Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 (21 page)

The dignified little card—they were all dignified and little—identified it as the exhibit of the Allcoran Laboratories, Inc. There were a couple of dozen boxes, small and large, with the small ones in front and the large ones in the rear, and three rows of brown bottles, all the same size, I would say about a pint.

Saul said, “Middle row, fourth bottle from the left. You have to tip the one in front to see the label.”

Wolfe stepped closer. Instead of tipping the one in front he lifted it with a thumb and forefinger, to get a clear view, and I got one too over his shoulder. No squinting was required. At the top of the label was printed in black, in large type, KCN. At the bottom was printed in red, also in large type, POISON. In between, and below the POISON there was some stuff in smaller type, but I didn’t strain to get it. The bottle was so dark it would have to be lifted out and held up to the light for a look at the contents, and that wouldn’t do, but you could see there was something white in it, almost up to the neck.

“Today’s daily double,” I said. “It was here, and we found it.”

Wolfe returned the bottle he had lifted, gently and carefully. “Did you touch it?” he asked Saul. He knew darned well he hadn’t, since our orders had been not to touch anything until we knew what it was, or at least that it wasn’t what we were looking for. Saul said no, and Wolfe called to Bill and Orrie to come and bring chairs along, and Saul and Fred also went and got chairs. They lined the four chairs up in a row in front of the cabinet, their backs to it, and the quartet sat, facing the room and the elevators. They looked pretty impressive that way, the four of them, and no bottle of poison was ever better guarded.

That was the sight that met four pairs of eyes when Oliver Buff, Patrick O’Garro, Rudolph Hansen, and Talbot Heery stepped from an elevator into the reception room.

“Good morning, gentlemen!” Wolfe sang out, in about as nasty a tone as I had ever known him to use.

They headed for us.

I
t rarely gets you anywhere, practically never, but you always do it. When four men enter a room and one of them sees six men grouped in front of a cabinet which has in it a bottle of poison out of which he has recently shaken a spoonful onto a piece of toilet paper, to be used for killing a man, you try to watch all their faces like a hawk for some sign of which one it is. That time it was more useless than usual. They had all had a hard and probably sleepless night, and maybe hadn’t been to bed at all. They looked it, and certainly none of them liked what he saw. Three of them—Buff, O’Garro, and Hansen—all spoke at once. They wanted to know who and what and why and when, oblivious of the presence of a customer who was seated across the room.

Wolfe was incisive. “It would be better, I think, to retire somewhere. This is rather public.”

“Who are these men?” Buff demanded.

“They are working for the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, through me. They are now—”

“Get them out of here!”

“No. They’re guarding an object in that cabinet. I intend shortly to tell the police to come and get the
object, and meanwhile these four men will stay. They’re all armed, so I—”

“Why, goddam you—” O’Garro blurted, but Hansen gripped his arm and said, “Let’s go inside,” and turned him around. Buff seemed about to choke, but controlled it, and led the way, with his partner and lawyer following, then Heery, then Wolfe, and then me. As I passed through the door to the corridor I turned for a glance at the four sentries, and Orrie winked at me.

The executive committee room was much more presentable than it had been before, with everything in order. The second the door was shut O’Garro started yapping, but Hansen got his arm again and steered him around to a chair at the far side of the big table, and took one there himself, so they had the windows back of them. Wolfe and I took the near side, with Heery at one end, on Wolfe’s left, and Buff at the other, on my right.

“What’s this object in a cabinet?” O’Garro demanded as Wolfe sat. “What are you trying to pull?”

“It will be better,” Wolfe said, “if you let me describe the situation. Then we can—”

“We know the situation,” Hansen put in. “We want to know what you think you’re doing.”

“That’s simple. I’m preparing to learn which of you four men killed Louis Dahlmann, and took the wallet, and killed Vernon Assa.”

Three of them stared. Heery said, “Jesus. Is that simple?”

Hansen said, “I advise you, Mr. Wolfe, to choose your words—and also your acts. With more care. This could cost you your license and much of your reputation, and possibly more. Let’s have the facts. What is the object in the cabinet?”

