Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 27 (12 page)

“However,” Wolfe continued, “I have a deep repugnance to letting the police take from my house people who have been moved to consult me and who have not been formally charged with a crime. There is a back way out, leading to Thirty-fourth Street, and Mr. Goodwin will take you by it if you feel that you would like a little time to discuss matters.”

“No,” Aubry said. “We have nothing to run from. Tell him we’re here. Let him in.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Not in my house, to drag you out. You’re sure you don’t want to delay it?”

“Yes.”

“Then Archie, will you please handle it?”

I arose, told them, “This way, please,” and headed for the door, but stopped and turned when I heard Caroline find her voice behind me.

“Wait a minute,” she said, barely loud enough for me to get it. She was standing facing Aubry, gripping his lapels. “Paul, don’t you think—shouldn’t we ask Mr. Wolfe—”

“There’s nothing to ask him.” Aubry was up, with an arm across her shoulders. “I’ve had enough of Wolfe. Come on, Caro mia. We don’t have to ask anybody anything.”

They came and followed me into the hall. As Aubry
was getting his hat from the rack I opened the door, leaving the chain bolt on, and spoke to Purley. “What do you know, they were right here in the office. That’s a break for you. Now if—”

“Open the door!”

“In a moment. Mr. Wolfe is peevish and might irritate you, so if you’ll remove yourself, on down to the sidewalk, I’ll let them out, and they are yours.”

“I’m coming in.”

“No. Don’t even think of it.”

“I want you too.”

“Yeah, I thought so. I’ll be along shortly. Twentieth Street?”

“Now. With me.”

“Again no. I have to ask Mr. Wolfe if there’s anything we wouldn’t want to bother you with, and if so what. Where do I go, Twentieth Street?”

“Yes, and not tomorrow.”

“Right. Glad to oblige. The subjects are here at my elbow, so if you’ll just descend the steps—and be careful, don’t fall.”

He muttered something I didn’t catch, turned, and started down. When he was at the bottom of the seven steps I removed the bolt, swung the door open, and told our former clients, “Okay. In return for the sandwiches and coffee, here’s a suggestion. Don’t answer a single damn question until you have got a lawyer and talked with him. Even if—”

I stopped because my audience was going. Aubry had her arm as they crossed the stoop and started down. Not wishing to give Purley the pleasure of having me watch him take them, I shut the door, replaced the bolt, and returned to the office. Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed.

“I’m wanted,” I told him. “Do I go?”

“Of course,” he growled.

“Are we saving anything?”

“No. There’s nothing to save.”

“The letters from Karnow to his wife are in my desk. Do I take them and turn them over?”

“No. They are her property, and doubtless she will claim them.”

“Did I discover the body?”

“Certainly not. To what purpose?”

“None. Don’t worry if I’m late.”

I went to the hall for my hat and beat it.

Since I wasn’t itching to oblige Homicide, and it was a pleasant evening for a walk, I decided to hoof it the fifteen blocks to Twentieth Street, and also to do a little chore on the way. If I had done it in the office Wolfe would have pulled his dignity on me and pretended to be outraged, though he knew as well as I did that it’s always desirable to get your name in the paper, provided it’s not in the obituary column. So I went to a phone booth in a drugstore on Tenth Avenue, dialed the
Gazette
number, asked for Lon Cohen, and got him.

“Scrap the front page,” I told him, “and start over. If you don’t want it I’ll sell it to the
Times.
Did you happen to know that Paul Aubry and his wife, Mrs. Sidney Karnow to you, called on Nero Wolfe this afternoon, and I went somewhere with them, and brought them back to Mr. Wolfe’s office, and fifteen minutes ago Sergeant Purley Stebbins came and got them? Or maybe you don’t even know that Karnow was murd—”

“Yeah, I know that. What’s the rest of it? Molasses you licked off your fingers?”

“Nope. Guaranteed straight as delivered. I just want to get my employer’s name in the paper. Mine is spelled, A-R-C-H—”

“I know that too. Who else has got this?”

“From me, nobody. Only you, son.”

“What did they want Wolfe to do?”

Of course that was to be expected. Give a newspaperman an inch and he wants a column. I finally convinced him that that was all for now and resumed my way downtown.

