Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 (10 page)

Silence. Then: “What makes you think a word from me would help?”

“You’re Mrs. Robilotti’s nephew. And I heard somebody say, I forget who, that she has sent you there on errands.”

Another silence. “What are you after? What do you want to talk about?”

“I’m just curious about something. Some questions the cops have asked me because I was there last night, the mess you got me into, have made me curious.”

“What questions?”

“That’s a long story. Also complicated. Just say I’m nosy by nature, that’s why I’m in the detective business. Maybe I’m trying to scare up a client. Anyway, I’m not asking you to attend a death by poisoning, as you did me, though you didn’t know it. I just want you to make a phone call.”

“I can’t, Archie.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because I’m not in a position to. It wouldn’t be—It might look as if—I mean I just can’t do it.”

“Okay, forget it. I’ll have to feed some other curiosity
—I’ve got plenty. For instance, my curiosity about why you asked me to fill in for you because you had such a cold you could hardly talk when you didn’t have a cold—at least not the kind you tried to fake. I haven’t told the cops about that, your faking the cold, so I guess I’d better do that and ask them to ask you why. I’m curious.”

“You’re crazy. I did have a cold. I wasn’t faking.”

“Nuts. Take care of yourself. I’ll be seeing you, or the cops will.”

Silence, a short one. “Don’t hang up, Archie.”

“Why not? Make an offer.”

“I want to talk this over. I want to see you, but I don’t want to leave here because I’m expecting a phone call. Maybe you could come here?”

“Where is here?”

“My apartment. Eighty-seven Bowdoin Street, in the Village. It’s two blocks south—”

“I know where it is. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Take some aspirin.”

When I had hung up, Fritz, who was at the sink, turned to say, “As I thought, Archie. I knew there would be a client, since you were there.”

I told him I’d have to think that over to decide how to take it, and went to the office to tell the conference it would have to manage without me for a while.

T
here’s no telling what 87 Bowdoin Street had been like a few years back—or rather, there is, if you know the neighborhood—but someone had spent some dough on it, and it wasn’t at all bad when you got inside. The tile floor was a nice dark green, the walls were a lighter green but the same tone, and the frame of the entrance for the do-it-yourself elevator was outlined with a plain wide strip of dull aluminum. Having been instructed over the intercom in the vestibule, I entered the elevator and pushed the button marked 5.

When I emerged on the fifth floor Byne was there to greet me and ushered me in. After taking my hat and coat he motioned me through a doorway, and I found myself in a room that I would have been perfectly willing to move to when the day came that Wolfe fired me or I quit, with perhaps a few minor changes. The rugs and chairs were the kind I like, and the lights were okay, and there was no fireplace. I hate fireplaces. When Byne had got me in a chair and asked if I would like a drink, and I had declined with thanks, he stood facing me. He was tall and lanky and
loose-jointed, with not much covering for his face bones except skin.

“That was a hell of a mess I got you into,” he said. “I’m damn sorry.”

“Don’t mention it,” I told him. “I admit I wondered a little why you picked me. If you want some free advice, free but good, next time you want to cook up a reason for skipping something, don’t overdo it. If you make it a cold, not that kind of a cold, just a plain everyday virus.”

He turned a chair around and sat. “Apparently you’ve convinced yourself that was a fake.”

“Sure I have, but my convincing myself doesn’t prove anything. The proof would have to be got, and of course it could be if it mattered enough—items like people you saw or talked to Monday evening, or phoned to yesterday or they phoned you, and whoever keeps this place so nice and clean, if she was here yesterday—things like that. That would be for the cops. If I needed any proof personally, I got it when as soon as I mentioned that the cold was a fake you had to see me right away. So why don’t we just file that?”

“You said you haven’t told the cops.”

“Right. It was merely a conclusion I had formed.”

“Have you told anyone else? My aunt?”

“No. Certainly not her. I was doing you a favor, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, and I appreciate it. You know that, Archie, I appreciate it.”

“Good. We all like to be appreciated. I would appreciate knowing what it is you want to talk over.”

“Well.” He clasped his hands behind his head, showing how casual it was, just a pair of pals chatting
free and easy. “To tell the truth, I’m in a mess too. Or I will be if you’d like to see me squirm. Would you like to see me squirm?”

