Rex Stout (20 page)

He pulled at the lobe of his ear, which was his favorite courtroom gesture for a pause when his tone was down. “Do you know what an investigation like this means? When a prominent man like Storrs is murdered? This is Sunday afternoon. A captain of detectives is in Storrs’ office in New York, with the vice-president of the firm, examining everything. We went through everything here in Storrs’ study last night. His associates in New York, business and social, are being questioned; likewise here in the country. And so on. The records of all of you here are being traced as minutely as possible, particularly, of course, with regard to your relations with Storrs. That includes you. I tell you frankly, we have so far found not the slightest contradiction of what you told us last night, that you and Storrs were the best of friends, that you never had a quarrel or cause for one, that since you first met him when you bought your place over the hill four years ago you have been good neighbors, and that he accepted you enthusiastically as the fiancé of his ward, Miss Raffray.”

Martin murmured, “That is all true.”

Sherwood nodded. “I don’t doubt it. It has been confirmed. But I want to say three things. First, we’ve found the gloves that the murderer wore, and they are your gloves. I know what you say about it, but it’s a fact and there it is. Second, the attorney-general of this state will be here tomorrow morning, and he’s a much more impatient man than I am. You’ll have him to deal with. Third, it would be a good plan for you to tell me right now what the trouble was between Storrs and your friend Zimmerman.”

Martin, obviously taken unaware, jerked up straight and said nothing. Sherwood snapped, “Well?”

Martin said resentfully, “Damn it, I’ve got nerves. I don’t know what trouble you mean. I know nothing about it.”

Sherwood was leaning at him. “You don’t? Do you know that Zimmerman called on Storrs yesterday morning?”

“Yes.”

“And that when Miss Raffray met him in the hall he was very agitated and spoke to her about a mortal injury?”

“Yes. He gets agitated.”

“And that a few minutes later Storrs told Miss Raffray that he would like to kill somebody?”

“Not Zimmerman.”

“Who else do you suppose? You or me or the mailman? It must have been Zimmerman, he had just that moment left. Zimmerman refused to tell us what the talk was about. All right. Zimmerman is an old and close friend of yours, you have known him for years. Storrs was also your good friend. Is it likely that there could have been hostility between them and you wouldn’t know about it? Certainly you know! Are you going to tell me that that was something else you didn’t notice, like the gloves being gone?”

Martin turned up his palms. “I simply don’t know.”

“You don’t? You stick to that?”

“I have to, or make something up. Storrs and Zimmerman never liked each other. It was too bad, but they didn’t. Storrs was a puritan and thought modern psychology was not clean, and Zimmerman was contrary and enjoyed baiting him.”

“You stick to it that you don’t know why Zimmerman went to see Storrs yesterday morning?”

“I do. I am compelled to.”

“By God,” Brissenden growled, to no one but Mars. He repeated it, “By God. I’d like to compel him a while.”

Sherwood got up. He walked to a window and glanced out as if in forlorn expectation of spying a fact perched on a branch of a horse chestnut tree. He walked back to the table and stood gazing murkily down at the top of Martin’s head, then lifted his shoulders high, held them there three seconds, and let them drop. He kicked at the leg of his chair, and sat down.

“I’d like to try something, Dan.” It was Maguire of Bridgeport, up and beside him. “Let me have the gloves.”

Sherwood handed them to him, and he approached Martin. “You say these was bought yesterday, Mr. Foltz?”

“Yes.”

“You ever had ’em on?”

“No. Oh … yes, in the shop.”

“Mind putting ’em on now?”

“I … don’t like to.”

“Just do me a favor. Help out the cause.—That’s right.” He winked and grimaced at Dol. “Miss Bonner and I like to use our heads.” He grasped Martin’s right wrist and held it so that the hand, with the glove on it, was before his eyes. “Bend your fingers shut. Tight. Now open ’em. Do it again. Do it a few more times.” Martin obliged.

“Thanks.” Maguire drew the glove off himself, carefully, took it to the window, and peered at it in the strong light. After a couple of minutes of that, he shook his head in defeat, returned to the table, tossed the glove over to Sherwood, and sat down. He explained, “Thought I might compare the creases with the ones our friend made yesterday gripping that wire, since the gloves are new. None of these new-fangled ideas is worth a damn.”

