Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 03 (12 page)

“I’m sorry,” Pomfret said, but didn’t sound sorry. He was panting. He stooped to get the bowl, which was intact.

Ted’s eyes were glittering at Garda. “I would like,” he said through his teeth, “to pass that tap on to you with interest. I don’t know why you’ve got it in for Miss Mowbray, but you try any more of that raving—”

“Ted!” Dora was there, with a hand on his arm.
“Please! She wasn’t raving. I did drop that paper into the bowl.”

Ted gawked at her. The inspector whirled:

“You did?”

“Yes.”

There was a stunned silence.

“By God,” Diego growled. “My little Dora—”

“No, Diego.” Dora shook her head at him. “Your little Dora didn’t put poison in Perry’s whisky.” Her lip trembled, then it curled in sudden anger and her face flared. “Look at you! All of you! Your faces! You believe—just because I—Oh, if my father was here! Everything has been hateful—ever since he died—”

“I’m here!” Ted sang at her.

Damon gazing at her, said dryly, “About dropping that paper in the bowl.”

“I did.” Dora’s eyes met his. “I said I did. It was in my bag.”

“Who put it there?”

“I don’t know. I found it there when we were leaving the yellow room to come in here.” She picked up a brown cloth handbag from her chair, held it up, and indicated an outside compartment made with an extra fold of the cloth. “It was in here. I saw the bulge and stuck my fingers in to see what it was. I had no idea where it came from. It looked like nothing but a crumpled piece of paper, and I dropped it in the bowl as I went by.”

“You are saying that someone put it in there while the bag was in your possession.”

“I am not. I didn’t say that. I left the bag lying on a sofa in the yellow room when Perry—when I went to the other end of the room with Mr. Dunham.”

“And it was when you got it again that you noticed the bulge in it?”

“Yes.”

“How long was the bag lying on the sofa?”

“Well, it was—fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Why did you go to the other end of the room with Dunham?”

“Because he said he wanted to speak to me.”

“What about?”

“About—something—a personal matter.”

“Were you engaged to marry Dunham?”

“That’s none of your business. But I wasn’t.”

The inspector grunted. “You’ll probably be surprised,” he said crustily, “at what the police regard as their business in a murder investigation. And what we don’t get one way we get another. If we can. Were you in love with Dunham?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“Did you hate him?”

“No.”

“Were you an intimate friend of his?”

“No.” Dora frowned. “I have known him all my life. His mother and my father were friends.”

“I’d like to know what it was he wanted to speak to you about this afternoon. If you refuse to tell me, you can’t blame me if I—”

“I don’t refuse to tell you. He wanted to know about the other note Jan left. Whether I had seen it—whether I had read any of it.”

“Note? Who is Jan?”

“Jan Tusar,” Tecumseh Fox broke in. “He committed suicide—shot himself—last Monday evening at Carnegie Hall. I think you’re going to have to shuffle that into your deck, and I can save you a lot of time on it.” His eyes took in the others. “You folks understand, of course, that there is no longer any question of going
to the police with the violin business. The police are here. I suggest, Inspector, if you want to cut some corners, that you get together with me and a man with a notebook.… By the way, Miss Tusar, since the police are here, how about that thing you were saving for them? You might as well hand it over now. You can’t do any better than the chief of the Homicide Squad.”

Garda, who had dropped into a chair beside Diego, opened her handbag and took out the envelope and held it out to Damon. He glanced at the address and then removed the enclosure and looked at it:

“My God,” he muttered in disgust, “one of those things.” He regarded Garda in bewilderment. “Then you were married to Tusar? And Dunham was your brother?”

Garda stared at him.

“No,” Fox said impatiently, “the violinist was her brother. That’s one small item of the background, which I’m offering you at a bargain. Unless you prefer to slash your way through the brush—”

“Thanks, I’ll take it. I like bargains.” Damon addressed the group: “A while ago I asked you folks to co-operate by staying together in one room. Now, in view of finding that paper in that bowl, as well as other things, I instruct you to do so. I’m going to start with
Fox, and you’ll be notified when I’m ready for you. Ryder, take a man and stay with them. Mr. Pomfret, will you kindly lead the way to a room where they can sit down? And Ryder, send Kossoy in with a notebook, and tell Craig I want to see him.”

I
wouldn’t call it a bargain at any price,” Inspector Damon declared in a tone of complete disrelish. “It looks to me like the worst damn mess I ever saw in my life.”

He was seated at an end of the big table, with Fox at his right and Detective Kossoy, his brow puckered in concentration at his notebook, at his left. They had been there nearly an hour. There had been a few interruptions—among them a phone call from the laboratory to say that a high percentage of potassium cyanide had been found in the whisky in the medicine dropper which had been retrieved from the dent in the top of the sedan, and one from the assistant medical examiner also reporting cyanide—but mostly Fox had talked. It was all down in Kossoy’s notebook, all that Fox had seen and heard; he had even relinquished to the inspector an envelope containing the morsel of varnish he had scraped from the violin.

Fox got up and stretched his legs, sat down again, and said, “It may be a mess, but still you got a bargain. People have paid good money for a report like that.”

Damon nodded. He looked at Fox obliquely. “One thing you haven’t mentioned. Where do you come in?”

