Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 02 (15 page)

“Good. Then there is no need—”

She snapped at him suddenly and violently. “You’re a fat fool!”

Wolfe shook his head. “Fat visibly, though I prefer Gargantuan. A fool only in the broader sense, as a common characteristic of the race. It was not magnanimous of you, Mrs. Chapin, to blurt my corpulence at me, since I had spoken of your fatuity only in general terms and had refrained from demonstrating it. I’ll do that now.” He moved a finger to indicate the knife which still lay on the newspaper on the desk. “Archie, will you please clean that homely weapon.”

I didn’t know, I thought maybe he was bluffing her. I picked up the knife and stood there with it, looking from her to him. “Wash off the evidence?”

“If you please.”

I took the knife to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, rubbed the blood off with a piece of gauze, and wiped it. Through the open door I couldn’t hear any talking. I went back.

“Now,” Wolfe instructed me, “grip the handle firmly in your right hand. Come towards the desk, so Mrs. Chapin can see you better; turn your back. So. Elevate your arm and pull the knife across your neck; kindly be sure to use the back of the blade, not to carry the demonstration too far. You noted the length and the position of the cuts on Mrs. Chapin? Duplicate them on yourself.—Yes. Yes, quite good. A little higher for that one. Another, somewhat lower. Confound you, be careful. That will do.—You see, Mrs. Chapin? He did it quite neatly, don’t you think? I am not insulting your intelligence by hinting that you expected us to think the wounds could not have been self-inflicted in the position you chose for them. More likely, you selected it purely as a matter of precaution, knowing that the front, the neighborhood of the anterior jugular …”

He stopped, because he had no one to talk to except me. When I turned around after my demonstration she was already getting up from her chair, holding her head stiff and a clamp on her mouth. Without a word, without bothering to make any passes at him with her little gray glass eyes, she just got up and went; and he paid no attention, he went on with his speech until she had opened the office door and was through it. I noticed she was leaving her knife, but thought we might as well have it in our collection of odds and ends. Then all of a sudden I jumped for the hall.

“Hey, lady, wait a minute! Your fur!”

I got it from Fritz and caught her at the front door and put it around her. Pitney Scott got out of his cab and came over to help her down the stoop, and I went back in.

Wolfe was glancing through a letter from Hoehn and Company that had come in the morning mail. When he had finished he put it under a paperweight—a piece of petrified wood that had once been used to bust a guy’s skull—and said:

“The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself. The woman—”

He was just trying to keep me from annoying him about business. I cut in. “Yeah. I know. The woman was a witch you had caught riding around in the curl of a pig’s tail. In spite of all that, it’s time for me to brush up a little on this case we’ve got. You can give me a shove by explaining in long words how you knew Dora Chapin did her own manicuring.”

Wolfe shook his head. “That would not be a shove, Archie; it would be a laborious and sustained propulsion. I shall not undertake it. I remind you merely: I have read all of Paul Chapin’s novels. In two of them Dora Chapin is a character. He of course appears in all. The woman who married Dr. Burton, Paul Chapin’s unattainable, seems to be in four out of five; I cannot discover her in the latest one. Read the books, and I shall be more inclined to discuss the conclusions they have led me to. But even then, of course, I would not attempt to place plain to your eyes the sights my own have discerned. God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.”

Fritz came to the door and said lunch was ready.

S
ometimes I thought it was a wonder Wolfe and I got on together at all. The differences between us, some of them, showed up plainer at the table than anywhere else. He was a taster and I was a swallower. Not that I didn’t know good from bad; after seven years of education from Fritz’s cooking I could even tell, usually, superlative from excellent. But the fact remained that what chiefly attracted Wolfe about food in his pharynx was the affair it was having with his taste buds, whereas with me the important point was that it was bound for my belly. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that Wolfe was never disconcerted by the problem of what to do with it when he was through tasting it. He could put it away. I have seen him, during a relapse, dispose completely of a ten-pound goose between eight o’clock and midnight, while I was in a corner with ham sandwiches and milk hoping he would choke. At those times he always ate in the kitchen.

