Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 07 (9 page)

“It sounds like a delayed cerebral process. I am accustomed to it. Unfortunately.”

“It sounds bughouse. And Goodwin’s not bughouse.”

“No, he isn’t. Not quite. Will you have some beer?”

“No. Thank you.”

Wolfe pushed the button, leaned back, and let the tips of his fingers meet at the apex of his middle mound. “Let’s cut across, Mr. Cramer,” he suggested helpfully. “You’re busy and you need sleep. Regarding the point you have broached, as to what happened up there between this time and that time, Archie says he didn’t want to be detained until midnight by the prolonged routine of your staff. I say delayed cerebration. If something significant really did happen it’s obvious that we don’t intend to tell you, at least not now, so let’s pass on that. Next, if you ask why we kept ourselves incommunicado until half past nine, my reply is that I wished to get his complete report without interruption and that I abhor any disturbance during the dinner hour; further, that you had a large number of people up there to deal with and Archie could tell you nothing that you couldn’t learn from them.”

Fritz came with a tray, and Wolfe uncapped a bottle and poured. “Next? I suppose, why Archie was sent there? Because a girl named Carla Lovchen, whom we have never seen before, came this afternoon to engage me in the interest of a friend of hers named Neya Tormic, who had been accused of theft. That matter was cleared up by a statement from Mr. Driscoll, who appears to be a blundering ass. Next, you will doubtless ask, after that affair had been settled and Mr. Goodwin had departed, why did he return? Because he phoned me and I told him to. As you know, when I accept a commission I like to get paid. I try to stop this side of rapacity, but I like to
collect, even when, as in this case, I have furnished more will than wit. I sent him back to see Miss Tormic. He was waiting for her in the office when the porter’s yells were heard.”

Cramer was slowly rubbing at his chin, looking stubborn and unconvinced. He watched Wolfe swallow the glass of beer and wipe his lips, and then turned to me:

“You’re not bughouse, you know. Someday when I’m not busy I’d like to tell you what you are, but you’re not bughouse. Now suppose you tell me a little story.”

“Sure, I’ll even tell you a big one. I was in the office talking with Mr. and Mrs. Miltan when we heard the yelling—”

“Oh, no. Back up. From the time you got there. I want the works.”

I gave it to him, in my best style. I knew from the tone Wolfe had taken that the program was eagerness to oblige in inessentials, so I skipped none of the unimportant details. I covered the route. One of the little cuts I made was the brief passage between the Balkans and me while I was standing guard at the front door. When I got through Cramer asked me some questions that offered no difficulty, ending with a few more jabs regarding what had happened between the time when this and the time when that. My only addition to my former explanation was that I had started to get hungry.

He sat a minute and chewed his cigar, frowning, and switched to Wolfe.

“I don’t believe it,” he said flatly.

“No? What is it you don’t believe, Mr. Cramer?”

“I don’t believe that Goodwin’s bughouse. I don’t believe he left like that because he was homesick and
hungry. I don’t believe he went back there to collect a fee from Miss Tormic. I don’t believe that as far as you’re concerned it’s washed up and you’re not interested in the murder.”

“I haven’t said I’m not interested in the murder.”

“Ho! Haven’t you? Well, are you?”

“Yes.” Wolfe grimaced. “Apparently I am. While Archie was on guard at the door Miss Tormic approached and asked him—me—to act in the matter in her interest. He accepted. I am committed, and the amount of profit that may be expected …” He shrugged. “I am committed. That was what happened that made Archie feel he should communicate with me promptly and privately. As you are aware, Mr. Cramer, I am quite capable of candor when the occasion presents—”

The inspector clamped his teeth on his cigar and said through them savagely, “I knew it!”

