Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 27 (16 page)

The red leather chair was for Cramer, who was in the dining room with Wolfe. After the Hornes had greeted their relatives, including Caroline, and got seated, I crossed to the dining room and told Wolfe we were ready, and he marched to the office and to his desk, and stood.

“Archie?”

“Yes, sir.” I was there. “Front row, from the left, Mr. Horne, Mrs. Horne, Mrs. Savage. Rear, from the left, Mr. Savage, Mr. Stebbins you know, and Mr. Beebe.”

Wolfe nodded almost perceptibly, sat, and turned his head. “Mr. Cramer?”

Cramer, standing, was surveying them. “I can’t say this is unofficial,” he conceded, “since I asked you to come here, and I’m here. But anything Mr. Wolfe says to you is solely on his own responsibility, and you’re under no obligation to answer any questions he asks if you don’t want to. I want that clearly understood.”

“Even so,” Beebe piped up, “isn’t this rather irregular?”

“If you mean unusual, yes. If you mean improper, I don’t think so. You weren’t ordered to come, you were asked, and you’re here. Do you want to leave?”

Apparently they didn’t, at least not enough to make an issue of it. They exchanged glances, and someone muttered something. Beebe said, “We certainly reserve the right to leave.”

“Nobody will stop you,” Cramer assured him, and sat. He looked at Wolfe. “Go ahead.”

Wolfe adjusted himself in his chair to achieve the maximum of comfort, and then moved his eyes, left and right, to take them in. He spoke. “Mr. Cramer assured you that you are not obliged to answer my questions. I can relieve your minds of that concern. I doubt if I’ll have a single question to put to any of you, though of course an occasion for one may arise. I merely want to describe the situation as it now stands and invite your comment. You may have none.”

He interlaced his fingers at the crest of his central bulge. “The news that Mr. Karnow had been murdered was brought here by Mr. Stebbins early last evening, but my interest in it was only casual until Mrs. Karnow came at noon today and aroused it by hiring me. Then I gave it my attention, and it seemed to me that your obvious motive for murder—Mrs. Savage and her son and daughter, and Mr. Horne as the daughter’s husband—was not very compelling. From what my client told me of Mr. Karnow’s character and temperament, it seemed unlikely that any of you would so fear harsh and exigent demands from him that you would be driven to the dangerous and desperate act of murder. You had received your legacies legally and properly, in good faith, and surely you would at least have first tried an appeal to his reason and his grace. So one of you must have had a stronger motive.”

Wolfe cleared his throat. “That derogation of your obvious motives put me up a stump. There were two people with overpowering motives: Mr. Aubry and Mrs. Karnow. Not only did they stand to forfeit a much larger sum than any of you, but also they faced a deprivation even more intolerable. He would lose her, and she would lose him. It is not surprising that Mr.
Cramer and his colleagues were dazzled by the glitter of that powerful motive. I might have been similarly bemused but for two circumstances. The first was that I had concluded that neither Mrs. Karnow nor Mr. Aubry had committed murder. If they had, they had come fresh from that ferocious deed to engage me to negotiate for them with the man one of them had just killed, for the devious purpose of raising the presumption that they didn’t know he was dead, and I had sat here and conversed with them for an hour without feeling any twinge of suspicion that they were diddling me. I was compelled either to reject that notion or abandon certain pretensions that feed my ego. The choice wasn’t difficult.”

“Also Mrs. Karnow was your client,” Cramer said pointedly.

Wolfe ignored it, which was just as well. He went on. “The second circumstance was that the possibility of another motive had been suggested to me. It was suggested in a letter which Mrs. Karnow had shown me yesterday—the last letter she had received from her husband, nearly three years ago.” He opened a drawer and took out sheets of paper. “Here it is. I’ll read only the pertinent excerpt:

He returned the papers to the drawer and closed it. “Mrs. Karnow had the notion that what her husband had done was to make a new will, leaving her out, but that theory was open to two objections. First, a wife cannot be so brusquely disinherited by a man of means; and second, such an act would have been merely malicious, not sardonic. But the phrase ‘speaking of death’ did imply some connection with his will, and raised the question, how might such a man have so remade his will as to cause such a woman to worry about money? That intention was clearly implied.”

