Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 45 (12 page)

“Kenneth Meer isn’t one of them. You don’t know him, but I do. How much longer is this going to take?”

“I don’t know. It depends. Not as long as it would with Mr. Wolfe. He likes to ask questions that seem to be just to pass the time, but I try to stick to the point. For instance, when Mr. Wolfe asked you that evening if you thought the person who put the bomb in the drawer was here in the room, you said you had no idea, but naturally you would say that, with them here. What would you say now, not for quotation?”

“I would say exactly the same, I have no idea. Mr. Goodwin, I—I’m tired. I’d like some—some whisky?”

“Sure. Scotch, bourbon, rye, Irish. Water, soda, ice.”

“Just whisky. Any kind—bourbon. It doesn’t matter.”

She wasn’t tired. The fingers of both hands, in her lap, had been curling and uncurling. She was tight. I mean tense, taut. As I went to the kitchen and put a bottle of bourbon—not Ten-Mile Creek—and a glass and a pitcher of water on a tray, I was trying to decide if it was just the strain of discussing her personal affairs with a mere agent, or something even touchier. I still hadn’t decided when I had put the tray on the little table by her chair and was back at my desk. She poured about two fingers, downed it with three swallows, made a face and swallowed nothing a couple of times, poured half a glass of water, and swallowed that.

“I told you—” she began, didn’t like how it sounded or felt, and started over. “I told you I don’t drink much.”

I nodded. “I can bring some milk, but it’s an antidote for whisky.”

“No, thank you.” She swallowed nothing again.

“Okay. You said you have no idea who put the bomb in the drawer.”

“Yes, I haven’t.”

I got my notebook and pen. “For this, since this room is
not
bugged, I’ll have to make notes. I have to know where you were every minute of that day, that Tuesday, May 20. It was four weeks ago, four weeks tomorrow, but it shouldn’t strain your memory, since the police of course asked you that day or the day after. Anyone going to Browning’s room went through your room, so we’ll have to do the whole day, from the time you arrived. Around ten o’clock?”

“There was another door to his room.”

“But not often used except by him?”

“Not often, but sometimes it was. I’m not going to do this. I don’t think you have a right to expect me to.”

“I have no
right
to expect anything. But Mr. Wolfe can’t do the job Mrs. Odell hired him to do unless he can get answers to the essential questions, and this is certainly one of them. One reason I say that is that Kenneth Meer told a newspaperman that anyone who wanted to know how it happened should concentrate on Helen Lugos. Why did Meer say that?”

“I don’t believe it.” She was staring at me, which made her face different again. “I don’t believe he said that.”

“But he did. It’s a fact, Miss Lugos.”

“To a newspaperman?”

“Yes. I won’t tell you his name, but if I have to, I can produce him and he can tell you. He wasn’t a stranger to Meer. They were choir boys together at St. Andrew’s. When he tried to get Meer to go on, Meer clammed. I’m not assuming that when you tell me how and where you spent that day, I’ll know why Meer said that, since you’ll tell me exactly what you told the police and evidently it didn’t help them any, but I must have it because that’s how a detective is supposed to detect. You got to work at ten o’clock?”

She said no, nine-thirty.

Even with my personal and private shorthand it filled more than four pages of my notebook. The timing was perfect. It was exactly 7:30 when we had her in the file room and the sound and shake of the explosion came, and Fritz stepped in to reach for the doorknob. So it was time to eat. If I am in the office with company, and Wolfe isn’t, when dinner’s ready, Fritz comes and shuts the office door. That notifies me that food is ready to serve, and also it keeps the sound of voices from annoying Wolfe in the dining room across the hall, if I have to continue the conversation.

That time I didn’t have to, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to consider a couple of the things she had said without her sitting there with her face, and I wanted my share of the ducklings with mushrooms and wild rice and wine while it was hot from the oven. It’s one of the dishes Wolfe and Fritz have made up together, and they call it American duckling on account of the wild rice, and I’m for it.

So I said she was tired, and she said yes, she was, and got up, and I thanked her, and thanked her again as I opened the front door to let her out.

