Prisoner's Base (8 page)

“Look, Lieutenant.” I was earnest. “It has always been a pleasure to lie to you, and will be again, but I want to make it clear and emphatic that my interest in this case is strictly personal, as I said, and Mr. Wolfe is not concerned. If you—”

“That’s enough.” The fist was tighter and was quivering a little. Some day it would be too much for him and he would let fly, and my reaction would depend on the context. It couldn’t be taken for granted that I would
break him in two. He went on. “It’s more than enough. Giving false information, withholding evidence, material witness, obstructing justice, and impersonating an officer of the law. Take him, Doyle. There’ll be someone here soon to t-t-t-turn him over to.”

He meant it. I considered swiftly. In spite of the current situation, I hoped and expected to have further dealings with some or all of the Softdown quintet, and it wouldn’t help any to have them sit and watch while a pair of bozos dragged me from under a table, unavoidably mussing me up. So I arose, sidled around to the back of my chair, and told Doyle, “Please be careful. I’m ticklish.”

A
t a quarter to six that afternoon I sat on a chair in a smallish room in a well-known building on Leonard Street. I was bored, disillusioned, and hungry. If I had known what was going to happen in sixty seconds, at fourteen minutes to six, my outlook would have been quite different, but I didn’t.

I had been bandied a good deal, though I had not yet been tossed in the coop or even charged. Escorted first to the Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth Street, where Cramer’s office is, I had sat neglected for half an hour, at the end of which I was told that if I wanted to see Inspector Cramer I would have to be taken elsewhere. I had expressed no desire to see Cramer, but I was tired of sitting, and when one in uniform invited me to accompany him I did so. He conveyed me in a taxi to 240 Centre Street, took me up in an elevator, and gripped my arm on a long walk around halls, winding up at an alcove with a bench, where he told me to sit. He also sat. After a while I asked him who or what we were waiting for.

“Listen, bud,” he demanded aggressively, “do I look like I know much?”

I hedged. “At first sight, no.”

“Right. I don’t know one single thing about anything. So don’t ask me.”

That seemed to settle it, and I sat. People, the assortment you expect and always get at 240 Centre Street, kept passing by along the corridor, both directions. I was at the point where I was shifting on the hard bench every thirty seconds instead of every two minutes when I saw a captain in uniform marching past and called to him. “Captain!”

He stopped, whirled, saw me, and approached.

“Captain,” I said, “I appeal to you. My name is Archie Goodwin, Nine-fourteen West Thirty-fifth Street, which is Nero Wolfe’s address. This officer must of course stick to me or I might escape. I appeal to you to send me a photographer. I want a picture of me in these things”—I lifted my manacled hands—“for evidence. A double-breasted ape named Rowcliff had me fettered, and I intend to sue him for false arrest and exposing me to shame, degradation, and public scorn.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said sympathetically and went.

I had of course stopped the captain and appealed to him as a diversion, just for something to do, and it was totally unexpected when, some twenty minutes later, a sergeant walked up to me and asked my name. I told him.

He turned to my chaperon. “What’s this man’s name?”

“He told you, Sergeant.”

“I’m asking you!”

“I don’t know of my own knowledge, Sergeant. Up at Homicide they said his name was Archie Goodwin, like he told you.”

The sergeant made a noise, not complimentary, glanced at my cuffs, produced a ring of keys and used
one, and my hands were free. I had never seen that captain before and haven’t seen him since, and I don’t know his name, but if you ever get struck in an alcove at headquarters with handcuffs on, ask for a captain around fifty to fifty-five with a big red nose and a double chin, wearing metal-rimmed glasses.

A little later another sergeant came with orders, and I was escorted down and out, to Leonard Street, up to the District Attorney’s layout, and to a room. There at last some attention was paid to me, by a Homicide dick named Randall, whom I knew a little, and an assistant DA I had never seen before, named Mandelbaum. They pecked at me for an hour and a half, and there was nothing in it for anybody, except that I got the impression that there would be no charge. When they left they didn’t even bother about a sentinel, merely telling me to stick. The third or fourth time I looked at my watch after their departure it was a quarter to six.