“A bottle of cyanide of potassium, in the display of Allcoran Laboratories, with the cap seal broken and almost certainly some of the contents removed. That can be determined.”

“There in that cabinet?” Hansen couldn’t believe it.

“Yes, sir.”

“A deadly poison there on public display?”

“Oh, come, Mr. Hansen. Don’t feign an ignorance you can’t possibly own. Dozens of deadly poisons are available to the public at thousands of counters, including cyanide with its many uses. You must know that, but if you want it on the record that you were astonished by my announcement you have witnesses. Shall I ask the others if they were astonished too?”

“No.—I advise you, Oliver, and you too, Pat, to say nothing whatever and answer no questions. This man is treacherous.”

Wolfe skipped the tribute. “That will expedite matters,” he said approvingly. His eyes moved. “I must tell the police about that bottle of poison reasonably soon, so the less I’m interrupted the better, but if you all refuse to say anything whatever I’ll be wasting my time and might as well phone them now. There are one or two things I should know—for example, can I narrow it down? Of course Mr. Buff and Mr. O’Garro were on these premises yesterday afternoon. Were you, Mr. Hansen?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Roughly, from four o’clock until after six.”

“Were you, Mr. Heery?”

“I was here twice. I stopped in for a few minutes when I went to lunch, and around four-thirty I was here for half an hour.”

“That’s too bad.” Wolfe put his palms on the table. “Now, gentlemen, I’ll be as brief as may be. When I’m through we can consider whether I have to enter a defense against Mr. Hansen’s charge of treachery. Until the moment of Mr. Assa’s collapse in my office last evening I was concerned only with the job I had been hired for, not with murder. I invited Mr. Cramer to the meeting because I expected that developments to be contrived by me would remove both the contestants and yourselves as primary targets of his inquiry, which was surely desirable. My first objective was to demonstrate to the contestants that their receipt of the answers by mail had made it impossible to proceed with the verses that had been given them last week, and it would be futile for them to resist the inevitable; and to get their unanimous agreement to the distribution of new verses as soon as their freedom of movement was restored.”

“You say that now.” Hansen was buying nothing.

“It will be supported. I was confident I could do that, for they had no feasible alternative. Then I would be through with them and they would leave, and I would pursue the second objective with the rest of you. I confess that the second objective was not at all clear, and the path to it was poorly mapped, until nearly seven o’clock last evening, when Mr. Assa called.—Mr. Hansen, did you know that Mr. Assa came to see me at that hour yesterday?”

“No. I don’t know it now.”

“Did you, Mr. Buff?”

“No.”

“Mr. O’Garro?”

“No!”

“Mr. Heery?”

“I did not.”

Wolfe nodded. “One of you is lying, and that may help. He came and we talked. Mr. Goodwin was present, and he has typed a transcript of the conversation for Mr. Cramer. He could report it to you now, but it would take too long, so I’ll summarize it. Mr. Assa said he was speaking for himself, not for the firm; that he had not consulted his associates. He congratulated me for what he called my brilliant stroke in sending the answers to the contestants and thereby rescuing the contest from ruin. He offered his personal guarantee for payment of my fee. He took a drink of Pernod and poured another. And he began and ended with a demand that I call off the meeting for last evening. As for me, I denied sending the answers to the contestants, and I refused to call off the meeting. He left in a huff.”

Wolfe took a breath. “That was all I needed. Mr. Assa’s pretended certainty that I had sent the answers, and his eagerness to give me credit for it privately, could only mean that he had sent them himself, having got them from the paper in Dahlmann’s wallet, or that he knew who had. The former was much more probable. Now the second objective of the meeting, and the path to it, were quite clear. I would proceed as planned with the contestants, get their consent to a new agreement, and then dismiss them. After they had gone I would tackle Mr. Assa and the rest of you, in the presence of Mr. Cramer. I wasn’t assuming that Assa had killed Dahlmann; on the contrary, I was assuming that he hadn’t, since in that case he would hardly have dared expose himself as he did in coming to me. My supposition was that Assa had gone to Dahlmann’s apartment, found him dead, and took the wallet—one of Mr. Cramer’s theories, as you know. If so, it had to be
disclosed to Mr. Cramer, and the sooner the better—the better not only for the demands of justice, but for my client, the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa. It would embarrass an individual, Vernon Assa, but it would be to the advantage of everyone else. It would eliminate the contestants as murder suspects, and would substantially lessen the burden of suspicion for the rest of you. I intended to expound that position to all of you and get you to help me exert pressure on Mr. Assa, and I expected to succeed.”