Of course I didn’t mention her as I joined Wolfe at the dining table. He had one of the ducklings carved, so that would have been talking business during a meal, which is not done. But when we had finished and moved to the office and Fritz had brought coffee, he showed that the week of marking time was getting on his nerves by demanding, “Well?” before I had lifted my cup.

“No,” I said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing for me. For you, I can’t say. I never can. You want it verbatim, of course.”

“Yes.”

I gave it to him, complete, up to the details of her day on Tuesday, May 20. For that I used the notebook. As usual, he just listened; no interruptions, no questions. He is the best listener I know. When I finished, the coffee pot and our cups were empty and Fritz had come for them.

I put the notebook in the drawer. “So for me, nothing. Of course she didn’t open the bag and shake it, who does? She knows or suspects something that may or may not be true and might or might not help, and to guess what it is needs a better guesser than me. I don’t think she planted the bomb. She wasn’t there at her desk in the next room when it went off, which was lucky for her, but she says she often went to the file room for something, nearly always when Browning wasn’t in his room. Of course the cops have checked that. Also of course it was a waste of time to have her name the seventeen people she saw go into Browning’s room. The bomb wasn’t put in the drawer while Browning was there unless he did it himself, and there’s another door to his room. As for who entered his room when he wasn’t there, there was a total of nearly two hours when
she
wasn’t there, according to her. As for her reason that Kenneth Meer wouldn’t want to kill Browning, toss a coin. You’d have to use a lie detector on Meer himself.”

He grunted. “Miss Venner, and now Miss Lugos.”

“Meaning I should have seduced at least one of them. Fire me.”

“Pfui. I complain of your conduct only directly, never by innuendo. You offend only deliberately, never by shortcoming. Miss Lugos did not plant the bomb?”

“One will get you ten.”

“Does she know who did?”

“No bet. She could think she knows. Or not.”

“Confound it.” He got up and went to the shelves for a book.

12

s
ix days later, at noon Sunday, June 22, the five of us sat in the office and looked at each other. Saul and Fred and Orrie and I looked at Wolfe, and he looked back, his eyes moving, not his head, from me past Orrie and Fred to Saul in the red leather chair.

“No,” he said. “This is preposterous. Amphigoric. And insupportable.” He looked at me. “How much altogether, including you?”

I shut my eyes and in less than half a minute opened them. “Say three thousand dollars. A little more.”

“It will be a deduction on my tax return. Call Mrs. Odell and tell her I am quitting. Draw a check to her for the full amount of the retainer.”

Fred and Orrie had to turn their heads to look at me. Saul, in the red leather chair, didn’t have to turn his head. I looked at Wolfe, especially the left corner of his mouth, to see how bad it was.

Plenty of things had happened. There had been three thunderstorms in a row Wednesday afternoon. Jill Cather, Orrie’s wife, had threatened to walk out on him because he didn’t get home until five in the morning Tuesday after taking a CAN female researcher to dinner and a show, though he explained that the meal and the tickets had been paid for by the client. The West Side Highway, northbound, had been closed for repairs all day Friday. Fred Durkin, tailing a CAN male employee Thursday evening, had lost him, and he hates to lose a tail; and on Friday, Elaine, his oldest daughter, had admitted she was smoking grass. Saul Panzer had spent two days and a night at Montauk Point trying to find a bomb maker, and drawn a blank. On Friday the Labor Department announced that the Consumer Price Index had gone up .3 of one percent in May. A busy week.

Personally I had done wonders. I had answered at least a hundred phone calls, including dozens from the three helpers. They were
trying
to help. Also including three from Mrs. Odell. I had discussed the situation for about an hour with a member of the CAN news staff, brought by Orrie. His real reason for coming had been to have a chat with Nero Wolfe. I had spent an evening with Sylvia Venner and a male chauvinist friend of hers, also a CAN employee, at her apartment. I had washed my hands and face every day. I could go on, but that’s enough to show you that I was fully occupied.