Wolfe’s brows went up a millimeter. “You knew? …”

“I knew it the minute I learned Goodwin had been there and gone off to chase a cat. It had already begun to look like a first-class headache, and when I heard about Goodwin that cinched it. So you’ve got a client! And sure enough, by God, it has to be your client that was in that room fencing with him! It would be!” He rescued the cigar from his teeth with his left hand and hit the desk with his right fist, simultaneously. “Understand this, Wolfe! I came here in a mood of cooperation, in spite of Goodwin’s tricky getaway! And what am I getting? Now you try to tell me that in the space of ten seconds, just like that, your man accepted a murder case for you! Nuts!” He hit the desk again. “I know what your abilities are, no one knows that better
than I do! And like a fool I came here expecting a little disinterested discussion and you tell me you’ve got a client! Why have you always got to have a goddam client? Naturally from now on I can’t believe a single solitary thing—”

My waving paw finally stopped his bellowing; the phone had rung and I couldn’t hear. It was a request for him. With a grunt he got up and came to my desk for it, and I made way for him. For several minutes his part of it was mostly listening, and then apparently he was told something disagreeable, judging from the way he violated the law against the use of profanity on the telephone. He gave some instructions, banged the thing into its cradle, and said in a quiet but very sarcastic voice, “That’s nice, now.”

He went back to his chair and sat there a minute chewing his lip. “That’s just fine,” he said. “The case is as good as solved. I won’t have to go to any bother about it.”

“Indeed,” Wolfe murmured.

“Yes indeed. Three Federals have blown in up there. Anybody might suppose that a murder in Manhattan is the business of the homicide squad of which I happen to be the head, but who am I compared with a G-man? If we throw them out on their tail, the commissioner will say tut-tut, we’ve got to co-operate. It has two pleasant aspects. First, it means an entirely new angle we haven’t even suspected, and that’s a cheerful idea. Second, whoever solves it and however and whenever, the G-men will grab the credit. They always do.”

“Now, Inspector,” I remonstrated. “A G-man is the representative of the American people, in fact it would hardly be going too far to say that a G-man is America—”

“Shut up. I wish you’d get an F.B.I. job yourself and they’d send you to Alaska. I can pull you in, you know.”

“If you can it’s news to me. Who made any law about an innocent man being overcome with repugnance at the sight of blood and taking a taxi home?”

“Where did you see any blood?”

“I didn’t. Figure of speech.”

“Metonymy,” Wolfe muttered.

“Kid me. I like it.” Cramer glared at Wolfe. “So you’ve got a client.”

Wolfe made a face. “Tentatively I have. Archie accepted the commission. I say tentatively because I have never met her. When I’ve seen her and talked with her I shall know whether she’s guilty or not.”

“You admit she may be.”

“Certainly she may be.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “May I make a suggestion, Mr. Cramer? If you want consilience. It would be doubly unprofitable for you to question me, since you have stated that you will believe nothing I tell you, and since all those people are strangers to me and I am completely ignorant of what went on.”

“You say.”

“Yes, sir, I say. But it might help for me to question you. It would certainly help me, and in the long run it might even help you.”

“Great idea. Wonderful idea.”

“I think so.”

Cramer put his mangled cigar in the tray, got out another one and stuck it in his mouth. “Shoot.”

“Thank you. First, of course, achieved results. Have you arrested anyone?”

“No.”

“Have you found adequate motive?”

“No.”

“Are there any definite conclusions in your mind?”

“No. Nor indefinite either.”

“I see. No indictments from the mechanical routine—fingerprints, photographs, blabbing objects?”

“No. There’s one object, and maybe two, that ought to be there and we can’t find it. Do you know anything about fencing?”

Wolfe shook his head. “Nothing whatever.”

“Well, the thing he was killed with is called an épée. It’s triangular in section, with no cutting edge, and the point is so blunted that if you thrust at a man hard enough to go through him it would merely break the blade, which is quite flexible. In fencing they fasten a little steel button on the end, and the button has three tiny points. The points are only to show on your opponent’s jacket when you’ve made a hit; the thick body of the button wouldn’t permit the épée to pierce through the pad they wear or the mask over their face.”

I said, “He didn’t have any mask on.”

“I know he didn’t, so he wasn’t actually fencing at the moment he was killed. Miltan says no one ever fences with the épée without a mask. The one Ludlow had been wearing was on a bench over by the wall. And the épée that was sticking through him had no button on it, just the blunted end, and it couldn’t possibly have pierced him like that. But there was that thing in the cabinet in the office which Mrs. Miltan discovered was missing while your Mr. Goodwin was present. Which she calls a culdymore. You talk French; you can say it better than I can.”

