Might as Well Be Dead (21 page)

“You were just collecting background?”

“Right.”

“We’d like to have you come and tell us what you collected. Now.”

“Where are you?”

“At Homicide West. I just got here with a man named William Lesser. When did you see him last?”

“Give me a reason. I always need a reason.”

“Yeah, I know. He came to Delia Brandt’s apartment twenty minutes ago and found us there. He says he had a date with her. He also says he thinks you killed her. Is that a good enough reason? When did you see him last?”

I never got to answer that. Wolfe’s voice broke in.

“Mr. Stebbins, this is Nero Wolfe. I would like to speak with Mr. Cramer.”

“He’s busy.” I swear Purley got hoarser the instant he heard Wolfe. “We want Goodwin down here.”

“Not until I have spoken with Mr. Cramer.”

Silence; then: “Hold it. I’ll see.”

We waited. I looked at Wolfe, but it was one-way because his eyes were closed. He opened them only when Cramer’s voice came.

“You there, Wolfe? Cramer. What do you want?”

“I want to expose a murderer, and I’m ready to. If you wish to be present, bring Mr. and—”

“I’m coming there right now!”

“No. I have to study some documents. You wouldn’t get in. Come at nine o’clock, and bring Mr. and Mrs. Irwin and Mr. and Mrs. Arkoff—and you may as well bring Mr. Lesser. He deserves to be in the audience. The others must be. Nine o’clock.”

“Goddam it, I want to know—”

“You will, but not now. I have work to do.”

He cradled his phone, and I followed suit. He spoke. “Archie, phone Mr. Freyer, Mr. Degan, and Mr. Herold. If he wishes to bring his wife he may. For this sort of thing the bigger the audience the better. And inform Mrs. Molloy.”

“Mrs. Molloy won’t be here.”

“She is here.”

“I mean she won’t be in the audience, not if Herold is. She doesn’t know Peter Hays is Paul Herold, and let him tell her if and when he wants to. Anyway she doesn’t want to be with people, and you don’t need her.”

“Very well.” He leered at me. He may have thought it was a tender glance of sympathy, but I call it a leer. “It is understood, of course, that you were not there today. If an explanation of how I got this material is required I’ll supply it.”

“Then that’s all for me?” Saul asked.

“No. You’ll be at his elbow. He has degenerated into a maniac. If you’ll dine with us? Now I must digest this stuff.”

He went back to the pile of papers.

Chapter 18

T
HE HOST WAS LATE to the party, but it wasn’t his fault. I wasn’t present at the private argument Cramer insisted on having with Wolfe in the dining room, being busy elsewhere, but as I passed in the hall, admitting guests as they arrived, I could hear their voices through the closed door. Since the door to the office was soundproofed and I kept it shut, they weren’t audible in there.

The red leather chair was of course reserved for Inspector Cramer, and Purley Stebbins was on one nearby against the wall, facing the gathering. Jerome and Rita Arkoff and Tom and Fanny Irwin were in the front row, where Saul and I had spaced the chairs, but Irwin had moved his close to his wife’s—not, however, taking her hand to hold. Mr. and Mrs. Herold and Albert Freyer were grouped over by the globe, off apart. Back of the Arkoffs and Irwins were William Lesser and Patrick Degan, and between them and slightly to the rear was Saul Panzer. That way the path from me to Degan was unobstructed and Saul was only an arm’s length from him.

It was a quarter past nine, and the silence, broken only by a mutter here and there, was getting pretty heavy when the door opened and Wolfe and Cramer entered. Wolfe crossed to his desk and sat, but Cramer stood to make a speech.

“I want you to understand,” he told them, “that this is not an official inquiry. Five of you came here at my request, but that’s all it was, a request. Sergeant Stebbins and I are here as observers, and we take no responsibility for anything Nero Wolfe says or does. As it stands now, you can walk out whenever you feel like it.”

“This is a little irregular, isn’t it, Inspector?” Arkoff asked.

“I said you can walk out,” Cramer told him. He stood a moment, turned and sat, and scowled at Wolfe.

Wolfe was taking them in. “I’m going to begin,” he said conversationally, “by reporting a coincidence, though it is unessential. It is unessential, but not irrelevant. Reading the
Times
at breakfast this morning, I noticed a Washington dispatch on page one.” He picked up a newspaper from his desk. “If you’ll indulge me I’ll read some of it.

