Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 (17 page)

Her voice came: “The
New York Times?”

“Correct. All others are imitations. Do you think one of the contestants killed Louis Dahlmann?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.” I couldn’t see her, but she kept her voice up and spoke distinctly. “I asked you to come here because the American public ought to know, especially American women, that a gigantic swindle is being perpetrated. I have been accused by three people of getting a list of the contest answers in the mail, and it’s not true. They say the other contestants got lists of the answers too, and I don’t know whether they did or not, but they have no right to accuse me. It’s an insult to American women. It’s a trick to wreck the contest and get out of paying the prizes to those who have earned them, and it’s a despicable thing to do. And it’s me they want to cheat. They’re afraid of all the publicity the Women’s Nature League is getting at last, they’re afraid American women will begin to listen to our great message—”

“Excuse me, Miss Frazee. We need the facts. Who are the three people that accused you?”

“One was a policeman, not in uniform, I don’t know his name. One was a man named Hansen, a lawyer, I think his first name is Rudolph, he represents the contest people. The third was a man named Goodwin, Archie Goodwin, he works for that detective, Nero Wolfe. They’re all in it together. It’s a dirty conspiracy to—”

I had my notebook out, along with the journalists,
chiefly for the novelty of participating in a press conference without paying dues to the American Newspaper Guild, and I got it all down, but I doubt if it’s worth passing on. It developed into a seesaw. She wanted to concentrate on the Women’s Nature League, of which they had already had several doses, and they wanted to know about the alleged list of answers received by the contestants, which would have rated the front page on account of its bearing on the murder if they could nail it down. But they couldn’t very well get the nail from her, since she was claiming she had never got such a list and knew nothing about it. They kept working on her anyway until Lurick suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, Goodwin’s right here!” and headed for the door.

Instead of retreating, I crossed the sill and got my back against the open door, since the main point was to make sure that it didn’t get closed with me on the wrong side. They all came at me and hemmed me in so that I didn’t have elbow room to put my notebook in my pocket, all demanding to know if the contestants had received a list of the answers, and if so, when and how and from whom?

I regarded them as friends. It is always best to regard journalists as friends if they are not actually standing on your nose. “Hold everything,” I said. “What kind of a position is a man in when he is being tugged in two directions?”

Charles Winston of the
Times
said, “Anomalous.”

“Thanks. That’s the word I wanted. I would love to get my name in the paper, and my employer’s name, Nero Wolfe, spelled with an e on the end, and this is a swell chance, but I’ll have to pass it up. As you all saw at once, if the contestants have been sent a list of the answers by somebody it would be a hot
item in a murder case, and it would be improper for me to tell you about it. That’s the function of the police and the District Attorney.”

“Oh, come off it, Archie,” Missy Coburn said.

“Spit out the gum,” Bill Lurick said.

“Is it your contention,” Charles Winston of the
Times
asked courteously but firmly, “that a private citizen should refuse to furnish the press with any information regarding a murder case and that the sole source of such information for the public should be the duly constituted authorities?”

I didn’t want to get the
Times
sore. “Listen, folks,” I said, “there is a story to be had, but you’re not going to get it from me, for reasons which I reserve for the present, so don’t waste time and breath on me. Try Inspector Cramer or the DA’s office. You heard Miss Frazee mention Rudolph Hansen, the lawyer. I’ve told you there’s a story, so that’s settled, but you’ll have to take it from there. Cigarettes on my bare toes will get you no more from me.”

They hung on some, but pretty soon one of them broke away and headed down the hall, and of course the others didn’t want him to gobble it so they made after him. I stayed in the doorway until the last of them had disappeared around the corner, then, leaving the door open, turned and went on in. Gertrude Frazee, in the same museum outfit she had worn five days previously, minus the hat, was in an upholstered armchair backed up against the wall, with a cold eye on me.

She spoke. “I have nothing to say to you. You can go. Please shut the door.”