“Col de mort.”

“Right. Anyone could have taken it from the cabinet. The chances are a million to one it was used on
the épée that killed Ludlow. At a distance of a few feet, and especially with the épée in motion, he would never have seen it was that and not the ordinary fencing button. But the culdymore was not on the épée. So it had been removed. So everyone was searched and twenty men went through that joint like molasses through cheesecloth. They didn’t find it. One person and only one had left that building, namely Goodwin here. You don’t imagine he took it with him for a souvenir?”

Wolfe smiled slightly. “I wouldn’t suppose so. Thrown out of a window perhaps?”

“It could have been. They’re still looking, in the damn dark with flashlights. Also for the other object which may be missing. Miss Tormic has an idea a glove is gone, one of the ladies’-size fencing gauntlets, from the cupboard in the locker room. Miss Lovchen and the dame that calls herself Zorka don’t think so. Mrs. Miltan won’t commit herself. Nobody seems to know for sure exactly how many there were.”

“What about the button that had to be removed from the épée before the
col de mort
could be used?”

“They’re all over the place. Right in the fencing rooms in drawers.”

“Would the handle of the épée show fingerprints if it had been grasped without a glove?”

“No. Wrapped with cord or something for a grip.”

“Well.” Wolfe looked sympathetic. “The only two objects that might have helped aren’t there. I’ll promise you one thing, Mr. Cramer, if Archie did take them away I shall see that they are handed over to you as soon as we finish with them. But to go on, how many persons were in the building at the time the body was found?”

“Counting everybody, twenty-six.”

“How many have you eliminated?”

“All but eight or nine.”

“Namely?”

“First and foremost, the one who was fencing with him. Your client.”

“I wouldn’t expect that. If she is still my client after I see her I’ll eliminate her myself. The others?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Miltan. They alibi each other, which would be a drug on the market at two for a nickel. The girl that came to see you, Carla Lovchen. That’s four. She had been fencing with Driscoll, but they had quit and had gone to the locker rooms, and she could have sneaked to the end room and done it. Driscoll. He’s unlikely but not eliminated. Zorka. She was in the big room on that floor with a young man named Ted Gill. He claims not to be a fencer and was in there with her learning how to start.”

I said, “It was him that was with Belinda Reade yesterday when they saw our client in the hall as she was going to the locker room not to pinch Driscoll’s diamonds.”

“Right. Then there’s the Reade girl and young Barrett. They were moving around and it’s hard to tell. Of course if it’s Donald Barrett you can have it. Also there’s a kind of a man named Rudolph Faber.”

“The chinless wonder.”

“Not original but good. It’s him, by the way, that’s responsible for the fact that there’s been no arrest. How many does that make?”

“Ten.”

“Then it’s ten. And no discovered motive in the whole damn bunch. I wouldn’t—”

The phone rang. I performed and, after a moment, beckoned to Cramer.

“For you. It’s the boss.”

“Who?”

“The police commissioner, by gum.”

He got up, said in a resigned tone, “Oh, poop,” and came and took it.

T
hat telephone conversation was in two sections. During the first section, which was prolonged, Cramer was doing the talking, in a respectfully belligerent tone, reporting on the situation and the regrettable lack of progress to date. During the second, which was shorter, he was listening and apparently to something not especially cheerful, judging from the inflection of his grunts, and from the expression on his face when he finally cut the connection and returned to his chair.

He sat and scowled.

Wolfe said, “You were lamenting the lack of motive.”

“What?” He looked at Wolfe. “Yeah. I’d give my afternoon off to know what you know right now.”

“It would cost you more than an afternoon, Mr. Cramer. I read a lot of books.”

“To hell with books. I am fully aware that you’ve got some kind of a line on this thing and I haven’t; I knew that as soon as I heard about Goodwin. If it ever did any good to look at your face I’d look at it while I’m telling you that the commissioner just informed me that he had a phone call ten minutes ago from the
British consul general. The consul stated that he was shocked and concerned to learn of the sudden and violent death of a British subject named Percy Ludlow and he hoped that no effort would be spared and so forth.”