‘A total disclosure law requiring all private welfare and pension plans to open books to governmental inspection was recommended today by a Senate subcommittee. The proposal was based on a two-year study that disclosed practices ranging from sloppy bookkeeping to a $900,000 embezzlement.

‘The funds have grown to the point, the committee said, that they now provide benefits to 29,000,000 workers and to 46,000,000 dependents of these workers. Assets of the pension funds alone now total about 25 billion dollars, it was said.

‘The Senate group, headed by Senator Paul H. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, said: “While the great majority of welfare and pension programs are being responsibly and honestly administered, the rights and equities of the beneficiaries in many instances are being dangerously ignored. In other cases, the funds of the programs are being dissipated and at times become the hunting ground of the unscrupulous.”‘“

Wolfe put the paper down. “It goes on, but that will do. I read it for the record and because it juxtaposed two things: the word ‘welfare’ and large sums of money. For a solid week I had been trying to find a hint to start me on the trail of the man who killed Michael Molloy—and subsequently Johnny Keems and Ella Reyes—enough of one at least to stir my pulse, to no avail. This, if not a flare, was at least a spark. Patrick Degan was the head of an organization called the Mechanics Alliance Welfare Association, and a large sum of money had been found in a safe-deposit box Molloy had rented under an assumed name.”

He pushed the newspaper aside. “That faint hint, patiently and persistently pursued, might eventually have led me to the truth, but luckily it wasn’t needed. I have here in my drawer a sheaf of papers which contain evidence of these facts: that from nineteen fifty-one to nineteen fifty-five Molloy made purchases of small pieces of land in various parts of the country; that their value, and the amounts of money he had to put up, were negligible; that in each case the purchaser of record was some ‘camp’—examples are the Wide World Children’s Camp and the Blue Sky Children’s Camp; that these camps, twenty-eight in all, borrowed a total of nearly two million dollars from Mr. Degan’s organization on mortgages; that Molloy’s share of the loot was one-fourth and Degan’s share three-fourths, from which each had presumably to meet certain expenses; and that the date of the last such loan on mortgage was October seventeenth, nineteen fifty-five. I can supply many details, but those are the essentials. Do you wish to comment, Mr. Degan?”

Of course all eyes were on him, but his were only for Wolfe. “No,” he said, “except that it’s outrageous and libelous and I’ll get your hide. Produce your sheaf of papers.”

Wolfe shook his head. “The District Attorney will produce them when the time comes. But I’ll humor your curiosity. When Molloy decided to leave the country with his loot, alarmed by the Senate investigation, and to take his secretary, Delia Brandt, with him, he stowed his records in a suitcase and left it in Delia Brandt’s apartment. That is suggestive, since prudence would have dictated their destruction. It suggests that he foresaw some future function for them, and the most likely one would have been to escape penalty for himself by supplying evidence against you. No doubt you foresaw that too, and that’s why you killed him. Do you wish to comment?”

“No. Go ahead and hang yourself.”

“Wait a minute,” Cramer snapped. “I want to see those papers.”

“Not now. By agreement I have an hour without interruption.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Listen and you’ll know.” Wolfe returned to Degan. “The best conjecture is that you knew Molloy had those records, some in your writing, and you knew or suspected he was preparing to decamp. If you demanded that he give them to you or destroy them in your presence, he refused. After you killed him you had no time to search the apartment, but enough to go through his clothing, and it must have been a relief to find the key to the safe-deposit box, since that was the most likely repository of the records—but it was a qualified relief, since you didn’t dare to use the key. If you still have it, and almost certainly you have, it can be found and will be a damaging bit of evidence. You now have another, as the administrator of Molloy’s estate, but surely the safe-deposit company can distinguish between the original and the duplicate they had to have made—and by the way, what would you have done if, opening the box in the presence of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Parker, you had found the records in it? Had you decided on a course?”

Degan didn’t reply. “Get on,” Cramer rasped. “Where did you get them?”

Wolfe ignored him. “However, they weren’t there. Another question: how did you dare to kill him when you didn’t know where they were? But I’ll venture to answer that myself. By getting Peter Hays there and giving the police an obvious culprit, you insured plenty of time and opportunity for searching the apartment as an old friend of Mrs. Molloy’s. She is not present to inform us, but that can wait.”