It was the same in business, when we were on a case. A thousand times I’ve wanted to kick him, watching him progress leisurely to the elevator on his way to monkey with the plants upstairs, or read a
book tasting each phrase, or discuss with Fritz the best storage place for dry herbs, when I was running around barking my head off and expecting him to tell me where the right hole was. I admit he was a great man. When he called himself a genius he had a right to mean it whether he did or not. I admit that he never lost us a bet by his piddling around. But since I’m only human, I couldn’t keep myself from wanting to kick him just because he was a genius. I came awful close to it sometimes, when he said things like, “Patience, Archie; if you eat the apple before it’s ripe your only reward is a bellyache.”

Well, this Wednesday afternoon, after lunch, I was sore. He went indifferent on me; he even went contrary. He wouldn’t cable the guy in Rome to get into converse with Santini; he said it was futile and expected me to take his word for it. He wouldn’t help me concoct a loop we could use to drag Leopold Elkus into the office; according to him, that was futile too. He kept trying to read in a book while I was after him. He said there were only two men in the case whom he felt any inclination to talk to: Andrew Hibbard and Paul Chapin; and he wasn’t ready yet for Chapin and he didn’t know where Hibbard was, or whether he was alive or dead. I knew Saul Panzer was going to the morgue every morning and afternoon to look over the stiffs, but I didn’t know what else he was doing. I also knew that Wolfe had talked with Inspector Cramer on the phone that morning, but that was nothing to get excited about; Cramer had shot his bolt a week ago at Paul Chapin and all that was keeping him awake was the routine of breathing.

Saul had phoned around noon and Wolfe had talked to him from the kitchen while I was out with Pitney Scott. A little after two Fred Durkin phoned. He said
that Paul Chapin had been to the barber and a drugstore, and that the town dick and the guy in the brown cap and pink necktie were still on deck, and he was thinking of forming a club. Wolfe went on reading. About a quarter to three Orrie Cather called up and said he had got hold of something he wanted to show us and could he come on up with it; he was at the Fourteenth Street subway station. I told him yes. Then, just before Orrie arrived, a call came that made Wolfe put down his book. It was from Farrell the architect, and Wolfe talked to him. He said he had had a nice lunch with Mr. Oglethrope, and he had had a tough argument but had finally persuaded him. He was phoning from the publisher’s office. Paul Chapin had on several occasions found it convenient to make use of a typewriter there, but there was some disagreement as to which one or ones, so he was going to take samples from a dozen of them. Wolfe told him to be sure that the factory number of the machine appeared on each sample.

I said, after we hung up, “Okay, that one’s turning brown. But even if you hang the warnings on him, you’ve just started. The Harrison demise is out, you’ll never tie that up. And I’m telling you that the same goes for Dreyer, unless you get Leopold Elkus down here and perform an operation on him. You’ve got to find a hole in his story and open it up, or we’ve licked. What the hell are we waiting for? It’s all right for you, you can keep occupied, you’ve got a book to read—what the devil is it, anyhow?”

I got up to take a squint at it, a dark gray cover stamped in gold:
The Chasm of the Mind
, by Andrew Hibbard. I grunted. “Huh, maybe that’s where he is, maybe he fell in.”

“Long ago.” Wolfe sighed. “Poor Hibbard, he
couldn’t exclude his poetic tendencies even from his title. Any more than Chapin can exclude his savagery from his plots.”

I dropped back into my chair. “Listen, boss.” There was nothing he hated more than being called boss. “I’m beginning to catch on. I suppose Dr. Burton has written books too, and Byron, and maybe Dreyer, and of course Mike Ayers. I’ll take the roadster and drive out to Pike County for a little duck hunting, and when you get caught up with your reading just wire me care of Cleve Sturgis and I’ll mosey back and we’ll tackle this murder case. And take it easy, take your time; if you eat the apple after it is too ripe you’ll get ptomaine poisoning or erysipelas or something, at least I hope to God you will.” I was glaring at him, with no result except to make me feel like a sap, because he merely shut his eyes so as not to see me. I got up from my chair and glared anyhow. “Damn it, all I’m asking for is just a little halfway co-operation! One little lousy cablegram to that Roman wop! I ask you, should I have to work myself into turmoil—now what the hell do
you
want?”