Wolfe turned a hand over. “Under the circumstances as I knew them, a plausible conjecture offered itself: that Karnow had made a new will, leaving everything to his wife. That would certainly give her an inescapable worry about money, the same worry he had had—how much should his relatives be pampered? And since it was his money and they were his relatives, for her the worry would be even more bothersome than for him. I would call that sardonic. Also he might have been moved by another consideration, a reluctance to bestow large amounts on them. I had gathered, though Mrs. Karnow didn’t make it explicit, that in matters of personal finance and economy Karnow did not regard his relatives as paragons—a judgment that has been verified by their management of their bequests.”

Ann Horne’s head jerked around, and she told Caroline, “Thank you so much, Lina darling.” Caroline made no reply. Judging from her intent face and rigid posture, if she replied to anything it would be an explosion.

“Therefore,” Wolfe resumed, “it appeared that the hypothesis that Karnow had made a new will deserved a little exploration. To ask any of you about it would of course have been jackassery. It was reasonable to suppose that for such a chore he would have called upon his friend and attorney, Mr. Beebe, but it seemed impolitic to approach Mr. Beebe on the matter. I don’t know whether any of you has ever heard the name Saul Panzer?”

No reply. No shake of a head. They might all have been in a trance.

“I employ Mr. Panzer,” Wolfe said, “on important missions for which Mr. Goodwin cannot be spared. He has extraordinary qualities and abilities. I told him that if Mr. Beebe had drafted a new will for Mr. Karnow it had probably been typed by his secretary, and Mr. Panzer undertook to see Mr. Beebe’s secretary and try to get on terms with her without arousing her suspicion. I would entrust so ticklish an errand to no other man except Mr. Goodwin. Early this afternoon he called on her in the guise of an invesigator from the Federal Security Agency, wanting to clear up some confusion about her Social Security number.”

“Impersonating an officer of the law,” Beebe protested.

“Possibly,” Wolfe conceded. “If such an investigator is an officer of the law, he is a federal officer, and Mr. Panzer can await his doom. In ten minutes he collected an arsenal of data. Mr. Beebe’s secretary, whose name is Vera O’Brien, has been with him two and one-half years. Her predecessor, whose name was Helen Martin, left Mr. Beebe’s employ in November nineteen-fifty-one to marry a man named Arthur Rabson, and went to live with her husband in Florence, South Carolina, where he owns a garage. So if Karnow made
a new will before he left New York, and if Mr. Beebe drafted it, and if Mr. Beebe’s secretary typed it, it was typed by the now Mrs. Arthur Rabson.”

“Three ifs,” Cramer muttered.

“Yes,” Wolfe agreed, “but open for test. I was tempted to get Mrs. Rabson on the phone in South Carolina, but it was too risky, so Mr. Panzer took a plane to Columbia, and I phoned there and chartered a small one to take him on to Florence. An hour ago, or a little more, I got a phone call from him. He has talked with Mrs. Rabson, she has signed a statement, and she is willing to come to New York if necessary. She says that Mr. Beebe dictated to her a new will for Mr. Karnow in the fall of 1951, that she typed it, and that she was one of the witnesses to Karnow’s signature. The other witness was a woman named Nora Wayne, from a nearby office. She supposes that Miss Wayne did not know the contents of the will. By it Karnow left everything to his wife, and it contained a request that she use discretion in making provision for Karnow’s relatives, who were named. Mrs. Rabson didn’t know that—”

“Sidney wouldn’t do that!” Aunt Margaret cried. “I don’t believe it! Jim, are you going to just sit there and blink?”

All eyes were at Beebe except Wolfe’s. His were on the move. “I should explain,” he said, “that meanwhile Mr. Goodwin was making himself useful. He learned, for instance, that the only item of tangible evidence against Mr. Aubry, a card of his that was found in Mr. Karnow’s pocket, had been accessible to all of you last Friday in Mr. Beebe’s office.”

“How’s that?” Cramer demanded.

“You’ll get it,” Wolfe assured him, “and you’ll like it.” He focused on Beebe. “The occasion has arisen, I
think, Mr. Beebe, for a question. As Mr. Cramer told you, you’re not obliged to answer it. What happened to Mr. Karnow’s last will?”

