr. Hannah’s account of his movements yesterday left him completely free up to noon. He could have followed Miss Annis here and, when she left without entering, back to her house. He could have stolen a parked car and, when she left her
house a second time, tried to run it over her; but, since he failed, that is of little consequence.”

“There’s damn little consequence in anything you’ve said,” Cramer growled.

Wolfe nodded. “I’m only explaining why my attention centered on Mr. Hannah. I could indulge in speculation—for instance, why did he kill Miss Baxter there and then? Had she seen him try to kill Miss Annis with the car, and confronted him when he returned to the house? But you can speculate as well as I, and it will be your job, not mine, to screw a confession out of him.”

“I’ve got nothing to confess,” Hannah said. “You’re going to regret this. You’re going to regret it good.”

“I think not, Mr. Hannah.” Wolfe’s eyes went to Leach, standing, and then to Cramer, sitting. “So when I sent three men to those addresses, with the invitations to luck, I sent Saul Panzer to the Mushroom. Mr. Panzer leaves less to luck than any man I know. He phoned four times to report progress. The third time, around three o’clock, he asked for reinforcements and I sent them. The fourth time, less than two hours ago, I told him to come and I phoned you gentlemen. Saul, will you describe the situation?”

Since Saul was over by the big globe, all but Wolfe and Stebbins and me had to twist their necks. “Just the situation?” Saul asked.

“Lead up to it briefly.”

“Yes, sir. The first two hours I covered the neighborhood, but got no lead, so I went inside the building. I didn’t tell the superintendent what I was after, just that I wanted to look around for something, and the way he reacted and the way he accepted forty dollars for his trouble, I decided he was honest. He showed me around the theater and the basement and the second floor. The third floor is occupied by a job-printing shop with two presses and the other equipment you would expect. He told the two men there what I had suggested, that I was an insurance underwriters’ inspector looking for violations. From the way the men looked I decided I was hot, and I told the superintendent I
would have to give the shop a good look and it would take a while, and he left. When I started looking behind things on shelves they jumped me and I had to get rough and pull my gun. I didn’t shoot, but I had to knock one of them out. There was a phone on a table, and I rang you and asked you to send Fred and Orrie to help me search the place. You said they would be calling in soon, and you would—”

“That’s far enough,” Wolfe said. “And now?”

“They’re still there. In behind stacks of paper on one of the shelves there are eight stacks of new twenty-dollar bills. In a compartment in the back of a cupboard are four engraver’s plates that were probably used to make the bills. The two men are on the floor with their hands and feet tied. I don’t know their names. There’s only one chair in the room and Fred Durkin is sitting on it, or he was when I left, and Orrie Cather was sitting on a pile of paper. One of the men has a lump on the side of his head where I hit him with my gun, but he’s not hurt much. I gave the superintendent another twenty dollars. That’s the situation.”

Paul Hannah had started to rise, but hands on his shoulders had stopped him—Stebbins on the left and Leach on the right.

“You might add one detail,” Wolfe told Saul. “The name one of them mentioned.”

“Yes, sir. That was after Fred and Orrie came and we had them tied and we found the plates. One of them said to the other one, ‘I told you Paul would squeal. The goddamn murderous bastard. I told you we ought to clear out.’ Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

“That will do for now. You will of course report in full to Mr. Cramer and Mr. Leach.” Wolfe’s head moved. “As you see, gentlemen, I was faced with a dilemma, since he was both a counterfeiter and a murderer. Preferring not to choose, I asked you both to come, and I leave the question of priority to you. Since Mr. Cramer has him under arrest—”

The movement that interrupted him was by Paul Hannah, but it wasn’t much of a movement. Apparently
his idea was to lunge at Wolfe, but Stebbins and Leach had him pinned. They glared at each other and Hannah glared at Wolfe, and Hattie Annis’s voice came from the couch.

“You see, Falstaff? Didn’t I tell you?”

She had told him absolutely nothing.

O
ne day three weeks later Wolfe and I were in the office disagreeing about something when the doorbell rang. It was Hattie. I escorted her in, and she sat in the red leather chair, opened her handbag, and took out a little package wrapped in brown paper. Wolfe made a face. I thought, Good Lord, she’s found another one. But she reached into the bag again and came out with an envelope that I recognized.

“This check you sent me,” she said. “You say in your letter it’s for my share of the reward, a hundred dollars. So you kept your share?”

“Yes,” Wolfe lied.

“Did you get yours, Buster?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Then that’s all right. But what about this bill? Five thousand dollars fee for services and $621.65 for expenses. What did I tell you that day, Buster? Didn’t I say I could pay forty-two thousand dollars?”

“You did.”

“Then here it is.” She tossed the package onto Wolfe’s desk. “A man at the bank helped me pick those bonds and he says there’s none better. These are transferred to you. This is the first time I ever let any of them go, and I hope it’s the last, but it was worth it. That was a day, the best day I’ve had since my father died. I didn’t like it when I saw in the paper that he had
confessed, but that wasn’t your fault. I’ve got no use for anybody that confesses anything to the cops. That Paul Hannah was no good. He even told them how he stole the car and tried to kill me with it because he thought I had the package and knew who put it in my parlor, and he saw Tammy across the street and knew she saw him, and when he went back to the house she was at the phone dialing a number and he got the knife from the kitchen, and when he got near her and she stood up he stabbed her, and then he carried her in the parlor and left her there with her skirt up to her waist. He was no good. I’ll have to be more careful about people that want a room.”

Wolfe was frowning. “I can’t accept those bonds, mad—Miss Annis. Not all of them. I prefer to evaluate my services myself. I did so and sent you a bill.”

She nodded. “I tore it up. The day I told Buster that, that settled it. I hired you and I said what I could pay. Now you say you won’t accept it. That’s no way to do.”

Wolfe looked at me. I grinned. He pushed his chair back and arose. “I have a matter to attend to,” he said. “I’ll leave you with Mr. Goodwin. You understand each other.” He marched out.

It took me half an hour to talk her around, and she told me twice not to call her Hattie.

Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen, never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in “The Rex Stout Library” will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.

HOMICIDE TRINITY

Rex Stout—A Lizzie Borden supporter? Indeed, he was a defender of her good name. Shortly after the 1962 publication of HOMICIDE TRINITY, Stout was awarded this certificate (from an organization of doubtful legitimacy).

Would Wolfe have been able to clear her name?