As I said, I was bored and disillusioned and hungry. An encounter with Rowcliff was enough to ruin a day anyhow, and that was only one item of the record. I had to meet Lon Cohen at seven-thirty to buy him a steak as promised, and afterward I had to go home and pack a bag before finding a hotel room. That was okay, but there was no telling what frame of mind they had pestered Wolfe into, and if I went home he would probably be laying for me. Also I didn’t mind sleeping in a hotel room, but what about when I left it in the morning? What were my plans? I shrugged that off, thinking I would get some kind of lead from Lon, and decided to call him then instead of waiting until seven. There was no phone in the room where I was, so I got up and went out to the corridor, glanced right and left, and started left. There were doors on both sides, all closed. I preferred one standing open, with a phone in sight, and
kept going. No luck. But nearly at the end of the corridor the last door on the left was ajar, a three-inch crack, and as I approached it I heard a voice. That was the event I have referred to as occurring at fourteen minutes to six—my hearing that voice, coming from that room. At twelve paces it was audible, at five paces it was recognizable, and when I got my ear within six inches of the crack the words were quite plain.

“This whole performance,” Nero Wolfe was saying, “is based on an idiotic assumption, which was natural and indeed inevitable, since Mr. Rowcliff is your champion ass—the assumption that Mr. Goodwin and I are both cretins. I do not deny that at times in the past I have been less than candid with you—I will acknowledge, to humor you, that I have humbugged and hoodwinked to serve my purpose—but I still have my license, and you know what that means. It means that on balance I have helped you more than I have hurt you—not the community, which is another matter, but you, Mr. Cramer, and you, Mr. Bowen, and of course you others too.”

So the DA himself was in the audience.

“It means also that I have known where to stop, and Mr. Goodwin has too. That is our unbroken record, and you know it. But what happens today? Following my customary routine, at four o’clock this afternoon I go up to my plant rooms for two hours of relaxation. I have been there but a short time when I hear a commotion and go to investigate. It is Mr. Rowcliff. He has taken advantage of the absence of Mr. Goodwin, whom he fears and petulantly envies, and has entered my house by force and—”

“That’s a lie!” Rowcliff’s voice came. “I rang and—”

“Shut up!” Wolfe roared, and it seemed to me that the door moved to narrow the crack a little. In a moment
he went on, not roaring but not whispering either, “As you all know, a policeman has no more right to enter a man’s home that anyone else, except under certain adequately defined circumstances. But such a right is often usurped, as today when my cook and housekeeper unlatched the door and Mr. Rowcliff pushed it open against resistance, entered, brushed my employee aside, and ignored all protests while he was illegally mounting three flights of stairs, erupting into my plant rooms, and invading my privacy.”

I leaned against the jamb and got comfortable.

“He was ass enough to suppose I would speak with him. Naturally I ordered him out. He insisted that I must answer questions. When I persisted in my refusal and turned to leave him, he intercepted me, displayed a warrant for my arrest as a material witness in a murder case, and put a hand on me.” The voice suddenly went lower and much colder. “I will not have a hand put on me, gentlemen. I like no man’s hand on me, and one such as Mr. Rowcliff’s, unmerited, I will not have. I told him to give me his instructions under the authority of the warrant, in as few words as possible, without touching me. I am not bragging of my extreme sensitiveness to hostile touch, since it is shared by all the animals; I mention it only as one of the reasons why I refused to speak to Mr. Rowcliff. He took me into custody under the warrant, conducted me out of my house, and, in a rickety old police car with a headstrong and paroxysmal driver, brought me to this building.”

I bit my lip. While the fact that he too had been arrested and bandied was not without its charm, the additional fact that I was responsible made it nothing to titter about. Therefore I did not titter. I listened.

“I had assumed, charitably, that some major misapprehension, possibly even excusable, had driven Mr.
Rowcliff to this frenzied zeal. But I learned from you, Mr. Bowen, that it was merely an insane fit of nincompoopery. To accuse Mr. Goodwin of impersonating a policeman is infantile; I don’t know what he said or did, and I don’t need to; I know Mr. Goodwin, and he couldn’t possibly be so fatuous. To accuse him, acting on my account, of giving false information may not be infantile, but it is pointless. You suspect that I have been hired by someone involved, either innocently or guiltily, in the death of Miss Eads and Mrs. Fomos, that I wish to conceal that fact, and that Mr. Goodwin went to that place today as my agent and, denying it, is lying.”