Thinking it over later, I decided that Beebe probably took his best bet. Him being a lawyer, you might suppose that he would simply have clammed up, but, knowing as he did that he was absolutely hooked on the will, he undoubtedly figured, in the short time he had for figuring, that the best way was to go ahead and take the little one so as to dodge the big one.

He addressed Cramer. “I would like to speak to you privately, Inspector—you and Mr. Wolfe, if you want him present.”

Cramer glanced at Wolfe. Wolfe said, “No. You may refuse to answer, or you may answer here and now.”

“Very well.” Beebe straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin. At the angle I had on him I couldn’t see his eyes behind the black-rimmed glasses. “This will ruin me professionally, and I bitterly regret the part I have played. It was a month or so before the notice came that Sidney had been killed in action that I told Ann about the new will he had made. That was my first mistake. I did it because I—of the way I felt about her. At that time I would have done just about anything she wanted. When word came that Sidney had been killed she came to my office and insisted on my showing her the will. I was even—”

“Watch it, Jim!” Ann, turned in her chair, called to him. “You dirty little liar! Ad libbing it, you’ll get all twisted—”

“Mrs. Horne!” Wolfe said sharply. “Would you rather hear him or be taken from the room?”

She stayed turned to Beebe. “Go on, Jim, but watch it.”

Beebe resumed, “I was then even more infatuated
with her than before. I got the will from the safe and showed it to her, and she took it and stuffed it inside her dress. She insisted on taking it to show to her mother. It’s easy to say I should have gone to any length to prevent that—it’s easy now, but then I was incapable of opposing her. She took the will with her, and I never saw it again. Two weeks later our engagement was publicly announced. I presented Sidney’s former will for probate, and that was completely insane, since I only had Ann’s word for it that the new will had been destroyed—even though the girl who had typed the new will had got married and gone away.”

Beebe lifted a hand to adjust his cheaters. “I won’t say what it was that cured me of my infatuation for Ann Savage. It was—a personal thing, and it was enough to cure me good. I only wish to God it had happened sooner. Of course I couldn’t stop the probate of the will without ruining myself. In May the estate was distributed, and later that month Ann married Norman Horne. That ended that business, I thought. I had had my lesson, and it had been a tough one.”

He pulled his narrow shoulders back. “Then, two years later, this jolt came. Sidney was alive and would soon be in New York. You can imagine how it hit me, or maybe you can’t. I finally got it in focus enough to see that I had only two choices: either fall out of my office window or tell Sidney exactly how it had happened. Meanwhile I had to go through all the motions of talking it over with them and listening to all their crazy suggestions. It wasn’t until Monday, day before yesterday, that I decided, and I phoned Ann the next morning, yesterday, that I was going to see Sidney that evening and tell him the whole story. Then came the news that Sidney had been murdered. I don’t know
who killed him. All I know is what I’m telling you, and of course for me that’s enough.” He stopped for his mouth to do little spasms. He tagged it. “As a counselor-at-law, I’m through.”

I was a little disappointed at Norman Horne. Surely he might have been expected to react manfully and promptly to such an indictment of his attractive wife, but he wasn’t even looking at Beebe. He was looking at her, there beside him, and it was not a gaze of loyal and trusting faith. It was just as well that she didn’t see it.

She didn’t see it because her eyes were on Wolfe. “Is he through?” she asked.

“Apparently, madam, yes. At least for the moment. Would you like to comment?”

“I don’t want to make a speech. I don’t think I need to. Just that he’s a liar. Just lies.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I doubt if that’s adequate. It wasn’t all lies, you know. Mr. Karnow did make a new will; you and Mr. Beebe were engaged to marry but didn’t; the estate was distributed under the terms of a previous will, with you as a legatee; and Mr. Karnow did return alive and was murdered. I strongly advise you either to keep silent, even though that would expose you to an adverse presumption, or to tell the truth without reservation. You warned Mr. Beebe of the hazard of an improvised complex lie. I urge you to heed your own warning. Now?”

She glanced aside at her husband, but he had focused on Wolfe. Her head swiveled for a glance to her left, at her mother, but that wasn’t met either. She looked at Wolfe. “You’re quite a performer, aren’t you?”