Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 46 (17 page)

She looked at me. She had fine brown eyes, really too big for her small face. Her make-up hadn’t included phony lashes. “I wanted to ask you about my husband,” she said. “From the newspapers and television, they seem to think his death—his—his murder—that the murder of that waiter was connected with it. And then his daughter. And he was murdered here.” She looked at Wolfe. “Here in your house.”

“He was indeed,” he said. “What do you want to ask about your husband?”

“Why, I just—” She cleared her throat. “It has been five days, nearly a week, and the police don’t tell me anything. I thought you might. They must think you know because they arrested you because you won’t talk. I thought you might tell me …” She fluttered a hand. “Tell me what you know.”

“Then you’ve wasted a trip, madam. I spent two days and nights in jail rather than tell the police. I’ll tell you one thing I know: the murders of your husband and that waiter
are
connected. And that woman. Of course I could tell you an assortment of lies, but I doubt if it’s worth the effort. I’ll tell you what I think: I think
you
could tell
me
something. It might help if you knew I wouldn’t repeat it to the police. To anyone. I wouldn’t. I give you my word, and my word is good.”

She regarded him, her eyes straight at him. She
opened her mouth and closed it again, tight. She looked at me. “Couldn’t we go to another room?”

I stood up. Sometimes you don’t have to make a decision, not even your subconscious; it’s just there. “Certainly,” I said. “My room’s upstairs. Just leave your coat here.”

I use the elevator about once a month, and never alone. As I took her out to it I wished there had been a mirror there on the wall so I could see Wolfe’s face. In the last couple of days I had spent a lot of minutes wondering about him, and now he would spend some wondering about me. As the elevator fought its way up and we went down the hall and entered my room and I shut the door, my mind should have been on her and what line to take, but it wasn’t. It was downstairs enjoying Wolfe.

But the line I would take was decided by her, not by me. As I turned from closing the door she put hands on me. First she gripped my arms, then she had her arms around my neck with her face pressed against my middle ribs, her shoulders trembling. Well. With a woman in that position you can’t even guess. She may be suggesting that you take her clothes off or she may be grabbing the nearest solid object to keep on her feet. But it seems silly just to let your arms hang, and I had mine around her, patting her back. In a minute I gave her fanny a couple of little pats, which is one way of asking a question. Her hold around my neck didn’t tighten, which is one way of answering it.

Her shoulders stopped trembling. I said, “You could have done this downstairs. He would have just got up and walked out. And I could have brought you something from the kitchen. Up here there’s nothing to drink but water.”

She lifted her head enough to move her lips. “I don’t
want a drink. I wanted
this
. I want your arms around me.”

“You do not. You just want arms around you, not necessarily mine. Not that I mind pinch-hitting. Come and sit down.”

Her arms loosened. I patted her back again, then put my hands up and around and got her wrists. She let go and straightened up and even used a hand to brush her hair back from her eyes and adjust the fur thing that was perched on it. There were two chairs, a big easy one over by the reading lamp and a small straight one at the little desk. I steered her across to the big one and went and brought the small one.

She had come guessing and she would have to leave guessing. Of course I would have liked to know a lot of things that she knew, and her arms around my neck with her shoulders shaking showed that I could probably pry them out of her, but if I tried to, she would have known how much
I
knew, and that wouldn’t do. Not yet. So as I sat I said, “I’m sorry that’s all I have for you, Mrs. Bassett, just a pair of arms. If you thought I could tell you something that the police don’t know or won’t tell, I can’t. We aren’t talking to the police because we have nothing to say. If you have read some of my books, you must know that Nero Wolfe is one of a kind. I admit I’m a little curious about you. Miss Rowan told me you never read books. Why have you read some of mine?”

From the way her big brown eyes looked at me, you wouldn’t have thought she had just had her arms around my neck. Nor from her tone as she asked, “What else did she tell you about me?”

“Nothing much. She just mentioned that she had seen you and you had asked her about me.”

“I asked her about you because I knew she knew you and your picture was in the paper.”

“Sure. Yours was too. Why did you read some of my books?”

