Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 (9 page)

“I would call it vital,” said Fox dryly. “I don’t know about the police, but I have been regarding it as settled that the murderer was someone extremely familiar with this place, because he got that weight from this room before making the attack. But if the weight was right there on Tingley’s desk—that spreads it out in all directions. As for the knife—anyone—even someone who had never been in the factory—might have expected to find a sharp knife in a titbits factory. And there was plenty of time to look, with Tingley on the floor unconscious, and it was in plain sight there on the rack. Was it?”

“Was it what?”

“In plain sight. Are the knives left on the racks at night?”

“Yes.”

“Well. This certainly opens it up.” Fox was frowning. “You say you left last evening at a quarter past six?”

“Yes.”

“Tingley was in his office alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything to you about expecting any caller or callers?”

“No.”

“He didn’t mention that he had phoned to ask Miss Duncan to come to see him?”

“No.”

“Would you mind telling me exactly what he said—”

The question was cut off by the entrance of a woman about half Miss Yates’s age in a working smock. She trotted up with the flurry of impending disaster on her face and in her gait. Fox knew her as Carrie Murphy, one of the five persons to whom he
had telephoned at midnight, but without taking any notice of his presence she blurted at Miss Yates:

“Mr. Fry says the mix in vat three is too stiff and he’s going to add oil!”

Miss Yates leaped from her chair and tore from the room, with Carrie Murphy at her heels.

A
fter rising to examine the two-pound weight which was there in its place in the row on the little shelf above the scale, and finding that it differed slightly in detail from one he had inspected on the floor of Tingley’s office, Fox left the sauce room to stroll through the factory toward the front of the building. He saw no special evidence of grief on any faces of the girls and women working at the tables and benches and the various machines, but having himself met Arthur Tingley in the flesh, that did not seem to him shocking or even unexpected. Their curious glances at him as he passed along did, however, display an agreeably horrified suspense and perturbation, as well as an anticipatory gleam for the social supremacy they would have that evening among friends who worked for firms whose names were not in the papers at all, let alone in banner headlines on the front page.

There was a slight commotion at the far side of the huge room, where Miss Yates, backed up by Carrie Murphy, was confronting a defiant but obviously defeated Sol Fry. Fox sent a chuckle in that direction and went on.

A corridor led him past the open door of the long narrow room where the employees kept their wraps, and other doors as well. The last one on the right was closed. Fox turned the knob and pushed and breezed in. A broad-shouldered husky came at him, demanded angrily:

“Hey, what the hell?”

“My name’s Tecumseh Fox.”

“I don’t care if it’s Franklin D. La Guardia! On out!”

“I should think, shut up in here like this, you’d welcome an intruder once in a while to break the monotony.”

Another man seated in Arthur Tingley’s chair, with his feet resting on a newspaper on Arthur Tingley’s desk, let out a growl, “Okay, go buy us a doormat with welcome on it. Run along.”

“I just thought I’d save some steps by going through here to the front offices.”

“Yeah. Do you want help?”

“No, thanks.” Fox backed up for space. “The truth is, I’m drawn irresistibly to a room that has been searched by a murderer, as a bee is drawn to a flower. What if he didn’t find what he wanted? I’d give a gross of Spiced Anchovies Number 34 to be in here alone for an hour. I see you’ve straightened up a little.”
The National Grocer
had been returned to the shelf, and Tingley’s coat was back on the hanger.

“He does want help,” said the man at the desk. “Help him.”

The husky made a forward movement. Fox backed out with sufficient alacrity, pulling the door with him.

He tried another door across the corridor and found himself in a medium-sized room with every inch of wall space occupied by rickety old wooden filing
cabinets and bookkeeping books on shelves. A young woman with freckles and amazingly fine legs was filing papers, and a man who could have been the brother of the one with rheumy eyes at the window in the anteroom was nodding at a desk. Fox said pleasantly, “I’m a detective,” and passed on through. He had to invade four other rooms, opening and closing five more doors, before he found the person he sought. She regarded him with a startled and hostile expression from her seat at a typewriter desk, where apparently she had been doing nothing whatever, and there was a redness around her eyes and her snub nose which caused Fox to wonder if there was some grief around after all.

“Good morning.” He smiled at her, and added sympathetically, “You’ve been crying.”

Berdine Pilt, who for sixteen years had nursed a silent resentment at being called “my clerk” instead of “my secretary,” sniffed, picked up her handkerchief, and blew her nose with a total lack of inhibition or restraint.

“I’m busy,” she declared with finality.

“In circumstances like these it’s a relief to have something to do,” said Fox, pulling up a chair.

He stayed with her half an hour, and got next to nothing for it, though he displayed the note Amy Duncan had armed him with. Miss Pilt professed admiration for Amy because during her brief stay at Tingley’s she had shown independence and spunk, and affection for her because of her generous action in the case of the fellow employee who had got into trouble, but Miss Pilt was nevertheless indomitably discreet. She took the position that since her room was separated from that of her employer by two partitions and a corridor, and since she was not an eavesdropper, she
knew absolutely nothing of Tingley’s confidential affairs, either business or personal. Nor could she be drawn into any speculation regarding the truth of the situation with respect to Phil, the adopted son; or an animosity in any quarter toward Amy Duncan which might have prompted the imprinting of her fingers on the handle of the knife; or whether the murder was in any way connected with the affair of the quinine. She did, however, furnish four items for the record:

1. She had left the premises, as usual, a few minutes after five o’clock, taken the subway to her home in the Bronx, and spent the evening there.
   