At Manhattan Homicide West on Twentieth Street I was hoping to be assigned to Lieutenant Rowcliff so I could try once more to make him mad enough to stutter, but I got a college graduate named Eisenstadt who presented no challenge. All he wanted was facts, and I dished them out, withholding, naturally, that I had entered the room. It took less than an hour, including having my statement typed and signed, and I declined his pressing invitation to stick around until Inspector Cramer got in. I told him another fact, that I was a citizen in good standing, or fair at least, with a known address, and could be found if and when needed.

Back at the office Wolfe was yawning at a book. The yawn was an act. He wanted to make it clear to me that losing a fee of five grand was nothing to get riled about. I had a choice: either proceed to rile him or go up to bed. They were equally attractive, and I flipped a quarter and caught it. He didn’t ask me what I was deciding because he thought I wanted him to. It was heads, and I told him my session at Homicide wasn’t worth reporting, said good night, and mounted the two flights to my room.

In the morning, at breakfast in the kitchen, with
Fritz supplying me with hot griddle cakes and the paper propped in front of me, I saw that I had given Lon not one inch but two. He had stretched it because it was exclusive. Aside from that, there was a pile of miscellaneous information, such as that Karnow had an Aunt Margaret named Mrs. Raymond Savage, and she had a son Richard, and a daughter Ann, now married to one Norman Horne. There was a picture of Ann, and also one of Caroline, not very good.

I seldom see Wolfe in the morning until eleven, when he comes down from the plant rooms, and that morning I didn’t see him at all. A little after ten a call came from Sergeant Stebbins to invite me to drop in at the District Attorney’s office at my earliest inconvenience. I don’t apologize for taking only four minutes to put weights on papers on my desk, phone up to Wolfe, and get my hat and go, because there was a chance of running into our former clients, and they might possibly be coming to the conclusion that they hadn’t had enough of Wolfe after all.

I needn’t have been in such a hurry. In a large anteroom on an upper floor at 155 Leonard Street I sat for nearly half an hour on a hard wooden chair, waiting. I was about ready to go over to the window and tell the veteran female that another three minutes was all I could spare when another female appeared, coming from a corridor that led within. That one was not veteran at all, and I postponed my ultimatum. The way she moved was worthy of study, her face invited a full analysis, her clothes deserved a complete inventory, and either her name was Ann Savage Horne or the
Gazette
had run the wrong picture.

She saw me taking her in, and reciprocated frankly, her head tilted a little to one side, came and sat on a
chair near mine, and gave me the kind of straight look that you expect only from a queen or a trollop.

I spoke. “What’s that stole?” I asked her. “Rabbit?”

She smiled to dazzle me and darned near made it. “Where did you get the idea,” she asked back, “that vulgarity is the best policy?”

“It’s not policy; I was born vulgar. When I saw your picture in the paper I wondered what your voice was like, and I wanted to hear it. Talk some more.”

“Oh. You’re one up on me.”

“I don’t mind squaring it. I am called Goodwin, Archie Goodwin.”

“Goodwin?” she frowned a little. She brightened. “Of course! You’re in the paper too—if you’re that one. You work for Nero Wolfe?”

“I practically
am
Nero Wolfe, when it comes to work. Where were you yesterday afternoon from eleven minutes past two until eighteen minutes to six?”

“Let’s see. I was walking in the park with my pet flamingo. If you think that’s no alibi, you’re wrong. My flamingo can talk. Ask me some more.”

“Can your flamingo tell time?”

“Certainly. It wears a wristwatch on its neck.”

“How can it see it?”

She nodded. “I knew you’d ask that. It has been trained to tie its neck in a knot, just a plain single knot, and when it does that the watch is on a bend so that—well, Mother?” She was suddenly out of her chair and moving. “What, no handcuffs on anybody?”

Mother, Sidney Karnow’s Aunt Margaret, leading a procession emerging from the corridor, would have made two of her daughter Ann and more than half of Nero Wolfe. She was large not only in bulk but also in facial detail, each and all of her features being so big
that space above her chin was at a premium. Besides her was a thin young man, runty by comparison, wearing black-rimmed glasses, and behind them were two other males, one, obviously, from his resemblance to Mother, Ann’s brother Richard, and the other a tall loose-jointed specimen who would have been called distinguished-looking by any woman between sixteen and sixty.