He took another deep breath, deeper. “I am, as you see, confessing to an egregious blunder. It came from my failure to consider sufficiently the possibility that Mr. Assa had himself been duped or had miscalculated. I now condemn myself, but on the other hand, if I had known at nine o’clock last evening exactly what—”

“You can omit the if’s,” Hansen said coldly. “Apologize to yourself, we’re not interested. How did Assa miscalculate?”

“By thinking that the man who had admitted to him that he had taken Dahlmann’s wallet was telling the truth when he said that he had found Dahlmann dead. By dismissing the possibility that in fact he had killed Dahlmann.”

“Wait a minute,” Heery objected. “You thought that yourself about Assa.”

“But Assa had come to me, and besides, I have said I blundered. It was painfully obvious, of course, when Assa died before my eyes. No effort was required to learn what had happened; the only question was, which one of you had made it happen. Which one—”

“Not obvious to me,” O’Garro said.

“Then I’ll describe it.” Wolfe shifted in the chair,
which was almost big enough but not used to him. “Since that bottle is under guard, with great assurance. Yesterday afternoon Assa learned somehow that one of you had Dahlmann’s wallet in your possession. Whether he learned it by chance or by enterprise doesn’t matter; he learned it, and he confronted you. You—”

Heery put in, “You just said that you assumed Assa took the wallet from Dahlmann himself. And he had it in his pocket.”

“Pfui.” Wolfe was getting testy. “If Assa took it, who killed him and what for? His death changed everything, including my assumptions. He confronted one of you with his knowledge that you had the wallet. You explained that you had gone to Dahlmann’s apartment that night, found him dead, and took the wallet, and Assa believed you. Either you told him that you had sent the answers to the contestants, or that you hadn’t. If the former, Assa conceived the stratagem of giving me credit for it as a blind; if the latter, he really thought I had done it. You two discussed the situation and decided what to do, or perhaps you didn’t; Assa may have discussed it only with himself and made his own plans. It would be interesting to know whether he insisted on keeping the wallet or you insisted on his taking it. If I knew that I would have a better guess who you are.”

Wolfe’s tone sharpened. “Whether or not you knew of his visit to me beforehand, you knew its result. He told you that I had refused to cancel the meeting, and that both of you would of course have to come. This raises an interesting point. If it was his report of his talk with me that so heightened your alarm that you decided to kill him, then you went to the cabinet to get the poison after seven o’clock. If
your fatal resolve was formed earlier, before he came to me, you might have gone to the cabinet earlier. The former seems more likely. Dread feeds on itself. At first you were satisfied that Assa believed you, that he had no slight suspicion that you had killed Dahlmann, but that sort of satisfaction is infested with cancer—the cancer of mortal fear. The fear that Assa might himself suspect you, or already did; the fear that if he didn’t suspect you, I would; the fear that if I didn’t suspect you, the police would. When Assa told you of his failure to persuade me to cancel the meeting, the fear became terror; though you believed him when he said that he had given me no hint of his knowledge regarding the wallet, there was no telling what he would do or say under pressure from me with the others present. As I said, it seems likely that it was then, when fear had festered into the panic of terror, that you resolved to kill him. Therefore it—”

“This is drivel,” Hansen said curtly. “Pure speculation. If you have a fact, what is it?”

“Out there, Mr. Hansen.” Wolfe aimed a thumb over his shoulder at the door. “It could even be conclusive if that bottle has identifiable fingerprints, but I doubt if you—one of you—had lost his mind utterly. That’s my fact, and it justifies a question. Mr. Assa left my office yesterday at ten minutes past seven. Who was on these premises later than that? Were you, Mr. Hansen?”

“No. I told you. I was here from four o’clock on, but left before six-thirty.”

“Were you, Mr. Heery?”

“No. I told you when I was here.”