Read Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 Online
Authors: Murder by the Book
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Private Investigators - New York (State) - New York, #Fiction, #Mystery Fiction, #Wolfe; Nero (Fictitious Character), #General
Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (22 page)
I put the folder back and locked the cabinet. “Am I going to bed now?”
“No.”
“I thought not. What, sit here and wait? Even if they find a corpse they might not get around to us until
morning. It would take a taxi five minutes to go cross-town to Thirty-sixth and Lexington. The fare would be fifty cents including tip. If it’s a blank I can walk home. Do I go?”
“Yes.”
I went to the hall for my hat and coat, let myself out, and walked a block north. At Tenth Avenue I flagged a passing taxi, got in, and gave the driver the address.
A radio car was double-parked in front of One-forty-five East Thirty-sixth, with no one in it. I entered the building. On the list of names on the wall of the vestibule, Corrigan was at the top, fifth. I went on in. It was an old private dwelling done over into apartments, with a self-service elevator. The elevator was there at that floor. From somewhere below came a faint sound of voices, but there was no one in sight. I opened the elevator door, entered, pushed the five button, and was lifted. When it stopped I emerged. There was only one door, at the right of the small hall, and standing at it was a cop.
“Who are you?” he asked, not sociably.
“Archie Goodwin. I work for Nero Wolfe.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to go to bed. Before I can do so I have to find out if we got imposed on. We reported this. The guy that lives here, so he said, phoned us and told us to listen, and then a gun went off or a good imitation of one. He didn’t hang up but he was gone, and we phoned Homicide. We don’t know if the phone call was from here, and I came to see.”
“Why Homicide?”
“This might be connected with a case they’re on. We have friends there—sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, you know how it is. Is your colleague inside?”
“No. The door’s locked. He went down for the superintendent. What did the guy say on the phone?”
“He just said we ought to hear something and told us to listen, and bang. May I put my ear to the door?”
“What for?”
“To listen to the radio.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of you. Full of gags. Should I laugh?”
“No gags tonight, I’m too sleepy. We heard the radio on the phone, and I thought I’d check. If you don’t mind?”
“Don’t touch the door or the knob.”
“I won’t.”
He stepped aside, and I got my ear close to the angle of the door and the jamb. Ten seconds was enough. As I listened there was another sound in the hall, the elevator starting down.
I moved away. “Right. Bill Stern. WNBC.”
“It was Bill Stern on the phone?”
“No, but it was WNBC. ‘The Life of Riley.’ Bill Stern goes on at ten-thirty.”
“The Yankees look good, don’t they?”
I’m a Giant fan, but I wanted to get inside and had to be tactful. So I said, “They sure do. I hope Mantle comes through.”
He did too, but he was skeptical. He thought these wonder boys seldom live up to their billing. He thought various other things, and was telling about them when the elevator returned and its door opened, and we had company. One was his colleague and the other was a little runt with very few teeth and a limp, wearing an old overcoat for a dressing gown. The cop, surprised at sight of me, asked his brother, “Who’s this, not precinct?”
“No. Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin.”
“Oh, him. How come?”
“Save it. Hey, get away from that door! Gimme that key!”
The runt surrendered it and backed off. The cop in command inserted the key and turned it, used his handkerchief to turn the knob, which made me suppress a snicker, pushed the door, and entered, with his colleague at his heels. I was right behind. We were in a narrow hall with a door at either end and one in the middle. The one at the right was open, and the cop headed for that and on through. Two steps inside he stopped, so I just made the sill.
It was a fairly big living room, furnished comfortably by a man for a man. That was merely the verdict of one sweeping glance, for any real survey of the furniture, if required, would have to wait. On a table at the far side, between two windows, was the phone, with the receiver off, lying on the floor. Also on the floor, six inches from the receiver, was the head of James A. Corrigan, with the rest of him stretched out toward a window. A third item on the floor, a couple of feet from Corrigan’s hip, was a gun—from where I stood I would have said a Marley .32. The lights were on. Also on was a radio at the end of the table, with Bill Stern telling what he thought of the basketball stink. There was a big dark spot, nearly black at that distance, on Corrigan’s right temple.