Wolfe hadn’t been idle either. When Inspector Cramer had rung the doorbell at eleven-thirty Friday morning, he had told me to admit him, and he had held up his end of a twenty-minute conversation. Cramer had no chips on his shoulder. What brought him was the fact that Cass R. Abbott, the president of CAN, had come to see Wolfe the day before, a little after six o’clock, and stayed a full hour. Evidently Cramer had the old brownstone under surveillance, and if so, he positively was desperate in spite of his healthy ego. He probably thought that Abbott’s coming indicated that Wolfe had a fire lit, and if so, he wanted to warm his hands. I think when he left, he was satisfied that we were as empty as he was, but with those two you never know.

What Abbott’s coming actually indicated was that the strain was getting on his nerves, and for a man so high up that would not do. When he got parked in the red leather chair, he told Wolfe he would like to speak with him confidentially, and when Wolfe said he could, there would be no recording, Abbott looked at me, then back to Wolfe, and said, “Privately.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Professionally nothing is reserved between Mr. Goodwin and me. If he leaves the room and you tell me anything relevant to the job we are doing—trying to do—I would tell him, withholding nothing.”

“Well.” Abbott ran his fingers through his mop of fine, white hair. “I have had a check on you but not on Goodwin. You hold up, but does he?”

“If he doesn’t, I don’t. What good is a chain with a bad link?”

Abbott nodded. “A good line. Who said it?”

“I did. The thought is not new, no thought is, but said better.”

“You use words, don’t you?”

“Yes. On occasion, in six languages, which is a mere smattering. I would like to be able to communicate with any man alive. As it is, even you and I find it difficult. Are you sure you can prevent my getting more or less than you want me to from what you tell me or ask me?”

Abbott’s raised eyebrows made his long, pale face look even longer. “By god, I can try.”

“Go ahead.”

“When I say ‘confidential,’ I mean you will not repeat to Mrs. Odell anything I say about her.”

Wolfe nodded. “See? You don’t mean that. Of course I would repeat it if it would serve my purpose or her interest to do so. She has hired me. If you mean I am not to tell her your name, I am to give her no hint of who said it, yes.—Archie?”

“Right,” I said. “Noted and filed.”

“Then that’s understood,” Abbott said. He slid further back in the chair, which is deep. “I have known Mrs. Odell twenty years. I suppose you know she is a large stockholder in the Continental Air Network. I know her very well, and I knew him well—her husband. That’s one point. Another point is that I have been president of CAN for nine years, and I’m retiring in a few weeks, and I don’t want to leave in an atmosphere of distrust and doubt and suspicion. Not distrust or suspicion of me, not of anyone in particular, it’s just in the air. It pervades the whole damn place, the whole organization. To leave when it’s like that—it would look like I’m getting out from under.”

He hit the chair arm with a fist. “
This goddam murder has got to be cleared up!
You probably wondered why I let you turn those three men loose in my building to go anywhere and see anyone. I did it because the police and the District Attorney were completely stumped, they were getting absolutely nowhere, and I thought you might. One reason I thought you might was that there was a good chance that Mrs. Odell had told you things that she hadn’t told them. But that was a week ago, a week yesterday, and where have
you
got to?”

“Here.” Wolfe patted his desk blotter. “I’m always here.”

“Hell, I know you are. Do you know who put that bomb in that drawer? Have you even got a good guess?”

“Yes. You did. You thought they were going to choose Mr. Browning, and you favored Mr. Odell.”

“Sure. All you need is proof. As I thought, you have done no better than the police, and you have had ten days. Last evening I discussed the situation with three of my directors, and as a result I phoned this morning to make the appointment. I am prepared to make a proposal with the backing of my Board. I suppose Mrs. Odell has paid you a retainer. If you will withdraw and return her retainer, we will reimburse you for all expenses you have incurred, and we will engage you to investigate the death of Peter Odell on behalf of the corporation, with a retainer in the same amount as Mrs. Odell’s. Or possibly more.”

I had of course been looking at him. Now I looked at Wolfe. Since he was facing Abbott, he was in profile to me, but I had enough of his right eye to see what I call his slow-motion take. The eye closed, but so slow I couldn’t see the motion of the lid. At least twenty seconds. He certainly wasn’t giving Abbott a long wink, so the other eye was collaborating. They stayed shut about another twenty seconds, then opened in one, and he spoke. “It’s obvious, of course. It’s transparent.”

“Transparent? It’s direct.”