I had forgotten that her lips moving at right angles to their slant, and her jaw moving straight up
and down, made an anomalous situation, and I had to jerk my attention to her words. “You must admit one thing, Miss Frazee,” I said earnestly. “I didn’t try to spoil your press conference, did I? I kept out of it, and when they came at me what did I do? I refused to tell them a single thing, because I thought it wouldn’t be fair to you. It was your conference and I had no right to horn in.”

She didn’t thaw any. “What do you want?”

“Nothing now, I guess. I was going to explain why I thought you might want to come to the meeting this evening at Mr. Wolfe’s office, but now I suppose you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ve already got your lick in. Not only that, you’ve spilled the beans. Outsiders weren’t supposed to know about the meeting, especially not the press, but now those reporters will be after everybody, and they’re sure to find out, and they’ll be camping on Mr. Wolfe’s stoop. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even got invited in. The others will know they’ve heard your side of the story, and naturally they’ll want to get theirs in too. So if you were there it might get into a wrangle in front of the reporters, and you wouldn’t want that. Anyhow, as I say, you’ve already got your lick in.”

With her unique facial design nothing could be certain, but I was pretty sure I had her, so I finished, “So I guess you wouldn’t be interested and I’ve made the trip for nothing. Sorry to bother you. If you care at all to know what happens at the meeting, see the morning papers, especially the
Times.”
I was turning to go.

Her voice halted me. “Young man.”

I faced her.

“What time is this meeting?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Sure, Miss Frazee, if you want to, but under the circumstances I doubt—”

“I’ll be there.”

I grinned at her. “I promised my grandmother I’d never argue with a lady. See you later then.”

Leaving, I took the door along, pulling it shut gently until the lock clicked.

By the time I got home it was after six and Wolfe should have been down from the plant rooms, but he wasn’t. I went to the kitchen, where Fritz was arranging two plump ducklings on the rack of a roasting pan, asked what was up, and was told that Wolfe had descended from the roof but had left the elevator one flight up and gone to his room. That was unusual but not alarming, and I proceeded with another step of the preparations for the meeting. When I got through the table at the end of the couch in the office was ready for business: eight brands of whisky, two of gin, two of cognac, a decanter of port, cream sherry, armagnac, four fruit brandies, and a wide assortment of cordials and liqueurs. The dry sherry was in the refrigerator, as were the cherries, olives, onions, and lemon peel, where they would remain until after dinner. As I was arranging the bottles I caught myself wondering which one the murderer would fancy, but corrected it hastily to wallet thief, since we weren’t interested in the murder.

At six-thirty I thought I’d better find out if Wolfe had busted a shoestring or what, and, mounting a flight and tapping on his door and hearing him grunt, entered. I stopped and stared. Fully dressed, with his
shoes on, he was lying on the bed, on top of the black silk coverlet. Absolutely unheard of.

“What have you got?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” he growled.

“Shall I get Doc Vollmer?”

“No.”

I approached for a close-up. He looked sour, but he had never died of that. “Miss Frazee is coming,” I told him. “She was holding a press conference. Do you want to hear about it?”

“No.”

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” I said icily, and turned to go, but in three steps he called my name and I halted. He raised himself to his elbows, swung his legs over the edge, got upright, and took a deep breath.

“I’ve made a bad mistake,” he said.

I waited.

He took another breath. “What time is it?”

I told him twenty-five to seven.

“Two hours and a half and dinner to eat. I was confident that this development would of itself supply me with ample material for an effective stratagem, and I was wrong. I don’t say I was an ass. I relied overmuch on my ingenuity and resourcefulness, though on the solid basis of experience. But I did make a mistake. Various people have been trying to see me all afternoon, and I have declined to see them. I thought I could devise a stroke without any hint or stimulant from them, but I haven’t. I should have seen them. Oh, I can proceed; I am not without expedients; I may even bring something off; but I blundered. Just now you asked me if I wanted to hear about Miss Frazee, and I said no. That was fatuous. Tell me.”

“Yes, sir. As I said, she was holding a press conference. When I got there—”

The sound of the doorbell came up and in to us. I lifted my brows at Wolfe. He snapped at me, “Go! Anybody!”

