Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families (26 page)

The expression of Zeck’s eyes, no longer popping, indicated that Wolfe had nothing on him there.

“Here’s the situation,” Wolfe went on. “During the two months I’ve been here in this outlandish guise I have collected enough evidence to get you charged on thirty counts under Federal law. I assure you that the evidence is sound and sufficient, and is in the hands of a man whom you cannot stop or deflect. You’ll have to take my word for it that if that evidence is produced and used you are done for, and that it will be immediately produced and used if anything untoward happens to Mr. Goodwin or me. I fancy you will take my word since you admit that I match you in intellect, and to climax these five frightful months with such a bluff as this, if it were one, would be witless. However, if you think I’m bluffing there’s no point in going on. If you think I’m bluffing, please shake your head no, meaning you don’t believe me.”

No shake.

“If you think I have the evidence as described, please nod your head.”

No nod.

“I warn you,” Wolfe said sharply, “that Mr. Goodwin and I are both ready for anything whatever.”

Zeck nodded. Nothing violent, but a nod.

“You assume my possession of the evidence?”

Zeck nodded again.

“Good. Then we can bargain. While I have great respect for the Federal laws, I am under no obligation to catch violators of them. Without compunction I can leave that to others. But I am under an obligation to a certain individual which I feel strongly and
which I must discharge. Mrs. Rackham paid me a large sum to serve her interest, and the next day she was murdered. It was clearly my duty to expose her murderer—not only my duty to her but to my own self-respect—and I have failed. With an obligation of that nature I have never accepted failure and do not intend to. Mr. Goodwin, working in my behalf, has been a party to that failure, and he too will not accept it.”

Zeck nodded again, or I thought he did, probably to signify approval of our high moral standards.

“So we can bargain,” Wolfe told him. “You said day before yesterday that you have evidence, or can easily get it, that will convict Rackham of the murder of his wife. Was that true?”

Zeck nodded. The shark eyes were intent on Wolfe.

“Very well. I believe you because I know what you are capable of. I offer a trade. I’ll trade you the evidence I have collected against you for the evidence that will convict Rackham. Will you make the trade?”

Zeck nodded.

“It will have to be more or less on my terms. I can be trusted; you cannot. You will have to deliver first. But I realize that the details of anything as vital as this is to you cannot be settled without discussion, and it must be discussed and settled now. We are going to release your hands and take that handkerchief from your mouth, but before we do so, one more warning. You are to stay where you are until we’re finished. If you move toward the floor signals under your desk, or try to summon your men in any other manner, you will die before anyone else does.

Also, of course, there is the evidence that exists against you. You understand the situation?”

Zeck nodded.

“Are you ready to discuss the matter?”

Zeck nodded.

“Release him, Archie,” Wolfe snapped.

Needing two hands to untie the cord, I put the Carson Snub Thirty down on the polished top of Zeck’s desk. I would have given a year’s pay for a glance at Rackham, to see what the chances were, but that might have ruined it. So I put the gun there, stepped around to the rear of Zeck’s chair, knelt, and started untying the knot. My heart was pounding my ribs like a sledgehammer.

So I didn’t see it happen; I could only hear it. I did see one thing there behind Zeck’s chair: a sudden convulsive jerk of his arms, which must have been his reaction to the sight of Rackham jumping for the gun I had left on the desk. More even than a sight of Rackham, to see if he was rising to it, I wanted a sight of Wolfe, to see if he was keeping his promise to duck for cover the instant Rackham started for the gun, but I couldn’t afford it. My one desperate job now was to get that cord off of Zeck’s wrists in time, and while Wolfe had used the trick knot we had practiced with, he had made it damn tight. I barely had it free and was unwinding the cord from the wrists when the sound of the shot came, followed immediately by another.

As I got the cord off and jammed it in my pocket, Zeck’s torso slumped sideways and then forward. Flat on the floor, I slewed around, saw Zeck’s contorted face right above my eyes, pulled the handkerchief out of his mouth and stuffed it in my pocket
with the cord, slid forward under the desk, and reached for one of the signal buttons.