The cop crossed to him and squatted. In ten seconds, which wasn’t long enough, he got upright and spoke. “DOA.” There seemed to be a little shake in his voice, and he raised it. “We can’t use this phone. Go down and call in. Don’t break your neck.”
The colleague went. The cop kept his voice up. “Can you see him from there, Goodwin? Come closer, but keep your hands off.”
I approached. “That’s him. The guy that phoned. James. A. Corrigan.”
“Then you heard him shoot himself.”
“I guess I did.” I put one hand on my belly and the other on my throat. “I didn’t get any sleep last night and I’m feeling sick. I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“I won’t.”
I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it if the radio hadn’t been going. It was plenty loud enough to cover my toe steps through the outer door, which was standing open, and in the hall to the door to the stairs. Descending the four flights, I listened a moment behind the door to the ground-floor hall, heard nothing, opened it, and passed through. The runt was standing by the elevator door, looking scared. He said nothing, and neither did I, as I crossed to the entrance. Outside I turned right, walked the half short block to Lexington Avenue and stopped a taxi, and in seven minutes was climbing out in front of Wolfe’s house.
When I entered the office I had to grin. Wolfe’s current book was lying on his desk, and he was fussing with the germination slips. It was comical. He had been reading the book, and, when the sound came of me opening the front door, he had hastily ditched the book and got busy with the germination slips, just to show me how difficult things were for him because I hadn’t made the entries from the slips on the permanent record cards. It was so childish I couldn’t help grinning.
“May I interrupt?” I asked politely.
He looked up. “Since you’re back so soon I assume you found nothing of interest.”
“Sometimes you assume wrong. I’m back so soon because a flock of scientists would be coming and I
might have been kept all night. I saw Corrigan. Dead. Bullet through his temple.”
He let the slips in his hand drop to the desk. “Please report.”
I did so, in full, including even the cop’s thoughts about the Yankees. Wolfe was scowling some when I started and a lot more by the time I finished. He asked a few questions, sat a while tapping with a forefinger on the arm of his chair, and suddenly blurted at me, “Was the man a nincompoop?”
“Who, the cop?”
“No. Mr. Corrigan.”
I lifted my shoulders and dropped them. “In California he wasn’t exactly brilliant, but I wouldn’t say a nincompoop. Why?”
“It’s absurd. Totally. If you had stayed there you might have got something that would give some light.”
“If I had stayed there I would have been corralled in a corner for an hour or so until someone decided to start in on me.”
He nodded grudgingly. “I suppose so.” He looked up at the clock and put his thumbs at the edge of his desk to shove his chair back. “Confound it. An exasperating piece of nonsense to go to bed on.”
“Yeah. Especially knowing that around midnight or later we’ll get either a ring or a personal appearance.”
But we didn’t. I slept like a log for nine hours.
S
aturday morning I never did finish the newspaper accounts of the violent death of James A. Corrigan, the prominent attorney. Phone calls interrupted my breakfast four times. One was from Lon Cohen of the
Gazette
, wanting an interview with Wolfe about the call he had got from Corrigan, and two were from other journalists, wanting the same, I stalled them. The fourth was from Mrs. Abrams. She had read the morning paper and wanted to know if the Mr. Corrigan who had shot himself was the man who had killed her Rachel, though she didn’t put it as direct as that. I stalled her too.
My prolonged breakfast was ruining Fritz’s schedule, so when the morning mail came I took my second cup of coffee to the office. I flipped through the envelopes, tossed all but one on my desk, glanced at the clock and saw 8:55. Wolfe invariably started for the plant rooms at nine sharp. I went and ran up the flight of stairs to his room and knocked, entered without waiting for an invitation, and announced, “Here it is. The firm’s envelope. Postmarked Grand Central Station yesterday, twelve midnight. It’s fat.”