Brissenden said grimly, “It depends on who has them.”

Sherwood was sitting with bent head and closed eyes, rubbing his brow, back and forth. At length he sighed, deeply, and looked up.

“All right, Foltz. That’s all for the present. You’re on thin ice, I can tell you that. Please don’t leave these grounds—that’s not a request, it’s an order.—Weil, get Governor Chandler on the phone—he’ll be at his residence.—Quill, tell Hurley to pass the word that everybody on any other line than this Birchhaven bunch is to call it off and report to Station H and wait for orders. Then go with Miss Bonner and have her show you that watermelon and bring it in here. You might see if there’s any chance of footprints. On your way, send that butler in. And send someone to Foltz’s place to bring that fellow de Roode over; I’ll see him when I’m through with the butler.…”

Dol, some minutes later, walking up the path toward the vegetable garden with Sergeant Quill, was not very good company. Nor was it concern or conjecture which chiefly possessed her; it was angry dissatisfaction with herself, and wrath at another woman. She was thinking, “So Janet lied. She lied and I swallowed it! Darn her ornery hide, she looked me in the eye and lied to me, and it looks very much as if I’m out on a limb.…”

Sylvia Raffray sat on a large gray stone at the edge of the rock garden, frowning at a brown caterpillar, born belated, which was mounting a twig of sea lavender in decrepit desperation. She herself, not quite desperate and certainly not decrepit, was nevertheless in an unprecedented state of mind, requiring—to prevent collapse into mournful inertia or tearful hysterics, which her healthy youth despised as the easiest and weakest of feminine retorts to catastrophe—an amount of discipline and control which she had never before been called upon to furnish. Grief gnawed at her and could not be cast out; she had had deep and genuine affection for P. L.; she understood why, in a less restrained civilization, women had torn their hair and beat their breasts when their dear ones had died. And as if grief were not enough …

Now Martin was in it. He was in there now with those men, shrinking from their noise and their questions—she could see him—explaining about his gloves. The gloves she had bought for him. Sylvia shivered with repugnance, and with terror at the ugliness of it. No faint doubt of Martin’s blamelessness was in her unsuspicious mind; but characteristically—for she was indubitably fortune’s spoiled darling—she was irritated with him because of those gloves. The gloves she had bought herself … and those horrible marks across the palms … what were they saying to him now … and what was he saying.…

“Sylvia. Er—Miss Raffray.”

She looked up. She had not heard him approach; apparently he had walked on the grass. She said listlessly, “Make it Sylvia.” She made an effort to flop her mind over to this
intruding object; it might help. She observed, “You certainly look sick.”

Steve Zimmerman nodded. “That’s nothing to worry about.” He looked down at her, his pale eyes intent and his nostrils twitching, then sat cross-legged on the grass, facing her, six feet away. “I mean for me to worry about. I was never calculated to get very far on my looks. It is popularly supposed that a man devoid of physical grace and attractiveness feels inferior about it. I never have. Of course, I’m not normal.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said. “You’re not?”

“Certainly not. Normal? My God. I am hypercerebral.”

“I see. ‘Hyper’ means too much, doesn’t it?”

“No. It means above measure. It can mean excessive.” His nostril twitched, and he rubbed it with the back of his finger. “Ever since lunch I have been deciding to have a talk with you. I saw you come out here a little while ago.”

“Well?”

Her face was a foot higher than his; he looked up at her. “It’s easy enough for you to say ‘Well.’ Your brain is accustomed to react almost exclusively to the simpler sensory impulses. That’s a loose way of putting it, but you wouldn’t understand a correct technical statement. I have been led to this decision by the most tortuous and difficult path I have ever followed. I have a proposal to make to you. To clear the way, and anticipate a question you will want to ask, I should tell you that I wanted first to inform Martin about it, but I have had no opportunity since I decided. He was in the study with the rest of you, and from there he was taken to the card room. So I’ve had no chance—”

Sylvia put in, “You don’t know what they sent for him for. Do you?”

“I suppose some more of the same questions that they’ve asked a dozen times—”

“No.” Sylvia shifted on the stone. “They’ve found the gloves they were looking for. Dol found them. They are marked the way they said they would be. It’s a pair I bought yesterday and gave to Martin, to pay a bet. They belong to him. That’s what they’re asking him about.”