“I might if you’re a good squirmer. How do I go about it?”

“All you have to do is spill it about my faking a cold. No matter who you spill it to it will get to my aunt, and there I am.” He unclasped his hands and leaned forward. “Here’s how it was. I’ve gone to those damn annual dinners on my uncle’s birthday the last three years and I was fed up, and when my aunt asked me again I tried to beg off, but she insisted, and there are reasons why I couldn’t refuse. But Monday night I played poker all night, and yesterday morning I was fuzzy and couldn’t face it. The question was who to tap. For that affair it can’t be just anybody. The first two candidates I picked were out of town, and the next three all had dates. Then I thought of you. I knew you could handle yourself in any situation, and you had met my aunt. So I called you, and you were big-hearted enough to say yes.”

He sat back. “That’s how it was. Then this morning comes the news of what happened. I said I was sorry I got you into it, and I am, I’m damned sorry, but frankly, I’m damned glad I wasn’t there. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience, and I’m just selfish enough to be glad I missed it. You’ll understand that.”

“Sure. Congratulations. I didn’t enjoy it much myself.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t. So that’s what I wanted, to explain how it was, so you’d see it wouldn’t help matters any for anyone to know about my faking a cold. It certainly wouldn’t help me, because it would get to
my aunt sooner or later, and you know how she’d be about a thing like that. She’d be sore as hell.”

I nodded. “I don’t doubt it. Then it’s an ideal situation. You want something from me, and I want something from you. Perfect. We’ll swap. I don’t broadcast about the phony cold, and you get me an audience at Grantham House. What’s that woman’s name? Irving?”

“Irwin. Blanche Irwin.” He scratched the side of his neck with a forefinger. “You want to swap, huh?”

“I do. What could be fairer?”

“It’s fair enough,” he conceded. “But I told you on the phone I’m not in a position to do that.”

“Yeah, but then I was asking a favor. Now I’m making a deal.”

His neck itched again. “I might stretch a point. I might, if I knew what you want with her. What’s the idea?”

“Greed. Desire for dough. I’ve been offered five hundred dollars for an eye-witness story on last night, and I want to decorate it with some background. Don’t tell Mrs. Irwin that, though. She’s probably down on journalists by now. Just tell her I’m your friend and a good loyal citizen and have only been in jail five times.”

He laughed. “That’ll do it all right. Wait till you see her.” He sobered. “So that’s it. It’s a funny world, Archie. A girl gets herself in a fix she sees only one way out of, to kill herself, and you’re there to see her do it just because I had had all I wanted of those affairs, and here you’re going to collect five hundred dollars just because you were there. It’s a funny world. So I didn’t do you such a bad turn after all.”

I had to admit that was one way of looking at it.
He said he felt like saluting the funny world with a drink, and wouldn’t I join him, and I said I’d be glad to. When he had gone and brought the requirements, a scotch and water for me and bourbon on the rocks for him, and we had performed the salute, he got at the phone and made a person-to-person call to Mrs. Irwin at Grantham House. Apparently there was nothing at all wrong with his position; he merely told her he would appreciate it if she would see a friend of his, and that was all there was to it. She said morning would be better than afternoon. After he hung up we discussed the funny world while finishing the drinks, and when I left one more step had been taken toward the brotherhood of man.

Back home, the conference was over, the trio had gone, and Wolfe was at his desk with his current book, one he had said I must read,
World Peace Through World Law
, by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn. He finished a paragraph, lowered it, and told me to enter expense advances to Saul and Fred and Orrie, two hundred dollars each. I went to the safe for the book and made the entries, returned the book, locked the safe, and asked him if I needed to know anything about their assignments. He said that could wait, meaning that he wanted to get on with his reading, and asked about mine. I told him it was all set, that he wouldn’t see me in the morning because I would be leaving for Grantham House before nine.

“I now call Austin Byne ‘Dinky,’” I told him. “I suppose because he’s an inch over six feet, but I didn’t ask. I should report that he balked and I had to apply a little pressure. When he phoned yesterday he tried to sound as if his tubes were clogged, but he boggled it. He had no cold. He now says that he had been to
three of those affairs and had had enough, and he rang me only after he had tried five others and they weren’t available. So we made a deal. He gets me in at Grantham House, and I won’t tell his aunt on him. He seems to feel that his aunt might bite.”