“Open it.” He was standing, dressed, ready to leave.
I did so and removed the contents. “Typewritten, single-spaced, dated yesterday, headed at the top ‘To Nero Wolfe.’ Nine pages. Unsigned.”
“Read it.”
“Aloud?”
“No. It’s nine o’clock. You can ring me or come up if necessary.”
“Nuts. This is just swagger.”
“It is not. A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.” He strode from the room.
My eye went to the opening sentence.
I have decided to write this but not sign it. I think I want to write it mainly for its cathartic value, but my motives are confused. The events of the past year have made me unsure about everything. It may be that deep in me much is left of the deep regard for truth and justice that I acquired in my youth, through both religious and secular teaching, and that accounts for my feeling that I must write this. Whatever the motive—
The phone rang downstairs. Wolfe’s extension wasn’t on, so I had to go down to get it. It was Sergeant Purley Stebbins. Purley would always just as soon talk to me as Wolfe, and maybe rather. He’s not dumb by any means, and he has never forgotten the prize boner that Wolfe bluffed him into on the Longren case.
He was brusque but not thorny. He said they wanted to know firsthand about two things, Corrigan’s phone call the night before, and my performance in California, especially my contacts with Corrigan. When I told him I would be glad to oblige and come down, he said that wouldn’t be necessary because Inspector Cramer wanted to see Wolfe and would drop in at eleven or shortly
after. I said that as far as I knew we would let him in, and Purley hung up without saying good-by.
I sat at my desk and read:
Whatever the motive may be, I am going to write it and then decide whether to mail it or destroy it.
Even if I mail it I will not sign it because I do not want to give it legal validity. You will of course show it to the police, but without my signature it will certainly not be released for publication as coming from me. Since the context will clearly identify me by inference, this may seem pointless, but it will serve all desired purposes, whatever my motive may be, without my signature, and those purposes are moral and not legal.
I will try not to dwell at length on my motives. To me they are of more concern than the events themselves, but to you and others it is the events that matter. All you will care about is the factual statement that I wrote the anonymous letter to the court giving information about O’Malley’s bribery of a juror, but I want to add that my motive was mixed. I will not deny that moving up to the position of senior partner, with increased power and authority and income, was a factor, but so was my concern for the future of the firm. To have as our senior partner a man who was capable of jury-bribing was not only undesirable but extremely dangerous. You will ask why I didn’t merely confront O’Malley with it and demand that he get out. On account of the source and nature of my information, which I won’t go into, I did not have conclusive proof, and the relations among the members of the firm would have made the outcome doubtful. Anyway, I did write the informing letter to the court.
Starting a habit, I said to myself, of not signing things. I resumed.
O’Malley was disbarred. That was of course a blow to the firm, but not a fatal one. I became senior partner, and Kustin and Briggs were admitted to membership. As the months passed we recovered lost ground. In the late summer and fall of last year our income was higher than it had ever been, partly on account of Kustin’s remarkable performance as a trial lawyer, but I think my leadership was equally responsible. Then, on Monday, December 4, a date I would never forget if I were going to be alive to remember and forget, I returned to the office in the evening to do some work and had occasion to go to Dykes’s desk to get a document. It wasn’t where I expected to find it and I went through the drawers. In one of them was a brown fiber portfolio and I looked inside. The document wasn’t there. It contained a stack of neatly assembled sheets of paper. The top sheet, typed like a title page, said “Put Not Your Trust, A Modern Novel of a Lawyer’s Frailty, by Baird Archer.” Through curiosity I looked at the next sheet. It began the text, and the first sentence read, “It is not true that all lawyers are cutthroats.” I read on a little and then sat in Dykes’s chair and read more.
It is still almost incredible to me that Dykes could have been such a fool. Through his connection with our office he knew something of the libel law, and yet he wrote that and offered it for publication. Of course it is true that lawyers themselves will do incredible things when their vanity is involved, as O’Malley did when he bribed a juror, and Dykes probably thought that the use of an assumed name would somehow protect him.