I didn’t know, and don’t know yet, whether the noise of the shots had got through the soundproof door or whether it was my push on the button that brought them. I didn’t hear the door open, but the next shots I heard were a fusillade that came from no Carson, so I came back out from under the desk and on up to my feet. Schwartz and his buddy were standing just inside the door, one with two guns and one with one. Rackham was stretched out on the floor, flat on his face. Wolfe was standing at the end of the desk, facing the door, scowling as I had never seen him scowl before.

“The dirty bastard,” I said bitterly, and I admit my voice might have trembled even if I hadn’t told it to.

“Reach up,” Schwartz said, advancing.

Neither Wolfe nor I moved a muscle. But Wolfe spoke. “What for?” He was even bitterer than me, and contemptuous. “They let him in armed, not us.”

“Watch ’em, Harry,” Schwartz said, and came forward and on around behind the desk where I was. Ignoring me, he bent over Zeck’s collapsed body, spent half a minute with it, and then straightened and turned.

“He’s gone,” he said.

Harry, from near the door, squealed incredulously. “He’s gone?”

“He’s gone,” Schwartz said.

Harry wheeled, pushed the door open, and was gone too. Schwartz stared after him three seconds, not more than that, then jumped as if I had pinched him, made for the door, and on through.

I went and took a look at Rackham, found he was
even deader than Zeck, and turned to Wolfe. “Okay, that’s enough. Come on.”

“No.” He was grim. “It will be safer when they’ve all skedaddled. Phone the police.”

“From here?”

“Yes.”

I went to Zeck’s desk and pulled one of the phones to me.

“Wait.” I had never heard him so grim. “First get Marko’s number. I want to speak to Fritz.”

“Now? For God’s sake,
now?”

“Yes. Now. A man has a right to have his satisfactions match his pains. I wish to use Mr. Zeck’s phone to tell Fritz to go home and get dinner ready.”

I dialed the operator.

T
hree days later, Friday afternoon, I said to Wolfe, “Anyway, it’s all over now, isn’t it?” “No, confound it,” he said peevishly. “I still have to earn that fee.”

It was six o’clock, and he had come down from the plant rooms with some more pointed remarks about the treatment the plants had got at Hewitt’s place. The remarks were completely uncalled for. Considering the two journeys they had taken, out to Long Island and then back again, the plants were in splendid shape, especially those hard to handle like the Miltonias and Phalaenopsis. Wolfe was merely trying to sell the idea, at least to himself, that the orchids had missed him.

Fritz might have been a mother whose lost little boy has been brought home after wandering in the desert for days, living on cactus pulp and lizards’ tails. Wolfe had gained not an ounce less than ten pounds in seventy-two hours, in spite of all the activity of getting resettled, and at the rate he was going he would be back to normal long before Thanksgiving. The pleats in his face were already showing a tendency to spread out, and of course the beard was
gone, and the slick had been shampooed out of his hair. I had tried to persuade him to stay in training, but he wouldn’t even bother to put up an argument. He just spent more time than ever with Fritz, arranging about meals.

He had not got home for dinner Tuesday evening after all, in spite of the satisfaction he had got by putting in a call to Fritz on Zeck’s phone. We were now cleaned up with Westchester, but it had not been simple. The death of Arnold Zeck had of course started a chain reaction that went both deep and wide, and naturally there had been an earnest desire to make goats out of Wolfe and me, but they didn’t have a damn thing on us, and when word came from somewhere that Wolfe, during his association with Zeck, might have collected some facts that could be embarrassing to people who shouldn’t be embarrassed, the attitude toward us changed for the better right away.

As for the scene that ended with the death of Zeck and Rackham, we were clean as a whistle. The papers in Roeder’s brief case, which of course the cops took, proved nothing on anybody. By the time the cops arrived there had been no one on the premises but Wolfe and me and the two corpses. A hot search was on, especially for Schwartz and Harry, but so far no take. No elaborate lying was required; our basic story was that Wolfe, in his disguise as Roeder, had got in with Zeck in order to solve the murder of Mrs. Rackham, and the climax had come that afternoon when Zeck had put the screws on Rackham by saying that he had evidence that would convict him for killing his wife, and Rackham had pulled a gun, smuggled somehow past the sentinels, and had shot Zeck, and Schwartz and Harry had
rushed in and drilled Rackham. It was surprising and gratifying to note how much of it was strictly true.

So by Friday afternoon we were cleaned up with Westchester, as I thought, and therefore it was a minor shock when Wolfe said, “No, confound it, I still have to earn that fee.”