2. The redness came from weeping. She regretted and deplored the tragic death of Arthur Tingley, but the weeping was due to the fact that Mr. Fry and Miss Yates didn’t like her and she didn’t like them, and she would probably soon be out of a job at her age.
   

3. The only callers Tingley had seen on Tuesday, aside from the usual run of salesmen and such, had been a Mr. Brown, a tall well-dressed man around sixty whom Miss Pilt had never seen before and who had arrived a little after ten in the morning and had stayed nearly an hour; and Mr. Fox who had arrived at eleven. The tall well-dressed man was of course the one whom Fox had seen crossing the anteroom on his way out.
   

4. Shortly after Tingley returned from lunch, he had told Miss Pilt to tell the sales department that he wanted to see Phil when he came in with his day’s orders and reports; and she had seen Phil enter his father’s office a minute or so after five o’clock, as she was leaving. That, she admitted, had been unusual, but by no means unique.
   

Fox, after using her telephone to make a call to the East End Hospital, and hearing something, judging from his expression, which surprised and annoyed him, left Miss Pilt there with her empty machine at her empty desk. On his way out he tried his luck with the old man at the window in front, but soon discovered that if there was any pay ore in that vein it would take blasting to get down to it.

He drove east to Fifth Avenue and then uptown, maneuvered the car into a space on 41st Street that would barely hold it, went to a Bar & Grill that he knew and disposed of three ham sandwiches with lettuce and three cups of coffee. For his leisurely afterluncheon cigarette, he stood on the sidewalk and watched people go by. Then he walked around the corner to the entrance of a modest office building only sixty feet higher than the Great Pyramid, took an elevator to the thirtieth floor, entered a door which bore the inscription, NAT COLLINS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, and bade a sharp-featured alert-eyed woman good afternoon, calling her Miss Larabee. She said he was expected, and he went through two doors to a spacious corner chamber with two large windows on each of two sides. An appraisal of it would have depended on the focus of attention. If you limited your gaze to the five Van Goghs, all good and one famous, on the walls, you would have thought you were in a small private gallery; if to the rugs and furnishings, you would have said a blatantly luxurious office; if to the large healthy-looking man seated at the enormous carved desk, you still would not have suspected that you were in the sanctum of one of the three ablest criminal lawyers in New York.

Fox, however, looked at none of these, but at the
young woman in a chair at a corner of the desk. He frowned at her and demanded:

“What’s the idea? What did you leave the hospital for?”

Amy Duncan had not only left the hospital, but also had obviously been down to Grove Street. She was wearing a tweed suit instead of the blue dress she didn’t like, a handbag of the same material as the suit, and a little cockeyed felt hat. Her face, though, with a general weariness and puffiness around the eyes, displayed no corresponding rejuvenation. She looked up at Fox and would have spoken, but the man forestalled her:

“She’s having an attack of autonomy. She doesn’t want me to make a living. She thinks he’s armed without that’s innocent within. She believes that virtue needs no weapon and grows its own armor like a turtle. I’m fired.”

Fox tossed his coat and hat across to a chair, propped his fundament against the edge of the desk, folded his arms, and gazed down at her. “What’s the matter?”

“Why—nothing.” Amy met his gaze. “Only my head’s reasonably clear again, and I see no reason why you should—I mean especially engaging Mr. Collins—I never could afford to pay him anything like—”

“I hired him.”

“I know, but how can I—I can’t possibly accept—”

“Oh, you can’t.” Fox’s tone was grim. “I don’t know whether you’re scared because there are things you know Collins and I will find out, or you’re simply a bum sport—”

“Neither one!” she denied hotly. “I’m not scared and I’m not a bum sport!”

“No? Say you’re not scared, then it’s like this. You
walk into my car and get knocked down and have me take you home. You request free advice as from a brother detective. You let me look at your eyes from various angles and in various lights, knowing the probable effect on an observant and discriminating man. Confronted by a new and more urgent emergency, you yell for me through sixty miles of November rain. You let me get involved and committed to the point where I as good as tell Inspector Damon that the wraps are off. And now you begin whining about what you can’t afford and what you can’t accept—”

“I am not whining!”

“That’s the impression you achieve, madam. Regarding the money to pay Collins, I’ve just sold a thousand shares of Vollmer Aircraft because I didn’t want to make any more profit out of things that kill people, having already made too much. Collins doesn’t care where his money comes from; he’ll take it out of that. Regarding my time and effort, don’t flatter yourself, in spite of your eyes. I’m an Arapaho on a trail, and I’m not eating or sleeping. Except at the usual times.”

Collins laughed. Amy fluttered a hand. “I assure you—I know I asked you to help me, but I don’t want you to think—”

“All right, I won’t. Inspector Damon tells me that there’s a set of your fingerprints on the handle of that knife.”

“Yes, he—”

“And that you haven’t any idea how they got there.”

“I haven’t.”

“In my opinion,” said Collins, “as I have told Miss Duncan, the person who put them there did so in a fit
of acute imbecility. I would use it on defense if the state didn’t.”

Fox nodded. “That part of it’s all right,” he agreed, “but it makes one thing certain—”

He stopped to let Nat Collins answer the phone. After a moment Collins told the transmitter. “Wait a minute,” and turned to the others:

“This seems to be a cat in our alley. A man named Leonard Cliff is here to see me. I’ll take him to another room—”

“Excuse me,” said Fox, “but I’d like to see him myself. Let’s all see him.”

“Oh, no,” Amy stammered, “it wouldn’t be—I don’t want—”

They looked at her face. “Your color’s better,” said Fox.

“Much better,” said Collins. He spoke again to the transmitter:

“Send Mr. Cliff in here.”