Zimmerman, his pale eyes fastened on her, said nothing.
All at once, apparently, he was not even breathing; he might have been offering a display of suspended animation.

Sylvia demanded sharply, “Well? Why are you staring at me?”

“I beg your pardon.” But his eyes didn’t move. “You say Dol found the gloves? Where?”

“In the garden. Hid in a watermelon.”

“You mean the vegetable garden?”

“Yes.”

“But—” Zimmerman stopped. At length he sighed, as if he had been needing air for minutes. “Then they found them. And they belong to Martin. What good does that do them?”

“I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t do Martin any good, or me, or anyone else.”

“What does Martin say?”

“I don’t know. What can he say? That he doesn’t know how they got there. What else could he say?”

“Nothing.” Zimmerman slowly nodded his head. “I see. That was the bomb they had to explode for him—a watermelon with his gloves in it. He should not have had gloves. But he had.” He frowned and shut his eyes as if the light hurt them, then after a moment opened them again to look at her. He said abruptly, “Anyway, that has no bearing on the proposal I want to make. Certainly I am not making it in the orthodox manner, and I suppose I strike you as pretty clumsy, but you must consider the circumstances. I want to ask you to marry me.”

He sat with his pale eyes on her. Sylvia was simultaneously convinced of three things: that her ears had gone back on her, that the man’s brain had cracked clear through at last, and that everything stored up for her, tragic and grotesque and merely comical, had decided to happen all at once. All she did was ask weakly, “What?”

“Naturally,” Zimmerman said, “you’re astonished. I don’t flatter myself that the idea has ever occurred to you. Why should it? But I have some considerations to advance that probably haven’t occurred to you either. I know that young as you are, your mind is not entirely frivolous. Our marriage would promise advantages, not only to us but also to society, which could not be expected from any other
probable choice you would make. I want to tell you about them, but before I do that I must clear your mind to make room for them. Otherwise you won’t even hear them. The obstacles must be removed first.”

He sounded, incredibly, completely serious, earnest, and sane. Sylvia, stupefied, could only gape. He went on:

“The most obvious obstacle is your engagement with Martin. I cannot remove that; I can only tell you that I disregard it and I think you should. He is my closest friend, but there are three considerations which with me rise superior to friendship. First, you—I’ll explain that later. Second, the egoistic satisfaction I get from my work. Third, the object of my work, to lift our race from the animal mire it is sunk in. So I ask you to disregard Martin. I offer a comment to help you: the phenomenon called, much too vaguely, love, has many different factors and manifestations. The sexual factor is easily transferable, as has been proven millions of times, unless it has become romantically or neurotically fixed. With you it has not. Aside from that, your attachment to Martin is predominantly the functioning of your maternal instinct—I dislike these silly romantic terms, but I don’t want to be technical—and that can be just as well satisfied with a lapdog, and much better satisfied with a child of your own, or even an adopted one. It is bad for Martin too; a grown man shouldn’t be mothered, it keeps him flabby. Your maternal instinct is obviously strong; that’s why you picked a man like Martin, a ready object for it with his faulty adjustment to an adult world, which you intuitively and unconsciously felt.”

Sylvia was enough recovered from her stupefaction to have found words, but she did not interrupt. She stirred on the rock, and listened; surely not because there was a drop of sense in what she heard.…

“So we’ll disregard Martin. There are many minor obstacles, as of course there are to any human proposal, but I think only one other major one, namely, that I am utterly unqualified as an object of romantic devotion. Look at me. My nostrils are equine, my physique is totally undistinguished, my eyes were faded at birth. I don’t know what the devil is wrong with my hair; possibly something could be done with it; I’ve never had time to try. But I am not
asking for romantic devotion. If you decide to accept my proposal, and it develops later that you have a capacity for romantic devotion which requires exercise, and you find an object for it, we can work that out when the time comes. It is just possible that by that time I can fill the bill. Of course, looking at me now, that strikes you as preposterous, but the chronicle of romantic attachments through the centuries, judging from portraits and photographs and other evidence, is an almost continuous series of miracles.