I was opening my mouth to ask him how come, when the phone rang. I got it. It was Annabel Frey. She wanted to speak to Wolfe. I told him so. He frowned and reached for his phone, and I stayed on.

“Yes, Mrs. Frey? This is Nero Wolfe.”

“I want to ask you a favor, Mr. Wolfe. That is, I expect to pay for it of course, but still it’s a favor. Could you and Mr. Goodwin come up here this evening? To my home, Birchvale?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Frey, but it’s out of the question. I transact business only in my office. I never leave it.”

That was a little thick, I thought, from a guy who had just spent five months the way he had. And if she read newspapers she knew all about it—or anyhow some.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “because we must see you. Mr. Archer is here, the District Attorney, and I’m calling at his suggestion. We have a problem—two problems, really.”

“By ‘we’ do you mean you and Mr. Archer?”

“No, I mean all of us—all of us who inherited property from Mrs. Rackham, and all of us who were here the night she was killed. Our problem is about evidence that her husband killed her. Mr. Archer says he has none, none that is conclusive—and perhaps you know what people are saying, and the newspapers. That’s what we want to consult you about—the evidence.”

“Well.” A pause. “I’m trying to get a little rest after a long period of overexertion. But—very well. Who is there?”

“We all are. We met to discuss this. You’ll come? Wonderful! If you—”

“I didn’t say I’ll come. All five of you are there?”

“Yes—and Mr. Archer—”

“Be at my office, all of you, at nine o’clock this evening. Including Mr. Archer.”

“But I don’t know if he will—”

“I think he will. Tell him I’ll be ready then to produce the evidence.”

“Oh, you will? Then you can tell me now—”

“Not on the phone, Mrs. Frey. I’ll be expecting you at nine.”

When we had hung up I lifted the brows at him. “So that’s what you meant about earning that fee? Maybe?”

He grunted, irritated that he had to interrupt his convalescence for a job of work, sat a moment, reached for a bottle of the beer Fritz had brought, grunted again, this time with satisfaction, and poured a glass with plenty of foam.

I got up to go to the kitchen, to tell Fritz we were having company and that refreshments might be required.

I
was mildly interested when the six guests arrived—a little early, five to nine—in such minor issues as the present state of relations between Annabel Frey and the banker, Dana Hammond, and between Lina Darrow and the statesman, Oliver Pierce, and whether Calvin Leeds would see fit to apologize for his unjust suspicions about Wolfe and me.

To take the last first, Leeds was all out of apologies. The spring was in his step all right, but not in his manners. First to enter the office, he plunged himself down in the red leather chair, but I figured that Archer rated it ex officio and asked him to move, which he did without grace. As for the others, there was too much atmosphere to get any clear idea. They were all on speaking terms, but the problem that brought them there was in the front of their minds, so much so that no one was interested in the array of liquids and accessories that Fritz and I had arranged on the table over by the big globe. Annabel was in the most comfortable of the yellow chairs, to Archer’s left; then, working toward me at my desk,
Leeds and Lina Darrow; and Hammond and Pierce closest to me.

Wolfe’s eyes swept the arc.

“This,” he said, “is a little awkward for me. I have met none of you before except Mr. Leeds. I must be sure I have you straight.” His eyes went along the line again. “I think I have. Now if you’ll tell me what you want—you, Mrs. Frey, it was you who phoned me.”

Annabel looked at the DA. “Shouldn’t you, Mr. Archer?”

He shook his head. “No, you tell him.”

She concentrated, at Wolfe. “Well, as I said, there are two problems. One is that it seems to be supposed that Barry Rackham killed his wife, but it hasn’t been proven, and now that he is dead how can it be proven so that everyone will know it and the rest of us will be entirely free of any suspicion? Mr. Archer says there is no official suspicion of us, but that isn’t enough.”

“It is gratifying, though,” Wolfe murmured.

“Yes, but it isn’t gratifying to have some of the people who say they are your friends looking at you as they do.” Annabel was earnest about it. “Then the second problem is this. The law will not allow a man who commits a murder to profit by it. If Barry Rackham killed his wife he can’t inherit property from her, no matter what her will said. But it has to be legally proven that he killed her, and unless that is done her will stands, and what she left to him will go to his heirs.”