Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families (13 page)

“No, thanks, that’ll do.”

“I thought so. Next, the possibility that when you phoned Wolfe right after the body was found you told him something that gave him a line on the murderer, but it’s tricky and he had to go outdoors to get his
evidence, preparing to grandstand it for the front page. I told Dykes I would rule that out too. Wolfe is quite capable of a play like that, sure he is, but if that’s all it amounted to, why move the plants out and put Fritz to work in a restaurant and list the house for sale? He’s colorful, but not that colorful. Mrs. Rackham only paid him ten thousand, about what I make a year. Why should he spend it having his orchids carted around?”

Cramer shook his head. “Not for my money. That leaves the third possibility: that something really did scare him. That there was something about Mrs. Rackham’s murder, or anyhow connected with it, that he knew he couldn’t handle sitting there in that chair, but for some reason he had to handle it. So he scooted. As you say, you either don’t know where he is or you know and won’t tell—and that’s no help either way. Now I’ve got a lot to say about this possibility. You got time to listen?”

“I’ve got all day, but Fritz isn’t here to get our lunch.”

“We’ll go without.” He clasped his hands behind his head and shifted his center of gravity. “You know, Archie, sometimes I’m not as far behind as you think I am.”

“Also sometimes I don’t think you’re as far behind as you think I do.”

“That’s possible. Anyhow, I can add. I think he got word direct from Arnold Zeck. Did he?”

“Huh? Who’s Arnold Zeck? Did you just make it up?”

I knew that was a mistake the instant it was out of my mouth. Then I had to try to keep it from showing on my face, the realization that I had fumbled it, but whether that was a success or not—and I
couldn’t very well look in a mirror to find out—it was too late.

Cramer looked pleased. “So you’ve been around all these years, a working detective, meeting the people you do, and you’ve never heard of Arnold Zeck. Either I’ve got to believe that, or I touched a tender spot.”

“Sure I’ve heard of him. It just didn’t click for a second.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. It’s affecting you already, having Wolfe gone. That wasn’t just a shot in the dark. One day two years ago I sat here in this chair. Wolfe sat there.” He nodded at Wolfe’s chair. “You were where you are now. A man named Orchard had been murdered, and so had a woman named Poole. In the course of our long talk Wolfe explained in detail how an ingenious and ruthless man could operate a blackmail scheme, good for at least a million a year, without sticking his neck out. Not only could; it was being done. Wolfe refused to name him, and since he wasn’t behind the murders it was out of my territory, but a thing or two I heard and a couple of things that happened gave me a pretty clear idea. Not only me—it was whispered around: Arnold Zeck. You may perhaps remember it.”

“I remember the Orchard case, certainly,” I conceded. “I didn’t hear the whispering.”

“I did. You may also remember that a year later, last summer, Wolfe’s plant rooms got shot up from a roof across the street.”

“Yes. I was sitting right here and heard it.”

“So I understand. Since no one was killed that never got to me officially, but naturally I heard things. Wolfe had started to investigate a man named Rony, and Rony’s activities were the kind that might
lead a first-class investigator like Wolfe in the direction of Arnold Zeck, maybe up close to Zeck, possibly even clear to him. I thought then that Wolfe had got warned off, by Zeck himself or someone near him, and he had disregarded it, and for a second warning they messed up his orchids. Then Rony got killed, and that was a break for Wolfe because it put him and Zeck on the same side.”

“Gosh,” I remarked, “It sounds awful complicated to me.”

“I’ll bet it does.” Cramer moved the cigar—getting shorter now, although he never lit one—to the other side of his mouth. “All I’m doing is showing you that I’m not just hoping for a bite, and I don’t want to string it out. It was a good guess that Wolfe had jostled up against Arnold Zeck in both the Orchard case and the Rony case, and now what happens? Not long after Mrs. Rackham calls on him and hires him to check on her husband’s income, someone sends him a cylinder of tear gas—not a bomb to blow out his guts, which it could have been, just tear gas, so of course it was for a warning. And that night Mrs. Rackham gets murdered. You tell him about it on the phone, and when you get home he’s gone.”