“I didn’t. I told her I did because I knew about her and you.” She stood up. “I’m sorry I came. I guess I—I just thought …” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I thought. I don’t want—My coat’s in there where he is.”

I was up. I told her I would get her coat and went and opened the door, and she came. That elevator is one of a kind too; it complains more about going down than about going up. Downstairs, she stayed in the hall when I went into the office for her coat. Wolfe wasn’t there; presumably he had gone to the kitchen. I wrote on a sheet of my memo pad:

I put it under a paperweight on his desk, went to the hall with Mrs. Bassett’s mink or sable or sea otter and held it for her, put my coat on, and let us out. Her Rolls-Royce was there at the curb, but I didn’t go and open the door for her because as we descended to the sidewalk the chauffeur climbed out and had it open by the time she was down. When he got back in and it rolled, I walked to Ninth Avenue and turned uptown.

It was ten minutes past noon when I pushed the button in the vestibule at 318 West Fifty-fourth Street. Three minutes passed with no response, and I shook my head. They might have cleared out. It had been four days since the daughter had been killed; the old man might be in a hospital. They might even have gone back
to France. But then her voice came, exactly as before: “Who ees eet?”

“Archie Goodwin, from Nero Wolfe. I don’t want to bother Mr. Ducos, and anyway I don’t speak French, as you know. I’d like to come up, if you can spare a few minutes.”

“What for? I don’t know anything.”

“Maybe not, but Nero Wolfe and I would appreciate it. Sill voo play.”

“You don’t speak French.”

“I know I don’t, but everybody knows those three words, even dummies like me. Please?”

“Well … for Nero Wolfe …”

The click sounded, and I pushed the door and was in, and the elevator was there with the door open. Upstairs, the door of the apartment was open too and she was there on the sill, white apron and cap exactly as before. She looked even shorter and dumpier, and the crease in the double chin looked deeper. From the way she stood and the expression on her face, it was obvious I wasn’t going to be invited in, so I had to try throwing a punch, hoping it would land.

“I suppose I call you Marie,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s my name.” You’ll have to supply her accent; I’m not going to try to spell it.

“Well, Marie, you probably prefer straight talk, so I’ll just say that I know you heard Miss Ducos and me talk that evening. You must have. You told the police about the slip of paper, and other things. Or you may have heard Mr. Ducos and Nero Wolfe talking. I’m not saying you listened when you shouldn’t, I’m just saying that you heard. I don’t know if you heard Miss Ducos tell me that you didn’t like her. Did you?”

“I don’t listen when I shouldn’t listen.”

“I didn’t say you do. But you must know
she
didn’t
like
you
. A woman knows when another woman doesn’t like her.”

“She’s dead, but it won’t hurt her to say I didn’t like her. I didn’t hate her, I had no reason to hate her. And she’s dead. You didn’t come just to tell me I didn’t like her.”

“No. It’s warm in here.” I took my coat off. “I came because we think there’s something here that will help us find the man who killed Pierre. Probably the slip of paper, but it could be something else. That’s what I was looking for in Pierre’s room. But I didn’t find it, and maybe it wasn’t there, maybe it was in her room, and of course she knew it was. Maybe it’s still there, and that’s what I came for, to see if I can find it.”

No visible reaction. She just said, “The police looked in her room.”

“Of course, naturally they would, but they probably weren’t very thorough. Anyway, they didn’t find it, so I would like to try. Nero Wolfe could have come to ask Mr. Ducos to let me look, but he didn’t want to bother him. You can stay with me to see that I don’t do anything I shouldn’t do.”

She was shaking her head. “No.” She repeated it. “No.”

There are a thousand ways of saying no and I had heard a lot of them. Sometimes it’s more the eyes than the tone of voice that tells you what kind of a no it is. Her little dark eyes, nearly black, were a little too close together, and they blinked a little too often. It was ten to one that I couldn’t sell her, but even money, maybe better, that I could buy her. “Look, Marie,” I said, “you know a man gave Pierre a hundred dollars for that slip of paper.”

“No. A hundred dollars? I don’t know that.”