The last was for Fritz. He had appeared in the door. He was frowning, because he never liked to hear me yell at Wolfe, and I frowned back at him. Then I saw someone standing behind him and I let the frown go and said:

“Come on in, Orrie. What’s the loot?” I turned to Wolfe and smoothed my voice out and opened up the respect: “He phoned a while ago and said he had got hold of something he wanted to show us. I told you, but you were engrossed in your book.”

Orrie Cather had a bundle about the size of a small suitcase, wrapped in brown paper and tied with heavy string.

I said, “I hope it’s books.”

He shook his head. “It’s not heavy enough for books.” He set it down on the desk and looked around, and I shoved up a chair for him.

“What is it?”

“Search me. I brought it here to open it. It may be just a lot of nothing at all, but I had a hunch.”

I got out my pocketknife, but Wolfe shook his head. He said to Orrie, “Go on.”

Orrie grinned. “Well, as I say, it may be a lot of nothing at all, but I’d got so fed up after a day and a half finding out nothing whatever about that cripple except where he buys his groceries and how often he gets his shoes shined, that when something came along that looked like it might be a little break I guess I got excited. I’ve just been following your instructions—”

“Yes. Let us arrive at the package.”

“Right. This morning I dropped in at the Greenwich Bookshop. I got talking with the guy, and I said I supposed he had Paul Chapin’s books in his circulating library, and he said sure, and I said I might like to get one, and he handed me one and I looked it over—”

I couldn’t help it; I snorted and stopped him. Orrie looked surprised, and Wolfe moved his eyes at me. I sat down.

“Then I said Chapin must be an interesting guy and had he ever seen him, and he said sure, Chapin lived in that neighborhood and bought books there and came in pretty often. He showed me a photograph of Chapin, autographed, on the wall with some others. A woman with black hair was sitting at a desk in the back of the shop, and she called out to the guy that that reminded her, Mr. Chapin never had come for the package he had left there a couple of weeks ago, and
with Christmas stuff coming in the package was in the way, and hadn’t he better phone Mr. Chapin to send for it. The guy said maybe he would a little later, it was too early for Chapin to be up. I deposited my dollar and got my book and went down the street to a lunch counter and sat down with a cup of coffee to think.”

Wolfe nodded sympathetically. Orrie looked at him suspiciously and went on: “I figured it this way. Two weeks ago was about the time the cops were warming up on Chapin. What if he got hep they would pull a search on him, and he had something in his place he didn’t want them to see? There were a lot of things he might do, and one of them was to wrap it up and take it to his friends at the bookshop and ask them to keep it for him. It would be about as safe there as anywhere. Anyhow, I decided I liked Chapin well enough to do him the favor of taking a look at his package for him. I got an envelope and a piece of paper from a stationery store and went to a real estate office and bummed the use of a typewriter. I wrote a nice note to the bookshop. I had used my eyes on Chapin’s signature on the autographed photograph and got it pretty good. But then I was afraid to send it, so soon after I’d been there and heard the package mentioned. I decided to wait until afternoon. So a while ago I got a boy and sent him to the bookshop with the note, and I’m telling you it worked and they gave it to him.” Orrie nodded his head at the desk. “That’s it.”

I got up and got out my knife again. Wolfe said, “No. Untie it.” I started to work at the knot, which was a lulu. Orrie wiped his hand across his forehead and said, “By God, if it’s just fishing tackle or electric light bulbs or something, you’ll have to give me a drink. This is the only break I’ve had.”

I said, “Among other things, there’s just a chance we might find a set of typewriter type-bars. Or love-letters from Mrs. Loring A. Burton, huh?— There’s nothing doing on this knot. He didn’t want me to untie it, or anybody else. Even if I do get it, I could never tie it back again the same.” I picked up my knife again, and looked at Wolfe. He nodded, and I slashed the string.