Cramer took the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at me. “I’ll tell you what I believe, Archie. I believe that if Wolfe had stayed and helped, the murderer of Mrs. Rackham would be locked up by now. I believe that he had reason to think that if he did that, helped to catch the murderer, he would have to spend the rest of his life trying to keep Arnold Zeck from getting him. I believe that he decided that the only way out was for him to get Zeck. How’s that?”

“No comment,” I said politely. “If you’re right
you’re right, and if you’re wrong I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Much obliged. But he did get a warning from Zeck—the tear gas.”

“No comment.”

“I wouldn’t expect any. Now here’s what I came for. I want you to give Wolfe a personal message from me, not as a police officer but as a friend. This is between you and me—and him. Zeck is out of his reach. He is out of anybody’s reach. It’s a goddam crime for an officer of the law to have to say a thing like that, even privately, but it’s true. Here’s a murder case, and thank God it’s not mine. I’m not pointing at Ben Dykes or the DA up there, I’m not pointing at any person or persons, but if the setup is that Barry Rackham is tied in with one or more of Zeck’s operations, and if Rackham killed his wife, I say he will never burn. I don’t say at what point Zeck will get his hand in, or who or what he will use, but Rackham will never burn.”

Cramer hurled his cigar at my wastebasket and missed it by a foot. Since it wasn’t lit I ignored it. “Hooray for justice,” I cheered.

He snarled, but apparently not at me. “I want you to tell Wolfe that. Zeck is out of his reach. He can’t get him.”

“But,” I objected, “granting that you’ve got it all straight, which I haven’t, that’s a hell of a message. Look at it from the other end. He is not out of Zeck’s reach, not if he comes home. I know he doesn’t go out much, but even if he never did people have to come in—and things, like packages of sausage. Not to mention that the damage they did to the plants and equipment last year came to thirty-eight thousand
bucks. I get the idea that he is to lay off of Zeck, but that’s only what he doesn’t do. What does he do?”

Cramer nodded. “I know. That’s it. He’s so damn bullheaded. I want you to understand, Archie, why I came here. Wolfe is too cocky to live. He has enough brass and bluster to outfit a thousand sergeants. Sure, I know him; I ought to. I would love to bloody his nose for him. I’ve tried to often enough, and someday I will and enjoy it. But I would hate to see him break his neck on a deal like this where he hasn’t got a chance. It’s a good guess that in the past ten years there have been over a hundred homicides in this town that were connected in one way or another with one of the operations Arnold Zeck has a hand in. But not in a single case was there the remotest hope of tying Zeck up with it. We couldn’t possibly have touched him.”

“You’re back where you started,” I complained. “He can’t be reached. So what?”

“So Wolfe should come back where he belongs, return what Mrs. Rackham paid him to her estate, let the Westchester people take care of the murder, which is their job anyhow, and go on as before. You can tell him I said that, but by God don’t quote me around. I’m not responsible for a man like Zeck being out of reach.”

“But you never strained a muscle stretching for him.”

“Nuts. Facts are facts.”

“Yeah, like sausage is tear gas.” I stood up so as to look down my nose at him. “There are two reasons why your message will not get to Mr. Wolfe. First, he is to me as Zeck is to him. He’s out of my reach. I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh, keep it up.”

“I will. Second, I don’t like the message. I admit that I have known Mr. Wolfe to discuss Arnold Zeck. I once heard him tell a whole family about him, only he was calling him X. He was describing the difficulties he would be in if he ever found himself tangled with X for a showdown, and he told them that he was acquainted, more or less, with some three thousand people living or working in New York, and there weren’t more than five of them of whom he could say with certainty that they were in no way involved in X’s activities. He said that none might be or that any might be. On another occasion I happened to be inquiring about Zeck of a newspaperman, and he had extravagant notions about Zeck’s payroll. He mentioned, not by name, politicians, barflies, cops, chambermaids, lawyers, private cops, crooks of all types, including gunmen—maybe housewives, I forget. He did not specifically mention police inspectors.”

“Just forgot, perhaps.”