Wolfe grunted. “Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman. Is he guileless?”

“I would reserve it. He is not a dope. He might be capable of knowing that someone was going to kill Faith Usher so that it would pass for suicide, and he wanted somebody there alert and brainy and observant to spot it, so he got me, and he is now counting on me, with your help, to nail him. Or her. Or he may be on the level and merely pitiable.”

“You and he have not been familiar?”

“No, sir. Just acquaintances. I have only seen him at parties.”

“Then his selecting you is suggestive
per se.
”

“Certainly. That’s why I took the trouble to go to see him. To observe. There were other ways of getting to Mrs. Irwin of Grantham House.”

“But you have formed no conclusion.”

“No, sir. Question mark.”

“Very well. Pfui. Afraid of a woman.” He lifted his book, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

At eight-twenty the next morning, Thursday, I was steering the 1957 Heron sedan up the Forty-sixth Street ramp to the West Side Highway. Buying the sedan, the year before, had started an argument that wasn’t finished yet. Wolfe pays for the cars, but I do the driving, and I wanted one I could U-turn when the occasion arose, and that clashed with Wolfe’s notion that anyone in a moving vehicle was in constant deadly peril, and that the peril was in inverse ratio to
the size of the vehicle. In a forty-ton truck he might actually have been able to relax. So we got the Heron, and I must say that I had nothing against it but its size.

I soon had proof of what I had been hearing and reading, that the forty-eight-hour rain in New York had been snow a little to the north. At Hawthorne Circle it was already there at the roadside, and the farther I rolled on the Taconic State Parkway the more there was of it. The sun was on it now, glancing off the slopes of the drifts and banks, and it was very pleasant, fighting the hardships of an old-fashioned winter by sailing along on the concrete at fifty-eight m.p.h. with ridges of white four and five feet high only a step from the hubcaps. When I finally left the parkway and took a secondary road through the hills, the hardships closed in on me some for a few miles, and when I turned in at an entrance between two stone pillars, with “Grantham House” on one of them, and headed up a curving driveway climbing a hill, only a single narrow lane had been cleared, and as I rounded a sharp curve the hubcaps scraped the ridge.

Coming out of another curve, I braked and stopped. I was blocked, though not by snow. There were nine or ten of them standing there facing me, pink-faced and bright-eyed in the sunshine, in an assortment of jackets and coats, no hats, some with gloves and some without. They would have been taken anywhere for a bunch of high school girls except for one thing: they were all too bulky around the middle. They stood and grinned at me, white teeth flashing.

I cranked the window down and stuck my head out. “Good morning. What do you suggest?”

One in front, with so much brown hair that only the middle of her face showed, called out, “What paper are you from?”

“No paper. I’m sorry if I ought to be. I’m just an errand boy. Can you get by?”

Another one, a blonde, had advanced to the fender. “The trouble is,” she said, “that you’re right in the center. If you edge over we can squeeze past.” She turned and commanded, “Back up and give him room.”

They obeyed. When they were far enough away I eased the car forward and to the right until the fender grazed the snowbank, and stopped. They said that was fine and started down the alley single file. As they passed the front fender they turned side wise, every darned one, which seemed to me to be faulty tactics, since their spread fore and aft was more than from side to side. Also they should have had their backs to the car so their fronts would be against the soft snow, but no, they all faced me. A couple of them made friendly remarks as they went by, and one with a sharp little chin and dancing dark eyes reached in and pulled my nose. I stuck my head out to see that they were all clear, waved good-bye, and pressed gently on the gas.

Grantham House, which had once been somebody’s mansion, sprawled over about an acre, surrounded by evergreen trees loaded with snow and other trees still in their winter skeletons. A space had been cleared with enough room to turn around, barely, and I left the car there, followed a path across a terrace to a door, opened it, entered, crossed the vestibule, and was in a hall about the size of Mrs. Robilotti’s drawing room. A man who would never see
eighty again came hobbling over, squeaking at me, “What’s your name?”