As I made my swift survey the flamingo trainer was going on. “Mother, this is Mr. Goodwin—the Archie Goodwin who was at the Churchill yesterday with Caroline and Paul. He’s grilling me. Mr. Goodwin, my mother, my brother Dick, my husband, Norman Horne —no, not the one with the cheaters, that’s Jim Beebe, the lawyer to end all laws.
This
is my husband.” The distinguished-looking one had pushed by and was beside her. She was flowing on. “You know how disappointed I was at the District Attorney being so godawful polite to us, but Mr. Goodwin is different. He’s going to give me the third degree—physically, I mean; he’s built for it, and I expect I’ll go to pieces and confess—”

Her husband’s palm pressed over her mouth, firm but not rough, stopped her. “You talk too much, darling,” he said tolerantly.

“It’s her sense of humor,” Aunt Margaret explained. “All the same, Ann dear, it is out of place, with poor Sidney just cruelly murdered.
Cruelly.
”

“Nuts,” Dick Savage snapped.

“It
was
cruel,” his mother insisted. “Murder is cruel.”

“Sure it was,” he agreed, “but for us Sid has been dead more than two years, and he’s been alive again only two weeks, and we never even saw him, so what do you expect?”

“I suggest,” Beebe the lawyer put in, in a high thin voice that fitted his stature perfectly, “that this is rather a public spot for a private discussion. Shall we go?”

“I can’t,” Ann declared. “Mr. Goodwin is going to wear me down and finally break me. Look at his hard gray eyes. Look at his jaw.”

“Now, darling,” Norman Horne said affectionately, and took her elbow and started her toward the door. The others filed after them, with Beebe in the rear. Not one mentioned the pleasure it had given them to meet me, though the lawyer did let me have a nod of farewell as he went by.

As I stood and watched the door closing behind them the veteran female’s voice came. “Mr. Mandelbaum will see you, Mr. Goodwin.”

Only two assistant district attorneys rate corner rooms, and Mandelbaum wasn’t one of them. Halfway down the corridor, his door was standing open, and, entering, I had a surprise. Mandelbaum was at his desk, and across from him, on one of the two spare chairs that the little room sported, was a big husky guy with graying hair, a broad red face, and gray eyes that had been found hard to meet by tougher babies than Mrs. Norman Horne. If she called mine hard she should have seen those of Inspector Cramer of Homicide.

“I’m honored,” I said appreciatively and accepted Mandelbaum’s invitation to use the third chair.

“Look at me,” Cramer commanded.

I did so with my brows up, which always annoys him.

“I’m late for an appointment,” he said, “so I’ll cut it short. I’ve just been up to see Wolfe. Of course he corroborates you, and he says he has no client. I’ve read
your statement. I tell you frankly that we have no proof that you entered that hotel room.”

“Now I can breathe again,” I said with feeling.

“Yeah. The day you stop I’ll eat as usual. I admit we have no proof, as yet, that you went in that room, but I know damn well you did. Information that the body was there came to us over the phone in a voice that was obviously disguised. You won’t deny that I know pretty well by now how you react to situations.”

“Sure. Boldly, bravely, and brilliantly.”

“I only say I know. Leaving Aubry and Mrs. Karnow down in the bar, you go up and knock on the door of Karnow’s room, and get no answer. In that situation there’s not one chance in a thousand that you would leave without trying the knob.”

“Then I must have.”

“So you did?”

I stayed patient and reasonable. “Either I didn’t try the knob—”

“Can it. Of course you did, and you found the door wasn’t locked. So you opened it and called Karnow’s name and got no answer, and you went in and saw the body. That I know, because I know you, and also because of what followed. You went back down to the bar and sat with them a while, and then took them back to Wolfe. Why? Because you knew Karnow had been murdered. If you had merely gone away when your knock wasn’t answered, you would have stuck there until Karnow showed, if it took all night. And that’s not half of it. When Stebbins went to Wolfe’s place after them, with no warrant and no charge entered, Wolfe meekly handed them over! He says they were no longer his clients, since Stebbins had brought the news that Karnow was dead, but why weren’t they? Because
he won’t take a murderer for a client knowingly, and he thought Aubry had killed Karnow. That’s why.”

I shook my head. “Gee, if you already know everything, I don’t see why you bother with me.”

“I want to know exactly what you did in that room, and whether you changed anything or took anything.” Cramer leaned to me. “Look, Goodwin, I advise you to unload. The way it’s going, I fully expect Aubry to break before the day’s out, and when he does we’ll have it all, including what you told them you had seen in Karnow’s room when you rejoined them in the bar, and why the three of you went back to Wolfe’s place. If you let me have it now I won’t hold it against you that — What are you grinning for?”