“I know damn well he is,” a voice blurted—Rowcliff’s.

“The arrangement,” Wolfe said curtly, “was that I was to speak without interruption. I say the accusation is pointless. If Mr. Goodwin is lying on instructions from me, do you suppose I didn’t consider the probabilities? It is likely that I’ll be halted or deflected by such inanities as putting handcuffs on him—yes, Mr. Rowcliff actually flaunted that—or dragging me down here in an unsafe vehicle? You suspect that I have a client; that I know something you don’t know and would like to; and that you can bully it out of me. You can’t, because I haven’t got it. But you’re correct in thinking I have a client. I admit it. I have.”

Rowcliff’s voice ejaculated something that sounded like a cry of triumph. I thought to myself, At last here it is. The sonofagun has got himself a customer!

Wolfe was going on. “I didn’t have a client this morning, or even an hour ago, but now I have. Mr. Rowcliff’s ferocious spasms, countenanced by you gentlemen, have made the challenge ineluctable. When Mr. Goodwin said that I was not concerned in this matter and that he was acting solely in his own personal interest,
he was telling the truth. As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects. He is especially vulnerable to young women who possess not only those more obvious charms but also have a knack of stimulating his love of chivalry and adventure and his preoccupation with the picturesque and the passionate. Priscilla Eads was such a woman. She spent some time with Mr. Goodwin yesterday; he locked her in a bedroom of my house. Within three hours of her eviction by him at my behest, she was brutally murdered. I will not say that the effect on him amounted to derangement, but it was considerable. He bounded out of my house like a man obsessed, after telling me that he was going single-handed after a murderer, and after arming himself. It was pathetic, but it was also humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable, and your callous and churlish treatment of him leaves me with no alternative. I am at his service. He is my client.”

Rowcliff’s voice blurted incredulously, “You mean
Archie Goodwin
is your client?”

The dry cutting voice of Bowen, the DA, put in, “All that rigmarole was leading up to
that?”

I pushed the door open and stepped in.

Eight pairs of eyes came at me. Besides Wolfe, Bowen, Cramer, and Rowcliff, there were the two who had been pecking at me previously, and two others, strangers. I crossed toward Wolfe. It had been desirable to let him know that I had heard what he said before witnesses, but it was equally desirable to make it plain that his new client had the warmest appreciation of the honor.

“I’m hungry,” I told him. “I had a soda-fountain
lunch and I could eat a porcupine with quills on. Let’s go home.”

His reaction was humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable. As if we had rehearsed it a dozen times, he arose without a word, got his hat and stick from a nearby table, came and gave me a pat on the shoulder, growled at the audience, “A paradise for puerility,” and turned and headed for the door. I followed. No one moved to intercept us.

Since I knew the building better than he did, I took the lead in the corridor and got us downstairs and out to the street. In the taxi he sat with his lips pressed tight, gripping the strap. There was no conversation. At the curb in front of home I paid the driver, got out and held the door for him, preceded him up the stoop, and used my key, but the key was not enough. The door opened an inch and was stopped by the chain bolt, so I had to ring for Fritz. After he had come and let us in, Wolfe instructed us, “Never again an unbolted door. Never!” To Fritz: “You proceeded with the kidney?”

“Yes, sir. You didn’t phone.”

“The dumplings and burnt sugar?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Satisfactory. Beer, please. I’m so dry I crackle.”

His hat and stick disposed of, he went to the office, and I tagged. For hours I had been sweaty where the leather holster kept my skin from breathing, and it was a relief to get rid of the thing. That attended to, I did not sit at my desk. Instead I went to the red leather chair—the chair where a thousand clients had sat, not to mention thousands who had never attained cliency. I lowered myself into it, leaned back, and crossed my legs. Fritz came with beer, and Wolfe opened, poured, and drank.

He looked at me. “Buffoon,” he stated.