I
t was Vernon Assa. He wasn’t as much of a misfit for the red leather chair as Mrs. Wheelock, at least he was plump, and his deep tan went well with the red, but he was much too short. I have surveyed a lot of people in that chair, and there has only been one who was exactly right for it. I must tell about him some time.

You might have thought, after what had just been said upstairs, that Wolfe would have been spreading butter on the caller, but he wasn’t. When he came down, after brushing his hair and tucking his shirt in, he crossed to his chair, sat, and said brusquely, “I can spare a few minutes, Mr. Assa. What can I do for you?”

Assa looked at me. I thought he was going to start the old routine about seeing Wolfe privately, but apparently he only wanted something attractive to look at while he got his words collected. I remembered that at the first visit of the LBA bunch he had been the impatient one, snapping at Hansen to get on and telling Wolfe he was wasting time, but now he seemed to feel that deliberation was better.

He looked at Wolfe. “About the meeting this evening. You’ll have to call it off.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe cocked his head. “Under what compulsion?”

“Well … it’s obvious. Isn’t it?”

“Not to me. I’m afraid you’ll have to elaborate.”

Assa shifted in the chair. I had noticed that he seemed to be having trouble getting comfortably adjusted. “You realize,” he said, “that our main problem is solved, thanks to you. The problem that brought us to you last Wednesday in a state of panic. There was no chance of finishing the contest without confusion and some discord after what happened to Dahlmann, and the wallet gone, but as it looked when we came to you we were headed for complete disaster, and you have prevented it. Hansen is certain that legally we are in the clear. With the contestants receiving the answers as they have, and it won’t do Miss Frazee any good to deny she got them, if we repudiate those verses and replace them with others, as of course we will, our position would be upheld by any court in the land. There is still serious embarrassment, but that couldn’t be helped. You have rescued the contest from utter ruin by a brilliant stroke and are to be congratulated.”

“Mr. Assa.” Wolfe’s eyes, on him, were half closed. “Are you speaking for my client, the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, or for yourself?”

“Well … I am a member of the firm, as you know, but I came here on my own initiative and responsibility.”

“Do your associates know you’re here and what for?”

“No. I didn’t want to start a long and complicated discussion. I decided to come only half an hour ago.
Your meeting starts at nine, and it’s nearly seven now.”

“I see. And you are assuming that I sent the answers to the contestants—or had them sent.”

Assa passed his tongue over his lips. “I didn’t put it baldly like that, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Goodwin is in your confidence anyway. It was impossible to figure why one of the contestants would have sent them, if he had killed Dahlmann and got them from the wallet, and that leaves only you.”

“Not impossible,” Wolfe objected. “Not if he found to his dismay that in the situation he had created they were worse than useless to him.”

Assa nodded. “I considered that, of course, but still thought it impossible. Another reason I didn’t mention my coming to my associates was that I realize you can’t acknowledge what you did to save us. I don’t expect you to acknowledge it even to me, and you certainly wouldn’t if one or two of them had come along, especially Hansen. We wouldn’t want you to acknowledge it anyhow, because we’ve hired you, and the legal position would probably be that we did it ourselves, and that would be disastrous. So you see why I didn’t put it baldly.”

“Thank you for your forbearance,” Wolfe said drily. “But why must the meeting be called off?”

“Because it can’t do any good and may do harm. What good can it do?”

Wolfe’s eyes were still half closed. “It can help me to earn a fee. I accepted Mr. Hansen’s definition of my job: ‘to find out who took the wallet and got the paper.’ It remains to be performed.”

“It doesn’t have to be performed, not now, since the contest problem is solved. You’ve earned your fee and you’ll get it.”

“You’ve admitted, Mr. Assa, that you’re speaking only for yourself.”

The red tip of his tongue showed again, flicking his lips. “I’ll guarantee the fee,” he said.

Wolfe shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not acceptable. My responsibility is to my client, and his reciprocal responsibility, to pay me, is not transferable. As for canceling the meeting, that’s out of the question. If such a request came unanimously from Messrs. Buff, O’Garro, Hansen, Heery—and you, and cogent reasons were given, I might consider it, but would probably refuse. As it is, I won’t even consider it.”