“I’m not in. Not professionally.” Fox smiled at the morose eyes and prizefighter’s jaw. “Really, you can cross me off. I haven’t held out a thing. That is, no facts. Of course I may have made a few deductions, as Schaeffer would call them.…”

“Yeah. Why the hell don’t a big strong man like that get a job? What kind of deductions, for instance?”

“Deductions come much higher than reports.”

“I thought you said you weren’t in this. What do you want?”

“Nothing. Frankly, Inspector, you’re perfectly welcome to this case, including the murder—if not legally murder, still murder—of Jan Tusar. Don’t forget that item, because it’s a part of your problem. I was having a try at it, but it felt dead in my hands. I was leery of it. It was too slick and too subtle. To kill a man by spilling varnish into a violin! Can you construe the mind that thought of that? I hope you can. You’ll have to, if you’re going to get the murderer of Perry Dunham.”

“You think the two are connected. You think Dunham knew something about the varnish in the violin, and you let the cat loose when you told about him going for the violin when he thought you had gone, and that’s why he was killed.” Damon grunted. “You may be right, but if that’s one of the deductions you’re holding for a rise in the market—”

“Oh, that’s nothing to brag about,” Fox conceded. “But here’s a nice little trick.” He got a memo pad from his pocket and uncapped his pen. “Look here.” With the others leaning over to watch, he made two drawings on the pad:

“Quite a trick,” Damon said sarcastically. “Do you think you could learn to do it, Kossoy?”

Fox, ignoring him, requested, “Let me have that thing Miss Tusar gave you.” He took the envelope Damon handed him, removed the sheet of paper, and put it on the table beside the pad. “Now. Which one of my swastikas is like the one on the note from the Nazi? You see the difference, of course.”

“Certainly. The one on the left.”

“Correct. And that’s the traditional design of the swastika, the design that the Chinese have used for centuries as a good luck symbol. But when Hitler took it for a trademark, he either made a mistake or deliberately switched it—anyhow, the Nazi swastika is like the one on the right. No Nazi would ever make one like the one on the left. So it wasn’t a Nazi that sent that thing to Miss Tusar. It’s a phony.”

“I’m a son of a gun,” Kossoy muttered. “Can I have that?”

Fox tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to him, and put the note in the envelope and returned it to Damon. “That,” he remarked, “will help a little. At least you won’t have to waste time trying to connect one of them with Berlin or the Bund. I only hope it’s not the only mistake the weasel made. If it is, you’re more than welcome.”

Damon was frowning at him. “You heard me tell my office to put twenty men on a check up and give special attention to the Nazi angle.”

“I did,” Fox admitted, “and it made me envious. An army like that ready to go!”

“Have you got any more nice little tricks?”

“Well …” Fox considered. “They go over better when they’re spaced out. Of course you’re going to get a pack of lies, as usual, but in my opinion you’ll get none from Miss Mowbray. She would lie in an emergency—naturally, anybody would—but I doubt if she has anything to lie about, and I believe her story about the paper that had the poison in it. Diego Zorilla is a friend of mine. That doesn’t convince you that he didn’t poison Dunham, but it does me—till further notice. You can have the rest of them except Mrs. Pomfret, I suppose, but even that carries no written guarantee.”

“I know the multiplication tables myself. I mean tricks.”

Fox shook his head. “The bag’s empty. If I were going to work on this, which I’m not, thank God, I’d have to start on a blank page.” He returned the pad and pen to his pockets, pushed back his chair, and arose.

“Where you going?”

“That depends. If you’ll give me a passport I’ll go home. If not, I suppose I’ll have to join—”

The inspector snorted in disbelief. “Sure you’d like to go home. And leave this hanging here? Not if I know you. And I do know you. If I send you in there with the crowd—you stay here. Sit down. There by Kossoy.”

Fox smiled at him. “I’m not making any contract. In case I do happen to think of a trick.”

“Neither am I.” Damon turned to a man in uniform who was seated by the door: “Ask Mrs. Pomfret to come here.”

It was a few minutes short of seven o’clock when Mrs. Pomfret entered the library. It was after midnight when the cook’s assistant, the last of the procession,
left. When the door had closed behind him, Inspector Damon muttered in weary legato a string of the most impressive and pungent terms of profanity, and, his eyes bloodshot with strain, glared with savage repugnance at the two notebooks in front of Detective Kossoy which were filled with scratches from cover to cover.

“Anyway,” Fox sighed, “the smoked turkey sandwiches were good.”

“One of those people,” Damon growled, “poisoned that man.”

Which certainly was not much of a show for six hours’ hard work, but that was as far as they had got. No one had been able to furnish a conjecture regarding a breast that might have harbored a desire to kill Perry Dunham. Many of them had confessed to various degrees of dislike for him. Though it was now established that the poison had been put in the whisky, not after their return from the library but during their preliminary assemblage in the yellow room, it had not been possible to eliminate anyone from the list; no one was positive that any other one had not gone near the bar. On the other hand, no one had admitted observing any suspicious action by anyone else—any handling of the bourbon bottle, or prolonged lingering at the bar, or telltale tension or agitation. In sum, if anyone had seen anything which might have guided ever so slightly the finger of accusation, he had not disclosed it. Even Garda admitted that there had been nothing furtive or wary about Dora’s movements when she dropped the ball of paper into the bowl; she had merely, openly, gone to the stand and tossed it in.