“Well, he did. But Pierre might have made a copy of
it. And Lucile might have found it and made a copy too.” My hand went to my pocket and came out with the little roll I had taken from the cash box. I draped my coat over my arm to have both hands and peeled off five of the ten twenties and returned them to my pocket. “All right,” I said, “I’ll give
you
a hundred dollars to give me a chance to find Lucile’s copy or to find something else that may be in her room. It may take five minutes or it may take five hours. Here, take it.”

Her eyes said she would, but her hands didn’t move. The white apron had two little pockets, and I folded the bills into a little wad and stuck it in her left pocket, and said, “If you don’t want to stay with me, you can search me before I leave.”

“Only
her
room,” she said.

“Right,” I said, and she backed up, and I entered. She turned, and I followed her down the hall to Lucile’s room. She entered but went in only a couple of steps, and I crossed to a chair by a window and put my coat on it.

“I’m not going to stay,” she said. “I have things to do, and you’re Archie Goodwin, and I told you, I know about you and Nero Wolfe from him. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

I said no thanks, and she left.

If it was a slip of paper, the most likely place was the books, but after seeing me doing her father’s room she might have put it somewhere else. There was a desk with drawers by the right wall, and I went and opened the top drawer. It was locked, but the key was sticking in the lock, probably left there by a city employee. It held an assortment—several kinds of notepaper and envelopes, stubs of bills, presumably paid bills, pencils and pens, a bunch of snapshots with a rubber band around them. Five minutes was enough for that. The
second drawer was full of letters in envelopes addressed to Miss Lucile Ducos, various sizes and shapes and colors. A collection of letters is always a problem. If you don’t read them, the feeling that you may have missed a bus nags you, and if you do read them it’s a hundred to one that there won’t be a damn thing you can use. I was taking one out of the envelope just for a look when a bell rang somewhere, not in that room. Not the telephone, probably the doorbell, and I made a face. It probably wasn’t a Homicide man, since the murder was four days old, but it could be, and I cocked my ear and heard Marie’s voice, so faint I didn’t get the words. The voice stopped, and there were footsteps.

She appeared at the door. “A man down there says his name is Sole Panzaire and Nero Wolfe sent him. He wants to come up.”

“Did you tell him I’m here?”

“Yes.”

“You told him my name?”

“Yes.”

“I guess Nero Wolfe sent him to help me.” I got the rest of the bills from my pocket and crossed over to her. “He does that sometimes without telling me.” Her apron pocket was empty, and I folded one of the twenties and reached to put it in. “Saul Panzer is a good man, Nero Wolfe trusts him. With him to help, it won’t take so long.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We don’t like it either, Marie, but we want to find the man that killed Pierre.”

She turned and went. I started to follow her, decided not to, went back to the desk, listened for the sound of the elevator, and didn’t hear it until it stopped on that floor. I opened the drawer and was taking a
letter from an envelope when there were footsteps and then Saul’s voice. “Any luck, Archie?”

He would. Saving his surprise until there were no other ears to hear it. “Don’t push,” I told him. “I just got started.” I walked to the door for a look in the hall. Empty. I shut the door. He was putting his coat on the chair with mine. “So that’s where he was yesterday afternoon,” I said. “He went to see you. I’ll try not to get in your way, but I’m not going to leave.”

We were face to face, eye to eye. “You’re on,” he said.

“You’re damn right I’m on. I’m on my own.”

He laughed. Not with his mouth, no noise; he laughed with his eyes, and by shaking his head. And he didn’t stop. “Laugh your goddam head off,” I said, “but don’t get in
my
way. I’m busy.” I went to the desk and reached to the drawer for a letter, and my hand was trembling. Saul’s voice came from behind.

“Archie, this is the first time I ever knew you to miss one completely. I supposed you had it figured and was enjoying it. You actually didn’t know that he thought you’d kill him? That he thinks he
knows
you would?”

The letter dropped from my hand, and I guess my mouth dropped open as I turned. “Balls,” I said.

“But he does. He says you wouldn’t do it with a gun or a club, just with your hands. You’d hit him so hard you’d break his neck, or you’d throw him so hard and so far he’d break his neck when he landed. I didn’t try to argue him out of it, because he
knew
it.”