“I suppose so. Another thing, those five exceptions that Mr. Wolfe made out of his three thousand acquaintances, he didn’t say who they were, but I was pretty sure I could name three of them. I thought probably one of the other two was you, but I could have been wrong. You have made a point of how you would hate to see him break his neck where he hasn’t got a chance. You took the trouble to come here with a personal message but don’t want to be quoted, which means that if I mention this conversation to anyone but Mr. Wolfe you’ll call me a liar. And what’s the message? That he should lay off Zeck, that’s what it amounts to. If in earning the fee Mrs. Rackham paid him he is liable to hurt somebody Zeck doesn’t want hurt, he should return the fee. The way it looks from here, sending a message like
that to the best and toughest detective on earth is exactly the kind of service Zeck would pay good money for. I wouldn’t say—”

I didn’t get to say what I wouldn’t say. Cramer, out of his chair and coming, had a look on his face that I had never seen before. Time and again I had seen him mad at Wolfe, and me too, but never to the point where the pink left his cheeks completely and his eyes looked absolutely mean.

He swung with his right. I ducked. He came up from beneath with his left, and I stopped it with my forearm. He tried with the right again, and I jerked back, stepped aside, and dived around the corner of Wolfe’s desk.

I spoke. “You couldn’t hit me in a year and I’m not going to plug you. I’m twenty years younger, and you’re an inspector. If I’m wrong, someday I’ll apologize. If I’m wrong.”

He turned and marched out. I didn’t go to the hall to help him on with his coat and open the door.

T
hree weeks went by. At first, that first night, I was thinking that word might come from Wolfe in the next hour. Then I started thinking it might come the next day. As the days kept creeping along they changed my whole attitude, and before the end of April I was thinking it might come next week. By the time May had passed, and most of June, and the calendar and the heat both said summer, I was beginning to think it might never come.

But first to finish with April. The Rackham case followed the routine of spectacular murders when they never quite get to the point of a first-degree charge against anyone. For a week, the front page by unanimous consent; then, for a week or ten days, the front page only by cooking up an angle; and then back to the minors. None of the papers happened to feel like using it to start a crusade in the name of justice, so it took a normal course. It did not roll over and die, not with that all-star cast, including Nobby and Hebe; even months later a really new development would have got a three-column spread; but the development didn’t come.

I made three more trips, by official request, to White Plains, with no profit to anyone, including me. All I could do was repeat myself, and all they could do was think up new ways to ask the same questions. For mental exercise I tried to get a line on whether Cramer’s notions about Arnold Zeck had been passed on to Archer and Ben Dykes, but if so they never let on.

All I knew was what I read in the papers, until one evening I ran into Sergeant Purley Stebbins at Jake’s and bought him a lobster. From him I got two little unpublished items: two FBI men had been called in to settle an argument about the legibility of fingerprints on the crinkly silver handle of the knife, and had voted no; and at one point Barry Rackham had been held at White Plains for twenty straight hours while the battle raged over whether they had enough to charge him. The noes won that time too.

The passing days got very little help from me. I had decided not to start pawing the ground or rearing up until Wolfe had been gone a full month, which would be May ninth, and I caught up on a lot of personal things, including baseball games, which don’t need to be itemized. Also, with Fred Durkin, I finished up the poison-pen case and other loose ends that Wolfe had left dangling—nothing important—drove out to Long Island to see if Theodore and the plants had got settled in their new home, and put one of the cars, the big sedan, in dead storage.

One afternoon when I went to Rusterman’s Restaurant to see Marko Vukcic he signed the checks I had brought, for telephone and electricity bills and my weekly salary, and then asked me what the bank balance was. I told him a little over twenty-nine thousand dollars, but I sort of regarded Mrs. Rackham’s
ten grand as being in escrow, so I would rather call it nineteen.

“Could you bring me a check for five thousand tomorrow? Drawn to cash.”

“Glad to. But speaking as the bookkeeper, what do I charge it to?”

“Why—expense.”

“Speaking as a man who may someday have to answer questions from an internal revenue snoop, whose expense and what kind?”

“Call it travel expense.”

“Travel by whom and to where?”

Marko made some kind of a French noise, or foreign at least, indicating impatience, I think. “Listen, Archie, I have a power of attorney without limit. Bring me a check for five thousand dollars at your convenience. I am stealing it from my old friend Nero to spend on beautiful women or olive oil.”