The novel was substantially an account of the activities and relationships of our firm. The names were different and most of the scenes and circumstances were invented, but it was unmistakably our firm. It was so badly written that I suppose it would have bored a casual reader, but it did not bore me. It told of
O’Malley’s bribery of a juror (I use our names instead of those Dykes used) and of my learning of it and sending an anonymous letter to the court, and of O’Malley’s disbarment. He had invented an ending. In the novel O’Malley took to drink and died in the alcoholic ward at Bellevue, and I went to see him on his deathbed, and he pointed at me and screamed, “Put not your trust!” In one way the novel was ludicrous. Its ending assumed that O’Malley knew I had informed on him, but there was no adequate explanation of how he had found out.
I took the manuscript home with me. If I had found it by accident and read it, someone else might, and I couldn’t risk it. After I got home I realized that I would be unable to sleep, and I went out again and took a taxi to Sullivan Street, where Dykes lived. I got him out of bed and told him I had found the manuscript and read it. In my agitation I did something incredible too. I took it for granted that he knew I had informed on O’Malley and asked how he had found out. I should have assumed that he had invented that.
But it didn’t matter. He really had found out. I had not written the informing letter to the court on my typewriter here at my apartment, on which I am writing this. I had taken the precaution of writing it on a machine at the Travelers Club. There wasn’t more than one chance in a billion of any risk in that, but that one had been enough. In connection with our defense of O’Malley on the bribery charge, we had photostats of all the exhibits, including the anonymous letter to the court. Dykes had made himself a fairly good expert on documents, and as a matter of routine he inspected the photostat of the anonymous letter. He noticed that the “t” was out of line, crowding the letter to its right, and slanted a little, and he remembered that he had observed the same defect in some other document. And he found it. He found it in a typed memorandum to him which I had typed two
months previously on that same machine at the Travelers Club. I had forgotten about it, and even if I had remembered it I would probably have considered the risk negligible. But with that hint to start him, Dykes had compared the photostat with the memorandum under a glass and established that the two had been typed on the same machine. Of course that was not conclusive proof that I had typed and sent the letter to the court, but it convinced Dykes.
It bowled him over that I had found and read the manuscript. He swore that he had had no intention or desire to expose me, and when I insisted that he must have told someone, possibly O’Malley himself, he swore that he hadn’t, and I believed him. He had the carbon of the manuscript there in his room. The original had been returned to him by a firm of publishers, Scholl and Hanna, to whom he had submitted it, and he had put it temporarily in his desk at the office, with the intention of putting it in the hands of a literary agent. The longhand manuscript, written by him in longhand, from which the typist had worked, was also there in his room. He turned both the carbon copy and the longhand script over to me, and I took them home when I went and destroyed them. I also destroyed the original of the typed script two days later, after I had reread it.
I felt that I was fairly safe from exposure. I had of course done nothing actionable, but if it became known that I had informed on my partner in an anonymous letter the effect on my career and reputation would have been disastrous. It was not so much anything O’Malley himself could or might do as the attitude of others, particularly two of my present partners and certain other associates. Actually I would have been a ruined man. But I felt fairly safe. If Dykes was telling the truth, and I believed he was, all copies of the manuscript had been destroyed. He gave me the most solemn assurances that he would never speak of the
matter to anyone, but my chief reliance was in the fact that it was to his own self-interest to keep silent. His own future depended on the future welfare of the firm, and if he spoke the firm would certainly be disrupted.
I saw Dykes several times at his room in the evening, and on one of those occasions I did a foolish and thoughtless thing, though at the time it seemed of no consequence. No, that’s wrong—this occasion was not at his room but at the office after hours. I had taken from the file the letter of resignation which he had written months previously, and it was on my desk. I asked him, for no special reason that I remember, if the title “Put Not Your Trust” was from Shakespeare, and he said no, that it was in the 3rd verse of the 146th Psalm, and I scribbled it in a corner of his letter of resignation, “Ps 146-3.”