“Where is she?” Cramer demanded.

Ignored again. “You must admit, Mr. Degan, that luck was with you. For instance, the safe-deposit box. You had the key, but even if you had known the name Molloy had used in renting it, and you probably didn’t, you wouldn’t have dared to try to get at it. Then fortune intervened, represented by me. I got you access to the box. But in spite of that good fortune you weren’t much better off, for the records weren’t there, and until you found them you were in great jeopardy. What did you do? I wouldn’t mind paying you the compliment of supposing that you conceived the notion that Molloy had cached the records in Delia Brandt’s apartment, and you approached her, but I doubt if you deserve it. It is far more likely that she approached you; that, having decided to marry William Lesser, she wanted to get rid of Molloy’s suitcase, still in her apartment; that before doing so she forced it open and inspected its contents; that if items such as passports and steamship or airplane tickets were there she destroyed them; that she examined the sheaf of papers and from them learned that there was a large sum of money somewhere and that you had been involved with Molloy in extensive and lucrative transactions and probably knew where the money was. She was not without cunning. Before approaching you she took the suitcase, with the records in it, to Grand Central Terminal and put it in a checking locker. Then she saw you, told you what she knew and what she had, and demanded the money.”

“That’s a lie!” William Lesser blurted.

Wolfe’s eyes darted to him. “Then what did she do? Since you know?”

“I don’t know, but I know she wouldn’t do that! It’s a lie!”

“Then let me finish it. A lie, like a truth, should reach its destination. And that, Mr. Degan, was where luck caught up with you. You couldn’t give her the money from the safe-deposit box, but even if you gave her a part of your share of the loot and she surrendered the records to you, you couldn’t empty her brain of what she knew, and as long as she lived she would be a threat. So last night you went to her apartment, ostensibly, I presume, to give her the money and get the records, but actually to kill her, and you did so. I don’t know—
Saul
!”

I wouldn’t say that Saul slipped up. Sitting between Lesser and Degan, naturally he was concentrating on Degan, and Lesser gave no warning. He just lunged, right across Saul’s knees, either to grab Degan or hit him, or maybe both. By the time I got there Saul had his coattail, jerking him off, Degan was sitting on the floor, and Purley Stebbins was on the way. But Purley, who has his points, wasn’t interested in Lesser, leaving him to Saul. He got his big paws on Degan’s arm, helped him up, and helped him down again onto the chair, while Saul and I bulldozed Lesser to the couch. When we were placed again it was an improvement: Stebbins on one side of Degan and Saul on the other, and Lesser on the sidelines. Cramer, who had stood to watch the operation, sat down.

Wolfe resumed. “I was saying, Mr. Degan, that I don’t know whether you searched her apartment for the records, but naturally—Did he, Mr. Cramer?”

“Someone did,” Cramer growled. “Good. I’m stopping this right here. I want to see those records and I want to know how you got them.”

Wolfe looked at the wall clock. “I still have thirty-eight minutes of my hour. If you interpose authority of course you have it. But I have your word. Is it garbage?”

Cramer’s face got redder, and his jaw worked. “Go ahead.”

“I should think so.” Wolfe returned to Degan. “You did search, naturally, without success. You weren’t looking for something as small as a key, but even if you had been you still wouldn’t have found it, for it was destined for me. How it reached me is a detail Mr. Cramer may discuss with me later if he still thinks it worth while; all that concerns you is that I received it, and sent Mr. Panzer with it to Grand Central, and he returned with the suitcase. From it I got the sheaf of papers now in my drawer. I was inspecting them when Mr. Cramer phoned me shortly after six o’clock, and I arranged with him for this meeting. That’s all, Mr. Degan.”

Wolfe’s eyes went left, and his voice lifted and sharpened. “Now for you, Mrs. Irwin. I wonder if you know how deep your hole is?”

“Don’t say anything, Fanny.” Irwin stood up. “We’re going. Come on, Fanny.” He took her shoulder and she came up to her feet.

“I think not,” Wolfe said. “I quote Mr. Cramer: ‘As it stands now, you can walk out whenever you feel like it.’ But the standing has been altered. Archie, to the door. Mr. Cramer, I’ll use restraint if necessary.”